The Death Of American Responsibility.

Hey folks! Did you know I am a magician? It's true! In fact, I will do a magic trick for you right now. First, read this statement a friend I like to debate with sent to me recently about his view of a particular social issue...

"Gang violence is a major issue in this country. It uses significant resources and tax payer money to deal with. We, the public, pay for the repercussions every day of gang violence in America. A government program to use our tax dollars to give gang members free crack would be the best solution to this problem. With free crack will come a reduced amount of gang violence and the public will pay much less than if we simply throw money at dealing with the problem."

That's a pretty ridiculous statement, isn't it?

But wait! Now comes the magic trick. You see, this is not actually what my friend said. Watch as I alter only two different phrases to return this statement to what he actually said, and change the whole statement into something that not only doesn't sound ridiculous, but is something that many people in the country support currently...

"Unwanted pregnancy is a major issue in this country. It uses significant resources and tax payer money to deal with. We, the public, pay for the repercussions every day of unwanted pregnancy in America. A government program to use our tax dollars to give women free birth control would be the best solution to this problem. With free birth control will come a reduced amount of unwanted pregnancy and the public will pay much less than if we simply throw money at dealing with the problem."

For some readers, your first thought will be, "But, it's not the same thing!" Think about it for a moment. How is it any different?

I'm not comparing all women to gang members, obviously. I'm comparing one group of people responsible for their own actions to another.

America has become a country where we insist that our personal lack of responsibility is the fault of the public, not ourselves. If we misbehave, make sloppy choices in life or commit completely morally irresponsible acts, the fault lies on the general public for failing to prevent us from making those choices. This is what American has turned into.

If someone kills or injures themselves or goes financially bankrupt -- if their children are attacked by predators or grow up educationally or morally stunted -- this is OUR fault and WE have to pay for it. And now, as Monty Hall shows us what's behind curtain number three, we can see the next thing we shall all be responsible for is when a woman simply can't manage to keep her legs closed or a guy just can't bring himself to stop humping whatever he can get his hands on.

Getting pregnant is a very delicate act. Ask anyone who's tried to breed pandas. You don't just trip over a banana peel and wind up pregnant. It takes either a lot of effort or a lot of very shitty, very conscious decisions.

Sure, it will cost the American tax payer less to supply drugs to women to save them (and us) from the repercussions of their own bad decisions. But I, for one, miss the days when people accepted responsibility for their own choices. And, if it were up to me, not a single cent would be given to any American by the government to bail them out of their own stupidity. It is only through the consequences of our mistakes that we learn not to make those mistakes. Isn't it interesting that the more we save people from themselves, the more they need saving?

Am I Creepy?: A Guide For Furries

As a furry, I've learned it's a universal fact that, sooner or later, everyone in the furry fandom will have a run in with a "creepy" furry. In most cases, this will take place at a furry gathering or a convention. Perhaps it will be a furry who goes barefoot in the hotel lobby, has a visible (and olfactorial) lack of hygiene or injects awkward subject matter into conversations with complete strangers. These are the furries the media look for to shock and awe their audiences at the quirky nature of the furries. The ones who, by no real fault of their own, can turn a social situation into an uncomfortable experience for those they're interacting with. When we call a furry "creepy", what we're really saying is that they're socially awkward -- they don't recognize or are unaware of the usual social clues and etiquette.

The problem many of us experience with these "creepy" furries is that they simply don't realize they're creepy. To them, they are behaving just like everyone around them. If they were aware of the social awkwardness they were stumbling over -- well, they probably wouldn't be doing it. Unfortunately, informing these furries that they are creepy, even in the most benign of situations, can still hurt their feelings and be very uncomfortable for the one informing them.

Now, here's the part that might be hard to believe. That furry could be you, dear reader. It is the goal of this post to try and help you realize if you are a "creepy" furry and, if so, what you can do to prevent those around you from feeling uncomfortable. I intend to be as honest and forthcoming as I can.

Let me start with a recent personal experience...

******************

I was at a dinner with another 20-or-so furries. My table was the one the celebrities had clumped up at (there is a reason for this, but I'll talk about that sometime in the future -- perhaps my next entry). Amongst the people at this table were friends and colleagues I've known and worked with for more than a decade and, in general, we were discussing convention business and musing over events that have happened in our pasts.

