Bits keep falling off this blog like so many bits of newspaper escaping from the recycling van cage. (E.g. the Atheist blogroll became landfill months ago, although I see it still works fine on dozens of sites.)
After bowing to WordPress’s nagging requests and upgrading WordPress to version x (I can’t remember) two days ago, I find that I can’t attach tags to posts.
Any ideas?
UNITE – the UK’s biggest trade union – has a vicar’s section. Wow. Blimey.
The union is currently a bit pissed off by the state of vicarages.
Some Church of England clergy and their families are living in crumbling and decrepit vicarages that are unsafe and environmentally unfriendly, according to trade union officials.
Unite, the country’s largest union that represents about 2,500 faith workers, is calling on the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu, to “practise what they preach” in terms of the carbon footprint left by hundreds of parsonages.
Unite want the Archbishops to revamp more than 6,000 vicarages and rectories that the union claims fail to meet modern environmental and safety standards. (from the Times)
OK, I am genuinely impressed that “faith workers” have joined a union. If you happen to be a vicar you can find out more from the UNITE webpage about their faith worker section.
I am even a bit impressed by the word “faith workers”. It sounds a bit like people who can work miracles by faith, which I guess they would see as coming naturally with the job description. But it also makes them sound a bit like prostitutes, who tend to get called “sex workers” by people who are trying not to offend them.
But, I am diverted by the prospect of there ever being a vicar’s strike. How long would it take for anyone to notice?
As someone living in a house which even the rawest curate would turn up his or her nose at, I was initially a bit unsympathetic to the complaints about their houses not being palaces. (Except for the Archbishop of Canterbury, I assume, as his home is called Lambeth Palace. I reckon the clue’s in the name.)
However, being a faith worker doesn’t seem to be quite the ideal job that you might assume if you are going on the same idea as me: “only work one day a week, get free housing and all the sherry you can drink.” Unite says:
“Ministers of Religion” have no employment rights and Unite is campaigning strongly to obtain these.
The New Humanist site said last year that:
We’d have had the Church of England down as fairly decent employers – short hours, free biscuits … you get the picture. Plus your overall boss would be the Archbeard, who seems like a nice enough guy. But it turns out the Diocese of Worcester has been trying to sidestep giving its clergy protection under regular employment law by claiming the buck stops at an infinitely higher desk.
Bloody hell, if you have an employment contract with god, it must be a bugger to enforce your rights under it. He’s so busy working in mysterious ways that, when you are being infested with mice and frogs (as in the case the New Humanist post discussed), he hasn’t got the time to send round the exterrminators. Unless of course, he deliberately sent a plague of frogs and you were too atheistic a vicar to realise that was one minor righteous smiting being applied to you.
(Luckily I can help you here, vicars. Now, you can speak directly to the man upstairs via his holiday postcards blog. I can’t promise he’ll turn up at an employment tribunal, though. Better stick with UNITE.)
According to the Times, church organists got employment rights in February 2008. So vicars might be feeling a bit jealous. Coveting their neighbour’s employment rights, even. If the Times is to believed:
Episodes of bad blood between vicars and organists …. could end following a judgment by an employment tribunal that organists are church employees.
Robert Leach, director of Organist Publications, a company that provides assistance for church organists, said: “This is a landmark decision …… It is estimated that about two thirds of qualified organists are no longer prepared to accept an appointment in the Church. Problems working with vicars is one of the most quoted reasons.”
Did you know that cloudspotting was a proper hobby, with a club you can join and everything?
Like trainspotting or twitching. But more random, more generally accessible and with fewer names for categories to learn.
I found this out from this morning’s BBC Breakfast Show. Sadly, half the UK must have found it out at the same time, because the server on the Cloud Appreciation Society has been intermittently incapable of serving up content all day, due to what it calls “incapacity problems”.
If you are either very lucky or patient enough to wait a few days, the site gallery has some stunning pictures.
