We expect the name servers to be updated later tomorrow reflecting this, but it's possible some of you will get diverted to the new network before it's live. If that's the case, and you end up in an empty #wota, type /server 66.24.32.37 to get back to the current chat on galt.

Once the name server changes are entirely in place, you will be able to use the following names to connect to IRC:

irc.mindasylum.netotaku.memoryleak.netgalt.mindasylum.net

A decision on the return of IRC Services has not yet been made. We'll keep you informed ...

You are more the desert night than you know.

Cold, intangible shadow dancing on the periphery of the sputtering fire’s glow. Unshakable silence that falls more thunderously and ominously than sound could ever hope to do. When night comes to the desert, man retreats back within his fragile cocoon of artificial light and life-sustaining warmth. In the presence of such elemental immensity, the scope of the unknown world becomes unfathomably vast while our sphere of perception shrinks only to the immediate.

There are mysteries ensconced there, soft echoes resonating in the darkness, which will remain forever indecipherable to me.

The desert has always called to me, and I have always answered. I creep out onto the fringes of encroaching twilight and sing to it in my many voices, waiting for the shadow time…waiting to be reminded of who I am and why I’m here. Filling the void with the essence of nothing, that is what I do. Conduit, catalyst, filter, inconsequentiality.

I am reminded of many realities there. Cold, austere beauty. Life’s delicate matrix of illusion and artifice. Dancing, winding, wind moving across the midnight sand with the certainty of a serpent, silent. Whirling there amid the infinite empty. Alone.

Yet, I am in a new place with you. I’ve not been here before, perhaps. I am unsure of many things. Love? No, not likely. I cannot love that which I do not yet understand, nor that which declares itself to be separate and apart from me as you have so boldly done. I know only that I yearn to know you. I yearn to understand. It is hard to hold my feelings in check. I am no veteran where affairs such as these are concerned. Pretense has never been my forte.

For as long as I can remember, I have reveled in the honesty of my emotion and the truth of the expression that lay therein. With you, I am undone. I am so fitfully undone.

There, alone with my thoughts, a hands breadth from you, craving your touch, craving to feel your warmth beneath my hands, consigned instead to alienation and silence. What do you want? Have I not asked you directly? Is that not enough? Near you, trapped in this place in such a way that, from this point onward, however far I roam, you are near to me also. I want to understand. I want to enfold you in my arms and let you speak to me. With each shuddering breath that I draw, I want nothing more than to understand the heart of you. That is the path. Understanding. I want to see you gazing once more into the deep wells of my eyes. There is more there than you know, I think. I hope that the lessons of this world have not lain so heavy a mark upon you that you are left unable to accept the truth, having finally stumbled your long way home.

I have felt you tremble beneath my touch, seen the helpless shift of your gaze as I have drawn near to you. You are no less a creature of the flesh than I, and for all your confusion, your elusive truth is no farther away than the gentle caress of my breath upon your neck (the delicate curve of your beautiful neck).

It is not truth you lack, but faith instead.

You are rare and precious, my lady, but I am not made of stone. Time takes its toll, leaves its mark upon my back, and this old webwork of scars is dreadfully weary. I pray that you will find the strength to believe, or instead the strength to set me free. I would sorrow greatly at having to turn my back on something so rare and indescribably precious, simply for the sake of prudence.

Trust

redguard@blackvault.com

First, being lied to about the nature of sin and forgiveness in 6th grade. Two years previous, I had made my first Sacrament of Confession. Then, in 6th grade, my religion teacher told me that all of my sins would be forgiven if I carried a rosary in my pocket. When I asked why we had made a Sacrament of Confession if the forgiveness of sins was as easy as carrying a rosary in my pocket, I was yelled at, told not to ask questions, and given a detention. I was already questioning the Catholic faith I was raised with, and already insecure in the notion that God existed.

