Guys , I have several email mates from the USA who are serving police , sheriff's office or retired from , they send me a lot of links all the time , I met these guys on the old Shooters.com and have been corosponding with them ever since , but I have to say that I just don't have time to look at them all and the ones I do look at tend to give my ulser a caning , I don't tend to send most of them on as I've found that many americans see this as disparigaging their country , so I only send on the milder ones
I see a lot of similarities between our countries but a lot of differences as well , for instance the level of patriotism in the USA would never catch on here , the My country right or wrong , just wouldn't work here at all
We don't think much of our politicians and we don't get much in return , our politicians are used to being abused and I think most don't take themselves all that seriously because we sure as hell don't , not long back " Big Ears " [ our prime minister ] was trying to meet people at a supermarket and several people just told him to " Fu$% off " , there is a youtube clip of it , there was another clip where he went up to a crusty old feller and the old feller told him to " Fu$% off you dopy Cu#$ " , unfortunately that clip has been removed , I especially liked the part where the federal Police minders just stood there and grinned like cheshire cats
We do give our politicians a pat on the back on the rare time they do right but we call them on all the shit they do wrong
Personally I consider the whole incarceration thing very important , especially with the level of corruption involved with the industrial prison system , one case that come to mind was where a teenager was jailed for several months for not showing proper respect for county officials and police , how is jailing some of for that a good idea ?, if he didn't have a good opinion of authorities before he now hates them with a passion [ and no , from the article it seems he was actually white ] but the local private prison had beds to fill , that judge is now serving time in one of those prisons , but most get away with it for years it seems
Bob , you are right , You cannot legislate morality , but that doesn't stop people trying to and it never works , you would think people would learn their lessons from the Volstead act , but they didn't and so they banned drugs , look how well that worked out , it wasn't just the USA who lost out on that one as the US government then went and relentlessly pressured the governments of the rest of the world to do the same , so they took a problem that wasn't and made it a worldwide problem
Hell they are still trying to ban prostitution , that has worked well for them too , every time a government bans something it just means that somewhere organized crime , corrupt police and judiciary and possibly the same politicians that banned it are making money
They can't really justify it as being for the peoples own good , hell alcohol , cigarettes and legally prescribed and taken pharmaceuticals kill many many more people and damage lifes much more than illegal drugs have ever done , hell I read a article some time back written my a well known law enforcement officer who reckoned that law enforcement have killed more users and ruined lives much more than the drugs ever could , he reckoned that drug dealers normally just kill other dealers but law enforcement isn't as selective ,
I don't know enough about the subject to know if that is any way true , but the guy seemed to have the credentials to have a better idea than me
Personally I don't believe in banning anything unless what it is negatively affects others and not just the people using it
I figure that in a free country I should be able to do anything I like as long as it doesn't hurt others and by hurt I don't mean hurt their sensibilities , I don't like drugs but I figure it's my business if I either choose to take them or not take them , the government has no business sticking their nose in it at all
By that same point I don't like the idea of Wife swapping , Bondage and S&M and a number of other sexual practices so I don't do them , that is my choice but I have no problem with other consenting adults doing it , just as long as they don't involve me in it
To me the choices are no different than the choice not to drink a certain rum
I'm a atheist , I just don't believe but I have no problem with what others believe just as long as it doesn't involve me in any way
I was talking about this to a mate a little while back and he said that taking that train of thought a step further what did I think about the people who were pushing to get the age of consent lowered and and to get Paedophilia recognised as just a different form of sexuality like gay or lesbian
I told him that they were two different things , with Paedophilia there is no mutual consent , just the same as beastiliaty , there can be no consent and as such should always be banned , personally I don't understand why the media is giving these people a chance to be heard at all , there is NO justification for those sorts of acts
But as to the lowering of the age of consent , I'm of two minds , the age of consent here in QLD is 16 , but even back in the days when I was a teenager girls were sexualy active at a younger age than boys , girls tend to mature physically and I think mentally at a younger age than boys , hell I had a mate who had his life screwed up when his girlfriend pressured him into having sex and her parents found out , seems she left her new diary out and her mother read it , [ good thing she didn't get to read the old diary ] well they had the boy , my mate through the courts and then to Westbrook [ for juvenile offenders ] there was only two months in age between them , he was a virgin and she certainly wasn't but it was he who ended up in the shit and there are numerous stories like that , as I said I'm in two minds , but I think the application of the law needs a bit more common sense
