Abusing the News

Simon Cowell is Sick

2010-02-03T21:38:00.003Z

Don't be rude... not that kinda sick - the type where you ring your boss and pretend to have a stuffy nose (when you're nursing a hangover) kinda sick. The man we all love to hate has the flu - probably the "real" flu - not man flu, but who knows? Influenza is a serious viral illness - I've had it twice - it can and sometimes does kill.

Now, to Simon Cowell.

This is a guy not known for his tact:

To a Pop Idol contestant: "Let me throw a mathematical dilemma at you - there's 500 left, well how come the odds of you winning are a million to one?"

Ironically, the odds could really be 1,000,000:1 against - the contestant was correct and Cowell in typically smug self-confidence was being a prime prick.

Think of a two-horse race. One horse is a prime thoroughbred, the other a nag fit for the knacker's yard? Who's going to win?

By direct equivalence to Cowell's quote this is a 50:50 split. We all know that no right-minded bookie would give odds on the old nag... but there's still a chance (albeit a slim one) that the racehorse could actually break a leg, have a stroke, etc. at any moment. We just don't know: and that's why people gamble.

Cowell is good at making money - lots of it - but as Gordon "Sting" Sumner recently observed, his shows really consist of judges with no discernible talent telling us what we want to hear. Cowell is really a modern-day pied piper. One contestant recently made Youtube when he was dragged away by security guards after being compared to a buzz-saw. Cowell and co. said he couldn't sing...

But does that matter?

Ali Campbell can't sing for shit. His 1983 reggae rendition of Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine" (with UB40) sounds to me like tomcat being held by the tail and flung around Hulk Hogan's head at varying speed.

This didn't stop the single hitting number 1 in the UK chart and being a massive hit elsewhere.

Sting - in his "Police" days - had what I can only describe as a unusual voice yet the trio sold records by the million - Walking on the Moon and Every Breath You Take being a couple of my favourites.

Slip back through pop history and listen if you will to: The Sex Pistols, Dire Straits, David Byrne (Talking Heads), Morrisey (The Smiths), Fergal Sharkey (The Undertones), The Pouges..., Lena Lovitch the list goes on and on.

Not one of these guys can sing but they could and can entertain.

The question is not one of what can we do, that's already out of our hands, but what can be done. In time, Cowell will fade, but what has to happen is for our regulators to pull their fingers out of their arse and stop people like Cowell presenting us with this stuff - and making a fucking mint out of it.

The competition commission has a fit when an American outfit wants to take over a British one - say Cadbury's - yet when TV is paying Simon Cowell to put this stuff on the box and giving him carte blanche say over what's good and what isn't then music has become a dictatorship where Cowell is no better than Napoleon or Stalin. Cowell can't loose - he selects whatever he wants and the public do the real work for him; and then go out and buy into this shit like sheep.

All music is suffering as a result.

French call Pope an Idiot

2009-03-18T16:24:00.003Z

Accoring to the BBC today, "The Roman Catholic Church says marital fidelity and sexual abstinence are the best way to prevent the spread of HIV"

and goes on to quote the virginal spiritual leader of millions as descrbing HIV/AIDS as, "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem", suggesting the the solution lay in "spiritual and human awakening" and "friendship for those who suffer".

Well fuck you very much.

AIDS is a horrible, vicious killer that you know absolutely nothing about.

Stick to worshiping your invisible sky fairy and pretending that it matters and keep your nose out of how women (and men) protect themselves from being consigned to a horrible, slow death.

Effective and complete condom use could have even prevented Jade Goody's cancer: and you should keep your fucking idiot dark age solutions to yourself.

About Time, Too!

2009-03-11T14:06:00.002Z

Not before time (in fact, long overdue) the BBC has an article which explains why statistics are so fucking misleading - particularly in the media and from government.

Michael Blastland's article, here is very good and has a step-by-step guide to demonstrating the simple maths behind the sort of everyday shite the people over at the Daily Fail wind the middle classes up with!

In other news, I'm quiet right now because I have a demanding day job and more demanding business partner who will spank my botty if she catches me blogging again... at least until I finish Faircycle.com ;-)

I'm also waiting for Jade Goody to pass over because the news is so full of her these days that there's very little worthy of a good piss take and I don't want to join the throngs of other bloggers saying how good/bad she is. It's a dichotomy, I know, but someone has to have it.

Oh No, Not Again!

2009-03-01T14:24:00.001Z

In my upcoming book (it’s been upcoming for years because I also have to eat) I made reference to a “think-tank” in America called the Discovery Institute [http://www.discovery.org/] and quipped that the only thing it has actually discovered is how to make monkeys from apes: a reference both to the old saying “Making a monkey out of someone”.

Humans are apes related to gorillas and chimps more than we are to gibbons or macaques; yet in common American parlance apes are also alluded to as monkeys: perhaps a trip of language - (you say potato, I say solanum tuberosum). Many Americans - and an increasing number of often influential westerners can’t seem to grasp this simple fact.

Evolution doesn’t have a plan any more than it has a purpose. It just is and for some people that’s just not acceptable because it doesn’t fit within their ordered worlds where things have to happen by cause, effect and design. By anthropomorphising nature, they infer an influence were there simply isn’t one. Former British Prime Minster, Tony Blair and Sir Peter Vardy of the Emmanuel Schools Foundation are two such men of enormous power and wealth.

This becomes a problem when such people start to leverage their ideas into vulnerable minds and thanks to Blair and his toadies in Middlesbrough, Vardy has managed to buy up several schools in Northern England: and today he is after another.

Vardy and Middlesbrough council have already made monkeys out of the people of Coulby Newham but with your help, they might be prevented from doing so again.

The full consultation is here:http://consult.middlesbrough.gov.uk/portal/el/abscc and I would urge free thinking people to write and inform Middlesbrough of the true nature of the Emmanuel Schools Foundation and its links with neo-conservative America.

It's My Pension and Screw the Lot of You!

2009-02-26T21:47:00.002Z

Dear Lord Myners,

You telephoned me yesterday and asked me to consider voluntarily taking a material reduction in my pension entitlement as a "gesture" to acknowledge the level of Government support being made to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

You highlighted that the absence of such a gesture would give rise to significant adverse media comment.

I outlined to you my view of the matter, but as I had not been expecting your call and as you expressly requested me to do so, I undertook to reflect on the matter again.

You emphasised that I would need to provide you with an answer ahead of the publication of the Group's annual report and financial statements sometime next week.

It came therefore as something of a surprise to find that both details of forthcoming 2008 financial statement disclosures relating to my pension and the substance of our telephone conversation had been placed in the public domain a few hours after we spoke.

In the circumstances, I feel that an earlier response to your request is necessary, and the purpose of this letter is to provide that.

Whilst my pension is the current focus of attention, there were a number of other aspects of my departure from RBS which need to be considered at the same time, particularly in the context of "gestures" and appropriate behaviour.

My contract of employment provided for a 12 month notice period, which I voluntarily waived in October of last year.

This amounted to a loss of 1 years' (sic) salary, and I discussed this with you at the time, when you indicated that it was both an appropriate and sufficient recognition of the circumstances.

Subsequent to this, you approached the chairman of the group remuneration committee to suggest that I should waive certain share related awards which would otherwise have vested upon my leaving the group.

Whilst difficult to value with precision, these had a value equivalent to about 3 months' salary at that time.

During these discussions, I am told that the topic of my pension was specifically raised with you by both the chairman of the group remuneration committee, and the group chairman, and you indicated that you were aware of my entitlement, and that no further "gestures" would be required.

On this basis, I agreed to waive my entitlement to the share related awards and proceeded to subscribe for my full allocation of shares in the ensuing share issue.

Like you, I believed that these gestures were appropriate in the circumstances, and sufficient, and revisiting the position today, I believe that they remain so.

I accept responsibility for that which I was responsible for, and recognise that my actions must be consistent with this.

I believe that they have been, and to voluntarily accept a reduction in a pension entitlement which has been built up over many years and in other employments in addition to RBS, is not warranted.

It is important to recognise that my pension arrangements have not fundamentally altered since I joined the group in 1998.

Whilst the quantum of the "pension pot" figure has increased, this is principally as a result of the assumption used last year about retiring at age 60 no longer being appropriate. The amount which I am due to receive as a pension continues to be calculated in a manner consistent with prior years.

Whilst I suspect that you will not now agree with it, I hope you can understand my rationale for declining your request to voluntarily reduce my pension entitlement.

In conclusion, since our private conversation yesterday is now in the public domain, I have no objection to the complete content of this letter being made public.

Yours sincerely,

Sir Fred Goodwin

-------- Now Lord Myners' Reply --------

Dear Sir Fred,

I am replying to your letter of earlier today, in which you informed me of your decision not to volunteer a reduction in your pension. I consider this unfortunate and unacceptable.

As I made clear yesterday in our phone call, I think such an act would be an appropriate recognition of the failings of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) under your tenure and the subsequent support the government has provided.

As I have already made clear, it was only last week that the Government became aware that the decision of the previous Board of RBS may have been a discretionary choice.

Once we became aware of this issue, UK Financial Investments (UKFI) has, on behalf of the government, been vigorously pursuing with the new group chairman whether there is any scope for clawing back some or all of your pension and whether, at the point the Board made their decision, it was made clear to the then remuneration committee and board that the scale of the pension payment was discretionary, as it now proves to be.

On the other points you raise in your letter, it is true that I expressed concerns over your 12-month notice period and certain share-related awards.

I welcomed your decision then to waive both these amounts.

That did not amount to approval of your pension arrangements given that, as I have outlined, I was unaware of any scope for discretion.

I do not agree with your rationale for declining my request that you voluntarily reduce your pension.

And indeed I hope that on reflection you will now share my clear view that the losses reported today by the bank which you ran until October cannot justify such a huge award.

Yours Sincerely,

Lord Myners

Gert Wilder's Speech

2009-02-16T15:14:00.002Z

Despicable as Geert Wilders might be, the truth is we need people like him to stop us falling asleep on the job. Jaqui Smith might have kept him out of the country, but like (or unlike) Geert, I believe in the right to free speech - and in so keeping, here is the speech he was due to make to the Lords.

London, Feb. 12, 2009

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you Lord Pearson and Lady Cox for showing Fitna, and for your gracious invitation. While others look away, you, seem to understand the true tradition of your country, and a flag that still stands for freedom.

This is no ordinary place. This is not just one of England’s tourist attractions. This is a sacred place. This is the mother of all Parliaments, and I am deeply humbled to speak before you.
The Houses of Parliament is where Winston Churchill stood firm, and warned – all throughout the 1930’s – for the dangers looming. Most of the time he stood alone.

In 1982 President Reagan came to the House of Commons, where he did a speech very few people liked. Reagan called upon the West to reject communism and defend freedom. He introduced a phrase: ‘evil empire’. Reagan’s speech stands out as a clarion call to preserve our liberties. I quote: If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.

What Reagan meant is that you cannot run away from history, you cannot escape the dangers of ideologies that are out to destroy you. Denial is no option.

Communism was indeed left on the ash heap of history, just as Reagan predicted in his speech in the House of Commons. He lived to see the Berlin Wall coming down, just as Churchill witnessed the implosion of national-socialism.

Today, I come before you to warn of another great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, the end of democracy. It is not a religion, it is a political ideology. It demands your respect, but has no respect for you.

There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is build on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never go away. First, there is Quran, Allah’s personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect.

Islam means submission, so there cannot be any mistake about it’s goal. That’s a given. The question is whether the British people, with its glorious past, is longing for that submission.

We see Islam taking off in the West at an incredible speed. The United Kingdom has seen a rapid growth of the number of Muslims. Over the last ten years, the Muslim population has grown ten times as fast as the rest of society. This has put an enormous pressure on society. Thanks to British politicians who have forgotten about Winston Churchill, the English now have taken the path of least resistance. They give up. They give in.
Thank you very much for letting me into the country. I received a letter from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, kindly disinviting me. I would threaten community relations, and therefore public security in the UK, the letter stated. For a moment I feared that I would be refused entrance. But I was confident the British government would never sacrifice free speech because of fear of Islam. Britannia rules the waves, and Islam will never rule Britain, so I was confident the Border Agency would let me through. And after all, you have invited stranger creatures than me. Two years ago the House of Commons welcomed Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh, linked to Al Qaeda. He was invited to Westminster by Lord Ahmed, who met him at Regent’s Park mosque three weeks before. Mr. Rideh, suspected of being a money man for terror groups, was given a SECURITY sticker for his Parliamentary visit.

Well, if you let in this man, than an elected politician from a fellow EU country surely is welcome here too. By letting me speak today you show that Mr Churchill’s spirit is still very much alive. And you prove that the European Union truly is working; the free movement of persons is still one of the pillars of the European project.

But there is still much work to be done. Britain seems to have become a country ruled by fear. A country where civil servants cancel Christmas celebrations to please Muslims. A country where Sharia Courts are part of the legal system. A country where Islamic organizations asked to stop the commemoration of the Holocaust. A country where a primary school cancels a Christmas nativity play because it interfered with an Islamic festival. A country where a school removes the words Christmas and Easter from their calendar so as not to offend Muslims. A country where a teacher punishes two students for refusing to pray to Allah as part of their religious education class. A country where elected members of a town council are told not to eat during daylight hours in town hall meetings during the Ramadan. A country that excels in its hatred of Israel, still the only democracy in the Middle-East. A country whose capitol is becoming ‘Londonistan’.

I would not qualify myself as a free man. Four and a half years ago I lost my freedom. I am under guard permanently, courtesy to those who prefer violence to debate. But for the leftist fan club of islam, that is not enough. They started a legal procedure against me. Three weeks ago the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ordered my criminal prosecution for making ‘Fitna’ and for my views on Islam. I committed what George Orwell called a ‘thought crime’.

You might have seen my name on Fitna’s credit role, but I am not really responsible for that movie. It was made for me. It was actually produced by Muslim extremists, the Quran and Islam itself. If Fitna is considered ‘hate speech’, then how would the Court qualify the Quran, with all it’s calls for violence, and hatred against women and Jews? Mr. Churchill himself compared the Quran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Well, I did exactly the same, and that is what they are prosecuting me for.

I wonder if the UK ever put Mr. Churchill on trial.

The Court’s decision and the letter I received form the Secretary of State for the Home Department are two major victories for all those who detest freedom of speech. They are doing Islam’s dirty work. Sharia by proxy. The differences between Saudi-Arabia and Jordan on one hand and Holland and Britain are blurring. Europe is now on the fast track of becoming Eurabia. That is apparently the price we have to pay for the project of mass immigration, and the multicultural project.

Ladies and gentlemen, the dearest of our many freedoms is under attack. In Europe, freedom of speech is no longer a given. What we once considered a natural component of our existence is now something we again have to fight for. That is what is at stake. Whether or not I end up in jail is not the most pressing issue. The question is: Will free speech be put behind bars?

We have to defend freedom of speech.

For the generation of my parents the word ‘London’ is synonymous with hope and freedom. When my country was occupied by the national-socialists the BBC offered a daily glimpse of hope, in the darkness of Nazi tyranny. Millions of my country men listened to it, illegally. The words ‘This Is London’ were a symbol for a better world coming soon. If only the British and Canadian and American soldiers were here.

What will be transmitted forty years from now? Will it still be ‘This Is London’? Or will it be ‘this is Londonistan’? Will it bring us hope, or will it signal the values of Mecca and Medina? Will Britain offer submission or perseverance? Freedom or slavery?

The choice is ours.

Ladies and gentlemen,

We will never apologize for being free. We will never give in. We will never surrender.

Freedom must prevail, and freedom will prevail.

Thank you very much.

Geert Wilders MP
Chairman, Party for Freedom (PVV)
The Netherlands

Chris Brown Got God (After Beating Up Girlfriend)

2009-02-16T12:15:00.005Z

It's widely reported that R&B star, Chris Brown got into a fist fight with his (then?) girlfriend the singer, Rihanna. A week later, after much press speculation he's all contrite about it and hoping it will all blow over.

"Words cannot begin to express how sorry and saddened I am over what transpired. I am seeking the counselling of my pastor, my mother and other loved ones and I am committed, with God's help, to emerging a better person."

Ah ha! So his invisible friend is going to make it all better. He goes on to say (in rather longer terms) how he's upset that the media is not on his side.

"Much of what has been speculated or reported on blogs and/or reported in the media is wrong.

"While I would like to be able to talk about this more, until the legal issues are resolved, this is all I can say except that I have not written any messages or made any posts to Facebook, on blogs or any place else.

"Those posts or writings under my name are frauds.”

Angel-faced Mr Brown isn't looking so smart now as it's been widely reported that Rhianna was so badly beaten that she has had to withdraw from the Grammys. For his part, Chris was being interviewed by the police in regards to the incident during the ceremony and apart from being reportedly remorseful, has declined to make a full statement.

His father, Clinton provided this wisdom:

"This is unfortunate, this stumble, this situation," he said. "Hopefully, he will get past it. We all have our shortcomings. We all trip."

Indeed we do, Mr Brown. Thankfully, most of us don't stumble so badly that we have to arrest our fall by repeatedly beating our girlfriends with our fists.

Fitna: Studio Cut

2009-02-15T11:55:00.004Z

Fitna - edited, shortened, refined and sharpened from a bunt mallet to a surgical scalpel by Reza Moradi of the Council of Ex Muslims.

Better than Wilder's orginal, yet just as provocative. Not suitable for young viewers due to extremely violent content.

Hat-tip to Mediawatchwatch.org.

Oxymorons...

2009-02-13T11:51:00.006Z

Creationist Idiocy posted this beautiful quote from Charles Darwin yesterday, although it could equally have come from any scientist or educated person.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

Blind, dogmatic ignorance delivers an air of confidence that is difficult to penetrate, particularly when the person speaking utters it with sincerity. Charles Darwin never claimed to have all the answers, yet people of faith who, by their nature, don't require proof for their claims, think they have all the answers.

It is with a heavy heart that I thumbed the electronic pages of a magazine which is, through no fault of its own, in danger of becoming an oxymoron*:

Scientific American

This is not to say that a lot of Americans are not scientifically minded, just that a fairly substantial majority are becoming so devoid of understanding the tenets of science the country is heading for disaster.

Christopher Marty writes in yesterday's issue under the headline:

Darwin on a Godless Creation: "It's like confessing to a murder"

and follows with:

"200 years after the birth of Charles Darwin, his theory of evolution still clashes with the creationist beliefs of some organized religions."

But glosses over the fact that the worst culprits in western society are his own countrymen - and lots of them too. I'm deeply ashamed to admit that recent surveys also seem to suggest that similar attitudes are taking foothold in secular "blighty" too.

I'm a marketeer these days. I used to be a computer specialist, but my job has moved on from there simply because there is too much competition from hungry young graduates. This is natural - we see it happen in nature as the young turks take on the old guard at their own game and beat them.

Learning marketing, something I've always been interested in or on the very fringes of due to the way my career has taken me, has taught me some interesting lessons. Not least that the louder you shout, the more people hear your message.

In practical terms, that means money.

The message isn't important insomuch as it doesn't matter what you're selling. Marketing guru, Seth Godin observed this point in remarking that even Darwin "marketed" evolution.

Most problems can be solved if you throw enough money at them: and the Americans have lots of it. Worse, the nature of faith means that people who make a living spreading pernicious bullshit about Darwinism have got an almost limitless stream of it.

Even Microsoft, one of the world's richest corporations, doesn't have a bottomless pocket: deep, sure, but even Microsoft has a budget.

Imagine what you could do if you had unlimited resources to promote your idea. Now consider the possibility that your message was exactly what people wanted to hear. To a guy in marketing, that the sort of account we can only dream of: yet it's precisely what churches have; particularly in America where the most extreme form of protestantism is to be found in any significant size.

By way of irony, another oxymoron is a rich scientist.

Scientists rarely achieve fortune although a select few, such as Richard Dawkins, do achieve dubious fame or infamy depending on which side of the fence you're on. It's fair to say that Prof. Dawkins is personally wealthy, but that pales against the bankrolls of many American Evangelists and pales against the might of the Discovery Institute and others like it.

Scientists have to rely on superlative arguments to win backing and that's why they fail so often when face with the almighty ignorance afforded by self-delusion and stupidity.

More after the jump...

Still more...

and if you can stand any more of this bullshit...

Now, go give your grey matter a nice warm lavage before commenting. Clearly, we can't censor these people - that would be wrong - but we have to stand up to them. The future depends on people knowing the difference between sincere faith and delusion. Darwin left plenty of room for god (even though I see no purpose for one) because we still don't have a way to explain the spontaneous creation of DNA. Yet.

The trouble is (as these guys admirably demonstrate in their moronic ruminations) that if you just throw in some "technical" sounding phrases, most people will be bamboozled and others convinced. They won't let a few facts get in the way of their ideas - lies in fact. What bothers me most is that as Christians, they are required to be honest - yet they are not.

Evolution is a fact and has even been demonstrated in the lab - not that these morons would let you in on that.

*Oxymoron. A couplet or phrase in which two contradictory ideas or words are conjoined, often with humorous intent: military intelligence; honest politician; rich scientist.

WASPish Ignorance

2009-02-12T15:12:00.007Z

How stupid can American's be - not all of them, of course, but by way of celebrating the man who not only gave us evolution but the entire field of biology, a bunch of ignorant WASPs are going to have a lie about how science has proved his idea wrong.

Science hasn't proven Darwin's basic ideas wrong, but it has refined them.

Of course, this triumvirate of bullshit isn't going to take that sitting down. They all sit around looking smug and talking nonsense.

According to these bozos, "Darwin thought that a turtle could become a reptile." A turtle is a fucking reptile!

Later in this clip, Steve Myers (the anchor) says the Bible (yeah, THAT Bible) talks "scientifically" he's obviously clueless about science. Not one of the three speakers in this clip has any apparent qualification in science, yet:

Mario Seiglie continues, "Darwin got it wrong and the Bible got it right."

(Seriously, I can't take much more of this...)

But I did - and made it to the end of the video where some fuckwit, voicing over the image of a chimp, calls it a MONKEY.

Happy Darwin Day everyone, I'm off to find my towel.

Now fuck it. I'm outa here.

Somebody Please, Shoot Me

2009-02-11T13:03:00.008Z

Hat tip to Luke O' Dell for unearthing this piece of thoughtless drivel in the Sydney Morning Herald. which features an extract from Tom Frame's* new book, Evolution in the Antipodes, in which he opines:

"The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won't take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them."

The problem with Tom's argument is that it's meaningless, emotive, irrelevant bullshit that has absolutely no place in intelligent discourse. You might also ask, as I did, what the hell a cleric is doing writing about evolution a subject he clearly and profoundly fails to understand?

I'm a dedicated Darwinian - and just like Luke and Professor Dawkins - I don't advocate, support or condone any of those things. He witters on in the same tone:

"Crudely naturalistic science leaves no room for poetic truth, refuses to honour any spiritual element in physical things and cannot accept the existence of a human soul."

Poppycock. I am both an atheist and a Darwinian; but I acheived both those things at separate points in my life; Darwin had nothing to do with me finally deciding that Yahweh of the Bible was a human construct which I had done long before I studied biology at that level.

Surely, this can't get any worse... can it?

"Evolution might account for the story of life's beginnings and progress, but it cannot explain its origin nor cast any light on its destiny"

Evolution (indeed Darwin) never attempted to explain abiogenesis - we still don't know how life actually started and there is room, for those who want to, to insert [god] here. As for life's direction and ultimate end, it doesn't try to explain that either. Astrophysics does that.

"All that Dawkins can offer is a revival of old-fashioned secular humanism, whose hopes and aspirations are summarised in John Lennon's insipid 1971 composition Imagine."

That's Professor Dawkins to you, fuckwit and besides, what the hell is so wrong with Imagine's lyrics?

Jeeeeeezus! I'm going to back bed, somebody wake me up when it's time to die.

*Professor of Theology at Charles Sturt University

Dubya Is Dead

2009-02-11T09:25:00.005Z

At least, according to a three second telecast on South African television he was; it wouldn't matter a great deal either way now because his influence on the world stage is largely over. The point here is that small errors on major media can cause widespread disarray.

This particular error happened when an engineer pressed a switch that put the test broadcast "ticker" into live view. The fact that such otherwise banal news could reach even the BBC, shows how powerful broadcast media is.

To Err Is Human

As a young computer programmer, one of the very first things we were taught was the American phrase, GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out. Our peers also learned the immortal phrase, "To err is human, it takes a computer to really fuck things up."

In truth, these two phrases go hand in hand.

It's often said that computers don't make mistakes - when of course they do. Somewhere along the line, a human had a hand in it, so there's always the possibility for error down to really geeky bugs like the infamous Pentium FDIV bug.

The problem with computers is that when they make mistakes, they make them very, very quickly. Which brings me to the media: if it takes a computer to really fuck things up, it takes the media to spread the error at an alarming , and often unstoppable, rate.

From the ludicrous (if harmless) pronouncements about the Conisholme wind farm UFO collision to the deadly MMR debacle - our media is an unstoppable juggernaut of bullshit.

GIGO applies to our media in just the same way as it does to a computer. There was a time when journalists would check their facts. These days, things move to bloody quickly to make that a viable option so much of what is presented to us as fact is actually reported (or more often repeated verbatim) with the assumption that the source is reliable.

If it isn't ...

Hit Me With Your Stupid Stick

2009-02-10T19:35:00.003Z

I'm all for new methods to help people conquer stress but when someone comes out with statement like this:

"There is strong evidence to suggest that drumming may actually be a healing activity " - Simon Lee, Musician.

My ears prick up a bit. It's words like "may" and "healing" that worry me particularly when they're connected with the phrase, strong evidence particularly when it's not cited and comes from someone who doesn't appear to have a science background!

Healing isn't word you hear uttered by real doctors unless they happen to alluding to ~~fake~~ faith healers. It's one of those wishy-washy verbs employed by people with no formal qualification who rely on people's fear to make a fortune.

