Why Dont You Blog?

The review for the new Police and Criminal Evidence Act includes a plan to capture the DNA of millions more people, by taking DNA from people accused of the most minor offences, according to the Observer.

Unsurprisingly, this is worrying civil liberties groups. In particular, there is a fear that there will be so many people’s DNA on file that it will seem unfair to miss off the rest of the population, so there will be a strong argument for getting everybody’s.

Of more immediate concern is how much the present system is collecting and how biased in its range.

Liberty claims that, per head of population, the UK has five times as many people on the DNA database as any other country. The government estimates that even if the database is not expanded to include the details of minor offenders, some 4.5 million people will still be on it by 2010.

The expansion of the database is prompting fears that people from ethnic minorities are being stigmatised. According to research by the Liberal Democrats, under the existing system within three years the details of more than half of all black men will be on the DNA database.

Do I really need to even comment on this stuff? It sets off too much knee-jerk 1984 incoherent ranting in me.

5 times as many people’s DNA as any other European country? More than half of all black men on it in 3 years? What a proud national record.

There will apparently be a few month’s public “consultation”. The road-pricing and ID petitions give you a fair idea of how far the government will diverge from whatever path it is set on, even if the whole country rises up and says mildly but assertively, “Hang on a minute. We’re not completely convinced that totalitarian control of every aspect of life is the only way to run a society…..”

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Well, this is a short one to say I am almost back online now, although the process has been far from easy. It is entertaining that in today’s modern world, having a short spell offline can cause more problems than you can shake a 32gb memory stick at.

It it hard to work out where to start with my ranting over this recent debacle, so I may be disjointed (no change there though). Some recent examples of the “traumas” (which are, admitedly mostly trivial!), have included such things as working out when the rubbish bins will be emptied. My house now has two types of bin (recycling and landfill), with a note saying they will be collected on alternate weeks. Nothing else. No idea which day of the week, or which week is which. Wonderful.

What the note did say was that to find out the day of collection, and which week was landfill and which was recylcing, I was told to “log on to the councils website and enter my address details.” Brilliant, except I didn’t have an internet connection. Read the rest of this post

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Was enticed to visit WorldNetDaily via a post on Richard Dawkins which reproduced their article on teachers who felt they were being forced to promote atheism.

The article turned out to be as silly as you’d expect. Even more hatstand but with more intrinsic comedic value is Chuck Norris’s article on this very topic. (You can get there from the WND homepage by clicking on his big dumb face in the right column.)
Title:

How to outlaw Christianity (Steps 2 & 3)

So even good old z-list action movie stars can see the wisdom in banning religions? Well. that seems a bit extreme to me but I am not gifted with the action hero’s can-do spirit. So, I am prepared to be persuaded, although the Roman empire’s failure to manage this example suggests it may not be the way to go.

No wait, fool. This is a warning of the powerful atheist conspiracy to do just that. Bah. This blog wasn’t even invited. Word must have reached Atheist Conspiracy Central of our weak revisionist tendencies.

Some representative content:

Step 2: Target younger generations with atheism

Atheists are making a concerted effort to win the youth of America and the world. Hundreds of websites and blogs on the Internet seek to convince and convert adolescents, endeavoring to remove any residue of theism from their minds and hearts by packaging atheism as the choice of a new generation. While you think your kids are innocently surfing the Web, secular progressives are intentionally preying on their innocence and naïveté.

What’s preposterous is that atheists are now advertising and soliciting on websites particularly created for teens. The London Telegraph noted that, “Groups including Atheists for Human Rights and Atheist Alliance International – ‘Call 1-866-HERETIC’ - are setting up summer camps and an Internet recruiting campaign.”

YouTube, the most popular video site on the Net for young people, is one of their primary avenues for passing off their secularist propaganda. Another antagonistic and self-proclaimed “blasphemous” site even beckons youth to record their anti-Christian beliefs on it.

Blimey. You think your kids are innocently surfing the web for goatporn or anorexia-promotion sites. You find that they are being suckered into rational philosophy sites. What parent wouldn’t be worried sick?

Thanks for the tip off, Chuck. Chuck Norris! I’m so pleased he has managed to crown his distinguished movie career with a new role as the moral watchdog of the religious right.

My god, the man has pretty well defined z-list acting since the 70s so I had to consult the biog on the IMDB to get the full flavour of his achievements.

