Monthly Archives: February 2009

Mind-reading

Posted on by

I’d barely started to grasp the concept of click-jacking. (And surf-jacking , modem-jacking, car-jacking, rate-jacking etc.)

Now, we also have to worry about “brain-jacking”, according to the Times.

It sounds like science fiction, but politicians, lawyers and advertisers are falling over themselves to buy into the latest scientific discovery: brainjacking. Soon our secret desires and not so innocent thoughts could become public knowledge. John Naish investigates an uncomfortable trend (sub-heading to the Times article)

The idea that machines can determine our true thoughts and feelings isn’t just silly (although, on present showing, it certainly seem to be that) but dangerous. It has already been used in several Indian cases that involved serious crimes, despite the opposition of scientists:

Although an Indian government panel of scientists says this technique, Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature profiling (BEOS), should be ignored, its use in India is spreading

I was pretty scathing about lie-detection technology a few weeks ago.

This sparked the researcher Aiden Gregg to put up an elegant defence of his work in the comments here. I was feeling a bit guilty for randomly splattering out knee-jerk scepticism, when his careful research itself couldn’t be held to blame for how it might be misused by people who don’t understand probabilities. But he said this:

However, as an asserted lie detector, the VSA may intimidate benefit claimants into bring more truthful in general. Ironically, this would involve telling a lie to deter lying.

I don’t think that ironically is the right word, here. I think that unethically is more appropriate. (And that’s ignoring the tendency of the innocent to feel guilty in the face of any interrogation and intimidated in the face of prying authority. Although, maybe, deterring as many claimants as possible is the true objective.)

The Indian courts might be able to intimidate the gullible-guilty into thinking that their brains have given them away. This will not work on the less-gullible guilty. The process could even work to give them an unearned apparent veracity.

The process is basically a conjurer’s mind-reading trick, with science-y looking props. If I had access to a million-dollars, so that I could offer a Randi-style million dollar challenge, I’d happily bet myself against a mind-reading machine as being just as likely to tell who was lying. I think I’m quite good at it. I wouldn’t claim more than 85% success rate but nor do the machine-minders.

So, not having a million dollars, I am setting up the “Ned Ludd Memorial Mind-reading Machine-breaking Challenge.” I will give £20 to the first person who can best my truth-detection skills with some new-fangled electrodes-in-skull contraption.

Reminder about modern liberty

Posted on by

The button that linked from here to ModernLiberty.Net somehow broke so we had to remove it. But, this is a reminder that there are Convention on Modern Liberty events all round the UK on Saturday 28th.

The London event is sold out but you can watch it on their site. That seems to be what will happen anyway in the regional events – but on a big screen – although these will also have discussion groups.

BBC site sub-editors in animal house

Posted on by

These are all real headlines from today’s BBC website. (These are pretty horrific news items, which makes the headlines seem even more crass. And my mockery even more so, I guess.)

Ape academic shot dead in Ecuador
(In your face, creationists. This proves that apes are so close to us that they even have their own universities.)
Turkey plane crashes in Holland
(Flightless birds forced to develop aviation skills, to escape from Bernard Matthews clutches before next Christmas.)
Tiger attacks trigger expert plea
(In court today, a ballistics technician’s claim to be “Not guilty” was destroyed by a forceful wildcat prosecutor)
*******
Late amendment, the BBC heading now says “Turkish plane crash in Amsterdam ” thus making an apparent liar of me. But, I will choose to take the credit instead.

Busybodies in the UK

Posted on by

Today’s Guardian had an interview with a senior police officer who was predicting a summer of rage. This seems a little like a step in a “police bargaining with the government for more resources” strategy, rather than a realistic prediction. (In any case, surely there must be few powers left that the government haven’t already given them.) But, following a link on the page, I found an old story that seems worth a full-blown rant despite it being a year old

A man was arrested by armed police for being armed with an i-pod.

Armed police arrested a man listening to his MP3 player and took a sample of his DNA after a fellow commuter mistook the music player for a gun. (from the Guardian)

His big mistakes were to have a black mp3 player and to get it out of his pocket at a bus stop. Obviously he also stuck the headphones in his ears and listened to it. That bit must have somehow passed right by the eagle-eyed paranoid person who called the police to say that he’d pointed and aimed a gun.

I’ve only ever seen a pistol in movies and on TV but I am still pretty confident that I could distinguish one from an mp3 player.

But, then, I’ve had a good few mp3 players and that might count as specialist knowledge that was denied to the person who phoned this incident in. So maybe it’s an easy mistake to make.

