October, 2020 - Bettina Network's Blog

Archive for October, 2020

Interesting and very nutritious Recipes to rev up your immune system!

Monday, October 19th, 2020

Try this hamburger with kale chips – you won’t believe how good it is.

First, the kale chips.

Take the “spine” out of the Kale. Just rip the leaves away from the middle tough spine and put the leaves on a baking sheet.

Pour a very little melted butter or peanut oil or olive oil (only use olive oil if you don’t have any of the others) If you use olive oil you will have to bake these kale leaves at 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 250 tops. Olive Oil goes rancid quickly if used with too high heat. Rancid oil does not help your immune system become healthier and in great shape. In fact, it does exactly the opposite.

We love very good Olive Oil on salads and other things not cooked. Keep my Olive Oil away from the stove.

Sprinkle himalayan salt (that beautiful pink salt), Old Bay Seasoning, maybe a little thyme, turmeric and sage over the kale leaves.

Mix with your hands turning the leaves over and over until they are all evenly coated with the oil and seasonings.

If you have other seasonings you like, don’t hesitate to use them instead of what we suggested. That comes from our taste. You probably have a culturally acquired taste for specific seasonings – by all means use them. You will find the kale chips much more to your liking if you do.

We have tried this with butter and with peanut oil. We prefer the peanut oil, but you probably will have to go to China Town to get it. Most groceries don’t carry peanut oil anymore or they carry a really inferior brand.

Put the baking sheet in the oven at 300 or 350 degrees Fahrenheit and bake them until they are very crisp. Check them periodically – ours take about an hour sometimes an hour and a half to cook.

To assemble the hamburger:

Put a hamburger bun in the oven to heat. Make sure you are using an organic hamburger bun. That means only organic flour and preferably made with whole wheat flour.

Once heated, spread things you like on the bun – mayonnaise, mustard, organic bread and butter pickles, etc. Make sure everything is organic, don’t ruin it at this point.

Use ground beef which is organic from grass fed beef and shape into patties.

Fry them in a cast iron skillet – briefly and on medium heat. You can oil the pan, however if you use 85-15% meat to fat you don’t need to oil the pan. And, if you keep your cast iron skillets well oiled you really don’t need to ever oil the pan – they are non-stick in that instance.

Put the cooked ground beef pattie on the hamburger bun. Top it with a slice or slices of tomato. Put the kale chips on top of the tomato and close the bun.

The kale chips take this way upscale. We used to like lettuce with the tomatoes on the hamburger bun, however this has more nutrition and adds dramatically to the taste.

We use mayonnaise on these buns because that lets the taste of everything else come through. Mustard could be too strong a taste, but if you are one of those people who needs your mustard – go ahead.

Enjoy! And feel this great nutritional dish surge through your system running out everything that does not belong and that will cause you “ill” feelings.

DO NOT USE store bought kale chips no matter how tempting and make sure you are using organically grown kale. It takes less than five minutes to prepare the kale for the oven and you will have leftovers to use as we suggest below.

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Once you have enjoyed this hamburger you will be more ready to follow our next suggestion. We keep kale chips and bake them fresh every week to use as seasoning in many dishes. Sometimes we use kale chips instead of salt in different dishes. Other times we find the taste is great with rice. Just about any dish is improved if you sprinkle a bit of kale chips in the dish.

Not only will the dish be improved, its nutritional value will also be stepped up and your body will benefit.

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Waldorf Astoria/Park Plaza/Donald Trump – share what?

Saturday, October 17th, 2020

There is currently going on in Taunton, Massachusetts at 2 Galleria Drive an auction, which is one of the largest held in recent memory and the items include all of those which were inside the Waldorf Astoria before its current rehab started. The sale is being held by Kaminski Auctioneers of Beverly, Massachusetts.

https://auctions.kaminskiauctions.com/viewuserdefinedpage.aspx?pn=waldorf-astoria-auction

This is the largest auction held – so far. The auction which held that title, until Kaminski came along with the Waldorf Astoria auction was the one which sold items from the Park Plaza Hotel, which was owned by Donald Trump. He went bankrupt, so the hotel and its contents were auctioned.

