Monthly Archives: March 2008

Wild things

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What is the best survival strategy for wild animals? The evidence suggests that it’s being hated by humans. There is nothing like a programme to bring any species’ numbers down to boost the population. This seems to bode ill for pandas and polar bears, but it’s working out fine for for magpies, rats, mice, pigeons, flies and fleas.

On the Guardian website, Graham Holliday says that there’s a war on wild boar in France.

In the UK guidance by Defra on how to cull the growing wild boar population was published in February. The British government has decided against a state-led cull saying that the damage currently caused by wild boar is too minimal to be of concern, but some people in France are seriously worried.

There are 1,000 feral boar in the UK, apparently. DEFRA have given advice on how to kill them, which doesn’t seem too hands-off to me, but, then, I haven’t read the guidance.

The French are apparently taking the threat of wild boar rampaging through their celtic villages, snuffling their magic potion and overturning their roundhouses seriously. Oh sorry, that was in Asterisk.

And if you read the Observer article about the French, it seems their imaginary wild boar rampages caused

…. an estimated 20,000 car accidents a year involving the animals and hundreds of millions of pounds of damage to crops and property

To reference another meat animal – Bull. Those figures are so blatantly spurious, they are hardly worth challenging.

The surprising thing is how many people see wild creatures as threats to people, rather than welcoming them as signs that we still haven’t managed to destroy the ecosystems that support us..

One commenter (Trxr) says

where you get the munters (including certain celebs who should concentrate on paying their divorce settlements to their temporary trophy-wives) screaming about a roo cull here in Australia. There’s a lot more than a thousand of the things roaming about here.

Another commenter (the aptly monikered “Ishouldapologise”) on the Guardian article says, in what I assume to be a sarcastic way:

Bring back the Weald, I say. Bring back the bears and the wolves and the wildcats. Bring back the eagles and the adders and packs of wild dogs. Bring back a little magic into this overfarmed country. Who cares if the occasional tourist or country inhabitant gets killed or eaten. That’s what the same people want for Africa and the Amazon, don’t they.

Well, yes, actually, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

It is really lucky – in terms of survival of some species, if not biodiversity – that all the creatures we hate and fear seem to thrive on our opposition if they don’t get made extinct. Any creatures that we like seem to be going extinct in direct proportion to how much we value them. Except for pets, but I doubt that the pet species could survive for long without Pedigree Chum and Whiskas.

One BBC writer on hating magpies on the grounds of an almost universal UK superstition:

The sight of another lone magpie still stops me short. Far from wanting the numbers to halve, I instantly want them to double.

Maybe the point is relevant in a wider context. Our desire to wipe out certain wild species might just serve to double their numbers, following some obscure law of nature….

Newsbiscuit (Newscookie to Americans)

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Newsbiscuit has a couple of posts to interest atheists:

Big Brother goes Shopping

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Take the cameras that follow us everywhere. Increase their intrusiveness level by a factor of ten and you get an idea of how much staff surveillance a German-based supermarket chain thinks it needs. Lidl has been spying on its German and Czech workers in ways that might shock the most avid defenders of surveillance, according to the Guardian story.

The store employed detectives and used video cameras to gather an alarming amount of personal information about its workers. Information about their finances, their tattoos, their love lives, their friends, how many times they went to the toilet….

Recording how a German employee identified as Frau M spent her break, one report read: “Frau M wanted to make a call with her mobile phone at 14.05 … She received the recorded message that she only had 85 cents left on her prepaid mobile. She managed to reach a friend with whom she would like to cook this evening, but on condition that her wage had been paid into her bank, because she would otherwise not have enough money to go shopping.” (from The Guardian)

The Guardian writer saw this incident in a Czech Republic store as the most shocking:

.. a female worker was forbidden to go to the toilet during working hours. An internal memorandum, which is now the centre of a court case in the republic, allegedly advised staff that “female workers who have their periods may go to the toilet now and again, but to enjoy this privilege they should wear a visible headband.

