Krudd, go [CENSORED] yourself

Over at Dangerous Intersection, I vent my spleen, an ink sac and a few of my gas bladders over Krudd's interwebs blacklist:

This stinks. I do not want my country to join North Korea, Thailand (which recently imprisoned an Australian writer for committing the heinous crime of criticising its royal family) and China on the list of the many countries in the world that are associated with such gross, inappropriate censorship and restrictions of peoples’ free speech. Generations of my own family risked their lives fighting imperialism &
fascism in order to preserve our freedom to speak and seek whatever information we choose to. I voted against the Howard government in our last election partly because of its unapologetic cosying up to the repressive Bush regime (and partly because I always voted against the Howard government).

Arses.

Herr Ratzinger continues the massacre

[Doubled from Dangerous Intersection]

HIV/AIDS is possibly the worst health crisis to hit this planet. It’s also arguably the worst thing to happen to the African continent since white people were regularly kidnapping its inhabitants and trading them like farm machinery.

But the one hopeful thing about the whole situation is this: while there’s no cure yet, AIDS is easily preventable. Ridiculously easily preventable. Avoiding the sharing of needles & using contraception are the two most effective ways to avoid the long, tortuous, wasting death we’ve all come to associate with this horrendous epidemic. And if you’re not an intravenous drug user (or you studiously avoid sticking sharp, blood-stained things in your body), there’s 50% of your prevention pretty much sorted already.

So … how the hell are you supposed to react when the gold-robed, paedophile-protecting dictator-for-life of the Catholic Church continues to threaten people with eternal torment for using contraception during sex (based on a very, very, um, interpretive interpretation the Bible) and instead tells people “just say no” to sex? In this story (BBC) Pope Oberstumbannfuhrer Herr Kaiser Ratzinger (I refuse to use his picked-out stagename, he’s not Axl Rose for crying out loud) once again proves to the world that not only is his outlook anachronistic, unrealistic & laughable, it’s also flat-out fatal. To millions upon millions of people.

In the referenced article Ratzinger, in the very same breath, calls AIDS a “cruel epidemic” and then follows that with this clanger: “The traditional teaching of the church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids.” Except when it hasn’t, doesn’t, isn’t and won’t. Obviously.

Allow me to rephrase & clarify that statement for you, Popey: “The inestimable, genocidal cruelty of AIDS is most efficiently perpetuated by people in positions of power (like Popes, for example) asking poverty-stricken superstitious people, living in abject fear for their very souls, to do what amounts to the impossible.”

In the past, before I knew much about AIDS’ awful presence in Africa (for instance, the article states that today, around 60% of the entire world’s AIDS 40 million patients are African and up to 1000 die each day), whenever I’d hear some robed halfwit with celestial voices in his head make a pig-ignorant statement like that of Ratzinger’s I’d just roll my eyes, sigh and think “Gosh, those wacky Catholics. At it again, asking the impossible and being ignored by the world, even Catholics. Laugh out loud!” But after a while I realised that while most people in the developed world treat Ratzinger’s words with all the respect they deserve, large swathes of Africa (and other developing regions) are still tightly gripped by superstition of all kinds and take the word of people like Herr Ratzinger and his little wizards as gospel. Accordingly, they avoid the simplest precautions against unwanted pregnancies and definitely unwanted STDs because they’ve been taught that wasting sperm incurs God’s wrath.

Then there was this gritty little cultured pearl of wisdom:

It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking and a contraception mentality [emphasis mine]

Righto. Right up there as the biggest threats to Africa’s future, along with human trafficking (a modern form of slavery if there ever was one) and prostitution (often related to said trafficking) are those gravest of grave sins: the right to choose if you conceive a child during sex (regardless of whether the sex was legal or consensual), the right to not carry an embryo into actual foetus-hood and that most awful of activities, the right to end a relationship.

Does this geriatric idiot in the imperial robes who lives in a palace not see the links - right there in his very own statement? There’s human trafficking - desperate, poor people either taken advantage of or simply forced into such activities as prostitution - quite often not presenting a choice to the new sex-slave about who they have sex with, when they have sex with them and whether the “customer” protects himself or not. Divorce - well, in many cultures across the globe, obviously including Africa, people (and by “people” I mean “women”) don’t get a choice who they marry or when their new spouse decides to consummate that marriage (search the web for “obstetric fistula” - a painful & embarrassing condition which occurs way too often in underage African girls). Abortion, that old Catholic standby - well, disregarding the fact that a fertilised ovum or a tiny clump of undifferentiated cells isn’t a human being - what if you’re nine years old and aren’t physically capable of carrying a child to term? Well, if you’d read the news lately that doesn’t matter to the Papacy. Their official response? Excommunicate the doctors and the kid’s family - but not the mangy son of a bitch stepfather who repeatedly raped the girl from when she was six years old - then impregnated her with twins which would almost certainly have killed the girl. But hey, everyone knows it’s par for the course for the Vatican to protect child-rapists.