Trump purchased the hotel in 1988 and paid some $400 million plus. It was purchased in its bankruptcy in 1995 for some $325 million. It was sold by the purchasers in 2004 for $675 million.

Joe Brancatelli wrote an article about Trump and the Plaza Hotel along with his foray into the travel industry March 3, 2016. That article was written when Trump was running to win the Republican primnary for president of the United States .

A quote from that article

“After a series of primary wins on Tuesday, Donald Trump is the man to beat for the Republican Party nomination for president. And as you surely know, Trump voters are enamored of his carefully burnished reputation as a businessman supposedly worth ” in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.”

But like his all-caps boasting on Federal Election Commission financial forms, Trump’s record doesn’t translate to the travel industry. His travel forays over the past 40 years have been a strange brew of missed opportunities, dreadful timing, questionable financial maneuvers, swaggering braggadocio, tear-down-the-competition innuendo and outright failure.”

To read the entire article go to: https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/blog/seat2B/2016/03/joe-brancatelli-donald-trump-travel-deals.html

The article is very enlightening because it talks about the many tries and failures of Donald Trump, some of his bankruptcies and the time he partnered with the Pritzker family in a hotel in New York which was apparently the beginning of the Hyatt chain.

That partnership was fraught with fights, law suits, and more negative stuff. The Pritzkers ended the partnership and they went their separate ways. The Hyatt chain in New York developed eight Manhattan hotels, including the Grand Hyatt while Trump’s own chain over the same period had two New York hotels.

Trump then went into the casino business and, according to this article, left banks, bondholders and other investors holding the financial bag. then came the casino bankruptcies and now Atlantic City, where his casinos were built, is a mess.

And now so is the United States.

The article is a must read if you would like to know the real story of Donald Trump as a business man. What amazes us is that all of this was known before Trump was elected President, yet none of it mattered to those who supported Trump for president.

Most interesting for us was the 1989 purchase by Trump of the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle. A Bettina Blog talks about Trump’s foray into the airline industry by using the work of an African American man who went back and forth from Boston to New York thinking Trump was interested in working with him on a shuttle. In reality Trump was interested in getting into the airlines business on the back of his work leaving him in the dust for all of his hard work and travel back and forth to New York to meet with Trump at his own expense. From our knowledge the man was never compensated and Trump simply took his work and used it as his own.

His history, character and personality prevailed, however and he overpaid for the planes, received a practically destroyed market share and cut costs by putting out “upgrades” of flash rather than actual, substantial, business improvements and of course, he tried to increase his market share by smearing his competitors with unfounded accusations.

It is a “must read” article if you would like to see just how much the United States voters who supported Trump were willing to overlook because they had a candidate who, they thought, would keep and move ahead to ever higher places their identity as “better than”. It is quite a story when you realize by who, for what and how Trump was elected.

This country was founded and became great through slavery. Those fighting the idea trying to move the United States to greatness through other means have constantly had to fight those who didn’t want to put in the work, but wanted an easier, quicker, filthier way to power and riches.

Trump has become a symbol of just how that has been done over the generations. He has also shown just how ugly are those goals and what one has to do to achieve such supremacy over others.

Trump’s pattern of life and its results have been documented, not only in this article by Joe Brancatelli, but in many others.

Today, the conspiracy theories, the lies, the mess, the upheavals all necessary for Trump to maintain in the way he tries to recreate the world in his own image, are all out there. Amazingly, even with history to show the results of following such a person there is still a large percentage of the United States population doing just that and feeling “better than” and justified as they spill and spurt filth, evil, brutality, lies, pain and suffering all over the world.

Make sure you read the article to its end where it points out that while Trump was calling for a ban on Muslims, Trump Hotels were aggressively courting Muslim business with an Arabic-language website.

There are other articles which outline what was happening in “Trump Business World” and they all read very similarly.

They all point to what bigotry can and has produced, yet we still engage.

One of Trump’s most horrendous legacies is his stamp on the United States Supreme Court. He is leaving a nominee who will keep his character, values, his brand of ‘integrity’ solidly enmeshed in the United States through almost everything the Supreme Court does.

That could be changed by the Senate finding its way back to a better, more truthful, more substantial place and vote to not confirm Trump’s nominee, but after watching what happened with the Kavanaugh nomination, that possibility has O% chance of happening. Real, substantial values are hard too restore once compromised and destroyed with others put in their place to achieve specious goals. The United States has not been able to work its way out of the morass it created and refuses to get out of from its beginnings.