My parents and teachers somehow symbolized God for me, and I knew they were far from perfect; to believe the statement that God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-forgiving as I was consistently told would have taken either a) a break from the hierarchical belief that authority descended from God or b) an insane leap of faith that flew in the face of experience and reason. The first option would take another year or two of living and growth. The second option was against my nature. Instead, I broke with God, and decided that He couldn't exist because his traits were not apparent in his representatives.

Second, during my first year of graduate school, one of the school's track stars said that she prayed to God before every race, and that's why she placed in the top three for every race. I wondered what would happen to her faith if she lost a race. Would she think God had abandoned her?

What has bothered me involves one or more of the following:

- viewing belief in a higher power as some sort of cosmic cash machine (God has changed my life. I now have a better job because of my faith.)
- the reliance on a sort of feel-good, spiritual-candy vision of religion (Ain't God cool?)
- the notion that belief and faith cannot be subjected to objective reasoning (You just have to have faith. Don't worry about it.)
- the notion that "my-God-must-be-your-God" (This is what we face everyday in religious or spiritual debates)

Answer to the first:
No wonder people feel alienated from a belief system. If only teachers and parents were more careful with children. Encouraged their curiousity. Had enough self-awareness and confidence to not set themselves up as gods, but as figures of authority who are fallible, but can generally be trusted. I do not advocate raising children without authority--far from it--that would remove the element of personal responsibility which is generally lacking in people. I simply would like to see people give children honest answers, or admit that they don't have the answer, rather than punish the child for it. I would like to see parents encourage children to explore nature, to make hypotheses and test their assumptions, to see developing a relationship with a higher power as being preferable to looking only for favors or for soothing a guilty conscience.

Answer to the second and third:
All beliefs, whether atheistic, agnostic, or centered around religion or belief, must be tested at some point. This should be sooner, rather than later, in order to avoid sacrificing a belief at a moment of true struggle. I advocate spending a few years trying to prove the converse of whatever is believed. Fear not...I'm not telling you to believe in God. I'm asking that you challenge every assumption or belief that you hold dear, whether it deals with religion or deals with your system of ethics and morals. I'm asking that you evaluate every piece of information you receive, and test the warrant of every claim.

Answer to the fourth:
I have no answer any more. I'm tired of all the prosthelytizing. I simply ask people to leave me alone, or explain that I already have set beliefs that will not change. Just yesterday, I was invited by an office mate to attend a Chi Alpha meeting with her. To those of you who don't know what Chi Alpha is, it's a cult-like Christian Fellowship group that operates on campuses. They target international students a lot because they are vulnerable in a new country. Once people get sucked into all the emotional candy provided, the leaders start controlling who gets to date who, and decrees whether they are "allowed" to break up with people or not. I've seen her come back from meetings alternatingly giggling and crying hysterically about "God's Love." Yikes.

In short, I believe that religion offers a cozy system to many, but all organizations do that. I believe that it is up to us to figure out our own systems, but to do that, we must break free of what we know to be true. We must question, constantly, and never be satisfied even with "known facts." We must not be afraid to step outside of the lines periodically. We must accept that we are flawed, that we are often wrong in our reasoning. We must be devoted to the challenge.

Now you might wonder what I would know about such a movie but I have had a varied past you see. I wasn’t always hanging out with that worthless old bag of wind, JEB. Actually, I had the great pleasure of being taken to see that movie by this exquisite young gothic girl named Morgany or something like that. She never would tell me her real name but by the gods, she put on a show during that movie that was better than the film itself.
Claimed she had seen it about forty times, strange girl, cute as a bug but seemed to run a bit off the side of the road if you know what I mean. But then, that is another story and a film review unlike any that I have seen around these parts.

So, here we were all set to go down to one of the finest fishing spots west of the ole Miss., Bean’s Bend on the Big Rio. We had been planning this trip for a long time, since the night before anyway. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the bar, seeing as how we seemed to be in some sort of disfavor with the local womenfolk for reasons unbeknownst to us.

