so big

"For all the weary souls grown bored with dreaming,
Whose thirst for Knowledge and for Beauty goes unslaked,
For all who long to wake from what is seeming,
And know what's Real, and what is Real, to embrace"

crustypunks

just different

fur series

JFK

and his interest in aliens

Drove home.
Had an accident.
No one was hurt except for the poor car and my shattered mind.
Came back.
No more holidays.
Thank you.

switch off

End of Days
by Marge Piercy

Almost always with cats, the end
comes creeping over the two of you—
she stops eating, his back legs
no longer support him, she leans
to your hand and purrs but cannot
rise—sometimes a whimper of pain
although they are stoic. They see
death clearly though hooded eyes.

Then there is the long weepy
trip to the vet, the carrier no
longer necessary, the last time
in your lap. The injection is quick.
Simply they stop breathing
in your arms. You bring them
home to bury in the flower garden,
planting a bush over a deep grave.

That is how I would like to cease,
held in a lover's arms and quickly
fading to black like an old-fashioned
movie embrace. I hate the white
silent scream of hospitals, the whine
of pain like air-conditioning's hum.
I want to click the off switch.
And if I can no longer choose

I want someone who loves me
there, not a doctor with forty patients
and his morality to keep me sort
of, kind of alive or sort of undead.
Why are we more rational and kinder
to our pets than to ourselves or our
parents? Death is not the worst
thing; denying it can be.

woah woah

Tom Ford...here we go again

with a little help of my friends

who

Happiness may come down to how your well-being stacks up to expectations.

CREDIT: © Martin Novak | Dreamstime.com

Americans really do love to work, it seems, while Europeans are much happier if they skip burning the midnight oil in favor of leisure. That’s according to a new study finding longer work hours make Europeans unhappy while Americans get a very slight (albeit not statistically significant) bliss boost from the extra grind.

“Those who work longer hours in Europe are less happy than those who work shorter hours, but in the U.S. it’s the other way around,”said study author Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a clinical assistant professor of public policy at The University of Texas at Dallas. “The working hours’ category does not have a very big impact on the probability of happiness of Americans.” [Happiest States' List]

The study, based on survey data, can’t tease out whether work causes happiness or unhappiness, though the researchers speculate the effect has to do with expectations and how a person measures success.

Prince

Prince William and Kate Middleton would like you to believe that the date of their wedding was chosen for practical purposes, pertaining to the social schedules of the participants, perhaps. According to Time Magazine, they “spent weeks deciding on a wedding date, repeatedly liaising with officials at Buckingham Palace, No. 10 Downing Street and Westminster Abbey.” But they had no idea that the date they had chosen, April 29th, was also the date that Adolf Hitler had married Eva Braun, before they both killed themselves in his bunker the following day.

The article points out other coincidences, other events that have happened on that day in history as well. For instance, this was the day that the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, was buried in 1986. She was the lady of common background who, like Kate Middleton today, married into the royal family during the reign of King Edward III. Because of his choice of wife, Edward had to abdicate the throne, making way for the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

What the article fails to point out is that April 29th is the eve of Walpurgis, the high holiday of pagan Europe, which is itself the eve of another pagan holiday, Beltane, or May Day. Beltane is named after Baal, the fearsome divinity of the ancient world to whom children were sacrificed en masse, in remembrance of Baal’s sacrifice of his own son. May Day was a traditional day for weddings in the British isles during the pre-Christian era, as well as highly sexual free love fertility rituals. The Queen of the May was the goddess Diana, and her king during these rites was the Green Man, or the King of the Wood.

Beltane is like a springtime version of the Saturnalia and Epiphany Feast rituals I described in my essay “Regnum in Potentia Part 1,” as well as in my book Money Grows on the Tree of Knowledge. At Saturnalia, a temporary king is elected called the “Lord of Misrule.” Similarly, in old Britain, at Beltane, festivities included the election of an “Abbot of Misrule.” Also, at the Epiphany Feast, a cake is made, and a token hidden within one of the slices. Whoever receives this token is the temporary king. He will be treated like royalty for a short time, and then symbolically sacrificed. In the more ancient versions of this rite, a literal blood sacrifice was performed.