As the BBC reports:

"Musician Simon Lee, from Kent, is called on to teach drumming to patients with problems ranging from addiction to autism, and learning difficulties to mental health issues.
"He has even offered help to terminally ill patients needing palliative care.
"And he says the results are amazing."

Fucking genius - more snake oil attached to autism. It's not bad enough that we have to copy with the idiotic MMR scandal still rattling on, now we're going to cure it by drumming. To be far, Simon doesn't say that... in so many words, but people will read such things into it.

There some evidence that we all have a natural rhythm, although real science has been unable to prove it either way, so it's fair to assume that some people will be able to find some solace bashing the shit out of a piece of tautened skin, in Analyse This (or was it the sequel, Analyse That?) Robert DeNiro's character took out his frustrations on a pillow: with a pistol.

Personally, I find that a couple of miles on a bicycle clears out the cobwebs, we all deal with it differently. My wife throws crockery - usually at me.

We have to be extraordinarily careful to confuse the correlation (people feeling better) with the actual cause. It may be that rhythm has something to do with it, but it's equally likely the cathartic effect is purely derived from the physical exercise.

I don't know - but I rather doubt Simon does either.

The Fools Are Out There

2009-02-10T15:16:00.005Z

Ah. The sweet smell of confirmation as a Daily Mail reporter notes regarding the Conisholme UFO debacle:

"An interim report from the firm, Enercon, has concluded bolts securing the blade to the hub of the turbine failed due to 'material fatigue'."

No fucking shit, Sherlock!

Which is what I said the moment this story broke to national news on this very blog entry!

Where is Nick Pope (a leading authority on UFOs and the unexplained*) now, I wonder? Hiding under a rock I hope.

I did write to one of the popular locals and a nice young lady there sighed, that yes, the UFO story was rather unlikely but it sells newspapers.

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No! It's a fucking newspaper editor trying to make a quick buck.

*According to his website.

I'm Deluded & I'll I Lie If I Want To

2009-02-10T14:34:00.001Z

Marie Jon is as a depressing as she is undeniably beautiful and astonishingly deluded.

I catch her opinions on the right-wing websites I occasionally trawl for the marked stupidity, but Ms. Jon is the upcoming Ann Coulter of her generation; undeniably charismatic and dangerously crazed. I don't have a free picture of her, but she can be seen here (assuming that the smouldering looks peering back are really her - I have no reason to doubt it though!)

She is also a nurse.

Her latest piece is particularly depressing in it's cerebral stupidity.

In her opening salvo, Jon writes:

"For nearly a century, our public school textbooks have been more than suggesting that humans are related to specific members of the animal kingdom. In fact, Darwinism insists on such teaching.

"The untruthfulness of the man-made theory of evolution is astounding. It’s bewildering that well-educated people should believe so ardently in this unproven science. This godless teaching is foisted upon our society as though it were empirically-demonstrated fact. Because of Charles Robert Darwin’s belief, secularization and atheism have gained wide acceptance throughout the world."

Dear Ms. Jon. Go to the fucking zoo and look in the ape cages, will you?

It's not rocket science.

Sure, the intricacies of evolution might be lost on you but it doesn't take a bloody genius to realise those beautiful creatures peering back at us through glistening eyes are our relations.

LOOK AT THEM! But mind they don't throw a pooball at you.

The have opposable thumbs - like you; lack tails - like you; nurse their young just like you (could).

Is it really such a leap of faith to realise that you share over 95% of your DNA with these gentle creatures?

What you call Godless teaching is the study of observed reality - your God is neither denied nor confirmed by it; evolution just is. Darwin started out as a cleric-in-waiting and became the greatest scientist of his time: by operating with an open mind.

But it didn't end there, Marie.

A couple of dudes by the names of James Watson and Francis Crick that you can read about in this Time article cracked the code of life decades after Chuck Darwin first proposed evolution. Since that discovery, now over a century old, we can decode vast tracts of the code that make us what we are.

Thought Experiment Time

Let's assume for a moment (shudders) that we were the product of some supernatural designer. If we are, then the designer made our DNA (unless Jon and Co. want to deny that too).

DNA carries the information that transfers information from one generation to the next and it is the material that makes humans, human and small furry creatures from Alpha-Centauri real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri (sorry Douglas).

We can reverse engineer a creature's DNA just as a skilled computer hacker can unravel the code of a complex computer program and then get himself nicked for entering the US Dept. of Defense while claiming to look for evidence of UFOs.

The point is that computer programs look remarkably like DNA - accepting that, DNA is almost infinitely more complex. As computer programs have little chunks of reusable code (subroutines or procedures) and computer scientists have developed shared algorithms so DNA carries shared bits.

Related humans shared large bits with each other; all humans share less bits and all life shares even smaller bits. Counting the number of bits that we share allows us to determine how closely two creatures are related.

Crucially (and unlike Darwin who deduced his findings by observation - a study called Phenology) we can take two unknown samples of genetic material and by comparing the similarities deduce their origin.

I wonder how Marie Jon would feel if she was raped and the only evidence that could specifically identify her attacked was his DNA? What if a close family member of hers brutally murdered and the only evidence available was DNA?

I wouldn't wish this on her, no matter what, like that infamous bloody cat in quantum physics, this is purely a thought experiment.

But WHAT IF?

DNA - even small samples of it can uniquely identify no just the race and sex of a person, it can even determine their likely traits too: eye colour, height and so on (although not always with pinpoint accuracy). If Marie's relative was attacked by an animal, we could determine which one by the same means. DNA makes us unique as individuals - no one precisely like us has ever live or ever will live again. Yet is also demonstrates how we are connected too - to all other life on Earth from the simplest virus to the most complex organism imaginable.

Marie denies this.

"Let’s be clear about this: It is not social interaction alone, or communication skills alone, that distinguishes humans from other living things. It’s the fact that God made us unique — putting us miles above the other living things and creatures in intelligence, language, and social abilities."

Rubbish.

You're no more unique than any other highly evolved creature and in your denial of the very facts you rely on to live and enjoy your life says you're probably mentally ill: only it's an illness that we call faith and that somehow makes it acceptable.

I think I'll have to go wash my brains now.

UPDATE:

That fine chap and all-round good egg, Luke O'Dell has a take on this too (and some other idiots) at this blog Creationist Idiocy. Luke clearly has a stronger stomach than I since he was able to dissect even more of Jon's ludicrous assumptions (plus two others) and still maintain his sanity.

I can't recommend this blog enough for those times when you just need reminding that some people really shouldn't be breeding and you need a hearty belly laugh.

Dying to be on Living

2009-02-09T11:54:00.006Z

When most people are ill these days, they take time off work. This is natural because we don't want to give everyone else our germs - or in some cases, would prefer that our boss didn't find out that we'd been on the piss all night. Yes, you know who you are...

I'm ill (not sick*) right now - but I don't have the luxury of taking time off because I'm self-employed. In fact, I'm nearly drowning in my own mucus and coughing so hard that my eyeballs feel like they're going to end up in my tissue. I will recover.

Jade Goody has an aggressive metastatic cancer and will not.

She's a miserable wretch to be sure. A creation of our disgusting vice-fed media which its unquenchable thirst for celebrity scandal. I find it rather ironic that the same people who decry others for blood sports - not limited to bull ~~baiting killing murdering~~ fighting and fox hunting are the self same people who extol the virtues of Big Brother, Fame Academy and all the other "reality" TV. Even the BBC has stooped to this level, albeit under the guise of a social experiment, to get ordinary people to perform Naked while image consultant, Jonathan Phang, eggs them on.

It's not real.

For sure, the people on Naked are ~~(being bullied into)~~ shedding their clothes for the camera - in a nasty variation of voyeurism that only a TV Exec could have dreamt up - but it pales into transparency against filming a dying woman's battle with this vicious disease.

Poor Jade claims she needs the money; I'm not sure that's true but it's not relevant either.

I have a sickening feeling in the very pit of my stomach that the poor child actually craves the glare of cameras that she's become so used to. Almost as if the presence of a TV film crew has become so central to her being that she has begun to believe the unreality of her reality.

Of course, Living TV is happy to oblige.

I wouldn't put it past them filming her dying moments; and even the intimate details of an autopsy if they thought they could make a buck out of it.

Perhaps Living would do the decent thing and give her the money but not actually show the footage. A better, less voyeuristic view would be to expose the reality of her situation and expose the futility behind it.

Jade's sickness began long before she achieved notoriety; the moment she started having unprotected sex with HPV (not HIV) positive partners, her fate was effectively sealed and that's the lesson we can all take from this.

Sexually transmitted diseases can kill you; not today, not tomorrow, but HPV, HIV and others will get you in the end.

And no amount of money will save you from that.

* Like gay (which originally meant happy or ebullient) sick has got all sorts of other connotations these days so I'd rather be poorly than sick, even if I am.

Ride a Horse? You're Safer Taking Ecstasy

2009-02-07T14:34:00.009Z

Risk is a funny thing: how many of us are so frightened of flying, we'd rather take a private car.

Humans are ridiculously poor at assessing risk. Flying - commercially anyway - is the safest form of transport ever devised and it gets safer with each passing accident. In the most recent air accident, where an Airbus 320 ditched in the Hudson river after hitting geese, everyone on board survived without serious injury.

Although hailed as a miracle, it was purely down to some great flying and superb aircraft design. The most difficult part of a water landing is ditching the plane at a very steep angle - so the tail hits the water first meaning the pilots have to work on instrument readings only.

Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, government advisor, Professor David Nutt compared the risk of taking Ecstasy with the risk of horse riding - and landed in deep water himself. He says:

"Drug harm can be equal to harms in other parts of life. There is not much difference between horse-riding and ecstasy."

Observing that 100 people are killed every year on horses (or more precisely, falling off them) he writes:

"This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates - indeed encourages - certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others such as drug use."

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, of which Professor Nutt is chair, is in a fluster as the BBC reports, but David Raynes for the National Drug Prevention Alliance was rather more forthright in suggesting to the Daily Telegraph that either Professor Nutt resigns or is sacked.

Horse Riding 300% More Dangerous

Looking at the raw statistics - you're about 300% more likely to die falling from a horse than you are having your insides cooked by ecstasy. The problem with the drug is that there simply isn't a "safe" dose yet it is regularly used by clubbers to get the sort of high they need to keep going for hours.

This, of course, is not the full story. Since ecstasy is an illegal drug we just don't know how many people take it, in what dosage or how often. Whereas it's somewhat easier to estimate how many people ride.

Raw statistics tell us very little and Professor Nutt has, perhaps naively, picked a rather poor example. Left where it belonged - in a scholarly article, where it could be assessed as what it was worth - that would have been the end of it. But NO, some nosey bastard has to make a big fucking issue of it.

You're more likely to die in a car accident than you are taking ecstasy. The WHO has suggested (probably an estimate) that some 1,200,000 [that's 1.2 million] lives are lost worldwide each year in automotive incidents. You're more likely to die from smoking or alcohol related illness than ecstasy, in fact.

Another bizarre and improbably statistic comes from the world of sport; if we ignore the really, really silly extreme stuff such as base jumping and just consider traditional sports, the most dangerous hobby you can have is: fishing. It's not that people are regularly assaulted by ravenous rainbow trout or die from maggot poisoning, it's just that so many fall into the water and drown.

That's not to say I'm condoning ecstasy use: because it really is like playing Russian Roulette, it's just that sometimes we really do have to get things into proportion and be very careful how much trust we place in the stuff we're spoon fed by the media.

Spoon-fed. Umm.. I've got the munchies... Mushroom anyone? Ooooo the colours... My hands, they're sooooo big..... Later dudes.

Oh Goody! Someone Has To Say This

2009-02-07T11:02:00.000Z

Tragic Jade Goody is dying.

Her prognosis is poor and life expectancy miserably short - even as I write this with a knot in my stomach, the metastatic cells devouring Ms. Goody's cervix have spread to her liver and will doubtless travel elsewhere before her systems are hopelessly overwhelmed.

I cannot describe her (as the media so often does) as a star or even a celebrity. For several years she was the poster child for everything that's wrong with "C" list celebrity and even went so far as to wear her avowed ignorance as if it were a badge of honour.

Teenagers of both sexes admired and even worshipped her: until she largely fell out of favour by making a (fairly mild) racist attack on Indian actress, Shilpa Shetty in Big Brother.

Poor Jade is a flickering, misty reflection of all that's bad in today's society.

Her story is tragic in more ways than most of us can imagine and I despise the way that Max Clifford is spinning whatever he can from it: even if Jade is driving him. The popular press have made all manner of nods of support: as empty as they are meaningless. Jade being Jade is old news; Jade bald from chemo and dying from cancer is a brilliant: like UFO bullshit and speculation, it sells newspapers.

By contrast, a genuine star, Patrick Swayze is also dying of a particularly nasty (and rarely survived) pancreatic cancer. I've never been a fan, but we should recognise that Swayze has earned his stardom - over many years - in ways that Jade couldn't even dream of. Their fate is assured, but I will only mourn one of them.

"Jade" - the commodity, not the person - is a product of a failed education system, moronic media and cheap television. Jade's cancer is the direct product of a poor upbringing.

According to a report in the Sun, Jade was first treated for cervical cell dysplasia at the tender age of 16 - which is frankly pretty young considering the primary cause of this condition is HPV - the human papilloma virus - not to be confused with HIV which causes AIDS.

Stephen Green almost (but not quite) made a sensible argument when he wrote:

"There is a Biblical principle that we reap what we sow. It applies to nations as well as to individuals. What politicians sow, the people reap. When politicians sow evil, the people reap misery, and the poorest reap it the worst.

"Now we have the disaster of teenage infertility. Every government initiative, including the HPV vaccine, will increase it, but as all the targets revolve around pregnancy, no-one in power knows how many young people they are making sterile and nobody cares."

In this case, Jade is reaping the seeds - viruses, actually - that others have sewn. Green would be so pleased; I feel a little sick.

I don't know at what age Jade began having sexual intercourse - or the history of those she did have, but it's fair bet, it was pretty early on and at least one of those partners was carrying one or more of the 46 strains of HPV - and one of the several that causes cervical cancer.

Virgins don't get cervical cancer and women who remain "pure" until their late teens or early 20s are less likely to get it than those who start early. Although human animals become sexually capable from as young as nine [Gary Glitter must be so proud] the cervix isn't fully developed until much later on - its cellular structure becomes more disease-resistant with age.

Draw your own conclusions, but Jade's history of PV bleeding and the late diagnosis of this fairly aggressive tumour speak volumes. Clifford and co are playing the blame game but the real culprit is the sub-culture that Jade lived among and, let's be honest, a pretty crap family.

Some children and young women will be spared now - provided they're not unlucky enough to attend a Catholic school where its banned - many will now receive a vaccination against the most common variants of HPV.

(Somehow, this is also going to turn them into raving sex maniacs, according to the wafer munchers.)

An friend of mine may one day be facing a similar nightmare - for the same reasons. Like Jade, she lost her virginity at a tender age, has had a poor diet and was a regular smoker - all risk factors. She had pre-cancerous cells lasered away a couple of years ago and I wonder now what her future holds.

UPDATE:

As the Mail glowers at the Internet hate sites popping up celebrating Jade's doom, it also carries a poignant piece from the woman who is credited with inflicting her on us all, in which she writes of our hideous appetite for scandal:

"Readers made it clear that they would sooner read about Jade's on-off romances than a Hollywood star giving an innocuous account of their latest film." - Jane Ennis.

Of course the newspapers have to make a profit, that's what they exist for, but this also demonstrates that in reality few of us have moved on from the days when our ancestors fed slaves to bears and lions in the collesum. It's not that different.

Have Sh*t - Will Flush

2009-02-06T17:57:00.006Z

Leeds University is in bother, reports the BBC, after an unnamed person clearing a lab, threw away a huge (35Kg) bag of poo belonging to grad student, Daniel Bennett. Lizard poo that is: I know students can be pretty disgusting creatures but that would be extreme even for them.

Mr Bennett had collected the faeces to study the butann lizard, a relative of the Komodo Dragon, thought to be extinct until quite recently. In an effort to understand how the creatures live, he collected and analysed the excrement and spent several years trudging around in the Philippines looking for it.

A spokesperson for the University told the BBC that protocols had been improved so that this sort of mistake would not be repeated. They didn't say if that meant that PhD students would be prevented from collecting doodoo in future or if the Uni was less likely to throw it away if they did.

Despite the overshite, Mr Bennett remains on course to finish his doctorate later this year and I wish him well.

Flush please.

MMR and The Left Side of ©

2009-02-06T12:13:00.006Z

Copyright is a thorny issue in today's world - and today the blogosphere is alight with the story of Ben Goldacre, MD threatened with legal action for stealing a large audio excerpt from a radio broadcasts where presenter and one-time actress, Jeni Barnett laid into the MMR debate and got it, er, wrong.

Dr. Goldacre described it (here) as:

"...some of the most irresponsible, ill-informed, and ignorant anti-vaccination campaigning that I have ever heard on the public airwaves."

Which he is completely entitled to to - and you know what I agree with him - but he made a grave (if rather naive) error in posting the entire audio to his blog and that landed him in deeeeep, deep shit as he was shortly served with a take down notice from lawyers representing LBC.

Unfortunately, and in spite poor Ben's bleating and messages of support from many, including yours truly, LBC were entirely within their rights to order a take-down. Not that it's helped their cause much - the Internet is well-known as a den of disregarded copyright and it's now popping up all over the place: including Wikileaks.

There's a good piece on Fair Use laws here (although it's US-based and the laws vary from country to country and judge to judge).

Ben admits that:

"...I posted the relevant segment about MMR from her show, 44 minutes..."

Uh oh.

44 minutes from 180 amounts to 24% of the entire broadcast - and worse - 100% of the arguments that were being discussed and in both cases, Fair Use (from my experience) does not apply.

You can't take a huge chunk from something and then claim Fair Use - it's simply not allowed; you can't even take a small section, say even a fraction of percent if that section represents (can be shown to represent) the heart of the work.

You'll notice the elipses (...) in these quote to suggest one continuations. This is a way of pulling a small section from a piece of copyrighted material (Ben's writings are similarly copyright) while not falling foul of Fair Use laws.

Like Ben, I get enormously pissed when (even well-meaning) Celebs get involved in issues that they know less than fuck all about and then spread a liberal amount of bullshit: which people then believe.

Christine Maggiore was an AIDS denier. She is now dead. Killed by an HIV-related illness.

The ludicrous MMR story, originated by Dr Andrew Wakefield (and others now distanced from the case) has rattled on and on and on: yet there simply isn't any evidence for the assertion it causes autism or IBS.

Not, so says Barnett, "Injecting tiny babies with substances that may compromise their immune system needs to be looked at not shouted down."

This might amaze you Jeni, but we've been doing precisely that for decades! Of course, you're a radio presenter: not a scientist, not a doctor and not qualified to talk about medicine.

By way of coincidence, the BBC reports that measles cases are UP again - 27% increase from 2007 to 2008... this is directly related to the sort of bullshit that Jeni and her ilk in the media are so good at spreading.

I don't think that we need a change in the copyright law, but this does raise an issue with free speech laws - and the responsibility that is required from broadcasters.

Bizarrely, in a world where the BBC has bent over backwards to apologise for allowing the unedited version of Batman star, Christian Bale swearing more than I do on air; and the Pope is embarrassed because one of his Bishops is a Holocaust denier (a criminal offence in some countries), we allow dangerous ignorance of this type openly onto the airways.

YES IT MATTERS.

It matters because measles blinds; measles deafens; measles kills children.

Jeni suggests we need an open debate: I'd agree that we need to discuss why she has not been sacked and this sort of dangerous advice is allowed on the air.

Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Pete...

2009-02-04T12:15:00.004Z

What is it about bloody Rolf Harris songs that make them so catchy? I can still hear "Two little boys..." rattling around my synapse as I try to get over this shocker.

Peter Freeman of the Competition Commission (Christ, there's nominative determinacy again!) has decreed that Project Kangaroo is going to end up as dog food after all.

For those of you living under a rock these past few months, Kangaroo was the name given to the project for BBC to offer on-demand iPlayer content from other providers including ITV and Channel 4.

The BBC quotes Freeman's thinking thus:

"The three joint venture partners are the largest TV companies in this country and you would normally expect them to compete with each other on a thing like this"

Here's the thing, Mr Freeman - they decided it was better for the viewers (and we pay for this service after all) so what the fuck gives you the right to stick your snout in?

The Competition Commission? Oh so it does.

Fuck! Fuckity fuck!

It's My Baby (& I'll Smoke If I Want To)

2009-02-04T10:25:00.006Z

I love abusing song lyrics... That one was originally "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to" and popularised in 1981 by Dave Stuart and Barbara Gaskin's number 1 cover.

Anyhoo...

Anyone who reads this blog regularly (or knows me personally) will tell you that I'm very, very, pro-choice (pro-abortion if you want to be inflammatory). It's not that I think we should use abortion as a primary means of contraception, but I strongly believe in a woman's right to make informed choices without legislation saying otherwise.

So what I'm about to say may now surprise you: foetuses deserve better than smoking mothers.

In the west, smoking is a personal choice as is pregnancy for the most part. We hear of "accidents" all the time but in reality you can, for the most part, replace accident with hubris, carelessness or downright bloody-mindedness.

A new survey reported at the BBC suggests that one quarter of pregnant smokers fear telling their GP, health visitor or midwife about their habit because of (I love this) "worries about being criticised."

Naw! You don't say! (Apparently, over 50% of those questioned in a separate poll were of the same view.)

Dr. Miriam Stoppard (please tell me this was quoted out of context) says on the site:
"Pregnant women who smoke do not automatically find it easy to stop smoking as soon as they become pregnant."
No shit Sherlock! My question is what the fuck are they doing trying to conceive while the are still addicted to weed?

I've always felt something ambivalent over the smoking ban. On the one hand if people chose to slowly kill themselves, that's fine by me; on the other, I do like to go into a pub and not be assaulted by the odoriferous wafting of stale tobacco smoke.

An unborn child has no such choice.

Every single atom of oxygen it uses while attached to its mother's placenta has to come via the mother's lungs. It's blood is fed oxygen and nutrients from it's mother's bloodstream and (because we didn't evolve to smoke) many toxic chemicals can cross the placental barrier: CO and nicotine being just two of them.

As as pure drug, nicotine is thought to be more addictive than Heroin (tell that to your local crack-whore) and CO - that's the stuff in car exhausts that people use to commit suicide. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how much this effects the development of a tiny embyo.

Child abuse is a very emotive issue - yet every day, mums-to-be the world over are abusing their unborn children with a vast array of poisons entirely legally; just for the sake of a cigarette.

And then they have the bare-faced cheek to worry what we think about them!

By Golly! More PC BS @ BBC

2009-02-04T09:34:00.009Z

Does anyone mind if I call myself a "cracker bastard?" Would I mind if Chris Rock, that excruciatingly awful comedian and sometime ham actor called me one?

Answer to both questions is no (at least it should be).

Rock isn't to everyone's taste - that's the nature of comedy - yet when he refers to white folk in his performances as "crackers" (a clear racist pejorative) no one seems to bat an eyelid.

That's OK even though it's a double-standard because in reality it's not the word that should be censored but the malice hiding behind it; a word is just a word whereas underlying sentiment is something else entirely.

Thanks to a culture of PC ignorance that seems intent on examining the minutiae of everything we say, think and do, the BBC has in a high-profile move, removed Carol Thatcher from a prime-time show for an apparently off-the-cuff reference made off-air in a private conversation.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

It's entirely proper that Johnathon Ross was suspended over the Andrew Sachs affair [Sachsgate] (which was also blown completely out of proportion) but to effectively sack a contributor for a private comment smells worse than one of Stinky's* farts after a particularly juicy plate of over boiled sprouts.

The story goes [and there's been no official announcement as such] that Ms. Thatcher (daughter of the erstwhile British PM, Margaret, referred to an Australian tennis player as a "Golliwog" in jest.

She has (rightly in my view) refused to apologise.

I'm actually old enough to have not only owned a "golly" but to fondly remember the mascot adorning jars of marmalade in my mother's pantry (example above). As children we used to cut out and collect them - it was an early loyalty scheme!

Adrian Chiles, presenter of The One Show is reported to be one of those offended by the remark but he's not actually a lot younger than me. Perhaps his mother didn't buy Robertsons' jams?

Although Robertsons has long since caved into PC pressure to drop Golly, the fond memories we baby boomers have remain and I for one never confused the cheerful characture with anyone real.

It's almost as if some people take it upon themselves to be offended by proxy.

Taking offence? Here, have the fucking railings and gate too while you're at it.

UPDATE:

BBC News now reports a counterstrike from Thatcher's camp - Ms. Thatcher's agent, Ali Gunn said on TalkSport that it "was absolutely outrageous" that her client's conversation had been leaked to the public and that, "They should be issuing us with an apology."

Too fucking right.

*Stinky is what my kids call "Atlas" my Great Dane - the poor old chap is getting rather late in life and has terrible flatulence which the vet tells me is entirely normal for one of his advancing years and harmless. Presumably, he also lacks a sense of smell.

This Is My Body....

2009-02-04T00:48:00.003Z

Bleat and howl all you want, but overturning Roe v. Wade comes at a high price.

What's your choice?

PI and The Baby Cudgel

2009-02-03T11:19:00.016Z

CAUTION:

THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING IMAGES OF A DECEASED INFANT WITH PATAU'S SYNDROME.

Gary Graham, best known for his portrayal of a Vulcan in TV's Star Trek, is a man with a pricked conscience. Like an ex-smoker or someone who's suddenly got God, Mr Graham has suddenly decided that the most cathartic recovery from his past is to tell anyone who'll listen - loudly. Writing in a blog, he opines:

"No. I’m going to say it. I’m going to say what millions know in the front of their brains, and many, many more millions know in the depths of their hearts…but won’t allow themselves to think it, much less feel it. And believe me, I know I’ll be hated for saying it, I’ll be hated by people who don’t know me, have never worked with me, have never golfed with me, had a drink with me, shot the shit with me. They’ve never met me, don’t want to meet me…but they will hate me. I’m going to say it anyway: Abortion is murder."

