Cory Doctorow posts an item over on Boing Boing about a manga collector that has plead guilty to possession of child porn because some of his manga collection includes depictions of  “minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct”, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” For this, he faces 15 years in prison and the remainder of his life tagged as a sex offender and pedophile. For collecting comic books. Read that again. Nobody involved with the case is claiming that Christopher Handley is a pedophile. Nobody is claiming he ever harmed any children. He was arrested and convicted on the basis of collecting comic books that are commercially available in Japan.

But that’s Japan, you say. Should we allow people to purchase film of little girls and boys being abused if it becomes commercially available in Thailand? Who’s there to protect the children? Here’s the thing. I’m all for protecting children from predators. In fact, in cases of clear sexual abuse of children…. where there can be no question of guilt, I’m totally in favor of the death penalty for them since, as near as I can tell, there’s no way to rehabilitate sexual predators. On the other hand, let’s say you’ve got a person who has a proclivity for such behavior and it’s taken care of by looking at some cartoon pictures of nastiness. Maybe it’s ok for him to satisfy his twists via cartoons, eh?

In the subset of manga known as hentai there is some pretty twisted shit. [Feel free to do a Google image search if you're  feeling brave. DO NOT do it if you're at work]. Apparently, the stuff seized by customs involved beastiality of some sort but I have to worry when we have become so puritanical that we have to outlaw cartoon behavior. It seems to me like this is the 60s pornography debate all over again since it the government is claiming that there is no artistic value to the work. But maybe it’s just me.

Here is a lengthier article at Wired by David Kravets.

So I was late getting there because I figured the doors would open at 8:00 like they usually did but tonight’s show opened at 7:00 so I missed the first act The Word Alive out of Phoenix. Sorry guys.

The second band was Eyes Set to Kill from Tempe, AZ (essentially Phoenix, was it Arizona night at the Brewery?). They were really good. Jammin’ songs, good sound and an interesting hook… Eyes Set To Kill was formed by 2 sisters which is something you just don’t see every day in the world of metal. I think March of the Dead is my favorite track off their new CD. For the record,  I’d like to note that Anissa Rodriguez is my new favorite female bass player. Seriously talented and really pretty. I was sort of hoping to talk to them after the show. Anissa walked by and said ‘hi’ and Brandon wandered back and forth a couple of times to the merch table but it was while SEA was playing and trying to have anything resembling a conversation while a band is playing in The Brewery is an exercise in futility.

Next up was In Fear and Faith, they had a really interesting line-up… two full time vocalists. It would have been cool if you could have heard either one of them. For this beginning of the first song I thought they were having mic problems then I realized whoever was running sound just didn’t have it turned up enough. It’s a shame really because from the stuff on myspace they both have really good voices and use the vocals to their advantage. As usual, it’s hard to tell whether that’s the fault of the band or the Brewery.

Sky Eats Airplane closed up the show. They did a passably good job.  They did an exceptionally cool cover of Nookie by Limp Bizkit. It was fucking miserably hot in The Brewery by the time they came on. All things considered it was a really good night. I took a couple of pics with my fly new camera but haven’t pulled them off yet. Today is the first 2009 Downtown Live with Candlebox headlining so I’ll get a bunch of pictures and post them tomorrow. Toodles.

I took this picture the other day. I don’t remember when or where I was other than I was in a McDonald’s. The important point to note is that I was already inside the men’s bathroom. There was a urinal to my right. This is a picture of the stall. When would somebody require an additional sign and why would the person putting it up do so? It boggles the mind.

I don’t care who you are, if you don’t experience a sense of wonder when you see an airship there’s something wrong with you. I think it’s almost criminal that one little accident basically killed the entire passenger airship industry. Were you aware that the 36 people who died on the Hindenberg were the only civilian deaths in the history of airships travel? Anyway I saw this blimp the other day in Elizabeth City and took a picture.

I saw this sign on a gas pump the other day and took a picture of it because I sometimes question authority. Seems to me that a sign like this should reference some statute or something. The reason I feel this way is that I’ve found that frequently statements like this are what I like to call “bullshit” . And, as near as I can tell, that’s what this is. I spent waaaaaayyyyy too much of my valuable free time looking over the general statutes of NC and  can’t find any reference to anything of the sort.

