La cuestión es beber vino

Con permiso del talentoso Don Miguel Hernández, saboreamos este divertido poema de borrachera:  

 

 

Ni yo admito fuentes, Juan:
las detesto. Es mi destino
vivir donde dan el vino
y donde mejor le dan.

(...)

Mi mujer dice que trago
algo más de lo que debo,
y yo digo: si no bebo,
¿en este mundo qué hago?

Beber en vaso o en taza
es mi mayor distracción,
como beber en porrón,
en bota o en calabaza.

La cuestión es beber vino
y paladearlo bien,
le den en donde le den,
hasta que se pierda el tino. 

 (...)

Me irrita el agua más clara,
no la quiero en mi camino,
y hasta me lavo con vino

Miguel Hernández
El labrador de más aire (Pág. 54)

Casas

Borrell del Caso

Rizzi

Child refugees in Turkey making clothes for UK shops

Syrian refugee children have been making clothes for British shoppers, an undercover BBC investigation has found.
 

Panorama investigated factories in Turkey and found children had been working on clothes for Marks and Spencer and the online retailer Asos.
 

Adult refugees were also found working illegally on Zara and Mango jeans.

All the brands say they carefully monitor their supply chains and do not tolerate the exploitation of refugees or children.

• The kids who have to sew to survive

Marks and Spencer says its inspections have not found a single Syrian refugee working in its supply chain in Turkey.

But Panorama found seven Syrians working in one of the British retailer's main factories. The refugees often earned little more than a pound an hour - well below the Turkish minimum wage. They were employed through a middleman who paid them in cash on the street.

'Unacceptable'

One of the refugees told Panorama they were poorly treated at the factory. He said: "If anything happens to a Syrian, they will throw him away like a piece of cloth."

 

The youngest worker was 15 years old and he was working more than 12 hours a day ironing clothes before they were shipped to the UK.
 

A spokesperson for Marks and Spencer said the programme's findings were "extremely serious" and "unacceptable to M&S". It is offering permanent legal employment to any Syrians who were employed in the factory.
 

"Ethical trading is fundamental to M&S. All of our suppliers are contractually required to comply with our Global Sourcing Principles, which cover what we expect and require of them and their treatment of workers.
 

"We do not tolerate such breaches of these principles and we will do all we can to ensure that this does not happen again."
 

But critics say the retailers are not doing enough to stop the problems highlighted by Panorama.

Danielle McMullan, from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, says the brands need to understand that they are responsible: "It's not enough to say we didn't know about this, it's not our fault.
 

"They have a responsibility to monitor and to understand where their clothes are being made and what conditions they are being made in."

 

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37716463

La música de Bitácora: Creedence Clearwater Revival: Have You Ever Seen The Rain?

El sabor es..

F.: Rafael Suárez

Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur transparent

Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant
D’une femme inconnue, et que j’aime, et qui m’aime,
Et qui n’est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même
Ni tout à fait une autre, et m’aime et me comprend.

Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur transparent
Pour elle seule, hélas! cesse d’être un problème
Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême,
Elle seule les sait rafraîchir, en pleurant.

Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse? Je l’ignore.
Son nom? Je me souviens qu’il est doux et sonore,
Comme ceux des aimés que la vie exila.

Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,
Et, pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a
L’inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.

 

 

Paul Verlaine

My reve

Que la tierra te sea leve

A Cohen, por transmitir  la alegría y el dolor del amor con esas raíces religiosas:

 

And it’s not a cry that you hear at night

It’s not somebody who’s seen the light

It’s a cold and it’s a broken

 

 

La Libertad según Schrödinger

F: Rafael Suárez

Un autorretrato de Beckmann

Why Can't We Rein In This Ridiculous Military Spending?

William D. Hartung

 

Through good times and bad, regardless of what's actually happening in the world, one thing is certain: In the long run, the Pentagon budget won't go down.