I don't hate you Gary, I just think you're nerve-jarringly stupid and more than a little guilty of youthful hubris having paid for THREE abortions. Gary goes on:

"I have been on all sides of this issue for most of my life, and I can simply not escape the logic. That fetus a pregnant woman is carrying inside of her, regardless of the gestation stage, is a living, breathing human being. Yes, breathing – the amniotic sac forms 12 days after conception, and in the second trimester the baby is actually breathing the amniotic fluid. It’s not an ‘unviable tissue mass.’ Not a wart, a mole, a skin outcropping, a boil, or a bundle of uncoordinated cells. It’s not just a ‘fetus’."

Yes Gary, a foetus: not a baby. At 12 weeks (the end of the first trimester) the baby is no more capable of living outside the mother's uterus than (with apologies to Douglas Adams) a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster can survive being being bludgeoned by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. It's not viable and therefore, not a fucking baby so stop using the word like a cudgel - it's a red herring. Get over it.

What you call a baby, more correctly a zygote, embryo or foetus depending on the stage of development does not once breath until it leaves the amniotic fluid. Certainly, it inhales - and even swallows - large amounts of the stuff, but its lungs do not exchange oxygen and CO2: that's breathing.

If abortion is murder (as you say) then you are also admitting to being accessory to that - on three occasions by your own admission. You may now go to jail, do not pass go and do not collect $200.

The truth sometimes hurts. You used your good looks to bed at least three girls, failed to take even basic precautions and then left them to suffer. I could almost understand one mistake - but three! Fuck me - don't ask for my forgiveness or understanding because you won't get it.

By like the argument over evolution, a personal favourite of mine, it's not really that simple.

Pro-choice advocates want every pregnancy to reach a natural conclusion - and if every pregnancy was healthy then maybe they have a point, but this isn't that simple.

Let's put aside the proactive birth control that you paid for (I guess rubbers were really expensive in your day) and consider just a couple of examples.

What about an ectopic pregnancy? Should we let that mature until the foetus gets so large that the mother's fallopian tube ruptures and she bleeds internally to death in agony?

What about Patau syndrome? Look at this!
Should we allow this pregnancy to continue until what you call a baby spontaneously aborts - or lives for a few hours and days in agony? That's a baby Gary! "A" is his "face" and "B" is a closeup on his eyes - if they can be called that.

A 37 2/7 week gestational age male infant with Patau syndrome demonstrating alobar holoprosencephaly with cyclopia. A) Facial features included sloping forehead with a proboscis superior to a single central palpebral fissure. B) Close-up of the fused eyelids and proboscis showing a single nostril. C) Polydactyly showing six digits. D) Posterior view of the brain showing indistinct gyri, fusion of the hemispheres, and occipital encephalocele.E) Transposition of the aorta (A), and hypoplastic pulmonary trunk (P). F) Trisomy 13 [47, XY, +13] (karyotype by Giemsa-banding).

Chan et al. Diagnostic Pathology 2007 2:48 doi:10.1186/1746-1596-2-48

That's the choice - because like PI, it's not that simple.

UPDATE:

Therese in the comments has chided me (as is her absolute right) for pulling a particularly nasty example of Patau's and I agree with her that no woman should be forced to terminate any pregnancy. (Google for some more images if you can stomach them.)

Her own child is one of the rare survivors - and that's great. But Trisomy 13 is not just identifiable by blood-screening it can be visualised better than ever before on advanced ultrasound.

Yet I this isn't about Trisomy 13 - it's about choice; informed choice.

I am sick of being battered about the head by these lame "abortion is murder" arguments which rely on deeply held emotion and are invariably driven by religious belief. This unfortunate is the other side of that coin - if this poor creature had been terminated, would that have been better for mother and child alike?

Could you decide? Should you?

We should never, ever legislate the choice away: no matter how hard a choice it is, it's not ours to make.

Down On Your Knees!

2009-02-02T14:38:00.005Z

Am I described as an atheist marketing consultant? No - so why is it the BBC has taken to describing a biscuit-munching nurse as a Christian in the story leader, here.

The 45 year old - who got God early on - has been suspended without pay since mid-December pending an investigations since she offered to pray for a elderly coffin-dodger.

She told the BBC, "I saw my patients suffering and as I believe in the power of prayer, I began asking them if they wanted me to pray for them. They are absolutely delighted."

Or perhaps they're just polite, dear.

The problem with prayer is it doesn't work when subjected to scientific investigation, but Mrs Petrie is entitled to her belief no matter what.

Worse still she's gone to that den of religious rabble-rousing, the Christian Legal Centre (CLC) which is probably why this has made it onto the BBC and even the bastion of inaccuracy, The Daily Mail.

Why do we need a Christian Legal Centre? Don't Christians have the same rights as everyone else?

Not surprisingly, despite the naval-gazing and hand-wringing from interested parties - yes they do - and (remember, I am a seriously angry atheist) even I can't understand the trust's decision to suspend this woman for offering a prayer. Provided that's all she did and then let it drop, then there's really no substance here.

UPDATE:

The Mail, which carries this story on the front page of its print edition has a little more depth adding that Mrs Petrie was already under caution for this behaviour.

Alison Withers, Mrs Petrie's boss at the time, wrote to her at the end of November saying: 'As a nurse you are required to uphold the reputation of your profession. Your NMC (Nursing Midwifery Council) code states that "you must demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity" and "you must not use your professional status to promote causes that are not related to health".

Now that does tend to shed a rather different light on it and I'm actually surprised at the Mail for balancing this up - albeit almost as an aside in a fairly long lead article. The Mail also notes:

Paul Diamond, a leading religious rights barrister, has been instructed to handle the case. Mr Diamond represented Miss Eweida and last year appeared for Relate counsellor Gary McFarlane, of Bristol, who was sacked for refusing to give sex counselling to homosexuals.

Yes, the awful Miss Ewedia who refused to follow the rules clearly set out by her employer but got her own way by petulantly claiming discrimination. The CLC got shafted back in December as my friend at Mediawatchwatch gleefully describes here in brilliant detail.

Melanie Phillips also writing in the Mail has this to say:

"I am a Jew; but when my mother was in the last stages of her terminal illness she was cared for by deeply devout Christian nurses who regularly prayed for her. Far from being offended by this, I was touched and comforted by this signal that they cared so much about her."

Which I found rather interesting - Ms. Philips doesn't note that Christians and Jews share the same god: where they differ around the "birth" Jesus who they don't recognise as a saviour or living God. I think they're all fucked in the head, personally, but that doesn't matter.

It's the interpretation that counts: I would have been surprised if Ms. Phillips had not taken some comfort that the people caring for her mother shared her belief in sky fairies. When my mother passed away recently after a long illness, the local bible-toting god botherers were at my father's door within hours. Luckily for them I wasn't there at the time.

Yes, prayer is harmless: in fact it does more for the person doing the praying than the person being prayed for. Mrs Petrie crossed the line when she raised the subject - because that's when she started marketing her idea. OK, it's the mildest form of prostelysing but it's prostelysing nevertheless.

Should she be sacked though?

No.

But not because what she did was right - because it's already way out of hand and a PR nightmare that interested parties such as the CLC can't lose and the poor NHS can't win. Call me a cynic by all means, but why do you think this made it to the papers so late the day?

Anyway, Mrs Petrie's a Baptist so perhaps this will all come out in the wash: take a deep breath now dear.

Give A Dog A Bad Name

2009-02-01T11:55:00.008Z

There's a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) theory called nominative determinacy that suggests at least some people's names are connected with their jobs: so Mr Baker may own a cake shop, Mr Pope studies biblical writings, Mr Payne is a dentist and so on. Historically, things were the other way around because until comparatively recent times, people didn't have surnames at all: largely because we just didn't need them in the tiny, disparate settlements that we inhabited. Even if two people in the same village shared the same Christian name, say, "Joe" they could be easily identified by their occupation (even the village idiot).

Many of these survive today - a Cooper for example, made barrels; a Smith would have worked in a forge; a Baker would be the village's, er, baker, etc.

But what of Christian names? It's a popular myth that native Americans name their children after the first thing the mother saw after giving birth - flying bird, hunting bear, two dogs shagging... but a more cogent explanation is that the tribal elder is actually the one to determine name. He will see a name in a vision or dream or perhaps from some specific feature special to the person or family.

So can your Christian name influence how you're likely to behave in future?

Researchers David E. Kalist and Daniel Y. Lee of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania think they have found a link, reported here. According to the limited report, boys with unpopular names such as Ernest and Ivan are more likely to engage in crime than are children with David or Michael.

On the surface this appears to be statistical confusion where the correlation (the match) is confused with the causation (the cause of the observed effect). Such confusion crops up all the time in statistics and it's often difficult to assess. This sort of statistical cluster is often cited to "prove" that power lines and mobile phone masts cause cancer; particularly in tabloid newspapers.

A deeper look at the results suggests that there may well be some causative link although it's as much to do with social class as it is with the name per se. Nontheless the authors also suggest that children with unusual names find it difficult to become accepted among their peers.

The knee-jerk reaction to this study is predictable: early comments on the story call it BS and demand to know what the statistical relevance and margins of error are. Yet in reality, we can see that there's a definite connection - analysing the figures just confirms what we already suspect.

Many names are common to social and ethnic groups. You won't meet many white boys called Leroy or Mohammed for instance; and girls with names such as Eugene or Beatrice are not likely to be standing on street corners plying their trade.

Crime - particularly juvenile delinquency - tends to run in certain social groups; and while it's not exclusive to them, it's certainly more prevalent there. Certain groups of Christian names are also common in specific societal groups - this is natural because, on the whole parents, even poor ones, want their children to fit in.

Therefore we have a direct link - the correlation. It's not the name - but the social group that uses that name.

Henceforth, I'm going to call myself Charles Nigel Draco in the hope that I can enter a better social class. Or not.

Life For Reilly

2009-01-30T20:54:00.004Z

This is a bit of a non-story really, but I rather thought the headline was amusing so I ran with it - it's a play on the expression "the life of Riley" meaning having it easy - bit like a modern-day politician or Life Peer, perhaps...

Anyhoo.

Nicky Reilly is a 22-year old Islamic convert who tried to blow up Exeter's Giraffe Restaurant in May 2008. Calling himself "Mohammad Rashid Saeed Alim", Reilly failed in his attempt to hurt anyone when he accidentally detonated the explosive device he was preparing in the toilets. He was swiftly arrested as he staggered, injured and bloodied outside.

In sentencing Reilly to life (with a minimum tariff of 18 years) Justice David Calvert-Smith said that "The offense of attempted murder is aggravated by the fact that it was long-planned, that it had multiple intended victims and was intended to terrorise the population of this country."

Reilly's lawyer described him as, "the least cunning person ever to have come before this court for this type of offense," and while Justice Calvert-Smith accepted this, he observed that, "Unfortunately those who attempt to commit suicide and in doing so murder other people are almost invariably unsophisticated in many aspects."

What is most interesting about this case is the way that the media are alluding to Reilly's apparent affliction with Asperger's syndrome - a low-level form of autism suffered by many. Although Asperger's sufferer's are socially awkward they are no more likely (and perhaps even less so) to harm another human being than any "normal" person.

Life is like a box of chocolates and Reilly has a long time to ponder on his actions although I have to wonder if a secure psychiatric unit would be a better place for this poor misfit - like Tony Blair before him, he was a puppet controlled by an outside force determined to fuck things up their personal gain.

BBC Editor: It's My Way or The Highway

2009-01-30T15:14:00.011Z

Rather like a few politicians I could mention, Radio 4 controller, Mark Damazer obviously forgets who pays his wages.

Towards the back end of 2008 Gavin Orland set up a pledge on Pledgebank to have Thought For The Day either removed or revised to include non-religious speakers such as A.C. Grayling (who correctly describes TFTD as a homily). Those who contacted the BBC (over 1,500 if PB is to be believed) received a nonchalant and thoughtless automated "fuck you" from Damazer, which goes like this:

Thank you for your email.

I regard this as a genuinely difficult question. There may be a case for widening the pool of contributors on Thought for The Day by having someone with an avowedly non-religious perspective. However on balance the BBC's position is that it is reasonable to sustain the slot with believers. Let me now set out the reasoning.

Thought for the Day is a unique slot in which speakers from a wide range of religious faiths reflect on an issue of the day from their faith perspective. In the midst of the three hour Today programme devoted to overwhelmingly secular concerns - national and international news and features, searching interviews etc - the slot offers a brief, uninterrupted interlude of spiritual reflection. We believe that broadening the brief would detract from the distinctiveness of the slot.

Within Thought for the Day a careful balance is maintained of voices from different Christian denominations and other religions with significant membership in the UK. We are broadcasting to the general Radio 4 audience which regularly engages with the comments and ideas expressed by our contributors from the world's major faiths - whether they are believers or not.

Outside Thought for the Day the BBC's religious output contains both religious and non-religious voices in programmes such as Sunday, Beyond Belief, Moral Maze. In these programmes atheists, humanists and secularists are regularly heard, the religious world is scrutinised, its leaders and proponents are questioned, and the harm done in the name of religion is explored.

Non-religious voices are also heard extensively across the general output in news, current affairs, documentaries, talks, science, history. These programmes approach the world from perspectives which are not religious. As, of course, do the other 2 hours 57 minutes of Today.

Yours sincerely

Mark Damazer
Controller, Radio 4

OK. So this clearly isn't good enough for those of us (probably a majority) think that TFTD is exclusive and pointless - especially when it's broadcast at peak time in the station's flagship news programme! Many of those people offended by this response wrote back in stronger words:

Sir,

why is it I just feel as if I've been gently patted on the head and told to return to my seat?

I AM NOT A SMALL CHILD.

Besides being a published author, I am also researching a book into this sort of platitudinous stock response from broadcasters.

My original email already addresses the note attached and I now require this complaint is escalated to the next person in charge - beyond Mr Damazer since he is obviously incapable of making a cogent argument without resorting to the supernatural.

I will, in time, escalate this to the BBC Trust and my MP if necessary - as a fee-paying licence holder I expect to be treat with more respect than this.

Predictably perhaps, the response came back within a couple of days:
Dear Marc Draco,

Thank you for your further email reply.

As I intimated this is a genuinely difficult issue, but I don't think I can add anything of real substance to my original email. If you would like to pursue this further, it is open to you to write to the BBC Trust at 35 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 4AA. Full details of the complaints and appeals process are on the BBC Trust website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/appeals/index.html

Yours sincerely,

Mark Damazer
Controller, Radio 4

So, stock answer #2 - not as obvious this time (the other one appeared on the Radio 4 iPM website) but fairly obvious as it includes my full name and a gentle push to fuck off and complain to the trust. Damazer knows full-well the trust has no power to press for changes in editorial policy so this is a dead end.

Or is it?

Gavin Orland has had enough, writing to the signatories of the original pledge, he says:

"Ultimately, we were “stonewalled” by Mr Damazer and the religious department. He did not engage with any of the arguments put to him. It is obvious the religious dept. wield disproportionate influence in this – but it remains a mystery to me as to why.

"Some have said the trouble here is this is just not public enough. The BBC are in trouble over all sorts of other issues, but this one seems so far to have slipped under the radar, despite all our action.

"I personally am not listening to The Today Programme any more. I find the BBC generally too religious and too politically correct and am so fed up of TFTD specifically, and by the way we have been ignored, that I just don’t feel like it any more. I also, of course, have my own life and work to get on with."

More news when I hear back from the BBC Trust because I won't let this arrogance drop without a fight.

The Water's Deep. Row or Wade? It's All About Choice!

2009-01-30T12:55:00.007Z

Row versus Wade? Geddit? No... Don't worry, you will.

Roe v Wade is a landmark US supreme court ruling which effectively afforded women the right to choose what goes on in their own bodies. The idea essentially is that a foetus has a right to life only after such time that it becomes viable - that is, when it can live outside of the mother's body: even if that means using artificial means.

Roe v Wade effectively gave US women the right to a medical termination across the entire country. This was particularly offensive and shocking in a country which puts such a religious right on life.

President Obama has already quashed Dubya's idiotic sanctions against supporting organisations outside the US but in response a group of right-wing senators have re-introduced the Life at Conception Act which will, if passed, overturn Roe v Wade and outlaw abortion by giving even a zygote equal rights as a person under the 14th amendment.

This is obviously idiotic but it's driven by religious conviction - not careful measured thought. The 14th amendment, ratified in 1868, was originally written to protect former slaves and effectively empower them with the same rights and responsibilities as the "white folk".

Laws are funny things and if their authors are not extraordinarily careful they can be widely abused, as example, consider this quote from Republican Senator, David Vitter

“As science continues to advance, the evidence that life begin at conception is becoming more and more irrefutable. This bill is critical to the fight to protect the culture of life, especially as we face an administration and new Congress that seems determined to advance the agenda of a practice that a great number of Americans find abhorrent.”

Even in the first sentence, the mind-buggering veil of ignorance & simplicity that these people operate under becomes horribly clear. Life (by this definition) has always begun at conception and we've known that for a hell of a long time.

However, how are we to define life?

The turning point in Roe v Wade was when the court accepted that life (as most of us understand it) begins when the foetus becomes capable of supporting its own life (even with medical intervention): and this in itself may prove critical.

That aside, the second part of Senator Vitter's statement demonstrates that he fails to understand the right to choose! Choice (not necessarily over pregnancy) isn't specifically written in to the US Constitution, but it is implied in the right of freedom (also implied in the 9th amendment).

No. This is about the religious right's wish to lord it over everyone else.

Choice - as we have it now and as Americans have had since Roe v Wade allows each person to chose based on their circumstance and personal belief. If it were overturned, the religious right would have removed the ability of clear thinking people to decide what goes on inside their own bodies; a dangerous precedent indeed.

As an extreme example, if a child with precocious puberty becomes pregnant the Republican idea would require she carried it to term and gave birth; by any means. Yet for a child of 5 or 6 years that is neither possible or practical. While rare, it happens. Similarly, who are they to decide - for others of conscience - that a woman should sacrifice her life for the sake of a foetus that has no hope of survival?

One law does not fit everyone and here's what a supporter of this bill has to say in a comment appearing PanHandleParade.com pasted as it appears replete with all the errors - judge for yourself:

"i totally agree. if anyone becomes pregnant, there is a reason. that is a life in there. if it is there, then God thought of that being. MADE THEM UP! why would He make a person without any intent for their life? He wouldnt.Everything has a purpose in Him, and just because you arent ready to have this child, God wants it here. So deal with it. =]"

We lay it all at your door, of course!

Myself, I'm going to "Roe, roe, roe me boat, gently down the stream."

You Paid HOW Much?

2009-01-29T12:08:00.004Z

£37,071 is the going rate for a missing child website these days, according to accounts published in the Daily Mail.

The Mail isn't a paper you can usually rely on for unbiased facts, but since this amount has been carefully extracted from the Find Madeline fund's published accounts we can probably take it at face value.

£37,000 for a goddamn poster site! What are these people coding on, Crays? No wait, they're PAYING the Krays - because that's fucking daylight robbery.

It also ~~pissed away~~ spent a staggering £111,522 on legal expenses not connected with the McCann's defence; £36,000 on professional fees;
over £13,000 distributing merchandise and nearly £27,000 producing it; it goes on.

The largest single expense was the £250,000 wasted on the portugese detective agency which claimed it would find the missing child (yeah, let's not forget this is about a missing child) in three months.

£250,000 spent - result: fuck all! I hope these arseholes are proud of themselves - if I buy a toaster and it doesn't work, the shop gives me my money back, but it seems if I make an outrageous claim that I can do what the police have failed to - I get to keep the money when I fail to produce a result.

What a farce. This is why, like all good parents, I keep my children close to me or have a responsible person in charge of them when I cannot.

Madeline and her siblings deserve non of this, her parents however brought it on themselves.

Ah! The Sweet Sound of Spin!

2009-01-28T20:14:00.006Z

Dakota Voice is running this story today, basically an updated version of an older anti-abortion argument. There's a beautiful irony here considering I found this on a Republican pro-life lobby and as ever it's loaded in favour of the pro-life argument.

When you think about abortion, think of something. Imagine a child…

This child’s future is a broken home…

He will be abandoned by his father…

His single mother will struggle to raise him…

Despite the hardships, he will endure…

This child will become the first African American president.

Life: Imagine the potential.

That's the thing about choice, President Barack Obama's mother didn't choose to terminate that pregnancy and if she had, history would be different.

What pro-lifers never get is that this is about choice - one option cannot fit everyone. For some women, abortion will be the wrong choice, for others, it will be the right one. We cannot judge what any foetus will become because we don't know how life will influence them; for every black president or musical prodigy, there will be many others which life leaves by the wayside.

We can know with a reasonable degree of certainty the outcome of many genetic diseases, however. We know the pain and suffering that some children will have to endure as they lose a desperate battle for life in the hours and days after they are born - sure to die.

Many others will have deprived lives, may die of starvation or suffer from malnutrition or disease. Still more will become petty criminals, living life on the fringes of society and spending much of their lives in an out of prison.

UPDATE:

Rowan Pelling's moving account (in the generally awful Daily Mail and right-wing) is an inspiration to those faced with the dilemma of termination. Of her first pregnancy, a child suffering with Patau syndrome, Pelling writes:

"I recognise that it can seem near impossible that anyone could terminate a foetus at this late stage, when its claims to existence appear so tangible. But I am certain that if my first baby had not been diagnosed with Patau syndrome until the 20-week scan I would have still made the decision to terminate the pregnancy.
"This knowledge, which will be abhorrent to some, has brought home to me the fact that other people’s agonies, situations and choices are often impossible to imagine from any distance. Can I really understand, say, the dilemma faced by a pregnant woman who endures brutish social deprivation and domestic violence?"

This is the choice (and a future we can't predict) that pro-lifers want to take away.

Look at this picture and tell me your loving God made this I dare you.

Stephen Green Can't Have His Own Way.

2009-01-27T00:58:00.004Z

Bwaahhhhhaaaahhaahhhha!

Stephen Green is pissed off - as this release from a couple of days back demonstrates. More on this later, in the meantime here is the complete and unexpurgated release!

The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that the humanists behind the newly-launched bus advertisement which claims there is 'probably no God' can't substantiate their claims.

The ad, the brainchild of comedy writer Ariane Sherine, says: 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life'.

But Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, and 325 others, complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. Many complaints said the ads were offensive. Stephen Green and others said the advertisements broke the ASA's codes on substantiation and truthfulness.

The ASA website says: 'Advertisements are not allowed to mislead consumers. This means that advertisers must hold evidence to prove the claims they make about their products or services before an ad appears.'

But in a ruling today, the ASA says the claim that there is probably no God is 'not capable of objective substantiation'. It says further that the complaints were not 'serious' or 'widespread' enough.

Stephen Green said today:

'If the ASA had thought the humanists could provide evidence for their claim, they would have asked them for it. As they know there is no evidence for the proposition that 'there is probably no God', they have let their secularist friends off the hook. 'I debated this issue secularists five times in recent days, and despite repeated challenges, they could not once come up with anything to back up their claim that there is 'probably no God'.

'The ASA have finessed Code 7.1, which says a ad should not mislead or be likely to mislead, ruling it would not be likely to mislead, so avoiding the thornier question of whether it actually does mislead. Which it does.

'On 'taste and decency', the ASA have simply taken a subjective decision to dismiss the complaints of offensiveness. On planet ASA, complaints from people of faith are not given the same weight as those from secularists. But what do you expect when the ASA Council is appointed and run by a campaigning homosexual, Chris, Lord, Smith of Finsbury?'

Last year the ASA ruled against Sandown Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster when the church published an advertisement 'The Word of God against Sodomy' against Belfast Gay Pride. That ad, decided the ASA, breached its code on decency (offensiveness) after receiving just 4 complaints. But they allowed that the ad was a legitimate expression of opinion when dismissing another part of the complaint.

Last week, it ruled against an advertorial Christian Voice placed in the New Statesman, after just one solitary complaint that a prediction that every Government initiative on teenage sexuality would increase teenage infertility could not be substantiated.

Stephen Green commented: 'The ASA upholds or breaks its rules as it goes along. It all depends on who is being complained about. They get 326 complaints and decide the bus ads were not causing serious or widespread offence. They get a mere 4, and say Sandown's ad was. They allow Sandown to express an opinion, but not Christian Voice. They excuse the secularists from the need to provide evidence for a categorical statement, claiming it is impossible to do, but they say Christian Voice needs hard evidence for a future prediction, which really is impossible.

'We always knew the ASA was just another tool of the politically-correct secularist establishment, but here's the proof. Their ruling is a good example of how the deck is stacked against Christians today, and the Church needs to wake up to the anti-Christian agenda right now. The good news is we now know that when the secularists decided to say: "There is probably no God", they had no reason for making that absurd claim, and time has not helped them come up with one. The bad news is that if Christians don't start standing up for their Faith and their Saviour soon, we shall see religious liberties trampled on, and the secularists will take us further down the road to their hell on earth.'

NOTES for Editors:

The CAP Code, which the ASA administers, says:

'SUBSTANTIATION

'3.1 Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims, whether direct or implied, that are capable of objective substantiation.

'Relevant evidence should be sent without delay if requested by the ASA or CAP. The adequacy of evidence will be judged on whether it supports both the detailed claims and the overall impression created by the marketing communication.'

DECENCY

'5.1 Marketing communications should contain nothing that is likely to cause serious or widespread offence. ...'

'TRUTHFULNESS

'7.1 No marketing communication should mislead, or be likely to mislead, by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission or otherwise.'

Stop That! You'll Go Blind!

2009-01-26T17:49:00.006Z

And so goes the old wive's tale of admonishment dealt out to many a happy schoolboy caught "spanking the monkey" or "bashing the bishop" when he should have been studying.

Ah, those were the days...

Now it seems there was an element of truth in that old saying - but only if prostate cancer can metastasize to the optic nerves or other visual areas; and if it should, well frankly that would be the least of your worries.

