The Folly of Prohibition: why banning guns won't work

When did banning something make it go away?

In the wake of yet another horrific mass shooting…the 27th in America in the past 10 years…people again are trotting out the knee-jerk “ban guns” demand. And while it may sound good at first blush, a little critical examination will reveal that legal prohibitions against things that members of the public really want and are willing to break the law to obtain benefits nobody in the society except the criminals.

In 2010 the US government spent more than $15 billion…that’s $500 per second…on the War on Drugs. And that is just the tax dollars spent on a drug policy that is and has been an unmitigated failure…except for those who have exploited and grown rich and powerful in the black market America’s prohibition of drugs has created.

The 18th Amendment to the Constitution took effect in January of 1920 and for the next 13 years, thanks to another black market created by the US government, liquor continued to flow throughout America due to the likes of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. The government hemorrhaged money into enforcing Prohibition and went without substantial potential tax revenues, since the production, transport and sale of alcohol was, officially, not happening. But it was happening and it spawned and supported America’s first major foray into organized crime, an organization that stayed with us even after the Amendment was repealed in 1933: the Mafia. And the cost, both in dollars and in lives, has been vast and the legacy of Prohibition continues to this day, nearly a century later.

Prohibition of abortion did not stop abortion, it merely drove it underground. From conscientious doctors who wanted to provide desperate women with a medically safe alternative to an unwanted pregnancy to back-alley butchers who killed women with perforated uteruses and septicaemia to distressed women who attempted to abort themselves with coat hangers, knitting needles, and noxious potions, abortions continued despite laws prohibiting them and prescribing draconian punishment for doctors caught providing them. It didn’t go away, it simply provided yet another black market opportunity for illegally-generated wealth while it dealt death and disaster to those forced to seek abortion outside the clean, sterile, safe walls of a hospital or bona fide clinic.

With this for a history to reference, who in their right mind can possibly believe that banning guns will not result in a new black market and increased opportunity for a new organized criminal element to rise to wealth and power—illicit gun dealers? Why target the tool when the real problem is the people using the tool? If we want to spend tax money on making and enforcing a law designed to reduce or eliminate these kinds of horrific killings, why not invest that money into something more likely to have a positive result, like government-funded mental health programs and mental health laws that improve the quality of life not only for the mentally ill, but for those around them as well.

We live in a society that, in the span of just a couple of generations, has gone from valuing and admiring courtesy and “good guys” to a culture that admires the rude, the snide, the cruel, the sarcastic. It is no longer enough to win, you now have to rub the other guy’s face in the dirt and spit on him. Gone are the days when the losers in a contest were consoled, their successes during the course of the contest praised, and encouragement for the next time given. Instead, they are humiliated, castigated, shamed, and hauled over the coals, as if rebuking them further provides some kind of inspiration to do better next time. We embrace and admire and make wealthy celebrities of people whose stock-in-trade is cutting, degrading, mortification of people who have done nothing more than fail to live up to an expectation. Gordon Ramsey, Simon Cowell, Anne Robinson of TV’s Weakest Link: all epitomize the sadistic set down trend that passes for humour nowadays, entertainment wrought at the expense of the feelings of those whom they verbally abuse. And, being the Great Apes that we are, we humans imitate and try to top our celebrity mentors and we turn our friends, families, classmates, co-workers, neighbours and even complete strangers into the butts of our cruelly conceived and thoughtlessly delivered attempts at humour.

Brutality has not always been considered acceptable entertainment. Historically speaking, American entertainment has had guidelines, regulations, and controls in the past. The Hayes office controlled the content of movies for decades, which is why old movies showed married couples sleeping in separate beds and you didn’t see graphic sex or violence in the theatre. That said, French and Italian cinema produced some pretty steamy pictures at about the same time, and you didn’t see their societies implode as a result. I remember my first Sam Peckinpah film and how horrible the graphic killings were. It does desensitize a person to see this kind of thing, and when it becomes everyday fare both in films and video games, it has to desensitize a person to the carnage: imagine the impact on someone already disaffected and feeling disenfranchised?

In any given contest there is only one winner. Everybody else are either fans or losers…and if you aren’t the winner, the way you avoid being identified as one of the losers is to throw your lot in with the winner—become a fan, a sycophant, a toady. And so the winners of the world, be they jocks or bankers, celebs or mean girls of any age, are joined by their fans in creating the us vs. them paradigm in which “them” are grievously insulted, assaulted, disrespected, humiliated, diminished and generally shat upon, all in the name of entertainment and humour.