Suddenly, I noticed the conversation at the table fell silent, and I saw a furry standing rather uncomfortably close to a friend of mine seated at the opposite end. I'm unsure of how his line of dialogue started, but he appeared to be lecturing my friend on some of his accomplishments in the scientific field. (I'll admit, I don't remember exactly, but I'm fairly sure none of us were discussing science at the time.)

He didn't notice the fact that the people at the table had gone quiet, or that they were either looking away from him or staring down at their hands. He didn't catch the facial expressions and social gestures from my friend that he was uncomfortable with the situation. And if he did see these things, he didn't know how to interpret them. It appeared that he'd just walked up and began discussing his life in the middle of our conversation and none of us had ever met this person.

After a moment of awkward silence, I could see my friend trying to respond in the nicest way he could and stumbling a bit. I thought the best thing to do would be to try to turn the conversation to something everyone at the table could relate to.

"So, where are you from?" I asked. The response I received from him was a pause-less, somewhat frightening torrent of words I will try to render thusly:

"Well I was in western Canada when I was younger but then I moved south for a while and I've been to the Los Angeles area before and around the southern California area but then I moved away from there and why would you ask something like that?"

I was a little taken aback. "Uh. This isn't a hard one, man. Where are you from?" After a couple more tries, he finally told us that he lives somewhere in silicon valley. Wonderful! Something we could grab onto and interact with him about. And, as another person at the table began to remark on someone she knew in the Silicon Valley area, the man vanished without so much as another word! Dissipated back to his own table, I assumed.

A few minutes later, as I was eating the dinner that had been brought out and talking with the friend in the seat next to mine, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a rush of breath on my neck from behind. I shivered, disconcertedly. I turned around and there was our new friend, his face just inches from mine.

"So I couldn't help but notice that question you asked earlier back when you asked me where I was from, I didn't know if you meant the place I was born or the place I live right now but I was just curious if that's what you meant because if that is what you meant then it seems like a strange thing to ask and why would you ask something like that?"

My mouthful of food sat there, terrified and unchewed. The friend who'd been talking to me had been cut off mid sentence by this and could only stare at me with an expression both concerned and relieved that this was happening to me instead of him. I tried my best to speak around a mouthful of steak.

"I was just curious," I said. At this point, I was becoming worried that he might have thought I was a secret agent or an alien trying to discover his home address. I'd never been told that asking a person you've just met where they're from was a strange question.

"Okay, because I wasn't sure why you'd ask a question like that and I didn't really know what you meant so I'm sitting at that table over there and I saw you were sitting here and I thought I'd just come over and say hi."

"Hi," I said. I had no idea what else to say!

"So all right, I'll go back to my table now I guess and I just wanted to stop over here and say hi so I'll go back to my table now and I hope I didn't upset you or anything."

"A little bit creepy, actually." Maybe I shouldn't have said it. Maybe it would have been better if I'd just smiled and nodded and let him go. But I tend to treat people the way I would like to be treated, and if I was doing something socially awkward and didn't know it, I'd want to be told about it.

He paused in thought and then looked at me. "Really?"

I nodded, "Yeah, that was a bit creepy." For a moment, it seemed like he might actually have been interested and appreciative of the feedback.

But then, all at once, he said, "Oh. Sorry, then." He got on his hands and knees and crawled across the floor, between the legs of a large horse statue behind me and back to his table.

************************

Almost everyone reading this will understand that this was a creepy experience. This person was socially awkward and uncomfortable -- even a little frightening -- to be around. Do I hate him? Of course not. Was I trying to hurt his feelings? Again, no. He just simply does not understand that the way in which he was behaving was strange and uncomfortable to the people around him. He doesn't understand that it's awkward to crawl on the floor of a restaurant or that there is a certain, generally accepted physical distance at which it becomes distressing for a stranger to be within. He doesn't understand that it's important to have met a person you wish to engage in casual conversation first, or that speaking in barely controlled barrages is very difficult to interact with. He doesn't understand, but this does not make him a bad person in any way.

 Unfortunately, once he returned home, he began to raise holy hell on the social networks, claiming his character had been publicly and ruthlessly attacked.. Ironically, if he'd wanted to prove I was wrong, that would have been the first thing he wouldn't have done. If not for the public self-crucifixion, he'd have probably been able to approach me again in a few months and I wouldn't have even remembered it. Now, of course, he's burned in my head for good.