The BBC reports from a Notingham University study, published in BJU, which has found a tentative link between the amount of sex a man has in his early years (20-30s) with the occurrence of prostate cancer in later life. Wacking off seems to present just as great a risk as engaging in sex with a partner, suggesting that hormones play a roll and reducing the implication that a virus or other factors may be involved.

As prostate cancer is often treated with hormone-reduction therapy, the team suggest that the increased presence of male hormones may be causative link although other studies have suggested that ejaculation causes the gland to release toxins.

While cancer charities have welcomed the finding, they were quick (and correct) to point out that this research is based entirely upon the recollections - and honesty - of each man tested. Memories that in some cases were 30+ years old! Not exactly the most reliable evidence...

So, it is with that skeptical view in mind and the fact that I won't live forever that I'm now going to flush me "custard bag".

Now where did I put those biology texts I used to study behind the bike sheds?

Pot Calls Obama Black

2009-01-26T12:27:00.002Z

The pot is (perhaps not that obviously) the Roman Catholic ~~fuckwit~~ Archbishop Rino Fisichella. Mr Fisichella has got himself all in a stew because the world's most powerful man has signed an accord which will allow US funding of overseas organisations which support abortion.

Of course, this is none of his business, but as Fishhead is president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, he thinks it is. Fisichella is quoted as saying:

"What is important is to know how to listen... without locking oneself into ideological visions with the arrogance of a person who, having the power, thinks they can decide on life and death"

When of course, this is precisely what Obama can do if he so chooses: he could (for example) commute the death sentence for prisoners on death row by little more than a wave of his pen; thus granting life back to those who took it.

But this isn't about abortion, it's about choice and in some cases it's about saving lives too, as AFP reports:

More than 250 health and human rights organisations from around the world sent Obama a letter, thanking him for ending a policy "which has contributed to the deaths and injuries of countless women and girls."

Which surely makes a very serious case (from those on the front line) that choice is precisely what is needed. As the ludicrous Fisichella enjoys his ivory tower and wears his knees out praying to his invisible friend, very real women are suffering because of his policies on birth control.

Surely, this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Not FITna for Broadcast

2009-01-24T13:37:00.003Z

Right-wing dutch politician, Geert Wilders anti-Islam Film was scheduled to be show to the House of Lords on the 29th January, 2009 but has now been cancelled after a group of Muslims led by Lord Ahmed put a case to the Government Chief Whip of the House of Lords and Leader of the House of Lords.

This is, quite frankly, fucking dumb.

One wonders what Lord Ahmed has to worry about! I've seen Fitna and it's pretty unpleasant but the really nasty stuff seems to come directly from the mouths of Muslims themselves. We have to temper that and remember that not all Muslims are that crazy, but ignoring it is like ignoring that some (very small number of people) abuse children.

Christian Democrat and Dutch Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, supported Wilders and led those supporting his right of free speech and the fact that the film provokes honest debate about radical Islam.

Times newspaper, leader writer Oliver Kamm, writes:

"Insisting on the right to offend religious believers may seem an unfeeling and uncaring doctrine. (The non sequitur that many Muslims in western societies are poor is often brought into the discussion at this point.) But the case for liberty has never been that it protects sensibilities. It is rather that by allowing people’s beliefs to be scrutinised, criticised and — yes — insulted, bad ideas are more likely to be superseded by better ones. Allowing ideas to die in place of their adherents is a mark of a civilised society. It is not hyperbole to say that in the defence of the unlikely figure of Geert Wilders lies also the defence of western civilisation."

So I'll ask again - perhaps rhetorically - what is Lord Ahemd so frightened of?

Hat tip to mediawatchwatch.org which also has obtained footage that you can watch and decide for yourself.

There's Definitely (Probably) No God

2009-01-21T15:19:00.005Z

Hat Tip to Mediawatchwatch which has broken this story:

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has concluded that the “There’s probably no God” bus ad campaign by the British Humanist Association is not in breach of the advertising code. The ASA will therefore not launch an investigation and the case is now closed.

The ASA carefully assessed the 326 complaints it received. Some complained that the ad was offensive and denigratory to people of faith. Others challenged whether the ad was misleading because the advertiser would not be able to substantiate its claim that God “probably” does not exist.

The ASA Council concluded that the ad was an expression of the advertiser’s opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation. Although the ASA acknowledges that the content of the ad would be at odds with the beliefs of many, it concluded that it was unlikely to mislead or to cause serious or widespread offence.

So that's the end of that - there's probably no god and it's OK to say it.

But believers are already extrapolating the ASA's requirement for "demonstrable facts" interpreting this in a manner to suit. Following is an extract from an email I received today from an Australian author:

"First, this issue is not one of 'faith vs science'. It's 'faith' vs 'faith' and 'science vs science'. Atheists have faith too. In fact, that is why Dawkins and the other atheists in the UK worded the sign on the London busses the way they did. They did not say 'There is no God' but they said 'There PROBABLY is no God.' In other words, they are not sure. So they have chosen to have faith in spite of the overwhelming evidence for the existence of God."

The writer has already received a reply which I'll not post here, but essentially this is the sort of thing we can expect. Despite Stephen Green and other idiots like him taking offence, others refusing to their jobs or just missing the point (see here) the ASA was happy to pass the advert.

Critical to this writer is his opinion that we have faith when in reality we're just complying with rigorous and completely fair advertising regulation that requires honesty; ironically precisely the same rules that Stephen Green has fallen foul of himself.

The interesting thing with people of faith is that so much of what they take for granted it based on highly suspect evidence or complete red-herrings - like this one. If you managed to grow a mighty oak in a sandy soil, it would still fall down with the slightest push.

Tiiiiiiiimmmmmbaaaaaaaaaaaa!

A New Hope

2009-01-21T00:42:00.005Z

I can't find the words to express what relief this is, but my brother-in-blogs Luke O'Dell can though - here!

Wait! You know that feeling you get when you're constipated so badly that your brain has started to fog up, you feel like you ass is going to prolapse and your haemorrhoids are going to explode?

No, not that feeling.... this one.

The feeling of blessed relief in taking that almighty dump secure in the knowledge that the almighty piece of shit that's been clogging up the world has finally been discharged into the toilet of history.

Yes, Obama, America can - and you'd bloody well better make sure you do.

Alternative Therapy II: The Crackdown!

2009-01-19T20:57:00.011Z

You have to love the English language - take words like compliment and complement, for example sound alike but have entirely different meanings.

To complement, from the Latin, complementum means to add to something. Whereas to compliment, also from complementum but via the Italian complimento means 'the fulfilment of the requirements of courtesy'.

If a man appreciates a woman's attire he may be paying her a compliment, but not a complement (and these days, thanks to fucking PC, he may even be accused of sexual harassment).

It is to this end that I may me introduce you to the "Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council" - which is one of those QUANGOs that has self-assumed the roll of overseeing the behaviour of alternative practitioners - quacks, in layman's speak. The website proudly (and predictably announces that):

"The CNHC has been developed with the help of complementary healthcare practitioners and with support from the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health. The Department of Health has consistently supported the CNHC throughout its start-up period and is committed to establishing the CNHC as the national voluntary regulator in the complementary healthcare field."

That would be this guy, HRH Prince Charles Windsor - the future monarch of England who desperately needs a proper job and whose no-expense spared education has failed to provide him with a modicum of cynicism or the power of critical thinking. Charles is dangerous - not like a terrorist is dangerous, but like an idiot with unlimited money, power and a cause is dangerous. Dubya was dangerous.

Charles lives in a protected environment where everything is done for him and he has access to the best medicines that science can produce and money can buy. Yet still he staunchly believes in and promotes some of the worst quackery imaginable.

So here we have an organisation (CNHC) funded and encouraged by a specialist in weird medicine which is going to regulate weirder "complementary" medicine.

~~Quack~~ Complementary medicine should, by definition add something to a conventional treatment yet more often that not, practitioners give the impression or worse, advice, that theirs is an alternative of equal or better efficacy.

Many of these "remedies" have been around for thousands of years and have their bands of enthusiastic followers, yet they comprehensively fail to stand up to scientific scrutiny. Homoeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture, herbalism - the list is long but every single one has been examined at some point and found lacking.

There's some evidence that some traditional remedies have had active ingredients that might have treated disease (gout, for instance) and plants such as Deadly Nightshade (atropa belladonna) gives us atropine which is one of the most basic medicines (of its type) we posses. Evidence is the key here: and there's no evidence whatsoever that any of the quack treatments are any more effective than a good doctor and a large dose of a powerful placebo.

CNHC co-chairman Maggie Dunn doesn't understand irony of this statement appearing on the BBC:

"If that means that people who are not up to scratch are driven out of business, I will not cry for them "

Up to scratch? By whose measure? Are the CNHC going to introduce some system of exams to make sure these people can cure the ailments they claim to?

Well, errrr, No. This rather toothless organisation, says BBC Health Reporter, Nick Triggle, will:

"...not judge clinics on whether therapies are effective, but rather on whether they operate a professional and safe business."

So this government-sanctioned, voluntary register (it's £45 per annum to join) is going to ensure that quacks behave in a professional manner and somehow that's acceptable.

If anything, this lends some credence to these fuckwits and failed wannabe doctors - ensuring they carry insurance and pay membership to a toothless QUANGO? What fucking genius!

Health Minster, Ben Bradshaw MP, spoke warmly of the idea saying that member practitioners will offer the public:

"...the reassurance of knowing that they have had to meet minimum standards of qualification and that they have signed up to a rigorous code of conduct."

Of course, a doctorate in quackery is still in quackery! Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter's, Peninsula Medical School had reservations, telling the BBC:

"I have concerns that the regulator does not have mandatory powers and is not looking at the efficacy of these therapies."

As do I. As will proper medically trained doctors. My dictionary defines medicine thus:

"the science or practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease"

If complementary "treatments" do not diagnose or can be shown scientifically to treat or prevent disease, then they are not fucking medicines and do not deserve that title!

Quack! Over and out.

Theos' Director Can't Read

2009-01-18T18:44:00.005Z

In all the furore surrounding the atheist bus ads, you could be forgiven for missing the plight of one Ron Heather.

Mr Heather is bus driver for First Bus and when he turned up for work and saw the infamous Atheist adverts plastered on his company's bus, the one he is required to drive as per his conditions of employment, he complained. Speaking to Radio Solent, he said:

“I felt that I could not drive that bus, I told my managers and they said they haven’t got another one and I thought I better go home, so I did,” he said. “I think it was the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God.”

Oddly enough, there must be plenty of atheist (or non-Christian) bus drivers around yet did anyone hear a peep out of them when the laughable Alpha Course was advertising, “Is this it?” and “If God did exist, what would you ask him?”

[Insert sound of crickets]

They just did their jobs - but when this idiot has his own faith called into question, he quakes in his boots. There's no implication in the advert - it's pretty open with its message.

But on with the show,

Theos Director, Paul Woolley [there's nominative determinacy cropping up again], said the ads were “hardly going to be a great comfort for those who are concerned about losing their jobs or homes in the recession.”

Though he didn't elaborate precisesly how God was going to dig us out of this hole either. Perhaps the Vatican would consider giving up some of its staggering wealth? Maybe the Church of England could stump up a few grand?

Only when airborne pigs are sighted over Conisholme. Woolly-brained Mr Woolley went on to say:

“And what does it tell us to do when we stop worrying?” he continued. “Volunteer overseas? Give money to charity? Campaign for the environment? No. It tells us to enjoy ourselves. It would be hard to come up with a more self-centered message than this.”

Wiat! Does it actually say "enjoy yourselves"?

NO! NO! And again NO!

It says, "enjoy your life." Which is an entirely different message.

This is a neat piece of spin and isn't corrected or questioned by Christian Post writer, Jenna Lyle who is clearly either too dim and uninterested to check the facts -or- more interested in pushing her own bias.

Now, does God of the Bile tell us to volunteer overseas (NO); does he tell us to give money to charity (NO); what about campaign for the environment? No again.

All of these things are human choices which any right-minded person should be able to figure our for themselves. You don't need to be a god-botherer to campaign for the environment - and ironically, it's the neocons in Bush's outgoing administration who partly fucked up the environment in the first place by greed for oil.

Do atheists volunteer to go overseas? You bet they do - the difference is they don't go and preach their bullshit ideas to poor people who don't know any better. They go there to help without a hidden agenda. And as for charity, only today I gave some money to save the Chinese bears - so there you have it, Theos Director Mr Woolley caught and gutted like a fish.

As for Mr Heather, he should be thankful that I'm not his boss.

Devonian Physics Lecturer Doesn't Do Evolution

2009-01-15T21:00:00.003Z

I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, but there's a fine line between arguing a point and actually deceiving people. The North Devon Gazette reports that Tim Street, a retired physics lecturer, is among the speakers appearing in an "antidote to Darwin Day".

The trouble with physics lecturers is that they don't know biology but because they are men of science people take them at their word. Woe betide any churchman who tried that around where I live, because if they do, they're in for a nasty shock.

Mr Street told the Gazette:

"How could all the amazingly complex plants and animals have come about by chance?"

Chance? Chance! Life may have originated by chance, but the diverse forms we see around us are the product of millions of years of evolutionary change. I could go, on but Mr Street is quite capable of demonstrating his ignorance of life science, going on to say:

"As for the origin of life, the idea that life spontaneously comes from non living matter was clearly disproved 150 years ago by Louis Pasteur. He showed that once all living bacteria or organisms are killed off, life would never start on its own."

This is abiogenesis - not evolution you dolt. Darwin never, ever argued the origin of life - the book is called the Origin of Species and for an intellectual to make such a basic mistake is inexcusable. Professor Stanley Miller (who died recently) and his professor demonstrated how it might have appeared but the jury is still out on that.

I get so angry when people pose these straw man arguments and then claim to have a better solution - which is always (predictably) goddidit. These Intelligent Design arguments invariably spill over from US-based "think" tanks such as the Discovery Institute who have only ever discovered one thing - how to make retrograde-monkeys out of highly evolved apes.

Next he'll be telling us that we're not actually apes at all but some special creatures created in God's own image - which is a weak argument in itself - would a creature capable of creating the universe really have such a ridiculous design?

What really bugs me is the Gazette's words which say that this is an "alternative" view to the accepted Darwinian evolution (which has been superseded by neo-Darwinism since 1950ish) as if this is a valid view.

It isn't and it never was. It's dumb, theological boilerplate of the highest order. A way of spreading ignorance of the worst kind.

Welsh Kids Can Opt Out of Zombie Worship

2009-01-14T18:03:00.004Z

Education Minister, Jane Hutt has decided that Welsh sixth-formers are to be given the right (like their English counterparts since 2007) to opt out of religious assembly.

Amazingly, this is due to the Education Act which dates back to 1944 which insists that children are exposed to a daily act of worship. The act says all schools:

"...must provide a daily act of collective worship which is broadly Christian."

This has less to do with the broadly secular UK and more to do with the stranglehold Churches had and still have on our nation's schools and, of course, the patently ridiculous notion that Bishops have the right to shit on, sorry sit in our upper house. This was gleefully seized on by Sir Peter Vardy's band of snake-oil salesmen who force children into what they call "tutor prayers" with the government's blessing.

1944 was an odd time for blighty. The 2nd World War was still raging, DNA had not been discovered and even television was in its infancy: yet it's not even a lifetime ago. It's not surprising that such an invidious piece of legislation should have slipped onto the statute books but it surprising that it's still there: but for the Bishops in the Upper House it most probably wouldn't be.

64 (!) years on and we've travelled to the moon, have hundreds of TV channels in glorious colour and high-definition, the Internet, personal computers, unlocked the mystery of DNA. The bishops are still in the House of Lords and (some) politicians don't think that young adults can think for themselves.

This is the problem: some of the Zombie Worshippers want to force their outmoded belief systems down children's throats even though it doesn't serve any useful purpose.

Ignoring the ubiquitous Rent-a-Quote, Stephen Green, the BBC quotes the Union of Welsh Independent Chapels, which said the assembly was,

"throwing away 1,500 years of Welsh Christianity to the wind - at the very time when young people need a sound moral and spiritual dimension in their lives more than ever."

This sort of comment really, really gets on my man-boobs. Who gives them the right to suggest that secular education does not or cannot give people a moral foundation? As for spiritual - that's a faith thing and it's for individuals to decide IF and WHAT they believe.

The UWIC is frightened that if this sort of outmoded practice is removed (and it will eventually be dropped from other schools too) then children won't follow their idiotic notions and may actually have to think for themselves.

Dr. Geraint Tudur whined to the BBC,

"Over the centuries, Christianity has been the bedrock of Welsh identity and morality."

Oh do move on dude! Christianity may have been the foundation of morals but we've moved on from there. Society is evolving (has evolved) to a point where most people - children included don't see the need to look up to a God. And, should it exist, it certainly doesn't need protecting.

As I see it, they're more likely to be frightened for their "jobs" - welcome to the real world, fucker!

A catholic spokesman was more relevant Father John Owen, a chaplain of Cardiff University, told the BBC:

"I have always thought that any form of compulsory worship was counter productive.
"I think it's a personal decision and personally I have no problem with this."

Amen to that brother. Errr....

Graham Stringer MP Is Ignorant

2009-01-14T16:10:00.005Z

Ignorant is to stupid what intelligence is to intellect.

The Labour ~~retard~~ backbench MP for Blackley, Graham Stringer says that dyslexia is a myth and we shouldn't be ploughing millions into helping people with a recognised disorder and it should be consigned to the "dustbin of history."

Stringer is basing his words largely on the controversial work of Durham Professor Julian Elliot who wrote in the Times Educational Supplement and was part of 2005 CH4 documentary called "The Dyslexia Myth". Stringer refers to Prof. Elliot's reseach:

"(it is also pretty damning that according to Professor Julian Elliot there are 28 different definitions of dyslexia).

But despite Stringer's posturing and complaining, even Professor Elliot concedes that dyslexia is real in a thoughtful article here: .

"I would hope that in twenty years from now, scientific advances have made a major impact upon our understandings of reading disability and the ways by which we can best help those who suffer so greatly. Maybe the term ‘dyslexia’ will survive but, if so, I hope that we will all – academics, clinicians, teachers and parents- have a much clearer consensual understanding about what we mean by the term."

What irritates Stringer is stuff like this (in his words):

"This reached a pinnacle of absurdity, with Naomi Gadien, a second year medical student initiating a legal case against the General Medical Council because she believes she’s being discriminated against by having to do written exams. I don’t know about anybody else but I want my doctors to be able to read and write."

But he has the answer: phonics. In the same way that social conservatives confuse gender dysphoria with natural learning (details) Stringer has picked up the title of a TV programme and run with it.

I'd agree Naomi Gadien has some gall to expect to be treated differently (and sue when she isn't) but that doesn't automatically mean that dyslexia is a myth and there is only specious evidence that phonics helps in dyslexia.

We really don't know what causes it - and like autism, it's more likely a spectrum with varying degrees of severity and even types. Calling it a myth is plane ignarnot.

Glenn Stanton Is (Gender) Confused

2009-01-14T15:14:00.006Z

With apologies to Cole Porter:

"Birds do, bees do it, even ignorant Yankeeeees do it...."

I love Dakota Voice, just when you think they've dredged into the deepest, darkest trenches of Conservative idiocy, they come with something new - this time it's Glenn Stanton. It's quite a short post, so you can see the video and Bob Ellis' comments here.

Stanton has been invited onto the Dr Phil show to discuss "Gender confusion" which Ellis has confused with homosexuality in his tags. Homosexual folks aren't confused about their gender - that's transsexuals you dolt! Homosexuals are attracted to people of the same gender.

Says Ellis:

"Due to a variety of environmental factors, children can become confused about their sexuality, what their proper role is and how they should act."

Which is bullshit, of course. Since Ellis is a God-fearing throwback, he cannot accept that. Even Stanton has this to say about gender dysphoria in children (the full article is here).

"Is it normal and healthy for young children to participate in cross-sex behavior? Of course! The whole world of a child is exploration. The role of the parent is to make sure their children explore and learn about their world in safe and directed ways."

Which is fair enough, but regrettably Stanton doesn't really understand what he's actually burbling about so this advice is misguided and wrong. The behaviour he alludes to is perfectly normal in normal children. His religiously formed guidance won't work in a truly dysphoric person. Our own NHS has this to say:

"The symptoms of gender dysphoria usually appear at a very young age. Children may refuse to wear typical boys' or girls' clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys' or girls' games and activities. In most cases, this kind of behaviour is just a normal part of growing up, but in cases of gender dysphoria, it persists into later childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
"The exact cause of gender dysphoria is unknown. It is currently classed as a psychiatric condition (relating to the mind), but many recent studies have suggested that it is more to do with biological development (relating to the body). There is ongoing research into what causes it."

Key here is the observation that a person with true dysphoria will refuse to wear clothes "appropriate" to their gender even at young age. (I did myself as a very young child. Children often dress up in alternative outfits - from the opposite sex to their favourite superhero - yet when they do, we don't assume they will grow up and go around dressed as Batman.)

Normal children just grow out of it! Biology and sexual identity will take over. Parental guidance (as promoted by Stanton) is a good thing; but our parents can't really influence our ultimate sexual identity: any more than zombie-worshipping plonkers can make God appear out of thin air.

Stanton says, Dr. Kennth Zucker:

"...one of the world's leading authorities on gender confusion in children, calls this dynamic "family noise" which he explains as unhealthy relationships between mother and father, parents and child, as well as sibling to sibling. He says allowing a boy to live as a girl might solve the immediate anxiety of such a child, but it would ignore the larger problem driving such desire, and it fails to serve the child and the family."

Does he indeed? Actually, we're not told what, precisely Dr. Zucker said that Stanton hasn't manipulated into his own words and since there is no real citation, there is no way to check, but googling does reveal why Zucker was chosen. TSRoadmap.com (who represent the opposing case) describes him thus:

"Ken Zucker is a psychologist at the Clarke Institute (aka "Jurassic Clarke") in Toronto. Zucker is famous for forcing gender-variant children into reparative therapy to conform to his expectations for male and female behavior in children. He considers transsexual women a 'bad outcome' for gay men."Zucker is a darling of the 'ex-gay' movement because of his work 'curing' gender-variant children. "

Now I won't go as far as alluding to Zucker as a quack, but shit, I'm sure I can hear ducks around here somewhere. Now, I think I'll go and pop some sheer stockings on. Oooo that feels soooo gooooood.

I've Seen Flying Saucers!

2009-01-13T09:37:00.002Z

It's true! The last time I saw a flying saucer it was coming toward me at breakneck speed just after the cup of tea and slightly before the spoon following. That was the last time I called the vicar a corpse-worshipper.

But UFO sightings are in the news again (or is that still) as the paper which claims to have broken this latest tomfoolery has now solved another mystery. The Scunthorpe Telegraph reports this morning that the curios orange lights seen in the Lincolnshire skies around Christmas were ---- wait for this ---- Chinese lanterns!

Local resident, Christine Harriman explained:

"We lit some Christmas day about 5ish as you light them and let the hot air raise them into the sky. Traditionally you make a wish, but we did them for our departed family members and our dog, which was a lovely way to remember them."

I'll agree with that.

Chinese lanterns are, in effect, miniature hot-air balloons. You light a lightweight candle inside and the less-dense hot air inside causes them to rise into the sky. On a still night they are quite beautiful and a great way to introduce young children to basic science.

See Nick (Pope) - doesn't matter how much you stir people up with your idiotic other worldly explanations, the truth comes out in the end. Now go back in your hole and feel ashamed - you ought to.

Peter Hitchens' Schoolboy Logic

2009-01-13T09:18:00.001Z

A couple of days ago Peter Hitchens ranted about wind farms. No, not about the silly events at Conisholme, but about the fact that when (as Hitchens put it) they are needed most during a cold snap, they stand dormant.

In his opening salvo, he demonstrates his skill with words in equal measure with his confounded ignorance:

"The swivel-eyed, intolerant cult, which endlessly shrieks – without proof – that global warming is man-made, has produced many sad effects. The collapse of proper education has made two whole generations vulnerable to rubbishy fads."

Let's not forget that this is a man who believes Darwin was wrong about evolution: so if anyone needs to do some soul-searching about education he needs to look in a mirror. There is any amount of proof that global warming is a man-made - but to understand it you have to open your mind to the frightening possibility that we're fucking with our environment.

Hitchens ignorant and intolerant naval gazing makes him popular with his followers, who take his word for it because that's what they want to hear, but leaves scientists in a frenzy of despair. Hitchen's needs to keep his job and the best way to do that is to raise a cheer from middle England's dullards .

Hitchens goes on:

"But the disfiguring of the country with useless windmills, and the insane plan to ban proper light bulbs, are supreme triumphs of this dimwit pseudo-religion.

"Both schemes override facts and logic. During the current cold spell, observant persons will have noticed that there has been very little wind, a rather common combination. Thus, at a time of great need for power, wind turbines would be almost entirely useless for producing electricity."

But as is usual with Hitchen's schoolboy approach, he's completely missed (or deliberately ignored) the very point, which is this: if wind farms generate electricity when the wind is blowing then conventional - precious - resources such as coal, oil and gas are preserved for the times when it isn't.

I can't say I'm terribly fond of wind farms and hope that new developments will improve and even remove the need for them. But we have to put the future first - because we only own the here and now; the future belongs to our children.

The Americans Are Dafter Than We Are!

2009-01-12T20:48:00.006Z

[bpsdb]
You have to hand it to the Americans. Whatever dumb idea we come up with, they can make it sound intelligent by comparison.

I've been blogging about the silly antics at Conisholme for a couple of days now as the story rapidly spread around the globe, seemingly unchallenged by rhyme or reason.

You can see my original posts here, here and here.

In which I've (a) dismissed and demonstrated the idea of a UFO as compete fantasy, (b) pointed out the alleged missing blade was never missing in the first place, (c) pointed out the terrestrial evidence (fireworks) for the lightshow and (d) had a bloody good laugh at their expense.

But I wasn't prepared for the lunacy appearing here !

The "tentacle" appearance of an unidentified flying object (UFO), such as reported over a wind turbine farm near Conisholme, England, on Jan. 4, 2009, may have been "constantly changing, torque-generating plasma beams" related to an exotic propulsion system.