We got up that morning, grabbed up all our gear, which was always packed up in case we needed to go on one of those quick fishing trips until things cooled off in town, and snuck past the nurse’s station and out the back door to the parking lot. JEB’s truck was nowhere to be found. We looked all over the parking lot but it was gone. Now this was very odd because we were reasonably sure we had driven it back because Fred was with us. At least that was the only logical thing that we could come up with at that hour and JEB, still being drunk, insisted that Fred would never let us walk home in his condition. I personally think JEB spends way to much time talking to that fleabit hound. We did spend a few moments mulling over whether it had got stolen but JEB did admit that even though he loved that truck more than his first two wives combined, that the odds were that a thief would more than likely break into his room and steal his stanky ole boots before they would bother with that truck.

We figured we ought to sneak back in and headed around to the front of the home, as the back door locked behind us when we left, and as we rounded the side of the building, there, much our delight, was the truck! Unfortunately, it was parked up on the porch of the home and for the life of us, we could not figure out how it had been parked where it was, as the front bumper was about 3 inches away from the wall and the back bumper was about the same from the porch rail. It looked like the porch had been built around it. Damnedest thing I had ever seen.

After wrestling around the yard for a few minutes, arguing over who had driven back the night before, we realized that not only were we wasting valuable fishing time but we probably didn’t really want to be there when the truck was discovered on the porch as we had yet to come up with a plausible explanation or alibi. So we headed for town figuring that somehow we could get in some fishing somewhere before we needed to deal with the situation back at the home.

We hadn’t walked more than a few blocks when along comes ole Rob Porter, owner of Porter Aviation.
Now, I used to do a little flying for ole Rob, dusting crops or occasionally running frozen bull semen over to Omaha. Never did ask what them city folk did with it, just kept my yap shut and flew the plane. Odd people, those city slickers.

Ole Rob stopped when he saw it was us and told us to hop in. We told him of our predicament, leaving out a few facts that may have tainted his opinion of us, and asked if he had anything we could use to get down to Bean’s Bend.

Rob asked if the Fed’s still let me fly and I assured him that they had yet to find anything they could prove that would have caused them to revoke my pilot’s license. Then, smelling the stench of booze on JEB’s breath, he asked if I was sober enough to fly. I told him I was sober as a judge, which made him immediately suspicious as he had been out drinking the night before with the local magistrate. He asked me if I could touch my nose with my eyes shut but before I could comply, that old fool JEB yelled, "I can!" and punched me in the nose as hard as he could. I didn’t take that too well to that and started whooping him upside the head. Soon we were both just a flailing away and Rob careened up to the hangar and jumped out, grabbed a rifle out from under his seat and threatened to shoot the both of us if we didn’t straighten up. Seeing as how neither of us was much for getting shot, we straightened up.

Rob figured that I was probably sober enough to fly as he noticed I had managed to get in a few well aimed shots at JEB’s punkin head so he took us in his hangar and told us we could use his personal transport, the Ebola Grape.
He came up with that name because he thought Ebola was the first name of that bomber that dropped the atom bomb on Japan and would not budge on that because he said Enola couldn't be right because he had never heard of an Enola and Grape because for one, he had painted it this gawdawful purple and two because he wasn’t about to put the word Gay on anything he owned seeing as how he made a habit out of getting drunk and standing on the bar and shouting out how he would never be a receptacle for another man's pudding. I figured this was just his way of saying he had had enough to drink about 3 or 4 drinks back. Hell, he knocked me out with a wing strut one time because I told him that them homo guys called their bunghole a cockpit and he wouldn’t get in a plane for about two weeks after that. I finally had to tell him I made that up as his wife threatened to shoot me because he was losing so much business refusing to sit in a cockpit and all. JEB told her I said that just because he knew she would light out after me with a gun. Them Porters are a violent bunch, I tell ya, and that sorry assed JEB has a sick sense of humor.

Now I would love to tell ya what kind of plane this was but I can’t. You see, ole Rob had built this thing out of parts from about forty different planes, even claiming that there were pieces of the Wright Brother’s first plane in it. Hell, the rudder pedals say John Deere on them and I don't ever recollect them being in the plane business but they worked so who am I to say anything.

