Lolita-Manga is 'Child Abuse' ??

A manga translator has been convicted of possessing child pornography after police apparently uncovered his stash of loli manga.

The man had acquired 51 pictures deemed offensive by Swedish police (although apparently there were only in the region of 30 pictures, with police counting backup images twice), in order to “stay up to date with the latest developments in the Japanese comic genre” – an excuse which was probably connected to one of the two allowable defences for having the images.

Swedish law considers drawings involving underage participants in sexual situations to constitute child pornography, with police allowing an exception for people drawing their own pictures, as long as they do not show them to anyone.

This leads to the bizarre reasoning that showing an offending drawing to someone constitutes “a criminal case of child abuse” against a fictional child or children in general, whilst those keeping their pictures to themselves have not committed any fictional child rape at all.

Textual accounts of underage sexual activity, such as Nabokov’s literary classic Lolita, are “not yet” covered by the law – although, based on their logic, reading this book constitutes a criminal act of child abuse.

Another allowable defence is that the drawings were being used for “research” – this appears to have been used in this case, although it seems to have failed dismally.

His purpose for having the images aside, he was found guilty but received only a fine and probation. An appeal is planned.

A Swedish source contacting Sankaku Complex describes the man as a well-known manga translator in Sweden, and apparently by his own admission the man was engaged in a battle with his ex-partner for custody of his infant daughter after the mother moved away, taking the child with her – he claims he was falsely accused of child abuse by the mother so she could secure full custody.

Police investigating could find no evidence of abuse and the charges were dismissed, but a subsequent accusation persuaded police to search his residence, where they found his manga collection – including images of such characters as Asuka, which prosecutors considered to look too young.

No evidence of child abuse was ever found, but police decided to charge him with possession of child pornography on the basis of the manga they found.

As he points out “if you are going to draw any naked cartoon characters, be sure they have big breasts or your drawing might be illegal!”

Unsurprisingly, the trial sparked the usual debate with regards to freedom of speech, with some voices of reason amongst the usual rabble-rousing histrionics – his lawyer for one:

“It goes against all common sense. These are just drawings; no children have been harmed.”

Even a tabloid newspaper is sympathetic:

“However unpleasant and nasty a work of fiction might be, and whatever one thinks about Japanese porn involving cartoon children, there is actually no victim here. The children in the… man’s manga comics were not molested since they were characters in a comic.”

It seems the rights of fictional children may soon trump the rights of real artists and writers, with even reading a book or looking at a drawing now considered an act of “child abuse.”

Marijuana.

For the majority of my pre-pubescence i grew up with the idea that Marijuana was a bad, evil, god-forsaken plant and should never be thought nor spoken of let alone inhaled. From Nancy Reagan deciding that "just Say No" was a suitable phrase to keep kids off drugs, and there we see how that worked out.
Shitty, for people who don't know. It worked out shitty. Or shittily.
"Just Say No" has never been a phrase to rely on. It hasn't worked with drugs (as we see drug related crimes escalating), it hasn't worked with abstinence (as the AMA even shows every year that teaching only abstinence doesn't lower the amount of kids having sex, it just lowers the amount of kids having safe sex), and it didn't work with any other possible organization or ideal you can think of that you should probably just say no to.
But I'm not here to talk about those other outlets and/or organizations or even sex today.
I'm here to talk about Marijuana, and why that little bastardized plant should be legalized and brought back to stores in America like it was less than 100 years ago.

Let's start at the beginning:

In the early 1930s lived a man by the name of William Randolph Hearst. This man is the inspiration for Citizen Kane if that helps you connect with this essayic prose. Old WRH was a newspaper magnate, and by that we mean he basically owned media and bought a newspaper to say good things about himself and people he liked and publicly bitch slap the people he hated, mainly politicians and plants. Ah you see, he was also an industrialist in timber. Timber is trees.
Well here comes the pulp of the marijuana plant, more commonly known as hemp. Hemp was cheap, could grow anywhere and in vast quantities, unlike trees which would take years to cultivate and required much more land (roots are funny that way). Hemp was seen as a huge problem to Willie. See back before the internet and phones, paper was used for goddamn everything. Newspapers, letters, goddammit you know what paper was used for. And Willie had a shit ton of it.
So what'd he do? He teamed up with Harry J. Anslinger (which I have to point out is one of the most douche-hole names I've ever encountered), who was the Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition. Again, douche-hole had to throw "Prohibition" in there twice). Since Anslinger couldn't help but prohibit relaxing and fun things for Americans (such as liquor) he was easily swayed by Hearst who explained the deadly properties of marijuana and the effect it would have the the moral imperative of the common god God-fearing Americans.
(To note: this is the 1930s, the holiest people in the country were the early Catholic Irish who couldn't find jobs thanks to N.I.N.A. and the Italians who were looked down upon and some [not all] forced into a life of crime.)
So in 1936 Hearst and Anslinger, the dipshit duo, team up and start posting fabricated stories in Hearst's newspapers. It takes 1 year for the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. That's not even a typo. They misspelt the damned plant's name. And even though this just seems like a tax on the plant, it effectively outlawed Hemp. And there went cheap everything, since everything was paper. Most cars were made out of paper during the depression. .[citation needed]
(Note: 1936 was also the year the inspiring film "Reefer Madness" hit the streets. A propaganda film later turned into the adopter love child of pot heads everywhere)
Now as i feel i have been boring you for too long on with my recants of a Willie, lets jump ahead to sometime within the current years.
Everyone knows that Amsterdam is the marijuana haven of the world. Even if the laws aren't the most lenient in the world (I'm sure Siberia let's you smoke whenever) it has become the cultural centerpiece for the weed culture. Now Oakland is attempting to break out as it's stoned baby sister city. Yes, Oakland, California. Where there is a section colloquially known as Oaksterdam, and in this city are shops, and in these shops is, you guessed it, marijuana. marijuana loose, marijuana plants, marijuana cookies, drinks, salad dressing, lollipops and even olive oil. It's all medicinal but as it is it is probably the most lenient section of the US for marijuana. You can buy up to 8 ounces at a time nonetheless.
And you may think that the government should hate this because its all medical there aren't any taxes and it goes against federal law, well you should slam your head fiercely into the pavement because this one lone shop pays $900,000 a year in taxes. Thats 300k for state taxes and 600k for federal taxes.
Anyone paying attention to the news within the past 2 years would know that our economy got fucked like it was a pretty little boy in a prison with an inmate named Bessy. I'm saying our economy got ass-fucked. harshly, if you didn't get the simile. As of November 6, 2009 the national debt is:
$11,984,375,618,759.41
Almost 12 trillion dollars.
And here we have an awesome chance to make a shit load of money back by selling this one little weed and taxing it but we can't. And no one can come up with a coherent statement as to why not except that it makes you high and you can't trust someone who's high.
You can trust a drunk though.
America has Impresidentated (yeah i made that word up) plenty of drunk Presidents (Grant, et al.) and yet only as early as 1992 elected a man who has indulged in weed (Clinton), and even he had to say he didn't inhale. The latest 3 presidents have all admitted to some sort of drug use (I'm still gonna count Clinton). So maybe this should show us that America is ready to accept and deal with Marijuana being legalized. It's not harmful to the lungs any more than cigarettes and cigarettes get a government seal. It's not any more impairing to driving than alcohol (and has actually been tested to show that it causes people to be far better drivers than alcohol induced drivers).
Look It Up.
States have even begun legalizing marijuana (Maine and California) when they won't even legalize gay marriage (Maine and California).
Marijuana has caused violence though. Every day in Mexico, rival gangs fight on the streets of decrepit towns over marijuana. Oh wait, that's happening because we prohibited marijuana and s we've seen in plenty of gangster films, prohibition just leads to violence. 2700 deaths from Mexican citizens in 2007 alone. Prohibition just doesn't work to cut down pain, suffering, violence.
And it doesn't keep people out of prison either. Even though first time possession is usually a misdemeanor, excessive charges can add up to actual jail time, and if you are on probation even a small, extremely small, microscopic small, amount of marijuana can put you in jail. And this is for plant that has been misconstrued and lied about for years on end all the way back to the 1930s. Every year we incarcerate thousands of people for drug abuses and law bendings. When we could legalize it and turn those people into tax paying citizens who eat plenty of doritos.
Compare how many people die every year of outside influences:
Smoking- 435,000
Alcohol- 85,000
Car Accidents- 26,347
Murder- 20,308
Marijuana- 0 (yeah that number has been always been 0 since marijuana has been discovered)

SquareEnix's a blast.

While playing FFVIII on my playstation emulator, i've wondered. why is it called final fantasy? What was its history of the game? So i've googled a few and here's a little trivia only few knows.


Did you know our beloved Final Fantasy was almost never created? In 1987, Square was losing money and head designer Hironobu Sakaguchi decided to make one "final" game, A "fantasy" role playing game. Thankfully, Final Fantasy was a huge worldwide success, Square was rescued from Bankruptcy, which allowed them to produce sequels, and the rest is history!