This morning there was a neutron bomb at my bus stop, but, luckily, someone threw an empty packet into it and I realised that it was just a rubbish bin before I’d called in a surgical strike.

This man (fortunately for him, not apparently Brazilian-looking, I assume) was soon surrounded by police, aiming weapons (real ones, not portable dvd players). He was held in a cell and had photographs, fingerprints and – you’ve already guessed it – DNA taken. (It’s probably still there, unless our government plans to follow the European court’s ruling.)

He now has a record on the police national database that says he was arrested on suspicion of carrying an illegal gun. Try and get a job that needs Criminal Records Bureau clearance (i.e. almost any job nowadays) with that on your informal record. (“No smoke without fire”…)

The DNA etc aspects of this case are just par for the course, by our increasingly authoritarian standards, and you can’t blame the police for taking seriously a report that a man was wielding a gun on a bus.

The most distressing thing about the incident was the way that some members of have public have taken the idea of the state-compliant-sneak-on-every-street-corner from the Big Book of How to Live Under Totalitarianism and have run with it. For instance, you might remember the steel band members who had to leave their flight and spend the night in a bus shelter, because of a false report from a fellow passenger.

These eagerly-reporting fellow passengers seem like ballistic weapons themselves – primed by having their heads filled with such constant fear that their perceptions get distorted to fit.

If I’m ever on a public transport service vehicle and someone pulls a gun, I hope that somebody has the presence of mind to act. But, I also really hope that – when I’m carrying a rucksack and listening to my mp3 player – that no paranoid lunatics get me taken awy at the point of an assault rifle.

The UK is turning into a “nation of narks and bullies”, as Marina Hyde said in the Guardian, a couple of months ago, discussing the XFactor-style plans for rating doctors:

…. we become a vast, swarming tribe of people constantly judging one another – a nation of narks too stupid to realise that we are being usefully distracted; a baying, bullying society of people laughing at the incompetent, sneaking on our neighbours, and undermining anyone with the temerity to work themselves into a position of expertise with a press of our red buttons.

Another two strikes for Jacqui

Posted on by

Jacqui Smith has already won my coveted “Most hated UK female politician after Margaret Thatcher” award. But she’s still in there fighting for the crown, seeing off any opposition. On current showing she could even beat Anne Widdecombe into the ground.

Two triumphs for Jacqui today, then, in her claim to the title. And it’s a Sunday, ffs. Surely Parliament is shut? Who’d have expected she’d even be in London today. She must be staying in her “main residence?” *snigger*

The first was just annoyingly typical of the Home office’s recent encroachments into every area of civil life. The police have apparently taken to rounding up teenagers who are out late at night and taking them home.

Operation Staysafe was intended to stop children becoming victims of crime or being drawn into criminal behaviour.

This was a police operation that was supposedly for the good of the community and for the young people’s own good.

More than 1,000 young people were spoken to by Staysafe teams, and 103 were referred to other services, according to Home Office figures.

Oh, yes, and add all their personal details to the stop and search database, in passing.

You have to assume this is a general Home Office policy. The Home Secretary is happy to take credit for it, anyway.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says it is unacceptable for parents not to know what their children are up to at night.

Do I have to explain the nature of adolescence, Jacqui? Teenagers tell lies to their parents. (They are “going to the library” or staying with acceptable friend X. ) So they can hang out with their mates and get drunk and so on. It’s part of being a youth. Transgressing, defining one’s identity in opposition to the adult world, all that complex natural stuff.

Sure teenagers make mistakes. that’s generally part of the learning process. Sometimes those mistakes have really bad consequences but there are few circumstances in which getting dragged home to your Mum and Dad in a squad car would be a better option.

More seriously, Jacqui has been responding to the immigrant-scapegoating agenda set by the BNP and the Daily Mail. By parroting their nonsense.

She is trying to steal the anti-immigrant sector’s clothing and wear it as her own.

Immigrants should not be able to take a skilled job in the UK unless it has been advertised to British workers, the home secretary has said.

This can only apply to non-EU workers, of course. So she is actually referring to a tiny number of immigrants. Not enough to satisfy the anti-immigration opportunists, but accepting their definition of “immigration” as a serious problem.

From April, non-EU workers wanting to come to Britain without securing a job beforehand must have a master’s degree – rather than a bachelor’s degree, as currently – and a previous salary equivalent to at least £20,000.

What is this about? A master’s degree? A salary of £20k?

The BBC sets some context for this, but somehow – like the BNP and the Home Secretary and the Tory party – is determined to present it as an inti-immigrant issue:

The employment of foreign labour has been a high-profile issue recently after a week-long dispute at the French-owned Lindsey oil refinery in eastern England, which was settled when operators Total agreed to hire more local employees.