We pushed the old crate out to the edge of the runway and checked the fuel tanks, amazingly enough, they were fairly full and I explained to JEB how to spin the prop to start the engine. He argued about how I ought to do it but I convinced him that operating the controls was way too technical for him and I need to be in the cockpit for that part. So Fred and I jumped in and I flipped the ignition switch and slapped the choke on and signaled JEB to spin the prop.

Now, to do this, all you do is pull down on one of the blades of the prop and get the hell out of the way when it catches. A trained monkey could do this so I felt that the old reprobate should be up to the task. I never thought to tell him that you don’t hold on to the prop and I guess I should have because he did and when the engine caught, it flung him about twenty yards off into the bushes. At first, I thought it had killed him but then I heard over the stuttering roar of the engine, "You JACKASS!!", so I figured he must have landed on his head and was alright.
I swung the plane around and headed down the runway with JEB trying to claw his way inside while Fred was licking his face to let him know that he was glad JEB was alive.

Now this plane was not the easiest thing to fly as most of the controls were not really designed to operate the parts of the aircraft that they were hooked to and the few gauges that did work, weren’t too accurate so I knew that it wasn’t going to be the smoothest flight on record and would just be tickled to death to even get in the general vicinity of where we were trying to get to.

We roared down the runway, the plane spitting and belching as it tried to pick up speed and it looked like we were going to run out of runway before we got off the ground. There wasn't much I could do but keep going as Rob had neglected to put brakes on the plane, amongst other things. Just as we got to the end of the asphalt, the wheels lifted off the ground with Fred baying and JEB screaming like that Zena woman’s war cry. Funniest thing I ever heard, in fact I damn near hit the power lines at the end of the field, I was laughing so hard. Those two should cut a record.

Most of the flight was relatively uneventful until we got within sight of Beans Bend. Ole JEB doesn’t mind the flying so much but the landings tend to make him a bit nervous as I have repeatedly pointed out to him that it is the return to Mother Earth that usually kills most everybody who flies plus he knew that landing the Ebola Grape was usually just a matter of making the best of an inevitable crash with the way she was put together and all. So JEB decided to fortify his courage and climbed back to the fishing gear to fetch a bottle of our special fishing medication. When he bent over to get it, he produced one of those classic plumber’s cracks that was just too much for Fred to resist and that dog stuck his cold wet nose right in it causing JEB to let out a whoop and launch himself right back to the tail of the plane.

Now if you don’t already know it, ole JEB is not what you would call a large person. He is huge, hell, if he was any bigger, he would have his own zip code. One of the few values he has as a fishing partner is the shade he provides. All that weight has a very undesirable effect on an aircraft when it is suddenly thrust into the tail. The tail gets real heavy and pilots, me in this case, find themselves staring into space instead of the horizon. Planes also do not fly very well when the tail is pointed to the ground and tend to do what is known in aviation as plummet. I kicked the rudders over and rolled the plane out, putting the nose down so I could at least see what we were going to crash into and here came the river, coming mighty fast too. I pulled back on the yoke seeing that I could possibly pull it out in time but I forgot that JEB and Fred were no longer at the bottom of the plane but were now overhead, which was soon remedied thanks to the fact that JEB was big enough to overcome the gee force and fall into the cockpit. Naturally, I was no longer able to pilot the plane with his big ass in my lap and we pancaked into the river with him doing that Zena thing, the Ebola bouncing off the water like a skipping stone and came to rest on the sand beach.

I calmly asked him to get him and his worthless dog off of me and proceeded to climb out of the plane with my duffle bag in hand and coolly sauntered to the shrubs up on the bank so I could change my soiled britches.
Miraculously, the Ebola Grape was still flyable so we settled down to a few days fishing and drinking. Didn’t catch a damn thing either. I had a feeling that the plane smacking into the water as it did probably scared them fish clean down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, the flight back… but that’s another story.