A beautiful dream – unrealizable?________________________________________________________________

A Publicly Acknowledged Bigotry acceptable for Supreme Court Justices.

Friday, October 16th, 2020

by: Marceline Donaldson

It is not only acceptable but a required part of your resume´ to be seriously considered for a substantial position within this Trump administration.

We have watched such happen for four years and each time a new set of nominations comes along we know the people so nominated have made Trump comfortable with the fact that they are full of prejudices and ready to act on them to bring about the ‘Northern European-ancestry white person’ as better than anyone to create the society Trump and his followers envision. After all, he did not have the Bible, nor Thurmans ‘Jesus and the Disinherited’ on his bedside table as did Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many others. On his bedside table – according to testimony in his divorce hearing – was a constant copy of ‘Mein Kampf’. Today, he does not have to go back and rummage through to come up with ‘what would Hitler have done’ – he has so internalized that way of being that it just oozes from him automatically in just about everything he does.

That can be clearly seen as we have lived through the many which this current Trump administration has nominated for top positions, middle and ‘at the bottom’ positions to maintain the bigotry which has existed in this country since its beginnings in slavery.

if you are full of racist, sexist, homophobic, immigrant, religious and all the other bigotries which we have been and are forced to live with to create and maintain one group ‘better than’ all others, then you have a chance of making Donald Trump’s list of nominees for government positions.

If your lifestyle shows you live that bigoted life as normal and everyday, you are certainly in line for promotions. If you assault women, have sexual problems disrespecting and forcing yourself on women or getting involved with all kinds of sexual deviancy and show your disdain and disgust for women who are independent and demand to live a life ‘equal to’ then you are also meant for greatness in this Trump government. If not, you are just cast aside and blocks thrown in your path even if you are far from the center of power. You still have to struggle so you won’t do much damage to the bigoted lifestyle required of you.

Currently, the topic is the Supreme Court nominee – Amy Coney Barrett.

What a great jurist she could be if only she wasn’t so imbued with the extreme bigotry which has been her lifestyle choice. What a destruction of the talent God gave her to use for good instead of for the evil path she has chosen.

That affects the rest of us because we do not have the internal strength and fortitude and honesty to call her out on her bigotries because we are afraid that in the process we might also be outed for all to see. Or, at the very least, have to endure shame and embarrassment as others rush to her defense.

During the hearings, to determine if Ms. Barrett should be confirmed, what was missing were questions about her extreme sexism. How can someone be a Supreme Court Justice in these United States when you believe women are inferior to men and cannot do the things a man can do or rise to the level to which a man has an automatic right to attain.

And then immediately comes – from many of you, even as you read this – DENIAL, DENIAL, DENIAL, EXPLANATION, EXCUSES, etc, etc ,etc.

I have heard those denials and explanations and excuses my whole entire life and today, being over 80 it is beyond enough already. But because I am losing the ability to continue to tolerate such doesn’t mean it will go away. My mother reached that point – so did my grandmother – and my grandfather – and I could go on listing all of my ancestors. But who would care? A few of you would give lip service and commiserate for a moment or two, but that would be the extent of it.

My family has achieved much, but their achievements have been in the midst of incredible sacrifice – ‘on all sides’.

To come from generations of people who intermarried and tried to be family under the stress and weight of this society’s bigotry has been an unbelievably difficult, painful, searing life experience.

I identified with Amy Barrett as I watched her demeanor, her dress, her way of speaking and recognized them all from my New Orleans upbringing. She certainly does not dress like a New Englander and I was just delighted to see that.

However, as who she is and the choices she has made through her life were exposed during these hearings my New Orleans upbringing at its most painful was also exposed.

New Orleans was and is a place where the most liberal and most conservative can co-exist and that goes through the generations. There were slave markets and free blacks with substantial assets. I grew up in a mixed neighborhood – white, black, rich, poor, mafia, police all lived within a couple blocks of one another. Three white families on my block.

