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We are products of a cultural tradition that fosters a certain scepticism toward the state (and authority in general). Hito, I believe, comes at these issues from a background that is inclined to regard the state and authority as benevolent until proven otherwise. To me, both intuitivly and intellectually, our tradition seems closer to the truth. But I expect he would say much the same for his.

For me Spring cleaning = vacuuming the rugs, scrubbing out the bath room and sorting through the dirty laundry piles to pick out the 10 or 12 loads that really need to get washed.

Steve Rattner, a key orchestrator of the U.S. auto industry bailout, writes in today's NYT what he thinks it will take to save the euro. May 10, 2013, 10:16 pm Europe’s Careless Dithering By STEVEN RATTNER EUROPE’S economic problems are growing steadily worse, with unemployment in parts of the Continent now above the level reached in the United States during the Great Depression. Meanwhile, policy makers dither over solutions. Last week, the European Central Bank cut interest rates by a meager quarter of a percentage point, akin to giving two aspirin to a patient with pneumonia. Meanwhile, pressure is growing to ease the emphasis on austerity and to allow larger budget deficits. If it were only that simple. Properly coupled with other new policies, fiscal stimulus can help, but on its own it is just an inadequate palliative. The problems of the euro zone are not some routine cyclical downturn that can be rectified by traditional macroeconomic policy; they are deep structural flaws in both the design of the common currency and the economic policies of many of its members. Most fundamentally, the design of the euro was ill conceived. A disparate group of 17 countries, ranging from the German powerhouse to weaklings like Greece, should never have been joined in a single currency without integrating their other economic policies. As a consequence, while Germany grew ever more efficient, many other members allowed the cheap borrowing rates that accompanied the euro to lull them into complacency. Budget deficits expanded, wages rose rapidly and speculation in real estate ran rampant. Meanwhile, excessive regulation of business and labor made needed restructuring nearly impossible. Take autos. The European automobiles industry resembles that of the United States, circa 2009: too many factories employing too many workers, able to make more cars than the market can absorb. And, doing it too inefficiently. A Fiat autoworker in Poland produces three times as many cars as a Fiat employee in Italy and is paid one-third as much. And yet, achieving an American-style restructuring in Europe is impossible. Closing a single plant, even in Germany, is an expensive and often unsuccessful effort. When Peugeot ran into liquidity problems last fall, the French government provided up to seven billion euros in loan guarantees, but only if Peugeot spared some of the 8,000 jobs on its cutting board. Saving unproductive jobs is not a recipe for economic prosperity. In contrast, there’s Spain, where a more flexible labor market has led to higher productivity and competitiveness and in turn, to expanded production by a raft of automakers, including Nissan, Ford, Renault and Volkswagen. Spain remains plagued by high unemployment and recession. But better competitiveness has led to rising exports and a workable base for future expansion. Ireland has done even better in improving its competitiveness, and as a result its exports have boomed, growth has resumed and its double-digit unemployment rate has begun to tick down. But two of the largest euro zone economies — Italy and France — seem paralyzed. For example, Italy, under the previous prime minister, Mario Monti, made modest reforms like higher retirement ages and more freedom for employers to shed workers. While the reforms did not go far enough, even Mr. Monti’s small steps were soon watered down. He lost the most recent election, and his successor has been conspicuously silent about the needed structural changes. Competitiveness is not the only problem. Banks, because of their own weak balance sheets and a fear of more losses, have been wary of lending to small and medium-size businesses, and when they do it’s at a high interest rate. In Italy, where 80 percent of workers are employed by small or medium-size firms, borrowing costs are around 6 percent, compared with 3.5 percent in Germany. Nothing significant has been done to address this problem. To be fair, the euro zone has been taking small steps toward the greater integration that is required. A banking union and single regulatory framework are under development. And discussions are under way over a deal in which the austerity regime would be relaxed for certain countries, including France, in return for structural reforms. But incrementalism is an insufficient response. Europe should pursue full economic integration, much like the United States did in 1789, after the failed Articles of Confederation experiment. That would involve harmonized regulatory policies and a shared central government budget that would provide extra funds to troubled countries, just as America does for weaker states. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/europes-careless-dithering/?hp

Careful there, they went quite young with the cast, Asa Butterfield just hit 16. He was also the boy in Hugo. It was a great book, but it's 20 years old so a lot of things in it you will have seen before and the crux of the book is probably spoiled for just about everybody. Unfortunately the author is a raging Mormon homophobe. After he started writing opinion pieces on the topic I got rid of all his books. Which sucks because the original Ender's series is quite good, and I like the first of the Shadow series too.