Final Fantasy characters
(from top,left-Vaan of FFXII revenant wings,Squal Lionhart and Rinoa Heartily of FF8;2nd row,right-Female Hume of FFXI,Ashelia B'nargin of FFXII revenant wings,Male Hume of FFXI;last row,left-Cloud Strife of FFVII, Yuna and Tidus of FFX)

And because of the success of square enix over Final Fantasy sequels, they've created a whole new addicting game which makes the player wanted the company more, and this is a Disney and the all time favorite Final Fantasy parody game called Kingdom hearts! Like FF, the game also has alot of sequel, such as Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts II, Kingdom Hearts:Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts: Birth to sleep, Kingdom hearts: Coded, and Kingdom Hearts: 365/2

(Top row: Riku (after Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories), Kairi, Goofy, Roxas, Donald Duck, Sora (from Kingdom Hearts II), Sora (from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories), Riku (from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories), King Mickey, Naminé, DiZ, and Xehanort's Heartless.
Bottom row: Xigbar, Demyx, Luxord, Saïx, Xaldin, Xemnas, Axel, Marluxia, Larxene, Lexaeus, Zexion, and Vexen or simply the Organization XIII)

Because of SquareEnix's successful game the Final Fantasy, the company now have loads rolling on every console invented!
See wiki for games you wanted from SE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Square_Enix_games
-- They are just totally amazing!

I-Generation.

I have not seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
I have seen the middling minds of my generation destroyed by apathy, filled to the brim with sanity to spare and nowhere to put it, nothing to care about, and no one with whom to share thought.
This is the "i-generation", or perhaps that could have been the last generation, and that seems to be the main purpose for this generation. I. As in me, myself, and. The aforementioned apathy speaks unto the relationships with others. No longer do people visit others , or strike up conversations. Now they visit people's facebooks, and start up new chats.
What. The. Fuck.

Get the fuck out of your house and talk to a god damn stranger. I will tell you to get up, walk out, talk to a stranger, and maybe in some small portion of your prefrontal cortex or your temporal lobe you'll think "That may be a good idea." Then, just for the hell of it, you'll find your shoes ready to put them on and depart from your drywalled cocoon.
And then it hits you.
Apathy.
Like an aneurism in your brain you never saw it coming and you felt no pain. You just stopped giving a shit.
"I'd go out but this show's on."
"I'd go out but i work tomorrow."
"I'd go out but I'm talking to someone on aim now."
And there's the kicker in which apathy resides.
Now for the irony.
I have used all those excuses. And now I'm fed up. When i go to smoke a cigarette i don't shy away from the people surrounding me, I say whatever greeting pops into my head which usually consists of the summation of the words "hello" (or it's counterparts), "what's" and "up." That's how i meat a 30 year old Unitarian minister who regaled me with stories of how he shot his best friend in the ass, how Moses didn't write a single book of the bible, and then asked if I had a weed connection. If we were sitting in a diner and one of us had a gun, I'd swear I was in a Tarantino film.
But no.
Just life.
Go go live your god damn life for fuck's sake.
I'm sick and tired of watching the pontentially great minds of my generation detroyed by sewer rats as the minds have long since fallen into the proverbial gutter or washed down the proverbial drain.

“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self
satisfaction” -William Osler

- Philosophical wordings from whatevericareabout

Analog Watch in a Digital Era.

Typewriters have given way to keyboards. Acoustic has given way to Electric. Watches with hands have lost out to digital watches. Talking on a phone has given way to Texting on cellphone, and with it we lost the personal touch. It seems as though with every bit of ourselves we give up to a machine, that little bit of self is a part we'll never see again.

Now far be it for me to say that electronics are not good, great, miraculous things. I'm writing this on a computer for one. But it seems we've lost the class, the style, the ambiance of the past decades in favor of widgets, download able content and whatever else we can fit into a pocket sized portable machine.

Sure, one thing i always have is a phone in my pocket, and sure, i text more than talk because it's easier. But i still wear an analog watch. Does that make me a hypocrite? I'm not sure. I'd say no, but it's my own opinion. It's nary explainable. A mold between man and machine to produce art, and computer screens are too impersonal, and fragile. One wrong mistake and boom goes the proverbial dynamite of your work.

So I'm not saying we should all revert to smoke signals and sundials. But maybe keep a piece of ourselves grounded in the past. Their generation didn't seem to be too bad at getting ours to where it needed to be.
So write on a typewriter, or in a notebook. Wear an analog watch and stay classy. Shop at thrift stores. Do whatever you feel like, but don't lose hold on past generations.