By the time I went off to college, Eisenhower had started his extreme geographical segregation of whites from blacks and turning middle class ‘mixed’ neighborhood into all black, drug infested blocks with the beautiful boulevards with their trees and picnic tables in those mixed neighborhoods into filthy, crime ridden places where expressways – freeways – whatever they are called were built over those boulevards and became areas where you would then find abandoned cars under the freeways and the trees and picnic tables and white and black small businesses on both sides of the freeway gone and bars and other such places even today existing in their place without even a historical reminder of what went before.

Children assume that is how it ever was and ever will be because as they become adults they see what their efforts amount to – nothing except pushing them down and holding up those who are quiet and appear to be satisfied with the status quo.

Amy Coney Barrett comes from a neighborhood which I remember well and I am sure with a little prompting you will also. “Old Metairie” – where those who were ‘wanna-be’ lived in cultural constriction and extreme racism. Turn the pages to the time of Katrina and remember when people in New Orleans trying to escape the fast rising flood waters ran to escape by attempting to cross the bridge from New Orleans to Metairie and were met by those with guns determined that “those people” are not going to threaten and rape our women. And what happened? “Those people” trying to preserve their lives were stranded at the top of the bridge and had to stay there for very long periods of time in the heat, the blazing sun, no food, water, shelter because they couldn’t turn around to go back from whence they had come – the flood waters now prevented that.

That would have been one of many events which shaped Amy Barrett’s life and life choices.

How did she respond? She became, on the one hand someone who adopted Haitian children, which gives her some “street cred”, but on the other, where her identity lives she became an extreme sexist – which by definition is a hatred of women.

Her Catholicism, in which she was raised, gave way to belonging to “People of Praise” – a paraChurch, where those belonging run back to their identity within the Catholic Church when that is more comfortable, but do not leave behind their beliefs as “People of Praise.”

One of their most basic beliefs is in the inferiority of women and that is shown clearly in their structure. Men only on the board of those who governs Women subjected and under the governance of their husbands. Things most of us have not had to deal with for decades.

Women getting the vote; LGBTQ rights; equal pay; and so much more has come from our moving beyond by light years from where Amy Barrett decided to sit and make her life and out of that life her choices and now she is being promoted as someone who can make choices for millions of others for decades and where are we – talking about not criticizing her religion because that wouldn’t be right and so much more nonsense. Nonsense to allow the status quo to exist while we claim to be in another place fighting for equality.

Equality does not come from putting a woman or a man on the Supreme Court as a jurist who does not believe in equality and whose “integrity” will allow her to vote in such a way as to insure that equality does not come and the racist, sexist, structure of this society which we have all fought to change remains in tact. Maybe a few cosmetic changes, but with Ms. Barrett’s beliefs, not even that, especially since those questioning her demurred from the most basic issues – do you believe in the equality of women or do you equivocate on that and are not willing to step out and be counted.

My husband and I pray for this society daily. All we have left is the hope behind those prayers – that the next generation will not have to endure and go through the kind of horribleness we have been put through because some people’s egos and identities were so weak they could only survive believing they were better than and insisting that the society in which they live continues and maintains its structure which allows the bigoted to be sated and not threatened with having to go through the emotional trauma of moving from ‘better than’ to ‘equal to’.

We have so much to atone for and every time we make a start, the fear rises and the future without the identity you were raised to believe was your birthright comes forward and does not look good so we take a side curve and move in a direction where ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same.’

It would be tragic for Amy Barrett to be confirmed as it was tragic for Kavanaugh to have been confirmed. We saw the pattern, but when it happened again we decided to walk the same path because it was easy and those who stood up to say it is time to change this were martyred – and that is normal for us. We do that so well we have even hidden the mechanisms by which that happens and we look the other way.

Sadly, in this society, our excuses come down to money. How much will my doing this cost me – how much will I gain from being silent – how much will I get to rake in from going out on the limb just a short distance making sure I am always safe enough to be able to get back to the trunk in case the branch shows signs of breaking.

God forgive!

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Donald Trump and Jim Jones – HERD IMMUNITY and KOOL AID

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020

Kool Aid and COVID-19.  What do they have in common.  

The people in Guyana who were followers of Jim Jones had a better chance of living after Jim Jones had his trusted Lieutenants begin to serve them a poisoned concoction because he saw that his rule as head of the group was coming to an end than the people residing in the United States have after Donald Trump put out his order for the COVID-19 virus to be met head on with HERD IMMUNITY.  