The story was taken from the German magazine Stern. It appears in the Telegraph and other UK newspapers. There’s more on Lidl on AsdaWatch. Lidl’s Wikipedia page that refers to the Guardian article.

Shoot the messengers

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An Indianopolis teacher faces suspension over a book. She introduced a book (Freedom Writers) containing language that the school board didn’t like.

This incident is obviously not the only instance of book-banning.

The American Library Association says the number of books banned or challenged at public libraries increases every year. Along with titles with obvious references to sexuality, violence and vulgarity, the Harry Potter series and classics like “Of Mice and Men” and “Huckleberry Finn” rank among the most-challenged books.(MSNBC)

What!

I looked at the Freedom Writers site. Well, it’s not “Of Mice and Men” but it seems exactly what you’d expect conscientious English literature teachers to be encouraging kids to read. But, it seems that the conceptual conscientious English literature teacher is facing a threat to her job because she did just that.

There is a strange process at work. Many of us believe that we can deny the existence of disturbing aspects of reality if we can stop children seeing them. This doesn’t actually make the bad things go away. It doesn’t even protect children. It just stops them being able to discuss unpleasant things openly.

The US is a haven for Protect the Children nutters. Black Sun posted an interesting, if chilling, blog about the Parents Television Council last week.

The UK isn’t immune from Ms Lovejoy syndrome. In the past few days, UK newspapers and magazines have been getting exercised over a silly Miss Bimbo game, the object of which is to make your character into the “coolest bimbo.” You do this by making it take diet pills, get plastic surgery and silicon implant its chest. The Times, the Daily Mail, the Metro and the rest all seem to have lost any appreciation of irony. At least they don’t credit any young players with any sense that this is mocking.

All the papers seem to be quoting from the same press release, although they differ about whether the game will be played by girls “as young as” 6 or 9. (Note the non-accidental use of as young as 6 rather than aged 6) I guess that the “as young as” bit also comes from a single press release, from the previously unheard-of parents organisation (“parents’ rights group Parentkind”)* that is complaining about this game.

What a marketing coup for the makers of Miss Bimbo and Parentkind. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the same people.

The true irony is that the papers that are throwing up their arms in disgust that this game promotes dangerous role models for girls are the very same papers that cannot produce a single issue without promoting anorexic, surgically enhanced, shopping-obsessed, intellect-challenged gold-diggers on every page.

* I know every organisation in the world isn’t Googlable but you’d think Parentkind would be, given that they seem to be on every news editors’ quotable list. I found something called The Parent Organisation with a blank web page labeled Parentkind. The page says “The Parentkind Directories are currently under development.” If you are not British and were to visit this site – which I am only assuming to be the source of Parentkind – you may think the address is some obscure joke. I can assure you that the places, at least, are legitimate.

Where can we get these placebos?

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Ben Goldacre (BadScience columnist from the Guardian) presented a programme about nutrition fads, on BBC Radio 4 today. It’s the first of a two-part series, The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists. You can hear a podcast on the Radio 4 site. (Pick Monday’s choice.) It’s quite entertaining. In this part, Goldacre talks about the history of some classic quackery.

In contrast, today’s Guardian prints a piece by Madeleine Bunting in favour of unscientific medicine. Referring to several anti-alternative medicine books, as well as Dawkins’ 2007 TV series The Enemies of Reason. Bunting says:

It seems the aim of some of these authors is to finish off a burgeoning health industry that they believe is based on charlatans and quacks preying on the gullible and desperate.

This is one of the most common charges made against complementary medicine – that most of it is no better than placebo. But there is a way of turning that accusation around: perhaps complementary medicine is an effective way to harness placebo as one of the most powerful – and cheapest – of healing processes.

Mind and body can’t be conceptually separated. We know relatively little about how they interact. There’s plenty of room for research into how we can use the mind to fight illness. But I still can’t see how this can justifies encouraging the sick to believe in lies.