These disputes were not anti-foreigner. (In any case, the French, Portuguese etc workers that the firms have been planning to import were all EU workers.) They were about the awarding of contracts for crucial UK infrastructure projects to foreign firms, which then imported their own employees.

Now, this seems to me to be a completely different issue. These were projects which would gather profits from British customers and the UK government for non-UK companies. They could at least have had the grace to provide some UK jobs. The workers were angry at the process of awarding contracts not at the workers who were brought in.

The far right have tried to frame these disputes in anti-immigrant terms that would make them appear to have political leadership. And, who could blame individual workers for seeing the disputes in anti-immigrant terms if the government is willing to do so.

Shame on you, Jacqui Smith. Shame on the government if you allow the Daily Mail or worse to drive your agenda.

Christian variant of classic scam?

Posted on by

Some “get rich quick” internet scams have the decency to target people who are gullible and greedy, as well as having more money than brain cells. (Oh, maybe I’m thinking of hedge funds, rather than email cons, here.)

Apathy Sketchpad has a few posts showing how to deal with some classic Nigerian scams.

There’s a more distasteful type of con that preys upon the mark’s charitable impulses and/or their religious beliefs, rather than their greed.

I found Sam Gipp’s “A Friend to Churches Ministries” site by following a link from fstdt. I was sniggering at posts like this, while thinking how glad I am there’s a whole ocean between me and the ground such people walk on:

Welcome to the U.S.S.A.
Since the “November Revolution” when the Communist Party took over our government and began its conversion to “GODvernment” the old United States of America is gone, replaced by a new entity: the United Socialist States of America. Here are some of the differences between these two countries.

Then I spotted this tale on the about page:

You all know that, in all the years I’ve written these letters I have never asked anyone to send us money…Don’t worry!…I’m not going to start now. But there is an Urgent Need that I am going to tell you about & ask you to help.

Well, I know you aren’t going to do anything so vulgar as to ask for money, Sam. It’s not as if I don’t trust you implicitly.

Carl & Leta Miller have been missionaries to Scotland for 23 years. They have been faithful through extremely difficult times. Their daughter, Libby, has had severe health problems. Carl has had surgery on the retinas in both eyes, needs to have his knees replaced, also his hips and has fought off cancer in his bladder. He cannot walk without leaning on his wife, Leta. Unfortunately, Leta is not much better. She has a severe back problem and uses two canes to walk. The great, government health care program won’t even look at her for surgery until they deem it, “Life threatening.” It takes 18 months just to get a pain shot. (Just wait until we have that here!)

Missionaries to Scotland? Hmm. It’s not as if Scotland isn’t already bursting with various Christian sects. This already stretches credulity.

But the next bit blows any residual credulity right out of the water.

“It takes 18 months to get a pain shot.” Eighteen months! Are you insane? Well, OK, the Scots are stereotypically seen as tough, after all. Who knows what is normal in those strange Northern regions?… (Just, never try to take their Freedom.)

Based on an ultra-conservative perspective, he is insulting what he sarcastically calls our “great, government health care program” as if it provides a service that would compare unfavourably with what you’d expect to find in a Somalian war zone.

But, in fact, judging by the long list of health problems suffered by his doughty missionaries, they’ve already benefited from plenty of nationalised health care, including a series of surgeries that would have bankrupted the average American family. What are these people? Health tourists?

We talked to my doctor. He said he would look at her. Get this! The Millers have put every penny into their mission work and couldn’t even afford the plane ticket for Leta to come here for tests. Kathy & I bought her the ticket and paid for the tests. My doctor says he can help here. He said without the surgery she is headed for a wheelchair. Leta is now back in Scotland. The Millers are coming to Louisville in January. A brother has provided airline tickets, a lady at Shawnee Baptist Church is giving them a place to stay and another church is renting them a car. Here’s their problem; they have no health insurance at all. The hospital costs are going to be around $200,000-$250,000.

But, wait. Hooray! He can get these costs discounted! As long as they get the money REALLY REALLY fast.

But! My wonderful wife has talked to the folks at the hospital. They said they will reduce the cost by 60%! They also said, if the bill is paid within 30 days after surgery they will drop it another 20%.

Don’t you just love the idea that a hospital could so drastically reduce a bill of a quarter of a million dollars for a quick sale?

Word For The World Baptist Missions has started a “Leta Miller Medical Fund.” We have given and several churches have also helped. They need around $50,000. Around $15,000 has already come in. Will you help? If they can raise the $50,000 by surgery time, January 26, 2009, they can pay the surgery off and save thousands of dollars.

