Eating Brains is Fun!

The Eye of the Donkey

Hillary Sports a New Look

Near Union Square, Manhattan.

Saving Horses, One Thoroughbred at a Time

Somewhere, far out of sight if not entirely out of mind, countless other former racehorses were on their way to being slaughtered.

“I struggle with it,” Diana Koebel said. She is the owner and trainer here at LumberJack Farm, one of hundreds of horse farms around the country helping rescue and rehabilitate thoroughbreds considered too slow or damaged to be worth anything more than horse meat. The rescuers cannot keep up.
...
About 15 percent of the American horses slaughtered, horse advocates said, are thoroughbreds. Many are only a few years old but considered too broken to race and, therefore, to live.
“But there is a lot of life left,” the ReRun president, Laurie Condurso-Lane, said. Horses can live to 30 years or longer. “They are young. So why not find them new jobs?”

The spotlight that shines on horse racing during the Triple Crown events each spring rarely illuminates the shadows. The sport is usually painted with bright, pastoral backdrops. Winners of the biggest races become royalty, revered by people and seemingly destined for a pampered life doing little but producing more runners like them.

But most racehorses run a far different route — downward, slipping from rung to rung in the sport’s hierarchy. Some are traded a dozen or more times as their earnings fade, until someone decides that the horse is no longer worth the time and money to keep it.

It even happened to Ferdinand, the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, who reportedly was slaughtered in Japan for pet food a few years ago.

More at Saving Horses, One Thoroughbred at a Time

Saturday Night Fun with a Cavegirl

More of Gislane at Zillow Book.

Don't know much about History

In other news, Evi wishes you a Happy Fishnet Friday!

KOI

KOI by ~xXxNewCultQueenX

So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
Wednesday May 14th, 2008 @ 11:48 AM
Filed under: News
After a personally difficult legal dispute over BME, I’ve had to face the potentially insurmountable reality of being massively in debt, and I have chosen to transfer the business to Rachel (the details of this deal are sealed, so please don’t ask). Within the month my role at BME will come to an end, and new staff (made up largely of people who’ve been working on BME for some time as well) will be taking over. I will no longer be writing online about body modification, although I will be maintaining my regular blog and other projects of course, as well as working on several body modification book projects which I am eager to complete.
It’s definitely a very strange and mixed set of feelings, having run this site from the very beginning, over nearly a decade and a half. On one hand I’m very much looking forward to having the opportunity and time to paint and tackle new adventures, and on the other hand I will very much miss both the people and the subject in general that I came to know through BME. That said, when I grew up and fell in love with body modification — and later built BME — this was a very different and much more “outsider” culture, so maybe now, as not just tattooing but body modification as a whole enjoys unprecedented levels of popularity and acceptability, it is a good time to pass the torch on to a new generation. It’s my hope that they maintain the site in the spirit that it was begun, while taking on the challenges of a new environment.
I have very much enjoyed being a part of BME and I leave it with good memories. Thank you to everyone who’s been a friend of the site, and everyone who’s helped bring it to this point. I hope you’ve enjoyed my contributions — I know I’ve enjoyed yours — and I hope that you continue to enjoy what BME brings in the future.
See you in hell! :P
Shannon snowrail@gmail.com zentastic.com

Beautiful – except for the scary fingernails

Precious by *photoport

P.S. I wish Hillary Clinton would STFU.

Bill O'Reilly Flips his limited transmitters

Koi Piercing?

Fashionable Goldfish Wear Labrets

Help Hana Understand the Gas Tax Holiday Issue

Vote here and/or add comments and suggestions to help Hana in her decision making process.

SWEET Caroline!

Check out my new ND blog!

KOI - me

KOI - me by *philosophyoftime

KOI 2 by *philosophyoftime

Not only does Clinton trash San Francisco and MoveOn.org, but KOI too!

I was ogled by creepy clowns and Hillary Clinton in my Maidenform bra

I dreamed I was ogled by creepy clowns in my Maidenform bra


Digg Natalie Portman Stands Firm By Hillary

Cut Loose and Club Shirts Not Seals!

Found in Mom's Basement

This is HUMANE?!

Commercial Seal Hunt Day 3 Cruelty

So much for Canada's kinder gentler slaughter of baby seals this year.

I should film Tanuki swimming

Tanuki can easily do a couple dozen laps in an Olympic sized pool.



I don't think this is very funny:

Charitable Causes

Clinton Foundation's latest intern:


Clinton Foundation's Sweet Cashback

Shady Deals
BREAKING NEWS UPDATE!
Neil Diamond's Thong Theory

Unique Fishing Lures

Fishing Lures For Artful Angling

The “egi” lure originated in Japan to catch bigfin reef squid and black squid.

This was quite a catch in the WSJ this morning. I can't believe the media isn't making more of the utter and complete hypocrisy of this discovery.

Accordion and Koinets!

Hat tip to Wagga for this lovely koinet fishnet set. More at Zillow Book.

::Crying Koi, Grrls and other orphans::

::otoshimono the blog::
.... the lost and found blog of innocent girl.....
via Ectoplasmosis

Special Agent Cooper on Tibet

Irrawaddy - By DENIS D GRAY / AP WRITER / BANGKOK : Tibetan monks hurling rocks in bloody protests against the Chinese and even Buddhist clergy peacefully massing against Burma’s military can strike jarring notes.