Similarly, at Beltane, there was the baking of the “Beltane cake,” which was used to select by lot the “Beltane carline”: the sacrificial victim. Whoever received the piece that had been blackened over the coals was the unfortunate one. The burning of the cake was a foreshadowing of what was to happen to him. Sir James Frazer, in his book The Golden Bough, quoted a minister in the parish of Callander as saying:

Upon the first day of May, which is called Beltan, or Baltein day, all the boys in a township or hamlet, meet in the moors … They knead a cake of oatmeal, which is toasted at the embers against a stone … they divide the cake into so many portions, as similar as possible to one another in size and shape, as there are persons in the company. They daub one of these portions all over with charcoal, until it be perfectly black. They put all the bits of the cake into a bonnet. Every one, blindfold, draws out a portion. He who holds the bonnet, is entitled to the last bit. Whoever draws the black bit, is the devoted person who is to be sacrificed to Baal, whose favour they mean to implore, in rendering the year productive of the sustenance of man and beast. There is little doubt of these inhuman sacrifices having been once offered in this country, as well as in the east, although they now pass from the act of sacrificing, and only compel the devoted person to leap three times through the flames; with which the ceremonies of this festival are closed.

This is very interesting, given one of the details of Kate and William’s wedding. In addition to the traditional fruit-based wedding cake that will be served for the rest of the wedding party, Prince William is breaking with tradition and commissioning his own “Groom’s cake” just for himself. It will be made of dark chocolate and tea biscuits, based on a “secret family recipe.”

I’ll bet. The ancient rituals we are dealing with here have their roots in a tradition by which a reigning monarch sacrifices his son to prevent him from threatening his reign. There were also many traditions throughout the ancient world of temporary kings being wed to their “queen” just before the sacrifice, just as Hitler was married before his suicide. This is part of the alchemical process as well. The king and queen must unite into one hermaphroditic being (the “chemical wedding”) before being killed, burned, and then regenerated into something new: the royal heir.

Given what happened to his mother (coincidentally named after the Queen of May, to whom the Beltane sacrificed were offered), let’s hope that William sleeps with one eye open.

jajaja

"Pues si no Zuera...que al menos tienen bis a bis"

keep it bright

so proud

Docentes y diputados de la Unión Europea analizarán en León el Derecho Administrativo Comunitario
11/04/2011


El Parlamento Europeo y la Cátedra de Derecho Administrativo de la Universidad de León han organizado un Seminario sobre Derecho Administrativo en la Unión Europea que reunirá en León a profesores y catedráticos de distintas universidades europeas , magistrados y diputados europeos. La cita tendrá lugar en el Salón de Grados de la Facultad de Derecho del Campus de Vegazana, los días 27 y 28 de abril.

Cada día son más frecuentes las relaciones jurídicas que se producen entre las instituciones comunitarias y los ciudadanos de la Unión Europea, como son la presentación de escritos a la Comisión a través del Parlamento, la interposición o queja ante cualquier institución comunitaria, una petición ante el Defensor del Pueblo Europeo o la solicitud de informaciones y documentos, entre otros trámites. Para algunos expertos el Derecho Público europeo no ha de pretender la suplantación de los derechos nacionales, sino que debe haber un espacio común compatible con los derechos nacionales, regionales y locales.

El encuentro será inaugurado por José Angel Hermida, Rector de la ULE, y por Luigi Berlinguer, vicepresidente primero de la Comisión de Asuntos Jurídicos del Parlamento Europeo, el próximo miércoles 27 de abril, a las 9,00 horas. Durante la primera jornada, se celebrarán cuatro sesiones con la participación destacada de Nikiforos Diamandouros, Defensor del Pueblo Europeo y Peter Hustinx, Supervisor Europeo de Protección de Datos. Los temas de las cuatro mesas de trabajo serán ‘De París a Lisboa: Alcance y evolución del derecho administrativo europeo’ (9,30 horas), ‘Normas europeas sobre el acceso a los documentos y la protección de datos’ (11,15 horas), ‘Procedimientos sancionadores’ (13,00 horas) y ‘Procedimientos administrativos europeos en sectores específicos’ (16,30 horas).