Why bother with scientific medicine at all, if you can just carry out a ritual or hand out a sugar pill?

Reason number 1 comes down to a similar point to that expressed in the question “Why won’t god heal amputees?” Can you cure cholera by reflexology? That is, alternative medicine “works” where symptoms are ill-defined and at least partly emotional in nature. Or as Bunting says, putting a positive spin on it:

Complementary medicine is most popular where conventional medicine fails, such as with musculoskeletal conditions and mental health – stress, depression, anxiety

Well, if some people’s mental conditions can be cured by ritual, surely these are revealed to be states of mind rather than organic disease. I bet the rituals don’t work so well with brain damage, dementia or full blown psychosis. So isn’t that like saying, lies aren’t powerful enough to cure real diseases.

Reason number 2. There are plenty of things that can make you feel happier/more relaxed/more cared for. These can be your own ritual practices or substances. (In the Asterisk books, the Brits’ magic potion is a cup of tea.)

You don’t necessarily have to pay for them. You do have to pay for alternative medicine.

In its raw form, a placebo may indeed be one of the cheapest healing process (as Bunting says). However, once you pay for the time of the “understanding” practitioner who prescribes you a 30 ml bottle of water, you enter into a commercial transaction that compares very badly with the cost of visiting a doctor, if you live anywhere with a public health service.

Reason 3: Alternative therapies are “alternative” because they haven’t been proved to work. End of story. Yes, medical research is pretty flawed in many ways. But, the very fact that new drugs are immensely profitable for drug companies and expensive for healthcare funders indicates why promising new treatments are unlikely to be ignored. If an alternative medicine or treatment worked, there would be an unseemly scramble to patent it or to use it to replace expensive drugs.

There must be hundreds of traditional medicines and bizarre treatments that would be effective against various illnesses. The only way to find this out is to test them. Why would the discoverer or inventor of an unusual cure not want to test it? Fear it doesn’t work. Fear of loss of profit.

Reason 4: Alternative medicine is generally the exact reverse of “empowering” despite the claims of its supporters. When you give up your power to evaluate solutions to your physical and mental illnesses, you must take the practitioner’s rituals as authoritative, with no basis for doing so except their claims.

Most of us would feel ripped off if we went to buy a toaster, paid for a toaster and were told – in a caring way – that we had got a toaster, when all we took home was an empty box. So, why is it OK to sell people treatments that don’t work? Indeed, not just morally acceptable but apparently desirable, according to Bunting?

Easter

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Ironically for an atheist blog we seem to have a large readership who follow the christian holiday! Over easter this year our visitors have dropped by almost 50% and the number of comments has fallen by almost 90%. Is this due to easter?

The other Hitchens rants again

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It’s not easy to see Peter Hitchens – the personification of the Daily Mail mindset – as a devout Christian. But here he is, furious about the fact that betting shops can now open on Good Friday. The headline:

Our braying, Godless land where Easter is another day at the bookies

As opposed to “another day” in which a newspaper’s main headline contrives to add to the grief of the mother of a 15 year-old murdered girl, by implying that the fact that the girl drank alcohol was somehow a reason for the girl’s murder and therefore the mother’s fault? Good example of Christian charity, that paper? Oh, blow me down with a feather, is that the Daily Mail?

Pause to reflect on the meaning of “braying” in Hitchens’ headline. Can’t find one. Assume, uncharitably, that is must be there to make “godless” seem more threatening. As with the unusual capital letter on “Godless”.

I must confess to not knowing that bookies were previously closed at Easter, (not being a gambler) so I start from a bit of a disadvantage. Nonetheless, I can’t see what the opening hours of betting shops have to do with morality, at all. There might be (unconvincing to me) moral argument for banning betting but how can there be a moral argument for banning betting on certain days?