And what are these “losers” supposed to do with their feelings of outrage and hurt? Suck it up? Shrug it off? Not have any feelings at all? One of the things people do when they are deeply and repeatedly wounded is they stop feeling. They become emotionally numb, at least on the surface, so that they don’t feel the pain so sharply. One of the problems with that, however, is that this causes a loss of empathy and compassion because if they can’t access their feelings of pain for themselves, those feeling for others are pretty inaccessible as well. They aren’t really numb, though…they just repress the pain and it goes underground where it festers and grows. And if the targeted people are already struggling with issues of low self-worth, if they’ve been bullied before, if they aren’t pretty or popular or have some kind of physical anomaly or are socially awkward…how do they assimilate the emotional assaults and carry on with equanimity? With little or nothing available to the average person in the way of mental health care, a lot of them don’t. Some of them become withdrawn and anti-social, some of them become willing to do anything to be liked, some of them engage in self-harm, some join gangs where they feel accepted, some commit suicide. And some of them turn their rage outwards and they kill.

Normal, mentally healthy people do not commit mass murders. And quite a few of the shooters in recent tragedies had mental health problems that could have been treated, or at least managed via medication or even hospitalization if it had been available to them. What few people seem to have noticed is that this mass murder as a means of payback or gaining recognition is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Very, very few comparable acts have been committed outside the US…and there has to be something to that. What is it about contemporary American culture that spawns this kind of heinous act?

One of our biggest failings, I think, is the abandonment of the mentally ill. Jared Loughner, had he been born a couple of generations earlier, would have been in a state hospital not for committing a crime but because he was mentally unstable and dangerous to himself and others. Today, state mental hospitals are almost exclusively for the criminally insane—after their mental illness has led them to commit crimes. In 1967 California passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act which, unfortunately, has only been enforced as far as relieving the state of the burden of care of the mentally ill; the provisions which would cost the state money have been assiduously ignored. Other states followed suit with similar limitations and basically put the mentally ill out on the street and took away the power of family members to do what is best for those people, and the state washed its hands of responsibility. Given that a significant portion of Americans do not have any medical insurance and those who do have it ordinarily have very little mental health coverage (certainly not enough to pay for extended confinement for a mentally ill family member), there appeared not a crack but a chasm in mental health care: with the exception of the independently wealthy, care for the seriously mentally disturbed was out of the financial reach of most Americans and the state washed its hands of any responsibility.

This “not my brother’s keeper” mentality has added to this problem by making people unwilling to have tax money spent to house and treat such individuals. Because the mentally ill are not gushing blood or spreading communicable disease like TB, the average American sees no reason why the mentally ill can’t just “suck it up” and behave like the rest of us. Ignorance of mental illness is rife—I remember being frustratingly unable to pry open the minds of people in the Andrea Yates case and get them to grasp what psychosis meant and why she could not be blamed. People kept saying “she must be crazy to do such a thing” without truly grasping exactly what crazy meant in the context of her situation.

Part of this “not my brother’s keeper” mentality includes a slavish but uncomprehending dedication to both competitiveness and capitalism. Socialism is beginning to take on the spectre that Communism had back in the days of the Red Scare and any program intended to help the unfortunate using tax monies is branded “Socialism” and backed away from with abhorrence. But the truth is, those countries that foster cooperation and respect and care for the less fortunate, like the Scandinavian countries, have the lowest crime rates, the highest education rates, the greatest “life satisfaction” scores. And these countries are heavily Socialist--they invest tax monies in their people through high-quality education, health (including mental health) care, and a societal attitude that does not foster a heavily competitive, win-at-any-cost kind of society. Norway had a single spree killing in 2011—America had four. In the decade from 2003-2012, inclusive, the whole of Scandinavia had just the one massacre, America had 27...five of which occurred in California, the most populated state in the Union, and six of which occurred in Wisconsin! In fact, the most recent massacre in Scandinavia, prior to Breivik’s attack, appears to have occurred in the 15th or16 century!

Scandinavians value the idea of not only a free and equal society, but one in which the more fortunate help the less fortunate through government social problems. You seldom see tax refugee Swedes or Danes, and the idea that allowing poor people to freeze to death or starve, or that their children should die due to lack of appropriate medical care, doesn’t seem to have much traction. And yet, despite the high tax rate and socialist government, many people make money and live affluent lifestyles...Sweden alone boasts at least nine billionaires (in USD), of which only two have left to escape taxes.

The bottom line here is that this is a complex problem that will not respond to simplistic solutions. Mentally healthy people do not commit these kinds of atrocities, mentally unbalanced people do, so it would seem the very first line of address should be to tighten up the mental health laws. Gun laws? I dunno—Texas, a state rife with NRA-types only accounted for one massacre in the past decade, and that was on a military base where gun control laws would not apply. And yet Wisconsin, a state with a low population and even lower profile, had more massacres in the last decade than any other. What is going on in Texas that has kept a well-armed civilian populace massacre-free over the last decade that is not going on in Wisconsin? Or, conversely, what is going on in Wisconsin that so many citizens feel the need to spray death upon their unsuspecting neighbours that is not going on in Texas?