An experienced American scientific researcher has proposed that the "jellyfish" or "octopus" visual effect that some witnesses have reported in the UK and United States could actually be what is called a "magnetoplasmadynamic" or "magnetohydrodynamic (MHD)" field.

Holy magnetominimetrohydrodynamic force fields Batman! (Grasps clenched fist in other hand).

This guy is a scientist! No?!

Magnetic motion-producing water?

Now that's too much, now I'm convinced I've been abducted by weird aliens and transported to another, parallel universe where stupid people walk the Earth. Only everything else is the same.

Writing for the American Chronicle, Steve Hammons quotes Ray Stanford (a pioneer in UFO detection systems), as saying the tentacle-like [fireworks, folks, fireworks] effect is:

"most often and readily visible when a craft is either slowing down or moving very slowly over an uneven surface."

[bullshit]

"Although some UFO-generated physical phenomena may, through human mind's ever-interpreting 'lens,' look 'organic' (as though what was observed is something alive), that absolutely is not the case."

[even stinkier bullshit]

Now clearly, he's got a point that the phenomena we're seeing (fireworks in this case) aren't actually organic or alive - but that only lends credence to a completely idiotic thesis.

Standford apparently prefers the term, anomalous aerial objects (AAOs) to UFO.

I on the other hand prefer the term "complete fucking lunatic" to "scientist" when applied to these crackpots. Writer Steve Hammons deserves some credit for this drivel as he appears to be another UFOlogist - but hey maybe I'm wrong.

In another priceless quote from the same piece, Hammons reports:

Stanford added, "It looks as though a craft is breathing, but that is only an interpretation the human mind makes in searching for analogs. In such case, it is a big misinterpretation. Likewise for the 'tentacles,´ which are really only constantly-changing, torque-generating plasma beams. But, they can bend under the 'Lorentz force' and other forces which are most often and readily visible when a craft is either slowing down or moving very slowly over an uneven surface."

Sure, a string of ionized gas (plasma) is very pretty - I got a lamp that does it from the pound shop just a few weeks back - but as for generating torque?

Torque derives from the the latin torquere meaning to twist is a measurement of turning force. It's useful for measuring the power from a reciprocating engine; but hardly much use for repelling gravity!

Sorry folks, the smell of bullshit is too much to bear. I gotta go wash.

As Succinct As It Is Dumb!

2009-01-12T20:13:00.003Z

There's a website devoted to the strange and frequently bizarre things that Christian fundamentalists come out with and it's well worth a visit, but this one found by the good fellow, Luke O'Dell at Creationist Idiocy is a corker that really should adorn science books: as an example of what not to say and English references as an example of how not to form a cogent argument.

Luke found this on PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog, and although I've tried thrice to leave a comment, I've failed, so I'll repeat it here, but for heaven's sake, take your socks off, tighten your belt and sit down - because your sides are in danger of splitting.

Wait for this....

...here it comes...

...this was posted by someone who doubts biological science (presumably believing in the literal Genesis tale from the KJV)...

...North Carolina resident Joel Fanti said:

"If evolution is so slow, why don't we see anything evolving now?"

I shouldn't really laugh at poor Joel, but I can't help myself. However, it does go some way to question the quality of American education. I don't know what Dr Myers' reaction was but I bet his sides ached for days. I know mine will.

Cheers Luke! I was having a shit day until I read that - what are you drinking?

How Stupid Are These People?

2009-01-12T17:45:00.003Z

Marie Jon a new writer over the uber-conservative Dakota blog, Dakota Voice looks to be a fun girl. Between all the hand-wringing about lies and deceit she claims to like Dubya, saying:

"Bush leaves office with a very low popularity rating in large part because of the one-sided, biased media. You’ll soon find out just how pervasive the media has been in persuading America’s electorate. In the months to come, President-elect Obama will be spoken of in glowing terms. The drive-by media will continue to lie. As our country moves in the wrong direction because of Obama’s policies, only good writes-ups and happy talk will be heard from our “in-the-tank spinmeisters.”

There's a grain of truth there. Some of the American media is very, very pro-Bush. Yet even with the media behind him, swing voters looked at the disastrous fiscal legacy and incredulous stupidity of the woman many saw as his eventual successor [McCain still is a dead man walking, politically] and thought, fuck that!

Obama is the great white hope - despite being part black. He's intelligent, articulate and so far, seems to have his head screwed on. Time will tell.

It's a sad reflection on the Bush years that the opposition fielded both a woman and African-American and won: brilliantly. I hope this has set a precedent in this country where the vacuous rub shoulders with the brilliant - in the corridors of power.

America is hated and despised in many parts of the world with good reason. Dubya led the west into an unjust war and his financial planning brought the world's financial systems to their knees. Islamic terrorism is more rife than ever before even though America has not been attacked recently, they have lost a lot of good men.

This is a man who was an alcoholic; a wastrel who has never had to balance his cheque book. A bloke who once suggested that "god" had spoken to him. Google for Bushisms and you might chuckle for a while before realising that this tongue-tied imbecile was barely able to produce a cogent sentence when he wasn't reading from a prepared speech - that someone else had written.

Yet blinded by some force that I am unable to fathom, people still profess to like the man.

Personally, I wish these people would realise the truth - not this selective biblical truth, but a scientific truth where even the nasty answers are acceptable when they happen to be the right ones.

Abortion Not Applicable, Marriage Optional

2009-01-12T15:54:00.003Z

Funny story this - not ha ha, but a little odd.

A Portsmouth couple who have been trying for a baby for a reported seven years have finally conceived but in a cruel twist of fate, the twins Lisa Chamberlain is carrying are are conjoined with a rare form of the condtion called dicaphaly.

They have separate heads and brains but a single body.

Doctors have advised an immediate termination but 25 year old Ms. Chamberline is not interested, calling them a gift from god, telling the Sun:

"To me, my twins are a gift from God and we're determined to give them a chance of life."

You might expect a pretty sharp response from me being an atheist. But I'm also pro-choice and it's Ms. Chamberline's choice to keep the babies despite the overwhelming medical evidence.

US-born twins, Abby and Brittany Hensel have the same condition and survived not only birth, but recently celebrated their 18th birthday.

In reality most conjoined (Siamese) twins do not survive to term and to make a spectacle of these unfortunate children and this family is fucking disgusting. Still, the smiling Ms. Chamberline and partner Mike Pedace, 32 don't seem phased - so that's alright.

I am phased at the double standards.

Ms. (read MISS) Chamberline is not married to Mr Pedace - and that's no real news in the 2008 - or in 2001 when they started trying for a family. It's no news the couple have been trying for a family but then there's a small point of relgion:

Now Ms. Chamberline is supposed to be "staunch Catholic" which may be the reason she opposes the termination.

But hang on - this isn't entirely consistent.

Staunch Roman Catholics teach marriage before family.

And what sort of god delivers this cruel blow to these children? I don't really care what Ms Chamberline thinks - she has a choice - but to believe that a loving, caring god could deliver the gift of life so cruelly beggars belief. Should these babies survive to term, their chance of ultimate survival is poor; and even then, they are destined to live out their days as freaks.

UPDATE: 20:00

At just 25 she has years of childbearing left. The suggestion she has been trying for seven years speaks volumes - has she never heard of a fertility clinic; or even a GP? Hell's teeth, perhaps the poor girl is pre-disposed to produce faulty embryos - we just don't know.

Please, please someone tell me it wasn't the lure of a tasty packet from a tabloid (the Sun in this case) that forced their hand. Tabloids are known to promote these freakish incidents because people love the lurid details of how these "determined" women are going to keep the multiple foetus despite being told none are likely to survive.

Anyone else remember Mandy Allwood - back in the mid-90s, she had fertility treatment and ended up the talk of the nation after receiving money from the tabloids and even engaging Max Clifford to represent her. Refusing a selective termination which would have given some of the children a fighting chance, Mandy lost all eight. It caused a sensation at the time and irritated the hell out of me.

Human females are "designed" for singleton pregnancies - like Kangaroos. Twins and triplets are unusual, but as the number increases, the chance of any foetus surviving to anything near term drops away sharply. Eight was fucking ludicrous.

I just thank common sense that termination is still an option for those who choose it.

Ecotricity Isn't Helping

2009-01-12T15:10:00.006Z

Yes, it's that bloody "UFO" at Conisholme again.

Of course, there isn't a UFO and there never was. They simply don't exist, but as if to pour petrol on already furious blaze, an unidentified spokesperson has told the Louth Leader that:

"If there is a rational answer out there, we will find it."

What is the matter with these people? "IF" there is a rational answer? IF!!

Blades fall off wind turbines all the time - and suddenly Ecotricity are hinting that the cause may be unexplained. Hell's teeth, despite the amazing accuracy and regular NDT applied to the turbines in jet engines, even they occasionally fail with deadly results.

So either Ecotricity is either incredibly clever or incredibly stupid.

It's clever because by playing the long, unexplained game, they avoid having to deal with the failure in their duty of care - they are ultimately responsible for ensuring the blades don't drop off in the middle of the night.

It's stupid because playing the long game promoting the UFO myth is going to harm wind farms (and its business) in the long term. Already dumb people who need jobs and/or girlfriends are trying to get on site to search for bits of crashed UFO.

They won't find any because nothing crashed there.

That won't stop them looking while people like Nick Pope appear in national radio and hand-wringing on TV telling supporting the myth with their own pet theories. Very few tangible events remain unexplained for long, but Rent-a-Fools like Pope make a nice little living from gullible people and perpetuate this crazy myths.

Of course with a name like Pope, it's not surprising he is into ridculous myths: nominative determinacy anyone?

Daily Mail Readers Are Gullible

2009-01-11T20:49:00.005Z

This is just a quick update on a story I ran a couple of days ago here.

One Daily Mail reader had the gall, the audacity to point out that the other commentators were well, daft, by writing:

"Are the public so gullible to believe such rubbish[?] One blade has broken off and the other was damaged in the freak weather conditions."

Which is pretty close to my own diagnosis and that of many experts including an insurance specialist who sees several of these incidents every year.

Mail readers are outraged - so far the comment is rating -90 (Sunday 21:00) and sinking! Dear god - are they really that stupid? Apparently, they are:

Molly of Stockport (currently one of the most popular comments at +86) has this to say:

"It isn't mentioned in this account but others state that there was no trace of the missing blade ... could ball lightening do that?"

It isn't mentioned, dear because it ISN'T MISSING and never was - it's been sent back to the manufacturer to see what went wrong; and what's ball lightning got to do with it?

It goes on to quote, rent-a-fool, Nick Pope a former MOD employee who now specialises in UFOlogy for TV. Mr Pope told the Mail:

'This is a really bizarre case. What's particularly exciting is that because there's been a collision, there will be residue of the object involved. Forensic science will enable this material to be recovered and analysed. This elevates this UFO case, because with most sightings all you have is eyewitness testimony or indistinct and shaky film footage taken on a mobile phone.'

Does it indeed? All it elevates is the smell of bullshit coming from your direction.

The flashing lights were still most likely of terrestrial origin - fireworks; and the noise - well can you imagine the din if a rotor blade comes off and hits a neighbouring one at speed? There's going to be one hell of a bang!

The residue - what are you going to say when this turns out to be parts of a neighbouring blade, Nick? Will the German engineers even bother to look?

Much of the rest of this is empty speculation fuelled by Nick Pope and his band of gullible idiots. Not that it matters. Nick never has to answer his critics: he just does a Hitchens and ignores them.

Lloyd Webber - "UK Lyricists Are Crap"

2009-01-11T18:56:00.003Z

OK, hands up, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber didn't really say that - but he might as well have.

On Saturday, the BBC reported that US writer Diane Warren will pen the lyrics to an ostensibly UK song that will be competing in Eurovision - the cheesy, political, waste of money that even Wogan has turned his back on.

Warren who has written powerhouse hits for Toni Braxton and Cher, is to write the lyrics for Lloyd Webber's music - or is that the other way around? Tin Pan Alley style never did much for me.

Not that it matters.

The UK has a mass of talent and really, what the fuck is a yank (albeit it talented one) doing stealing our jobs? If I were a potential competitor in one of the other competing countries I'd be feeling a bit short-changed too and laughing at us for not being able to produce the lyrics in-house as it were.

I mean, this is a small island - there's only 50-odd million people here!

Surely, if we're daft enough to make a spectacle of a bunch of hopefuls by running a televised competition to find the artist, the same could be done for the words, couldn't it?

I'm sure you could line up some walking egos like Simon Cowell, Peter Hitchens and maybe even Bruno Tonioli to judge whatever our home-grown scribes can get onto paper. Then we could have a national phone-in vote to raise loads of money for the telly company while the result is decided long before the phone lines close.

That would be great!

Peter Hitchens Is Gutless

2009-01-11T13:02:00.004Z

Under Peter Hitchen's latest pseudo-scientific diatribe I noticed link where readers were invited to debate with the Mail on Sunday's Idiot In Chief.

Could I resist telling this educated, self-indulgent fool pretty much everything he wrote was wrong? Well yes and no. Many fellow bloggers have already tried (and failed) to engage Hitchens; tearing his rants to pieces on various blogs - the Lay Scientist being a personal favourite.

Out of curiosity, I waited until comments started to appear and read the following message, tucked away in light-grey against the white background. Visible - but not hardly DDA compliant.

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them.

So put another way you can't debate with Hitchens - any more than you can debate with his fellow Creationists.

For the sake of the Mail and Mail readers, here's what the word actually means:

Debate: Vb. [Trans.] to argue about (a subject), esp. in a formal manner.

Argue means to disagree about something so in order to debate something with Hitchens you have to be able to engage him. Yet by enabling comment moderation in this way, Hitchens has denied anyone with a modicum of knowledge the route to contradict him.

Predictably the only comments appended to the blog are of the sort that Hitchens could have written himself - my god, that man must have an ego the size of Arcturus.

Well here's an open to challenge to Mr Peter Hitchens of the Sunday Mail.

Come and debate some of the people you see fit to critcise in an open forum and see how you fare. Come and edify us as how Darwin was wrong about evolution; how climate change isn't man made; what future generations are going to do when the coal runs out and so on.

No comment moderation - everyone gets to have a say.

I say you can't Hitchens: because you're haven't got the guts to stand up and fight or the evidence to back up your outrageous claims. You just want to sit around and have that gigantic ego stroked by people who think you're infallible while destroying the reputations of people who actually know what they are talking about.

We're waiting.

No Tits Please, We're Christian Politicians

2009-01-11T11:26:00.006Z

A bunch of throwbacks in Australia are trying to mess with evolution again - only this time it's a cultural evolution, not a biological one. I have to admit this story is over a week old, but it's too good not to report on it.

A group of Conservative Christians in New South Wales are trying to ban topless bathing on the the state's glorious beaches. Led by moral throwback, which Reuters describes as "Christian lawmaker and veteran morals campaigner Reverend Fred Nile" the group wishes to constrict laws governing nude sunbathing on the beaches.

Topless bathing has been acceptable and commonplace in this part of Oz since the 1960s - yes folks, nearly half a century ago - but Reverend Fred is disgusted (and old). Perhaps he hails back from the Victorian era when covering up was the order of the day: not just a sensible thing to do on our terribly chill beaches.

It's certain his ideas do. Fred told Reuters in heavily accented Oz dialect:

"She demeans herself. I believe that she's taking away her own self-respect and I'd say any of the men around that area would not have any respect for that girl and probably would think that she's cheap and maybe even trying to pick up somebody"

There's that word "probably" again.

When did breasts become offensive? We're used to covering ourselves - originally it was to keep warm and clean, but then later when the god-botherers got involved it was to cover our reproductive areas.

To me, Fred and his supporters are performing a sort of self-flagellation because they can't get close to a pretty young girl any more and being denied that, they want to stop everyone else.

Breasts are there to feed our children before they are able to take solid food. That's what nature developed them for and we all have them - it's part of being mammal. They're just less developed in men and no one complains about men going around topless!

Which brings me to a super song about this very topic, the great Rodney Carrington has a song about it: "Show them to me!" - you'll find it on Youtube.com and I'd recommend going there now if this story depresses you.

Because it seems that Fred and his followers might be making some headway and the idiots may actually get their way and prevent women having a another choice. Did I mention that? It's not compulsory for a woman to put her funbags on display in NSW, but it's her right to do so if she wants to.

Excuse me now while I nip to Oz before evolution goes into reverse like it did on that Guinness advert a while back.

PETA Needs To Check Its Facts

2009-01-10T20:50:00.010Z

When PETA got wind of a 140 year-old cock lobster, it knew it had to act and persuaded the City Crab and Seafood restaurant in New York to release it back into the sea off Maine, according to the BBC.

PETA's Ingrid Newkirk was pleased:

"We applaud the folks at City Crab and Seafood for their compassionate decision to allow this noble old-timer to live out his days in freedom and peace. We hope that their kind gesture serves as an example that these intriguing animals don't deserve to be confined to tiny tanks or boiled alive."

She doesn't have anything to say about the other lobsters or crabs or other stuff that the restaurant goes through daily.

Now I don't know who told PETA that George was 140, perhaps his birthday was inscribed on his shell somewhere? No wait, can't do that, because lobsters eat their old shells when they moult. Watching these beautiful creatures gracefully exit their shells is a sight to behold - what remains looks like a ghostly image of its former resident for a while before it disintegrates in the tide or is eaten. I've kept smaller lobsters such as crayfish over the years and despite what PETA are saying, you can't really get an accurate age just by looking at or even weighing them. Even within a species, a crustacean's weight and size are determined by its diet.

This from www.veganpeace.com (which seems fitting, considering PETA screwed up):

"The only way to gauge the exact age of a lobster would be by their shell. However, since lobsters shed their shells so often, it is impossible to determine their age. Knowledge of body size at age makes scientists believe that lobsters can attain a maximum age of 100 years. The normal life span is about 15 years. Lobsters can grow to be 3 feet long in overall body length."

According to an expert, the animal's (?) age bears no relationship to the taste either (that's after it's been boiled). Lobsters and crabs eat all manner of things and it's this that gives them that distinctive seafood flavour - excuse me while I go vomit.

Worse still for George (insomuch as the expert was concerned) being a cock lobster he wasn't actually a lot of use. A large female would be far more valuable since she could produce far more eggs - and therefore, lobsters - and was therefore more valuable to leave in the water.

Although no one knows for sure, lobsters probably only live about 40-50 years - even 100 years would be a wild overestimate.

PETA do have a point - though not about George's age - research suggests that crustys feel pain like we do: so a British inventor has come up with a gadget to electrocute them in about 5 seconds. Better than being boiled alive - slowly - (OUCH). A home version is available and you can find out more here.

http://www.crustastun.com/

TV Chef Lloyd Burgess suggests an alternative method:

"Live lobsters can be humanely killed by putting them in a plastic bag in the freezer for about two hours. They slowly lose consciousness and die."

What a way to go, boiled, suffocated and frozen or the electric chair - I'll never be able to watch Spongebob Squarepants again.

As an aside, starfish which are closely related to sea urchins, are thought by some experts to live essentially for ever - unless they starve to death, are eaten or otherwise destroyed. Weird. Weirder still, while they have tens of thousands of independently controlled hydraulic feet commanded by intricate and fiendishly complex nervous system, they don't have a discernible brain - as you or I would understand.

Bit like some of the journalists writing today, I guess.

"Mark Damazer is God" - BBC Presenter

2009-01-10T17:32:00.005Z

On the BBC's iPM, journalist Eddy Mayer referred to BBC Radio 4 Controller:

"Mark Damazer or God as we call him."

It isn't clear at this stage if Mr Mayer will be struck by lightning or just a reprimand for this blasphemy. He was being flippant (at least I HOPE he was) but I would be surprised if some rent-a-quote like, oh, S. "Burdshite" Green didn't have something to say.

On the same slot, Director of Christian Think-tank, Ecclesia Johnathon Bartlay, called the automatic inclusion of Bishops in the upper house, "absurd". Further noting how he had been quietly removed from the panel of "Thought For The Day" when he argued that non-religious speakers should be allowed a voice.

Presumably this is why Mayer referred to Damazer as God and not just the "baldy bastard from upstairs."

Damazer eloquently spews vitriol on the Today programme's audience on the iPM blog, where he writes:

"I regard this as a genuinely difficult question. There may be a case for widening the pool of contributors on Thought for The Day by having someone with an avowedly non-religious perspective. However on balance the BBC's position is that it is reasonable to sustain the slot with believers. Let me now set out the reasoning.

Thought for the Day is a unique slot in which speakers from a wide range of religious faiths reflect on an issue of the day from their faith perspective. In the midst of the three hour Today programme devoted to overwhelmingly secular concerns - national and international news and features, searching interviews etc - the slot offers a brief, uninterrupted interlude of spiritual reflection. We believe that broadening the brief would detract from the distinctiveness of the slot.
Within Thought for the Day a careful balance is maintained of voices from different Christian denominations and other religions with significant membership in the UK. We are broadcasting to the general Radio 4 audience which regularly engages with the comments and ideas expressed by our contributors from the world's major faiths - whether they are believers or not."

Obviously, he's talking shit as anyone of an atheist persuasion would be able to tell you if they could sit through this five minute interlude, which is effectively a short sermon, every weekday for a couple of weeks.

I have - and I can't bear the Archers. ("Oooooo Arrrrr. Look at the udders on that, baby!")

What Damazar refers to as "secular concerns" is, in fact, the real world. The tangible. But let's not forget, as he seems to have, that many of the wars - and certainly the bloodiest conflicts that are happening right now are - you guessed it - religious in nature. Jews and Muslims are fighting in Gaza and US Christians sending forced to pound Muslims in Afghanistan.

As a second point, and this will form part of my own argument to BBC management, why do we need "a brief, uninterrupted interlude of spiritual reflection" anyway?

If Mr Damazar is, as I suspect, a bible following Christian that is his own concern and he has no respect for the wishes of the largely secular R4 audience by continuing to bang us over the head with introspective, Abrahamic naval gazing.

TTFD is there to please a small minority of people who cling fearfully onto the notion that there is an afterlife and it'll all be better rather than having the guts to face what the future brings or the courage to change it.

Today would be better off without it.

The ASA Might Draw Battle Lines!

2009-01-10T11:40:00.007Z

Work commitments prohibit me from commenting any more than to promise I'll write more on this later with citations, but currently reports are suggesting that 100+ people have added their voice to that of Stephen Green complaining about the atheist bus advert.

This is likely to be the ASA's toughest ever challenge.

If it decides it has to rule (and it might even have that hand forced) it may effectively have to rule on the very existence of a god or gods.

If it were me, I would demand the complainants define what constitutes god (because you can't have something if you can't define what it is) AND which god they are alluding to. The nasty, jealous, antagonist, murderous fucker of the Old Testament or the slightly more charismatic and gentile figure portrayed in the New. Which is a dichotomy in itself!

Gavin Orland, who organised a campaign to email the BBC to protest about the corporation's Thought for the Day told the Telegraph:

"The fact that humanist, non-religious contributors are excluded from the slot gives the impression the BBC believes morality is the exclusive remit of religious people, which is offensive, unrepresentative and untrue.
"It's great that there will be a non-religious thought allowed on iPM: let it be an example to the Today programme."

This may indeed be a turning point for religion in the UK, which although ostensibly secular, still carries the weight of centuries of Christian heritage. At the simplest level, this manifests itself as people, almost instinctively, tick CofE [Church of England] on forms where religious affiliation is requested; right through to the startling control that religious influence still holds over schools. In England, religious schools are maintained by the state; yet are free to fill the minds of vulnerable children with sectarian bile.

The problem for tub-thumping "out" atheists is that ordinary English folk don't care either way.

It's part of being English. We drink milky tea, go out in the noonday sun and declare to be Anglicans (unless we're catholic) even when we're not. Even today, many official forms still contain options for religious affiliation (AS IF IT FUCKING MATTERED) and yet omit the option for: none.

Many regard Stephen Green and his ilk as a bit of a joke - but a harmless one - when in reality, it's only the efforts of a campaigning core of rational, free thinkers that keeps him tethered.

Chief god-botherer , Tony Blair was quite happy to allow Peter Vardy's Doberman, Nigel McQuoid to teach Creationism in his academies until a bunch of academics and ordinary folk came out and took a stand until the government was forced to legislate against the slow march of stupidity.

I was one of them and I'm proud of our collective achievement.

But this is far from over - this country - indeed the West as a whole needs to a have an open and honest debate on these matters.

Christian Bigot Claims Unfair Dismissal: Fails

2009-01-10T10:37:00.002Z

Direct from my friends at the National Secular Society comes a story of common sense beating religious bigotry. Terry Sanderson reports:

A Christian therapist at the Relate counselling service, who refused to give advice to gay couples, has lost his claim for unfair dismissal.

Gary McFarlane was employed by Relate as a counsellor, but he later qualified as a psychosexual therapist. He told Relate that although he had counselled gay couples in the past, he was unwilling to provide sexual therapy as it conflicted with his religious beliefs. After objections from his colleagues, Mr McFarlane was sacked in March 2008.

Mr McFarlane, of Bristol, claimed unfair dismissal against the Avon branch of Relate on the grounds of religious discrimination, but the tribunal panel unanimously rejected his claim. The panel said: "The claimant was not treated as he was because of his Christian faith, but because (Relate) believed that he would not comply with its policies and that it would have treated anyone else of whom that was believed, regardless of religion, in the same way."

Mr McFarlane's boss at Relate had said during an earlier hearing that he had been sacked because he made it clear that he would not abide by its equal opportunities policy, which states that all clients must be treated in the same way, regardless of sexuality. Mr McFarlane's case was supported by the Christian Legal Centre which has been party to a string of failed challenges to the equality laws over the past year.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: "This is the right outcome for this case. The fundamentalists who are mounting one challenge after another to Employment Tribunals are trying hard to overturn the laws that protect gay people from discrimination. They are seeking to place Christian dogma over the rights of people to fair treatment. They must not succeed."

