Another week, another struggle to get to the weekend.
There's a fair amount of blogging material out there to start the week. For starters, Sir Elton speaks candidly:
"I think religion has always tried to turn hatred towards gay people," John said in the Observer newspaper's Music Monthly Magazine. "Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays."
"But there are so many people I know who are gay and love their religion," he said. "From my point of view, I would ban religion completely.
At least he says what most gays think: abolish religion. They dress it up in terms of eliminating any influence it might have in the public square, but if that were truly completely and thoroughly accomplished, the practical result is a ban on religion, as far as the gays are concerned. They'd never have to deal with it again. The fact of the matter is, religion will keep on influencing the public square as long as people can vote on things that matter, since religion influences how a person thinks and, consequently, how he votes.
I suspect Elton could sympathize with this religious leader's sentiments: Ayatollah: Thank Allah for Democrats' victory.
News to make your day complete (a euro is worth about 1.25 dollars):
Four urinals shaped like a woman's lips were sold on eBay on Sunday for a total of 5,343 euros (3,594 pounds) after their owner removed them from a public toilet in Vienna following protests that they were sexist.
I remember first reading about this nearly a year ago. It looks like China still knows how to turn a profit from its prison system:
China is thought to carry out as many as 10,000 executions a year for crimes ranging from murder to official corruption, according to Amnesty International, which called on Beijing to abolish the death penalty. Failing that, Amnesty urged authorities to disclose death-penalty numbers-information that is currently considered to be a state secret.
Death-row prisoners have become something of a medical profit center because of the sale of their "harvested" organs to foreigners needing transplants. China officially banned all types of organ purchases and sales effective July 1, but a recent undercover BBC report found the business still "thriving." The going price for a liver transplanted from an executed prisoner, the BBC said, is about $94,000-though that may be low since, at the time of the report, there was a "surplus" of organs because of the increase in executions ahead of the October 1 National Day.
That's it for now. I'm going to try to add a handful of blurbs throughout the day from now on (I never intended for this one long post to be the sole post on most days; it was supposed to be the feature post, but not the sole post). I'll see how my day goes.
