Laws, laws, laws…

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Those of you who monitor the newsfeed have probably seen the stories about the warnings regarding piercings and tattoos being issued in Australia (more, more). The government is stating that anyone helping a minor (15 years old and younger) getting nipple piercings or genital piercings — including both the piercer and the parent that approves it — will face up to fourteen years in prison. If the person is 17 or younger the same penalties apply for tattoos.

So basically they're saying that until you reach 18, your body belongs not to you, and not to your parents by proxy, but to the government. I don't know about you, but I'm not comfortable with that… Do I think people should wait till they're 18 to get a tattoo? Probably yes. Did I? No. Was it a positive experience for me? Yes. Same goes for piercings. I am a happier and better person today because I did those things, and I don't feel any government has the right to try and steal that.

Reading the experiences on BME it becomes immediately clear that body modification is an immensely positive activity in many young people's lives. By passing insane laws threatening piercers and parents with dramatic jailtime, they make their feelings about this community very clear. For comparison, the penalty for murder in Australia is seven to fourteen years. That's right — we're actually being told that body piercing and tattooing are as bad as murder.

I'll also mention on the tongue splitting bill in Illinois that the Senate has approved the bill (more) but with one condition — deleting the provision that there must be a “therapeutic or clinical need” for the procedure. That is, they've said, in effect, that it may be done by doctors — they've given oral surgeons the green light to treat this as an elective procedure.

If doctors actually start offering this procedure, this could be a step in the right direction.

That said, if doctors say “thank you very much, but we're still not doing it” (a quite likely outcome) then it's a step in the wrong direction because it'll stop quality non-medical practitioners from doing it, leaving only the hacks. So we'll see… The house still has to approve the revision.

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Zentastic update

Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Some more info on the property… I don't know if I'd mentioned that all the power had been cut to the cabins. Now, when I say “power had been cut” I mean that the light switches had been torn out of the wall and the cables snipped. Real crazy stuff by a guy who grew to hate electricity.

I'm not kidding when I tell you that when I tell you that he “sold” the property to a couple seeking to open a lesbian wilderness resort, what I actually mean is that the former owner went survivalist, started amassing weaponry to prepare for judgement day, and was eventually shredded* by the bullets fired at him by a SWAT team.

The property is being offered to us at what is I think a fair price. I'm still up in the air on it I have to admit… While I understand that when it comes to Western countries, Canada is the place to be, I'm not 100% sold that the 21st century belongs to “the West”. I'm far more convinced that the future lies in Central and South America, at least as far as these continents are concerned.

That said, a decision like that comes with much more political unrest and crime, and with a warm climate you trade comfort for disease. Logically I don't think I could find a better “homesteader” property than this one. Plus it's literally five minutes off the highway and right next to a major city, but still totally wilderness so I would think it's a solid investment as well.

Decisions, decisions!

Who wants to come build this summer?

* Ok, I wasn't told “shredded”… I was told “taken out by a SWAT team”. I choose to tell the story dramatically… He was probably just dragged off in cuffs or something less devilish.
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Quote

Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Via Transformation, by Pill or Scalpel:

"[Body modifications] are not just matters of vanity, narcissism or frivilous self-regard. They also concern my psychological well-being, the locus of my self-fulfillment. Enhancement technologies put me in touch with my true true self."

"There's a moral strand to it ... You're missing out on something if you don't live a fulfilled life. At other times, other places, it would have been getting in touch with God, or the good in yourself, or living life as a good citizen."

- Dr. Carl Elliott
University of Minnesota

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Morning time

Tuesday, May 20, 2003


What news should I mention here? Saudi Arabia and Iran are financing Russian upgrades to Syria's defense systems (more) to defend against potential attacks from US forces, or I could mention how Afghanistan is still a total mess (more), let alone Iraq which gets worse every day (more). Saddam is even said to be in good health (more), and plotting his return to power (more). Meanwhile, the Saudi ambassador warns the US to expect new terror attacks on US soil (more), with the US acknowledging that thousands of al-Qaeda troops are poised to strike back at the US for its invasion of their lands (more).

We ended the rule of one of history's worst tyrants, and in so doing, we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure.
- George Bush Jr.
Crawford, Texas, May 3, 2003

But don't worry — the US, well, the US defense sector anyway, continues to get very wealthy, supplying 28% of all weaponry on the planet, making it the largest arms dealer in the world (more). It's not alone though; include four of the other G8 countries (Russia, France, Britain, and Germany) and you'll come up with 2/3 of the weaponry sold on the planet. Thankfully Italy and Canada have banned military exports if there's any chance they'll be used in human rights abuses, and Japan has gone even farther and banned military export altogether. In the military money file, it turns out the Pentagon has misplaced one trillion dollars as well as 56 planes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missiles (more). Ooops!