But it appears, according to the rabid one, that the new testament provides the justification:

……this is the first generation in centuries that does not know that the soldiers cast lots at the foot of the Cross, ignoring the groans of the crucified Jesus and the weeping of his mother, to decide which of them should have Christ’s seamless garment.

Betting makes the baby Jesus cry? But only at Easter?

Hitchens then argues that:

“paintings of the Crucifixion by the great Flemish Masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and you will see, baying or sneering at Golgotha, exactly the same snarling, contorted, heedless faces you find on the drunken streets of our country.”

What? I thought this was rant against betting on Good Friday, rather than against angry drunks. Is a bad-tempered drunk in the street somehow mocking the crucifixion? Is the (conceptual) guy putting a Five pound Yankee twist forecast on the fourth race at Cheltenham somehow responsible for another (mythical) guy betting on an old t-shirt 2000 years ago?

Falling for Hitchens’ usual rhetorical trick of arousing emotion by association of ideas, I confess that I now picture Hitchens as some sort of Bosch demon. I definitely picture him “snarling” at the keyboard as he types his column.

Oh, it turns out the cause of society’s ongoing tumble into the Pit isn’t gambling on the first “Sunday after the first fourteenth day of the moon (the Paschal Full Moon) that is on or after the ecclesiastical vernal equinox.” (Wikipedia) Nor is it people who look ugly when drunk in public. It’s single parents, according to the next few paragraphs.

This is actually what people such as me have been warning of for years, while being dismissed loftily as puritans and bigots and falsely described as believers in a past “golden age”.

Please let me join in the lofty dismissal. May I add ranting, fear-mongering, hate-spreading, self-satisfied, unable to present a halfway coherent argument?

He’s supposed to be a committed Anglican, according to his Wikipedia biography.

That’s “committed” used in a sense other than that which it has when it’s coupled with “should be”.

And that is “Anglican” used in a sense that is so unlike that brand of Christianity of Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney, as to make you wonder if the Trades Descriptions Act might usefully be applied to religion.

I’m on a roll

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That was such fun that I have to look at more GoogleAds appearing on the blogs of members of Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll

No God blog has

the atheist’s riddle. so simple, any child can understand so complex, no atheist can solve

from cosmicfingerprints.com. I’m not sure what this is offering except 5 days of spam e-mails, You don’t even get to find out what the riddle is until day 4. (If it’s like any other riddle I’ve ever read, the answer is always “the moon” or “a man”.)

No God blog also has adlinks to an organisation that wants a referendum on the EU Constitution, the familiar “end-times” site and atheist.net. (Look, don’t spoil this now by having relevant links, please….)

And Jesus2020.com. It has a few lines at the bottom of the index page, a prayer you are supposed to say and a big gold YES button you are supposed to click if you said the prayer. Bugrit, I’ll click anyway. Momentarily disappointed that choirs of angels haven’t appeared, I find it’s just a mailing list.

No explanation of the 2020 bit. I guess they were looking for a domain name and everything up to jesus2019 was already taken by Spanish-speaking men.

Just about to leave Nogodblog, when I see its links are going to eat up this whole post, all by itself. It’s got another tier of GoogleAds. More pantheism, Christianity in the UK, Catholic religion after Vatican II. Plus ChristianityToday.com/marriage/

My Son is Gay? One woman’s struggle with her son’s homosexuality and God’s answer.

(After he turns down her offer of a Christian un-gaying solution, she decides to hate the sin and love the sinner.)
Plus, from anointed-one.net

Atheism against the law? Scientific proof that atheism requires a belief in miracles.

Do these Christian sites really have to demonstrate that “form follows function” so slavishly, by having such unattractive blogs? This is yet another site with an eye-burning colour combination. This combo might be OK in a different context. Such as, if it didn’t involve text. Turquoise on black with primary red links isn’t normally associated with readability.

