Saturday, January 8, 2011

[Peckers_Pics] Model Wars, PICS; Jan 9, 2011 - Safe PICS For All Ages, Rated G



Model Wars, PICS; Jan 9, 2011
Safe PICS For All Ages, Rated  G

 
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  • Perhaps our male fitness photos shall inspire you to get Fit!
Health - Wellness - Exercise - Reflections:
Diabetic Nerve Pain Soothed by Botox, Ginkgo
 
Diabetic neuropathy is the clinical term for a nerve condition which affects many diabetes sufferers: pain, numbness and tingling in the nerve endings of the hands and feet.

For many years, diabetic neuropathy sufferers had little recourse other than standard painkillers and blood sugar monitoring, but an intriguing study finds that two unlikely treatments may provide lasting pain relief: Botox injections and supplementation with ginkgo biloba extract.

One study found that animals with diabetic neuropathy who were injected with botulinum toxin A, marketed under the popular brand name Botox, became less sensitive to pain for up to 15 days. In another study, ginkgo biloba supplementation provided a long-term reduction in pain symptoms for patients with diabetic neuropathy.
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And Now, Model Wars!

This group is called "Peckers Pics."  The English -  slang definition of "pecker" is to pluck at the truth. Therefore, we peck at items such as Gay Men's Health, Male Fitness, Gay (LGBT) Politics & Issues.  In this section you may peck at each photo in order to decide the winner of the "war of the fittest!"  Whereas, who is the model that may inspire you to exercise and "get fit?"  Warning: This may stoke you!
 
Your participation in discussion of health / news articles - appearing in this message is greatly appreciated.
 
James Guardino
 
VS
Victor Webster
Victor Webster (born February 7, 1973) is a Canadian actor. He is best known for his roles as Brennan Mulwray in Mutant X and "Coop" on Charmed.
 
You Decide!
NYC Gay Pride; June 27, 2010
Stoked?
NYC Gay Pride; June 27, 2010
Slain (Gay Activist) journo's gay 'boyfriend' actually straight, used him for the $$$
By LARRY CELONA, ISABEL VINCENT; Jan 8, 2011 / New York Post
 
Before a gay Portuguese fashion journalist was beaten to death and castrated in a Times Square hotel room, his 20-year-old fashion model boy-toy told him he was actually straight and only with him for the money, sources told The Post.

The pair - who were in the middle of a New York vacation that included visits to Broadway shows such as "Spider-Man:Turn off The Dark" - got into a heated argument after the revelation, the sources said. They were fighting so loudly Thursday at the East Village restaurant Paulinos that other customers complained.

After days of tension, veteran newspaper reporter Carlos Castro, 65, wound up nude and dead -- his testicles hacked off -- on the floor of his ransacked room on the 34th floor of the InterContinental Hotel on Friday night.

News of the romance-turned-tragedy stunned people in Portugal who knew Castro's boyfriend - aspiring model Renato Seabra - as womanizer who gave no indication he was gay, a source said.

[Renato Seabra- Allegedly Killed lover]

[Castro/Seabra]

Acquaintances of Seabra, who had recently won a modeling contract by becoming a finalist in a Portuguese reality model search show, thought he was only pretending to date Castro to get ahead in the fashion world.

"Carlos Castro was a trampoline to rise in the fashion and social worlds," the source said.

After doing well on the show, "Pursuit of a Dream," Seabra told a reporter of his burning need to succeed in fashion.

"I have entered this world, and I don't want to leave it because I see I can be successful," he said.

Castro was found dead in his trashed room at about 7 p.m. Friday. His head was smashed in by a blunt object and he was mutilated possibly with a broken wine glass.

Shortly after the slaying, Seabra was spotted by a friend of the victim waking out of the hotel.

"We asked him about Carlos and he seemed in shock. He wasn't expecting to see us," said the friend, Monica Pires, who was at the hotel with her mom, Wanda.

The three talked briefly and Seabra cryptically said: "He's not coming out."

Seabra then got in a taxi and went to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was treated, apparently for self-inflicted cuts to his wrists. Police - who went so far as to stop a Continental Airlines flight he was booked on too keep him from fleeing the country - arrested him at the hospital.

He was later taken to Bellevue, where he was under sedation yesterday. He has not been charged with anything, as police wait to question him.

Castro was long known as a gay activist in his native land, and has been a major chronicler of Portugal's high society and jet set. He is also a known fashion icon, famous for nation's best and worst dressed lists.

He was quoted as saying that he loved New York so much he wanted his ashes spread here.

___________________________

Catholic, communist, gay

Jan 9, 2011 12:03 AM | By Chase Madar / Times LIVE

Meet the new star of Italy's left, Nichi Vendola, who, unlikely as it seems with this profile, is poised to capitalise on the country's increasing disgust at the outrageous antics of its once untouchable prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, writes Chase Madar

Silvio Berlusconi's gift for the battuta - wisecrack - has been a great help to his political career. But there are limits. He tried to bounce back from the revelation that he intervened to secure the release from prison of a 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer, "Ruby Heartstealer," who had been at his private parties, by saying "it's better to go crazy over beautiful girls than be gay".

This did not go over well and in no way blocked public disgust with Berlusconi's "bunga-bunga" lifestyle. Bunga-bunga refers to an orgy involving a powerful leader, to which the Italian prime minister was allegedly introduced by his friend, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The crack about homosexuality was aimed at the Italian left's new star, Nichi Vendola.

Vendola is the governor of Apulia, heel of the peninsular boot, one of Italy's poorest and most socially conservative regions. That it should elect (and re-elect) a governor with a background in the Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation party), which he helped found in 1991, but is also openly gay, is counter intuitive, even if Vendola is a professed Catholic. He is now one of Italy's most popular politicians and may lead a coalition of left and centre-left parties in the national elections of 2013. He is a charismatic scrapper, and has the Italian right worried.