Meanwhile, Lillian Ladele, the Christian registrar who refused to carry out civil partnership registrations for same-sex couples, has asked permission to appeal a recent ruling by an Employment Appeal Tribunal that her employer, Islington Council, did not discriminate against her on religious grounds.

Ladele's lawyer, Mark Jones, head of employment law at Ormerods, said that he hopes to hear in the next two weeks or so if permission to appeal has been granted. He said he could not give too much information about the appeal but that one of the grounds would relate to evidence put before the tribunal and the EAT by the council's own witnesses "relating to the treatment of Ms Ladele and the reasons for it".

Ladele's case is backed and funded by The Christian Institute. She is still employed by Islington Council and still, presumably, refusing to carry out her duties in full.

Carla Revere, Chair of the Lawyers Secular Society, commented "Religious discrimination law is about protecting people not their beliefs. The Ladele judgment clearly explains that a refusal to carry out an employer's instructions because of religious beliefs that are prejudiced against gay and lesbians is not religious discrimination. Miss Ladele was sacked not because of her beliefs but because she refused to do her job. Mr Justice Elias, president of the Employment Appeal Tribunal said that an anarchist who burnt down his employer's office would be sacked for burning down the office, not because of his philosophical beliefs.

The law requires employers to treat gay and lesbian employees and customers with equality. The Ladele judgment shows that religious people cannot use religious dogma to exempt them from the requirements to treat and respect gay and lesbian people equally. "

Stephen Green Is (Probably) Dumb

2009-01-09T12:28:00.012Z

Predictably, Stephen 'Bird Shit' Green has come out in all of a fluster after comedienne Ariane Sherine helped launch the "There's Probably No God" campaign, yesterday.

Unsurprisingly, Green wasn't in evidence when the Christian adverts appeared last year warning that people who rejected God were going to spend eternity in hell.

Oooo oooo, Steve. I'm trembling in me boots at the very thought.

In a statement to AFP, Green whined:

"It is given as a statement of fact and that means it must be capable of substantiation if it is not to break the rules," he said. "There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

"I believe the ad breaks the Advertising Code anyway, unless the advertisers hold evidence that God probably does not exist."

Which is where he starts to go wrong. Green's press release lectures editors on the ASA code as follows:

SUBSTANTIATION
'3.1 Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims, whether direct or implied, that are capable of objective substantiation.
'Relevant evidence should be sent without delay if requested by the ASA or CAP. The adequacy of evidence will be judged on whether it supports both the detailed claims and the overall impression created by the marketing communication.'
'TRUTHFULNESS
'7.1 No marketing communication should mislead, or be likely to mislead, by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission or otherwise.'

Green obviously missed the word probably.

Carlsberg's marketing has said for years that its is probably the best lager in the world. In fact, it probably isn't, but probably is like that, it's not a statement of fact, just an idea. Green is confusing probably with definitely.

Curiously, when this was first mooted, I hear that the message did not include "probably" at all and the word was only inserted at the behest of London Transport.

No one can say for sure that there is no god (or gods come to that); but by the same token, no on can say for definite that supernatural forces exist. Fact is, you and I might be just brains in a jar: it's an age-old problem for philosophers and goldfish everywhere.

What Green see as evidence for God I see as nature in all her magnificence. Poor old Green can't cope with this - because that destroys everything he understands. Every bit of evidence we have (that's proper evidence, not some story from a dusty old story book) says that life on Earth evolved from little more than simple strands of DNA.

Scientists think that the entire universe was created in an instant from a tiny mass of matter which exploded about 13.5 billion years ago: the Big Bang. Others don't agree, they think that the event was triggered when a couple of "branes" (sheets or membranes of alternate space-time) collided; but this is the realm of string theory and those guys can't agree on much.

Anyway, Green smugly announces that the bible is immutable and can be quoted without problem.

The Christian evangelist is not concerned by fears that his complaint will lead to atheists complaining about Christian adverts. 'I am sure many of them have complained about Christian advertising already,' he said, 'but a statement such as "The Bible says 'the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord'" is entirely factual. The Bible does say that. The statement "Jesus said, 'I am the way, the truth and the life - no-one comes to the Father but by me,'" to take another example, is a Biblical quote, from the same Bible which is part of our Christian Constitution and upon which witnesses promise to tell the truth in Court. The Bible is, to coin a phrase, our Bible.'

He's missed the important point that although you can quote parts of the bible, you can't automatically use those quotes to cause offence to certain groups of people without falling foul of precisely the same guidelines.

He also incorrectly suggests the UK has a Christian constitution - it doesn't. The UK has a Christian heritage, but that's entirely different - the place is about as secular as they come.

Course, Green never let facts get in the way of a good story, running an advertorial in New Statesman suggesting that the HPV vaccine was going to turn our daughters into harlots, which opened (according to its own release) with the words:

'VIOLENT CRIME - SOWING AND REAPING'

Delightful.

It went on to opine:

'There is a Biblical principle that we reap what we sow. It applies to nations as well as to individuals. What politicians sow, the people reap. When politicians sow evil, the people reap misery, and the poorest reap it the worst.

"Now we have the disaster of teenage infertility. Every government initiative, including the HPV vaccine, will increase it, but as all the targets revolve around pregnancy, no-one in power knows how many young people they are making sterile and nobody cares."

Someone was pissed and called the ASA who insisted that, CV provided 'robust, scientific evidence that the HPV vaccine caused infertility in teenagers'

I don't blame them and where I live we have a disaster of teenage pregnancy not infertility. Green is obviously confusing the HPV vaccine with the bacterial infection, Chlamydia trachomatis. But hey, he's a Christian (direct line to God) so he knows more than the medics and people who bother to research what they write.

HPV - the virus that causes genital warts - is carried by men and is thought to be a major cause in certain types of cervical cancer. Virgins don't suffer with it. Immunising against HPV is a sure way to prevent HPV and reduce a common and dangerous cancer that claims the lives of many each year - even, dare I suggest, Jade Goody may not have been so ill had HPV vaccination been available.

Chlamydia is a different kettle of fish - it's bacterial, not viral for starters - but like HPV, condoms provide an excellent level of protection and it can be cleared by a simple, short course of antibiotics. The problem is that most people (50% men and 75% of women) can remain asymptomatic for some time, even when the damage has been done.

About 40% of women with Chlamydia will go on to develop pelvic inflammatory disease which may lead to damage to the fallopian tubes, uterus and surround tissue; resulting in sterility. It can also lead to, potentially life-threatening ectopic pregnancy (where the foetus implants outside the uterus) and chronic pelvic pain and even arthritis. [Figures from the CDC].

Where Green may have become confused is by the less-known reference that Chlamydia is more common among young people, particularly women because the bacteria can more easily take hold in the less mature sexual organs. It is also passed readily between gay men and through oral and anal sex. The CDC recommends that all sexually active women under 25 are screened annually although so far as I am aware, this is not routine in the UK.

Green's (probably) pissed off because, as Douglas Adams wrote, "he doesn't get invited to those sorts of parties."

UFO Damages Wind Turbine (NOT)

2009-01-08T11:49:00.013Z

In some breaking news, a wind turbine at Conisholme, England has lost one of its 20M blades and had another damaged has UFO ~~idiots~~ ~~experts~~ ~~fruitcakes~~ ~~researchers~~ believers in a frenzy. UFOolgists as they like to be called (I can think of a lot of other things) are now crawling all over the site like ants scouring for clues.

Not surprisingly, the local and even national press is abuzz with the story of the millenium - little green men are real after all and we're being invaded! Strange lights have been reported in the sky around the area and mysterious sounds have been heard.

Uh huh!

Although Dale Vince one of the site owners wasn't saying much, the MOD are being rather more sober.

They're not even vaguely interested, in fact.

What the UFOidiots want us to believe is that a massive spaceship could navigate its way across the vastness of space, successfully get into low earth atmosphere and then crash into a wind farm!

Photos of the structure appear here, although they're not that clear. Even looking at that, I have another explanation which is closer to home and rather more believable and I can sum it up in two words:

Metal fatigue.

I may be wrong, but my immediate guess is that the missing blade actually came loose or began to bend while the turbine was rotating at speed. As it flailed around it collided with a second blade causing that severe damage before eventually falling off completely.

Occam's razor folks.

You read it here first. I'll update this story if any clearer explanation appears.

UPDATE:

and here it is, just 30 minutes after I posted my results, Associated Press puts this on the wire (courtesy of Google and copyright Associated Press)!

"Fraser McLachlan, chief executive of GCube, which insures more than 25,000 wind turbines worldwide, said that although it is unusual, this type of incident happens about five or six times a year. It does happen that a blade will sometimes just come off a machine for one reason or another," he said. "The main reason is the blade may shear."

FUCK YOU Ufologists!

Reason wins again.

Those bright lights are just that, everyday bright lights or more likely fake memories. More on this in my upcoming book which may even come out this year.

UPDATE 2:

The brilliantly sober Financial Times has an explanation for the lights in addition to a carried away "expert" as its Energy Editor, Ed Crooks writes at lunchtime today:

Nick Pope, a UFO expert, said it could be “one of the most significant UFO incidents for years.”
The Financial Times can reveal, however, that the likely cause of the lights seen in the area was a firework display.
Peter Bell, a retired farmer who lives close to the wind farm site, celebrated his 80th birthday on Saturday night with a party that culminated with fireworks being let off in the back garden.

In another priceless quote (this one appears in a newspaper from Thailand!) the amazingly gullible Russ Kellett, from the Flying Saucer Bureau, said witnesses had reported:

“Balls of light in the sky and the MoD (ministry of defence) has no explanation. We are very, very excited about this. To hit two of the blades, any object must have been about 170 feet long."

Where do they find these people? The MoD isn't interested Nicky boy. They don't give a fuck because they have better things to than chase your flying spaghetti monsters. As for an explanation, I rather think they came to the same conclusion as I did.

Dear God, if we weren't in such a recession I'd be screaming, "Get a fucking job, you idiot!" but now I'm denied that comeback.

Those weird lights in the sky were fucking fireworks! Not aliens from the planet Zod, but common or garden display fireworks all the way from down town China.

UPDATE 3:

My head is starting to hurt with all this as the story spreads across the globe. A sober report in the Louth Leader's website, "louthleader.co.uk" lists several other instances of blade failure along with a quote from the "tentacle man", John Harrison. Looking from his landing window, he saw:

"a 'massive ball of light' with 'tentacles going right down to the ground' over Conisholme wind farm."

"It was huge. At first I thought it must have been a hole where the moon was shining through but then I saw the tentacles – it looked just like an octopus. It was an incredible site; I have never seen anything like it before. I have no idea what it was, all I can say is what I saw".

Dear god, does this man wear spectacles - does he need to? Has he ever seen fireworks before? The paper doesn't elaborate on these points but that's the sort of thing I'd be asking. Seems that Mr Harrison (no age given) has gotten caught up in all the hype and just gone along with it.

Paraphrasing what Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel crooned in, The Boxer, "a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest."

He sure has done here.

UPDATE 4:

The story has finally hit the US with Fox news carrying a story from The Sun which says:A woman motorist told how she saw a UFO zoom towards the wind farm and strike the turbine.

"There was no trace of the missing blade."

Which is patently bullshit - the bloody thing was there for everyone to see. This is the result of overexcited early reports, but the Currant Bun isn't going to let a few facts get in the way:

An [unidentified] UFO expert said: "We are very excited."

Humm, wonder if that's Nick Pope - who is either nuts or very smart, I can't tell yet. He used to work at the MOD, but is now a TV personality - promoting UFOs. You decide that one.

The Bun goes on:

Dorothy Willows — who lives half a mile from the scene of the hit-and-run — was in her car when "strange lights" loomed in the evening sky.

"The lights were moving across the sky towards the wind farm," she said. "Then I saw a low flying object. It was skimming across the sky towards the turbines."

Isn't it amazing how a simple firework display (as was revealed earlier in this article) suddenly turns into a low-flying object - oh yes, and a moon squid.

I know from personal experience that journos put words into people's mouths, so I can't be sure that's what Mrs Willows said - but I wouldn't be surprised. People are obviously keen to get in on the act and not be outdone. It's the old "It was THIS big" claim.

Hey ho.

More on this as the bullshit, sorry, story develops momentum.

Christ Model Disturbs Residents

2009-01-08T10:48:00.005Z

A hideous depiction of pain and suffering that has adorned the front of a church in southern England has been removed because people thought it too unpleasant. One elderly resident interviewed by the BBC said:

"I'm glad they've taken it down. It gave me the creeps when I was going past it"

Explaining the decision to remove the hideous thing, Reverend Ewen Souter told the BBC the sculpture was, "A horrifying depiction of pain and suffering."

Disagreeing with the church's decision, Reverend John Capron told the BBC:

"I think it's very difficult for us to sanitise the Christian faith and certainly to sanitise human suffering. The cross was a dreadful event; one of the cruellest events in the history of mankind. As we look at what is happening in the world around us, for example what is happening to the people of Gaza, I don't think it's entirely realistic to think that violence and horror don't happen to us. For Christians, the great comfort in the crucifix is the thought not that it represents simply, human pain but also the love of God. The God who created us is also the God who suffers with us."

Designed in the 1960s by Edward Bainbridge Copnall, a former president of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, it's made from a mixture of coal dust and resin and will now be housed at a Horsham museum; presumably away from small children.

Reverend Souter thought the oversized idol was actually scaring people off and not communicating the "Christian" message. He wanted to portray, "an accurate biblical picture of the crucifixion as a moment of hopefulness for the world, and not one of despair".

Oh for fuck's sake.

Rewind that a moment. Did he just say, "an accurate biblical picture of the crucifixion... (in the negative)"

I've seen the statue and it's a pretty nasty looking thing and fairly accurate. The malnourished shadow of a man, face contorted into screaming agony with hands nailed to the wooden cross through the palms (which is a common mistake).

I'd say it was an fairly accurate depiction of pain and suffering the early Italian army forced on anyone who pissed them off.

Modern scholars (at least, ones who don't have a religious axe to grind) now think the resurrection that is a cornerstone of the Christian faith was only added by a scribe hundreds of years after the original text was laid down. The earliest text (that we have) stops where at the point where the cave is opened and Jesus's body is missing.

The empty stainless steel crucifix that will replace this hideous throwback only serves to feed the lie that professional Christians need to keep people believing in. Tell them the truth is what I say - even if it's nasty.

Tell them that your god was an evil, jealous, murdering bastard - just like it says in the bible. I know you won't because then they'll realise you're just a bunch of bigots feeding them a crock of shit: and you'll be out of a job.

Edinburgh Professor Believes In Teaching Creationism

2009-01-07T09:45:00.006Z

According to a recent Guardian poll a quarter of UK teachers believe that creationism is should be taught. Says the paper:

The Ipsos/Mori poll of 923 primary and secondary teachers found that 29% of science specialists agreed with the statement: "Alongside the theory of evolution and the Big Bang theory, creationism should be TAUGHT in science lessons.

Anyone with a scientific mind should be able to dismiss creationism and intelligent design as dumb without much difficulty, but demonstrating how far the reach of belief can distort the view of otherwise learned and intelligent people, we need look no further than Thomas Crowley, professor of geosciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Crowley has, reports the paper, taught evolution in North America where fundamentalism is rife and young earth creationism is accepted almost as matter of fact. It doesn't state his credentials - so I can't say that he is (or is not) qualified to teach biological sciences, but nevertheless he feels there is an argument for creation. Writing in the Guardian, here, he says:

"... it [science] cannot in fact explain how 'something' (the energy of the universe compressed into a volume the size of a golf ball) arose from nothing beforehand."

This is entirely true - science has ideas, but no proof of anything prior Big Bang. The professor then disconnects the logical parts of his brain and by adding:

"This yawning logical gap leaves open the possibility that something else may be going on. The history of life is consistent with Darwinian evolution, although life's increasing complexity - including the very recent appearance of modern man - is also consistent with (but not proof of) the possibility of some special creative agent existing."

and, futher:

"It [intelligent design] is embedded in any Christian religion that continues to treat the promise of a messiah, the incarnation and the resurrection as historical fact (the reasoning being that, if God is responsible for creating the big bang, then the incarnation and resurrection would be child's play by comparison)."

This is the old and rather jaded "god of the gaps" argument: which goes, "you can't explain something so God did it."

He continues along a similar path by commenting:

"And it is essential for any teacher to point out that, even if 'soft [old earth] creationism' and 'intelligent design' are true, they cannot be considered science until they make predictions that can be falsified."

But surely this is a case of not just having your cake and eating it, but not even paying for the cake in the first place. If Intelligent Design (which is creationism wrapped in fancy language and complex straw man arguments) is true then we should be able to prove it.

We can show evolution to be true. On the microscopic scale it happens so rapidly that bacteria and other organisms are out-evolving the treatments we devise to protect against them. On a larger scale, things are much slower so we have to look to the fossil record - which is incomplete by its very nature. In some ways, we're lucky to have fossils at all - we burn a lot of fossil goo in our cars every day on the way to work!

The Christian faith and promises that Professor Crowley alludes to were developed from stories thousands of years old at a time when science was something of the future. Even Issac Newton, himself a great scientist, thought that God did everything and his job was just to unravel it all.

Yet there is no tangiable evidence of the supernatural anywhere. The further we walk down the path of enlightenment (scientific enlightenment that is) the deeper our understanding becomes and the more bleak things appear.

Why are we here? We just are.
What is my purpose in life? Life has no purpose - it's just blindly walking into the future.

Some of us, and I assume from what he writes, Professor Crowley is one of them, need to believe there is a higher purpose. This is what drives and ultimately probably buffers them from descent into mental illness. They cling on to the promise of something greater than they are in the hope of eternal life.

The rest of us accept our lot and get on with it. One of us is going to be wrong, but only one is in for a shock.

Professor Crowley can be reached here: thomas.crowley@ed.ac.uk

Christine Maggiore Is Finally Dead

2009-01-05T21:41:00.013Z

As (medical) Doctor Ben Goldacre less gleefully reports, the most famous AIDs denier of them all has finally succumbed to HIV. The author of the disgracefully titled, "What if everything you thought you knew about Aids was wrong?" has been nailed by the virus that fucked up her immune system until there was nothing left to fight an infection which finally killed her.

She was 52.

The US media loved her because she promoted an idea that went against science, medicine and common sense and, for a while, appeared to survive despite refusing anti-retrovirals which could have prolonged her life.

Worse though, when pregnant she refused the ARVs despite the evidence that the reduce the risk of maternal transmission of HIV to the foetus and breast fed her children, refusing them HIV tests.

Her daughter, Eliza Jane Scovill, died three years ago from a similar pnuemonia to that which killed Maggiore.

As Dr. Goldacre writes:

"She set up successful campaigning organisations and counselled HIV-positive pregnant women on how to avoid pressure from medics to use azidothymidine (AZT) during pregnancy to prevent maternal transmission of the virus. She appeared on the cover of Mothering magazine, with a “No AZT” sign painted on her pregnant tummy."

Most embarrassing of all, her fellow denier Prof. Peter Duesberg (University of California), managed to take in Neville Hodgkinson of the Sunday Times - an otherwise respectable paper. Nature described the Times' coverage as “seriously mistaken” and “probably disastrous”.

Fuck you Duesberg and fuck you Maggiore. I have family and friends lost to this virus.

Bad science kills people - the blood of millions is on your hands.

UPDATE: 7 Jan 2009

Seth C. Kalichman, Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Connecticut has written a book (also mentioned in his comment below) which I am happy to link to here: www.springer.com and priced at £13.99 it's due out in March this year.

Unlike psuedo-scientists, Seth is donating his royalties from sales to buy AIDS medications in Africa. Why Africa? Because America can afford to pay its own way and Africa can't - and it's worse because the bloody Catholic church is still teaching people there that it's "God's will" for them to have sex without condoms; compounding the problem, African men are just as bloody minded and won't wear them either.

Where I will disagree with Seth is (although this might not be entirely disagreeing) is in Maggiore's choice to refuse ARVs while pregnant and her decision to breast feed despite medical advice and all the evidence that her child would suffer harm.

While Maggiore was entirely within her rights to refuse treatment for herself, Eliza Jane had no choice in the matter and had a terribly short life as as result.

The pro-Maggiore brigade are out in force, too. I found this piece of "news" rather interesting:

"Pneumonia doesn't appear to harm HIV-positive patients any more than those without HIV, according to a new international study conducted in part by the University of Alberta. There was also negligible difference in the mortality rate; total deaths among the HIV patients was 3.5 per cent (two of 58 patients), and 4.8 per cent (seven of 174) among the HIV-negative patients."

So from these results, it seems that you're more likely to die from Pneumonia if you're HIV positive. Smelling the sweet scent of denier-bullshit, I did some digging (OK, googling) and discovered that it's the pneumocystic form of pneumonia - not the bacterial form - that occurs most frequently in AIDs patients (indeed, occurrence is often an early indicator of HIV infection!)

The research cited in that article was interesting, but essentially meaningless to the case in point. Bacterial pneumonia is entirely different from the fungal pneumocystic variety - which is so common it's estimated that 75% of children are exposed to (and immune to it) by the age of four.

It killed Maggiore's daughter before her fourth birthday.

Like Autism denier, Jenny McCarthy, Christine Maggiore was both ill-informed, attractive and charismatic. It's a dangerous combination but combined with an apathetic, story-oriented and hungry media is lethal.

Oh Pleeeeeeeeeze!

2009-01-04T22:01:00.004Z

Radio 4 is never far from my heart, and when I heard an unnamed (well, he was named but I forgot it) evolutionary biologist stating that the virgin birth had a potential scientific explanation, my ears pricked up faster than a speeding bullet. Oh, crap! I'm mixing my metaphor, but no matter.

Parthenogenesis (literally virgin-creation) is a form of reproduction where a single female creature gives birth to another female without the ova being fertilised. The reason for only female births is that a male requires a Y chromosome and females don't posses it.

Now this evolutionary biologist was a Christian who took his bible pretty seriously, and although he accepted Darwin's theory (and neo-Darwinian theory) he felt that the virgin birth could be real. He even went on to explain the rare case of a woman who does carry a Y chromosome - someone in the comments will doubtless remember the name.

Anyway, assuming "Mary" had this rare condition AND had experienced parthenogenesis, that would explain the fact that she was a virgin who had a spontaneous pregnancy and gave birth to a son. Ta dah!

And this is a respected biologist!

The fact that virgin birth stories existed before Jesus would only serve to strengthen his argument, but since this guy is a scientist, how can he have missed Occam's Razor?

Oh shit. Maybe he was snoozing that day?

I don't personally believe in supernatural intervention; but I do accept virgin birth. Not in the church's version of course. Sperm are pretty tricky little buggers and although unlikely, it is possible for a couple of horny teens in a fit of dry humping, end up with an surprise.

If we accept (and I highly doubt) that Mary WAS a virgin, there's no way to tell that this child wasn't just a product of a simple mistake.

So our choices are:

1) Supernatural power;
2) An early example of dry humping or;
3) Mary had a little shag (before she knew Joseph)?

Occam's Razor says 3: every time and it's very rarely wrong and even assuming that parthenogenesis was the cause, why has it never been reported since in 2000+ years of human history?

A Rose By Any Other Name...

2009-01-03T21:16:00.005Z

... is still a rose. But in a toe-stubbing piece of PC-stupidity, a new school in Sheffield is to be known as a "place of learning."

Head Teacher of Watercliffe Meadow, Linda Kingdon, reportedly said the word "school" had been removed from the title as a new approach to learning.

Costing a staggering £4.7m Watercliffe Meadow opened in September 2007, replacing Shirecliffe Juniors, Watermead Nursery Infants and Busk Meadow Nursery and Infants.

Councillor Andrew Sangar, aid: "It's a school, we consider it a school and that's how we refer to it. How a school chooses to manage and refer to itself is a matter for the board of governors and the community it serves and we're relaxed about that."

Ms. Kingdon said: 'We decided from an early stage we didn't want to use the word "school",' she told The Mail, 'This is Watercliffe Meadow, a place for learning. One reason was many of the parents of the children here had very negative connotations of school."

The Campaign for Plain English was less relaxed with "spokesperson" Marie Clair calling the decision, "laughable".

Laughable it is. A spade is still a spade, even if you call it "A multi-purpose manual gardening implement for the turning of soil. " Likewise, a school is still a school and bullshit still stinks.

What's shit got to do with this, you demand to know? If someone stood up to the PC bullshit these idiots came up with and made them spend a bit more time teaching the 3Rs, we might be better placed in the world's standing. No wonder children enter secondary schools barely able to read and write when the loonies are running the primaries.

I despair, I really do.

Tony Blair Is Still Interfering

2009-01-02T15:17:00.004Z

It's said you can't keep a good man down; but, as the marketing goes you can't keep a Weeble™ down either.

Former British Primeminister and Catholic convert is now trying to meddle in American politics by leaning on Barack Obama to, "Unify the world." Writes Joe Murphy in the Mail.

Mr Blair is now an international peace envoy, which is sort of ironic considering his hand in deceiving the British people and leading us into an unjust and possibly illegal war against Sadam Hussain. He also claims to remain on friendly terms with President Bush (jnr.). Says Blair:

"I'm not a fair-weather friend. I say this to people all the time, even [to] liberal people who cannot believe I can possibly like George W Bush."

Now I believe Blair likes Dubya because if he said anything else, he'd come across looking like a hypocrite - oh wait...

Blair went on to say of the Iraq war and Bush's "war on terror":

"He [Dubya] had very difficult decisions to take after September 11th, and I think he took the right decisions, actually. I'm afraid that if there was any collective mistake that was made, it was not understanding how deep the struggle is and how long it's going to have to be fought."

You think, Mr Blair? You THINK! Dubya had some hard decisions to make for sure, but if there's one thing we've seen admirably demonstrated over the last eight years, he's prone to make the wrong ones - and run with them no matter what the cost is: provided it doesn't cost him.

So here we have a warmonger rubbing shoulders with an idiot (you decide which is which) and both of them have the gall to call on President elect Obama to fix their mess for them. Religious wars have gone on for as long as religion has existed: even the Abrahamics (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) have fought through history vying for power: and they still are despite all claiming to be one people under the same god!

