It's goodbye for a week

Australian War Cemetery Villers-Brettoneux.

The Australian Nincompoop Party which governs the country (after a fashion) has given up on the Internet filter scheme. They are still going to introduce it but accept that it will not work. As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald

“In an official response to parliamentary questions on notice released yesterday, Senator Conroy said he had attended an hour-long demonstration of filter circumvention on 5 June 2009.

He was shown how to get around the ISP-level filter using free proxy network TOR and Virtual Private Network (VPN) techniques at the Enex TestLab in Victoria.

Although Enex expected "technically competent" users to be able to circumvent the filter, Conroy said monitoring circumvention attempts would not be required by the Government.

"ISPs will not be required to block circumvention attempts by their customers or end users," he said.

While he said it would be "irresponsible" of the Government to publish circumvention techniques, the Government took no measures to prevent other organizations from doing so.”

‘Technically competent” means basically anyone over 10 years old who uses the internet. There will be hundreds - if not thousands - of sites telling people how to circumvent the filter. I may even run one of my own.

Euthanasia advocates are running ‘masterclasses’ to teach senior citizens how to get information online about this subject and yes - I kid you not - Euthanasia is one of the subjects that the government desperately does not want its citizens to know about.

To the extent that - and again I kid you not - it is illegal in Australia to discuss euthanasia on the telephone or Internet. This is because the god botherers think that no matter that we may be very old and very sick and an very dying and unable to get relief from pain - god wants us to suffer until the last gasping moment of our miserable, shuddering, leaking, dribbling existence.

He does this because he is a kind and merciful god who wants us to endure unbearable suffering so that we will appreciate it more when we are summoned into his company by trumpets and massed choirs and can drink beer and play pinochle all day eavery day.

I really hope that there are chicks in Dirndls serving the beer.

This would all be hilarious except that and has real and visceral consequences and this nonsense is perpetrated by nutters who think that there is apparently an invisible man who lives in the sky and is responsible for the ghastly shambles that is planet earth which is full of poison and hatred and where the religious kill each other in droves and molest small children and subjugate women and spread hatred across the globe.

But he loves us and wants us all to be with him - wherever that it is (I think it may be Kansas or Oklahoma) as soon as we have suffered sufficiently on earth.

My son David arrived on Saturday and on Monday we are off to Caen where we will collect my daughter Melissa who will arrive there from Paris. We are going to visit the Normandy in invasion beaches and then go to the Somme to spend a few days mooching about the WW1 battlefields.

My father’s brother was killed at Pozieres in 1916 and another relative was killed in 1918. It is a sad and sombre place but a must see for many Australians. 60,000 Australian soldiers died in WW1 - most of them in France.

This means the you will not get a Blog for a week. Eat your hearts out.