This is a very good article that de-bunks anti-porn myths. Turns out that porn isn't as bad as Jerry Falwell wants us to believe. And it's not confined to perverts. As the author points out, "With 800 million videos being sold and rented in North America each year either porn is loved by everyone, or everyone’s a pervert. Paul Fishbein (founder of AVN magazine) said that anti-porn protestors want us to believe that the porn industry serves 800 guys who each rent a million movies a year. He’s right." Also, "Porn is worth $10B a year in the US alone. If the moral standards of our society say porn is wrong where’s the money coming from?" The belief that porn is bad comes from a morality that says sex is bad. The only reason Pat Robertson condones sex at all is because it's sort of necessary for the continued existence of humanity. Also because the Bible says it's okay, but only for reproduction! And Pat Robertson would never contradict what the Bible says. But he would embellish things, inventing crazy interpretations of things that are already in there. Which is better, though: a society that relieves its sexual frustrations through pornography, or a society that represses its sexual frustrations and then lets them out in inappropriate ways at inappropriate times? A lot of Christians -- not just Evangelicals -- would like to pretend that sexuality doesn't exist, that if you repress it, it goes away. Turns out that it's not like that at all! But some Christians with an axe to grind will invent bogus think-tanks and "scientific" research institutions to perpetuate the lie that pornography leads to moral degredation which, using a trope that dates back to the earliest Greek dramatists, leads to physical degredation.

This is a very good article that explains how the current "War on Terror" began with Ronald Reagan. Who do you think gave Saddam Hussein all those weapons? He sure as heck didn't invent them. They were given to him by the Reagan Administration, which really didn't like the Iranians because of that whole hostage thing. And the fact that Ayatollah Kohmeini was a crazy Islamic dictator that we couldn't control, unlike the Shah, who was a crazy secular dictator that we could control. So, in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted for most of the 1980s, Reagan supplied Iraq with weapons that it could use to fight Iran. Supporters of the invasion of Iraq say that Saddam gassed the Kurds back in the '80s. Guess who gave him that gas? The same guy who starred in Bedtime for Bonzo. It's quite convenient that supporters of the war in Iraq can block out all memory of a time when we supported Saddam, who was obviously a crazy, cruel dictator back then, but it was perfectly acceptable in the 1980s, because he was on "our side" then. Him and a half a million other crazy dictators who despised "freedom," "liberty" (and the other empty words that the Bush Administration spews from Scott McClellan every other day) but at least supported us against the Soviet Union. People who support the Iraq War need to read a book and understand why we really went to Iraq. And they're not allowed to use the words "freedom," "liberty," or "terror(ism)." Why? Because those words have nothing to do with the reason we went to Iraq.

Meta-blogs are fine, but too many of them get irritating. Whenever I link to another interesting article online, I try to comment on it a little bit so that this place doesn't turn into Fark. I also think my Photoshop skills are better than Fark's. Then again, a blind monkey with no hands can win a Fark Photoshop contest, so I don't think I need to worry. All the monkey needs to do is know how to poorly paste and stretch a pixelated image of Admiral Akbar or a Domo-kun or any other character from the latest lame Internet in-joke, and it wins a million points.

Both of these major stories came from Metafilter. Neo-cons make me sick.