Especially when you consider that 100 years ago 13 year old girls marrying wasn't all that uncommon , trouble is that you can't make a law to encompass everyone , some people are mature enough at 14 and 15 to engage in a steady relationship but others aren't at 18 , so a bit of common sense in needed
I think that I've mentioned before the problem we had here in QLD with police corruption , but not only in the police but in the judiciary and state government , it's something I feel very strongly about , not just because we the people of QLD were being screwed over and that is a big part of it , but because I had relatives and friends who were screwed over ,
Some of the most corrupt policemen in the state were given full amnesty and allowed to stay on in the police service with no loss of rank or pay just to give evidence , some of those people are now pretty much in charge of the QPS
A schoolmate of mine who come from a police family joined up as soon as he left school and he got screwed over big time , he made complaints about the corruption and that complaint was filed away with all the rest by the police minister until he considered there to be a political will to tackle the corruption issue , he was called to give evidence , because he was honest he didn't have any deal with the commission to give evidence and he was given a real hard time by the other police he served with , the people who were giving him a hard time weren't corrupt but they considered that he had broken ranks and treated him like shit , he had to work by him self and he couldn't get back up and was sent into situations that were extremely dangerous for a team of officers let alone a single officer
He also had his flat broken into , he had by this stage lost his marriage due to the stress of it all and was living in a one room flat , in the end he just had a camp chair and camp table , TV , fridge and a hammock , no cupboards or closets as he had to come home every day and search his flat for drugs of any thing illegal , a few times he got home found his place had been broken into , so searched , found and flushed stuff just ahead of a raid by the drug squad , he even had to keep the back off his TV to make searching it easier , same with the toilet cistern lid
He sold his car and took public transport just so no one could hide contraband in his car , he complained to his bosses and was told " What do you expect " , he got abused by his inspector when he told about the break ins and raids and was told he was very lucky he wasn't charged with destroying evidence ,
In one break in they slashed his hammock and his spare uniforms , broke up his table and camp chair , pissed in his fridge and on the floor , shit on the half a pizza in the fridge and wrote DOG on the wall in human shit
His nerves were shot , he lost weight and started getting ill , his inspector told him that he needed to get out of the QPS and not to even think about trying for a medical discharge or pension of an sort and if he tried then all the shit that had come before would look like a walk in the park by comparison , this was an officer with a very good record and several commendations for bravery
This sort of thing happened to a lot of officers who gave evidence willingly , not to all them , in some stations they were very supportive of their officers but in others they were even worse , thing is word of what was happening to some of these officers seemed to be hushed up to a large degree or at least not talked about
I've heard bits and pieces from a lot of the officers I knew back then , many of them had stories about what happened to them or other officers they knew personally but didn't realise it was happening to other officers outside of their aquantance
A good mate of mine who retired a few years back and uses me as someone to talk to about it all [ he reckons telling me is cheaper than telling a therapist , although I do wish he would get a therapist as some of the stuff he tells me really screws up my ulcer ] tells me a lot of stuff as he was transferred to Headquarters as the Fitzgerald was going on
So we and the USA have a lot of the same problems , of course with the USA being so much bigger in population when you get corruption it tends to be a lot worse
A friend in the USA always used to reckon that the USA was founded on the ideal of " One man one vote " , but it didn't take long for it to be changed in reality to " One Dollar one Vote " , but he reckons with inflation it's now most probably " $10 one vote " or possibly more , he reckons that the USA has the best political system that money can buy which is saying something because every political system is for sale as is every political party
When you consider the amount of money spent on every election , doesn't matter if the election is here in Australia or in the USA , at the end of the day some one is going to be expecting a return on their money
Sorry if this post is a bit rambling and disjointed , but I've written if it a dozen or so sittings , my knees are stuffed these days and I've been doing some stuff in the shed and I can only stand for about 10 to 15 minutes at a time before I have to lay down with my leg up , so I lose my train of thought , so I apologize and hope it isn't to rambling and makes sense on some level
David