What does this mean for our creepy friend? Well, it simply means that I will be making a point not to be around this person in the future. It's an unfortunate way to start out what could have possibly been a friendship with someone. Though I don't blame him for his lack of social skills, I'm still going to avoid him in the future. He has likely missed out on other helpful or important interpersonal relationships for the same reason.

In the end, he had (and still has) no idea that he was behaving in a creepy way. It's even likely the description of what happened that night will be completely different in his perception. And that's where this blog comes in. If you are a creepy furry, you likely don't know it. So, to prevent you from causing people you might like to know better to flee from you, and to help stop others around you from taking on the uncomfortable task of informing you that you're creepy, I have put together some guide lines to help you realize when or if you're being creepy and what to do about it.

Keep in mind - It is far beyond the scope of this journal to explain every unspoken social rule, why they exist and how to deal with them. Many of these rules are instilled into people from early childhood and on through their lives. What this journal can do is help you recognize if you're breaking those rules and offer some easy ways to react.


AM I CREEPY?

Focus on the actions in which you are currently engaged and the other people around you and ask yourself these questions (note: these conditions apply only to actual events and not necessarily internet experiences):

1. Have you spent 20 minutes or more focused on or following a person whom you've never met or been introduced to?

2. Have you spent 30 minutes or more focused on or following a person who is not interacting with you socially?

3. Are you sitting with a person or group of people who did not invite you to sit with them?

4. Are the people you're with repeatedly attempting to excuse themselves and go elsewhere?

5. Has it been more than one day since your last shower?

6. Look at your current attire (with the exception of costumes). Do you feel you would get in trouble if you were wearing your current attire at school or in a shopping mall?

7. Have you spent more than a few minutes having a conversation with someone who is rarely responding and/or responding in short, passionless replies?

8. Are you sharing more intimate details of your life, relationship(s), job or fantasies with someone who does not know your real first and last name?

9. Does the person you're talking to appear to be frightened or disconcerted by your presence?

10. Have more than a few people told you that you were creepy or socially uncomfortable?

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes", then it's possible that you are socially uncomfortable for some people to be around. If the answer to more than three of these questions is "yes", then you are certainly socially uncomfortable to be around. And if you answered "yes" to all of these questions, then God just spent a lot less time on you.

Now comes the important part -- what to do if you *have* answered "yes" to any of these questions. The easiest solution is in the question(s) to which you answered yes. Simply stop doing it. Remember, if you have goofed when it comes to a social rule, then you've just goofed. It's very unlikely that anyone will hate you for it. However, unless you stop yourself, you may wind up with a person or group of people who will never want to be around you again. If you recognize that you are behaving in one of the ways listed above, simply say goodbye and leave the area -- or, if it applies, reconsider your hygiene. If you're interested in meeting or talking to someone, perhaps it might be best to do it later. And it definitely wouldn't hurt to read up on social etiquette, specifically how to meet someone or have a meaningful conversation.

In the end, if you suspect you are a creepy furry and you can follow these guidelines, your social interactions with others will likely be much less uncomfortable for you and for them. And ultimately, you may have a much better chance at meeting and talking to people you're interested in.

Group Guilt Line

In my writings, rantings and general scriptus vomitus, people have accused me of making blanket statements against people. And honestly, they're correct. I am not ashamed of this. I do, on occasion, blame the innocent for harm done by those in their group. You may be asking yourself what kind of person would hold an entire group of people responsible for actions that only some of them have committed. The answer is WE do... all of us.

I've always found it a bit comical how many people will jump out of the woodwork to defend a hundreds-of-millions-of-members group like Christians from little ol' me, and I've been doing some thinking about it because it simply doesn't make a lot of sense.

What I find the most fascinating about this psychological knee-jerk is that it demonstrates that we would ultimately rather absolve the innocent than blame the guilty.

To paraphrase a conversation I once had:
"Catholic priests are horrible! More of them turn up having molested children every day!"

Response:
"It's unfair to say that. Not ALL Catholic priests do that!"

How quickly we lean toward forgiveness of a group by demonstrating what it's NOT doing than condemning them for what they ARE doing. But wait a minute here... If the whole group isn't collectively guilty because some priests are not molesting children, then why isn't also the whole group collectively guilty because some of them are? If it's wrong to proclaim a whole group guilty for something being done by part of the group, isn't it just as wrong to proclaim them innocent for the same reason? It's as if the fact that 10 priests raping children is acceptable as long as 20 of them weren't! And this is a logical atrocity that I hear spewed over and over, by people from all walks of life.