More than anything, we need to think...really, truly think...about this situation and not take action simply because it is an action. Ill-conceived laws hastily passed end up getting tossed out by the courts, leaving us right back at the starting point, but with precious time having been wasted. It’s not enough to control guns—or even ban them. The disturbed and truly determined will find other ways... there are numerous other ways of committing mass carnage than firearms including running a motor vehicle into a crowd or busy establishment or even bombs...any fool can make a bomb, instructions and ingredients are readily available. Most of all, however, we as a people have to start changing our attitudes, remember we are our brother’s keepers, and that compassion and empathy get us all further in the long run than selfishness and scorn.

Dumb ways casinos lose money

I’ve never worked in the gaming industry, so I know nothing about the operational aspects of running a casino but…and I am just speculating here…I have always been under the impression that casinos are primarily in the business of making money. I’ve been to Las Vegas, Reno, Carson City, and Lake Tahoe, I’ve been to Indian casinos, and I am a card-carrying member of four casinos here in South Africa and, until recently, nothing I have seen in any of these places has given me reason to question my assumption about their raison d’être.

Hubby and I used to go to Grand West Casino in Cape Town on occasion and, when visiting his family in Durban, stop in at Sun Coast once or twice. Hubby likes to play black jack (and is pretty good at it) while I play the slots, the lower the denomination the better. Sun Coast is a little old fashioned in that you use real money…coins…in their slot machines, and Grand West, the most profitable casino in South Africa, uses the epitome of modern technology, a “smart card,” in theirs. To use these cards, which are the size and shape of a credit card, you simply slide them into the machine’s card slot, slip any denomination of rand note into the money slot, and play: the machine credits the money to your card and then debits each bet (and credits each win) as you play. When you are done with the machine, push a button (usually labelled something like “cash out”) and the machine ejects your card from the slot. Couldn’t be easier, could it?

It can, however, be decidedly more difficult and at least three Johannesburg casinos have come up with diabolically clever ways to cheat their own bottom lines while motivating you to keep your cash in your wallet rather than donating it to them via their little money-eating machines. Emperor’s Palace, a plush paean to the almighty buck, is located entirely too conveniently to the airport. All SA casinos I have seen have grand, glitzy hotels attached, and this one is no exception. Between the locals and the visitors to Joburg who have taken shelter in hotels near the airport, the place was jam packed the night we visited.

I don’t like it when the casinos are too crowded. Not only do they not seem to have sufficient air conditioning to keep the gambling floor comfortable, there are few machines available to play. Um…I should amend that to “there are few functioning machines available to play.” We seldom spend more than a couple of hours in a casino, but this night I think we spent less than 45 minutes…if I could find an unoccupied machine, it would not accept my card. “Invalid card” the readout would say, and spit the thing back out at me. I went to the cashier and she exchanged it for a new card but the problem continued. I found one machine that accepted the card but couldn’t get others to work. I finally called an attendant over who demonstrated to me that I was inserting the card incorrectly…I watched closely as he inserted the card in what appeared to be exactly the same manner I had done, only to see it work for him. Unfortunately, the subtlety of his minor manipulation of card insertion was lost on me and the next machines I tried declared the card invalid and rudely spit it back at me. Frustrated, I hunted down Hubby at a black jack table and suggested I was ready to go. Bless his little heart, we left. Foolish, foolish Emperor’s Palace: by allowing the machine’s card readers to become worn to the degree that it took a special trick to get the card to function, they cost themselves a chunk of money on each machine that would not greedily gobble a player’s card and help itself to their money.

Monte Casino, which is near my house, has the same problem with cards plus a little twist…when you decide to cash out of a machine, it doesn’t program the card with the amount you have left, it prints out a ticket that it spits out at you. These tickets are about 2.5 inches wide by about 4 or 5 inches long, each one custom printed, and you get one each time you leave a machine. Imagine how many trees die each day just to supply Monte Casino with the paper for these tickets for their hundreds of slot machines? These tickets are as good as cash, so if you lose one, the guy who finds it can pop it into another slot machine or he can take it to a cashier and get folding money for it. And if you have played a number of machines, you can end up walking around with a fist full of these things which you must not fold, spindle or mutilate or the next slot machine you try to insert them into will choke and you’ll have to call a non-existent attendant (at Sun Coast I hit a serious jackpot and cleaned out the machine, and it still owed me hundreds of rand…to get an attendant to come to the machine and pay me out, I eventually had to call my husband on his cell phone and he had to leave his black jack game and physically hunt down an attendant to service the machine and bring me the rest of my money!). So cumbersome and inconvenient are the tickets that, when Hubby asked me recently if I’d like to go to “the casino” I asked “which one?” and when he said Monte Casino, I declined.

