No, responsible people are stuck speculating about what’s going to happen to him now. Responsible people like President Obama:

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know: no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world, and the next.

You might expect that I’d be disapproving when the President starts confidently asserting what’s going to happen in “the next” world. But you’d be wrong. In fact, I quickly realized that “Next-World Justice” is the key to otherwise-intractable political reforms.

For instance, I feel pretty confident that in a generation or two, assuming we haven’t gone extinct, that we’ll look back on the current-day practice of imprisoning users and sellers of recreational drugs as some sort of medieval barbarism.

However, my “let’s legalize drugs, so that people don’t have to be locked behind bars for engaging in the same recreational activities you did” letters to the White House have not managed to elicit a response. (Unless you count the autographed picture of Bo, which I don’t.)

But my new approach (“Drug users will suffer enough in the next world, so can’t we leave them alone in this one?”) seems like it has a much better chance of working, as it’s worded in Obama’s own language.

For my next act, I’ll try to convince the CPSC that people who sell pre-1985 children’s books will get their just deserts in the next world too!

And if there’s one man you can count on to take a firm stand against pleasure-providing, consensual activities, it’s the Pope.

Which is why it’s not terribly surprising to find him weighing in against drug use:

In particular, the Holy Father noted Mexico’s work to eliminate “violence, drug trafficking, and inequality and poverty, which are fertile ground for delinquency.”

I can already hear you objecting that the Pope is only opposed to drug “trafficking,” not drug use, to which I will simply point out that without drug “trafficking,” there is no drug use, except maybe for drugs that you grow yourself in your closet using a hydroponic setup that you lied to the sales clerk and told was for “legitimate vegetables,” drugs that you made in a trailer in the woods from common household items you bought at supermarkets and hardware stores, and model airplane cement.

At this point you might be wondering why exactly the Pope cares about drug use. After all, the College of Cardinals has been known to smoke some wacky stuff during papal elections, and Benedict is himself supposed to have experimented in the past with Nazi crank. And you’d think that as a well-known Cypress Hill fan, he’d have more appreciation for the “bubonic chronic.”

Well, it’s possible that nostalgia-minded priests are encouraged by the parallels between the War on Drugs and the Inquisition. Also, drugs have “an obvious affiliation with the desires of Satan,” especially his desire to eat at White Castle. And probably the Church views the War on Drugs as a useful proxy for its war against Santa Muerte.

According to the internet, though, it’s primarily because Pope Benedict is the antichrist, who will necessarily support the drug war:

“If cannabis was one of the main ingredients of the ancient anointing oil _ and receiving this oil is what made Jesus the Christ and his followers Christians, then persecuting those who use cannabis could be considered anti-Christ,” Mr Bennett concludes.

End times could be near! I’ve already picked out which house I’m moving into after the rapture, but have you?

The septic fight began in late 2006 when the executive director of the Cambria County Sewage Enforcement Agency, Deborah Sedlmeyer, found that human waste at the schoolhouse, where 18 children were taught, was being collected in a 50-gallon metal drum under an outhouse

“It was overrunning the barrels,” Ms. Sedlmeyer said, and it was being dumped, untreated, onto nearby fields.

The Swartzentrubers agreed to improve the outhouses, adding a larger, 250-gallon holding tank and treating the waste with lime.

But they refused to follow state law, which called for installing a 5,000-gallon precast concrete tank and allowing someone certified by the state to use an electronic meter to test the waste’s chemical content.

The elders had determined that use of a precast tank was too modern — they want to make the vat themselves — as was the electronic meter and the requirement that they obtain certification to do the testing.

Perhaps, though, their refusal to use the color orange makes them a bit too anti-modern for your tastes. In which case why not start your own Amish sect? You’ll still get the ACLU on your side, and you can decide which laws are “too modern” and which ones aren’t.

For instance, if I were to start my own Amish sect (the “Rolltreppenbenutzungshinweise Amish”), we would probably decide that the following laws were “too modern”:

• marijuana prohibition
• speed limits
• income tax
• the DMCA
• Campaign Finance Reform
• Stimulus 2009

We’d start a farm somewhere in Pennsylvania, grow weed, drive as fast as we want, keep our income, circumvent DRM, single-handedly finance fringe political candidates, and not piss away a trillion dollars of our neighbors money.

That sounds kind of good, actually! Who’s in?