The best way to win a religious war is to not get into it in the first place, but thanks to this idiot and his puppet, we're all neck-deep in shit and resentment. I want to know which fucking idiot thought that a guy responsible for the Middle East hating Britain thought it would be smart to give him a job as a peace envoy. For fuck's sake, he's a new-born member of the most hated and power-hungry major Christian sect of them all.

Thank god for atheism, I say.

World's Fastest Cordless Drill - 0-60 in 1 second.

2009-01-02T12:24:00.005Z

OK, I lied, it's a motorcycle, but it is powered by the same battery technology that drives DeWalt cordless drills.

So, apart from being an amazing feat of engineering, what's so special about this? Well, The Daily Mail reports in typical disregard for science that:

"The bike's makers claim that the G-force which the rider has to contend with is three times more than that faced by a skydiver during freefall."

G-force is a unit equal to the force exerted by gravity. It gives weight to a mass. The other way to look at it, is we are all being accelerated towards the earth by 1G (although strictly, that depends on where on Earth you are). 1G is about 9.8m per second (every second).

A skydiver in free-fall reaches a terminal velocity at about 120mph (200kph) due to wind resistance and never experiences any more g-force than if he were sat in a chair. The equations of motion for an object under constant acceleration, accelerating from a standing start are as follows:

The bike covers the quarter mile track (about 402 meters) in 7.8 seconds giving an acceleration of 13.2 ms-2 which is well below the brain-busting 29ms-2 acceleration claimed attributed to KillaCycle. There is something I'm ignoring here and I'll come back to that before you jump in and comment on it, but if KillaCycle really was achieving such acceleration it would travel nearly 1800 metres (over a mile) in the time.

So where does that come from? Clearly, KillaCycle is not accelerating constantly for the entire quarter mile. The 3G experience comes in the first shoulder socket-wrenching second and it's likely that most of that happens in a small fraction of a that second.

Cars, planes, motorcycles and pretty much everything that accelerates under power do so variably - the acceleration curve: but the Mail isn't interested in that and just runs the quote from the release.

Perhaps more interesting though is the boast that a four minute charge from wind energy is enough to power the vehicle (they claim) for seven runs. The energy may indeed by "green" but you can bet your CO2 emissions that those batteries are about as recyclable as George W Bush is climate aware

However, let's take nothing from the achievement, even if it is a bit of a white elephant. KillaCycle's team are now said to be working on a 1000BHP version. Presumably the Mail will be telling us next that it's twice as fast too.

In other news, someone stole my shaving cream so my face is sore.

American Conservatives (Still) Don't Get It

2009-01-01T18:58:00.011Z

I love Dakota Voice. Rather like Christian Voice, it claims to represent family values and so on but when it comes to the crunch it's a small band of ultra-conservative buffoons led by a bloke with far too much time on his hands.

Leading from a story in the Telegraph, and letting a few facts slip by, DV's Bob Ellis almost recites scripture in gleefully informing us of how us pro-choicers are wrong to give women the chance to decide what happens to their unborn children. Of course, he doesn't say that in so many words, what he says is this:

"Better to leave life and death up to the Author of Life, and not take death into our own hands by killing innocent children.

Which is clichéd and highly emotive rhetoric: and he knows it.

The problem with Bob is he just won't accept the simple fact that there probably is no god. Even an idiot should be able to see that nature is the author of life. Pro-choicers would no more go around "killing innocent children" than he would. If you believe in a god, you might accept that a superior being kicked life off, but there's no evidence at all - none - that we're controlled on a daily basis.

Bob and his followers (and there are many like him, mostly descended from Catholic tradition) believe that life begins at conception. Technically it does but that life does not become remotely sentient until many weeks and probably months later; moreover, that life is not capable of sustaining itself even aided current medicine comparatively late in the pregnancy. Even after birth, this child has to be provided for every hour of the day. It relies on its mother for everything: from heat and shelter to food and emotional warmth.

The Bob variety of pro-lifers are a pretty trenchant lot. Abortion is never an option. Not if the mother was a child who had been raped; or if the foetus was horribly deformed and already in great suffering; not even if the mother's life was at risk. We get the same line in entrenched bullshit from Alaska Governor, Palin - which is why she was so popular with right-wing America in the 2008 election - despite being a complete ignoramus who abused her power. The more informed, pro-choice America breathed a heavy sigh of relief when Obama defeated this creationist freak show, but the war isn't over yet.

The Telegraph article Bob alludes to goes into rather more detail that the Conservatives at DV would like, so I'll summarise some of it here.

First of the headlines:

Telegraph: "Mother has healthy baby boy despite abortion warning by doctor"

Dakota Voice: "Healthy Son Despite Doctors Advice to Abort"

Wait did I miss something here? From the headlines, things look pretty clear cut - they aren't.

The Telegraph doesn't have an axe to grind like DV, and continuess with the hint all is now what it ought to be:

"A mother who was twice advised to have an abortion by doctors has gone on to have a 'perfectly' healthy son."

Note how they've cautiously placed perfectly into single quotes? Wonder why - and I wonder why Mssrs. Ellis and co. missed that? Might this have something to do with it? This from the Telegraph:

"Further tests conducted a few days later on New Year's Eve suggested the baby could also have Edwards Syndrome - the presence of an 18th chromosome - with a life expectancy of only up to four months if birth is survived."

Words like "could", "might" and "may" are the sort no prospective parent wants to hear. Rather like life, medicine isn't black and white (oh, if it only were). The worst was to come as the Telegraph reports, contradicting its own headline:

"Kai was born six weeks premature on March 5 at Scunthorpe General Hospital weighing just 2lb 6oz and immediately admitted to intensive care, but was discharged within six weeks.
One side of his heart was slightly bigger than the other which may need an operation to correct in the future, but regular tests have been showing the condition is constantly improving."

Kai Purdy pictured with his mother, Gaynor. Photo: ROSS PARRY AGENCY

So in truth, little Kai Purdy was anything but a normal healthy baby boy.

Dakota Voice effectively lied by omitting these facts and the Telegraph wasn't entirely honest either.

It appears that he does have Edwards Syndrome (aka Trisomy 18) and his heart was abnormal. The little fella is a fighter though and everyone at Abusing the News wishes him well. This is a great story of survival against the odds and one where the right choice was made.

However, consider this sobering evidence from Wikipedia (backed up from other sources):

"The survival rate of Edwards Syndrome is very low. About 95% die in utero. Of liveborn infants, only 50% live to 2 months, and only 5–10% will survive their first year of life. Major causes of death include apnea and heart abnormalities. It is impossible to predict the exact prognosis of an Edwards Syndrome child during pregnancy or the neonatal period. Because major medical interventions are routinely withheld from these children, it is difficult to determine what the survival rate or prognosis would be with aggressive medical treatment. The median life span is five to fifteen days. One percent of children born with this syndrome live to age ten, typically in cases of the less severe mosaic Edwards syndrome."

Of course, this won't rain on Pro-Life's parade. They'll just happy that Kai was born.

Had things been different, and the evidence is strongly in favour of that being the case, this child would have died before being born or very shortly afterwards.

The medical advice given to the Mr and Mrs Purdy was, statistically and rationally, entirely correct. Kai isn't a miracle (because that suggests supernatural intervention) he's just 1 in a 100. The other 99 children born with this condition will either be dead already or suffer agonising deaths during their very short lives.

They made an informed decision and it paid off.

This is the nature of choice that Conservative America, the Catholic church and all the pro-lifers around the world don't get.

Pro choice doesn't mean "abort every faulty foetus" it simply means give women the right to make a informed decision about what happens to their children. No one held a gun to Mrs Purdy's head, they just gave her the evidence and she made the decision. The right one.

Regarding the other 99 other times the Telegraph won't report will be a rather different story.

Bankers Sorry (Still Rich)

2009-01-01T12:39:00.003Z

Citigroup chairman, Sir Win Bischoff, has tacitly accepted some of the blame for the economic downturn saying that the industry felt "partly to blame."

This isn't entirely correct - the bankers should shoulder almost all of the blame. It's true that people have been mind-buggeringly greedy, but that greed has been entirely fuelled by easy and cheap credit: and that's down to banks.

Sir Win went on to say that bonuses at Citigroup would be "way down" at a bank which has just received a $35bn from the US taxpayer.

Wait a minute. WAY DOWN! You mean these assholes are actually receiving bonuses during a time when the global economy is so fucked that ordinary people are having to stump up to bail them out. How about the greedy bastards give something back? Apparently, those receiving bonuses will be the ones in the profitable sections.

My point is this: if a business makes an overall loss, the parts of it that did make a profit are responsible for bailing out the bits that don't! The poor US taxpayers shouldn't have to have their pockets picked!

In a staggering example of banking hubris, BBC reports that Goldman Sachs, despite halving its pay bill, still pays its 30,000 employees an average of £250,000 EACH!

FARK!!!

Fly Me To The Moon (You're Less Likely To Kill Me)

2008-12-31T13:37:00.003Z

A report just out concludes the the Columbia shuttle disaster in Feb 2003 was not survivable. The sad fact is astronauts were safer flying to the moon atop the gigantic Saturn 5 rockets than they were in the comparatively simpler missions to Earth orbit.

The first major failure occurred in January of 1986 O-rings designed to keep the hot gasses inside the right-hand solid rocket booster (SRB) failed due to extreme cold. The resulting breakup caused the loss of Challenger and all seven crew before the vehicle even left Earth's atmosphere. Physicist Richard Feynman revealed the primary cause of failure at a press conference by keeping a sample of the O-ring material in a glass of iced water to the surprise and embarrassment of NASA management.

Unlike Challenger, Columbia actually carried out her mission but her fate was sealed before the orbiter had even cleared the tower. A piece of insulating foam broke away and pierced the heat resisting tiles under the left wing. Although NASA were aware of the incident, it seems that no one bothered to tell the crew.

According to the BBC, the 400 page "Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report" concludes the accident was not survivable. They had around 41 seconds after realising the craft was in trouble before the vehicle finally broke up and tried desperately to rectify the problem. Some of the crew were not wearing the bulk helmets and gloves that might have kept them alive longer; others were not even strapped into their seats.

NASA Deputy Associate Administrator, Wayne Hale, concludes soberly that lessons had to be learnt, urging spacecraft designers everywhere to study the, "hard lessons which have been paid for so dearly."

The agency had not lost a single astronaut in any of the manned moon missions (although the crew of Apollo 13 came perilously close) and several others lost their lives in during training.

Has space travel become too routine? In both cases there's a body of evidence pointing at cost cutting in key areas and, frankly, poor management. Either way we should never forget the courage demonstrated by those who offered and finally gave their lives for the betterment of humanity.

Sarah Palin: MILF to GILF

2008-12-30T12:36:00.002Z

~~Whore~~ ~~slapper~~ ~~tart~~ Daughter of the one-time Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin has given birth to a son, Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, People magazine reports.

It's not particularly newsworthy that an 18-year old girl has a child - happens all the time. However, Sarah Palin is the moral voice of Alaska, an ultra-conservative right winger who opposes abortion and promotes family values such as marriage (man-woman marriage, not the other kinds) and the couple are planning to marry in 2009.

Hoopy-fucking-do!

Wait a minute - traditional family values? Marriage?

That makes poor little Trip Jnr. a bastard (as in born out of wedlock) a label he will have to carry for the rest of his life. If that wasn't bad enough, he's also likely to be a creationist-republican. I'd rather be a bastard - oh wait...

This stable door has been open so long, horse hasn't just bolted (to borrow from Douglas Adams) it's gotten buried in soft peat and been recycled as fire-lighters. In neo-Conservative eyes, you grow up THEN get married THEN you have sex (for the 1st time) THEN you have children. Unless you cut out the awkward middle-man (commitment) and just say, "fuck it, let's breed."

This Palin family reaction is typical goalpost shifting - while they preach one thing, when they are caught doing something else, they just sweep it under the rug and pretend it was all OK.

Staggeringly, this "private matter" is being ignored by conservative America which is a shame - if they would only pull their heads out of the sand they could actually see what a disgrace the people they vote for are.

Credit Crunch's Sharp Teeth

2008-12-30T11:51:00.004Z

The credit crunch continues to bite - after years of credit madness, the scythe of reason is cutting swath through the those that relied on it too much. High street names that has already fallen victim to this seemingly unstoppable force include Zavvi, Wolwoorths, Adams, The Officer's Club and now Olan Mills.

I had thought that Olan Mills had gone under some time ago after the local branch stopped calling me.

Wait, did I mention that?

Seemed like not a week went by when the sorry bastards from Mills' sales department didn't ring me up and offer me something. Unlike a normal store (Zavvi, Woolys, Adams) Olan Mills' modus operandi was to offer clients sweet deals on the proviso that they gave up five of their friend's personal telephone numbers - so they could offer a similar deal.

Cold call them in other words.

Didn't matter that I'm an accomplished amateur photographer and member of a highly respected local photographic society; didn't matter that I had more gear personally and access to more skills than their entire studio had. Half my friends are professional photographers! All that mattered is that my wife or I could come in for a makeover and sitting.

Much as I feel sorry for the support staff and customers, I'm not sorry to see these fuckers go out of business. An American import - Olan Mills' operation worked like a dodgy double-glazing company and the way it extracted personal contact details from people was shameful.

The photographs were rarely up to much either: formulated to look attractive using soft light, a limited selection of accessories such as a the clichéd feather boa and massive over-softening. Olan Mills' photographs were mass-production and damaged the business for real photographers who actually employed skill and experience to produce decent portraiture.

Farewell and good riddance.

Bishops Can't See The Irony

2008-12-28T12:56:00.007Z

Next to the state and possibly the monarchy, probably the wealthiest landowner in the UK is the Anglican church. The church of Rome is similarly rich.

Yet what do they actually do to accumulate this great wealth? Very little.

I'd like to say, they do sod all, but they do perform certain ceremonial duties and I have to admit that there are still people who desperately need something to cling to.

Yet today, in another foot-in-mouth feat of (Douglas) Adamsian irony, five top Anglican bishops are have criticised the government for failing the poor. Bishop of Manchester the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch said that Labour is "beguiled by money" and "morally corrupt".

Hey buddy - look in the fucking mirror will you!

I don't see either church handing out millions of its accumulated wealth to the poor. Sure, they preach to their followers to "give generously" (often to them, of course) but do they give any back.... errrrr....

Now I won't argue that in recent years, Labour has lost the plot. But in recent years, led by Tony Blair, the party has massively extended the City Academies programme. This education initiative was supposed to help the poor by building massively expensive, state-of-the-art super schools in the heart of deprived areas.

Hot on the heels of Sir Peter Vardy, Bob Edmiston and Graham Dacre offered to sponsor academies. Each one a car dealer, each a "Christian" and all three amazingly rich - a factor fuelled almost entirely by the consumer credit explosion. In all three cases these "Christians" only had to stump up less than 10% of the cost of the schools, got to set the agenda while the taxpayers got to carry the rest. For ever.

Then what happens? The offspring of well-to-do families are bussed (or more usually driven) in while the poorer children are pushed to one side. All this does is widen the gap between rich and poor - and the naturally better performing richer kids make everyone hail the Academy a success - where the opposite is true.

The Bishop of Durham, Rt Rev Tom Wright said:

"We have not seen a raising of aspirations in the last 13 years, but instead there is a sense of hopelessness. While the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer."

Yes indeed - like three representatives of your flock that I've just mentioned, Reverend.

Jesus would be ashamed of the lot of you.

UPDATE (29/Dec/2008):

Liam Byrne MP came out punching, he said "Labour had fought hard to narrow the gap between rich and poor." And Sir Stuart Bell, MP, the Church's own Commons representative, called the bishops' claims "nonsense".

Daily Mail Contradicts Itself

2008-12-27T12:26:00.006Z

Peter Hitches is a journalist with strong views and he doubts evolution:

"For in my view the theory of evolution is done no favours by its fervent supporters. Interestingly, it's not comparable to other major scientific theories (like the theories of flight, gravity and relativity) to which its supporters always link it. These can be used to predict events, and are testable. Evolution is a theory about the distant past, unobserved and now unobservable."

In this single paragraph, Hitchens both makes an interesting point and then reveals amazing ignorance of both evolution and the scientific method.

First to his positive observation that people like Richard Dawkins (and hell, even folks like me) constantly bang on at people like him to leave it alone and let us study it.

He's right, we do: but with bloody good reason.

Evolution represents probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made but like many other major discoveries it threw a massive scientific clog into machinery of the great Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

The modern-day theory of evolution, so called neo-Darwinian theory is what most scientists regard as the definitive (if incomplete) version; and it's this incomplete bit that pro-theists like to drive wedges into.

Anti-evolutionists, creationists - call them what you will don't want replace evolution with a better natural theory, they want to replace it with a story written four thousand years back by a bunch of nomadic Jews.

Which is why we get so utterly pissed off.

This alternative to evolution is no more an alternative than a slice of plastic is alternative to a sandwich. An alternative to a sandwich would be, say a nice, juicy Aberdeen Angus burger topped with melted cheese and a dill pickle... oh wait, it must be nearly lunchtime here.

It takes Hitchens just a dozen words to prove how strikingly ignorant he is about the whole affair:

"Evolution is a theory about the distant past, unobserved and now unobservable."

WRONG!

One theory about the distant past that a majority of scientists agree with is the Big Bang. We can observe the remnants of Big Bang in the cosmic background radiation - the very low temperature afterglow (about 4 degrees kelvin) of the cataclysmic event that brought our universe into being, yet we cannot - directly - see the event itself. Only a very few scientists actually disagree with Big Bang although small details are frequently debated. We don't have all the answers, yet Hitchens and his ilk don't, err, bang on about it.

Big Bang does not contradict a theist world view - whereas evolution does (sort of). There's a small matter, ignored by creationists that does allow room for God, if you must, called abiogenesis: the creation of life itself - we still don't know for sure how life came about. The famous Miller-Ulrey experiment looked promising, but failed to produce concrete results.

Evolutionary theory does not concern itself with abiogenesis - it only cares about how organisms developed from the simplest form of life into what we are today.

Hitchens can't grasp this.

Evolution is not a theory of some distant past: it's a theory of the development of all life. It is directly observable and it does make testable predictions. Darwin's contemporary, Karl Popper, solidified how theories work by making them falsifiable.

I have a theory that all sheep are white because all the sheep I have ever observed are white. This theory would be valid unless someone could find a black sheep. Even if I could produce a billion white sheep, a single black one would destroy my theory.

If, for example, a dog gave birth to a litter of cats (without human intervention) then evolution theory would be destroyed in an instant. It doesn't happen. Evolution is pretty safe as a theory among respectable scientists.

Journalists like Peter Hitchens are still wrong yet the Mail allows them to vent their spleens at regular intervals about stuff they know less than nothing about. In an amazing change of pace, the paper prints this Salute to Charles Darwin by the respected scientist, Desmond Morris, which is a remarkable about face .

They've also run the story I covered here several days late, but refreshing to see nevertheless with all the evidence including some I didn't include.

My guess is there's someone standing in over the Christmas holidays and the normally dumb service will be resumed shortly.

Too Late Nanny State

2008-12-27T11:12:00.012Z

In a move regarded by some as trying to close the stable door after the horse has run off and died of old age, Culture secretary Andy Burnham, MP has demonstrated shocking ignorance of the Internet. The father of three told the Telegraph that standards were needed to protect children from unacceptable imagery and videos.

"You can still view content on the internet which I would say is unacceptable. You can view a beheading," he said, presumably alluding to the Ken Bigley execution video although there have been others posted by Islamic terrorist groups.

No shit, Sherlock! When asked about film-style ratings for websites, Mr Burnham shockingly revealed a complete ignorance of the subject:

"That would be an option." He said, "this is an area that is really now coming into full focus."

Perhaps no one told him that we've being doing precisely that for many years. Safesurf, for example, has been managing voluntary website content since 1995 and most other providers (particularly the smut pedlars) already clearly mark all offensive content. Game sites that carry violent imagery (such as advertising for the PEGI-18 rated Gears of War) already check the user's age.

Trying to enforce such a system is unworkable: the Internet is simply too damn big and just because one remote website operating out of Mydadisstan, is promoting Islamic terrorism, we can't just block every single site coming from the region because apart from the technical difficulties, it goes against the principals of free speech and freedom of expression.

The best and most effective censor in the world is informed choice.

In "A Clockwork Orange", Alex (played by Malcom McDowell in the Stanley Kubrick film adapatation) is exposed to masses of imagery while his head is firmly clamped in place and his eyes pinned open.

Alex has no choice - but we do.

The BBC reports on a poll carried out by the children's charity, the NSPCC which found that 75% of children had been exposed to images that had disturbed them. It doesn't elaborate.

I'm frequently disturbed by the verbal abuse and endless conflict in the popular TV dramas Eastenders (BBC) and Coronation Street (ITV) yet they are broadcast before the 9pm watershed without so much as a "by your leave" even though they occasionally garnish a knuckle-wrapping from viewers when they cross a perceived line.

I have informed choice and I choose not to watch them but remain convinced that some of the problems I face within my own family are as a direct result of my nearest and dearest spending hours glued to them.

The question remains of whether children can make an informed decision of what they are exposed to on the Internet. Observation of my children is that they can and do - although that did not prevent me installing a modest parental control filter as a belt-and-braces approach.

Nevertheless the best parental control remains a decent parent.

No amount of software is going to stop your 12-year old son looking at gaping arse, mature lesbian strap-on hardcore if he tries hard enough. He's just not going to do it if you happen to be stood right behind him. Girls, on the other hand, are more interested in inane teenage chatter - so a simple keystroke monitor is a great bonus, but sotftware and common sense is no replacement for having the computer in a well occupied family area.

Parents who abdicate their responsibility are the ones we should blame - the rest of us can manage perfectly well without MPs getting hot under the collar and trying to make a name for themselves.

Now I have go change my socks because I just stood in cat sick. Take that Andy Burnham.

Ted Baehr is Wrong About Everything

2008-12-26T18:45:00.005Z

According to Newsmax, a survey showed that 70 percent of people the UK doubted the biblical account of the birth of Jesus Christ. But, says "Bigoted" Ted Baehr, we are all, "gravely mistaken"

Excuse me while I recover from the paroxysm of laughter there.

Baehr, founder of The Christian Film & Television Commission ministry goes on to say:

"Christianity is true as well as historical, factual and intellectually sound"

Now excuse me for wondering, but where do these people get off making statements like this? It's pretty obvious that if people realist they're been sold a bottle of snake oil, they're going to go elsewhere - and that means that Baehr's network would be in trouble. He's hardly a impartial witness: quite the opposite.

He's also apparently a complete buffoon as this quote from the same article implies:

"Not only can you have complete faith in the New Testament documents and what they say about the virgin birth, divinity, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and teachings of Jesus Christ, but you can also rely on what they say about non-Christian places, people, and events, such as the names and titles of Roman government officials."

There's a small matter of several articles of pure faith in that sentence - not to mention and this is a brilliant clincher - the recent discovery that the original NT documents do not contain any reference to the resurrection. Uh oh. Sort of buggers that argument. The earliest text that we know of stops well short of anything about Jesus coming back to life, and stops at the bit where the disciples found the empty tomb.

The bit about resurrection was added later.

In more right-wing bollocks, Good News Daily reports that Disney is dropping the nauseating Narnia movies due to budgetary constraints, but goes on to say:

"The franchise stems from the classic, beloved, seven-part young fiction series THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA written by acclaimed Christian author C.S. Lewis, who defended the Faith against atheists and other pseudo-intellectuals."

So now they're saying if you don't have faith, you're dim. Oh yeah, that really works just like the straw man. Guess who wrote that... none other than, Ted Baehr. Yes folks, Baehr isn't just ignorant, he's actually a flag waving bigot to boot. He should try and practice a bit more of what he preaches.

PLOT SPOILER

If you are enjoying the Narnia books/films, then you won't want to know that they end with the children discovering they are all dead and in heaven. The lion was Jesus all the time - well who knew?

Depressing. Truly depressing.

Dail Mail is Confused by Snow

2008-12-26T13:38:00.005Z

Must be a slow day at The Mail as a Canadian woman makes headlines after surviving for three days in snow. In what it calls a Christmas 'Miracle', the second one today, the Mail extols:

"Donna Molnar, who disappeared during a heavy blizzard, was discovered under two feet of snow wearing only ordinary clothing. Rescuers were stunned to find the 55-year-old Canadian still breathing after enduring temperatures as low as -15C."

It's great that she was found alive, maybe a little surprising but not really a miracle and not at all unheard of.

Mrs Molar, who is reported to be suffering from depression had lost family members over the festive period. When she went missing in the middle of snowstorm, friends feared the worst. Her abandoned car was discovered over the weekend - it's not clear at this stage how long she was out in the open or when she was buried by a snowdrift.

The Mail continues:

"...almost three full days after Molnar went missing, volunteer Ray Lau’s dog, Ace, became excited by a scent he had picked up in a field. Under heavy snow and high winds, the animal would normally be unlikely to smell a human presence."

So the Mail is almost implying that Mrs Molnar has been under the snow for three days - we already know that for at least some of that time she had been in her van. We can take it as read that she was in dire straits, but what of the dog and this heavy snow?

The canine sense of smell is many times more sensitive than our own and the Mail's assertion "the animal would normally be unlikely to smell a human presence" is bullshit either through ignorance or the the fact it weakens the story. Trained dogs routinely find skiers trapped under feet of snow after avalanches and by the story's own tacit admission, Mrs Molnar wasn't deeply covered.

"He [Ace] began nuzzling something hidden there, barking furiously and Mr Lau, who followed on his tail, then saw a gloveless hand and a woman’s face half-obscured by a black hood."

So in fact, at least some of Mrs Molnar was only covered by a thin blanket (making Ace's job a bit simpler): and what about that black hood - that sounds like outdoor clothing?

But the officer in charge, Mark Cox appears to have the key, telling the Canadian Globe and Mail, reportedly saying:

"Never even come close to something that was this unlikely. It really is incredible how she survived it. I’m shocked."