Rape & sex-slavery & STDs aside, even in the average committed, loving, monogamous relationship - even one completely without risk - there should be a choice. There should be a right to choose not to have a child. One word comes to mind when people think of Africa: poverty. If you can’t afford to feed & clothe & educate a child, there is absolutely no reason that you should be forced to have one. To force people, under the threat of eternal damnation, to simultaneously conceive children they cannot support and risk contracting the deadliest disease ever experienced by humanity is possibly the most reprehensibly immoral act that can be undertaken by a person in a position of power and responsibility. Ratzinger knows the effect his words will have among the faithful, he knows what the stakes are and, unless he’s been living under a rock (maybe not but I’m willing to bet he sleeps in a coffin), he surely must know what the results have been from decades of official Vatican “don’t protect yourself, just say no to sex” wisdom. Of course he knows all that, for crying out loud. But why care too much about adding millions more to the existing millions of sick & dying Africans? There are more where that came from, right Ratzi? Of course there are going to be if you tell people they’ll burn in Hell for wasting their sperm. And hey - dying slowly & horribly of AIDS and watching all your kids starve, followed by eternal bliss in heaven has just got to be better than a long, healthy life followed by forever with a red-hot pitchfork inserted somewhere less than convenient. Right?

But, honestly, I don’t know how to react anymore. These days when I hear Ratzinger, as he frequently does, displaying a stark ignorance of the realities of the world (unmatched except perhaps by Sarah Palin or your average coma patient) or condemning people to what he surely must know is an early death, I’m not sure if I should scream unintelligibly at my screen, post floweringly verbose excoriations, sigh in defeat & just sit and feel powerless and frustrated or … just have a healthy, profane vent & say “Ratzinger. Hey. Shut the fuck up. You’re killing people with this retarded dogma of yours - actually killing people - just as much as if you strangled them with your own bony, pampered hands. Your words are weapons of genocide - a war crime in peace-time, a crime against humanity - and if anyone’s going to Hell, you elderly virgin whose first & last experience of a naked woman was being pushed, tiny, wet & screaming, out of one, it’s going to be you, because you had the opportunity to save millions of lives and you bailed on it, your mind enslaved by your precious god-damned magic book. And once you’re there, roasting, I hope the millions of victims of your arrogant delusions & murderous idiocy visit you in Hell to kick your balls right up through your face.”

Here endeth the rant.

Muffins and the end of innocence

“Did you know there’s totally science behind muffins? Totally ruined muffins for me.”
Ah, the wisdom of youth. That particularly large & shiny pearl came from a blazered private school girl of perhaps 15 who I was standing next to (almost on top of) on my Connex-brand cattle-truck - I mean, “train” - this morning. Girl Student (henceforth “GS”) was bemoaning the fact that in her cooking class her teacher explained that the release of carbon dioxide during the cooking process was responsible for the rising of muffins and for the tiny little pockets of air that end up being formed in all things baked. So, in response to this new but unwanted & unwelcome knowledge, GS now proclaims her hatred for - or at least new found apathy toward - the little round cakes she used to love.

Naturally, her comment got me thinking. Does GS approach every mundane mystery in her life in such a manner? Would she disavow Myspace if she figured out that barely any of those seventeen thousand and eighty-four “friends” of hers actually qualified for such a title? Would she stop catching the train if she knew a tad more about electricity? What if she found out what keeps planes in the air? Sweet flaming crikey, no more summer trips to the Whitsundays then (probably a good thing, it’d totally suck to find out how that big hot disc in the sky is making you slightly darker). Safer stuck at home I guess, with just the TV/Wii/Blu-Rayer/microwave/mobile phone for company … on the other hand, perhaps not. Perhaps all those modern wonders are just a fresh crop of parades waiting to be stripped of their brilliance by the acid rain of knowledge. You never know what awful, awful knowledge might leach into your brain if you sit on the remote and accidentally switch to the Discovery Channel.

However, I’m willing to give GS the benefit of the doubt. After all, when you’re 15 you’re really just on the on-ramp to true sentience and mental independence. You’re just starting to simultaneously figure out & shape both who you are and who you’re going to be. Too much info all at once at such a critical time can confuse you and make your brain seize up and annoy the crud out of you - even if the forbidden knowledge is just a three-second soundbite revealing the awful truth about your favourite cake. I do, however, wonder what she thought made muffins rise before she had her world shattered by learning of just one function of one of the planet’s most common gases. How about muffin gnomes? Well, that just raises more questions than it answers, such as “where do they go once they’ve carved all those little air-pockets?” and “why do some muffins collapse in the middle? Have we displeased the gnomes?”