But nothing, so far, beats Gold Reef City for practices guaranteed to send customers fleeing from the machines and donating their money to their competitors. I’ve been there twice…most recently today…and the hoops you have to jump through to use the majority of their machines are just mind-boggling. Now, this is OK for regulars…they know all the little quirks and foibles, the tricks and the special things you have to do to get a machine to work, but for newcomers, the necessity of doing more than putting in your card and some money in order to get the machine to function can be very off-putting. In fact, a woman sat down at a machine next to me this very day, put her card in the slot and quickly ejected her card and left when the money slot failed to function. She tried a couple of other machines, got the same result, then put her card in her handbag and walked away. I am guessing that was the end of her attempts at gambling for the day, since someone looking for a new machine to play generally keeps their card in hand.

What she apparently didn’t know is that Gold Reef City’s machines require the user to program them. Yup…you gotta program the machine before you can play it…and there are no instructions on the machine to tell you A) this is necessary, or B) how to do it. It goes like this: First you insert your card and pay attention to the readout which will tell you how much money is on the card. Next, you push “0” on the keypad, then input the amount of money you want “downloaded” to the machine. Then you push the √ button on the keypad and, if you are lucky, the machine will now “unlock” itself and allow you to play. Now, if you only had a paltry sum on your card and need to add money, you may put a note in the money slot at this time…assuming the money slot is functioning which, in many machines, it is not. If it isn’t, you must find a functioning machine, load money onto your card on that machine, eject the card, return to the machine you want to play (or have been playing), put your card back in, do the download dance again, and resume play.

Now, this is stupid for two reasons…First of all, the more effort you make people exert to get a machine to work, the more likely they are to become frustrated and/or impatient and walk away with their money still in their pockets. If you want people to give you their money without qualm, you have to make it both fun and easy, something Gold Reef City seems not to have grasped. Second, if the casino wants the best chance at stripping the customers for as much of their disposable cash as possible, they should not be giving the mark…er, customer…a chance to withhold some of his winnings from the next machine. At Grand West, if you pull off a big win on a machine, the whole shebang is credited to your card and, when you move on to the next machine, that whole wad of winnings is available for you to lose. Playing Gold Reef City’s way, not only does the player have to jump through a series of hoops just to get the machine to work, the player is able to download only a portion of the amount credited to the card…thereby saving himself money by not being tempted to play everything he's got. Grand West is not the most profitable casino in South Africa for nothing!

There are still a couple of casinos we haven’t tried up here and I am now curious to discover how they have conspired to shoot themselves in the economic foot. Grand West, in Cape Town, so far seems to be the only casino around that is geared towards making it as easy as possible for the patrons to leave behind as much money as they can…just like any self-respecting gaming house should!

Post Script: Well, we tried a new casino this evening and I discovered yet another way for a casino to lose money through discouraging its patrons. Grand West is part of a group of casinos and your casino card is good in all of the casinos of that group; naturally we assumed that would be the same for other groups of casinos. We have Gold Reef City cards and tonight we went to the Silver Star casino, which is owned by the same company. At the entry gate, our Gold Reef City card got us into the parking lot for free, so it was a great surprise to find that, while the parking system honoured the card, the casino did not! Hubby, a table games player, was able to play for cash but I, a slots player, spent an hour sitting in the lounge nursing a Coke Zero while Hubby played because when I put my card in a slot machine, it indignantly spat the card back at me with the huffy notation “Foreign Casino Card!”

After I stood in a queue for a good 30 minutes, a clerk told me that my Gold Reef City card was not valid inside the casino despite the fact that they have the same “loyalty” program…the two casinos, he told me, are not linked. And, since I had not brought my ID with me, I couldn’t get one of their cards…which meant I could not play…which meant my money stayed in my wallet instead of being swallowed down by a horde of hungry Egyptian queens and pharaohs, fairies, black cats, frog princes and princesses and their ilk. Just as well, I suppose…I have a birthday party for a one-year-old to attend next Saturday and I’ll just spend it on a gift for him.

More Fundie "fun"

Speaking only for myself, I have long thought the phrase “he’s a good Christian” referred to great virtue on the part of the person so described, someone who embodied the values of neighbourly love, compassion, honesty, and peace.

Seems it is time for me to revise my definition of a “good Christian”: see below for more examples from www.fstdt.com of what makes a “good Christian” today.