If one person condemns ALL of the police force for shooting unarmed people, another person will absolve ALL of the police force for spending a quiet night with doughnuts and somehow walk away, happy with himself that he corrected such a fallible blanket statement.



Where exactly is the line drawn? If 2 out of a million people abstain from stabbing penguins, are they still all innocent because "Not ALL of them stab penguins!" How much of a group must be guilty before the whole group is? Who sets this number and what basis do they use? The fact is we ALL set this line for ourselves based on who we are and what we believe. And in spite of what you, yes YOU, might think, no one's "group guilt line" is any more or less correct than your own.



And, unsurprisingly, this defense of the innocent only applies to statements we don't already agree with.

Remember when I said we all hold groups responsible for the actions of a few? By percentage, only a small number of Nazis ever killed any Jews. As as distasteful as the topic is, it's just a fact. The majority of the Nazi war force held desk jobs, repaired equipment, drove supply vehicles... fairly menial tasks. They certainly weren't all running through the street blowing away members of a specific religion. Yet where are all the people to jump up and defend the Nazis when I proclaim that the Nazis were collectively an evil group?

In a society where we consider someone who downloads kiddie porn just as guilty as the person who took the pictures, how can we disassociate the blame between a Christian who is protesting against gay rights and the very pastor who encouraged it simply because he's not also standing on the street with a sign? It simply makes no sense.

My only hint of an answer to this lies in a certain selfishness. Very few of us knows or cares about any Nazis or child molesters. On the other hand, quite a few of us have friends or family who are Catholic, police officers or Christians. Our "group guilt lines" are in direct connection with our desire to fool ourselves into thinking we couldn't possibly care for a complete scum bag or two. If the group in question isn't present or able to defend themselves, we judge them all. If, on the other hand, we know a member or two of the group and have judged them to be good people, then it's wrong to judge the whole group, no matter what they do.

But keep this in mind. The very moment we make the choice to separate who is guilty and who is not, we are doing the same thing as those who have judged us. 70 years ago, would it really have been less ignorant to have a moral separation between the "good" and "bad" black people than to judge them all bad?

Either we're all guilty or we're not, folks. And the fact is, we're all guilty. And while I find it inspiring that human beings tend to favor innocence to guilt, I have been judged far too often to think I'm qualified to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus, my personal "group guilt line" is set very low. If you disagree with it, that's fine. But you might want to take a look at where you've set yours and ask if it's any more correct.

Molesting the molesters.

In Los Angeles yesterday, an old person yet again accused another old person of molestation sometime around 100 years ago when they were a child. The alleged molester, Kip Arnold, was a school teacher and by all reports from his neighbors, a very kind, quiet and trustworthy person. When police converged on Mr. Arnold to arrest him, he lead them on a high speed chase through the Los Angeles area, ending with him flying off an embankment and crashing into a tree. He's now in the hospital where he's being healed so they can prop him up in front of whatever weeping, cross burning mob is waiting to throw him in prison for the rest of his life. Other victims are already beginning to step forward to take their pound of flesh and claim that they too were molested by Mr. Arnold when they were children and it is just now, after 30-some years, that this suddenly makes them sad.

In case you couldn't detect it, I've become a bit dubious about the entire cultural process of atonement, absolution and social justice for sexual predators. I don't wish to defend them or their crimes, but in a country that chants, "an eye for an eye", I'm seeing something closer to a couple of legs, an arm, a few fingers, half a liver, both testicles and an eye for an eye when it comes to child molesters.

I began to get a bit suspicious of the validity of this "justice" a short time ago when I was watching witnesses in the trial of Jerry Sandusky testify about his actions again them. Grown men turned into blubbering, sobbing children as they detailed the when's, what's and where's of their individual sexual assaults. And though I understand that Sandusky is certainly not a good person and being sexually molested isn't exactly a fond memory, I found myself questioning if the events these people went through as children were so traumatic as to call for all the hand-wringing, crippling sorrow of an overly dramatic off-Hollywood film.

