Yes, the long-running president of Venezuela – Hugo Chavez – is pushing through legislation to fully ban violent video games in his beloved country.  This makes sense of course.  I mean it has to be the fault of violent video games that put poor Venezuela into it’s current situation.  Just because drug cartels have been murdering each other and civilians since long before Pong was created is no reason to look at this rationally.

In addition, this new legislation would ban toy weapons.  Which is a smart economic move when you think about it.  I mean, why let your people buy cheap toy guns from China when you are building the largest machine gun factory* in all of South America in your country? Keep that money in country and sell those kids real weapons instead.  Besides, that will keep them safer on their way home from school than that old toy would have anyway.  ( * This is an older link but this still seems to be on-going.  I just can’t find any articles online.)

In related news, the Vatican is also calling for an end to all violent video games.  According to the Pope, the Crusades were not the result of theocratic greed and corruption but by early video games.  It seems that demos of Grand Theft Carriage caused quite a stir with peasants and drove the knights to slaughter.  A lesser known but more revolting game called Messenger featured a messenger who had one too many bad days at the Messenger Office and started shooting all his co-workers with a cleverly hidden crossbow.  It is said that this game was an allegory to the Muslims and how mean they were for not giving back land to the church that was never the church’s in the first place.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Telepathic requests for comment to the Pope were not returned by the time I posted this entry.

Here’s the quick summary: a man who is a prolific collector of Japanese manga (comics) was found guilty of child pornography because of artwork in a series of manga that he was importing depicting depraved sex acts with children.  According to the article, this is a man who collected ALL types of manga and not just this style which puts him in the realm of what should have been considered an art collector.  He faces up to 15 years in jail.

So here’s the problem – this is a victimless crime.  There is no one who has been hurt… no one who has been wronged…  no one to be compensated.  These are drawings of fictional characters.  And the law has been left purposely vague (although less vague than the first iteration) so that it can cover things it was never meant to cover.  So now a comic collector is being put in jail and resources that could have been used to catch and prosecute real child pornographers has been wasted.

Welcome to the new world that allows for an idea to be illegal.  The most common anology to this is that if we play a video game that has us kill a virtual person are we then considered a murderer?  Sounds far-fetched doesn’t it? Now think about every school shooting over the past few years and how many times video games were blamed as influencers of the mentally flawed people who commited these crimes.

So where does the line get drawn?  Do we need to burn every copy of Lolita?  Should fans of Dakota Fanning get thrown in jail for watching Hounddog?  I guess we can’t make any more gang movies… ya know, unless no one dies of unnatural causes in them.  Slumdog Millionaire should have been X-rated based on this kind of thinking (oh wait, everyone loved it and it won awards).

What’s your opinion? (please read the article or be familiar with the case before venting)

Muse and I waiting an hour and forty-five minutes to vote from start to finish.  I’ve heard that some polling places were even crazier this morning.  If you haven’t yet voted and can go this afternoon then I highly suggest you do that instead of waiting for everyone else to get off work and stand in line.  Middle of the afternoon is the best time with very little wait.

Get out there and vote people.

But no….

It’s about some stupid kids who actually decided to publicly display a banner to “Free Tibet” outside the Olympics in Beijing.  This isn’t sad and disturbing.  This is stupid.  This is the kind of thing you do if you like foreign prisons.  The only way that this could actually be sad or disturbing was if the people involved really had no clue as to the culture and politics and thought that they would be allowed to just do this and walk away.  That kind of stupidity would be sad and disturbing.  Them being jailed for a stupid stunt in a country like China is just what I would expect and exactly what they should have expected.

I mean come on… we’re talking about a government and military who will never live down the tanks and killings at Tiananmen Square.  If these kids with their clever little LED sign only get life in prison then they should count themselves lucky.  Of course their parents will complain to the US government to get involved and this will become a media three ring circus of hype and rage and then the American people have “one more reason to hate those evil Chinese”.

What the fuck people.  Start thinking: for yourself and for your own good.

