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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

More photos from New Year’s Eve fireworks on Sydney Harbour.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

A Christmas piece of short fiction.

I still haven’t decided if I hate the ending. Let me know if you think it doesn’t work. I’m thinking now maybe the shooting star should hit the Christmas Lights house across the street and something else happens, maybe something more dramatic? instead of the ending as is.

I think I like the ending as it is now, but that opinion could change, shit, in two hours? another part of me is going, ‘Go further, go harder! Make it rock beyond!’ But the way it ends, feels right, even if to me it still doesn’t read quite right. Yet.

It’s the end of another year, so…

But hey, I’m easily distracted right now as I’m having my New Year’s Eve piss-up tonight,with old friends over enjoying Not Quiet Hollywood!, the downright best movie doco ever and better for everything because it’s about insane Australian movies. Seriously, Australia is responsible for Mad Max and The Road Warrior (or Mad Max II, as we call it), so when the rest of the world gets its shit together to produce the ultimate post-apocalyptic action thriller, come by and say hello. Until then?

By the way, and you will agree once you see the Not Quite Hollywood doco.……Grant Page, you were my childhood hero, so much fucking cooler, yeah, than even Evil Kenevil, who was also plenty cool. Grant Page, fuck yes, you set yourself on fire and fell eighty feet into a fucking pond, burning to all fuck, so fucking wild were you that even Dennis Hopper during the worst of his super-alcohol and drug excesses said, Grant Page, fuck man, you are fucking insane!

But watch the Not Quite Hollywood doco here, and then buy a copy for your friends. They will love you for introducing them to this, the Best Exploitation Movies Doco Ever! It even has Quinten Tarantino wetting his pants about outrageous Australian movies most Australians have never heard of, well not for many years, but fuck yeah, Quint, I know your movies back to front, and I know all the Australian movies you went, shit yeah, I’m so going to steal that shot or that sequence of action for your own movies, fuck yes. And good on you for acknowledging the movies that made your movies so much better. Do we have an Order Of Australia medal for american movie directors who appreciate the subtle complexities of Dead End Drive In and Turkey Shoot? No? Well, we should have.

Yes, I’m a little bitter at the end of 2008. I had high hopes for so many movies, but only The Dark Knight, Not Quite Hollywood, and the final episode of Trailer Park Boys really delivered the demented goods I was hanging for. It was a year of cinematic anti-climaxes. Wall-E was one of the best sci-fi movies ever, until he left Planet Earth. Clint Eastwood’s Gran Turismo came close to perfection.

But Yes Indeed, rock on, Heath. We will miss you. What you did with The Joker is fucking monumental. You were going to be even more awesome than Brando and Nicholson in the decades to come, we were so with you, all the way, we wanted to grow old with you mate, and we wanted to watch along as you continued to fuck off the falsity and fakery of movie acting and make us really fucking feel every role you played, as you did, as you would have continued to do, for years, if you didn’t fucking die. We were so looking forward to what you were going to give us, once a year, or once every few years (once you became a director-poet), we were hoping, Heath, that you might keep delivering the simply stunning quality of your characters for decades to come as you grew into an old man, maybe another legend like Lee Marvin or Steve McQueen, movie after movie that fucking rocked, because you were in it, and because we knew if you were in it, it would be worth watching, even if it didn’t ultimately work, it would still be worthwhile viewing because you thought it was worthwhile to act in it. We were all so there.

It was supposed to be this way : when we were all old men, looking back on the movies we made in the early decades of the 21st century, you were going to be the New Vid Gen’s Charlie Chaplin, actor writer director producer, fucking innovator, rule breaker. You fucker, I wrote a script for you, I rewrote it ten fucking times sitting in that room at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan in 2001, waiting for you to turn up for one fucking meeting, outside of your generous phone calls, and now nobody can ever play the character I wrote for you even close to as good as you would have done it, so it can never go to anybody else. It was still fun to write it for you. And that kind of writing fun is so goddamn rare and unique. I’ve seen that movie, in night dreaming, starring you Heath, and it was awesome.

I seriously hope you died accidentally, because to even think that you did yourself in because of, whatever, is fucked up beyond all bad shit.

How can anybody not know how much their friends love them and care for them?

Shit, why so serious?

