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FRIENDS WHO USE YOU ARE THE LOWEST.

It is so sad when you realise that someone you thought of as a good friend, was jjust feathering their own nest and using you.  This happened to me recently with someone I have oput myself out for - many times - and have had them living here more or less rent free and with all meals and he couldn't evenm be bothered to lend a hand unless we told him - as asking was a waste of time. he would even use my staff member to do things for him - which soon came to an end when I found o

Some people sadly do not get it - they don't understand that life does not owe them anything and we are not here to serve their needs and cater to them - and as my Mother always use to say - ' YOU ONLY GET OUT OF LIFE WHAT YOU PUT INTO IT' and if all you do is take - tyake - take, then you will eventually come up against those who are not interested any more and will tell you where you can shove it.

Groundbreaking legislation legalizing physician-assisted


suicide recently passed both branches of the Vermont State Congress.

 

The bill, entitled, “The Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act,” will automatically go into effect, once Vermont governor, Peter Shumlin, signs on the dotted line. His signature would officially make Vermont the first state to approve such a law through the legislative process. Oregon and Washington have had similar legislation for years; however, both of their laws were passed via public referendum.

Physician-assisted suicide (also dubbed, “death-with-dignity”) laws allow doctors to legally prescribe lethal prescription drugs to people with are near death. These rulings also provide protection for friends and family members who support a dying individual’s choice.

For more than a decade the Vermont’s version of a death-with-dignity law has been under construction; traveling back and forth between the state’s House and Senate several times and undergoing multiple revisions.

The final iteration of the bill closely mirrors the one passed in Oregon over 15 years ago. Here are a few of the key provisions in Vermont’s bill:

A person applying for a deadly dose of medication must:

• Have a terminal illness with a prognosis of six months or less
• Undergo a complete examination of their current and past health status
• Be deemed capable of making a decision
• Be able to take the medication themselves

Also included in the bill are specific protections for anyone who is present when a terminally ill individual consumes doctor-prescribed life-ending medication

Comment by John Bellamy

Some years ago we hiosted an event here at Hamilton Hall for a doctoir from Australia who facilitated a workshop on Assisted Suicide and it attracted CNN / Sky-Fox / BBc and all the main news media channels and newspapers and the entiore building was under seige by the media.  It was a very interesting day with the good doctor - actually - not offering  agood workshop at all and much of it was all about hype,  and I cpould really have tauight a much better and easier technique for thiose who werte terminally ill and in need.  It is quite horrible how we keep people alive long after we would if they were our cat or dog and I saw this first hand when my Mother got old and had dementia and didn't have a clue what was going on, was bed bound, relied 100% of diapers / nappies - and didn't recognise herself or her children in photo's and barely knew who we were in person. her health wasa dreadful and with medication she striuggled through 3 years like this and in all of this time, there was no quality of life at all, no fun for her, no laughter, no joy, and yet the law says she must be kept alkive as long as possible and that means the law is deliberately lengthening her pain and anguish as well as that of the family who have to witness and be a part of this cruelty. 

I completely support assisted suicide - with strict and legal guidelines in place, and if in the future my ehalth - mentally and / or ophysically is impaired to such a degree that I need constant care and attention, or severe medication, the I demand the right to be able to legally end my life in the manner of my choice ( peacefully in bed withStreisand playing - a spliff and a few friends around, and then to take a tablet and drift off to sleep and let that be the end)  and I will be damned is some scared politician or doctor are goping to tell me what is right or wrong for me.  
 

Fanny & Stella:


The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England

by Neil McKenna
(Faber, £16.99)


Dressing up in drag in the 19th century could be hazardous. Male transvestite prostitutes often wore false breasts made from boiled sheep’s lungs. One, who took out his breasts when he went to bed, was surprised to find the next morning that they’d been eaten by his cat.

However, far greater perils lay in store for “Stella Boulton” and “Fanny Park” when they were arrested outside the Strand Theatre in 1870. Stella had already gained some renown as a great beauty — indeed one man at the Strand mistook her for the Duchess of Manchester, recently described by the prime minister, William Gladstone, as “the very fairest of our land”.
But at Bow Street police station, Stella admitted that her real name was in fact Ernest Boulton. As for Fanny, she was really Frederick Park. Stripped naked, they were examined by an exceedingly curious doctor who noted that both had unusually slack bottoms and inordinately long corkscrew-shaped penises — both these things, he concluded, being the result of “sodomitical activity”.

They were then charged with “the abominable crime of buggery” — which until nine years earlier had carried the death penalty: the sentence had now been commuted to penal servitude for life. The case, predictably enough, caused a sensation — all the more so when details emerged of the two men’s backgrounds. Fanny’s father turned out to be a High Court judge, while Stella’s was a stockbroker.

Both Fanny and Stella had dreamed — rather fancifully under the circumstances — of becoming actresses, but had ended up as male prostitutes. To make matters even more exciting, there was an exotic cast of supporting characters. One of Stella’s more regular consorts was Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, son of the Duke of Newcastle and an MP.

The case also lifted the lid on something that had hitherto been kept tightly screwed down in Victorian London — the drag scene. Drag, it seems, was a lot more popular at the time than might be supposed. There were regular drag balls which the police, on the whole, turned a blind eye to — although in 1854 they did arrest a 60-year-old man “dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the golden age”.

Meanwhile, Stella and Fanny were languishing in Newgate Prison and being subjected to yet more medical examinations. One of these involved the two leading French specialists in sodomy, along with 17 English medical men “of the highest eminence”. They peered through magnifying glasses at both men’s bottoms and concluded — I suspect to the astonishment of Fanny and Stella themselves — that they could find no evidence of sodomitical activity.
By the time the case came to trial the public mood had changed — from shuddering fascination to something like sympathy. And when Stella and Fanny were found not guilty the public gallery erupted into cheers. Never one to be upstaged, Stella promptly fainted.

You would need to be a very dull — or prim — dog indeed not to find this a terrifically entertaining story. Neil McKenna has thrown himself into it with unfettered glee. If the opportunity arises to describe an anal fistula — and it does, frequently — he does not shirk it. Every so often the campness threatens to tilt out of control, but he’s a sufficiently crisp, colourful and funny writer for it not to matter.

Perhaps the abiding impression the book leaves is just how thin the curtain was separating the demi-monde from solidly bourgeois society of Victorian England. In later life, one of Stella’s ex-lovers renounced the “sodomitical underworld”. Instead he decided to explore some other fleshy nooks and crannies — and became a chiropodist.


 

STOP THE WAR COALITION

Newsletter No.1236 29 February 2012

Email office@stopwar.org.uk

Tel: 07956 718 958

Web:  - CLICK HERE
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 J

J