After listing teh universal laws that atheism is supposed to break, the site concludes:

Atheism requires not only a tremendous amount of faith but also a belief in miracles. And not only miracles but natural miracles, an oxymoron. Both naturalism and supernaturalism require faith and which one you place your faith in is one of the two most important choices you will ever make.

Imagining for one moment that this stuff is actually meaningful, I still can’t see any logical connection between the arguments that (a) science doesn’t provide answers to everything and (b) therefore there is an all-powerful “god”.

Click link to “find out how life began.” Guess what, a magic man did it.

Misplaced ads

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There is a tradition of posting weird searches that bring people to a blog- even using a poetry format. So, what about the GoogleAd links that take people away from skeptics’ blogs?

I am an atheist has links to the-end.com:

2008: God’s Final Witness
Unprecedented destruction will come in 2008, leading to America’s fall

(Oh shit, I blogged about this very site’s endtimes nonsense a few weeks a go. For free. :-()

Called to be a monk, nun, priest? Take Free Online test Now To see if God is calling you.

From vocationsplacement.org. Well, OK, but I think I know the answer already so I’ll skip the online test and check out the free holiday destinations. Lose interest when I see that the destinations are generally states that I don’t recognise by their initials. I can’t find Hawaii. Look, I’m not prepared to pretend to be Catholic and pray for a couple of weeks for Wisconsin. But thanks for the offer.

Sexed-up Atheism- Dawkins Pantheism adds reverence for Nature, Universe, Life

(Pantheism.net) Well, no great argument with these people, except that I have a fastidious revulsion at the use of the term “sexed-up” to mean “slightly more interesting”.

The Enlightenment of the Healy (me neither) has an advert for hidden-advent.org:

Desiring Lord appearing? Expecting Lord’s return? A pleasant surprise is awaiting you

Hidden advent? Is that a really obscure pre-Christmas calendar? No. It’s one of the most eye-burningly ugly sites you’ll ever see. It deals with The Work of the Lord’s Hidden Advent In China However, the site is even less comprehensible than the title. I click on a link that says

Typical Cases of Leaders in Catholicism and Christianity in Mainland China who Resist Almighty God Being Punished

Not understanding the English, I have to click the link. I now understand even less than I did before.
It has a series of bizarre tables by province. Eg Henan.(65 Cases Selected) I pick a randomly numbered case:

Liu X from Dengzhou City, female, 48 years old, a believer from the Born Again denomination. In February 1999, someone preached God’s end-time work to her, but she didn’t accept it. In March, another person preached it to her again, but she said: “What you believe in is a false way and a cult. I just believe in Jesus. If I were to die, I would die under Jesus’ name.” Two months later, Liu X got uterus cancer, and she lost all her hair after chemotherapy.
In the autumn of 1999, the brothers and sisters preached God’s end-time salvation to her again, but she still resisted and condemned it. Right after that, her innards began to rot. She suffered unbearable pain and failed to respond to any medical treatment. ….. Her oath “rather die than believe” was fulfilled eventually.

They list “Two hundred cases selected from among tens of thousands of cases”. They all involve people dying a painful untimely death for not accepting the end-times idea. Who’d have thought there could be a religious group that compared unfavourably with the Phelps family?

Back in the real world, the advert still says “A pleasant surprise is awaiting you “. Loki forbid that they ever try to give a site visitor an unpleasant message….

Times for the rich

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At a time when “sub-prime”, “banking crisis” stories keep popping up in the news, how odd that the Times has just launched an e-zine, Luxx, aimed squarely at people with very much more money than sense.

In fact the Times seems to be rebranding itself as the paper for people rich beyond the dreams of avarice. There’s now an odd whiff of pre-revolutionary French aristocracy in the paper.

For example, the repellently-named “Alpha Mummy” column put forward the (frankly eccentric) view that Heather Mills McCartney didn’t get enough money to pay for really good childcare. (£24 million. How on earth is anyone supposed to scrimp by on that, you may wonder?)