Goodnight 2008.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Detail from a stunning portrait of our next home. Go here for the full wallpaper image.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

A fresh piece of short fiction, A Christmas Story, is up here for you to read.

An excerpt :

He walked down the stairs, the rest of the house below sat quiet and still. The only noise in the whole house was the steady sound of his son slowly tearing long strips of paper, in his bedroom, upstairs.

It was dark in the lounge room. He moved through the flickering shadows cast by the bright lights outside. Pink, yellow, blue and green lights glowed across the street. It was the neon-drenched Christmas display covering most of his neighbour’s house that had drawn a steady stream of family-packed cars every night for two weeks. Most had stopped to admire his handiwork for a few minutes, but there were many who’d parked their cars and walked into his yard to really explore his Christmas creation. His neighbour had greeted them all, and welcomed them.

He knew his neighbour wouldn’t be able to pay the astonishing electricity bill for this year’s festival of Christmas lights, when it thudded into his mailbox in February, because he knew his neighbour wouldn’t be there to get it. His neighbour had already packed up the larger pieces of furniture and valuables and moved them elsewhere, so when the bailiffs turned up and let themselves in one day to tally up the assets, they’d find nothing of any real value, all of it long gone.

He stood at the bay window, and noticed for the first time, of the many nights he’d stood there, beyond midnight, staring at the lights, just how much the softly-blinding illumination lit up the surrounding houses, his own house, his front lawn. It touched everything around it in the dark, and made it glow with colours. The Christmas illumination that his neighbour had sometimes worked through the night to complete was something of rare beauty, a piece of temporary public art, and he wished he spent more time enjoying it than resenting it because his own home Christmas decoration attempts seemed so futile in comparison.

The thousands of dollars of lights and waving, smiling dioramas and glowing reindeer had cleaned out his neighbour’s bank account and credit cards over three afternoons of madness in late October. Making something beautiful, if only for a few weeks, had become an obsession for him…

It was only now, tonight, that he realized his neighbour hadn’t gone mad, that he had given the people of this devastated street something beautiful, a flood of light, a place to stand and be awed in the dark by dizzying, dazzling colours. It was a gift to the friends and neighbours that remained, and something free and wonderful for families from across the city to come and see, experience, share.

When other fathers who visited asked how much it all cost, his neighbour had always grinned and declared, “Nothing!”

His neighbour had nothing left, so he had nothing left to lose.

He wondered, briefly, how long it would be before his family joined the exodus from the neighbourhood. Another month or two, maybe less.

From upstairs, the sound of ripping paper ceased. His son would soon be asleep.

Read The Full Story Here

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Written by Michael Vass

Ok, here is a bit of a news flash. Burning your home to remove ice is a bad idea. Even melting ice on your home with a blowtorch is dumb.

You would think that this was an obvious thing. That such a public safety announcement was unnecessary. Ah, but you would be wrong.

On Tuesday, in Massachusetts a man set his home on fire - by accident - as he was removing ice from the recent storm. His mode of removal, you guessed it - a blowtorch. Not only did he set his porch on fire, the 2 upper apartments of the 3-story building were set ablaze as well. And the ultimate cost was $30,000 of damage.

Now there is one positive in this story for this dumbass action. The owner who caused the fire is not being charged with arson, or anything else. That makes him doubly lucky (triple if you include the fact no one was hurt). The first is for not getting arrested. The second is for the fact that there are no laws that would get you arrested for being stupid.

So if you happen to be at home and have a blowtorch, flamethrower, Maltov cocktail, a high incendiary grenade, a phosphorous grenade, tons of magnesium strips, a hoard of gasoline/kerosene, or moonshine of quality and you notice the ice on the house - DON’T decide to burn or melt the ice off.

But if you are the neighbor of an individual that does not read my blog, and has such items in their home, and proceeds to burn it down, please do send me a video for the blog. And roast some chestnuts too.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

There is a lot of digital music being released. According to this story there are some 13 million songs available for paid download, and some 1.23 million albums. But relatively few of the song or album titles available are selling :

The problem with this is consumers haven’t been able to see the wood for the trees and have decidedly stuck to what they know when downloading music.

This isn’t a problem, it’s just bad marketing. If your music is good, if you want nothing more in the world than to share your creations with as many people as possible, if you come up with a damn brilliant way of attracting attention to what you have created, then the internet is the best means of publicity and distribution you could ever possibly dream of.