Vendola can use the battuta, too. In November he enraged the right-wing governor of prosperous northern Lombardy by declaring it the most "mobbed-up" region in Italy. The Camorra, with its base in the south, has managed to penetrate northern Italy, but still, having a southerner criticising the north is a novelty. And reversing decades of anti-communist Stalin-baiting, Vendola has condemned Berlusconi for embracing Vladimir Putin and the "business is business" approach to buying energy from authoritarian states like Russia and Libya.

When asked if he might become the first gay prime minister, Vendola said there had already been one, whose identity he had sworn never to reveal.

He is also unusual in that he easily quotes the 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, and the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as the New Testament and his former bishop, Don Tonino Bello, who is in the process of being beatified.

A poll last November found Vendola was the best-liked politician in Italy, more popular than either leader of the largest centre-left parties.

After his failed attempt to lead the Communist Refoundation party, Vendola formed a new party, Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (Left Ecology Freedom), of which he was unanimously voted president at its founding in October 2009, offering him a secure if relatively small national power base. His Fabbriche di Nichi (Nichi's Workshops) are political and social clubs, primarily for the young, that began in Apulia but are now to be found all over Italy. They are dedicated to decentralised, "horizontal relationships" of power, and to doing public good deeds. Vendola has more Facebook fans than any other politician in Europe, and he podcasts, blogs and tweets.

However, for now Vendola is governor of Apulia (population four million). He was first elected in 2005: after a narrow victory in the broad leftwing coalition's primaries - new in Italian politics - and then gained an even narrower victory against the conservative incumbent. "The centre-left didn't want me to run: they said the left would never win with me on the ticket. Well, the left never won in Apulia anyway - until me. Which shows all along the problem was not in the demand for good politics, but in the supply." In March he was re-elected by comfortable margins.

Vendola has made novel reforms. Apulia has invested heavily in renewable energy sources and now supplies Italy with 13% of its solar energy and 24% of its wind power. Land and properties confiscated from the Sacra Corona Unita - Apulia's organised crime syndicate - are no longer put up to police auction, where the mob used to buy them back, but turned into co-operative farms and youth and cultural centres. Tourism is increasing.

The Italian south is also a public health disaster zone, with some of the highest cancer rates in western Europe. Apulia's change to cleaner fuel sources, and a provincial 2008 regulation limiting dioxin emissions from the steel plant in Taranto, have been welcomed by environmentalists and political leaders. But the planned opening of two new waste incinerators has disillusioned some of his fans. Vendola claims he lacks the power to block the construction of incinerators.

Organised crime remains a serious problem. Vendola, as a southern Italian and former vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies' anti-Mafia commission, urges that all law enforcement efforts be complemented by social programmes targeting those who might otherwise enter organised crime at its lowest levels.

His prescription is not a flaky one: as has been documented by ethnographers and sociologists, the roots of Italy's Mafia culture run deep in social and family life. Loosening organised crime's hold on Italy will require not only good police work, but social transformation as well.

Vendola's rise has not been without friction. He has fallen out with comedian and anti-politician Beppe Grillo, and has been accused by Marco Travaglio, Italy's leading investigative journalist, of being "a red Berlusconi" for denouncing some anti-Mafia inquiries that targeted some of his circle.

Now Vendola is an international figure supported by Italians living abroad, for whom six seats are reserved in the Senate and 12 in the Chamber of Deputies. On a visit to the US in November, Vendola met John Kerry, now head of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, with the assurance that he didn't want Italy to pull out of Afghanistan, just out of the war in Afghanistan. Vendola said Italy wished to refocus on humanitarian work and peace negotiations. At first glance this would appear to be a coherent policy, but in fact it was humanitarian non-governmental organisations that clamoured the loudest for troop escalation. Vendola's position is not a departure from that of his previous party, as the Rifondazione Comunista acquiesced to Italian military participation in the occupation of Afghanistan.

The Italian media call him l'Obama italiano - a politician whose candidacy has gone from impossible to compelling. Vendola's childhood home, like so many others across Italy both Catholic and communist, had portraits on the wall of Pope John XXIII and Yuri Gagarin. Nichi, born in 1958, joined the communist youth group at 15 and treasures the memories of its consciousness-raising activities.

After school he would read L'Unità, the daily paper of Italy's venerable communist party (PCI - disbanded in 1991) to illiterate labourers. "They loved hearing about South America ... When I started travelling down there, I had read so much about all the places and their struggles it was like I had been there before. Today if you ask a 20-year-old in Italy where Chile is, he won't have any idea."

Vendola comes from a tradition where Italy's mass left was the largest and most vital in Europe, building up important civic associations: women's groups, youth organisations and farmers' associations, among others.

But political parties failed to keep pace with the popular unrest and collective actions that lasted from 1967 to the last great Fiat strikes of 1980.

When Vendola speaks of the past 20 years as lost decades, he is referring to the extinction of a vibrant and politically sophisticated civic culture which brought millions of people into the orbit of leftwing politics. Today, much of Italy's elite dreams of a stable, narrow, two-party political system, each party hewing close to a centre. Vendola, however, seems more committed to stirring up mass participation in politics than in "normalising" the system.

"Every gay and lesbian person who has been lucky enough to survive the turmoil of growing up is a survivor. Survivors always have an obligation to those who will face the same challenges."

....Jake

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"Every gay and lesbian person who has been lucky enough to survive the turmoil of growing up is a survivor. Survivors always have an obligation to those who will face the same challenges."

...Jake (Moderator)



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