Alpha Mummy herself pays a half share of £32,000 a year for her nanny. She recommended “age-old nanny-budgeting” tricks to bung the nanny a few more pounds, like giving said nanny a generous food-shopping allowance and letting her keep the change.

The Times is blatantly overpaying this woman by a factor of at least ten, if she can afford to pay her nanny three times the minimum wage, in exchange for childcare and “nutritious” quinoa snacks. I study her writing to see if it is so brilliant that it’s worth all that cash. It seems rambling and smug to me. I guess the Times is using some age-old columnist-budgeting tricks to get her salary past their accountants.

Maybe, Alpha Mummy could afford some of the Luxx items. The extra xx makes this word too irritating to even focus the eyes on. Ah. I get it. It’s not an attempt to abbreviate “luxury” in such a way as to make it seem subtly decadent (i.e., verging on xxx) It’s because the word Lux is already a brand name. A cheap but serviceable brand of soap.

It’s quite hard to do Luxx justice. The functionality of the whole thing has you spitting before you even look at the content pages. Annoying intro that makes you wait for the beginning page to load, then shows you page turning icons that don’t actually work.

Obviously you – the target reader with much more money than sense – are unaware that next and a right arrow might take you to the next page. As it turns out you are correct. These are just the training pages, so you can develop the page-turning skills you need to read the e-zine. (As it turns out, I should have studied harder, because I failed the test.)

I could only turn the page by grabbing the bottom corner and, before I managed that, the image of a woman and horse had gained and lost colour several times.

Argh. I clicked on the Luxx list in the table of contents, assuming this might be the key to the point of this. I am still gagging. A picture of a group of wealthy women, apparently too classy to attend the opening of an envelope but still well-known for their style. Roll the mouse cursor over each one to find out her personal style.

Like a rabbit trapped in headlights, I do.

I only have myself to blame. But then again, this simple act turns out to be a blessing. Because I can’t actually manoeuvre my way out of the page that tells me that rich person blah has a feminine style, slightly bohemian but always elegant……

It’s not as if I’m rolling round laughing or anything (although, well, yes, I am pretty well chortling) and can’t click a mouse. There genuinely is no way out of it, except the merciful close window x in Firefox.

Don’t try this at home

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Phillipino health officials have warned that there are health risks from crucifixion, according to the BBC.

Who’d have thought it?

Bodiam Castle? Google Is Your Friend…

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I have been looking through the website logs to see just what it is that drives people to this site and, while lacking in raw comedy value (unlike some), it has been interesting.

Running a combination of Firestats, Feedburner and Google Analytics it seems this blog is getting around 400 visits a day. From these around 80% are new (which shows just what a non-loyal readership we hold…) and of those around 70% come here from a search engine – nearly all from Google. For the numbers-fans, this translates to about 200 hits a day from Google searches. Given the insanely varied nature of topics here, you would be excused for thinking this was reflected in the search stats. Not so.

Of the top ten search terms used to come here, seven are image searches, and this accounts for about 90 of the incoming hits. Even stranger, of these over a third are all searching for images of Bodiam Castle.

Now, Bodiam Castle is a gorgeous, fourteenth century fairytale castle in East Sussex, run by the National Trust, so I can understand why people are interested in it. In fact, I understand this well enough to have uploaded another photo!

Bodiam CastleIf you have come here searching for Bodiam Castle, I hope you like this, and you can even see more on Flickr. It has been a long time since I have been to Bodiam so please, forgive me for the photos being out of date now. If you have links to other pictures of this gorgeous castle, please let me know and I will be more than happy to link to them from here.

Back onto the search topic, there is the determination issue to consider now. Will my posting of a new Bodiam article increase the amount of hits I get for this? Are people massively disappointed when the Mighty Google sends them here rather than elsewhere? Why dont people use Yahoo to search for Bodiam?