House Passes Telecom Immunity Bill, Expands Domestic Spying Powers

I don’t think any commentary is really necessary on this one. Nice parting shot Bush. Asshole.

Jack Thompson with his favorite video game

Jack Thompson is the florida lawyer who deems himself as a “moral crusader” who has slapped lawsuits against everyone and every thing over the past two decades (at least). He’s the one who got Howard Stern banned from something or other (no big loss there) and the one who flocks to every school shooting and teenage violence case to feed on the carcasses of the families left behind. He’s the worst kind of ambulance chaser because he doesn’t just try and make money off of other people’s tragedies, he parades these people in front of the world as a symbol of his insane fight to try and censor everything that ‘he’ deems improper.

Finally, the public and the government are catching on to this guy and doing something about him and is working to get him disbarred in the state of Florida. He walked out of that hearing. He refused to acknowledge the judge as a judge and accused her of falsifying her credentials among other things. He wrote a 14 page essay against his hearing where he actually stated “You don’t know Jack.” This guy has been a lost cause for a long time but I think he’s completely and clinically cracked at this point.

He’s also made it very clear that he has already applied for the ability to practice law in other states since Florida is obviously just out to get him. I’m hoping that no other states approve him but I’m not sure I have that much faith in the government. It’s hard to say at this point.

So imagine my surprise when I read this article: Canadian Politicians Negotiate to Join ACTA, Will Criminalize CD Copies, iPods at Border Crossings Basically this is saying that the border patrols between the United States and Canada (and presumably borders between any countries involved in ACTA) have the authority to decide if you have illegal copyrighted material on your computer/MP3 player/mobile phone/USB drives/etc and confiscate and/or destroy the device in question. No proof on their part would be required if the rumors are true.

So have you even heard of this ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)?  I hadn’t till I read this.  Since then I’ve found that this is being called the Pirate Bay Killer act which goes along with the whole copyright issue.  As stated in the linked article above, when people have tried finding out more about this through the Freedom of Information Act, all they got was the title of the act and everything else was blacked out.  From what little information can be found about this, the governments are being very quiet about this whole deal and the process to create it.

As usual, I encourage people to do their own research and make their own conclusions but this kind of thing honestly scares the shit out of me.  Not because I have anything to fear from it but because of the possibilities of the kinds of violations of rights this kind of act can make possible.  Mix this in with Homeland Security and we may be looking a little more dystopian any day now.

Two of my co-workers stopped me and asked, with somewhat shocked looks on their faces, why I was wearing an orange shirt. It’s just a plain, solid-color, bright orange polo-style shirt: nothing fancy. It has an old ink stain on it but it’s hardly noticeable. So I told them why: It was clean. Then they laughed and said to each other “He doesn’t know!” The confused look on my face was threatening to become a permanant fixture.

The Olympic Torch is going through the streets of Hong Kong as I type this. I knew about this because cameras were setup this morning already and traffic was jacked up all to hell. What I didn’t know was that people were wearing Red color shirts to show their support of China and the Olympics in China. People were wearing Orange shirts to show that they are supporting human rights.

So, I’m thinking that supporting human rights isn’t such a bad thing, right? Well maybe. It seems that Orange is also symbolizing being Anti-Chinese and against the China government. Which truthfully I’m not terribly fond of their government but I wouldn’t go so far to wear a shirt that says so. Except today it would seem. I was also told by these co-workers of mine – who all seem to revel in my ignorance of things that go on in China – that a man from Denmark was denied entry into Hong Kong because he was some form of protestor or another. Presumably something to do with human rights, Tibet, the Olympics, Tiananmen Square or some combination thereof which got him pulled aside and give a full body cavity search. I made up that last part about the full body cavity search but these people are pretty thorough over here so there’s no telling really.

And what was this Danish man wearing when he was being questioned with rubber hoses and thumbscrews? A freaking Orange shirt. So now – much to the confusion of foriegners and color blind people everywhere – orange shirts have become a symbol of civil unrest and rebellion towards the Chinese government. I was warned to steer clear of police and military people and to definitely avoid going to the Olympic Torch route. Which is funny because I stood along that very same route for over 30 minutes this morning waiting for my bus to work.