Starring: Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Courteney Cox Arquette, David Arquette, Thomas Haden Church, Howie Long, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Pollak, Christian Slater, Bokeem Woodbine, Paul Anka, Craig Newell and Ice T as Hamilton.
Director: Demian Lichtenstein
Writing Credits: Demian Lichtenstein, Richard Recco
Distributor: Warner Brothers
Rated R for some sexuality, drug content, violence and language.

3000 Miles To Graceland Is about an hour behind me. I'm still singing Elvis tunes but was forced to stop saying "thank-ya, thank-ya very much sugah" by my girlfriend under threat of a "morning sex moratorium".

The movie is a standard heist flick. Well, fairly standard.

All dressed as Elvis Presley, a group of ex-cons (Costner, Russell, Slater, Arquette, Woodbine) plan to rob a Las Vegas casino during an Elvis-impersonator convention which will serve as a perfect cover, and allow them to get away quickly.

The job is done and the thieves get away with 3.2 million.

As they divide the loot miles away from danger, dissension and betrayal among the gang erupts and complications arise.

From before the opening credits this movie gets your attention, surprising you with surreal imagery and weird cuts.

The sight of Russell's candy apple red '59 Cadi land shark tooling wildly through the Nevada desert in off-time and blurred acid dream editing during the opening credits is reminiscent of a Hunter Thompson passage.

"We had two bags of Grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.... also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls... but the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge..." -## HST '71

The movie starts quickly with little introduction of the characters or their backgrounds. It honestly doesn't matter who they are. The movie's comic book feel makes their shallowness acceptable and almost necessary for us to accept the extraordinary volumes of violence and general bad assedness.

If you are sick of Costner's cornpone earnestness (i.e.: The Postman) then this movie is a tonic. I can't recall Costner playing a real villain before and he is great. Funny, savage and out of control this role demonstrates him at his sexy best. Compare this performance to the ham-handed 13 Days and you can easily see this is a direction he should explore.

Or maybe he is just having a mid-life crisis.

Russell, the anti-hero crook is passable but largely flat and uninspiring. Costner's Murphy outcharms him. This "everyman" approach to the role works up to a degree. He provides a grounding point to Costner's lunacy but I found myself rooting for the bad guy a little too much.

Interestingly, Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner each submitted their own cut of the film, which was then viewed by test audiences. Costner's won.
Courtney Cox can't act and should be banned from further movie appearances by United Nations edict. She is good eye candy but as a femme fatale she lacks any real sex appeal, danger or plausibility. The scenes between her and Russell are the only unenjoyable parts of this very enjoyable movie.

Kevin Pollack(Usual Suspects) and Thomas Hayden Church(tv's Wings) are hilarious as the US Federal Marshalls on the band's trail. They counterpoint the surreal, ultra-cool and hip villians with sardonic, understated wit. They are the only good guys you root for.

The gunfights are fun and cartoonish. 4 Elvis impersonators battling security forces at The Mirage is hysterical to watch. Look out for a funny turn by Paul Anka as Chief of Hotel security. Nicely done.

The final shoot out would make John Woo blush but by this point you are just riding the wave and if you have abandoned credulity you will be enjoying the ride.

There is an undercurrent in the movie poking our infatuation with villains and the mythology of the 'Wild West' which doesn't get preachy but has the smell of guilt in it. The film is pretty violent and the cops take the brunt of the thrown lead. But it's silly and in the name of fun. They probably should have left it at that.

All in all I had a great time at the movies. A little kitsch, a little gunplay, some dirty double-crosses, a very good soundtrack with everything from DMX to the King.

It's silly, cartoonish fun. Not terribly witty. Not great cinema. Funny, fast and weird.

I give it (out of 5.)

selah.

I was bored this evening, and decided to see if my old web site was still around, despite the contract with Tripod stating that all pages inactive for a month are deleted.

I found it.