The problem is that major record companies are throwing out everything they’ve got, and hoping to turn some bucks off what sticks, or the songs or albums that snare enough immediate interest to lead to sales.

The big problem for the major labels is that in a Greater Depression, and post GD-world, the ways they used to do business simply won’t work anymore.

As horrible an idea as it may be to some that think the sheer act of creating something immediately means others should pay to share the experience, the big money music industry of the 20th century, like the book publishing industry, is all but dead and gone.

Young musicians, like young novelists, will have to get used to the idea of giving away their debut and/or early creations to find an audience. If these creatives are truly dedicated to their craft, and simply cannot do anything else with their lives, that is if they are aiming at a long-term career, than giving away first works shouldn’t be a problem at all.

There will be ample opportunities to make money in the future for writers and musicians, and vid-makers, if what they’re doing is original and captivating. An audience will eventually pay to hear or read or watch the work of somebody who is consistently putting out good stuff that they always have to hear or watch or read. But the creatives will need to make physical packages of their creations that the die-hard fans cannot resist shelling out some bucks for.

As long as the internet stays as close as to free and reachable as it is now, a long-term creative career, that regularly delivers quality, or simply interesting, work, and finds an initial audience through free previews, will return financial satisfaction, as long as you’re not too greedy.

It will probably be a long time before we hear of the new Madonna or Stephen King picking up $20 million deals, or of some music label spending millions to promote a new record by the Next Big Thing. And that’s a good thing, in all. The grinding domination of just a few major book publishers and music companies ruling most of the marketplace through huge ad and promotional spends is over. And those writers, musicians, movie-makers who are in it for only the money, and fast money at that, will be peeled away, and those who love what they do, and want to share it (or some of it) with the world for free will have a fair shot (for the first time in history) at finding audiences (some of whom will gladly pay for something special) big enough to make all that mind-mining worthwhile.

It’s sad news that music companies and book publishers are firing thousands of people, but it’s also exciting that this feels like a new age of publishing and distributing music, books and movies has already begun.

It’ll be fascinating to see how it all unfolds. There’s a lot of very skilled entertainment industry, behind-the-scenes professionals, unemployed now, who are thinking deeply about ways to carve their own path in this new, digital entertainment dominated world.

Many major book publishers, movie studios and music companies will fall in the next few years (hell, the next few months), but many more independents will rise in their place. And we’ll all be richer for it.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

An observation by Thomas Friedman :

…while capitalism has saved China, the end of communism seems to have slightly unhinged America. We lost our two biggest ideological competitors — Beijing and Moscow. Everyone needs a competitor. It keeps you disciplined. But once American capitalism no longer had to worry about communism, it seems to have gone crazy. Investment banks and hedge funds were leveraging themselves at crazy levels, paying themselves crazy salaries and, most of all, inventing financial instruments that completely disconnected the ultimate lenders from the original borrowers, and left no one accountable.

“The collapse of communism pushed China to the center and [America] to the extreme,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

American capitalism became extremist, while Communist capitalism soaked up the best ideas of the west, ignoring most of the dangerous excesses and bigger gambles.

Read the full story here

A friend insists that all is not what it seems with the collapse of the American economy. His theory goes that America takes a savage fall, but only so as to totally fuck with and deplete Russia and China, after which, America will stage a fast, victorious recovery to world financial supremacy.

Well, that’s one theory….

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

I get the feeling there will be many more acts of hilarious civil disobedience like this in 2009. Not only because there will be a lot more bored people without jobs sitting around wondering what to do with themselves (but with easy access to digital cameras and YouTube), but also because such inventive acts against innanimate targets of the surveillance society are so popular on video sharing sites. How YouTube will deal with such videos remains to be seen, but they will still get around, and will become powerful visuals beacons of opposition for the many who feel their private lives are already being intruded upon enough.

The Surveillance Society has gone far enough.

A Stand has to be made, and 2009 is the year the mass movement should begin. Police, landlords and councils will soon be legally be allowed to install cameras in the private homes of non-criminals, for a variety of reasons, the possibility of a crime being committed being just one.

Opposition to the Surveillance Society must be non-violent, yet powerful, loud and annoying as hell to those who are trying to inflict total surveillance on us, the supposedly free.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

The original, far darker 1939 version of the same cartoon is here.