NB: there are a couple of quotes here from fundie muslims, but the mindset difference between them and fundie christians is so small as to be immaterial: they both ascribe to the notion that their interpretations of their own ancient book should be forced upon the rest of us, and those of us who resist or demur should receive horrible punishments, either here or in the afterlife…or both.

“women should dress modestly; if a woman dresses like a whore and gets raped, she is partly responsible herself” (No, she is not. The entire blame rests with the man who makes the choice to force a sex act on an unwilling woman, no matter how she is dressed. The definition of “modest dress” is subjective…what is modest to me might be provocative to you. But let’s just suppose for a minute that a specific immodestly dressed woman actually is a whore: how does this give a man the right to rape her? Even whores have the right to refuse, you know. )

“Of course the Middle Ages were a time of great prosperity, cultural advances, and general well being, as anybody who has cracked open a history book written in the last century should know, it was Rome that was oppressive to innovation and cultural change.” (You’re being sarcastic, right? The Middle Ages…also known as the “Dark Ages”…were a time of ignorance and superstition, repression and cruelty. Rome, as in the Roman Empire, had long been gone from Europe and the British Isles…but Rome had brought such innovations as running water (via aqueducts), paved roads, bathing and cleanliness, things pretty much unknown during the Dark Ages, or repudiated as works of devil. Rome, during the Dark Ages, referred to the Church of Rome (Catholic Church), which was pretty much all there was for Christianity. The Church of that period rejected as heresy any kind of science that did not conform to the bible. Galileo is perhaps one of the more famous examples of this. Thanks to the Church, the Middle Ages were a time of repression, torture, ignorance and superstition.)

Terri (Schiavo) was only disabled. Are you telling me that disabled people should be exterminated at for our convenience? If so you would have been great friends with Hitler! (She was not “only disabled.” Her brain had died and it consisted mostly of fluid. She was not disabled, she was dead and being kept artificially alive. Where were you when Tirhas Habtegiris was unplugged from her respirator against not only the wishes of her family, but her own expressed wish? That’s right…under the auspices of a law signed by GW Bush himself (and supposedly a christian), a Texas hospital removed a respirator from a conscious and responding patient against her wishes; she died 15 minutes later. Why did they do such a thing? Because her condition was terminal and she had no insurance. Under the Texas “Futile Care Law,” signed into law by Georgieboy himself, if you are too poor to pay for medical care and your condition is not expected to improve, the hospital can pull the plug on you without your permission! http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/14/151930/63
And where were you and your “only disabled” argument when six-month-old Sun Hudson died the same way and for the same reason? http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/healthlawprof_blog/2005/03/lifesupport_sto.html

Folk singer Eric Schwartz says it so well:
So you’ll execute a person and then protect the single cell?
But mercy kill the terminally ill and you’re going straight to Hell?
Well, I don’t know much about the word of God, far be it from me
But I can tell you what it ain’t, that’s hypo-Christianity.)

i dont see why someone would believe in darwin but not belief in the devil, the devil is real and you can see what evil he reaks on this world everyday. the devil makes war and desease and famine and yet you claim darwin made this? how does darwin explain evil and how it comes to this world? He cant because he didnt know because the devil is real and darwin isnt. Satan was proably working through the devil to test the faith of christians well i stand strong behind my faith, its the only real thing darwin is just made up. (This is one of the better examples of confusion and conflation I have found in the quotes on the site. Not only does this person have the language skills of a poorly instructed child, there is no evidence of reasoning skills at all. She seems to have cast Darwin in the role of a deity with the devil as his opposite number. She then seems to think that evolutionists believe that Darwin created war and disease and that he somehow is responsible for explaining evil and its origins. All of this is followed by her assertion that Darwin doesn’t (and perhaps didn’t?) exist! Not only is she confused about evolution, she seems to be a bit muddled about her own dogma: “Satan was proably [sic] working through the devil…” When did Satan and the devil split into two separate entities? The only thing more sad that the pure waste of this person’s intellectual potential is the fact that she will spread this ignorance to others and one day inflict it upon her own helpless, vulnerable children. )

No convert to Christianity has ever left the faith. The church is a group of believers. (Right…if a person converted and later left the faith, he wasn’t a TRUE convert, so he doesn’t count. Is that how it works? Tell me, when you count christians, do you include these apostates, since they once professed faith? Or do you leave them out because they weren’t TRUE christians to begin with? As far as the church being a group of believers, that may seem true on the surface, but if you’ve ever looked over a congregation and counted the obviously bored, the sleeping, and the daydreaming, you’d know that notion is stone dead.)

