Little children should not suffer. Rant-warning.

Here's my 30-second take on the Stolen Generation:

• Attempting to improve the living standards and future prospects of the very young: Good
• Removing children from their families and putting them in foster care as a last resort if their living conditions are abusive and/or abysmal: Good
• Using foster care as a whole-sale attempt to destroy an entire culture and language without first supporting that culture to grow and adapt to a changing world: Atrocious.

As you will no doubt see, the issue is a whole hell of a lot more complicated than that. If you can't see the complications, please move away from the keyboard.

And now that we have government investigations, a demand for an apology and compensation, and what appears to be a worrying tendency to use "the stolen generation" as a sort of holocaust-style catch-all attempt to induce guilt in mainstream Australia, we have this little scenario:

• Girl, aboriginal, less than 10, gets removed from her community because she's being sexually abused: Good
• Girl gets placed in foster care with a white family: If that's what was available, okay.
  
• Girl, aged about 10, gets removed from foster care and sent back to her community because leaving her with a white foster family would be tantamount to "a second stolen generation": WTF?
• Girl, aged 10, gets gang-raped in her community. FOR FUCK'S SAKE WHAT HAPPENED?

This beggars all belief. It really does.

Just to make the story complete, and to set this little girl up for just about the most miserable self-esteem and life anyone in this dubiously first-world country can have, the magistrate sentencing the pack of low-life throw-backs who raped her gave them light sentences, some of them even with no convictions recorded, because "she probably consented". Consent? THAT'S WHAT IT'S CALLED STATUTORY RAPE YOU BRAINLESS DING-BAT. The law should not care if she consented or if she just refused to express an opinion, she is under-age by federal law. Ergo, she can not legally provide consent. Oh yes, and the entire pack of rapists are pederasts.

I don't believe in punishment for punishment's sake, I really don't, but there are times when castration looks like being the only real option.

That magistrate's judgements are being reviewed. All of them. I can't bear to think what else may come to light now.

I can not tell you how much I want this

Steampunk laptop.

Too heavy and gorgeous to be portable, not even laptop, but I tell you I don't care.

Pleeease?

Hmm... peaty, and with overtones of bondage gear

First, a warning: If you don't know anything about the film "Preaching to the Perverted", go and find out before reading on. And if you're hideously disgusted, stop reading. Or not, your choice.

On that official movie page, there is a synopsis of the "performance artists" who appeared in the film.

This is the bit that got me:

"Luci The Axle Grinder or Lucifire as she is better known, chucked in her whiskey testing job as a research scientist for United Distillers to take a degree in contemporary dance. During that time she developed an unhealthy interest in semi-industrial power tools and an over zealous pyromania. She is working as a freelance performer either solo or with other performers such as Archaos, High Rise Rubber, the famous Coney Island Sideshow."

Excuse me? She packed in a job as whiskey tester to become a performance dance pyromaniac?

I think I'm in love. How do you get a job like that???

Somebody got paid to design this?

My partner and I have a new washing machine. It happened in a rush, courtesy of the old one breaking, and cleaned out my finances quite nicely so that I could save a couple of hundred dollars by paying cash (and shopping around served me very nicely, thank you) and not have to pay off another interest-incurring loan.

It is, because you'd be mad not to miss the opportunity, a dual washer/dryer. And it's marvellous. Put clothes in, press buttons, come back six hours later and they're clean and dry.

But...

It's a front-loader, which it has to be to be a dryer as well, but one consequence of this is that it can't have a conventional, nice little accessible lint filter.

In fact, it doesn't have a lint filter. At all. Which surprised me a bit.

So now, instead of a small cloth bag that catches fluff and hair and rubbish like that and which gets emptied every other wash, it all gets flushed out with the dirty water. Or rather, doesn't get entirely flushed out with the dirty water because most of it collects in the drain hole of the sink you're draining into, building up until it clogs, and you come down and find that the sink is full of grotty water into which you must plunge your hand in order to fish out wet, slimy tangles of lint which would have been nice and compact if it had been in a filter, but which instead is partly foul and disgusting and partly escaped down the drain to clog up the works further down-stream and become even more foul and disgusting.

But wait, there's more. It gets even better.

There is a lint trap, in case there are buttons or coins or bits of bra strap rattling around inside, and this gets clogged with lint as well. And because this is an integral part of the waterworks inside the machine, when it gets clogged the machine stops working, which you find out when you go downstairs in the morning to fetch the clothes you put on last night and which aren't dry at all, but are sitting there still wet with the machine flashing "SE" at you on the display, leaving you with nothing to wear.

But wait, it gets even better. You see, in order to clear this lint trap you first have to get down on your knees and lever off a small plastic panel that is clipped on in a way that requires you to try and insert something thin into the gap, swear because it's too weak to lever off the panel, insert something sturdier, swear because it won't quite fit, and then just apply brute force. Our panel was removed entirely, and will not be replaced.

You then have two caps, one small and one large. The small one, it turns out, covers a drain tube. You see, because the lint filter is at the bottom of the machine, any water still inside will come gushing out when you remove said filter, so there's a drain tube which you can pull out to drain neatly into a bowel. Or you could, if you could get enough grip on the little plastic end cap to pull it out once you've turned it to the release position, which you can't, so you need to use pliers.

Fuck that. Our washing machine is sitting on a concrete floor under the house: Water can go everywhere, I really don't care.

So I just unscrew the big cap, which is the lint trap. Which, when removed, turns out to be have been blocked by less lint than you can pull out of your trouser pockets when they're fresh out of the wash.

Somebody got paid to design this?

Is this sour grapes or just stupidity?

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, rates of christianity in Brisbane are falling. Which is, in my not-so humble opinion, a good thing. But here's the rub:

According to an Associate Professor of something-undisclosed, the reason is consumerism.

Yesssss, clearly the reason I don't go to church isn't because I believe they're morally reprehensible, factually wildly incorrect and attempt indoctrination to a degree that tips them over into child abuse, it's because I'm too busy shopping. LIke, oh my gawd, I totally never realised that!

Supporting this view, apparently, is the fact that the highest level of non-believing is in the "wealthy Liberal electorate of Ryan". I like that "wealthy Liberal" throw-away line there, but be that as it may, I can sense the echoes of Karl Marx rolling in his grave and mumbling "opiate of the masses" through his beard.

On the other hand, the churches are worried by people shopping around, and trying to find a church to fit their lifestyle.

Does anyone else think that if a church can't convince people that they're (eternally) relevant and important and correct, and that the other mob aren't, they don't deserve their worshippers and do, in fact, deserve to shrivel up and die like the leach upon society that they are?

Courier Mail report here.

Sometimes hitting people is the safest thing to do

What this says about human behaviour is quite frightening:

More crashes, fewer deaths: new Swedish road safety approach cuts road toll (ABC News)

The gist of the story is that by adding wire rope barriers you can cut down on the damage done during crashes, and by adding lots of roundabouts (otherwise known as "fuckabouts") you can make people have more minor crashes and therefore fewer deaths.

Now, leaving aside the fact that as a motorcyclist the thought of more wire road barriers (otherwise known as "cheesegraters") scares the fuck out of me (and if you can't work out why stringing a couple of lengths of wire rope between two rigid poles is bad for a motorcyclist, check out the MRAA's briefing notes), let's think about that for a moment.

What they're saying is that they can reduce the number of deaths (serious life-long debilitating injuries as well?) by shifting accidents from high speed to low speed. They're not talking about reducing the number of accidents, they're talking about increasing the number of accidents, but making them minor.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that these people are not sponsored by panel-beaters. Let's assume instead that if there are fewer serious accidents as a result (and the causal link is still an assumption) of more minor accidents, that it is the same group of people having the minor accidents who would otherwise be having the major accidents, and that means that there are clearly groups of people who shouldn't be allowed on the road.

I've always said so myself.

My mind is still boggling.

I'm not sure what to say. This (NSFW warning) was clearly always going to be a lolcthulhu of some sort, the question was only when.

Actually, the bigger question is: Who the hell paid for this picture to be taken?