The other common terms people use for an “images search” are:

  • Schwarzenegger
  • Nice Art
  • Fine Houses
  • Holy Wafer
  • Jesus Toast (around 5 people a day come here using that search term… MADNESS)
  • Future Castles

Now, some make more sense than others, but I can only guess at the disappointment people must feel when their searches lead them here.For completeness, the most common search terms that bring people to this site are:

  • HDR How To (use Photomatix)
  • Cool Viking Names (well all of them)
  • Bad Journalist (again, all of them)
  • Firefox Memory Hog (it is)
  • Pipex Download Speeds (almost non-existent)
  • McCanns Blog (wrong place, I didn’t even know they had one)

One last point, a bit of an oddity is a search term Feedburner has identified leading some poor unfortunate here: “blog: I cannot read, feel distracted” – I have no idea what this blog has to offer this poor person.

McCanns, Libel and the press

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Warning: This is a blog. It is personal opinion. There is no evidence that Kate and Gerry McCann killed their daughter then created a media storm to mask their evil deeds. If you do not wish to read personal opinions please read no further.

Now, generally speaking, I am not the biggest fan of the UK media in general and I am certainly not a fan of tabloid press. I find both the Daily Express and the Daily Star to be offensive, trashy newspapers. Despite this, today I feel sorry for them and, part of me feels there has been an interesting twist in the UK law courts. From the BBC news website:

Madeleine McCann’s parents have welcomed a libel settlement and apology from Express Newspapers for suggesting they were responsible for her death.

In a statement the McCanns said they were pleased that the newspaper group had admitted the “utter falsity” of the “grotesque” stories written about them. [followed by]

The papers said: “We acknowledge that there is no evidence whatsoever to support this theory and that Kate and Gerry are completely innocent of any involvement in their daughter’s disappearance. “

OK, on the surface this seems reasonable and for years the tabloid media has been getting away with printing nonsense stories. However, this has normally been seen as just the way the tabloids print “news”. The idea that they can now be taken to court where I think something interesting has happened.

First off, as a sort of position statement, I think that, while there is no evidence Kate and Gerry McCann actually killed Madeleine there are a few issues that strike me as odd. Not least of these is the very fact the McCann’s felt the need, while under so much pressure to find their daughter, to take out a libel action against the newspapers. There was a risk they could have lost, and if so the “find Maddie” fund would have had to cover their expenses. Even though they have won it brings them no closer to a conclusion to the whole sorry deal. All this, coupled with the very existence of a “family spokesperson” leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Compare and contrast this with the behaviour of Shannon Matthews mother when she went missing. In the early days there was no hint of rich benefactors funding a “find Shannon” account, there was no family spokesperson and, with the recent media hints that the mother was in fact to blame, no signs of a libel action. Why is that? Is it because Karen Matthews is pretty much a “working class oik” while the McCanns are upper middle class professionals?

Anyway, before I wander too close to the line at which the McCanns decide to take legal action against this blog (they can have every single penny this blog has earned to date if they really want…), the other ramification of this case is how it may influence others.

Keeping with the topical nature of the McCanns, lets use Robert Murat as an example. Here we have an example of someone who the general media has declared guilty since pretty much day one. In Mr Murat’s case this is not the newspapers making sly allusions that he may be guilty, pretty much everything written about him says he is the “one.” The Daily Mirror even printed an ironic tirade by friends of the McCanns heaping more suspicion on Murat:

Fiona Payne, Russell O’Brien and Rachael Oldfield insisted they saw him outside Kate and Gerry McCann’s flat on the night Madeleine, four, was snatched – despite his denials.

Despite all this, there is not one shred of evidence that Murat was the criminal. Can we expect to see a large scale libel action? (Well no, Murat doesn’t have a huge fund to bankroll such things…).

In fact, pick up any paper any time of the year and you will read articles in which people are made out to be things they are not. Suspects in rape cases are often named (with all the ensuing problems) but I can not recall a single time, when someone was found innocent, a retraction was published.