Inspired by the Rapture Index, this is an attempt to quantify the UK political news for the past week or so on an objective (:-)) scale. And to put it in a handy playable format.
Sorry, I haven’t designed a board yet. There are too many snakes and not enough ladders. Feel free to try it yourself.
The BBC says this incident wasn’t waterboarding. Just a friendly sticking someone’s head down the toilet, perhaps making it seem like the schoolyard bullying on which we all look with nostalgic affection. *
The Guardian the Independent, and many other papers, even the Daily Mail (ffs) all used the W word.
From the Guardian:
Torture allegations against six officers in the Metropolitan police were so serious that Scotland Yard used the word “waterboarding” to describe the claimed mistreatment of five suspects arrested in a drugs raid.
Despite attempts to play down the seriousness of the allegations against six officers in north London – with sources describing it as more Life on Mars than Guantánamo Bay – it emerged today that it was the Met itself which used the word waterboarding in a document to describe the alleged actions of its officers.
There’s something a bit cheering in the fact that the reports of this horrific and nationally shame-inducing story indicate that – in the UK at least – waterboarding is recognised as torture – even as a particularly vile form of torture. (Bear with me, I’m trying to extract something positive from this story, although it’s an uphill struggle.)
However, I confess to being confused by the implication that torture, as such, doesn’t seem inherently newsworthy enough. Oh, we’re all getting so used to plain old vanilla torture, aren’t we? We can only be shocked by its appearance in a fashionable new guise. Or maybe if it involves waterboarding, so it sounds like something we can blame on the USA
The facts of this story – apart from the extent of the waterboarding element – include the following:
6 Met police officers (allegedly) tortured suspects.
The torturees were “foreign nationals” (i.e. fair game.)
That implies that 6 employees of the British state – people employed to uphold the rule of law – felt free to torture suspects, because the suspects were apparently in no position to uphold the aforementioned rule of law against the police. No one would pay the slightest attention to any complaints the victims made.
It also seems that these officers would have been quite right in assuming that they could do whatever they felt like to the suspects, as the complaint didn’t come from the victims. It seems to have been made by a “police employee.” I.E. Someone with a sense of decency strong enough for them to overcome all the pressures to keep their mouth shut. The rare heroic person whom we all believe ourselves to be, in the face of the masses of evidence that very few of us actually are.
I really admire that person. He or she is really the only cheering element in this disgusting story. However, recent misdemeanors** involving the Metropolitan police suggest that people like that are few and far between on the Met’s payroll. See the cases that were so well discussed on Apathy Sketchpad.
*That sentence needs a heavy sarcasm alert, in case it wasn’t obvious. Lowest form of wit, yeah, I know.
** understatement for effect, in case it wasn’t obvious.
While I have been busy over the last few weeks I’ve been unable to spend time looking at the stats for my Flickr images – this is unusual because all of us at WhyDontYou towers are somewhat stats obsessed. However, I found time to catch up today and what a bit surprised.
Now there is a fairly consistent amount of views on the photos in my Flickr stream with predictable changes when I add new photos or put some effort into getting them more visibility. Unsurprisingly, almost all my visitors come from Flickr with a rare few being driven from various blogs (hardly ever here…shame on you all) or other sites. Today this consistency was there, with one exception – this image:
For some reason, this image has been getting more traffic than any other image over the last month, and almost all this traffic is coming from google images. Over the last month, 91% of the traffic to this image has come from google images (almost all using “Animals” as the search term) while a further 8% has come from Yahoo Images (even more bizarrely, this is normally from a search for “Boxing”…) with almost none coming from organic Flickr searches. I have tried both google and Yahoo searches and I cant make this image appear in the first 10 pages or so of either engine.
I find it a bit strange that enough people are searching for animal and / or boxing images to wade through pages of results before deciding to visit this one. I find it equally strange that, given the number of animal images I have on flickr, this effect seems isolated to this image. It has gone from relative obscurity (around 1000 views in total) to one of the most viewed images in my photostream – currently 5,556 views in just over a month. (Not that I am complaining but none of these people even leave comments!)