It’s not just brand new adults who think this way. People who have been adults for many, many years and who’ve developed a more relaxed & accepting attitude toward baking employ precisely the same “don’t spoil it for me” attitude toward other important mysteries of the universe as GS does toward her once-beloved treat. We’ve all met such people. Perhaps we’ve even been them at some point or we’re likely continuing to be them even as we speak! Perhaps I shouldn’t spell things out though, so as to avoid offending anyone’s cherished personal beliefs with regard to important questions as “how do magicians saw girls in half anyway?” or “why do I always beat that guy who seems to live at the bar at 8-ball the first time, but never the second? What does he do with all my money?”

There is a point here, folks. The point is this: I believe wholeheartedly that in most cases it’s better to learn the truth than live in ignorance. Of course, I concede that it doesn’t actually matter to most people the precise scientific process that’s going on in a rising muffin. Even so, once you find out, why resist it? Why choose to loathe muffins because you learned something new about them? How exactly does learning about carbon dioxide spoil your enjoyment of a muffin? Well, I suppose the simple & short answer to that is that it shouldn’t. But that’s not an answer, because learning the facts behind an everyday something really does spoil a lot of things for a lot of people. My actual answer would be that some beliefs about the world are sacred to a lot of people and that they invest a lot of themselves in those beliefs. Beliefs can be as intertwined with someone’s self-worth as their physical appearance or occupation or the car they drive, so if anything comes along that challenges a particular belief (or simple in-hindsight preference to have remained ignorant of a particular truth, in the case of Girl Student), it can be painful to hear and elicit an almost autonomic fight-or-flight response. In such cases, the believer in whatever-it-is can clap their hands over their ears in denial or arc up and start fighting back, shooting the messenger and perhaps even accusing them of some kind of hate crime for daring to share new knowledge or an opinion contrary to their cherished version of the truth. Taking such personal offense at a disagreement or contradictory evidence is inevitable when you’re dealing with strong personal feelings about how certain things are or, at least, how you think they should be.

But whether it’s regarding muffins, microwaves or mammoths, I believe it’s generally better for you, me & us to know the truth about anything & everything than to not know. If you’re labouring under the false assumption that gnomes carve air-pockets in muffins, that your husband is faithful and loves you (even when he goes out every other night without explanation and returns smelling of perfume and sweat and perhaps other fluids), that the dinosaurs were all peaceful vegetarians and were ridden as mighty steeds by early humans (and that every single branch of science which studies them - and that every single other branch which intersects with and confirms the discoveries of, um, dinosaurology - is completely & utterly wrong) then there are probably several other areas in your life where you’re totally kidding yourself. But look: maybe that pain in your chest isn’t indigestion. Maybe the cheque isn’t the mail. Maybe that ex-government minister from Nigeria doesn’t really want you to help him embezzle millions from his government (but he sounds so earnest, and his tenuous grasp of English is really quite endearing! That should be enough to draw anybody into massive intercontinental fraud!). Maybe you and I and GS (and everyone else - I don’t believe for a second that there isn’t one person in the world who isn’t kidding themselves about something) should just accept that all our beliefs about everything - even those we think are based on the most solid & objective evidence - are transitory, only waiting for that one piece of contradictory evidence to send them to the scrapheap.

Because, after all, I’m typing this post as our planet spins through the ether on the back of a magic tortoise, and don’t you dare poop my party.

George, meet Barry. Now fuck off.

Doubled here (sans profanity!): http://dangerousintersection.org/2009/01/21/george-meet-barry-now-sod-off

Don't let the Whitehouse door hit you in the arse on the way out. On the other hand, I hope someone jams your pinky finger in it. And smacks you in the nuts with an army boot.

But, seriously, now that he's gone, I guess we can't rag on Dubya anymore. Sure, he's given the world enough material (both unintentionally comedic, in a painful, Ricky-Gervais-in-The-Office kind of way as well as just plain tragic) to last the next 8 years, but have pity - he's unemployed now. He's likely to stay that way too - given his oratory skills it's doubtful he'll be able to make a living on the lucrative public-speaking circuit like his silver-tongued predecessor Bubba Clinton. But hey, there's always Pop to turn to. Hell, who do you think got him his last job? And the one before that? Oh well, he's got plenty of time to work on his golf game - and no pesky-ass reporterers asking him about boring shit like wars or deficits or hurricanes or drowned cities.