Please enjoy your Post-Apocalyptic Christmas from i09

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

This British couple go on holidays to international cities and terrorists attack. New York City, London, Mumbai. According to the Press Trust of India, the couple are known locally as “tourists of evil omen”. Probably best not to have that stamped in your passport.

Some of their thoughts on what they’ve witnessed, post-attacks :

“I would say that Mumbai sprang back to its feet faster than New York or London,” Mrs Cairns-Lawrence said.

“New York took almost a week to come back to normal. But Mumbai was back to its usual business from day three. It was just amazing.

“As I looked around, it was impossible to tell that such a ghastly thing had happened.

“In New York people carried the look of terror in their eyes for weeks after the carnage.

“In London, the police appeared more scared than the people.”

Do they choose their holiday destinations because they get good prices on flights and accommodation, or do they decide because they feel like they simply have to go to a certain city, at a certain time of year? Maybe they should consider camping as a holiday next time, in the middle of nowhere, a long way from everyone else.

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Time Magazine, in its Photos Of The Year gallery, presents a soft portrait of Barack Obama, reading through a speech, with the following caption :

The speech “that we would deliver”.

Just a typo, you would presume. Or maybe that’s how bloated, establishment media will save their skins, simply become adoring fan magazines for a president who will rule from the White House until 2017.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

More human than human? Or is it better than human? A new robot reality within 20 years, muse some :
But will they be listening to us because they want to, because they have to or because it’s a good way of building up trust before the final robot uprising is unleashed?

‘Robot’ is a bit of a naff 20th century name for the synthetic humanoids who will be replacing our pets, lovers and relatives through this century. ‘Robot’ just doesn’t sound very exciting at all, and it has the unfortunate baggage of having ‘Killer’ attached to it through decades of anti-synths books, comics and movies.

How about ‘Beeple’ instead?

No, that’s far too cute.

‘HuBots’? ‘Mecha’? ”Synths’?

I’m sure by the time they are engaging us in conversation that excites us more than talking to an actual human, they will have come up with a term for themselves that they prefer.

Actually, I’m sticking with Beeple, just to annoy them.

“A robot may be a more effective partner and a better person than the humans we actually have in our immediate lives. Just as you can see dog owners talking to their pets today, soon we will be talking to robots.”

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The Grapes Of Wraith is an only-occasionally remembered classic film, from 1940, about lives of dirt-crusted hardship and barely scraping by during the Great Depression. On the brink of perhaps - that is, perhaps very likely - an even Greater Depression unrolling through the next decade, that which was then, is also of today :

Early on in the film, a flashback shows Muley Graves, an Oklahoma dirt farmer, being dispossessed by a well-fed gentleman with a fine car and a big cigar who disavows any personal responsibility. He’s just doing the bidding of the land company, which is doing the bidding of the bank, and on the chain goes — all the way up to the fat cats back East. That no one is to blame puzzles poor Muley. “Well, who do we shoot?” he asks.

A similar question may be forming in the minds of more than a few Americans in 2008.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

The Boston Herald has an extraordinary three part series of News Photos Of The Year. About 120 images in all, and many as dramatic as the one above. Absolutely spectacular, and a great way to re-visit the major, and minor, events of 2008.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

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Written by Michael Vass

Just wanted to take a moment to make my readers aware of our latest photo shoot which features Ms. Ashley France. The shoot covers most of the custom designed women’s clothing available at our online store including the Wanna Ride, Respect My Mind, You’ll do, and Nothing Sexier clothing lines among many others.

Every clothing item in the video, and 1500 more, are available. There are clothes for men and women, Black, White, Hispanic/Latino, virtually every person that is a reader of the sites of M V Consulting, Inc.

Watch the video then check out the calendar and clothes. Let us know what you think.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

If in 2009, you come out of a long period of full-time work, half a lifetime of 40 or 50 hour long work weeks, you may find that sitting around at home for a few hours longer the small windows you used to get to faff-out on so many disappeared weekends, may pose something of a challenge. It will take time to learn how to waste away all that new spare time, without going out of your mind.

This story from the UK Guardian has some good advice. First, you must learn what ‘faffing’ is, and then learn how to do it, effortlessly, because you can’t put any effort at all into a good faff :

A new report says that we waste three hours a day faffing around, doing nothing in particular, pootling, dawdling, pottering, hanging about.

Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing.

Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden. Go to the shed with the intention of tidying up and instead fall asleep. Make mental notes…. Be useless.

Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.

Outside of slavery, has there ever been another period in the history of human existence where so many of the population were putting in 60 or more hours a week? Who ever imagined, standing at the dawn of the Industrial Age, that by the year 2000, people would be working longer and harder than they did in the 18th century? Of course, promising more work and longer hours is never a good way to sell any new enterprise, or revolution.

Getting your life back again will take some getting used to. Faffing without guilt, actually enjoying staring at the sky for a solid twenty or thirty minutes, without getting up, without rushing off to do something else, anything else, is a skill that must be learned. Or re-learned. But your mind and body will thank you for doing nothing, for a little while.

Remember, watching television, surfing the net, sleeping or reading doesn’t qualify as True Faffing. The point is to be or do the utterly pointless, or what we have been taught and trained to believe is pointless, day dreaming, time wasting.

Everything’s gonna be okay, I’m just having a faff.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

College photos from 1980, by Lisa Jack, of the already serving US President Barack Obama smoking pot and looking, basically, pretty wasted, were discovered before the election, but are only now seeing publication in Time Magazine :

“For a while, Jack put the negatives in a safety-deposit box, so that they could not be used until after the election, when there would be no chance they could be used for a political purpose.”

The full story of these ‘lost’ Obama photographs, plus many more pics, are here.

But would the above picture have really damaged Obama’s run for the White House? Or would their early revelation only led to more slightly uncomfortable news chat where journalists have to admit to also having smoked a fair slab of weed in their youth as well?

I doubt that photos of an extremely happy young man smoking cannabis would have harmed Obama’s election chances much at all. Most Americans are anything but hysteric about occasional cannabis use, nor do they widely object to its use as a medicine.

Any number of state and federal politicians in Australia, including leaders, have now admitted they have, sometimes deeply, inhaled. Does anybody, anywhere, really care anymore if anybody, local doctor or politician or president, smoked cannabis when they were young? It would not appear so.

The question now is will Obama open up the United States to legal, widespread use of medicinal cannabis? At one point last week, 16 of the Top 50 most popular ‘Obama, Please Make This Change’ subjects on his Change.gov website were about legal cannabis for the sick and injured.

Will Obama betray the tens of millions of true believers who know, as he did, and presumably still does, that cannabis (including hemp) is one of the most miraculous of all the plants of this planet? Will he revive dying farm economies with the hope of Hemp, for its oil, its fibre, its biofuel value, the vast protein storied in its seeds?

Will he launch a new generation of Hemp For Victory farmers and industry?

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In yet another ‘Did you have to actually do a study to know this?’ study, researchers now believe that dogs can experience jealously, and even resentment :

Do dogs feel envy? A provocative new study indicates that they do, making man’s best friend the first species after humans and primates to appear to chafe at being treated unfairly.

Aside from offering the first scientific evidence supporting what many dog lovers take for granted, the finding adds to the growing body of literature suggesting that animals, including dogs, have much richer emotional lives and more sophisticated behavior than humans have traditionally believed.

“Traditionally?” I think they mean “religiously.”

Before the new study, the only creatures other than humans for which there was evidence of anything similar to envy were monkeys and chimpanzees. When asked to return rocks to their keepers in exchange for a treat, for example, monkeys that got cucumbers essentially went on strike and started throwing the rocks and cucumbers at researchers if they saw other animals getting grapes instead.

Damn straight. They’re lucky they didn’t get handfuls of shit thrown at them.

“Every dog owner will tell you, ‘Yes, of course my dog has this.’ You see it a lot if you have two dogs. If you treat one differently, then the other one would get angry,” she said. But demonstrating it in a careful study helps dispel lingering notions that dogs and other animals are capable of only the most basic emotions, she said.

“It’s definitely very interesting, because it shows that dogs don’t just have primitive feelings like ‘I’m afraid’ or ‘I’m happy.’ This is a more higher level, deeper and profound,” she said.

What is a dog really thinking about its owner if it gets a smack? I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry? Or is the dog’s reaction more like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m gonna get you buddy. Yeah, I’ll wag my tail soon and slobber all over you, but I won’t forget this. No way. Just when you need them the most, those good shoes in the cupboard are going to get a little deposit from me. Oh yeah, Mr Slappy Hands, just you wait.’