Gave us the cotton gin from which your $40 American Apparel t-shirt with the ironic phrase came. Gave us the telephone, which is how you can play doodle jump on your iphone. Gave us rocket ships, so we can ignore space shuttle launches.
So you may not agree, or even understand how I mean what i say. maybe I'm just an old soul trying to get out. I prefer the titular phrase for myself. So do what makes ya feel good. and for me, that's an analog watch in a digital era.

- Philosophical paragraph from whatevericareabout. Class, yet trendy.

Project Natal

We are so near to virtual reality. Kinect for Xbox 360(originally known by the code name Project Natal) is a "controller-free gaming and entertainment experience" by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game platform. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller through a natural user interface using gestures, spoken commands, or presented objects and images. The project is aimed at broadening the Xbox 360's audience beyond its typical gamer base.

Here are some Link videos for Project Natal or Kinect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qlHoxPioM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HluWsMlfj68

Natal is scheduled to launch on November 4, 2010 worldwide with a fix price of $299.99 (Try to conver it yourself) enabling all previous xBox games will also be read-able to Natal, Imagine playing Halo on a controller-free console, Whatmore if you're playing some world war such as COD(Call of Duty) You'd have to duck/crawl/jump, for the character to do the same. That would be awesome. it is an addicting game, at the same time an exercise for you, well yes exercise. Cause you have to move your body to play. See again the vids, there's alot of games to see, Tekken type, Race car. Plus, the console is now internet-able! you can chat/internet on your own natal console! Awesome to the max.

Religion.

Religion has always been a major issue in all sorts of locations. It has sparked wars, divided families, crushed nations, destroyed peoples, set neighbors and brothers at each others throats. It has also consolidated splintered people against dissapearing, it has written rules by which a society that follows it will thrive, they have brought rules to those without conscience, saved brothers and sisters they don't even know, helped those who needed it most.

The question i pose are these; Would this crazy world we live in be better of or worse without religion in general? Does the good it does outweigh the bad, or the bad it does outweigh the good? Does it make sense at all to believe in a higher power?

There are so many different things to think about any religion. Some parts may be good, some bad. If there are things about religion that you think are good, then make a note of that, if there are bad things about another, say why. i don't want to see "OH SUCH AND SUCH SUCKS" and the like.

Also, please be sure to know what the heck you are talking about or at least be able to admit your wrong when you are discussing the specifics of a religion as it completely ruins your argument and messes up your credibility.

I have my own personal grudge match with christianity and its many splinter cults, for legitimate logical reasons I mgiht add. But for the arguments sake, I will stick with Christianity, Judaism, Muslim and Buddhist.

Christianity
These guys have been one of the ruling religions in the world for a while. With that power, they have committed atrocities such as the crusades and witch hunts all across Europe and the Americas. Originally a splinter cult from Judaism, they worship the son of God (which is all wrong in my opinion. Venerate, yes, worship, no) and believe in the opposite afterlives of heaven and hell (and sometimes purgatory). Christianity is composed of thousands of splinter groups in and of itself that all have varying specifics that all would like to throw off the mantle of playing nice and kill each other good and dead. These days they've gotten better; focusing on strength of community, helping those who need it, and furthering one's spiritual understanding of oneself.

Judaism
Though I know less about Judaism, Its consolidated and concise according to my knowledge. They worship God, who's name is never spoken in their tongue (Hebrew) and have been around since before the time of Christ. These guys have been summarily kicked out of just about every country in the world at one time or another and have still managed to stay alive and to some extent, thrive. Though these guys are less outspoken, they give a community a place to gather and consolidate.

Muslim
These are the USA's current "Bad Guys". Though the actual religion preaches nothing but peace and nonviolence, like allays, a tiny percent of them in splinter cults believe otherwise and have managed to get everybody upset at them. These guys are some of the most spiritual people I have met. Having not read the Koran, and not knowing a lot of details about them, I cant go into much further detail.

Buddhists
These guys are the hermits who live in mountain temples in Asia. They, for the most part, are pacifistic, human rights loving people who spend their days in contemplation and meditation. Though I'm not exactly sure, they are also those who have trained themselves as martial artist to protect themselves. They are in the front lines when it comes to human rights, especially in China/Tibet.

In general, I would say that Religion has kept us back from a lot of things, but kept us together across the world when we were desperately searching for something that was missing in our lives. In general it is/was a good thing, but if history could be rewritten, it needs some definite changes. And while I dont belive in the "God" that everyone else seems to, I admit that the presence of a higher being does exist in our world. After all, through random chance, the chance of us being as we are today is so astronomically improbably that it would have to be calculated as 0%.