Anyway, there's a new kid in town. A handsome chap who can - get this - string a few words together. Words that make grammatical sense as well as express all the stuff the world (and America) has wanted to hear from a US President for a while now. He's resilient too. On his way to the Oval Office, Barry Hussein Obama managed to stride with class past all kinds of accusations from his desperate opponents: that he's a Marxist; that he's pro-abortion for everyone whether you want it or not; that he's a secret Muslim; that he's an Arab; that (and this was really stretching it) he's not even a US citizen and therefore ineligible to be President in the first place. I suppose those people forgot that Hawaii, Bazza's home state, is actually part of the US, even though it's not physically attached (Alaska's separated from the US by several million Canadians, but that didn't stop people voting for Klondike Barbie, the beehived moose-shootin' halfwit in Tina Fey glasses who couldn't even lie & name just one newspaper - then accused the media of entrapment. Did she have a running mate? Some old guy? Meh. Whatever.). I'm also wondering why those desperate Republicans thought the possibility of Barry being an Arab or a Muslim would automatically make him an evil ayatollah-in-waiting, ready at a moment's notice to impose an Islamic theocracy on the US, burn everyone's Bibles, make everyone get gay-married and abort their third-trimester babies for the glory of Allah and Karl Marx. Hmmm...I think some people got a little confused there. Hell, I'm a bit confused myself.

In the end it all turned out great for Barry & Mimi O and the First Daughters, despite all the head-explodey brain-vomit from the nutjobs who couldn't even mount an attack more damaging than "Dear lord, his middle name is 'Hussein' - RUN for your LIVES!" The other day (you may have seen it on the news) the O's had themselves a big party with movie stars & pop stars & two million of their closest friends (& fucking Bono of course - he wasn't invited, but just try and keep that bloke & his blarney away from a microphone and a captive audience) and then they got to ride in what must be The World's Most Pimping Bulletproof Cadillac, which musta been just swell.

But now, after a totally sweet speech, the hard work begins. And "hard" barely even scratches the surface - George and his team basically wiped their arses on America for eight years and left Barry holding one worn-out toothbrush with which to clean everything up. Team Bush's parting shot, the current financial crisis (brought about in part by George and his pals making life easier for themselves at the expense of pretty much everyone on the planet who isn't a CEO) is the economic equivalent of leaving a massive hangover-turd in Barry's new Presidential bedroom. With only one box of Kleenex on the dresser! Classy, George. Real nice.

So, anyway: the new guy's got his work cut out for him. I don't think anyone with a shred of realistic objectivity thinks the big O is some kind of political messiah, but hey - the guy can talk English proper where George, obviously, had it as a second language (I'll take submissions on what George's first language might be). Barry O says the things people want to hear, he represents a lot of what people find great about America and Barry even has daughters who aren't running around binging on alcopops and flashing their gear all over the place (but give 'em time - they're not even in high school yet).

But Big O's definitely going to be pushing shit uphill for the next four years and he'll need serious intestinal fortitude. I for one hope he doesn't take any easy, quick-fix options. America needs more than a new lick of paint, it needs the kind of fixin' that crappy old houses on renovation shows need: re-stumping, new floorboards, bi-fold doors leading to a new deck, a cubby for the kids with beanbags, plasma screen & PS3 in it, the kitchen walls painted in pistachio, a themed water feature and a wee day bed-equipped gazebo thatched with authentic Balinese thatching stuff. Hell, maybe one day the O's will return home blindfolded from a state visit, that blokey tool-belt bloke off the telly will yell "surprise" and they'll find their America has been backyard blitzed while they were off begging Venezuela's Hugo Chavez for some more heating oil. Baz will be agape, the kids will jump up and down & squeal, the First Dog will hump the handyman's dog to everyone's amusement, Mrs O will start blubbing and whichever blond pint-size who's hosting the show that week will give her a big ol' bear-hug like they've been best gal-pals since primary school. And Everything Will Be Fine!

Or maybe Baz will be just another Democrat president in the mold of a Kennedy or Clinton: a little more careful on the cash side of things; a bit more discrete when it comes to razing poor foreign peoples' villages to the ground; a little more eloquent when justifying his administration's reflexive support of and sucking up to the usual suspects like those affable, head-removing, woman-hating, oil-filthy scamps, the Saudis.

Can we see that happening? Yes we can.

Drugs'r bad...m'kay?