America is losing its way at home and in the world. We have no money to rebuild America's cities, but we have money to blow up cities in Iraq.
- US Rep. Dennis Kucinich

As a new civil war brews in America between local (US) governments and the Bush regime (more), we're told that “Politics should be regarded as less like an exercise in producing truthful statements and more like a poker game, and there is an expectation by a poker player that you try to deceive them as part of the game.” (more)… Um… I understand things may be moving in that direction, but isn't it clear that when democracy is built on a battle of who's the better liar that the process has fundamentally failed and we need to scrap this implementation?

In any case, the one story that I really wanted to draw attention to was this quote from Mike Van Winkle at the Justice Department (more), in regards to issuing “terrorist threat” warnings any time there's a (peaceful) anti-Bush or anti-war demonstration:

If you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism ... you can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.

That is, since Bush has chosen to fraudulently fly this “terrorist killer” banner, anyone who opposes him must support and be a terrorist. As you know from the recent quorum hubbub in Texas as well as some of the judiciary staffing moves by the Bush regime, attempts are being undertaken to shift the US from a two party democracy to a “unitary government” (ie. a democracy where you only have one choice; kind of like Iraq was)…

They want to change the rules of the Senate itself in a raw bid for unitary government, run out of the White House. We should not and we cannot let the Senate or the federal judiciary become mere arms of any political party or any president.
- Sen. Patrick Leahy

Americans already have far less political choices than almost every other Western nation; it's only one very small step and they'll be left with no choice at all, and their “votes” will do nothing but prop up a militaristic totalitarian police state. If you're in America, you need decide when the time comes for you to defend your rights and your homeland. If you're not in America, you need to start deciding just how long you're willing to risk sharing the world with this growing threat…

Don't expect politicians, even the good ones, to do your job for you. Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.
- David R. Brower (more)

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Tired

Monday, May 19, 2003

Not that it's particularly exciting, but I've just rewritten the code that builds BME News to properly sort the columnists chronologically (so new ones will always be at the top). Later this week there will be another SHAPESHIFT posted, and maybe some other pleasant surprises as well.

I've been continuing to informally catalogue the spam that I get. The number continues to rise since the last time I mentioned it; I'm getting easily six thousand spams a day, as much as thirty meg of crap. On BME I regularly just make up email addresses to suit my needs of the day since most of it is just a “catch all” system; that is, anything@bmezine.com works, and is then filtered by my email software. Anyway, at least 90% of the spam that I get, if not more, is being sent to addresses that don't exist!!!

Oh, and I should note that if I include BMEworld, my servers in total are probably receiving close to 100 meg of spam per day. It's obscene.

Now, in the “what were they thinking” category, I saw this car for sale on eBay. Because I'm a sucker for Sterlings (the Sebring, which this is, is just a variant) I did the ol' clickity-click. I mean, it's low, sleek, rear-engined, rare, and has kooky doors (and is cheap):

Looks good, right? Let me again emphasize the rear engine thing. That means the engine is in the back. But this car has sidepipes:

Seriously, this idiot actually put on fake sidepipes because he thought his car would look cooler. Not only should it be obvious to anyone that there's no engine up front, but he's left the original exhaust for all to see, and since it's just powered by a Beetle engine, no one's getting fooled. That's almost as bad as those lame “fake stretching” earrings that make it only look like you've stretched but still have a narrow centre post.

He's also got the car jacked up for some reason; it should sit about 3″ lower than he has it. Inexcusable!

It reminds me of a conversation I had at the gas station the other day. I was putting gas into the 911 which of course fills at the front. Some dude in a new Monte Carlo or something pulled up.

Dude: That's a funny place to put gas in your car!

Shannon: Well, when the junk's in the trunk, they put the gas tank up front, eh.

Dude: Huh! I've never heard of anything like that! What kind of car is that anyway?

Shannon: It's a Porsche.

Dude: Wow, that's really something — I've never heard of that!

This wasn't some local gas-sniffer either — he was about 40, well dressed, had a decent car and so on. Maybe I'm too much of a car nut, but I just assumed that everyone knew what a Porsche was.

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