“As time goes on, we’re collecting an astounding amount of information about the social skills that animals have for negotiating their social world,” said Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado, author of the forthcoming book “Wild Justice,” about animal morality. Bekoff noted, for example, that mice have shown signs of empathy for other mice in danger, that elephants will go out of their way to care for other injured elephants, and that coyotes will ostracize other coyotes who play unfairly.”From an evolutionary point of view, there’s very little that we have that other animals don’t have. Do I think that dogs can be envious and show resentment and jealousy? Of course I think they can,” Bekoff said.

The sense of envy probably evolved to help the animals cooperate and probably exists in other animals for which cooperation is important, such as wolves and perhaps dolphins, Range said. Understanding how animals cooperate provides insights into how cooperation evolved, she and others said.

Animals can feel and experience and presumably remember the sting of jealously, perhaps even get caught up in chilling thrill of envy. But can they plot revenge?

The whole story makes for a fascinating Sunday afternoon read.

It may also make you wonder about those occasional stories where animals kill children, like the one where a family cat suffocated a baby. What if the cat was insanely jealous at the new arrival getting all the attention, and knew exactly what it was doing?

The moral politics of dogs will be confusing enough, but are we ready to comprehend the mostly remorseless, unemphatic moral politics of cats?

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The Simpsons are people, too, an Australian judge has declared, even if they’re yellow, made of cartoon and not actually real.

Bizarre :

Cartoon characters are people too, a judge has ruled in the case of a man convicted over cartoons based on The Simpsons, in which children are shown having sex.

It’s demented, but it’s still a cartoon.

In the New South Wales Supreme Court today, Justice Michael Adams ruled that a fictional cartoon character was a “person” within the meaning of the relevant state and commonwealth laws.Alan John McEwan was appealing his February conviction for possessing child pornography and using his computer to access child pornography.

“The alleged pornography comprised a series of cartoons depicting figures modelled on members of the television animated series The Simpsons,” the judge said.

Is this cartoon, or is it real?

The cartoons showed characters such as Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson having sex.

No, it’s definitely cartoon.

McEwan was convicted and fined $3000 and placed on a good behaviour bond.

“In my view, the magistrate was correct in determining that, in respect of both the commonwealth and the NSW offences, the word ‘person’ included fictional or imaginary characters …” the judge said.

Fictional or Imaginary, meaning Not Actually Real.

“… the mere fact that the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation in some respects of a human being did not mean that such a figure was not a ‘person’.”

It’s a cartoon. It’s not a person, it’s not real people, there isn’t actually an eight year old girl called Lisa Simpson, or Bart Simpson. And they’re not actually fucking each other.

But the presentation of images showing them doing such things means the same as it would had the fictional characters been real children.

The Supreme Court judgement officially recognises sexual interaction between cartoon characters as “child pornography”.

This means McEwan was facing a possible 10 years in jail for using a computer to access child porn.

Here it is again :

…the mere fact that they were not realistic representations of human beings did not mean that they could not be considered people.

Fritz The Cat is a cartoon that shows felines fucking, constantly, smoking drugs, shooting drugs, does this mean animal welfare groups can sue to stop the distribution of Fritz The Cat because a cartoon cat is the same as a real cat?

And how will such laws deal with videos of disturbingly realistic robot children engaged in sexual acts, or being abused, being raped or assaulted? No doubt, somebody in this sometimes downright bizarre world is either working towards or already making such videos. Obviously they will be banned, because they are realistic representations of human beings, and therefore must be considered Real People. A robot child will be recognised as being as real as a human child.

If such scenarios are to become reality in our courts, and the occasional depravity of human invention means it’s only a matter of time, what then for the robot children whose abuse is deemed illegal to own, or even view?

Will a robot child have the same rights as a human child? If it is illegal to abuse children in cartoons, then how could it be anything else if the target of such horrors was a robot child, whose appearance would be so much more realistic than Bart or Lisa Simpson?

Will we see a Law & Order SVU in three or four years where they find a basement full of battery dead robot children in a mini-studio torture chamber?

What will it mean for someone’s job prospects if they had the conviction of Robo-Pedo on their permanent record?

And this is all a couple of decades before robot lawyers and robot judges get involved.

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