 Trump  is out in front having gatherings which will do the maximum at spreading the virus quickly around the country and he has many people working with him to achieve his goal.  As did Jim Jones.   It is time for “head in the sand” people to take their heads out of the sand and look around.  

Rather than face life without the power and control he had experienced as head of this group, Jones had them all killed and his chief lieutenants obliged and carried out his wishes.  Donald Trump has done the same thing using the Coronavirus and his chief lieutenants are following his orders. 

What are you going to do about this?  Wait to die? We, at Bettina Network, inc. are clearly being harassed.  We have been experiencing much harassment.  After this blog I expect there will be more.  We survived being out there during the 1960’s fighting for civil rights.  We were out there in the middle of the women’s movement in the late 1960’s through the 1970’s.  We have been out there fighting for equal rights for everyone because that is how we were raised.   

Today,  our telephone constantly rings and there is no one on the other side.  The last call was from “Nicholas Gary 1-813 289 8225.  at 9:50pm.  When you dial that number an interrupt signal comes on and the recorded voice says – “this number has been disconnected.”  That is a common response from the telephone calls with no one on the other side we have been receiving for months. Minutes before that the call came from 617 691 2429.  The recording said “the number you have reached has been changed.  Please make a note of the new number and there then happens a busy signal.

Minutes after that a call came from “Blue Ox Bistro” 215 728 9440 with a long recorded message ending with a busy signal.  714 942 9957 with a message that says “we have determined that you are a scammer.  If our info is wrong you may email us at info@ scammer blaster.1” and it goes on and on with calls every few minutes. 

We are not the only people being harassed and threatened – and now it goes across the country threatening everyone.  Don’t you think it is time to put a stop to this?  Pelosi?  Schumer?  and the rest of you?  What will it take to remove this man from office and move him to some safe place where he will not be able to do harm to the citizens of the United States? With his announcement that there would be no COVID relief bill until after the election when he is re-elected – how much more is needed to remove him along with his lieutenants from office?  

Mark Meadows looks and acts very much like Jim Jones’ chief lieutenant during the Guyana event.  How much more is needed to act? We had no thought that we would be in such a place to say such things, our Harvard Business School education put us in line for great things – or so we thought.

However, these are crucial times and friends, family and colleagues are dying because of Donald Trump.   We have had a “thug” in office as President of these United States.  His grandfather was the first to come to this country and he made a substantial living on the backs of women who he used as prostitutes and built a bordello.  His son, Donald Trump’s father, made a substantial living partnering with someone who many claimed to be Italian Mafia.  Together they succeeded wildly and made it possible for Trump to become president.  

Trump himself sent out the dog whistle to all of those who could not face life without being “better than” and that dog whistle got him elected.  There are still those who see themselves as supporters of the one they claim has been sent by Hitler to restore the Nazi empire and we sit and wait.

How long, O Lord, are we going to sit and wait for the powers of evil to do their worse while we keep our hands clean to be able to wait until others do the dirty work and we can then come out of hiding breathing a sigh of relief? That is how it has ever been – would it be so beautiful a world if that could/would change?

We were raised with the belief that “I am my brothers’ keeper.” We sang that hymn – “Send me”. Were those only words to feel good by or words to live by? Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped out and with him were a number of people, but not as many as claimed to be there when the air cleared and he was declared one of our heroes. His army of supporters at that point, after he was long dead, multiplied by the millions, still doing nothing, but laying claim to being a part of his sacrifice.

When will that attitude change. We have caused many wars and much suffering for generations. We fled the “old country” for freedom in the new and we simply put in place to live by what we fled from.

If ever there was a time to stand and be counted – this is it.

Where were you when the United States was being destroyed by its “democratically elected” president? Were you on the front line? Or were you cowering behind waiting for others to clear the path so you could join them at the victory party as though you had been there all along!

With this White House declaring its way to go is through “Herd Immunity” it is time to stop sidelining and it is time for you to join those on the front lines. What can you do? What do you have to give? How are you going to protect your family from such a threat? Is your need to be better than – which you hide under all kinds of deflecting rhetoric – worth this?

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