flambingo

restoration

hippopotamus / behemoth

i've been looking at the marvelous jewish encyclopedia recently. aparently the behemoth may be modelled on the hippo. not as foolish as it sounds given that hippos kill more humans each year than any other big game. however the relationship to Tiamat (primal chaos) is probably a better fit. though hippos rising from the primordial chaos.......

god hates fags

"Why should Christian preachers be intimidated by Bournemouth's large homosexual community, which objects to hearing about its sin and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? "
from uk.gay

because your deluded cunts.

the worst system of government, except for all the others

jose saramago grasps that democracy is a process to be made not an ossified thing to be imposed.
from le monde diplomatique

"Experience confirms that political democracy is of little use unless it is based on economic and cultural democracy. Yet economic democracy is now a despised idea, replaced by an obscenely triumphant cult of the market. Cultural democracy has been replaced by the no less obscene idea of industrialised mass culture, a pseudo-melting pot that conceals the predominance of one culture over all others.

We think we have progressed but we are regressing. Talk of democracy will become absurd if we persist in identifying it with institutions called parties, parliaments and governments, without examining the use those institutions make of the votes that bring them to power. A democracy incapable of self-criticism is doomed to paralysis."

things fall apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats