Quickies

Here a couple of things that have got my goat recently.

States urged to impose total ban on mobile phone use in cars.
The nanny state gone mad. Yes using a mobile phone or texting in a car is dangerous. Have you ever been behind someone yakking on a mobile while driving? They look like they're driving pissed. By all means ban hand held devices, but hands free? The study suggests that even hands free devices are distracting and could cause accidents. Maybe, but this is taking the nanny state too far. The law would be almost unenforceable anyway. What will they ban next? Passengers? Do you know how distracting passengers can be?

'Appalling' law lets schools expel gay students.
This absolutely appalling law is a relic of the Wran years when homosexuality was still illegal. Holy shit have these people ever heard of basic human rights? The law allows private schools to expel gay students not because they're disruptive or are "flaunting their homosexuality" or harassment. But just because they are gay. What the fuck? It's like outlawing lefthandness or brown eyes. Fucktards.

Christians put faith poll on the agenda.
The Australian Christian Lobby have organised an event where Christian leaders will question Kristina Keneally (Premier) and Barry O'Farrell (Opposition leader) on a range of "social" issues. The ACL did this during the Federal election with the two Federal leaders too. Hello, Church State Separation anybody? Why the leaders pander to this out-of-touch and un-representative to the majority of people in the state I don't know? Maybe I do. Votes. The ACL, and Catholics for that matter, agenda is probably the newly approved Ethics Classes in public schools. For some reason the various religions have been allowed to come into public schools and teach scripture classes once a week. While the classes were technically not compulsory, ask Nowra and Ulladulla High Schools about that though, students who had permission from their parents were not allowed to do anything constructive. No school work or homework was allowed so as not to disadvantage the poor kiddies in the scripture classes. Recently though ethics classes were trialled as alternative to scripture classes. In the trials apparently more than half the kids chose to do the ethics classes instead of scripture. This outraged the Anglicans and the Catholics. I don't know why they have their own fucking schools after all. Now the government is rolling out ethics classes across the board. Ethics are cool. I wish I had them. Last week the Opposition Liberal Party dropped its objection to ethics classes and their promise to remove them from schools. This has again outraged the Christians. It appears to me that the Liberals have seen how the wind is blowing and how popular the ethics classes actually are with voters.
The scripture classes have no place in public schools. Ethics classes are appropriate for public schools, or any school for that matter. If the Christians want to teach scripture they can go and start there own schools. Oh. Hang on. They have their own schools. Hundreds of them. Well piss off out of the state system then. We nominally have a separation of church and state in this country.

DNA and dollars are killing capital punishment.
You'd think this abhorrent practice would be outlawed just because it is barbaric but if DNA evidence and the cost of executions is doing the job, well that will do I suppose. The execution rate in the US has halved since 1999 which was the peak year for judicial homicide in the USA.