SC Gubanatorial Candidate Attorney General Henry McMasters got bitchslapped by federal court today. District Court Judge Weston Houck issued a consent order prohibiting him or anybody in his office from prosecuting Craigslist in relation to ads posted by third parties.

Attorneys General have long been known as attention seeking assholes (ref: John Ashcroft). SC’s Henry McMasters is no different. He started by  flapping his gums about criminal prosecution of Craigslist  for having prostitution ads available on-line in SC. So Craigslist removed the ads. Then he kept yammering because you can’t get to be governor by having people comply right away. So today Craigslist filed a lawsuit in federal court. McMasters hasn’t got a leg to stand on in court so what does he do? That’s right class… he declares victory and spins the whole thing into we won.

And people wonder why I don’t like politicians.

Michael Arrington’s Post over at Techcrunch is better than mine because I just start ranting pretty quickly.

So yesterday I wrote about the dangers of allowing ideologues to run your political party. To help me out a little bit Michael Steele, of the RNC, gave a speech in which he said,

“Now all of a sudden I’ve got someone who wasn’t a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for,” Steele told Republicans at the state convention in traditionally conservative Georgia. “So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money.”

What he was talking about was gay marriage and I assume that he’s talking about some fictional small business owner but it’s so obtuse that I’m not really sure what he means. However,  if you read it as it stands it applies to hetero marriage to, doesn’t it? So are the Republicans now so opposed to gay marriage that they’re willing to do away with their precious family values to stop it? It also shows the sort of disconnect that the professional ruling class has with real people. I don’t remember ever working anyplace that paid for the insurance for my spouse or children.  Most of them don’t fully cover the employee anymore but you might now know that if you’ve spent you entire adult life feeding at the public trough.

Of course, Steele isn’t known for his clever analogies either since he claimed that the refutation of global warming is that Greenland was called Greenland for a reason. Which it was…. it was Erik the Red’s own personal marketing campaign. FWIW, I’m not sold on the whole global warming thing but that’s just stupid.

At any rate, as far as gay marriage goes, I don;t really understand why they’d want to but as far as I’m concerned there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be as miserable as they people who haven’t gotten divorced yet.

Instead of posting the 18 Wheel Archive as individual posts I decided to give them their own page. So I did. You can get to it from up there ^^^^.  And I’ll be deleting the previously posted stuff here. Because I can. Thank you for your attention.

I used to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate pretty regularly because it’s been a long time since either of the major parties represented anything that approached my views on how things should be done.  As best as I recall, here is how I’ve voted in US Presidential elections since I was able to vote:

1980 – John Anderson (I)

1984 – Ronald Reagan (R)

1988 – Ron Paul (L)

1992 – Andre Marrou (L)

1996 – Bill Clinton (D)

2000 – Harry Browne (L)

2004 – Michael Badnarick (L)

2008 – Didn’t vote

So in 8 elections, I voted for 1 Republican, 1 Democrat, 1 Independent, 4 Libertarians and there was one time I was so disgusted with the process I couldn’t even bother to go down to one of our mobile voting stations and cast a protest ballot. My personal opinion is that most Americans in the mainstream are really libertarians (Capital L and lowercase l will be used to distinguish between the politcal party and the political belief system) and yet the Libertarians routinely get less than 1% of the popular vote.  I think there are 2 intertwined reasons that this is the case.

The first is that the people in charge of the LP are ideologues and anytime ideologues are in charge their organization will be marginalized. Just ask the Republicans. The only reason the Democrats didn’t hold the White House continuously from 1988 to 2008 was that they managed to find the blandest people on the planet (Dukakkis, Gore, Kerry)  to run against the Republicans.

The second is related — when ideologues are in charge their marketing sucks since they don’t understand that everybody doesn’t feel the same way they do because it would be stupid to feel differently.

So, here’s me, all out on the raggedy edge. On the World’s Smallest Politcal Quiz I score a 100 on personal issues and a 70 economic issues. On the Libertarian Purity Test I score a 77 out of 160 which according to the author of the test makes me a medium core (?) libertarian.  Which is probably fair. The problem is that amongst the people running the LP they don’t want anything to do with me because I’m not pure enough. It would be like if the Republicans suddenly didn’t want anything to do with anybody who was pro-choice (Oh, wait…..). If the LP ever wants to be anything more than a marginal party they’ll have to embrace people who, for instance, don’t think taxes to build public roads are an abomination.

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