There is some Biblical thought that heaven is located in Orion and for the scientist there is a pure white light which comes from this region which cannot be diffracted into the rainbow of colours as normal white light. This would be pure white light from God. Heaven is a real physical place. There is no point to a spiritual heaven. Yes heaven is Gods residence. When probation is up and sin is dealt with, heaven will be relocated to this very earth, isn’t that exciting. (I find it very interesting how many of these people who self-identify as christians have no idea what their book says and just make up stuff they like and say it comes from the book. I promise a reward of $100 American dollars to the first person who can find scripture that clearly states (not your own woolly interpretation) that heaven is in Orion or there is a light from Orion that cannot be separated into the light spectrum of colours, or the physical location of Heaven (need address and directions). Leave the info in a comment and I’ll get back to you.)

The sun circles the Earth because it is smaller than the Earth, as is evident in Koranic verses. Have you ever seen how the sun moves? I have seen the sun moving. The sun makes one move every 24 hours. What I say is based on Koranic science. He bases his arguments on the kind of science that I reject categorically -- the modern science that they teach in schools. This science is a heretic innovation that has no confirmation in the Koran. No verse in the Koran indicates that the Earth is round or that it rotates. Anything that has no indication in the Koran is false. (OK, this is islamic fundamentalism, but if you just substitute the word “biblical” for “Koranic,” you’ll see a statement that closely follows some of the stuff posted in my last blog entry. As said before, I make no distinction between christian and islamic fundamentalism: they are merely different colours of the same garment.)

Witch, you have no idea of what Christianity is. That is why atheists are stupid. You can take your Wiccan beliefs and put em where the sun don't shine. Go ahead and smirk. Satan is jumping for joy because he has so many of you deceived. Worship him, that is what he wants most, is your worship and every time you deny God you are bowing to the devil. I hope you are happy in your self delusions. (Aren’t christians supposed to be loving, kind, help-your-neighbour sorts? Didn’t Jesus tell them to love their neighbours as themselves, and to turn the other cheek? Such hostility! Is this what passes for a christian today? Aside from being horribly misinformed (Wiccans and atheists are not even remotely aligned), this poster does not seem to embody any of Christ’s teachings.)

We took prayer out of schools,The ten commandments out of schools and courts,countless people use God's name in vain...and your shocked we have all of these horrible natural diasters in America?(I have to wonder about all the terrible spelling, grammar and sentence construction that permeates the posts from these fundies. Is it a result of home schooling? Or simply an indication of lack of intellect? This person must have missed the “non sequitur” portion of her English composition classes, not to mention homonyms, punctuation and capitalization.

I attended public school in southern California from 1952 to 1964. At no time did we ever say prayers in class (although the Pledge of Allegiance was mandatory). I never saw the 10 commandments in my schools either, and I can’t recall ever seeing them in a courthouse or courtroom. And my mother could curse to make a sailor blush…and throughout all of this, the closest thing to a natural disaster that befell my community in that dozen years was the typical drought conditions of a semi-arid region and the occasional mudslide when the rains finally came and filled up the drought-caused cracks in the earth. This, of course, was before this malignant, creeping fascist fundyism came along…makes ya wonder, doesn’t it?)

Both of your theories are blasphemy. Gods do not destroy life, but care for it and worry for it.
(It’s pretty obvious that this person has never cracked open the Old Testament or read any part of Revelations…and is woefully ignorant of faiths outside christianity, as well. There are plenty of myths that show gods destroying life from Shiva the Destroyer of the Hindu faith to Jehovah and his floods and fires and plagues and wars. How can a person know nothing of his own holy book and still profess to adhere to its dogma? When did christians get the OK to make up stuff and call it christianity?)

THE U.S. IS A CHRISTIAN NATION UNTIL OBAMA GETS IN..SOON WE WON'T BE ABLE TO SAY PRAISE GOD IN PUBLIC
(Uh, no it is not. The framers of the Constitution were not christians, they were Deists, they specifically repudiated the notion of America as a christian nation in the Treaty of Tripoli, and they wrote into the Constitution language designed to keep the church and state separate. And what does Obama have to do with being unable to say “praise god” in public? Oh, I know, you are one of those stubbornly misinformed morons who think, because he has an Arabic name, he must secretly be Muslim, right? I know a black woman in South Africa named Juanita…does that mean she is secretly a Mexican?)

Whites evolved from the more intelligent chimp, Blacks the more primitive ignorant gorilla and Asians from the orangutan. (I find it impossible to believe than anyone can really be this incredibly stupid…not just stupid enough to believe such nonsense, but to be stupid enough to post it on the internet for the world to see. The only thing stupider would be for this person to tattoo “I am a racist” on his forehead and then take a leisurely stroll in Soweto…or Detroit.