Wow, how economical is that. Praise the Lord!

But, stop right there, Sam Gyp Gipp. Let me save your donors a few more Yankee dollars. Guess what? We also have private medical care in the UK. Your $15k could buy the unlucky Leta as much UK health care as she can handle. Yes, even in heathen Scotland.

Confessing to a survey

Posted on by

How many catholics devoutly confessing their sins would be happy to think that the priest is actually taking a sin survey?

I am struck by the image (mainly based on old Hollywood films) of a remorse-filled catholic sobbing out guilty secrets while the chap behind the filigree screen (look, I already credited Hollywood) slyly ticks boxes on a survey sheet.

That’s the inescapable conclusion from this piece on the BBC website which claims that men and women sin differently.

The report was based on a study of confessions carried out by Fr Roberto Busa, a 95-year-old Jesuit scholar.

This is not even a pseudo-scientific survey (but, hey, Theos produce those all the time and they get called a “think-tank” so why can’t a priest get in on the act?)

Here’s the male/female top seven in the Deadly Sins league table.

Men: 1. Lust 2. Gluttony 3. Sloth 4. Anger 5. Pride 6. Envy 7. Greed

Women: 1. Pride 2. Envy 3. Anger 4. Lust 5. Gluttony 6. Avarice 7. Sloth (from the BBC)

Is “greed” the same as “avarice”? Because otherwise men and women seem to be picking their chosen misdemeanors from different sin books, not just sinning in a different order. In fact, don’t loads of these sins mean the same thing? I guess a priestly training allows you to distinguish between “envy”, “gluttony”, “greed” and “avarice” but I am a bit confused how you can tell the difference.

I love the sound of Sloth. Other sins may sound like more fun, admittedly, but no others are called after a tree-dwelling edentate mammal.

Anyway, that list comes from less sin-filled times. There are now new official modern sins:

The revised list included seven modern sins it said were becoming prevalent during an era of “unstoppable globalisation”.
These included: genetic modification, experiments on the person, environmental pollution, taking or selling illegal drugs, social injustice, causing poverty and financial greed.

(It was something of a relief to see “genetic modification” there, because I was beginning to suspect that I might have blithely committed all 14, whether deliberately or otherwise.)

I can’t see the new sins getting their own Magnum ice-cream Special Editions, though.

Creating an absurdity

Posted on by

I see that mouthy atheists are to blame for the spread of creationism. ROTFL. * chortle immoderately * etc

Well, so it says in the Guardian special on the rise of creationism.

They also claim that the aggression of the new atheists is helping them. They paint Dawkins as a “recruiting sergeant” for creationism because he links evolutionary thinking with atheism. “He has been a real help to the ministry, ” says Randall Hardy.
Creationists argue that the new atheists are fuelling the dogmatism; Richard Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford and a theistic evolutionary, last week threw that accusation back at them. “Creationists totally misunderstand the Bible,” he said. “Genesis is in the business of story, myth, poetry, metaphor. They [creationists and atheists] feed off one another. The debate has an unreality about it. Those of us who are not fundamentalists can’t find a place.”

Thus, even the relatively sane Bishop of Oxford puts atheism and creationism in the same conceptual “fundamentalist” box. And the full-blown creationist believes that -people who believe in God think they can’t believe in evolution, just because Dawkins links evolutionary thinking with atheism,

That is giving Dawkins much more influence than he can possibly dream of having. I refuse to believe that most people have even the vaguest ideas about evolution. Nor that more than a tiny minority of the population have ever read the God Delusion or even watched a Dawkins tv programme. (You would think that, almost by definition, people stupid enough to believe in creationism are too stupid to read erudite books or watch demanding tv)

Indeed, even the article undercuts the implications that there are grounds for this “Blame atheists for creationism” viewpoint.

Almost all Christians used to go along with the idea that Genesis was a bit suspect on dates, and that the six days of the Bible were metaphorical, with each day representing a vast geological age. The majority of Anglicans, theistic evolutionists who have no difficulty in believing in a Darwinian God, would still abide by that. But the publication in 1961 of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood, which set out to give a scientific demonstration of the literal truth of the Bible, emboldened those who refused to accept evolution.

1961? Dawkins was 20 then. I’m pretty certain this predates The God Delusion by a few decades. Well, Wikipedia informs me that the God Delusion was published in 2006.

What on earth was fuelling creationism in the intervening decades, then, if noisy atheists are to blame now?

Or are we to start dating the “New Atheism” in creationist terms, so that we are to accept not only that dinosaurs walked with men but that an undergraduate Dawkins managed to spark the rise in creationism with his strident atheist complaints?

