First bucket of cock for the year. Sorry about that!

And in magic sky fairy news, Adam Darski, lead singer for Behemoth is facing up to two years jail time in Poland for tearing a bible as part of his stage show.

Ah, this is Poland. Land of the former Pope, a land where “offending people’s religious beliefs” is a crime.

Well fuck you. That’s Poland off the visiting list then, they’d pick me up at immigration.

Update: lots more information on Blabbermouth.

For starters, we get to keep the tree and the yule log. Winter feasting is deffo a keeper. You can stuff your turkey (arf)  but the rest of it is great, even the sprouts. Goose would work, a crispy something of pork maybe or some Bambi. Just something with leftovers.

I can leave the mass-TV but a good fillum uring digestion is good. A familial forced march in the locale as a morale boost before returning to attack, well, anything else really.

Presents are good, but please, just little trinkets hand-made by starving artisans. Especially photographers.

Me, I’m pissing off and spending three weeks with some Taiwanese Buddhists.

But for you, what’s a keeper for your myth-free Winterval?

If you care anything about your freedoms, sign the petition.

Charlie Stross rants on his blog and boingboing have a good stab too.

SIGN THE PETITION.

Update: Those nasty people at the EU say no. Gotta have judicial process.

That’s good to know. Damn scientists and their evidence.

Speaking of which, A.N. Wilson got ripped a new one in the Daily Fail for preferring fairies over science. Sane Mail comments? Whoda think it?

Just read it in all its glory.

The standout paragraph for me though and one, if I could be arsed, to memorise is the litany of the Catholic churches evils:

The Crusades, the Inquisition, anti-semitism, treatment of women, missionaries (especially the knock-on wiping out of native American populations), slavery, the treatment of Gallileo, child abuse, collusion with the Nazis, collusion with Mussolini, collusion with the Croatian Ustasi, collusion with Franco, the sale of indulgences, the treatment of homosexuals, and, of course, the policy on the use of condoms and their “inability” to prevent the spread of HIV.

In the end, 268 voted for and 1,876 against from a starting point of 678 people for the motion (Catholic Church is a force for good) and 1,102 against it.

Utterly indefensible. Catholics: time to overthrow your masters.

Catholic Church braces itself for more damning revelations. The church actively colluded in protecting pedophile priests.

The Vatican’s obduracy claims another 70,000 innocent lives. And that’s just from dodgy abortions. Let’s not get started on HIV in Africa.

Still, it didn’t stop a million Spanish taking to the streets to encourage more unnecessary deaths. I really hope the Spanish government hold firm in its stance against these superstitious people.

And let’s not talk about the woman scraped to death by seashells. Oh wait, that was the 5th Century. Call off the hounds. Still the cock-hats are worried that it’ll stir up hate. Newsflash: raping children then covering up is doing fine in that department already.

They’re beginning to make me feel warm towards the clams who have been rather quiet of late.

With the pope coming to the UK, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the organisation he represents.

Recently, the vatican was forced to respond to accusations of its pathetic response to the child abuse that has been endemic in the church. The gist of the rebuttal is:

• Jewish synagogues have worse record and, oh
• The assaults were by homosexuals not pedophiles

Well, that’s all right then. Some good links in that NSS story if you care to follow them including a Catholic leader writer in the Telegraph missing the point by a long way and having apoplexy along the way.

The New Humanist adds that the Vatican says: “somewhere between 1.5% and 5% of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases”.

What. The. Fuck.

And that’s only the cases! Unreported incidents would push this number up, surely.

Tanya Gold in the Guardian adds a little African AIDS holcaust into the mix.

The pope and all he stands for is a load of cock.

Big whoop.

Massive kudos to Debbie Purdy for getting the issue this far. But can I say one thing:

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE.

There. I’ll say it: I, being of sound mind, reserve the right to terminate my miserable existence on this rock however the fuck I want.

Two things:

1. The resistance to someone choosing to end their life has Christian roots and is therefore to be laughed at and ignored. I fear no sky fairy.
2. I’m sure we can come up with a system which prevents granny from being coerced into offing herself.

Easy peasy.

I’ll declare an interest here. I’ve had a good family friend with bad diabetes, having had a stroke walk in front of a train because he felt the alternative would have left his wife of 30 years in a legal quagmire.

This needs to stop.

Lily has two main lines of argument: FAC is made up of “some really rich and successful artists” who “sell out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world”, so they can afford file sharing, and that if this state of affairs goes on, “British music will be nothing but puppets paid for by Simon Cowell”. She hammers on these quite a bit.

Well, first of all, there are a lot of people in FAC I’ve never even heard of, complete unknowns. Perhaps she only looked at the photo on the Times article and didn’t actually bother to check out their website. Being a cynical bastard, I’m inclined to think she’s just trying to manipulate people, by hiding that fact. Readers of The Cockbucket might be familiar with this technique, it’s cherry picking, pure and simple.

Second, let me bring you up to speed, Lily: British music is already nothing but puppets paid for by Simon Cowell. Have you looked at a chart in the past, oh, 30 years? Most of the independent artists have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into the limelight, and if it wasn’t for file sharing they would probably reach a total of 3 people outside their families, not that you’d care about that, because obviously you’re the British music’s Florence Fucking Nightingale.

In the last part of that article our Lily opens her heart to us, and tells of her distress to pay the huge debt she had to her record company. I almost wept. Well, dear, perhaps you should’ve read Steve Albini or Courtney Love before signing up with the cunts, right? Or did anyone point a gun to your head and force you to sign? Or could it be that the parties with the A-Listers were more important to you than “the British music”? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if I could I’d do nothing but snort coke off of £400 hookers’ tits, but if you chose to get in bed with the fat cats, then DON’T WHINE ABOUT IT, YOU FUCKING SPOILED BRAT.

After all her laments, she fails to mention whether she thinks it’s ok to cut someone off the Internet because they do illegal file sharing, which is the main point of the FAC/BASCA/MPG press release that she was initially very upset about. I guess you don’t actually have the cojones, do you, Lily? When you grow a pair and answer that in no uncertain terms, I’d also like to hear your view on copyright extension, I must’ve missed it at the time.

See also The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

This was a guest Cockbucket brought to you by someone with more passion about music than I could ever summon, Spotify premium account notwithstanding.

As I’ve said here before, I’m all for the clams being a religion. They have as much claim as any other sky-fairy worshipping loons.

However, don’t piss off the nerds, for they have skillz.