I designed it when I was 15, and first started using the Internet. I remember sitting in the computer lab of the public library, using their computers since I didn't have one of my own, and dreaming about how cool a site it was going to be. I never updated it again, but the thing has gotten enough hits to roll the counter over once. The page offers a little bit of information about Final Fantasy Tactics, and that's about it. I got an e-mail from some guy in New Zealand telling me how cool the site was last year. Every now and then I still get an occasional e-mail about the site, although the mail has stopped now.

Those were the days, back when I would sit at a computer, and play MST3K's Caption This! because it was funny to make fun of still frames from film on the Sci-Fi Channel. I also met my first e-friends playing CT. After a few of them thought I was cool enough, they let me in to their "private" sector of the Sci-Fi Channel's web site. We called it "private" because we were about the only people who knew about it. It was called The Buzz Bin, but they recently removed Sci-Fi Buzz from their servers, as they had threatened to do many times before.

Back in the day, I wasn't known as "SocialParasite," or "Orestes," or "ComaWhite." I was a cross between "Bomber Man," and "anal probe," which I came up with while registering my Tripod site. The first evolution was "Proberdude," but "Proberdude" only lasted about twenty minutes. When I registered for my first e-mail account at Excite!, which I still have today, "Proberdude" became "Proberman." "Proberman" stuck with me for many, many years. In fact, "Proberman" died when I first came to The Stile Project Forum. But I digress.

We also had a little BBSs we frequented on the Sci-Fi Channel's site, which can be found here. There may be a few more, but I've forgotten where they are. Unfortunately, I came in at a very xenophobic time. Shortly before I joined, there had been a major knockdown, kick-'em-in-the-teeth flame war with some asshole from Seattle who went under the handle "Wyrdrune." The group accepted me, but only after I proved I wasn't going to flame them at the drop of a hat.

We had many heated discussions at times, mostly on the subject of homosexuality (I've nearly fine-tuned many of my arguments on the subject because of my time there) over at Sci-Fi Buzz, and I did a little story writing on the BBSs.

Wyrdrune eventually returned, more psychotic than ever, and we eventually moved. We resided at a message board one of the members was kind enough to build on her AOL account. We later moved again to a more private board because Wyrdrune found us. I know it seems like we were running and hiding, but it became impossible to carry out a conversation without him taking over the board. We also couldn't ban IP addresses, so we decided to move on to a board where we had enough control over that we could safely resume conversing.

We now reside at Slugfest on an Ez Board forum. As a minor note, if any of you attack our current home, I'll have your IP banned, no questions asked. We don't take kindly to attacks. Anyway, our community now lives a lazy existence, and we have sort of drifted apart. Busy schedules with school, and work, and raising kids, and home repairs, and other things that make up the American Dream.

After a while at the current home, a friend of mine pointed me out to the Stile Project (pre-forum days). I was totally shocked by what I saw: people eating shit. It wasn't just the abundance of porno that I was given access to which kept my attention; it was also some of the weirdest, most outrageous movies I had ever seen. I quickly took a liking to the pages shocking and fresh content, and when the forum opened, I eventually joined in it, too.

I believe my first handle there was "Sandrock," which is one of the Gundam mobile suits from the anime series, "Mobile Suit: Gundam Wing." When I first showed up, I wasn't exactly the mega-cool poster I've turned out to be today (yeah, right). It wasn't until many, many forum resets and handle changes that "SocialParasite" came about. After a while, everyone accepted me, or at least put up with my existence. Then I was introduced to the next level of chat: IRC.

Up until this point, I used ICQ and various Java chat applets for chatting with people. I first used IRC to publicly apologize to Stile for wishing death on him. Yes, it was rather silly, but I did it anyway. Of course, I didn't do it in a chat room, so he never heard. I later figured out how to join #stileproject, and apologized in private. He said everything was cool, and all was well within me.

I later joined in the antics of #wotsp back during our Darktree days. I remember how much fun it was to chat with all these people that had amused me for so long in real time. It was a shame that garycoleman had to fuck things up for us, but life moved on. I still remember the little bastard flooding me so hard and so fast that it caused my modem to malfunction until I rebooted. Now that I look back on it, it's kinda funny.