If anyone has any insight as what may be causing this, I’d love to hear it.
British politics seems to have gone into a weird meltdown, all because of a few expenses claims. Some MPs fiddle their expenses….. why am I less than surprised?
The TV news and most of the press are filled with people expressing their horror and claiming to have lost all faith in Parliament. How odd.
The Iraq war or evidence of collusion in torture didn’t have that effect, oddly. But a few dodgy expenses claims did?
It seems that the system was constructed so that MPs were more or less expected to claim for things (such as food and rent) that the rest of us have to treat as normal household expenses. This system was apparently created – in Thatcher’s time- so that MPs wages would appear becomingly modest to us sensitive taxpayers.
Mp’s wages aren’t exactly low – from the perspective of the average non-millionaire – but they aren’t paid enough to keep up two homes – one of which is in central London – and to run an office to deal with constituents. Hence, the expenses scam was deliberately set up to let them pay for things, whilst appearing to be taking home wages lower than those of judges or hospital consultants.
Obviously, some of them took the piss. In which case, the problem is mainly the failure of the system for scrutinising their claims. The House of Commons seems to have agreed en masse to scapegoat the Speaker – who had already upset Tory MPs by letting the police apply the same rules to them that they expect the police to apply to the rest of us. However, even the Speaker’s sword-falling hasn’t stemmed the Telegraph’s desire to pick through every Tesco’s receipt and claim for dry-rot-proofing it can get its hands on.
The result is a country that seems to have decided that a few fiddled expenses mean that our entire Parliamentary system is broken. The Guardian has been soliciting random famous-ish political-ish people’s wishlists, throwing up ideas ranging from PR to time-limited Parliaments, as if any random political commentator’s ideas are somehow relevant. It even gave David Cameron a platform to spout the Tory party’s nebulous reform ideas.
Marina Hyde called for lots more Independent MPs, then had to write another column explaining that she didn’t mean celebs, in the face of an unholy collection of celebs – Esther Rantzen, ffs – began scrambling to get elected. However, if we don’t have professional politicians, it seems most likely that D-list celebs would fill the void. No one in their right mind could see that as an improvement.
This is baffling. None of the reform suggestions seem to have anything to do with expenses-fiddling at all. If Parliament is broken, and constitutional change is urgent – why was noone calling for it before? The BBC reported this morning that more people voted for Britain’s Got Talent (or an x-factor or a big brother or something, the “got talent” name is obviously a lie) than vote in elections. And there were loads of people in Stoke willing to tell the BBC that they won’t ever vote again.
There is much media fretting about the BNP and other lunatic parties getting votes. I thought this was just a fear tactic. However, I have been told by people who live in likely-BNP-recruiting-territory estates that there seem to be significant numbers (i.e greater than zero) of BNP posters proudly showing in house windows. (I assume that these would counts as a bricking invitation in any reasonable court.)
It’s hard to imagine the waves of mass stupidity that give rise to that. For a start, it seems to be going on the principle that – if your MP is dishonest enough to have got the taxpayer to have paid the cost of a John Lewis lighting unit – you would automatically choose to have someone with a criminal record for committing GBH and inciting racial hatred as a clean alternative. Britain’s Got Morons by The Bucketload might be a more suitable tv show theme.
I have been as pissed off as anyone at the effrontery of some of the expenses claims. But I admit to having been quite pleased to see Jacqui Smith hoist on her own “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” petard. I’ve also enjoyed seeing people who’ve made much of their desire to stamp out benefit fraud being revealed as engaged in benefit frauds that amount to much more than a well-paid worker’s wage.
Did many people really think MPs were all more ethical than the average person, until the Telegraph printed their expense claims? Does someone getting something for nothing really rouse the public to such fury, when any number of seriously bad decisions didn’t bother anyone?
Fine to reform our voting systems, the composition of our parliament and so on. But it’s hard to believe that meaningful constitutional decisions can be taken during the current hysteria.