 

It's not that the budget has never been reduced. At pivotal moments, like the end of World War II as well as the war's end in Korea and Vietnam, there were indeed temporary downturns, as there was after the Cold War. More recently, the Budget Control Act of 2011 threw a monkey wrench into the Pentagon's plans for funding that would go ever onward and upward by putting a cap on the money Congress could pony up for it. The remarkable thing, though, is not that such moments have occurred, but how modest and short-lived they've proved to be.

 

The current DoD budget is roughly $600 billion—more than it was at the peak of Ronald Reagan's massive arms buildup.

 

Take the current budget. It's down slightly from its peak in 2011, when it reached the highest level since World War II, but this year's budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is nothing to sneeze at. It comes in at roughly $600 billion—more than the peak year of the massive arms buildup initiated by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. To put this figure in perspective: Despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office.

 

S.: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/tomdispatch-pentagon-government-military-spending

Spain’s Socialists May Have Destroyed for Years the Chances of a Left-Wing Government



By Bécquer Seguín and Sebastiaan Faber

 

On October 29, four months after the most recent parliamentary elections, the Spanish parliament voted to reelect Mariano Rajoy, head of the conservative Partido Popular (PP), as the country’s prime minister. Rajoy’s minority government, sworn in today, is poised to continue a politics of austerity and privatization that, at its peak, left more than one in four Spaniards jobless. And it is thanks to the center-left Socialist party (PSOE), Spain’s second-biggest party, that he will get the opportunity. While two smaller parties—Ciudadanos, a young right-wing party, and Coalición Canaria, the longtime ruling regional party of the Canary Islands—supported Rajoy, the key votes were abstentions. Four-fifths of the PSOE’s deputies followed a party mandate to abstain, despite the fact that the party had campaigned on the promise to push Rajoy out. The other fifth kept its word, voting “no” in open defiance of their own party’s most recent conservative turn. The result: For the first time in Spain’s democracy, a prime minister has been elected with the help of the primary opposition party. Instead of a “grand coalition” between the center right and the center left, as Europe has seen in Germany or the Netherlands, the Socialist party appears to have self-destructed in order to pave the way for a continuation of conservative rule.

The Socialists’ divided vote stated the obvious: The party’s institutional fabric is tearing at the seams. The thread that once tied together the rank and file and the party elite—which includes many, such as former Prime Minister Felipe González, who helped orchestrate the country’s transition to democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco—is quickly coming undone. The decision to let Rajoy continue was spun by Socialist leaders as a necessary sacrifice for the sake of ending a 315-day political deadlock. After two general elections, Spain’s fragmented parliament had been unable to forge a governing coalition. A failure to elect a prime minister last weekend would have automatically triggered the third election in thirteen months, an option that would have gone against the wishes of two-thirds of Spaniards.

            

In early October, then PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez, who had vowed to vote against Rajoy, was effectively forced to resign as a result of party elites’ increasingly favorable view of abstention. A cabal of party heavyweights with deep ties to the country’s corporate and media establishment selected a managing committee to take over the party reins and, last week, that committee asked its parliamentarians to abstain, despite pleas from numerous representatives of Catalonia and other regions. The committee’s reasons for choosing abstention were largely unstated but clear enough. After obtaining the party’s worst-ever result in December and losing even more votes in June, a third election would only have accelerated the PSOE’s decline. But there was a more likely motive: In the eyes of the Socialist chieftains, forming a progressive coalition to end conservative rule in Spain would have been more dangerous to the party’s future. Such a coalition would have included Podemos, which allied with the longstanding United Left for the June elections to form Unidos Podemos (“United We Can”), and smaller parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country that favor increased self-rule or even independence—options anathema to a party leadership and to a good part of the rank and file, particularly in the central and southern parts of the country where “the unity of Spain” is as sacred as it is for the right.

 

Read more: https://www.thenation.com/article/spains-socialists-may-have-destroyed-for-years-the-chances-of-a-left-wing-government/

Leighton (detalle)