The Guardian weighs in with a shrewdly dyspeptic take on this and another upcoming SF flick... Gravity likely to be less weighed down than Ender's GameWhile the anti-gay views of creator Orson Scott Card will do little to help Ender's Game, space adventure Gravity will be aided by cinemagoers' admiration for director Alfonso Cuarón The received thinking in Hollywood is that science fiction is a risky area of film-making. Nevertheless, studios continue to dip their fingers bravely into the danger zone like poor, doomed Peter Duncan in Flash Gordon. Perhaps it's the success of films such as Avatar, or the eternal popularity of Star Wars and Star Trek, but there seem to be more space-oriented movies around at the moment than there have been since the glory days of the 1970s. Two teaser trailers hit the internet this week for two very different films, both with a futuristic bent but hailing from as far apart in the sci-fi galaxy as it is possible to travel. Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in the tale of two astronauts facing disaster after a spacewalk goes horribly wrong, has been on the radar since at least 2011. Gavin Hood's Ender's Game arrives weighed down with plenty of baggage thanks to the repugnant views of its creator Orson Scott Card, who wrote the original novel. But it nevertheless gives us the chance to see Harrison Ford in a space uniform as well as the opportunity to check on the continuing development of Hugo's excellent Asa Butterfield. Gravity was supposed to be with us in November last year, but will now arrive in October 2013. The movie has managed to avoid any World War Z-style public meltdown, so there's no way of telling what's taken it so long. From the trailer, one could easily imagine this one morphing – once the initial action has dissipated – into an existential, enigmatic and claustrophobic 70s-style space drama such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (the presence of Clooney, who starred in the 2002 Hollywood remake, lends something to that reading). Of course, Cuarón may have a less fanciful disaster movie in mind, but something about the trailer's mesmerising slo-mo depiction of catastrophe in space hints at a cerebral subtext. It reminds one of the wonderful stereoscopic turmoil at sea of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, and it's no surprise to note that the film will be released in 3D. It's also worth noting that this is being officially pitched as a science fiction movie, suggesting that something out of the ordinary lies in wait. So what happens next to our poor beleaguered space floaters? Production cost a reputed $80m, for which we can presumably expect a little more for our dollar than Clooney and Bullock discussing how much oxygen is left for the rest of the movie. Go on Alfonso, chuck in an alien or two to liven things up. At least Cuarón, whose diverse back catalogue includes such gems as Y Tu Mamá También and Children of Men, has built up a repository of goodwill from cinemagoers. The same cannot necessarily be said for the makers of Ender's Game, which has been hamstrung by Card's determined anti-gay marriage stance. One might have hoped for a movie that transcended its roots (Card's depiction of the genius brute child warrior Ender has been compared to Adolf Hitler) just as the much-missed Paul Verhoeven's superb Starship Troopers subverted the right-leaning subtexts of Robert Heinlein's source novel in 1997. However, one would probably be disappointed, since Card himself is on board as a hands-on producer. Ender's Game, which also stars Ben Kingsley, Abigail Breslin and Hailee Steinfeld, does arrive with a screenplay officially attributed to director Hood, rather than one of two versions Card is said to have worked on over the years. For those who have not read it, the original 1985 novel is the story of a young boy plucked from obscurity to be trained in war games aimed at discovering a human commander to fight the extra-terrestrial threat of the insectoid "Buggers". This bright-eyed little murder machine is picked for the elite after killing two other small boys in scraps. The US military has for some time now included the book as suggested reading for its marine corps, which really tells you everything you need to know. Hood is best known for the Oscar-winning South African film Tsotsi, but rather marked his card with the poorly-received comic book sequel X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. We can only hope that the movie version of Ender's Game flags up the sinister nature of scary military types recruiting rosy-cheeked cherubs for genocidal space war rather better than the trailer (though I have to admit Kingsley's tattooed Mazer Rackham does look suitably horrid). Hood had this to say about Wolverine a few years back: "Any movie that is simply about good versus evil … is in my view putting out into the world and certainly into a mass audience and young audience's mind a rather dangerous philosophy, which is that there is good and evil in the simplistic and easily defined way … I think that for the last eight years, we've had that philosophy very much prevalent in the Bush administration that if you're on the side of good, at least as you perceive it, then you can do no evil." That's the kind of philosophy that surely needs to cut through the film version of Ender's Game if the movie is to avoid descending into really quite repulsive gung-ho territory. Summit Entertainment, the studio that made the Twilight films, is apparently eyeing the movie as the first in yet another teen-oriented sci-fi saga, but it seems rather unusual material to say the least. Perhaps the sequel could see an older Ender caught in a love triangle with a Bugger and one of his fellow pubescent angels of death – though one cannot quite imagine Card agreeing to it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2013/may/10/gravity-enders-game-orson-scott-card