Why is it so hard for some people to grasp the idea that man is not descended from apes but that humans and apes have a common ancestor? Lions, tigers, and house cats all have a common ancestor…house cats didn’t descent from lions, they simply share an ancestor as do humans and apes. Why is this so hard for some people to comprehend?)

The theory of evolution is supported almost completely by atheists...and atheists don't have just a great track record for telling the truth. Lying comes natural for them, as they don't believe in The 10 Commandments and see nothing wrong with lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc....because, hey, we're all just dumb machines that operate by random chemicals bouncing into each other. To them, (or many of them) telling lies and killing Christians is a good thing because they hate Christians and wish we were dead. (The last time I looked, the Pope stated that evolution is not incompatible with scripture and that the Catholic Church endorses evolution. No sane person with more than one functioning brain cell is going to say the Pope is an atheist. It is obvious that this poster needs to get the beam out of his own eye before commenting on the mote in the eye of another. The entire statement about atheists is untrue and in violation of the commandment prohibiting bearing false witness. Personal ethics do not require religious prohibitions but emotional maturity: to refrain from bad behaviours out of fear of punishment is the way of the emotionally immature child; to refrain from bad behaviours because of an internalized sense of right and wrong (no punishments threatened or rewards offered) is the way of an adult.)

Hey be glad I'm not Pope, if I were, I'd call for a general crusade and then when we'd won, I'd ban Mormonism, and JWism, burn down their meeting halls and execute their leaders
(More christian love. Seems this person needs to crack open a history book and look to the results of previous crusades. But there’s always some mindless zealot eager to murder, maim, pillage and burn in the name of Jesus, eh?)

There is NO contradiction whatsoever in The Bible anywhere. Judas hung himself through strangulation via disembowelment (1. So many contradictions there are too many to name here. Open the book and read a few pages and you are sure to find some. 2. How does that work? He disembowelled himself and then used his intestines as a rope to hang himself? You should be very careful here that you don’t strangle on a loop of your own intestines, with your head shove so far up there…)

Nowhere (in the bible) does God condone or encourage genocide. Genocide is the killing of a group of people for who they are, God only commanded the killing of people for what they did. Also, totally innocent people do not exist. (So, what did the babies do that was worthy of the death penalty? Sodom, Gomorrah, Jericho, the flood…what were the heinous crimes of the infants and children too young to yet comprehend good and evil? Totally innocent people do exist, even today. We call them babies. But of those of us who do know right from wrong…are you saying that ANY transgression renders us worthy of annihilation from your god? Makes striving to avoid sin rather pointless, don’t you think?)

Atheism is a religion which is trying to pull the wool over our eyes by pretending its doctrines are affirmed by evolution, thus giving us the FALSE illusion that Atheism = Science. (There is so much WRONG in this sentence, it is amazing! First of all, by definition, atheism is not a religion…it means “without god(s).” So, if an atheist is a person who has no god, how is it a religion since a religion requires a god (or at least a doctrine)? Atheism has no doctrine aside from a lack of belief in gods/supernatural beings. The atheist’s repudiation of the concept of god is not affirmed by evolution…they are totally unrelated. Atheism has nothing to do with science, although atheists pretty much believe scientific explanations for things (as opposed to supernatural explanations). (BTW, a “false illusion” could be defined as reality, since if the illusion is false, it isn’t real.) Atheism and science may be comfortable in bed together, but they are far from the same thing.

[We legally recognise gays. Gays can have a gay marriage here in Britain, there are gay nightclubs all over Britain and the British public are tolerant of homosexuals. Why is it that we don't get these earthquakes? Are we special?] "Why is it that we don't get these earthquakes yet?" the element of surprise in the divine punishment is the most amusing (Wishing harm on an entire population is evil. Delighting in the pain and hurts of others is even more evil. So, if your god derives amusement from toppling brick buildings on little babies and feeble old women, your god is evil. And if you derive amusement from such a thing, so are you.)

A closing thought: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." --Blaise Pascal

Birthdays, burlesque, and Belgian circus tents...

So, now I am officially old…

They say that 30 is the new 20, meaning that it is an age women no longer dread to reach for fear their youth is behind them. It used to be that life…and middle age…began at 40, but the end of middle age has always been a bit blurred. At what age do you become a Senior Citizen? Can you be a Senior if you look like you are in your early 40s? Must you accept the label of Senior even when others refuse to believe you’ve even cracked the half century mark, let alone crossed over into that sixth decade or beyond?