Gary wasn't a jerk in private. What you saw in public was just a show, but when you got him to talk to you one-on-one, he was funny and fun to talk to. Not everyone shares my sentiments, but that's their own perogative.

I also remember when Stile went from super-cool forum administrator to mega-stupid jag-off administrator. I remember the ban-fest he had one night, and how Anti-Stile kept getting in through anonymizers to post a few more posts, and then get banned. Rinse and repeat.

All of that and a few more ban-fests now lead us to where we are now. I remember when we were hated for breaking away from Stile's grasp, and how we all swore we'd never go back. Of course, a lot of us did go back, and we aren't hated over there any longer.

It amazes me how a group of "rebels" have banded together to form their own community, and how we haven't died yet, or abandoned this place to return to the MotherLand.

Now, I'm 18 years-old, I haven't touched my crappy web page since a couple of years ago when I added contact information, and I feel as though I am one of the more liked members of the forum. I'm not saying I'm the most loved, or the über-poster; I'm just saying that as a general rule I'm not hated. Come now, do you really think my ego is that big? Shame on you!

And so, in closing, Asylum, I salute you. I salute you, and thank you for all you have offered me, and I hope that in some small way, I've given back even a small fraction of what I've been given.

*Final curtain drops, the lights go out, and the people go home*

We don’t currently have the ability to do this, but I think if we could, we should put contraception in all the drinking water in the world. Of course, since we are hypothesizing here, let’s make clear that I am suggesting only a form of contraception that has no side effects at all and can be reversed with a simple pill or antidote of some kind. It actually doesn’t have to be in the drinking water, but some people might be tempted to cheat if you had to go in and get a shot or something. The water is the best way to get everyone.

I can’t think of a good reason not to implement this type of population control. It would be a boon to underdeveloped countries struggling with overpopulation and underproduction, as well as prevent the spread of diseases like AIDS between mother and child in utero. Women in these situations consistently opt for birth control when provided; this would be all the better for them.

It wouldn’t be just a third world thing though. If we did it in one place, we would have to do it in all places. But it would be just as beneficial in other places, albeit in perhaps different ways.

Take the U.S. for example. It would prevent unwanted teen pregnancies (and unwanted adult pregnancies as well, I suppose). We would have to work hard at educating kids about the dangers of STDs, but that can be done.

The image of welfare mothers getting knocked up to get a bigger check would be a thing of that past. No more children born to pathetic women who get pregnant to trap a man. No more bastard children to bring down athletic and political careers. No more abortions for the most part, because there would no longer be any surprise or unwanted pregnancies.

Only people willing and capable would be allow to procreate. By requiring people to pass certain minimal standards of economic and emotional/ mental competence, we could raise the overall quality of parenting in the country. Factor in genetic screening for disease and we could also greatly reduce health and education costs incurred through disease and genetic births defects.

Antidotes would only be granted to fit couples who wanted children. They would have to be able to demonstrate financial stability as well as emotional competence and an awareness of the responsibilities necessary for positive parenting. Kids aren’t pets who just need to be fed and bathed and everything works out okay. Potential parents need to be aware that they must spend time, lots of time, with their kids. Parenting is like a marriage, only more so. You must adapt your life to raise the child, not just be a bread winner or mediator of punishments. If you don’t want to have to raise your kids 24/7, then you shouldn’t be having them.

Of course the potential exists for abuse. We would have to insure that all minorities, for example, were given access to the fertility antidote. It would not be good if blacks or Jews or Tutsis or Chinese or whoever were not allowed to breed. But we could also ensure that children were borne only to parents who truly wanted them, who were prepared to raise and love them.

This solution obviously wouldn’t solve all the problems we have, but it would be a useful start. I wonder how far away we are from being able to do this actually. I’d vote for it in the next referendum!!

Now go vote on last weeks submissions and download the new target.

GRAFFITI