This article does provide creationist “answers” to two questions that have long baffled me.

  • Question: Why didn’t Noah take all the dinosaurs into the ark if humans and dinoasurs were all happily living together?
    Answer:

    Creationists, who argue that the world was created no more than 10,000 years ago, believe dinosaurs and man co-existed in the pre-Flood period (they date the Flood to around 1,600 years after the creation), that there were dinosaurs on the ark, but that they were eventually wiped out by the changes in climate which followed the Flood.

    Ah, it wasn’t that Noah just didn’t like dinosaurs. (Mentally upscale the conceptual size of ark needed, from one the size of France to one the size of Asia) He did his level best to save them but somehow they proved unable to survive in a changed environment. (Oh, you mean, like evolutionary processes?)

  • Question 2:
    What have creationists got against the biological sciences that they don’t have against mathematics or physics or geography?

    Answer:
    It seems that biology is nothing special. They are indeed just as willing to abandon all sciences where they conflict with the Bible.

    …..virtually all existing science has to be rewritten – and the creationists are ready to do the rewriting. The speed of light, Rosevear argues, used to be 300 times faster than it is now – necessary for creationists to explain cosmology and the distance of other solar systems from our own; the great cataclysm of the Flood explains the formation of sedimentary rock and the distribution of fossils; …

The Guardian writer either assumes that almost any reader will see the creationists as self-evident nutters or he lacks the most basic information-processing skills. For example, he uncritically reports “findings” from all those surveys (e.g for Theos :-)) that supposedly show that sizeable minorities of the population are creationists.

And his naivety seems incomprehensible when he says this:

British creationism is surprisingly independent from the far bigger, better funded, more vocal, highly politicised movement in the US, where creationists and intelligent design organisations (often a front for Christian creationists) are fighting perpetual legal battles to get creationist teaching into the classrooms of state schools.

The Portsmouth Genesis Expo may be a saggy old cloth cat to the Cincinnati Creation Museum’s roaring lion. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t manifestations of the same species, seen once in tragedy (Creation Museum) ; the second time in farce (Genesis Expo).

If I had to choose between whether to blame “The New Atheism” or the media (who present the opinions of lunatics as if they have some validity, in a “two sides to every argument” distortion of the concept of balance) for the rise of creationist lunacy, I know where I’d lay most of the blame.

.

Ask a silly Big Question

Posted on by

If you could save the solar system from being extinguished by setting fire to your only child, would you do it?

Bloody stupid question. At best, it’s a thought experiment and even then it’s basically setting up an impossible scenario.

The BBC’s Sunday morning programme The Big Questions, which discusses moral issues, was talking about torture today.

One man made an intellectually dishonest pro-torture argument, which is basically as realistic a scenario as the “save the solar system” question I posed above. Paraphrased – because I am not going to watch the show and take notes – this argument is “What if you had to save the lives of thousands of people by torturing one man?”
This was discussed as if it was a real case to answer.

I am still in shock at finding myself in total agreement on this issue with Anne Atkins so I may not be too coherent.

This imaginary “save thousands by torturing one person” is meant to imply that those who oppose torture will happily sacrifice thousands to salve their own conscience. However, it is a complete crock.

As the token academic pointed out (sorry I didn’t catch his name), this scenario is from Hollywood, not real life. (24 is fiction, ffs.)

There are no conceivable circumstances in which you could know that the person in front of you was (a) the right person to torture to get the answers to your questions; (b) wouldn’t tell you lies which could endanger many more people and (c) would break under torture in such a way as to tell you the exact truth, rather than go mad.

So, there’s not even a need to bring in the standard arguments against torture to challenge this nonsense. The moral issue – although it is the basis of every decent human value – is actually irrelevant, here. The issue, of the practical consequences – the fact that using torture creates implacable enemies – is also irrelevant.

This argument leads us into the worst kind of moral morass. It softens us up for thinking that torture is bad but, just maybe, in really extreme circumstances… etc (As if the definition of which circumstances were extreme enough to justify it wouldn’t immediately be subject to an ongoing downhill standards creep.)

In fact, if a government’s knowledge is precise enough to confirm that they can save the lives of thousands on the basis of the evidence of one definitely-guilty person that they have captured, then they would already know enough to avert the imaginary catastrophe.

If they don’t have the exact right person, they are just torturing for nothing, which even the pro-torture-in-an-extreme-scenario voices on the show agreed was horrendous.

And just as a little topical torture aside, the Guardian website reported today that the supposedly threatening letter from the USA – that prevented the case of Binyan Mohamed being discussed in a UK court – was actually written at the request of the Foreign Office.