This post over at Atheist Revolution got me thinking about Prohibition and what a monumental failure it was. So many dead, huge amounts of money & manpower wasted attempting to apprehend criminals who were, of all things, trading in alcohol. Makes you wonder how many extra criminals Prohibition created out of thin air! Now, we do have quite a few wowsers (aka "buzzkills") in this wide brown land of of ours Down Here, however - if anyone seriously asked us to stop drinking alcohol they'd be laughed out of town. But then, the Puritans who landed in the US in the 17th century (and then almost starved to death) left a lasting legacy of, well, puritanical behaviour (Exhibit A: hysteria over Janet Jackson's exposed boob - won't someone think of the children??!), where we down here were founded either by reformed/escaped criminals (e.g. Victoria, New South Wales) or by free settlers from across Europe (e.g. South Australia). Either way, we retained in our genes a love for the demon drink and a deep suspicion of anyone telling us we're not allowed to do stuff that we like doing.

Now, Vjack's post - and the comments thereafter, including some about the US War On Drugs (can't we go a decade without the US declaring war on poverty, terror or something else they'll never defeat because they think all they have to do is just shoot at it?) - also got me thinking about drugs. More specifically, how drugs are demonised in this country. Not all drugs and not as much as in the US perhaps, but certainly to a level occasionally approaching hysteria.

What I find interesting is this: in my home town of Adelaide in Australia, the dreaded weed is decriminalised. You get a fine for a small amount or for one plant, i.e. a quantity for personal use ("personal use" used to cover up to ten plants, amazingly enough - trust me, noone can smoke that much before it goes all dry and shitty). You don't go to jail unless you're clearly growing or stockpiling for distribution, and even then you have to be in posession of quite a bit. Basically, the law is set up to punish the greedy wannabe kingpins and slap the wrist of the casual grower. Fine with me. It's not cool to deal with guys who want to make a living out of it - who actually rent an entire house and grow weed in sophisticated hydro setups in every single room! Also, a lot of the time with guys like that it's not just weed they're into, and and it's not just them or their mate that's involved. I'm just saying, you don't want to deal with guys who for all you know are into some shit with speed-cooking bikers. You don't want to be around some dude's house buying some bush in preparation for a night with the bucket and the PS2 on the same night some amped-up Bandido decides to exact some Scarface-style revenge for something that didn't go so well. We've all seen those movies where a well-meaning but naive doofus gets into some serious shit and ends up dodging more bullets than a Fallujah ambulance driver. Besides, it's just a lot more friendly to hook up via a mate, or a mate's mate, who maybe has a plant or two in the laundry. It's also likely to be cheaper or a more generous deal.

Anyway, bullet-dodging aside, I could grow myself a little friend, get busted and not end up someone's bitch. However! If I were to grow my own tobacco - a legal, addictive & provably deadly drug) without government permission in the form of a producer license I could be jailed for 2 years! For one plant! OR be fined up to - well, over - $50,000. Source: Excise Act 1901.

Why? Because, as an unregistered tobacco grower, I'd be depriving the government of money. Tobacco taxes here are ridiculous - when I started smoking in 1991 at age 15, a pack of Marlboro 20s was about $4, now it's over $11 with like half of that being the tax. To put that into perspective, a glass of beer has gone up less than a buck in that time and CDs have remained the same at $30 - in a lot of stores they've gone down. I'm really glad I quit 6 years ago when my Peter Stuyvesant 20s were approaching 9 bucks.

So, if I grow one dope plant for personal use, I guess the law figures I'm not hurting anyone or depriving anyone of anything. So I get a small fine, no jail, no criminal record. I grow one tobacco plant - and deprive the government of a small chunk of one of its biggest income streams (along with alcohol and gambling) and I'm instantly a criminal who deserves jail time or to go bankrupt. For growing my own cigarettes! While my neighbour with his weed crop gets comparatively nothing!

Now, to me, this is laughable - we're expected to take drug policy in this country seriously while the government rakes in cash from the most dangerous & addictive drug this side of heroin (yet allows it to remain legal) and punishes severely anyone who tries to produce it without their approval (and associated piece of the action). This by any other name would be called a racket.

However, there's a positive, and a model to be examined: because of the government's racketeering, there's no real black market for tobacco. No prohibition-style gang wars, like when the righteous banned that most enjoyable of legal drugs - alcohol. No gangland drug deal-related murder sprees like those which rocked my home of Melbourne in recent years (check out the recent TV series "Underbelly" - it rules). No wannabes growing weed in every room of a rented house using off-grid, stolen electricity.

So, now I think about it, maybe I'm backwards on this - maybe the government should apply their tobacco policy to weed & other drugs and get into all of them - they could rake in the cash, clean up the drugs so noone's shooting drain cleaner up their arm or snorting sherbert powder & punish the hell out of anyone who gets in on their racket. At least that'd be consistent!


