Again, religion....

This is an exerpt of a short letter written to the editor of an American newspaper, regarding an article it recently printed:

"Second, the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t now, nor has it ever offered a wafer and wine as Communion. We do offer the body and blood of Jesus Christ, which in John’s gospel he proclaims to be our source of life in Him. To refer to the Eucharist as a wafer and wine is to demean the value of this sacrament, seemingly equating it to an evening snack.

I suggest that Mr. Kush apologize for his lack of respect to Bishop Reilly and the faith of the Roman Catholic Church.

Rev. PAUL M. LaPALME

Millbury "

I see. So the press describing it the Catholic way (saying that every Sunday, people gather together at a fixed location to feast on someone's flesh and drink their blood hence believing they will come to heaven through it) would be better? If I claimed to believe that about consuming anyone in general, I'd get sent to jail and spend the rest of my life in a psychiatric ward. But yet again, everything's excused as long as you do it in the name of religion. Why is it that someone's religion is seen as something that automatically deserves respect from everybody else; more respect than any other matters out there? To us sane people; it is just a wafer.

Also, it seems that yet another woman (why is it always women in their mid-fourties?) has seen God in her breakfast.

Ahh, religion.

The high end of low

"I gave myself 158 scars in one day. It was me trying to prove a point to someone – myself. It wasn’t like my years in the past of self-mutilation; something to be hidden or a type of compulsion. This was more like tattoos, 158 things that happened that day and I wanted to remind myself."

And you wonder why I can't wait for this album. Roll on May 27th.

"Swine flu: More schools closed, more cases reported

The kids are better off not being in school. They get a break from the disease known as state indoctrination. They get a chance to spend a little time living as free individuals and not as part of the collectivist herd.

They won’t be forced to stand and salute a pretty rag while reciting a useless, meaningless chant of allegiance.

Here’s hoping they learn to like it."

I concur.

Prostitution

I heard something on the radio the other day about the police being a little taken back by the fact that the Swedish law that makes buying sexual services illegal hasn't done much good since it was first introduced ten years ago. Surely, this says something? It's a need that isn't going away because it's an incredibly basic one, and legislating against it obviously does absolutely no good. personally (and I don't think a lot of those who know me will be surprised here), I would like to see it allowed. I see absolutely no reason whatsoever for it to be illegal. After all, we pay people we don't know to perform a service in every other aspect of our lives; we go to the doctors when we're sick, leave our kids at the kindergarden, we pay people to drive us where we want, to cut our hair, to cook our food...why not pay them to get us off. Really, it's that simple. It's interesting to think about why most people want prostitution banned. Most people would probably say that the business is a very destructive one for the women in it, which is often -often, but not always- true, but I eprsonally think it's more about the agenda that women aren't supposed to be in charge of their sexuality. People don't want to accept that women might actually LIKE providing this sevice. It's the oldest profession in the world for a reason.It is true that the business today most likely attracts people that are emotionally unwell or are being forced into it and it can be a very destructive business, I'm sure. However, it *can* be done in other ways.

The state of Nevada allows prostitution and currently has 28 active brothels. Nevada law requires that registered brothel prostitutes be tested weekly (by a cervical specimen) for gonorrhea and Chlamydia trachomatis, and monthly for HIV and syphilis; furthermore, condoms are mandatory for all oral sex and sexual intercourse. Brothel owners may be held liable if customers become infected with HIV after a prostitute has tested positive for the virus. Hygiene is extremely thorough and all customers are obliged to bring their health certificate. This takes the business off the street hence minimalizes the risks of violence, rape and drug abuse (note the use of the word drug ABUSE, as opposed to just drug use). It's one hundred per cent obvious to me that it should be treated like any other business and thast sex workers should have thge same benefits as everybody else -even their own union movement. Some maya rgue that this makes sex clinical, but here's a newsflash: sex and love doesn't have to go together. They can, but they don't have to. And what's to say that the people buying it don't actually have the emotions with it just because they're paying for it? It's about time we started people living the way they want without moralizing so much.