Luis Angel Ballesteros, profesor titular de Derecho administrativo de la ULE, participará en la quinta sesión del programa del jueves 28 de abril a partir de las 9,00 horas y que tratará sobre ‘Fragmentación y lagunas de los procedimientos administrativos europeos en diferentes sectores’. Sesión que contará con la presencia del Ministro de Justicia de Finlandia, Päivi Leino-Sandberg. La sexta y última sesión estará dedicada a la necesidad de una ley de procedimiento administrativo en la que intervendrán Helena Jäderblom, magistrada de la Corte Suprema de Suecia, y Jacques Ziller, catedrático de la Universidad de Pavia.

I needed this

cat

the shame

Greg Jeloudov was 35 and new to America when he decided to join the Army. Like most soldiers, he was driven by both patriotism for his adopted homeland and the pragmatic notion that the military could be a first step in a career that would enable him to provide for his new family. Instead, Jeloudov arrived at Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training in May 2009, in the middle of the economic crisis and rising xenophobia. The soldiers in his unit, responding to his Russian accent and New York City address, called him a “champagne socialist” and a “commie faggot.” He was, he told NEWSWEEK, “in the middle of the viper’s pit.” Less than two weeks after arriving on base, he was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States. When he reported the attack to unit commanders, he says they told him, “It must have been your fault. You must have provoked them.”

What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, it’s an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hell—a soldier can’t just quit his job to get away from his abusers. But now, as the Pentagon has begun to acknowledge the rampant problem of sexual violence for both genders, men are coming forward in unprecedented numbers, telling their stories and hoping that speaking up will help them, and others, put their lives back together. “We don’t like to think that our men can be victims,” says Kathleen Chard, chief of the posttraumatic-stress unit at the Cincinnati VA. “We don’t want to think that it could happen to us. If a man standing in front of me who is my size, my skill level, who has been raped—what does that mean about me? I can be raped, too.”

In fact, it is the high victimization rate of female soldiers—women in the armed forces are now more likely to be assaulted by a fellow soldier than killed in combat—that has helped cast light on men assaulting other men. For most of military history, there was neither a system nor language in place to deal with incidents of soldier-on-soldier sexual assault. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Defense Department even acknowledged such incidents as an offense, and initially only female victims were recognized. But last year more than 110 men made confidential reports of sexual assault by other men, nearly three times as many as in 2007. The real number of victims is surely much higher. Even among civilians, sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. In the military the silence is nearly complete. By the Pentagon’s own estimate, figures for assaults on women likely represent less than 20 percent of actual incidents. Another study released in March found that just one in 15 men in the Air Force would report being sexually assaulted, compared with one in five women.

let me weep alone

once

Once, in a doorway in Paris, I saw
the most beautiful couple in the world.
They were each the single most beautiful thing in the world.
She could have been sixteen, perhaps; he twenty.
Their skin was the same shade of black: like a shiny Steinway.
And they stood there like a four-legged instrument
of a passion so grand one could barely imagine them
ever working, or eating, or reading magazine.
Even they could hardly believe it.
Her hands gripped his belt loops, as they found each other's eyes,
because beauty like this must be held onto,
could easily run away on the power
of his long, lean thighs; or the tiny feet of her laughter.
I thought: now I will write a poem,
set in a doorway on the Boulevard du Mont Parnasse,
in which the brutishness of time
rates only a mention; I will say simply —
that if either one should ever love another,
a greater beauty shall not be the cause.

da mirror

shit always flows uphill

the face of Jesus

curly

baby come on

not going better after this

"All Jews are bastards!" The narrator knows this because he heard the stories. He feels lucky he never really met a Jew. "The average Jew is about as despicable as the Germans (or Austrians which is about the same thing really). Germans are fat boors whose low intellect puts the almost on the level with women (whores, all of 'em). Germans are so dumb they even lack the common decency to be ashamed of being german."

The narrator lives in France and has taken on the French nationality ("stinking greedy egocentric self-loathing..." you get the picture.) His mother was French but he was born in Italy (Cowards). "Italians are a bastard race, a breed mixed of lesser bastard races with less savoury habits undoubtedly because they grew up under the influence of the RCC and the less said about them, the better."

"Whores are about as bad as their customers. I know because I visit the brothels but only to observe and have a quiet drink. I don't need woman, I can handle my urges myself quite fine thank you. Not that I indulge too much because going blind would be bad in my profession."

Umberto Eco´s Simonini

AHH SHIT

ANUBIS

GALLORE

ahhh manly man of mine

working so much

Lonely and alone