NEWS RANT The Goverment should grant Alfie's parents wishes and an update to my Oxfam rant.

OK so I am back News Ranting again

So the Home Office have denied a family's plea for there six year old boy to be given medical cannabis. So Six year old Alfie Dingley, from Kenilworth in Warwickshire, suffers up to 30 violent epileptic seizures a day. You might wonder why I am talking about this and well one of the key reasons is that I am an epileptic myself. For those of you who are not epileptics I am not going to get massively technical here but just let me tell you that having a fit sucks. You suffer not only from the fit, but from the injuries you take while falling the pain you feel in your head after, the disorientation and headaches after, its not the same for everyone but its certainly not happy happy fun time.

Anyways Alfie was taken to the Netherlands to take a cannabis-based medication in September. While he was there he was prescribed cannabis oil by a pediatric neurologist, and this saw his seizures reduce dramatically in both number, duration and severity.At one point while in the UK, Alfie had 3,000 seizures and 48 hospital visits in a year, but while abroad he went 24 days without a single attack. When you are having fits every day or practically every day when you are feeling ill because of this almost constantly you get to the point where you are just so sick of being ill, where you would look for anything to help, would do anything to help. It is hard to be a sufferer of epilepsy but as someone who had it from around the age of 6 I can tell you I think it is even harder for someones parents. Alfie's mum knows how much he suffers and knows that something could help her little boy to be happier and live a better life and yet here the home office is telling her he cant have it.

The Home Office when asked about this said that the drug "cannot be practically prescribed, administered or supplied to the public". They also added that it can only be used for research. I know some people will just say its the law and expect this to be answer enough but its about time we cut the crap here. The UK is absolutely full of drugs, Cannabis is pretty much everywhere, the police are fighting this war on drugs and they are absolutely losing. We can not hold Cannabis down, we can not stop drug dealers from making huge wads of money on it, so lets screw it all and just legalize it. Lets make it legal and tax it and actually make an on the books profit from it so the money goes somewhere decent and helps the country but more importantly so that little Alfie can get the few drops of Cannabis oil he needs a day so that he doesn't have to needlessly suffer. I think its about time we came up with a way to make other people feel our illnesses even just for a second as no one should have to tell Alfie's parents that he is not allowed the medication he needs to make his life better without having to first walk a day in Alfie's shoes without having to feel what he feels and struggle the way he struggles. All I can say to end this is that I hope things get better for Alfie somehow.

OK I also feel I need to do a quick update on my Oxfam Rant. I commented that I didn't care about the whole prostitution thing and that if people wanted to pay for that as long as it was out of there own money and not the charities money then I simply didn't care. Well it seems that what was first announced was the tip of the iceberg. If I had known more at the time then I would have said more. I have thought about revisiting this topic several times over the last few days but the story has just never stopped growing but now seemed as good a time as any to do a quick catch up.

Since I last wrote about the situation all sorts has been said there have been allegations that there were big parties thrown with prostitutes, where girls were wearing Oxfam T-shirts, running around half-naked, full on orgies, that some of the sex workers were between 14 and 16 years old and therefore below the age of consent. There were other allegations of things such as bullying, intimidation, harassment and the use of 'pornographic and illegal material' on work computers the story just seemed to grow and grow without an end. The government said they were going to look into Oxfams funding, one of there celebrity ambassadors stepped down many people stopped donating to them.

Now I don't want to go into massive depth about all of this but I just want to say that... Yes bad things have happened in regard to Oxfam if you want to you can read up on them in far more detail on various news sites as I don't want to do a massive in depth piece on it, but what I do want to say is that some people have been shockingly quick to stick the boot into Oxfam in general. Now stop and think about it Oxfam is huge and many many people work for them, they have lots of volunteers working in shops doing there best to help the cause while also gaining some experience for themselves, yes some people have done wrong in one way or another but lets not tar everyone with the same brush. Yes I condemn anyone who has generally been a dick but lets not be a dick about those who have been doing nothing but good.

Well thats it for now join me for more News Rant basically the next time something in the news causes me to want to moan and go on a bit.

NEWS RANT: The Oxfam Situation and Peters been a bad wabbit.

Oxfam's deputy chief executive has resigned over the handling of a sex scandal involving aid workers. So whats all of this about in short well Oxfam (which is a British Charity for those reading this from other parts of the world) is accused of concealing the findings of an inquiry into claims staff used prostitutes while delivering aid in Haiti in 2011.

Penny Lawrence said she was "ashamed" and takes full responsibility. I personally don't think she should but we will get into that later. Part of Oxfams funding is gotten through donations but they actually get more money from the government. Oxfam which denies a cover-up has met with the International Development Secretary in a bid to prevent its government funding from being cut.

A million and one things have been said about this whole situation, apparently this was being investigated but kind of on the hush hush. The government is now wanting all of the gory details and from my point of view it is wanting Oxfam to get on its knees and beg which if you ask me is pretty rich when you look at some of the things politicians have been caught doing. It was only just before Christmas when seven Conservative MP's were facing various investigations one of which had allegedly acted inappropriately  towards a young activist, as well as having“extreme” pornography on one of his government computers. Add to this the fact we used to have a Prime Minister who apparently put his John Tomas in a dead pigs mouth and this feels like it is all a pointless witch hunt.

I have but two questions I want answered about this whole situation and those questions are who paid for the prostitutes, and did the people using them pay out of there own money or was government money or donation money used? If they paid themselves then hey thats there own business and I don't really want to hear about it. If they spend there time working in other countries helping other people get valuable aid then what they do in there free time is there own business.

I wouldnt personally pay to have sex with a prostitute but I dont feel I have the right to take the moral high ground and to tell people that they cant do that or to say I am better than someone who does, that would make me a judgmental asshole.

OK so thats not the only thing in the news I have felt the need to talk about I have also felt the need to talk about Peter Rabbit. The makers of the new film Peter Rabbit have apologized after facing a backlash over their depiction of a character's allergy. OK so obviously the Peter Rabbit film is based on the books of the same name. In the film there is a scene in which a character who suffers a blackberry allergy is pelted with them by a gang of bunnies. Now I need to admit I haven't seen the film yet but I know the character pelted is the son of the man who turned Peter's dad into a pie. So I am going to go out on a limb here and imagine that most likely he is the bad guy of the piece and if he is anything like his old man then he wants to turn the bunnies into a pie, so this pelting is most likely in self defense and also its in a film and being done by cartoon rabbits so its also incredibly fictional.

Well apparently campaigners condemned the scene and some Twitter users adopted the hashtag #boycottpeterrabbit. The charity Kids with Food Allergies Foundation said in a Facebook post "food allergy 'jokes' are harmful to our community". Well I don't have a food allergy so maybe I just don't get this whole thing, I do however have a whole heap of other issues all of which I am perfectly willing to take the piss out of. Yet apparently a petition calling on Sony Pictures to apologize also attracted thousands of signatures. OK so now even if someone wants to murder you and eat you then you cant take advantage of a medical condition they have to save your life because that would be wrong? It is getting to the point where you cant make a joke about anything in even the most gentle way without somebody trying there darn best to be offended by it.

When you get down to it both of these stories are about people choosing to be offended, they are getting all mad and getting there panties in a bunch, what they are actually wanting is to impose there will, they don't want anyone else to have the freedom to laugh at something they personally don't find funny or to do something they wouldn't do. Well as always I hope this gives you all something to think about.