I guess it's about time I commented on this. Frankly, I don't know where to start. As everybody knows, the papers have been fileld with alarming reports recently about the swine flu, first discovered in Mexico a couple of weeks back. And now, for some reason unknown to me, the entire world is freaking out. The interesting thing is that if you bother to thionk a little for yourself and go beyond the panicky, black bold lettering of the fronts of the newspapers, you'll realize that this is no different from a regular flu. That's it. And, just like with the regular flu, it is only potentially (and I say potentially) deadly if you're old and sick witha weak immune system, or a small child. So WHY, then, are grown ups of all ages freaking out? Do you see small children and people in elderly homes panicking? No, because they know better than to worry about the media wanting to sell papers. It is just the flu. It's not the Black Plague and it's not Malaria. It's no big deal. But as always, the big masses swallow every word that's being spoon fed to them without thinking.

When doing a picture search on Google for the word "swine", every three pictures or so is showing people with masks on. The right wing parties in America are using this as an excellent opportunity and excuse to blame the swine flu coming to their country ont he illegal Mexican immigrant, hence suggesting the closing of the borders. In Iraq, the pigs of a local zoo are being put down, here in Sweden hygiene masks are flying off the shelves and in Egypt, thousands of pigs are being slaughtered. That particular thing seemed odd to me untill I remembered that most Egyptians are Muslim, hence consider pigs as "unclean" and will not eat them. Their government were quite soon forced to admit that they were only using the swine flu as an agenda to get rid of the animals. People are panicking for absolutely no reason and it's baffling to me. No one buys surgical face masks to protect themselves from the normal flu, so why now? I'll tell you why; because there hasn't been much int he news for the past couple of months apart from the echonomy. We need something to wake people up, something that will make them start to consume again. Consume fear, consume facial protection, consume papers, consume Tamiflu...whatever, as long as they consume.

Green Day released a song called "American Idiot" a couiple of years ago. It was written with George Bush and the American people in mind but some parts fit the current state of the world quite well...heard it the other day and this line stood out to me:

"Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the idiot nation
Where everything isn't meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We're not the ones meant to follow
For that's enough to argue

Don't want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
Calling out to idiot America"

People are staring themselves blind at the scale of which the spreading of a disease is measured and freaking out by the fact that it's being raised a notch, but no one has bothered to find out what that scale actually means. Level five, for example (also note that this is one step away from being at the absolute top of the scale, making six as bad as it can possibly get) means the flu has spread to two countries. Two. Out of more than two hundred. See any need to panic yet? This is just another false alarm to generate mass hysteria. Four years ago it was the bird flu, and who in our part of the world even thinks of it now? No one; because the media stopped reporting on it, even though it is still as common in Egypt now as it was then. If it's not in the paper, people forget.

For your information; the swine flu is considered relatively high in contageousness but low in aggressivity. This quote from professor Angus Nicoll from the ECDC influensa program, says it all:

"We will most likely see the same pattern in Europe as we do in the States with increased cases." According to professor Nicolls, this will lead to some ending up in hospital and some dying:

"It happens every year during flu season."

I rest my case.

The bride awakens

"Your name is Buck, right? And you came here to fuck....right?


Sorry for the Norwegian subtitles.

Oh, make me over...

Plastic surgery is fascinating...as anything, when taken to its extreme, it gets scary.

* A 50 year-old woman recently spent £10,000 on surgery to become the spitting image of her 28 year-old daughter.

* A man in China has convinced his new wife to undergo plastic surgery so she could resemble his dead first wife. Zhao Gang, 32 from Chongqing city, China, lost his first wife in a car accident three years ago and now wants his new wife to look exactly like her dead wife.

* Lisa Connell, 29, is terminally ill from a brain tumour and has decided to spend £40,000 on plastic surtgery to look like Demi More, saying: "I want to die beautiful. This is my way of getting the control back in my life”. (Demi Moore recently spoke out against the surgery, asking her to please not go through with it).

* A male Jennifer Lopez fan has undergone plastic surgery in Miami for MTV's "I Want a Famous Face" to turn himself into a J.Lo look-a-like. Michael J. Tito, 23, had breast and cheek implants, an eyebrow lift, eyebrow bone shaved and his hairline lowered in front of the MTV cameras for the reality show, Britain's Sun reported Wednesday.

* Jocelyn Wildenstein underwent multiple preocedures to look like her husbands favourite animal - a cheetah- after he had decided to divorce her.

* After having transformed herself into a modern day Barbie Doll, Cindy Jackson recently decided to start a new transformation and turn herself into a spitting image of Birgitte Bardot.


...and so on. I can't help but feeling bad for these people and it hruts me to think how unhappy and full of self-hatred they must really be to want to literally transform themselves into someone else. :( Psychologically, though...it's incredibly fascinating. Humans are an interesting species.