Both his parents were half Irish and half Cherokee

Oh come on. Both? Surely the entire current Irish-Cherokee gene pool must consist of him and his bothers. (Wieland and Aaron, since you asked)

His real name is Carlos Ray. This is already a mystery. Why would anyone change the inoffensive Carlos to the ludicrous Chuck? Or Ray to Norris. Norris, ffs. It’s a mere step away from Norbert. Carlos Ray is Charles King in Spanish almost - if you ignore the spelling. He could have chosen that as a nom-de-action-movie if he thought his given name was too Hispanic. (Or Man-who-fights-bad-guys O’Shaughnessy, reflecting his background.) But he went straight for an English-sounding name that seems to have any residual human intelligence sucked out of its very syllables. The human equivalent of the Mazda vehicle called the Bongo Friendee. (Google it if you don’t belive me.)

The only watchable film that he was ever in, to my knowledge, was the one where he fought Bruce Lee in the Colliseum (watchable because of Bruce Lee rather than Mr Norris) This is called Meng long guo jiang, with what I consider excessive pedantry, by IMDB. And he was comically chest-and shoulder-hair-covered in that.

Everything else in the list of his movies brings the old phrase “straight-to-video gem” to mind.

Let’s see the upside here, fellow evil conspirators. If Chuck’s illustrious film career makes him the best-known celeb that the religious right can field to be the star face of a major blog, they really have had to scrape the barrel.

Let’s redouble our efforts to turn the youth to our godless ways.

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The Register reports on Technorati’s problems resulting from its redesign. It knocked itself out of operation (surely not unprecedented for Technorati. I thought it let its imaginary Monster out to ravage it every weekend)

The Register argues that Technorati has more or less given up on indexing blogs and concentrated on images.

So what was always a lousy blog search tool is now little more than a lousy image search tool - this is not going to worry Yahoo! or Google

I hope not. For all my whining about it, Technorati is pretty useful.

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Technorati gives this blog a level of authority that could be considered pretty generous,given the unauthoritative nature of most of our posts. However, for the uninitiated, in Technoratispeak, “authority” refers to how popular you blog is, determined by how many other blogs link to it, not by how authoritative your content is (mercifully…).

But, links to us from the Atheist Blogroll that I can actually see on my screen - and that send visitors to us, according to FireStats - haven’t been listed for months.

I’ve tried researching the reasons for this, unsure whether the fault lies with our code (that would hardly be a first), our recent attempts to restyle the site (not an unmitigated success, yet), Technorati or the Atheist blogroll’s code.

I am none the wiser. This appears in Technorati’s explanation for why links may not get picked up.

If the link was in a blogroll, you may want to check to see if the hyperlink to your blog is located in the blog source of the blogroll. Blogroll links that are generated via a tool or script are not seen. The blogroll must reside in the blog home page as well. If the blogroll is in a subsection or directory of the site, it is not seen or picked up

On an experimental basis, I visited the most recent posters (at the top of the blogroll list on the left.)

onegoodmove.org doesn’t actually show the blogroll, nor have a link to Technorati that I could have used to check if it picks up the link from us.

Sans God has us on the Blogroll, on the index page and not below the so-called jump (other Technorati forum reasons for not seeing links) When I looked for blogs that link to Sans God, I see: “Why Dont You Blog? by Admin Istrator · 44 days ago ” Well no. It rather looks to me as if we linked to them today and yesterday and the day before and so on. When the 6 months from 44 days ago is up, we will disappear off their list of linked blogs.

God is pretend has a scrolling blogroll. Maybe that’s why our blog - which shot itself in the listing foot by starting with a letter as close as dammit to the end of the alphabet - doesn’t appear to be linked to from here. But, wait, God is pretend has only 3 inbound links and Whydontyou doesnt appear in the three. Maybe that’s because they are using a script.

We get lots of links from visitors to Gratuitous common sense and I can see us quite clearly on their blogroll, on the index page, not below the jump etc. Ahha. Technorati thinks this has links from whydontyou, but dates them as 35 and 50 days ago…..

I am getting bored with this. You get the picture. The only links that keep getting consistently
updated are from Parabiodox (ffs :-D) and content-scrapers. Any ideas?

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A job in any sci-fi movie or tv series is a job for life.

Actors get constantly recycled within the genre. Think of the self-effacing officer from the original Star Trek turning up as the sinister Bester in Babylon 5. Officer Sun and the captain from Starscape becoming SG1 crew members. Quark from Deep Space Nine in Buffy. The Doctor from Voyager in almost everything. Even the Quantum Leap man became the captain of Enterprise (did I mention it doesn’t have to be good sci-fi?) And so on.