So I was down in the mall that connects to our office building (because no self respecting office building in Hong Kong can be more than walking distance to a shopping center) and contemplating the purchase of another shirt for my long commute home. It was then that I saw a local delivery man wearing his company polo-style uniform shirt. It was bright orange. So I figure that if their company doesn’t think that orange shirts are a problem then I shouldn’t have anything to worry about. And I’ve never even been to Denmark.

If I don’t make it home tonight… someone please come looking for me. I’ll be the white guy with the chin beard sitting in a cell with a bunch of Chinese anarchists wearing orange shirts.

So I guess you can tell where I stand on Capital Punishment.  I am all for it and I believe it should be a simple cut and dry process.  No languishing in prisons once the sentence is passed down.  Just do it right there on the spot and viewable on national TV.

• Rape a child (and probably kill the child): then we execute you.
• Commit cold-blooded murder: then we execute you.
• Torture animals: then we execute you.
• Cancel another TV show as good as Firefly: then we execute you.

But no, there always has to be some tree-hugging pacifist who thinks that we should spend millions of dollars every year keeping these bastards alive.  Feeding them three meals a day, providing them with workout equipment, basketball courts, satellite television, etc.  The best punishment we can hope for for their time in prison is perhaps the occasional beating  and/or ass-raping for the convict.

Why do we have so much crime?  That’s an easy one to answer.  Our legal system is broke or at least severely fractured.  Sure justice is served from time to time, but people are willing to take the risks that they do in committing crimes because they know all they have to do is pay for a good lawyer and if necessary go whining to the various ‘humanitarian’ groups.  People who are inclined to commit crimes are not afraid of the system and that’s where the downfall is these days.  And if you are a celebrity you already know that the laws don’t apply to you in the same way.

What happened to the public execution?  Entire cities used to turn out to watch the beheading of criminals.  When people were strung up to hang from their necks in the middle of a town square, everyone was reminded of the consequences of bad deeds.  When was the last time you saw a person die by execution?  Probably never in real life.  People are no longer faced with the very real consequences of evil deeds.

So my answer to crime in general is more executions IF they are publicly viewable on television, YouTube, HD satellite broadcast.  Start with those that have been rotting in our prisons for decades like Charles Manson.  Use the money that would have been spent to guard, feed, entertain, administer and heal him and others like him and use that money to setup an execution with advertising on the SuperBowl.  Why not?  It’s not like we are EVER going to let people like him out and yet we just can’t bring ourselves to kill the poor wretch.  It’s not his fault, it was his mother/his father/society/rock & roll/drugs/insanity/war/whatever.  Kill him.  Plain and simple.

But it will never happen.  And that’s why we will continue to see gangs on the streets because they know if they kill a baby in a drive by shooting they only have to go away for ten years and hang out with others from their gang and make more contacts for when they get out.  That’s why we will see random killings and hate crimes because there is no fear.  The system is a joke people and the more easily offended our society gets and the more politically correct everyone is forced to be because someone can’t handle reality the worse it’s going to get.

Food for thought: Every time I fly to Malaysia, the announcement before landing reminds everyone that anyone caught smuggling any illegal drugs into the country is subject to capital punishment.  I bet Malaysia doesn’t have the same drug problems that the United States does.  I wonder why?

And it’s serious. China is actually deplying Anti-Aircraft emplpacements, rocket launchers and various chemicals to try and keep it from raining during the olympics in Beijing that will be help in August. Go read the article because I wouldn’t believe this either if I hadn’t read it.

They may not admit it, but I would bet dollars to dumplings that they will have caches of standard munitions within easy reach of each of these ‘weather controlling’ weapons. You know, just in case someone tries to fly a plane into their weird Bird’s Nest stadium.

I’m not sure wether to be amazed at their ingenuity or dumbfounded by their bizarre display of military.

What do you think?