What is sexual molestation? The physical nature of it is obvious, but what what does it represent emotionally to the victim? A loss of control. Helplessness. Perhaps some pain. Being forced to do something you don't want to. Shame and embarrassment. These are all unpleasant things. But they're also unpleasant things that most people experience nearly every day from their bosses or co-workers at their jobs or from teachers and other students at school.

When I was in school, being whacked with a paddle was still a common punishment for kids who broke the rules. Sometimes, teachers became overzealous with this form of punishment. On one occasion, I was taken into the hallway and smacked with a wooden paddle in front of other children for nothing more than failing to cut a shape out of a piece of construction paper properly during an art project. I didn't do anything to deserve it. I was a victim. I definitely felt a loss of control, shame, embarrassment and helplessness. There was definitely pain and I absolutely didn't want to do it. However, to this day, the woman is still a teacher at the same school and has yet to be dragged away by the enraged masses to rot in a jail cell for her brutal defilement of innocence. And honestly, I wouldn't want that. Because after about a week, I got over it.

Could it be that our level of suffering over being harmed is adjustable and programmed by society? Humiliation in one form affects us less while in another form demands an entire life in retribution. It doesn't take a genius to see that the modern American cannot function without the convenience of being able to define him/herself as a victim. We cannot accept failure or weakness in ourselves, so we push it onto another person, business, disease, large corporation or the government. And amongst our coveted victimizations, being sexually molested as a child is the Crown Jewel -- the ultimate end-all, be-all get out of jail free card. If I'm an insufferable, alcoholic bastard, don't blame me... I was molested. If I steal or take drugs -- if I'm violent or even kill someone, it's not entirely my fault. I was molested. And we -- as nasty, broken, ill-mannered and ultimately inhuman as we can be -- can sleep soundly at night knowing that the person to blame for all our faults is sitting in a jail cell somewhere.

And in that sense, these child molesters are, in fact, the saviors of their own victims. They are their personal messiahs. The molested have been washed blemishless of all sins by their molesters. Because, no matter the situation, it's always harder to confront your demons and move on than blaming someone else for all your problems.

Open letter to Jews.

Dear Jewish People,

I shall lay my honest position on the line, plain and simple. I do not like or dislike you as a people because of who you are. I am neutral. Your heritage does not impress nor disappoint me. I simply do not care. Whether or not a person is Jewish means nothing to me. I have no vested interest in persecuting nor praising you for your lifestyle alone. Having said this, I wish to make this statement to you:

You are not a "race". You are a religious institution. People who hate you are not "racist", and to claim such only solidifies the stereotype that you will make the biggest possible fuss out of the smallest possible thing. Do not be that stereotype.

I am utterly sick to my stomach of being accused of being a "racist" every time I disagree, on any issue, with a person who happens to be Jewish. It is a convenient way to convince yourself that my opinion should be disregarded instead of considered just because you don't happen to like it. It's rude, it's disrespectful and it's indicative of a person who feels their own stance is weak.

I do not care that "your people" have been enslaved for the last 3000 years. How often have YOU been a slave? If the answer is "never", you have no right to bitch... especially at someone who has never OWNED a slave in their life. The fact, if you care to research it, is that everyone... and I mean *everyone* has at some point, stemmed from people who have both been slaves and slave owners. There is no exception to this.

If there is a reason I might find you ridiculous, it is simply and ONLY because you believe in invisible, magic people who grant wishes, watch you and protect you if you mutter incantations to them on a regular basis. This has nothing to do with color, sex, orientation or class. It is because you have chosen to completely exercise your right as human beings, along with many others, to be complete idiots.

That is all.

Florgnats

So, imagine you are an alien visiting Earth. Better yet, imagine you are yourself visiting another alien planet. You know nothing about the life on this planet except that they appear to be intelligent and have a complex social structure. For now, we'll call them the Florgnats.

The Florgnats are odd looking creatures, resembling a cross between a large octopus and a tropical bird. They each have brightly colored feathers, three large eyes and tentacle-like appendages which they use to move about through the sand and perform tasks under their perpetually dusky, purple sky. There is other life on this planet too, however it's not at all like the Florgnats. The others seem more environmental and driven by instinct rather than morality or goals, something like Earth animals. There's even one particular creature that reminds you of a giant millipede that some of the Florgnats like to keep as pets.