The Web held too many odors for any one in particular to stand out. Or at least be traced to its source!

I was really surprised with Oregon. I had bought in to the idyllic nature of Oregon sold decades ago. Never got past it. It was next to heaven-on-earth with forward thinking people and so what if they ate crunchy granola. Wow!! Number one bottom of the barrel for retirement.

LOL Tom, surely you are not one to fall in love and then out so fast you can't remember. LOL As someone who has seen you take 7 or 8 guys a night, I doubt I would remember them either. I think it all gets blurry after 3.

Please pass the mayo, I'm thinkin' Turkey sandwich!

Learning from Andre how to bottom. Enough said?

The studied reasonableness in the elocution of your response would seem impervious to refutation. (A parlor game: Spot the Escape Clauses. )

My Favorite Escort Experience with was a PR escort I met at Stella's in NYC. He was adorable and a yummy ass. I had a Brazilian BF at the time and we lived in Westchester so I hired this 18 year old for fun and an overnight. It was a great experience and we ended up fucking all night long. That was over 15 years ago and we are still friends. He is still a voyeur and loves sending me naked photos of himself after all these years. LOL He did get me in a lot of trouble with the BF as the rule was only one time but I just kept seeing him over and over again but not for pay as we were now friends. One night, Thanksgiving, he had dinner with us and spent the night along with a few other boys. Everyone was exhausted and full from dinner. It was 4 of the hottest guys you can imagine and me. Well, we all ended up in bed together and fucking. The PR had told me he always wanted to get double fucked. So, I shared that with the group and they did double fuck him. In fact he was double fucked by everyone and I have never came so much in one night. The hotness of him getting pounded over and over was amazing. His beautiful bubble butt PR ass must have hurt for days and he gave me dreams to jack off to for years.

...from Broke Straight Boys TV.

Sorry, I'm with them. Don't get it. Being currently unemployed with health issues, I'm delighted that obama care is going to help me get and keep coverage.

thanks Anxiom, I would try to discover whatever Brasília hás to offer... And of course I will report from exciting Colombia

Well, even Louisiana? NO, Baton Rouge, Lafayette all seem to have reasonable quality of life, and reasonable enough gay scenes. Plus within striking distance of Houston for the weekend. Just avoid (needless to say) the state's English-settled northern tier. As for me, I can see I may need to go live out my dotage in RA1's basement. (Attic? Madwoman in the...)

You could consider that whomever you are having sex with at the moment is your lover...

