Finally, a good refried bean recipe.

I love bean burritos!! (Just ask any of my kids) After many attempts I finally found a bean recipe that tastes great.

2 cups of pinto beans ( I glean through them to see if there are any stones)
Soak overnight in lots of water (3-4 inches above the beans)

In the morning rinse beans
Cook beans with new water covering beans by 2 inches, and add 2-3 bay leaves for 2 hours
(Check occasionally so they don't dry out)

After the 2 hours take out bay leaves and add:
1 small chopped tomato
6-7 cloves of roasted garlic (Sometimes I add a whole head)
2-3 tsp sea salt
3/4 cup canola oil (I use olive oil)
(I add 2 TBS of green chilies)

Cook for another 1 1/2 hours. Make sure the water stays about 2 inches above the beans.

WALA I take off the excess water, (you may use some of this water to get the right consistency of the mashed beans, so don't toss it right away) I mash some and keep some whole. Enjoy

Women's work and Chesterton (Freedom of Expression)

From the London News 1906

"The woman's world is a small one, perhaps, but she can alter it. The woman can tell the tradesman with whom she deals some realistic thing about himself. The clerk who does this to the manager generally get the sack, or shall we say (to avoid vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture. Above all, as I said in my previous article, the woman does work which is in some small degree creative and individual. She can put the flowers or the furniture in fancy arrangements of her own. I fear the bricklayer cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without disaster to himself and others. If the woman is only putting a patch into a carpet, she an choose the thing with regard to colour. I fear it would not do for the office boy dispatching a parcel to choose his stamps with a view to colour; to prefer the tender mauve of the sixpenny to the crude scarlet of the penny stamp. A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures of a ledger."

Why I am not an Atheist:

1. The Nazi’s were wrong. This may seem like an obvious statement but have you ever considered that the world can agree the Nazi’s were wrong only if there is an objective truth. And the only objective truth is God. Now, you could say, based on logic, that the Nazi’s were wrong because we are supposed to be humane, we are supposed to protect life. Really, why? One of my students showed me 2 sentences in a book that went something like this, “Man descended from monkeys; therefore we should be nice to one another.” Now there is a middle sentence missing from this logic that should state---monkeys are nice to one another. Since I have never sat and watched monkeys for more than half an hour I can not determine whether the third statement is correct. But I do know that the reason I am nice is not because monkeys are nice and the reason the Nazis are wrong is because monkeys shouldn’t hurt each other. It seems the world can agree on the evilness of the Nazis because we know in our souls what evil looks like and what good should look like. If evil is real then good is real.
2. I can look with awe at a painting. Not all paintings are beautiful and you can even convince me that feces on cardboard should be considered art. (But it is not art because it is beautiful, it is art because it is making a statement.) Pure joy from staring at Velasquez in the Prado museum is not an evolutionary experience. It is from another world and only poetry, the language of artists, comes close to explaining the experience.
3. I can disagree with you. Only if there is objective truth can you disagree with me and I disagree with you.
4. If there isn’t a God then where are we going? Shouldn’t we know what the next step is? Who or what is in charge of this evolutionary process? If it is a mind that has a plan for us then this is the same as saying there is a God.
5. I can will myself through emotional turmoil. Where does that will, that strength, come from?
6. If God doesn’t exist there is no point and we could never find out that there is no point.
7. People that wrote 3,000 years ago were smarter than we are. Read a few ancient texts and you will come to the same conclusion.
8. Everything runs down. When did you last tune down your car? Life that is tuning up has to have an up to tune to. What is up? Look up and see. And as dimensional scientist know, "Order will always emerge from chaos". The only thing an atheist offers me and my family is death. It is a choice between nothing and something and last I checked nothing doesn't exist.



Oh, there are more reasons but probably the greatest is in the eyes of a newborn baby. He knows so much and he can’t wait to tell you.

That's Edutainment

The world is a stage of edutainment. Now, some of you may not of heard of the word 'edutainment' before, but even if you haven't you still know what it means. We are being educated by our entertainment far more effectively than our formal educational institutions are educating us. And what exactly is being tutored? Our worldview. In Tocqueville's Selected Letters, he states, "You know my ideas well enough to know that I accord institutions only a secondary influence on the destiny of men. Would to God I believed more in the omnipotence of institutions! I would have more hope for our future, because by chance we might, someday, stumble onto the precious piece of paper that would contain the recipe for all wrongs, or on the man who knew the recipe. But, alas, there is no such thing, and I am quite convinced that political societies are not what their laws make them, but what sentiments, beliefs, ideas, habits of the heart, and the spirit of the men who form them, prepare them in advance to be, as well as what nature and education have made them. " Industry instead of institutions are directing, not only our youth but, the entire consumer populous.

Schools once watched over by doting parents are now abandoned to educational professionals. Neighborhoods where each neighbor knew where the other neighbor's children were have gone by the wayside. Entertainment has taken over the outdoor afterschool playtime. This happened in my lifetime and those of us raised playing in the streets and coming home to dinnerbells let it happen. I don't exactly know when it all stopped. Maybe when we first heard that a child was kidnapped. Maybe when all the moms stopped baking chocolate chip cookies. I don't know when but here we are waiting for redbox to supply us with something for our family to do.

Sentiments once turned to wisdom, self control and maturity have, under the direction of a capitalist entertainment system, turned future adults into perpetual children or even worse perpetual teenagers