As you study them, you observe that not only are the Florgnats intelligent and social, but also seem to have a sense of their own mortality and even a duty to protect each other from harm. Eventually, you begin to pick up some of the words and grammar in their hissing-sounding language -- enough to understand simple phrases and ask basic questions. And one of the first things you learn is that not all Florgnat are created equal. Some Florgnats have six tentacles, while others have seven. Some of them have feathers that are decidedly a deep purple color, while others tend to hue toward a lighter blue. And rarely are each of their three eyes the same color. While this might not seem like much of a difference to you, to the Florgnats these differences are not only obvious, but part of their complex social structure.

You begin to notice that the bluish-feathered Florgnats are reacted to slightly different than the purple-feathered ones. The six-tentacled, purple Florgnats are almost always the ones who are in charge of building their simple, igloo-like houses, while the seven-tentacled purple Florgnats seem to be expected to wander off over the sand dunes and bring back a certain leafy shrub which will later be eaten. You note that these behaviors don't seem to be rules or laws, but social cues. You once observed a six-tentacled, purple Florgnat wandering off to gather Poodoocucucu (the Florgnats' favorite plant) instead of building a house. No one stopped it from doing this, but all the other Florgnats avoided the mismatched individual and seemed to harass and make fun of it.

But this is just the beginning of the fascinating things you witness! If a purple Florgnat insults any other Florgnat, they will usually fight! However, if a blue Florgnat does the same thing, it tends to be forgiven. Furthermore, the seven-tentacled blue Florgnats seem to keep more D'ak-bok around -- those millipede things -- while the six-tentacled blue Florgnat don't seem to be expected to do much at all, unless their eyes are colored red, white and yellow from left to right, in which case they will usually crawl on top of the highest Florgnat structure they can find and sit there in a trance-like state, sometimes for weeks, until another Florgnat hands them a balloon-like vehicle which they grab onto and float up into the cloudy atmosphere, repeating what sounds like "Nuu-Waaaaaaaa!", until they float out of sight, never to be seen again.

You conclude that the Florgnat certainly do have very complex social and cultural development. Like on Earth, no Florgnat is perfect. They sometimes make mistakes. Some of them break rules and are punished. Some of them get sick and are taken away to a particular place where other Florgnats try to make them healthy again.

But by far, one of the most puzzling things you observe is a particular inconsistency in Florgnat society. Once in a while, you see a Florgnat try to cause harm, not to another Florgnat, but to itself! When this happens, other Florgnat actually step in to prevent the self-injury and then take it to a particular place, not unlike others who become sick from a disease. Only this place appears to be for healing confusion.

If a Florgnat tries to stab one of its own eyes out or have one of its tentacles chewed off by the vicious Oooboos in the cavern of Ul, other Florgnat will save it and direct it to this special place of healing. Even if a six-tentacled purple Florgnat claims to be a seven-tentacled blue Florgnat, it will be sent for a visit to this place. Sometimes you see the confused Florgnat wander out of this place later appearing to have regained its bearings. Other times, you never see them come out again at all. All in all, it seems like a good thing the Florgnat are trying to do.

One day, you witness a Florgnat dangling one of its tentacles over the edge of B'am^rhiaf$dfa chasm where the snapping jaws of the Parana-like "Glubtu" will certainly chomp it right off. Looking around, you see that no other Florgnat are stopping this one from hurting itself! And having developed a fondness for these creatures, you decide to help. You move in to prevent the Florgnat from having its tentacle chewed off and, as you'd observed others do before, you begin to direct it to the healing place. However, this time, you're in for a surprise!

Before you know it, you are surrounded by Florgnat of all different kinds, and they're angry! You hear them, in their language, hissing words at you like, "Insensitive!" "Bigot!" "Evil!" One of them even calls your mother a S'pung-bat! In your best Florgnatese, you ask them why. Why are the other Florgnat who try to hurt themselves taken to a hospital or place of healing, but this one was left to injure itself?

Well, your Florgnatese is rather spotty. All you could manage to pick up was that while Florgnat who hurt themselves or have delusions that they are a different creature belong in a hospital, the best way to help a Florgnat who is trying to sever its seventh tentacle because it believes it is a six-tentacled blue Florgnat is to let them do it. Though, you may have gotten a few of the details wrong between all the Florgnat cursing and accusations of racism.

