Okay, maybe he doesn’t hate it, but he doesn’t want to see it on the IPad either!

According to Slate’s “The Big Money”, a comic book version of the incomprehensible James Joyce classic Ulysses – which I believe tells the tale of a Jewish Irishman’s daylong search for a fresh bagel – has been knocked back by the mighties at Apple because one panel features a tiny drawing of the grossly offensive male organ!

Adding to the puritan bizarreness of the situation, the comic’s creators claim that they aren’t even allowed to include the penis panel with some kind of pixilation to blur the evil thing, as doing so is against Apple policy!

I don’t have a problem with Apple not wanting actual porn on the IPad, but this is clearly not porn but rather a small, inoffensive, and patently un-erotic depiction of some naked guy jumping into the sea! Not to mention of course the fact that the novel is known for its sexual content, so what were Apple expecting? A bowdlerized version of Ulysses produced by Disney and featuring songs by Celine Dion?

I wonder if this means Apple won’t carry photos of Michelangelo’s David or the Farnese Hercules?  Those works are also considered masterpieces and they feature much more detailed depictions of the penis, not only that but said wangs are also attached to what most people would consider to be good-looking men and therefore have far more erotic potential than this rather minimalist depiction of our sun-loving Irish friend.

Perhaps Apple’s view of an artwork featuring the penis can best be summed up in the immortal words of The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy…

“It’s filth! It graphically portrays parts of the human body which, practical as they may be, are evil.”

More on the banned banger here.

Kerry Robertson is apparently a bit of a thicky (not that you can tell from the interviews in the linked articles) so the Scottish social services decided that she couldn’t raise baby Ben and promptly stole him from Kerry and his dad Mark McDougall.

The authorities had earlier prevented the two from getting married, claiming that the girl didn’t understand what she was doing, and when the pair found out about government plans to steal the child as soon as it saw the light of day they fled to Ireland, only to have that country’s storm troopers steal the baby on behalf of their Scottish counterparts!

Even if Kerry was a drooling vegetable like the kind of boofheads who made this vile decision the State’s actions would still be insupportable, given that the child’s father has no “disability”. But McDougall doesn’t need to be “disabled” to have his child stolen by The State as, wait for it, he is not married to the mother and therefore has no legal rights to the baby! Well, that worked out nicely for the kidnappers, didn’t it? I guess now we know what the Scottish hierarchy is when it comes to who “owns” children – state first, mommy second, dad not even in the running unless he’s married to the mother, and even then almost certainly a very distant third.

It’s all very 1984, deciding who can or can’t get married, who can or can’t raise children. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, the family unit is a threat to the powers that be. Orwell knew it, you and I know it. Even with the media invading children’s minds more and more every day, those pesky parents are still there to teach them things the government would rather they did not know. Unless of course you can find some bullshit excuse to take the children away from them…

More here.

The weirdoes in charge of Australia’s RSPCA (our version of the Humane Society) have put forward a proposal that takes government interference in everyday life to a ridiculous new height – they’ve suggested that people who don’t walk their dogs “often enough” should be fined thousands of dollars, and in some cases even jailed!

Being a swine myself, I’m all for giving people who mistreat animals a kick in the teeth, but making it an offense to not walk the dog “often enough”? And just how often is “often enough”? Well according to the article…

“The proposed new laws are designed to formalize the national code, which states dogs must be walked at least once a day.”

So on top of everything else, Australians will now have to take doggy for a walk every freaking day or they’ll be looking down the barrel of jail time. Bad enough for those who work very long hours, but even more so for the elderly or disabled for whom doing this every day may simply be impossible. There are a couple of women in my area that can only get around on motorized wheelchairs, and both of them have lapdogs. How the hell are they supposed to take these dogs for a walk every day? And what if your dog is a lazy bastard who refuses to go walkies? What are you supposed to do, drag the bastard through the streets? Why, that would be illegal too!

And precisely how does one prove the dog is being walked regularly anyway? You can prove it’s not underfed by pointing to it’s gut, prove it isn’t being abused by pointing to a lack of injuries, but what do you do to prove you’re walking the bugger? Make a video recording of each walk while keeping a newspaper with the day’s date in clear view? Ludicrous. Let’s face it, anyone with a grudge against you (psycho ex-wife, that bloke you keep beating at pool, that drinking buddy who resents you for never buying a round…) could claim you’re not taking Fido for enough walkies and you could end up wearing a fine of up to 12 thousand dollars or even jail time!

I’m all for protecting furbearing quadrupeds, but this goes far beyond the protection of animals to the oppression of humans. It’s yet another little thing to keep people worried and anxious, yet another distraction from the real problems of the world, yet another way to keep people scared and unthinking. Think I’m exaggerating? Think the people who enforce the law will always be sensible about it and not lock up citizens who are clearly not criminals? That’s what many people think, people like Samantha Tumpach, an American woman who taped four minutes of Twilight: New Moon during her sister’s birthday celebrations at the local cinema , and is now being threatened with three years jail! Safe to say that if someone had told Tumpach that something this surreal was in her future she would have said “Oh, come on, you’re exaggerating!”

Big Brother strikes here.