Which leaves me wondering how much experience he has at this - if he actually used those words - journos have nasty habit of, well, frankly putting words into people's mouths. The Mail is on a roll now:

"Bizarrely, police believe Mrs Molnar, who works in the nearby city of Hamilton, might have been kept alive by the snow acting as an insulating blanket."

BIZARRELY?! Dear god, doesn't anyone at the mail understand basic thermodynamics... oh wait. I take that back, of course they don't.

We know from the report that Mrs Molnar suffered frostbite to several fingers and hypothermia, which isn't that surprising, but the mail reports that she endured temperatures of -15c. Did she?

There's a couple of things at work here and the police report is right on the money. It's perhaps paradoxical that the best way to survive a blizzard is to bury yourself in snow. It's not so much the snow that kills you - it's the exposure to wind chill as the driving wind carries your body temperature away.

By actually covering yourself in fluffy white stuff (which is also full of stagnant air) you insulate your body from the effects of the wind and therefore receive some degree of protection. In fact, the insulating nature of snow means you can stay comparatively warm. Suffocation is a more likely consequence, but as the temperature drops our respiration slows so we use less of the precious air in our icy tomb.

Moreover, did anyone actually have a thermometer against Mrs Molnar's body? Of course not, those -15c temperatures (which are not all that extreme) would have been at ground level - most likely at night and probably using wind chill for effect.

While I wish Mrs Molnar a speedy recovery, I wish the Mail would try a bit harder.

Touched by a (Camera) Angel

2008-12-26T11:19:00.014Z

Among the usual suspects, the Daily ~~Fail~~ Mail carries this story of a child who made a remarkable recovery after being touched by an Angel. The Mail says:

"Colleen Banton, from Charlotte, North Carolina, was facing the agonising decision of taking her daughter off a life-support machine when the 'miracle' occurred."

At least the Mail has included the quotes suggesting that someone down there still commands a quantum of scepticism. It goes on to quote Mrs. Banton:

On the monitor, there was this bright light,' she said. 'And I looked at it and I said, "Oh my goodness! It looks like an angel!"'

Of course, that's the only explanation. The Mail continues:

"A first attempt at capturing the image with a digital camera was unsuccessful: 'The first picture wouldn't take,' she said. The second time she succeeded, and the mother-of-two sought solace in the image while her daughter's oxygen mask was removed."

Apparently, everyone was stunned as the oxygen mask was removed and the teenager continued to breath for herself. Some two weeks later, she was fit enough to be discharged in time for her 15th birthday on Christmas day.

The Mail goes on to quote the typically religious American lady:

'If they doubt it, that's fine... But I know what I saw, and the picture's untouched. I didn't make it up. That's just something that I believe. I believe that more people have changed since this happened. I know I have. I look at things differently than I used to – because I know God is in control.'

If God's in control why was this poor child born five weeks premature with hydrocephalus? Why is it she's suffered life-threatening illness throughout her short life and why is it that tangible medicine has continued to keep her alive?

Yes, I'm a cynical bastard. So let's take a closer look a the facts which are pretty short on the ground since we only have witness statements to go on.

Even the Mail is confused:

"The unusual light appeared while her daughter Chelsea was fighting for life on a ventilator"

How do we know this light just appeared mysteriously? Simple - we don't.

All we can see is a bright light on the monitor on a picture that's already distorted by the camera angle and the goldfish bowl CRT and wide-angle of the CCTV camera.

The green lines I've added here show the approximate true lines of perspective and the purple ones trace a corner that's fairly close to the camera. I don't know the dimensions involved, in particular the width of the corridors at this junction, but you can see how distorted everything is to begin with.

So to the light. Any decent photographer will tell you bright light - or glare - is a pain in the bum. There are several types of glare - lens flare is probably the most common, but by no means the only one: and it's not what we're seeing here. This is classic overexposure bleed typically associated with electronic recording.

By roughly tracing the edge of the bleed it's easy to see how it follows the lines of the doorway.

You can see from this that the glow appears to drop away when at the edge of the painting and also slightly along the bumper rail. It follows the metal bumper on the door too.

What we have here is a reflection from a bright source just outside of the camera's view - but you already guessed that, didn't you. This is further confirmed by the way the light reflected from the area also pools on the floor.

So could it be an angel after all then - just out of shot? There's certainly a light source, but since hospitals are full of bright light sources - this is a far more tangiable explanation than the sudden appearance of a supernatural construct. The glowing effect is simply caused by the way the overexposure flare falls off.

This next image is just for fun (but watch it pop up around the net!)

This bit of Photoshoppery is courtesy of a photographer friend, but you can see how convincing it is - it took about 30 seconds to complete the illusion: and it's deliberately slightly inaccurate.

Belief is a very powerful thing. Many of us need to believe in something greater than ourselves to give our lives purpose - or to blame when things go wrong. This lady's genuine belief has distorted a very simple trick of the light into something supernatural.

So what about her daughter's miraculous recovery? That's good and I'm genuinely pleased for the family, but I doubt the story's accuracy.

Witnesses are notoriously unreliable - even without the added confusion of strong emotions and beliefs. We only have the report's word that Chelsea was at death's door. Reporters often play around with the truth to make the mundane into the fantastical.

Mundane stories don't pay their wages and they have to eat.

Misquotation, distortion and exaggeration are orders of the day if you're a hungry journalist and a mother desperately seeking answers is paydirt.

Your mission, should you chose to accept it is to keep on questioning everything you read.

Christmas (Credit Crunch) Message

2008-12-25T18:59:00.006Z

One of the things I hate about Christmas is the way that so much airtime is given over to the religious nutters. Look, Christmas was nicked from the poor Pagans - it's a celebration of the winter solstice. No one knows when (or frankly even if) Jesus was born - the odds of him being born on 25th December on our calendar are about 365-1 against.

I love the idea of being around family and giving of gifts (because I love to give) but the supernatural message is lost on me. The churches cling on to it because they don't have a lot to offer frankly in these days of manic consumerism.

But they've been handed a gift this year.

Most of the west is suffering a massive downturn and they're milking it for everything they can get. Lots of hand-wringing about how we should be good to each other and how Jesus said this and that... the usual stuff. Credit is hard to come by and the effect of the greed that governments allowed to run unchecked for decades has finally burst a bubble and we're in a recession - a bad one.

So you will forgive me for observing that not all so-called Christians are so thrifty. Sir Peter Vardy, a favourite of god-bothering former British PM, Tony Blair built a multi-million pound car business thanks to cheap credit: and became enormously rich into the bargain.

He got out when the going got good and once commented that the lord (God) had given him a "very full cup" which made me want to vomit.

God, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Vardy is a businessman and with some good judgement and shrewd decisions, he rode a tide of easy credit and explosion in personal debt to dizzying financial heights. I have my doubts he would fair so well selling cars in the current financial climate where even the car-makers are having to be bailed out by governments.

But Vardy doesn't do motor cars now - he jumped ship, becoming even more personally wealthy than before and ploughed some of his gains into another sure thing: City Academies - and it's his belief in promoting the supernatural that brought him onto my radar. (The guy is a snake-oil salesman and we're letting him decide the future of some of our children!)

At the same time the very practices that made Vardy so eye-wateringly rich are being decried as wicked from virtually every pulpit in the land: by senior members of his own sect.

BBC reports Right Reverend Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester as saying:

"Society is facing an inevitable come-uppance for its 'buy now, pay later' culture."

I wonder how Sir Peter can sleep at night knowing that his millions come from precisely that? Rather well, I expect.

Bring Back GoreSat!

2008-12-25T01:39:00.004Z

Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, he might not have even made the most convincing documentary on climate change, but the guy's heart certainly seems to be in the right place. At the end of the last century (less than a decade back) NASA scientists, jaded at the prospect of putting folks on the moon (been there, done that), came up with the idea of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) - aka Discover. Gracious, these acronyms get cheesier.

The idea was for DSCOVR to stream a live colour image of the blue marble we call home from about a million miles away and help model how climate change is affecting us. The nickname "Goresat" comes from the politician's support for the project since inception. Gore wanted to steam the data live onto the Internet 24/7 so we could watch in awe at the jaw-dropping beauty of Earth from space.

But the Bush "administration" put the clog in. DSCOVR would have put a smoking gun into America's hand proving that its reliance on oil is fucking with the planet - and Dubya, a god-bothering climate-change denying idiot and his cronies weren't going to let that happen on his eight year ~~snooze~~ watch.

Writing for the BBC, Dr Christopher Riley curator of the online Apollo film archive project, Footagevault, says:

"Today, the satellite still rests in storage at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland awaiting a more enlightened presidency to give it a green light. Perhaps, under a new administration, and to mark the 40th anniversary of humankind's first vision of the Earth from space, that time has now come."

We can only wait and hope.

Pope: "Catholicism Must Save the World From Gays and Trannys!"

2008-12-23T10:16:00.012Z

In his end of year ~~dribble~~ speech to Vatican staff the 81 year old pontiff has suggested that saving the world from gay folk is as important as saving the rain forests.

Funny how they can freely and openly attack people for being naturally programmed a particular way and yet when someone criticises their unquestioning belief in the invisible, they cry blasphemy.

Homosexuality may be abhorrent to these folk, in fact it offends many atheists and agnostics too - unless they are red-blooded males watching a two or more 20-somethings getting all steamy together. Erotic lesbianism is OK... But that's homosexual sex.

So what's wrong with two dudes falling in love?

I know the problem. Folks can't get their heads around the way gay men make out. This has nothing to do with reproduction of the species (although that's what the religious would have you believe.) It's because they can't abide what goes on in the bedroom (or in George Michael's case - somewhere else).

Like or not, accept it or not, but being gay is part of the human condition - and it's not just restricted to humans.

Sexual attraction involves many parts of the brain and for the most part we don't fully understand it, what we do know is that some people are sexually attracted to members of the same sex. They can't help it because they are made that way; they didn't consciously choose to nip into the closet one day never to return.

Sexual orientation is determined in the womb.

If you believe in God, it's God's fault that some men and women are gay. If you believe in science on the other hand, it's natures fault.

Either way we have absolutely no right to try and rid the world of them: and the organised churches have even less right than that; and what really grinds with me is that a bloke who has, by definition never even experienced an orgasm, is considered a suitable person to tell the rest of society how to think.

As Rodney Carrington observed, "I think I'll go in the closet now. I'm tired of all that pussy, gonna get me some dick now."

UPDATE:

Now I'd missed this, but the Christian post reports:

the Pope said, “It is not man who decides who is a man or woman but God.”

Clearly, and as typically usual, the intellectually challenged corpse worshipper, has missed a fascinating point about transsexual behaviour: and since one of my best friends was afflicted this way (and even confessed to me before telling his then model girlfriend) I do feel a little better informed than he is about the subject.

We'll call him Dave - not his real name.

Dave and I were computer programmers and pretty good mates. He was very handsome, articulate and well-mannered. But he wasn't in the least bit camp.

He came to my birthday party and made me feel like a true guest of honour. We (the small selection of office staff, including Dave) wined and dined while I did my "Siadwell" impression and drunkenly put pinhole burns all down the front of my favourite shirt: that I'd just received that very evening.

Some weeks later, we were talking at his place and he explained that he had a secret and over the next few hours poured out the details of his feeling like a woman trapped in a man's body. He hated his penis and longed to wear woman's clothes: he'd already bought himself some stuff which he delighted in showing me. We went into a lot of detail including the pictures of the operation he eventually planned to have where his penis and testicles would be reformed as a vagina and vulva. Although they were in monochrome and early versions of today's op., they were enough to make me wince a little inside.

I was the first person he'd confided in and I felt honoured: to this day, I feel honoured that I was the person he "came out" to if that's the right word.

Dave was probably in love with me and although I considered him a trusted confidante, I had never considered him anything else than just one of the lads - yet here he was confessing the need to become a woman.

You may be wondering why I didn't feel phased by this. (Many hot-blooded males in their 20s would take serious offence or horror to be told by a friend that they were gay - but this was even more earth-shattering.)

No that was just, Dave. If he wanted to be a woman, then that was fine with me and as blogger is my witness, he never made a move on me. We understood each other. I looked at him and saw another guy, he looked at him and saw a woman - trapped in a man's body.

This is key.

Transexuals are not gay, indeed the condition is recognised in psychiatry as a gender dysphoria. It is not homosexuality but an entirely different condition the causes of which remain unclear.

As far as Dave was concerned, he was a woman. He had the outward physical characteristics of a man including the musculature, Adam's apple and so on, but inwardly - his sense of self - told him he was female.

So what's God got to do with this?

Ancient people had very strange ideas about sex. In Jesus's day, for example, it's widely considered that they believed that men ejaculated some form of embryos and that the woman only acted as an incubator. This lends some credence to acceptance of the virgin birth myth: god just appeared and planted the "seed". What those people didn't know was that a pair of gametes are required to create an embryo - one from each parent. Gametes are involved when plants reproduce sexually to - but in plants, the seed is an analogue of the embryo.

However, even though modern Christians cannot ignore modern biology (unless it suits them to) they still consider that life is a divine creation. This leads into to some horrid arguments about the sanctity of life versus a woman's right to choose which I'm not going to address here. My opinions should be clear from my other writing.

So let's work from their teaching: in the book of Ecclesiastes, if memory serves, it is written that it's wicked and sinful for a man to lie down with another as if it were his wife.

Make love, in other words.

However, from what I can recall, there's nothing in the bible that actually says you can't remodel a man (or woman's) body into the opposite sex.

This is not really the issue.

The simple people who wrote those words, so alien to thinking people and so precious to modern evangelical Christians, simply thought that gay folk (and transsexuals) had a choice.

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

When comedian Rodney Carrington cracks jokes like:

"I think I'll go in the closet now. I'm tired of all that pussy, gonna get me some dick now."

He's alluding to precisely this. We can't chose to be gay, any more than we can choose to be black, white, indigo, man or woman - and we can't choose to be transexuals either.

So if we can't choose to do something (using the free will, they are so fond of telling us God gave us) then the decision was made for us.

God made gay people and God made transsexuals.

I didn't work out this logic, the Bible does in concert with what we know now.

Crap - looks like I'm stuck with pussy after all.

Today I'm Going To Be: A Doctor

2008-12-22T21:40:00.004Z

They're an odd breed, journalists.

In most professions you train for a long time to acquire the skills required and then spend years moving up the ladder.

"Experts are not born, they are hewn from the bedrock of endeavour and the granite of experience."

When I wrote that, back in the early 90s, I was considered an expert on computer that today few people have even heard of. It took many years to acquire the knowledge to be specialist in that comparatively narrow field and as a friend of mine wryly observed on me being introduced as an "expert":

Expert: an "ex" is something that was and a "spurt" is a drip under pressure.

Um... a few years later, I refined that into:

A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less. So the ultimate specialist is someone who knows absolutely everything about absolutely nothing.

Richard "Holier Than Thou" Littlejohn and the cringe-making Peter Hitchens (to name two) are specialists: of the worst form - they're journalists.

The trouble is they have taken upon themselves the mantle of, well, whatever suits. One day they are doctors writing about MMR (a common theme in The Mail) another they are evolutionary biologists telling us that Darwin was wrong (Hitchens) and on yet another day, they become mystically transformed into climate experts and tell their readers that people like me are climate Nazis (Littlejohn).

Not one of these idiots possess anything remotely connected to a science degree and yet they choose to tell vulnerable people all matter of tosh they pick up unchecked from Wikipedia, or more usually thin air.

If I went to an airport and demanded to fly an jumbo to Hong Kong, I'd be escorted off the premises by security and probably handed to men in long white coats. Yet I can fly a jet - I just don't hold necessary licences. There's the small matter of those pesky months of intensive training, hideously difficult exams not to mention the £30,000+ cost.

There was a time when journalists checked their facts but somehow that's got lost to the mists of time. There was also a time when specialists were allowed to write and discuss their specialities - not any more. Now anyone with the journalist's mantle is free to write whatever bullshit they want: hell, they can even make shit up because on the (very) rare occasions they get caught, the fines are minute.

The author Mark Twain (I think) once observed that if you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed. In those wise words, I think that ignorance might just be bliss.

Even our elected politicians command less trust than the newspapers. While I'll grant you that some of our honourable members are, well a bit dodgy, at least they are subject to some degree of scrutiny and can easily lose their jobs. The same, unfortunately, is not true of most journalists.

Believe nothing - check everything.

Report: Academies Not Panacea

2008-12-22T14:58:00.005Z

In a report which will be regarded by many in education as predictable and embarrassing for ministers, the Sutton trust has found that no less than 72% of the £25M+ super schools do not pass muster for the governments own benchmark.

Further and also predictably, the BBC reports:

"It [the Sutton Trust] also suggested rises in achievement corresponded to falls in the proportion of pupils from deprived backgrounds."

No shit Sherlock!

Academies are a fucking shambles. They are a massive waste of money that let lunatics (if well meaning lunatics) like Peter Vardy's Emmanuel Foundation get a foothold into something that should not belong to them. While Vardy himself denies being a tub-thumping Creationist, there's absolutely no question that his enforcer, Nigel McQuoid is.

McQuoid famously allued to being decended from monkeys (i.e. that he didn't want children to think that they came from or are related to our primate cousins). Problem is, as is typical with relgious twits, he confused APES with monkeys.

Humans are apes, albeit a highly advanced ahd largely naked version, but apes nontheless. McQuoid doesn't like that idea - he prefers to think of himself as something special: creation of a loving god... etc. The man's an idiot and I wouldn't put him in charge of the family piss-up, let alone a school.

McQuoid/Vardy's King's Academy opened near me a few years ago and caused a storm. Poor kids dropped out (or were thrown out) and the rich kids got in. The percentage of pupils on free school meals (i.e. the less fortunate) dropped markedly and results went up.

BBBC reports:

Schools minister Jim Knight said: "It is important to note that the number of children on free school meals (FSM) in academies has actually risen compared to the under-performing schools they replaced.

Are you listening, Lord Adonis? What about you, Jim Knight?

Funny - that's the complete opposite of what the independent report says and the complete opposite of what I see on my drive home from work... there's plenty of very expensive metal driving out of King's Academy! The poor kids from "Hemo" are mostly going to the other schools further away.

Academies DON'T WORK! Open your eyes and give the poor a chance - all you've done with this failed experiment is prove what we all predicted: money does not make for a better education if you concentrate it all in one place.

Pope Praises Gallileo: Still Picks Cherries

2008-12-21T18:10:00.004Z

Pope Benedict XVI has praised the astronomer, Galileo for his work in helping us to better understand the universe and the fact that we live in a heliocentric solar system where the Earth is a rather insignificant rock. If we didn't live here, we'd probably not be that impressed by it.

His predecessor reportedly remarked in in 1992 that the catholic church's treatment of the great man was a "tragic error."

Tragic error? There's a fucking understatement. Thanks to the Roman Catholic church's mind buggering ignorance and unwillingness to adapt, the cause of astronomical science was put back decades and perhaps more.

Benedict XVI is a modernist of sorts - he's not daft enough to come out and suggest the Earth is flat or the Earth is at the centre of the solar system (making it the Terra system) or even the universe. He's smart cookie and just expands his views a bit to fit with modern thinking.

God's still real, but now we can use Gallileo's discovery to observe God's work.

So that's OK then.

That's the problem with these assholes. They need to justify their jobs - after all they get paid for promoting the biggest bunch of bollocks in history of, well, history.

Every time we figure out how something else works (evolution was a good example) they shit themselves and have to either deny it (as the Americans are fond of) or wrap it up in a nice box of God's doing.

It's a lot harder to burn people a stakes these days - people tend to notice.

That's the great thing about the God concept. No matter what we figure out about our surroundings, one God fits all a bit like one of those Magic Gloves you get down the Sunday market.

It rains - god did it. (No guys, that's precipitation).

Precipitation? God made clouds!

Clouds - that the weather and God made the seas!

Water. No guys that's hydrogen and oxygen.

Hydrogen and Oxygen? God made them.

No they are atoms. Listen guys, Oxygen is made in stars and hydrogen when the universe was created.

AH! But God made the universe!

FAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRK!

and then there's this:

Life - god did it. (Wait no, it was evolution).

Evolution? God did it!

Abiogenesis - see, you can't explain that, so God must have done it!

Daily Mail: "Ming Emperor Had Swiss Timepiece"

2008-12-20T21:19:00.006Z

OK, I admit I'm having a laugh at the Mail's expense, but this is the sort of dubious BS that it prints on a daily basis, so why shouldn't I?

The story now starring all over the net although I can't find an original source, is that a couple of archaeologists have found a swiss-made ringwatch in some rubble while excavating a tomb. The key bit is here, where the writer records:

"They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant's funeral.

It's fairly obvious they are mistaken. Says Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Museum:

'When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with metallic sound.'

Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this. Perhaps it was a time traveller? But you'd have thought a couple of things would have occurred to them, notwithstanding that time travel is paradoxically impossible, the simple fact that the clumsy bastard could would have brought a more accurate electronic timepiece - not a early 20th century clockwork version.

I can see it now: "Flux capacitor: check! FTL drive: check! Antique clockwork timepiece: check!"

Oh do behave - the most worrying thing about this is that so many new sources are sufficiently slow to actually print this as news.

Let me spell it out for you O-C-C-A-M-S R-A-Z-O-R. The idea that when there are several conflicting theories, the simplest one is usually the correct one.

Christ, these people get on my nerves.

Great American Hubris: Still Wrong

2008-12-20T11:25:00.008Z

EEK! Was Al Gore wrong?

According to my ultra-conservative source, even the Democratic leaning CNN is starting to doubt the prevailing scientific theory that global warming is entirely man-made.

I'm not a meteorologist, but I've lived long enough to see the climate change. When I was a child, white Christmases were a regular thing an summers were long, dryish and warm. Things have changed.

Left-wing Americans like Gore have promoted the idea that global warming is entirely man-made whereas the right-wing like Dubya have lived in some form of denial.

Gore has a point, he just makes it badly and we all know that Dubya is religiously-driven fucking idiot. You can get details of Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth here but be cautioned that the film has a tendency to exaggerate: something that Dubya supporters have seized on.

The Earth's been here for 4.5 billion years give or take (or only 6,000ish if you believe Ken Ham and idiots like him) and for a large part of that, it's cooled down from a molten blob into what we see today.

Our home's molten core is still pretty hot and reminds us on occasions when it breaks through the fragile crust and forms massive volcanoe, but for the time that life has been on this planet the majority of our heat has come from our sun.

Due to our orbital eccentricity, solar orbital distance and heat lost to space, the planet's temperature has remained fairly constant over that time: warmer at the equator where it's close to the sun and cold at the poles where it's further away. Yet strikingly, the difference between the warmest and coldest places on Earth is quite dramatic: tens of degrees centigrade. We experience seasonal changes (particularly at the far north and south) because the Earth is tilted a few degrees from vertical.

We know this because life as we know it cannot survive outside of a comparatively narrow range of temperatures. While simple bacteria can survive and even thrive in extremely hot water for example, the higher lifeforms require far more modest temperatures.

Our planet, our home is an ideal temperature to sustain and nourish life as we know it (although this is in part an effect of the anthropic principal).

OK. So what about global warming - is it happening or not?

The majority of Americans, or American politicians anyway, don't want to think so. Such is the state of their denial, they refused to sign up to the Kyoto treaty. (Neither did India, China or Russia). Another excuse suggests that the Kyoto protocol causes economic stagnation and that following such a path allows the non-signatories to get an unfair economic advantage.

But global warming is a fact.

The scientist and the weatherman in the video above both miss (or ignore) an important point about evolution.

Not evolution of a species - evolution of a system.

There are more people alive now than have ever lived and we are changing the planet in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine. Chaos theory tells us a lot about that.

It's not just our cars - it's us! We are net consumers: we're not putting anything back. We're cutting down the trees that scrub the CO2 from the atmosphere and that leaves us with a net imbalance that the planet cannot absorb: it's never had to in its 4.5Bya history.

Sure, the sun is warming the planet. If it should experience a slight blip in output, we'll feel it for sure, but if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise, the heat energy cannot escape regardless, the planet will warm and climate will change.

We are to blame and no amount of American naval gazing and well-meant bullshit won't help.

Plant a tree and observe your environment.

Mother nature is old and wise - listen to her and listen well because our future depends that we do.

Head over the Lay Scientist to see what right-whinger, God-botherer Richard Littlejohn writes in the Daily ~~Bullshit~~ Mail. Original article here and please try to understand that while there are people just as stupid as Littlejohn, they don't have the opportunity to sell their ideas as facts.

BBC Fined £95,000: but who pays?

2008-12-19T17:49:00.004Z

The great British public, that's who.

Competitions ran as far back as 2006 were pre-recorded so there was no way that viewers could win despite being charged premium-rate calls. However, thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded (essentially an annual television tax) the BBC isn't actually paying: the poor British public is.

Fuck that.

If presenters, producers and others are going to play fast and loose with the rules, they should be sacked. Not suspended, not wrist slapped, but sacked for gross misconduct.

Job done. No excuses. No buck passing and no fining people twice.

Ah--Ah-Chooo! Damn I'm horny!

2008-12-19T17:21:00.004Z

A scientist from Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital, has discovered a link between sexual arousal and sneezing.

Although reports of the condition are extremely rare, its thought that this is due to a crossed wire in part of the old brain (the bit at the back of our head) that controls autonomic functions such as breathing, temperature control, heart rate and so on. Sexual arousal is similarly automatic (even if it requires a stimulus) so the scientist considers this a probable explanation.

A more commonly reported complaint (about 1 in 4 people) sneeze when exposed to sunlight - suggesting a similarly crossed-wire between the optic system and sneeze reflex.

Somewhat bizarrely, the BBC reports, our noses also contain erectile tissue leading to a condition know as honeymoon rhinitis where men and women experience stuffiness during arousal. (The same condition is also a well-known side effect of Viagra.)

I have to ask, albeit rhetorically and with a tongue firmly in cheek, is this where the phrase "fuck nose" descends from?

Fuck knows.