This is particularly pertinent to me since earlier this year I had my 60th birthday. That morning Hubby rose at his accustomed time, but before he left for work, he gave me a tiny jeweller’s box and inside was a beautiful, dainty little gold band flush set with three tiny diamonds so that they looked like little twinkling stars…a ring I had been admiring at a jeweller’s more than a month ago. Before he went out the door he admonished me to be ready to go out, no later than seven, and I should dress up. Sneaky man that he is, he refused to tell me where we were going.

I spent a few hours at the salon…it was time for a haircut and a touch-up. Yes, I am a natural blonde (Swedish and German ancestry), just not naturally this blonde…well, at least not since I was a kid. My stylist informed me that there was no grey to report, which I thought was pretty good until I thought of my maternal grandfather…no more than 30% grey when he died at the age of 79. Some of us just get lucky in the gene pool, ya know?

So I came back home, played around on the computer for a while, and then he was home and it was time to get ready to go. Freshly coiffed, painted and polished, I pulled out a gold tone-on-tone, embroidered and sequinned sheer silk overblouse, some black linen pants, an understated black lace-trimmed camisole, and some prettily sequinned and beaded black sandals. In a matter minutes I was dressed and we were out the door.

Well, almost out the door…when I got to the dining room I was faced with a HUGE gift wrapped box on the dining room table. Covered in red and gold paper and tied with red and gold organza ribbon, it took up half the table (which easily seats eight!). I had to get Hubby to take the tape off the box…I was reluctant to risk breaking a fingernail just before we went out to dinner…but once I got a look inside, I was just breathless…a pair of tall crystal and silver lamps I had been eyeing in a local interior décor shop, topped with the most beautiful hand-made shades of cream-coloured silk shantung and trimmed with ribbon embroidery, hand-made ribbon roses, pearls, and crystal fringe, all in the same creamy hue. Very tony, very feminine, very Art Nouveau. I was speechless!

Finally we were out the door and in the car, but he still wouldn’t tell me where we were going. It wasn’t until I actually guessed it that Hubby confirmed we were en route toMadame Zingara’s Theatre of Dreams. For those of you who’ve never heard of this venue, let alone experienced it, please go to this website for a quick promo and some pics: http://www.dining-out.co.za/member_details-MemberID-2004.html .

It is even better in person! The tent is huge and easily seats more than 400 people. And it was sold out…a full house. Unlike your basic circus tent, however, this thing was sumptuous. The ceiling panels were a deep claret velour, the seams dressed with gold bullion fringe, the walls covered with an array of bevel-edged mirrors that reflected light in such a way that it felt like being inside a jewel. Stained glass windows encircled the tent at the junction of the walls and the top, just above the booths, and tables with crisp white linen filled the room.

In the centre of the space was a raised circular dais and above it a hook hanging from the peak of the tent from which dangled a mass of flowers. Throughout the night this hook was lowered, something new attached to the hook, and then put into use. You see, this is Dinner Theatre and all manner of Cirque du Soleil type acts go on during the course of the evening. They range from a quartet of quite excellent Doo-Wop singers to acrobats, belly dancers, and even a guy who juggles a running chainsaw!

The food was excellent. They serve banquet style…all courses are delivered to all of the tables at the same time…and you have limited entrée choices, but it was lovely, just the same. Chilli and chocolate are among the ingredients in Sonoran molé sauces, which I love, so the chilli and Belgian chocolate sauce on the fillet of beef was much better than one might have expected.

The tent, the excellent food, the fun entertainment, however, was a bit spoiled by a wholly inattentive waitress. She basically ignored us (and her other tables nearby) except at serving time and at the end of the evening when she stopped by between the entree and dessert to ask if everything was OK. She didn’t even notice that the busperson who had set the tables up for the final course had skipped our table and the one behind us. So, as everyone else sat sipping their coffee and sampling the tiny crème brulee, Hubby and I (and the poor sots at the table behind us) craned our necks to see if we could find our waitress. When Hubby finally spotted her, caught her eye, and motioned her over, she was rather irritable when he pointed out the lack of table accoutrements.

When the evening came to a close we looked around for our waitress to get our bill. She had disappeared from the floor. After asking two other servers to find a way to get our bill (to which they agreed but did not comply) I finally lost my patience (we had been sitting there with a table full of dirty dishes and no bill for more than half an hour). I stood up, intending to walk up to the front of the tent and find a management person to get our bill for us. As I shouldered my handbag and waited for Hubby to shuck his chair, who should arrive with a chipper smile pasted across her face? Our missing server. Without our bill.

Needless to say, her tip was much, much smaller than it might have otherwise been and her abandonment of her station put rather a damper on the evening, seeing that it was 23h00, we had been up since 6 and had to get up at 6 yet again.

All things considered though, it was a fabulous evening, the food was good and the entertainment first rate. It was a lovely...and quite memorable...way to begin the segue from middle age to senior citizenship!