The same applies to tv cop shows. (There is a certain amount of cop/sci-fi crossover but I guess that probably just constitutes an acting career rather than a pattern. E.g. The blonde woman out of last year’s series with the fishy aliens is in more cop & medical shows than she was in fish episodes.)

I am now going to make a mockery of my pure and true love of the Wire by sharing my personal TV trivia game.

(Don’t judge me too harshly, here. I’m just following HBO’s lead. They offer downloads of “Naimond’s” choice of classic hip-hop, or such.)

The original game consisted of trying to spot the entire cast of the Wire in old LawnOrder episodes. Anything from the LawnOrder stable counted (classic Law and Order, Special Victims or Criminal Intent. Or even the new spinoff, with lawyers, that’s set slightly outside the format, that I haven’t really got into. In fact even old episodes of Homicide might count, if I am feeling pushed for successes.

So far, I can only really claim Avon Barksdale, Omar and the female cop for definite, because I only recently realised the gameplay was up to a really extended scoring system. Bit I think I’ve seen Stringer Bell in one. And I’m sure I started squealing with joy because Marlow was spotted in an episode.

Then I thought, even with the most intense TV watching, it wouldn’t be possible to match the whole cast to Law and Order spinoffs or precursors.

So the new challenge is to match every speaking part actor in the Wire to EITHER a Law and Order character - 1 point each episode - OR the most comically different role in any visual medium - 5 points, but it’s got to be REALLY funny.

This lets me score points for McNulty in the 500 and Bodie in the Cosby Show. Omar scores 10 in anything, for being so extreme. Naimond’s mom would score 10 as well, but I’ve never seen her in anything else.

My ambition is to find the whole Barksdale crew. Contributions welcome. All the same, it only counts if I actually see it. Shortcuts like searching IMDB cost 10 conceptual penalty points for nerdiness above and beyond the call of duty.

My alternative ongoing games include:

• “spot the musicians turned actors” by music genre -
• e.g. Method Man and IceT - LawnOrder and the Wire -
• Spandau Ballet - now TV/movie villains in a crasser version of the “Ray Winstone loveable
  Cockney villian” archetypes
• Phil Collins, ditto,
• One of the bros out of Bros.. ditto..
• I just refuse to count Will Smith and Kylie as I think they took the reverse direction. And in any case, people only count if they are either respected and/or unspeakably naff in either genre.

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Spam us and you won’t usually get read, let alone answered.

In fact, a good few legitimate emails get thrown out accidentally in the rsi-inducing marathon of spam deletion that follows opening the email client. (Sorry to everyone whose mails get flushed)

All the same, this blog link, which came from a promotional semi-spam to the blog is actually very interesting. The blog name and blurb are:

Off the Page - Current Affairs Books, Comment & Debate
Source of content and opinion from some of the UK’s best published writers on a range of diverse topics, from the war on terror to the trouble with Tesco

We are of course holding you to ransom for a reciprocal link, seeing as you are such fans of the blog, as you mention in your email :-p ….

(Don’t take this a cue to comment-spam or spam us, though, all you cialis vendors and Nigerians who have unaccountably discovered how trustworthy we are and want to give us free dollars, you know who you are. This blog’s comments are protected by the magical shield of Akismet, not to mention the Power of Greyskull.)

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How do you get broadband if you don’t have an Internet connection?

Answer: You phone someone with a net connection to do it for you.

Explanation: TW is currently offline due to having to move to a place in which only the most intrepid ISPs will offer the most minimal services. Thanks to the world-class silliness of Virgin media tech support service, I have also very recently spent another two weeks offline. I will spare you from the uber-dull details, solved eventually again by the Cafe-Nero-style lad who seems to be Virgin’s only competent techy. It was hellish, in a very mild sense of the word “hellish”, true, but, nonetheless, you wouldn’t choose to do it.

In fact, how does anyone live now without being plugged into the matrix of the Net?

Even given the willful Luddism that stops me from doing Internet banking or shopping, I genuinely can’t imagine how we lived before the Internet, let alone before PCs. It’s not that I wasn’t alive, then, either.

But, to be honest, I can barely conceive of there not being an Internet. If ever anything felt like historical inevitability, it’s the world wide web.

How did we get information? Despite dumping industrial quantities of used books on charity shops every time I move, this house is still a book depository. But, it never has a book with the right information when I need it.

Which is always ten minutes ago, because of the “instant information gratification” expectation that has come along with the Internet. So the library won’t do either.