A former senior State Department official said that it was the Foreign Office that initiated the “cover-up” by asking the State Department to send the letter so that it could be introduced into the court proceedings.
The revelation sparked fresh claims that the government is trying to suppress torture evidence relating to Mohamed, who is expected to be released this week after four years and flown to RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire. (From the Guardian)

More Measles Rubbish

Posted on by

Ben Goldacre has had another week of run-ins with the residual anti-MMR lobby. Kudos to the Times’ David Aaronovitch for telling the story that didn’t appear in Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column in the Guardian today, probably because of legal threats from LBC radio.

This story involved Ben Goldacre’s response to a broadcast about the MMR vaccine on a London radio station. You can get the broadcast from wikileaks. I had read all the blog posts on badscience.net but I half assumed that that Goldacre was exaggerating a bit until I listened to the show….

Among all the other nonsense, the thing that really irritated me was that the broadcaster and a “qualified homeopath” anti-vaccine mum argued that measles is an insignificant illness that any healthy child would easily overcome. (Just ignore, for a moment, the impact of a new measles epidemic on kids who aren’t healthy. And the fact that, by definition, a kid who is suffering from measles is certainly NOT healthy at that point. ) A bit like having a minor rash with a cold, almost. This point of view is expressed in one of the comments on the Times piece:

Could someone on this thread please explain why measles is now considered such a threat. This is a genuine enquiry because when I was a child catching measles was considered simply as part of growing up, no big deal and, indeed, something which would actually harden immunity.

How impressive that one respondent, who can actually remember a time when measles was widespread, isn’t wearing the Daily Mail-issue rose-tinted rear-vision goggles:

Measles are just a few spots and the children get a rash, that was statement I heard a young mum say . Having nursed most types of fevers in the forties please get through to young mums Measles is dangerous, often fatal.

If you aren’t convinced by an old nurse, what about the Measles Initiative (made up of the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, American Red Cross and others)? According to their website:

Measles is one of the leading killers of children worldwide. An estimated 540 children die each day from the disease…
Since 2001, the Measles Initiative has saved lives by supporting the vaccination of more than 600 million children in more than 60 countries.
Between 2000 and 2007, measles deaths fell by 74% globally and by 89% in Africa alone.

The broadcaster and her chosen non-cattle (basically, that’s how she described parents who opposed the vaccination) seemed to think that they could get expert knowledge on vaccines by searching the internet. Seriously. (Well, the internet isn’t allowed to lie, after all.) So, I’d suggest that they might try googling the deaths and cases of brain damage caused by measles and maybe evaluating some of the “evidence”

In case the anti-vaccine parents think that their relatively-privileged lives mean their children are somehow charmed, Aaronovitch pointed out:

…over the past decade we have managed the interesting – and almost unprecedented – trick of reintroducing into this country a disease that had more or less disappeared. A few children will have died as a result and some others will suffer serious long-term health problems. These figures correlate to the drop in parents giving their children the MMR vaccination.

Making the baby jesus cry, again

Posted on by

What is it with the new “christians” that they have to keep presenting themselves as a persecuted minority? This week’s poor “christians” story supposedly involved a five year-old being told that she couldn’t talk about god in school. (There’s a good summary in the Times.)

The Daily Telgraph headed their version of this tale:

Primary school receptionist ‘facing sack’ after daughter talks about Jesus to classmate
A primary school receptionist, Jennie Cain, whose five-year-old daughter was told off for talking about Jesus in class is now facing the sack for seeking support from her church.

Well, it seems not. The BBC reported that

But the head teacher said Jasmine had told her friend she would ‘go to hell’ if she did not believe in God.

Which isn’t quite the same thing. The teacher- as you might expect – told the child that maybe it wasn’t really a good thing to threaten your classmates with hellfire…..

The mother claimed that her daughter was “upset” and interpreted this as meaning her daughter had been told she couldn’t speak about Jesus again.

It has clearly not occurred to this woman that the other five-year-old might have been rather “upset” on being told by a classmate that she’d go to hell. But, then, her own unfortunate daughter has obviously been exposed to this poisonous nonsense for so long that it’s obviously never occurred to the mother that it might be in any way cruel….

She sent an email, from her home internet account, to members of her church asking them to pray about the situation.

One person in the congregation forwarded it to the head teacher. Now, maybe I’m too hard-nosed, but I’d think that spreading malicious gossip about your employer is not normally considered acceptable. (Granted, making malicious prayer calls is a whole new category of industrial conduct that might not fall under standard employment law.) . So you might think that she could indeed be facing the sack, but it turns out that she isn’t.