Went twice to Termas in Barcelona last week end I arrived around 4 pm on Saturday. I was pissed because it seemed to me that there was no guy I would like. At first, I mainly saw Romanians and ugly brasilians. Of course after having experienced Mezzaninu in Porto Alegre in Brazil, it is difficult to find a sauna which can be compared. I went to the bar downstairs and rapidly spotted a customer in the swimming pool being "serviced" by a boy. When I say "service" I do not mean hardcore, but he was gently kissing the customer, cuddling him as well as himself was cuddled by the customer. it lasted some time and I had the feeling that this particular rent boy was really nice. Not exactly my type (not so tall and muscular), but good looking, smiling, nice face, ok body ... After some time he left his customer and was clarly trying to find another customer. I went up in the building and he soon came to me, smiling. As a good profesionnal, he had obviously spotted that I might be interested in him. We started to chat. He said that his name was Michele and that he was from Italia, Firenze area, but came to Spain because what he was doing in the sauna was not authorized in Italy. He is actually waiter and came to Barcelona for the first time to see what the sauna was and eventually make some money. He soon proposed his services which were everything (active and passive). He soon proposed also to give me sample of his skills in a cabin. After the sample of course, we continued for a full session. What a hot guy, nice body, nice face and good sucker, kisser, rimmer and perfect passive. He is gay for pay but obviously enjoy something up his ass ... We stayed long time in the cabin, and I really enjoyed every minute of it. After, we went to the bar to have a drink and something to eat. While he was eating, I was stroking his cock. From time to time he stopped eating to kiss me of cuddle me. Lovely. After maybe 2 hours together, we decided to split. He went to try to find another customer and I was thinking of having another boy, but noone was to my liking, After some time, though,I found a tall muscular Hungarian, Andrei. I was immediately in love with his muscular chest, his trimmed torso and his firm ass. When he said that he was a good passive, I knew that I would not resist long and we headed soon towards a cabin. Funnily he also proposed to give me a sañple oh his skills ... It is clear that during the winter there are not so many customers in Barcelona and in Termas, only the locals, and boys outnumer the number of customers by a large amount. Good session, maybe not as friendly as the one with Michele, but nice and as he said he was a good bottom. I like topping a tall ñuscular guy, taking him "de quatro" as they say (doggy style). After session, I went alone to the bar and was thinking of leaving soon. I was sitting at the bar and came to seat close to the bar the most beautiful cutie I has seen in the sauna today. Tall, nicely defined body, blue eyes, blond hair, smiling ... ¿ One boy was sitting between us. He tried something with me, but it was clear that I was only interested by his neighbour. He soon left his seat for me and I was not sitting close to the cutie, We started chatting: His name was Markus. Fom Poland, thence the blue/green eyes and the very white color of the skin. He came to Spain for construction work and is now unemployed. After our chatting, he said that he was going to smoke tobacco in a cabin and I joined him to continue chatting. When he offered some sex, even though he said that he was not passive, I accepted and started being sucked for the third time of the day by a gorgeous lad. Markus was not passive and that was fine with me since I was not able to fuck another ass today. But he was nice, friendly, good sucker. A third great experience the same day ¡ Termas sauna was really paradise for me that day. I left around 10 pm after another chat (only chat) with Michele. He was to spend the nite in the sauna to save a night in a hotel and we planned to meet sunday around 1 pm. I was so tired and happy that I did not feel like going to another place (I had planned NewChaps where I was to meet a local guy interested in a bear like me), but decided to skip and go to bed instead. Sunday at 1 pm, I met again Michele in the sauna. He had just been controlled in front of the sauna by the local police and had to show his ID, show that he had no drug with him. He was a bit embarassed when police exhibited 20 condoms that he had with him ... Anyway he was on time and we started a long long session, first in the jaccuzi, only me and him, cuddling, kissing, licking ... and then in a room for a torrid session. I had his cum all over my chest and fucked him as if it was my last day on earth. Then drink together, more chat. We spend 2.5 hours together and I was not willing to spend more time with wny other boy. Even when I saw Polish Markus coming to the sauna, I declined to join him ... Perfect week end in Barcelona. Worth another visit some day ...

Last date in Barcelona. He is from Brazil, Rafaa at Gay Romeo. 80 e. Totally my type, although less fun than Tony.