The main reason, in my estimation, that tobacco isn't trafficked like weed, or just grown in peoples' backyards, is because the government has had its hands tight around the production & distribution for the last however, century and a bit. They control who grows it, they tax the shit out of it, they legislate where you can smoke it, they punish unregistered producers. They even publicly rail against it, banning cigarette advertising pretty much across the board and requiring tobacco companies to plaster their packages with detailed, visceral images of smoking-related maladies - all the while taking gobs of money from the afflictee and the afflictor. Now, much as they do rail against smoking in all avenues (when they know they're being recorded) and pay lip service to various reps from the AMA and anti-tobacco lobby, the government can't ban smoking. Yet. Mostly because there's not yet a revenue stream that can adequately replace that of tobacco tax. Also, they're probably aware that the trade will go underground as surely as the liquor trade did during US Prohibition, creating a shipload more criminals where there weren't before. The effects on the economy through loss of jobs and exports would also be astronomical. At this point, it makes sense for the government to continue to tell everyone that smoking is evil but take a major cut of the profits from the activity. There are probably more reasons, maybe even more compelling ones, but those'll do for now.

So, the government have plenty of good reasons to continue to support & control tobacco production. The main ones being that they reap taxes and that it would be excessively counterproductive, even harmful, to ban or criminalise it. As a result, anyone over 18 can go into a store and buy, consume and get hopelessly addicted to tobacco, quite probably costing themselves & us (as taxpayers) billions a year through healthcare-related costs and anti-smoking campaigns - billions which, in part, would come from precisely the tax they paid on their cigarettes in the first place.

Now, while I'd like to see weed 100% legalised nationally, attracting no penalties at all for growing or consuming and not being under any governmental oversight - which would remove the criminal element from it entirely and allow anyone to have it growing next to their tomatoes and basil, guilt-free - I understand why the government wouldn't allow it. They would have no control if granny could pop in a couple of plants next to the petunias to help with her trick knee when the weather gets cold. It perhaps wouldn't be like people growing their own tobacco, as weed for most people is in no way as addictive (can be strongly habit-forming though, and very hard to stop for heavy users - but so can coffee, trust me on that), so nowhere near as many people would grow it. And, well, some people just don't like being stoned. Fair enough. Even those who do enjoy being stoned generally don't smoke a joint three or ten or fifty times a day like cigarette addicts do.

Still, though, if the government added weed to its drink & smoke racketeering, it would corner the market on recreational soft drugs in this country. The "Big Three" would be under the auspices of the government. You'd buy your gram from a store, licensed to sell weed the same way a bar is licensed to sell liquor & the government would get its cut from the distributor. The weed would come from an approved producer who pays his annual license fee, scaled according to the size of his operation. The government wouldn't make as much money as it does on ciggies because weed doesn't hook you in like tobacco does, but it'd be a nice little earner and they'd retain that all-important control of the product, all the way from the go stage to the "woah" stage. Not only that, you'd keep jails and courtrooms free of smokers & growers. You'd free up drug cops to chase smack rings and speed cookers.

Of course, in a flash of blinding irony, it would mean anyone caught growing their own weed without permission, but while it was legal, would get into even more trouble than they would if they were caught today while it's technically illegal. It may also mean that anyone wanting to get into drug distribution as a career move wouldn't bother with now-legal & tightly-controlled weed as a stepping stone. Here's the real "gateway" danger, kids - not that smoking weed would lead you to heroin, but that growing weed as a business venture may well lead you to thinking that dealing horse with the Triads or eckies with the Carl Williamses or speed with the outlaw bikers of this world is a quick, easy way to a pimped Hummer and a beach house with nine plasma screens and wall-to-wall hotties. Which, as any movie will have already told you, leads to ruin and maybe even an explodey, kickass death. Remember Scarface? New Jack City? Any druggie movie that ends in a hail of lead? Hell, forget fiction: Pablo Escobar, King of Medellin, the infamous godfather of all Latino smugglers, whose income once rivalled that of many multinationals, ended up with more holes in him than the plots of the Matrix & Minority Report combined.

So, in closing: perhaps it's better to keep weed technically illegal because the penalty for growing your own without permission under some tobacoo-style, tax-heavy governmental oversight would probably be worse than it is today.

Also in closing: I don't know what the hell to do about heroin, ice, coke, speed, eckies or any of the other shit I don't touch with a ten-foot clown pole. Maybe the government should get into everything! Take control of distribution (like the US did with the raw materials for quaaludes), clean it all up, oust the criminal element completely and shut every skanky backyard dealer, cutting up his shit with ground glass and icing sugar, down for good.