The head confirmed that Mrs Cain was being investigated for making “unfair allegations” about the school, but denied she was facing the sack. That’s not enough to satisfy the latest “christian” defence group.

Mike Judge, from the Christian Institute, which is supporting Mrs Cain, said: “A six-year-old girl and her mother have been slammed for nothing more than expressing their Christian faith.
“I am particularly concerned about the way in which Mrs Cain’s private email to her church friends ended up in the hands of the head teacher.
“This is the latest in a series of cases where Christians are being persecuted for their religious beliefs.

D’uh? an issue that vaguely involves religion in passing takes place (A five year-old is asked not to scare the shit out of her schoolmates. Her mother blows it up into a church issue.) Yet another spurious “christian” defence organisation gets involved. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph get in on the act…

Is there some sort of template somewhere?

There must also be some sort of template for the graphics. I’m not going to say “Hang your heads in shame, Renaissance masters” because the inspiration photos tend to be more Victorian sentimental saint pictures than Renaissance masterpieces, but there is still a clear line of ancestry. The Telegraph shows this woman looking heavenwards with an expression that signals “suffering terribly but still full of faith” ROTFL.

Who are this Christian Institute anyway? (These fundy organisations seem to be popping up in all directions. Who could keep track?) Their website has the standard stories from a set outrage list that these “christians” are working their way through: the nurse who prayed which was last week’s “christian nonsense, “christian” registrar fired for refusing to do her job, boy scouts being allowed to make an islamic pledge, etc.

The website doesn’t try to milk this story for every drop of outraged “christian” emotionalism at all (;-D):

A five-year-old girl from Devon was left in tears after her teacher reprimanded her for talking about Jesus in class – and her mummy could be facing the sack.

They are still rank amateurs compared to Daily Mail when it comes to emotive language, though. Daily Mail gives this story an even more thoroughgoing emotional makeover:

The child

“was ticked off by a teacher for discussing heaven and hell with a friend, and came home in a flood of tears.”

The sobs intensify as the piece progresses.

After comforting the distraught little girl, her mother sent a private email to ten close Christian friends asking them to offer prayers for the families and the school.

…The case has sparked fresh outrage among the Christian community, which fears its members are becoming the most discriminated against people in society.

And so on, ad nauseam. I’ll spare you more quotes except this one:

Today former minister Ann Widdecombe said: ‘There is now daily evidence of Christianophobia in this country and it is high time that it was tackled.

Cow juice

Posted on by

Without being at all convinced this story is true, I can’t resist repeating it…. The Times says that Hindu Nationalists are about to launch a soft drink made from cows’ piss.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots – which include the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party – began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

The claim is that it will be healthy and cheap.

(Hmm. If the health argument is founded on the likelihood that drinking cow’s piss will cure cancer or liver disease, what is there to say? Obesity is a different matter. It might be hard to keep down any food after you’d forced yourself to swallow a cup of cow’s piss, so maybe you’d lose weight through starvation.

Cheap? Quite possibly, but, as you couldn’t pay most people enough to drink it, charging anything at all seems a doomed marketing strategy.)

He insisted, however, that it would be able to compete with the American cola brands, even with their enormous advertising budgets. “We’re going to give them good competition as our drink is good for mankind,” he said. “We may also think of exporting it.”

Many of the comments on the Times article are surprisingly in favour of the idea. (Do I suspect a comment-based marketing impetus?)

And oh joy! 😀 Just when you thought there was at least one area of life that the anti-PC brigade couldn’t spew out their gibberish, one commenter says:

Cow’s urine or anyone’s urine! Never in a thousand years! Yuck!! The world has indeed gone mad. What else will they think about? The politically correct bunch will no doubt embrace it and force it on us. Just wait and see. John Lim, Carlsbad, US

Amazingly, it’s actually easier to get your head round the prospect of drinking cows’ piss than it is to see the tortured logic in that.

Unwelcome party

Posted on by

Yuk. Argh. etc. Riding on the back seat of the international interest in the atheist bus campaign, “christians” are trying to take some advantage. Here was the deeply unpleasant committed “christian” George Hargreaves in the Guardian.

(I put “christians” in quotes because I don’t recognise any of the positive aspects of the traditional christian denominations in these ranting zealots. I still cling to a wishful-thinking belief that christianity isn’t always just about being a twat. )

Hargreaves toned down his message for his audience, of course. So he only exposed Guardian readers to a criticism of the money spent on bus ads. He failed to spot that it was shooting himself in the foot to then say that the “christian party” were about to do the same. Plus, he got in a jibe at the BNP, knowing full well that any Guardian reader will be spitting blood at their very existence, so he tries to trade on the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” effect.