Using the Mirror as an example, a while ago a children’s TV presenter Mark Speight was implicated in the death of his girlfriend. For the whole time, he was linked in a manner that would make the casual reader assume the weight of evidence was against him, then today they print an article headlined: “Kids’ TV star Mark Speight won’t be charged over girlfriend’s death.” That is it. No huge payout to assist the investigation into her death, no front page apology. Just a short piece to say he wont be charged.

Amazing isn’t it.

At least now, thanks to the McCanns and their tireless crusade for justice, everyone who has a slightly negative mention in the press can use the vast fortunes of rich strangers to fund their legal defence cases…

[Cynical footnote: I sometimes wonder if the legal action was at least partially motivated by the fact the McCanns have pretty much dropped off the media radar, and since the Shannon Matthews case everyone had pretty much moved on – their donations may have even been starting to dry up…]

CGHoP for St Patrick’s Day

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Christine Gallagher’s House of Prayer has apparently become engaged in a battle with the Catholic Church, despite – or because of – its apparently over-the-top Catholicism.

They called out the big liturgical guns to defend themselves.

Our Blessed Lady, Queen of Peace, in a most urgent plea, is calling all Her children in Ireland and throughout the world to unite in a novena honoring the Most Holy Trinity to crush evil attacks coming against Her Mother House of Prayer, the Chain Houses and Her daughter Christina. (October 2007 on the House of Prayer site)

Bit ironic really. Sort of demonstrates the ineffectiveness of prayer, in fact. Well, at least, prayer’s ineffectiveness at getting the support of the Roman Catholic Church. As reported in the Irish Independent, the CGHOP organisation is not acceptable to the church.

The controversial House of Prayer has been disowned by the Catholic hierarchy and has no standing in the eyes of the Church.
In a hard-hitting statement, the Archbishop of Tuam Michael Neary said the House of Prayer “has no Church approval and their work does not enjoy the confidence of the diocesan authorities”

However, their prayers managed to bring some excellent material rewards, according to Eirbiz.com

One woman today told of how her mother had been sucked into the cult to the point where she has paid about €15,000 to Christina Gallagher so far and now wants to sell land worth about €100,000 in order to give more to the House of Cash. Her mother even pressurized another daughter to part with money from her SSIA account.
The report in the Sunday World said that Mrs Gallagher now lives in an up-market area of Malahide in a house worth €4m.

When their Sunday masses were banned discontinued this week, according to the Connaught Telegraphit even caused some financial anxiety outside the odd cult prayer organisation.

Some representatives of the business community in Achill were due to meet last night (Tuesday) to discuss what they describe as “a worrying situation” because of the economic importance of the Centre for the area. (Connaught Telegraph)

I have to speak up on behalf of the Catholic god here. Isn’t he going to be a bit confused? Which novenas should he take as legit? There’s the ones coming from the Catholic Church itself, headed by his representative on earth. So, you’d expect him to be paying a bit of attention to the people he employs. But then, Christine Gallagher is speaking for his mother. Doesn’t it contravene Catholic family values to favour his representative-on-earth against his mum and his Irish half-brothers and sisters. Dilemma, huh?

If he makes his decisions on aesthetic grounds, it’s an easy choice for the man upstairs, though. Official Rome: Sistine Chapel. In fact, Renaissance masterpieces by the metric tonne.
CGHoP: This sort of image. Blimey.
The picture on the christine gallagher House of P

More Minority Reports

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(A hat tip to Shefaly for the reference) Phew. Proof that the whole world isn’t going gladly into that dark totalitarian night discussed in the last post.

There’s a page of comments, on the Register article about ACPO’s proposal to extend the DNA database to infants, most of which gladden my heart.

Some are really enraged – in a good way. Some are really witty. Only a few are by fools.

There’s more on the subject at frethink where you can see the text of a Guardian interview with Frankenpugh.