Pfft, whatever. If I wasn't at work I'd go have a smoke right now. My brain's a little hepped up on caffeine right now and I'm not thinking straight. Could use a chillout.

Vatican Watch: pretend country opposes decriminalisation of homosexuality

From [Reuters]:

VATICAN CITY, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Gay rights groups and newspaper editorials on Tuesday condemned the Vatican for its decision to oppose a proposed U.N. resolution calling on governments worldwide to de-criminalise homosexuality.

The row erupted after the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations told a French Catholic news agency the Holy See would oppose the resolution, which France is due to propose later this month on behalf of the 27-member European Union.

Archbishop Celestino Migliore said the Vatican opposed the resolution because it would "add new categories of those protected from discrimination" and could lead to reverse discrimination against traditional heterosexual marriage.

"If adopted, they would create new and implacable discriminations," Migliore said. "For example, states which do not recognise same-sex unions as 'matrimony' will be pilloried and made an object of pressure," Migliore said.

Migliore, you stupid little shit, it's not about (ooh booga booga) gay marriage. People are being KILLED because they're gay and being gay is against the law in some countries. Killed fucking dead. Because they're gay. And you don't seem to give a shit about putting a to stop that. Which doesn't surprise me, considering that, when it comes to most of the rest of the developed world, including pretty much all of your European neighbours including the country that fucking well tolerates your presence in its capital, you are completely arse-backwards on basically every point relating to human sexual freedom. Sex before marriage? No, what if you liked it? You'd want to do it a lot but maybe not to conceive new Catholics, all fresh, branded with an Original Sin they had no fucking control over and ready to be "saved". The simple act of contraception? Hell no, then there'd be no abortions to wring your hands over and no fresh marinated Catholic bums on pews (and what precise passage forbids contraception anway? Did the ol' Jews know about the pill?). Homosexuality? Bah, give me strength. Sure, we don't execute them anymore but it's still wrong. And don't even get us started on female priests. Well, look - considering you're a pack of repressed virgins (except for the ones that rape children and are allowed to get away with it), I don't think you're any more qualified to hand out dictates about sexual behaviour than I am to hand out instructions on how to orbit the fucking Moon. If you don't know how it works, if you haven't had sufficient experience, don't goddam well presume to hand out an instruction manual. I wouldn't tell people how to "Shut The Fuck Up" unless I knew how to do it. Well ... I've got a fair grasp on the theory, so shut the damn hell fuck up.

Does anyone take these Papist fuckers seriously anymore? If so, why? Exactly what function does the Papacy serve at the UN? Precisely what is accomplished by giving this pretend country/museum of iniquity and horror a vote equal to that of other nations who actually contain real people and not glorified statue-polishers? These Janitors for Jesus seem to do sweet fuck all except provide enough soundbites to show the world just exactly how out of step they are with evolved modern societies. There's a reason Europe & the world shunned the Papacy and its Inquisitions & Dark Age in favour of democracy & knowledge and the Papists show this to us all at every opportunity with statements like those of Migliore. What, if anything, does the Vatican contribute to the UN except embarrassing anachronistic remarks? Who exactly does the Vatican represent? A billion Catholics? No! They're all citizens of the other 190+whatever proper countries with seats at the UN.

Seriously, what it is going to take for the UN to realise that the Vatican should be seen and not freaking heard? It's like the embarrassing great-uncle at Christmas time whose rude, racist, homophobic & generally offensive remarks everyone tolerates because he's been around forever, has tons of cash & everyone knows he's losing his mind. Everyone knows he won't be around forever, including him, so everyone's just holding their tongue until he pops his clogs. Noone really knows (or cares) how he fits into the family tree except for the oldest rellies, but they don't like him either.

So, yes, SIGH, Mandy's got another frickin Catholic hate-boner. Again, I must point out it's not actual Catholics that inspire this rage. From any post on this blog marked "catholic" it should be pretty clear it's the administration, the empire and its spokes-idiots that raise my bile. I know full-well that there are plenty of other religious organisations that deserve at least equal loathing & dark wizardry, but there really are none that compare to the Vatican - the 1500 year old Christian empire, constant enemy of knowledge, science and societal evolution, constant defender of gender/sexual inequality & child-rapists. No other religious organisation has been around for as long & has its own pretend country & corresponding seat at the fucking UN. For every Catholic city mission, nobly handing out blankets and feeding the homeless, there's a statement from some senior manager, laying out the official policy that anyone who's not a Catholic male is basically fucked. No other nation/empire has as lengthy or as reprehensible a history when it comes to human rights. Crusades, Inquisitions, Nazi appeasement, enabling child-rapists, lying about condoms & AIDS (condeming untold numbers to death), railing against masturbation, contraception AND abortion (effectively a three-pronged attack against sexual freedom of choice of any kind) and now, effectively condoning the executions of gays in tin-pot shitty little theocracies across the world.