The christian party, huh? Who are these christian politicos? Followers of Martin Luther King, Philip Berryman, Pastor Niemoller, Paolo Freire, maybe?

I think you’ve maybe already guessed it, no.

It turns out that their politics is as subtly nuanced and intelligent as their concept of christianity (*heavy sarcasm alert*) Look at how they greeted Obama’s election for instance:

But the greatest black politician the world may YET see – or the greatest black scientist, greatest black artist or the greatest black sportsperson – could under Obama’s presidency never have the chance to be seen – because Barack Obama would have had them aborted before they ever had the chance to be born (from http://-insertedcrap- www.christianparty.org.uk/cmsparty/ website)

Wtf? There’s plenty more.

…Within days of the election, his welcome statements … are already making way for the vicious anti-life agenda of Washington’s abortionist elite.

I have the sensation of being in a room where everyone else present is living in an alternate reality, where the inconvenient real world never intrudes. But this maniac – who somehow thinks it’s totally reasonable to say that Obama plans to abort all future foetuses, at the behest of some secret elite annihilation cadre – was giving “an English perspective” on Obama’s election for CBS..

I have spent most of the past four weeks in the USA following and filming the historic US presidential election for my TV programme, The Politics Programme on Revelation TV. I was there on election day giving an English perspective on the election to the CBS Channel 7 News.

Wtf, again.

Revelation tv, lol. I bet the combined IQ of its all viewers wouldn’t reach triple figures. But CBS? Isn’t that supposed to be a real channel? Obviously not.

Revelation TV. Blimey it’s a Sky channel, apparently. (Another good reason for sticking with cable only.) They portray Obama as a threat to the unborn and to marriage.
(Doesn’t extending the boundaries of who can marry whom imply the exact opposite of a thretat to marriage. Outlawing marriage would be a “threat to marriage”. Maybe I’m just being too literal here. 😀 )

This is good to read …..

Will the Republican Party decide that conservative Christians are just too troublesome for the party and see the pro-life movement as a liability?

One can but hope.

The perils of Ignorance

Posted on by
The Perils of Ignorance

The Perils of Ignorance

(hat tip: FSTDT, as always this is the ultimate source of both ignorance and witty responses to it)

No angel

Posted on by

If you were in hospital, what’s the least appealing behaviour you’d expect from the nursing staff?

(OK, I should rephrase that. The “least appealing” thing after “threats to your continued existence” or “carrying out painful and frightening medical interventions.” )

Anyway the answer to the lead rhetorical question was “behaving like a doorstep evangelist.”

Which is what this nurse did. She got suspended from work for it, but was then reinstated.

I’ve linked to the Times story, out of the many links that I could have put here, because it has a photo of the nurse which would win an undisputed Gold in the Semiotic Olympics. (I defy you to look at it without sniggering. If ever a portrait expressed the sitter’s personality on so many levels, this is it.)

Last week Mrs Petrie, who was supported by the Christian Legal Centre, was summoned to a disciplinary hearing on the basis that she had failed to demonstrate a “personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity” by offering her prayers.

Let me refresh your memory. This nurse bothered people with unsolicited offers of prayer, at a time when they were physically at the mercy of her goodwill. How irritating, even distressing, would that be? Imagine being seriously ill and feeling that you had to politely humour a god-botherer – who was, incidentally, getting paid to attend to YOUR needs rather than her own need to proselytise,

Sir Patrick Cormack, the Tory MP for South Staffordshire and a committed Anglican, told Parliament that the case illustrated the “utter absurdities” of political correctness.

Well, “political correctness” had to have gone mad somewhere in this tale, or we might begin to suspect that the “anti-PC brigade” weren’t even trying. Although, I admit that “utter absurdities” makes a refreshing change from the cliched “gone mad.”

Anyway, the Christian Legal Centre, don’t you just love them? They are like a Superman figure to defending people who somehow skipped the Sermon on the Mount stuff and define their “Christian faith” in terms of jewelry, opposition to statues, homophobia and freedom to push their own beliefs onto other people.

Their biggest moment in the spotlight was their failed blasphemy case against Jerry Springer the Opera.

(Which reminds me that the usually-hilariously-funny Stewart Lee co-producer of the Jerry Springer the Opera show has a new series starting on BBC on 18 March.)

A Channel 4 documentary last year showed Christian Voice and their fundy -funded chums in their true horror. It also did the world a major service by showing the incident in which Steven “Birdshit” Green earned his nickname. I mean, if that wasn’t a message from above, I don’t know what is.