In short, the Florgnat pretty much shout you back to your rocket ship where you take off and fly back to Earth, never to return. And now that we're back on Earth, and with this story in mind, I'd like to ask a question... But it may not be the one you think.

Earth has living on it human beings who believe they are Napoleon, aliens from other planets, different races than they actually are and even animals. It also has people who have a brain that screams at them night and day to hack off their legs, arms, fingers or ears. What does society think of these people? What would our society think of a person who believed he was possessed by a fish and proceeded to try and cut his own legs off so his body would more closely resemble his "real" form? Obviously, this person would be sent away to be given proper treatment and, with any hope, cured from this harmful and delusional state.

Why then, when a man believes he is corporeally possessed by a woman and has a continual permeating drive to sever his own penis off, is this person denied proper care for this condition? Why is the "proper treatment" for this particular variation of delusion considered to be allowing the person to go ahead and injure themselves, where ANY other form of similar mental/emotional illness is tended to with the goal of actually helping the person to realize the reality of their identity and to prevent them from hurting themselves?

Why, in fact, is every other delusion-driven self-harmful mental state considered a "problem" where as the latter mentioned not only isn't considered a problem or delusional at all, but even supported and thought of as perfectly healthy?

There are a lot of questions here. But the one I truly wish to ask is this: Why am I, the person who asks this honest and obvious question, nearly always demonized and labeled a bigot for the simple act of asking it?

I think I'll take the next rocket ship to the Florgnats.

No Excuse?

For my first offering here, I would like to briefly tackle an age old adage set forth by American government and law enforcement that is, to this day, used to enable our judicial system's ability to choose who is a criminal and who is not. This is the ever present, sanctimonious voice that drones, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," from beneath black sith lord robes.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Or, more directly, not knowing what the laws are is not an excuse for breaking them. This is one of the rules on the standards of conduct under which we, as American citizens, live on a daily basis. If you step on one insect in a rare phylum of spotted-neck douche beetle, it does not legally matter that you had no idea it was a protected species, harm to which is punishable by fines, gulag and death, followed by community service. It was your fault for being unaware of the law.

The laws in America have been created for two reasons; one, to keep order and two, to make sure that everyone at all times is guilty of breaking them. The government doesn't like trouble makers -- especially the ones who manage to make trouble without breaking any laws. The solution... make so many laws that it's impossible NOT to break some of them. And the result is a government that can, at any time, point to anyone they wish and have a legal reason to lock them up. Speaking out against the government is not a crime -- but if you become too influential, jaywalking, sitting on a park bench after dark and that lemonade stand you ran without a business license when you were 12 suddenly become inexcusable breaches of American patriotism. Does it matter whether or not you knew you were breaking these laws? Of course not. Because if it did, the government would have no legal means to haul you away and shut you up.

So, in a country where there are so many laws that everyone breaks at least one of them while carrying on their normal routine every day, how can it be possible to know them all? The answer is, it can't. And that's the way the government wants it. If you cannot know every law and that vice in itself is legitimate cause for legal incarceration, then as a fact, every American is a criminal. Even the judges and lawyers themselves.

Within a single court case, the representing attorneys and the judge must pile through libraries of tomes on American law in order to discover what laws have been broken and examine the history of retribution for such infractions. These are people who have completed, on average, eight years of law school, have been tested and licensed as legal experts and have then had untold years of experience beyond -- and even these people must reference legal volumes to understand the law for the particular circumstances of each court case. Even these people do not know every law.

Then why are we, as American citizens expected, under threat of imprisonment, to know what those who uphold the law can't? How are we supposed to know the laws when even those who will send us to jail for our "ignorance" don't? If licensed legal experts must do research on a law or set of laws for each person who winds up sitting in front of the jaws of American justice, then what would an ordinary person with no legal training be required to do to plan their whole day ahead?

In short, how can ignorance of the law be no excuse when it's not even possible for trained, government recognized experts to know every law? What does it say about America in general when there is no excuse for a condition that is not avoidable?

Should ignorance of the law be an excuse? Probably not. But since there is no alternative but to be ignorant of the majority of them, it damn well should be some excuse. And if I or anyone in this country is to be held legally accountable for their ignorance in matters of law, then I will expect my government funded legal degree from Harvard soon.

First Blog.

Hello world. I shall be blogging here soon. You may think my ideas are amazing or you may think they're offensive. But by the greasy nipples of Zeus, you WILL think!