Seriously, what the fuck is going to wake the UN up to this antiquated museum masquerading as a nation? Do they just keep them around to piss the Arabs off?

Bah, whatever, Merry fucking Christmas. Fuck the Pope and all his little wizards.

Ray Comfort is a fucking idiot

"Fucking" being the operative word in this case. That is, he reproduces, or can or will reproduce (oh god, I sincerely hope not) sexually. With another person.

However, he is under the following mistaken impression about Darwinian evolution (a mistaken impression about evolution? Ray? Say it aint so!):

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half ("Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).

Ray Comfort, you are a fucking, fucking, FUCKING idiot. At no point, ever in human history, or even pre-human history, have "we" (bipedal apes) reproduced via splitting in half. At no point, ever in Darwin's history, did he "theorise" that humans ever could or ever did reproduce asexually. That is possibly the most unimaginably, mind-bogglingy brain-rapingly stupid thing you've ever written on your blog (which is really, really saying something).

OK then, I shall attempt to be charitable. If you're not simply a fucking clueless idiot, then you're one of the following: (a) laughably, pathetically ignorant, (b) in complete understanding of what you read but flat-out lying through your teeth about what evolutionary theory says, for some reason, (c) unable to read & comprehend words of your own language that are put in an easily decipherable order that clearly & unambiguously describes a concept or idea or (d) deliberately baiting atheists with what you know to be complete falsehoods in order to rile them up and expose to your loyal cadre of credulous Raytheists exactly how unpleasant atheists are, all of the time (not just when responding to such blatant falsehood). It could even be (e): you're a cynical charlatan who takes great delight in simultaneously pissing off & misrepresenting atheists & scientists while taking the money of history's easiest, softest, most stationary targets: hardcore evangelists who take the Bible literally.

If it's simple ignorance or carelessness at the root of this ridiculous error, that could be excused - except that you frequently present yourself as some kind of authority or expert or, at the very least, a knowledgeable & educated layman in the areas of evolution and the development of life, all in order to lend credence and credibility to your supposed debunkings of it, which eliminates (a). Obviously you can read & write English and I've even seen you speak it on youtube while masturbating a banana, so (c) is out. Option (b) - you're a bald-faced liar - is very likely, I think, as is (d) - you just like baiting atheists or just anybody who believes evolution is a well-supported theory backed by literally millions of pieces of evidence gathered over 150 years by humans (including so many transitional fossils that it would pretty much require a textbook to list and describe them all), but amassed over the past 3.7 billion years by the natural processes of our planet, with much still waiting to be discovered. Option (e) - that you're a charlatan, ripping off credulous idiots in the full knowledge that what you're peddling is bullshit - is very, very possible (because you wouldn't be the first) but I don't think it's likely.

It's hard to tell which of those it is. You appear earnest and stupid and ignorant enough to believe what you're saying (which would require of even the most cynical of charlatans and gifted of actors a Herculean effort to either not burst out laughing at the idiocy of your statements and gullibility of your patsies or to simply not choke on the vomit that would arise in most rational people were they to attempt to portray your fantasies as truth) and you display a deep misunderstanding and dislike of people who aren't religious, or who just understand what science is (which would explain why might enjoy baiting them with your fabrications and seemingly deliberate misunderstandings on a website called 'atheist central'). Flat-out liar? Well, only if you know what you're saying is bullshit - you don't seem to know much at all that's useful, which really just leaves my original position: that you're a fucking idiot. Oh, and a charlatan - because you do take peoples' money - the fact that you believe your own bullshit doesn't change the fact that you are indeed a peddler of complete bullshit. And you're an ignorant cretin - the evidence you seek is all around you, yet you refuse to read & understand it. So, I suppose you're a mix of all of those ... you're a standard-issue creationist evolution-denier, ripping off the faithful and spreading ignorance, while simultaneously demonising anyone who disagrees with your narrow, literalist reading of the Bible, while at the same time completely misrepresenting the arguments and points of view of your opponents in order to argue against them (because I think we all know if you attacked the arguments of evolution as they actually are - and not how you see them - you'd fail dismally). So, you can add fucking liar to that list too.

A lot of the time, Australians are quite happy to claim New Zealanders as their own if they're successful: Russell Crowe (though we're happy to give him back after hearing his band) and Phar Lap the legendary racehorse are just two. In this case, I'm sure I speak for all of rational, unretarded Australia when I say "America, you can keep him."

Found via Raytractors. Go there :)