Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So, as you probably know, there have been a few disease scares in porn rescently with HIV outbreaks, scary staph infections, and so on. To make the ObBodMod requirement, I'll mention that it's that outbreak which forced Janine Lindemulder to shoot her first boy-girl scene with the fascinating Nick Manning, rather than the slightly less fascinating TT Boy (sorry to gonzo fans). I put up a new Janine entry in the encylcopedia too:

Because of all those outbreaks, California (which is one of the hotbeds for production of this type), is starting to fine companies who shoot porn without condoms. That's right — $30,000+ a pop. Because body fluids are potentially contagious, worker safety laws require that condoms be used. So basically they're using OHSA rules to kill free speech. It's perfectly legal to fuck without a condom on, and as much as people want to pretend it's not the case, sex with a condom is terrible and it's just not what a lot of people fantasize about. Make it illegal to shoot condomless porn in America and it'll just be shot somewhere else — but still be sold in America, thus, as is too often the case, siphoning money out of the country. The market won't change, but the money flow will.

Using backdoor approaches like this to attack artistic — or non-artistic — free expression is fundamentally wrong in terms of civil rights, and as I've just explained, backfires as an economic policy. This is not the same thing as worker safety laws and overtime laws and so on. This is a specialty industry with people who are experts in their field choosing to take risks. It should be no more illegal than professional sports which certainly has had its share of death on the job, especially when you include racing and extreme sports. Should we ban everything that could endanger someone?

While I'm complaining about things that are fundamentally wrong, let me explain about oil pricing and how the greed of the Arab nations is going to do us all a great deal of harm. Oil fields are not all the same. Some are very easy to pump — you just drill a hole and oil sprays out. Much of the Middle East is like that, and America was until it drank almost all its oil. Other fields are hard to process like the Alberta tar sands, and others are difficult to get at such as deep ocean oil and arctic oil. Thus the cost of producing a barrel of crude is radically different from producer to producer…

Instead of OPEC oil being cheap because of their cheap production costs, they elevate their prices to match the most expensive methods in use. Thus all oil, including “cheap oil”, is sold at the high cost. One of the big problems with this (outside of the financial screw-over) is that it means that the “difficult to get” oil gets exploited just as quickly as the “easy to get” oil — which means that in terms of peak oil, we have a plateau and then a crash, rather than a decline in supply and a gradual ramp in pricing.

Better go dust off your old Big Wheel.