These scenes run counter to Buddhism’s philosophy of shunning politics and espousing loving-kindness toward even bitter enemies which the faith has adhered to—with some tumultuous exceptions—through the 2,500 years of its history.

But political activism and occasional eruptions of violence have become increasingly common in Asia’s Buddhist societies as they variously struggle against foreign domination, oppressive regimes, social injustice and even climate change.

The change has seen more monks and nuns moving out of the seclusion of their monasteries and into slums and rice paddies—and sometimes into streets filled with tear gas and gunfire.

“In modern times, preaching is not enough. Monks must act to improve society, to remove evil,” says Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile and a high-ranking lama.

“There is the responsibility of every individual, monks and lay people, to act for the betterment of society,” he told The Associated Press in Dharamsala, India, discussing protests, initiated by monks, in Tibet’s ancient capital of Lhasa and elsewhere this month.

In widespread protests over the past three weeks, angry crimson-robed monks—some charging helmeted troops and throwing rocks—have joined with ordinary citizens who unfurled Tibetan flags and demanded independence from China. Beijing’s official death toll from the rioting in Lhasa is 22, but the exiled government of the Dalai Lama says 140 Tibetans were killed there and in Tibetan communities in western China.

Bloodshed also stained last fall’s pro-democracy uprising in Burma, dubbed the “Saffron Revolution” after the color of the robes of monks who led nonviolent protests against the country’s oppressive military regime.

In Thailand, the Dharma Army, followers of a Buddhist sect, took part in street demonstrations which led to the ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra two years ago.

In Sri Lanka, the ultra-nationalist Jathika Hela Urumaya party, led by monks, has pushed for use of brute force against the country’s Tamil rebels. Buddhist involvement in politics is nothing new in Sri Lanka—in 1959 a monk assassinated Prime Minister S.W. Bandaranaike amid public protests against a law that gave some protection to the Tamil language.

Indeed, the activism by monks reflects another side of Buddhist history. Despite the faith’s image of passivity, an aggressive strain has long existed, especially in the Mahayana school of Buddhism, practiced in Japan, Korea, China and Tibet.

Monks in Japan, the sohei, fought pitched battles with one another and secular clans for over 600 years until around 1600. China’s Shaolin Temple, a martial arts center to this day, was allowed to retain warrior monks from the 7th century by emperors who sometimes called on their services to put down rebellions and banditry.

In more recent times, the monk Saya San became a national hero in the 1930s in Burma by leading a revolt against the British colonials who hanged him after fielding 12,000 troops to suppress his peasant army.

The self-immolation of monk Thich Quang Duc in the streets of Saigon became one of the iconic images of protest against the Vietnam War.

Before China’s take-over of Tibet in 1959, warrior monks sometimes wielded more power—and weaponry—than the army. Lhasa’s Sera monastery, one of the hotbeds of the recent protests, was particularly noted for its elite fighters, the “dob dobs,” who in 1947 took part in a rebellion that took 300 lives.

“Use peaceful means where they are appropriate, but where they are not appropriate, do not hesitate to resort to more forceful means,” said the previous, now deceased Dalai Lama when Tibet fought the Chinese in the 1930s.

But Christopher Queen, an expert on Buddhism at Harvard University, noted that the new Buddhist activism also means some among the world’s 350 million faithful are expanding the traditional focus on individual spiritual liberation to attack problems that affect whole communities or nations such as poverty and the destruction of the environment.

Examples include Sri Lanka’s Sarvodaya Shramadana, or “Mundane Awakening,” movement which provides everything from safe drinking water to basic housing in more than 11,000 poor villages, and Buddhist groups in India that are fighting for the rights of “the untouchables,” or outcasts.

Loosely affiliated but global, originating at the grass roots rather than atop religious hierarchies and more muscular than meditative, this movement is widely known as Engaged Buddhism.

“Engaged Buddhists are looking at the social, economic, and political causes of human misery in the world and organizing to address them. The role of social service and activism is clearly growing in all parts of the Buddhist world,” Queen said in an interview.

Given the religion’s deeply rooted peaceful doctrine, scholars are doubtful that the new activism will spill over into terrorism or violence other than occasional spontaneous outbursts.

While not immune to spilling blood, Queen says “the Buddhist tradition is rightly known for the systematic practice of nonviolence.”

Proponents like to say that, unlike Christianity, Buddhists have not waged Crusades and burned heretics at the stake, tried to institute anything akin to today’s radical Islamic states or used force to spread their faith like Christians and Muslims.

Although one Chinese Communist Party leader called the Nobel Peace prize laureate “a wolf in monk’s clothes,” the Dalai Lama has decried the recent violence while supporting peoples’ rights to peaceful protest.

“If (monks) want to fight, they have to disrobe and join the fighters,” Samdhong said.

Still, Tibetan Buddhist monks are regarded as perhaps the most potent and organized anti-regime force.

“Under China they came to be the only force that represents the interests of the community, of the nation,” said Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University. “Monks and nuns have acquired this heroic status of representing the nation in its most difficult times.”

via ABITSU - All Burma I.T Students' Union

Also see Buzz Saw's Big Hitter, The Lama

Daily Koi Starts Now!

"A Cabinet Of Natural Curiosities"

Woohoo!