In fact the local library, which was limited enough (with romantic novels, improving multicultural children’s books and fishing hobbyist books filling about 70% of its shelves) has been more or less replaced by a caffeine-beverages-free Internet cafe. The incommoding books got sold off for pennies, even adding a few volumes to the aforementioned book depository.

I seem to remember it was possible to write letters, take photos, contact people, do calculations, play games, draw pictures, play music and so on. It seems unlikely that we did them much, though, given how bloody hard it is to do any of these things without a computer and a net connection.

Pencil and paper are OK. At least they are portable. But, have you tried using a manual typewriter? A calculator? Well, you just wouldn’t, would you? You might as well get out the slate and abacus.

Have you tried even using your PC without the Internet, recently? It’s OK for playing music and doing 3d rendering. After that it’s like playing frisbee with a dog with its back legs cutoff.

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This part of the blog is a sucker for free newspapers. (Mainly because of a bizarre reading obsession that can be fed by repeatedly reading the words “Hot” and “Cold” on the bath taps, if absolutely necessary.)

But the previously unspotted City News that dropped through the door last evening was a free newspaper too far. It looked slick. In fact it looked like a tabloid version of the community news magazines that the local council persists in seeing as not being a waste of taxpapayer’s money.

The front page shows a full page colour shot of a man - looking like an Armani perfume model gazing moodily into the middle distance, brow slightly furrowed in Deep Thought. And there ias a mini-inset picture of Madonna. The heading splashed across this picture in about 60 point sans-serif is “Can envy harm you?”

(Hmm, I’m starting to get a mite suspicious now. )

On page 3, the continuation of the lead story revealed that the chap in question (now pensively holding his chin in his hand, while gazing into the middle distance) and his sister had suffered leprosy and worse since a childhood visit to Cape Verde - the result of witchcraft practised by a jealous relative. (That’s the “envy” and “harm” bit, by the way) Luckily, after he had spent thousands on doctors and witchdoctors and got no relief, prayer from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God Help Centre put paid to that.

(I kid you not.)

No surpises that this free newspaper turns out to be a publication from an organisation called UCKG - a registered charity, no less.

The rest of the paper is basically full of tales of people whose illnesses - especially depression and suicidal thoughts - and problems were all cured by UCKG. Having an exploding mind; getting engaged 3 times to men who cheated on her; having a father who beat him senseless; baby who stopped breathing every ten minutes ; etc. Whatever the human tragedy… they were all sorted by UCKG.

Blimey, put that in your pipe and smoke it, atheist blogroll.

This UCKG certainly know their target - really unhappy people - and are going straight for it without passing Go but clearly collecting their £200 (at least) on the way.

I had to Google these miracle workers. (That’s not a real link I put in .extrawords. to stop it being a link, with the happy accident of making it say http://www.extrawords.uckg.org/.) It is a church headed by a self-anointed Bishop Renato Cardoso, founded in Rio thirty years ago, according to its website. It even offers a song-book but, disappointingly to those of us with a really sick sense of humour, this only shows the words, not the music.

Now, the over-used ROFL word is not going to appear here, except in passing. (Because obviously it is a funny publication. The relenetless accumulation of sob stories reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s remarks on Little Nell’s death in the Old Curiosity Shop.

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing”

)

However, a dip into this world actually ends up quite disturbing. The idea that unsceptical people’s deep misery is being exploited to get adherents is blatantly sick. At the same time, you wonder how the rest of us can ignore the fact that there are thousands of people without any hope except the pseudo hope provided by this sort of thing.

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Quintessential Rambling posted yesterday to say that he/she? thinks war with Iran is about to happen on the basis of an order for massive upping of missile cones, as seen before the last two rounds of global “Risk”.

This post has the horrible ring of truth. So I am just saying to the full pantheon of all deities, spaghetti-monsters, tooth fairies and all “Please, let this be too paranoid a conclusion”

The Armageddon-meisters on any of the constantly shifting sides in WWIII tend to be quietly confident that:
(a) they won’t actually have to do any killing or dying themselves. Lots of young men and women in the armed forces and millions of civilians who happen to been unfortunate in where they chose to be born will do that for them.
(b) they will be rewarded after death anyway when the big magic man rewards them for doing his righteous smiting.

I don’t suppose they care, but some of us are quite pleased to be alive on this planet. We’re not remotely convinced that we’ll be anything except wormfood when we’re not here anymore.
Basically, only having one shot at this life, some of us may value life a bit more than those people who think they’re going to a better one.

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