Death by chocolate

Posted on Wed, 16 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The UK population spent £8 million pounds on chocolate fountains, last year.

You didn’t misread that. The Guardian says so, anyway, on the basis of a report by GfK Marketing Services (Guardian G2 print, page 10. Cant be bothered to look online for a reference sorry. You’ll have to take my word for it. It is obviously deeply spurious, but for the purposes of a rant, I am going to treat it as if it were fact.)

Could a kitchen gadget scream “pre-revolutionary French aristocracy” more loudly than that?

Rephrasing an old quotation (that I am too idle to reference right now) “A kitchen chocolate fountain is the universe’s way of telling you that you have WAY WAY too much money.”

Plus I would add “And if you have bought one, please cull yourself now, for the good of the species’ gene pool ……”

We are suckers

Posted on Mon, 14 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

People enjoy wine more if they believe it costs more, according to a California Institute of Technology experiment that was widely reported today. The BBC put this politely as having shown that people enjoyed the supposedly more expensive wine more.

This wasn’t just due to people pretending to have a more sophisticated palate, either, as it was observed on brain scans that “pleasure centres” in the brain were more activated.

If the pop science reports are right, this was a very elegant experiment, so simple and easy to repeat, but suggesting so many wider avenues for investigation beyond the taste of wines..

It’s an illuminating reminder that so many of our pleasures are experienced only because of the value that others put on things. There is no simple nature-culture divide. We perceive what other people have allowed us to perceive. We value things that we are led to see as valuable – obviously making us suckers for advertising, as well as eager consumers of a whole range of cultural fables and moral values. Social values are somehow integrated into our biology.

Rewarding hypocrisy

Posted on Sat, 12 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Which is worse – a hypocritical “faith” or a sincere but demented one? The world is obviously more at risk from the real millenarian rapture-ready Christians and devout jihadists. So hypocrisy must be less dangerous to humanity.

All the same, I can’t resist a cynical shudder at the story, on BBC television and in the press, e.g. the UK Daily Mail, that parents are baptising more and more kids to get them into “good” Catholic schools.

Parents hoping to ensure places in oversubscribed Catholic schools are behind a surge in “late” baptisms into the Church in England and Wales, it was claimed today.
Baptisms of children aged between one and 13 years old made up 5.4 per cent of total entry into the church in 1958 but this figure had risen to nearly a third, or 30.3 per cent, in 2005, according to a report by an independent research body. (from the Daily Mail)

The BBC report says

Children are being baptised several years after birth to boost chances of getting into Roman Catholic schools, research has suggested

This shows both parents and the RC Church to be deeply cynical. Much more cynical than the sceptical atheists who hold to naive humanist values about telling the truth….

These parents miraculously regained their faith at the exact same time that they were looking for a local school for their offspring? Are they happy for their kids to grow up learning by example that hypocrisy is GOOD, if it gets you what you want.

(This may be turn out to be a bit of a Faustian deal for some parents. Exposing your kids to being taught by an organisation that has long been riddled with paedophiles seems like a pretty stupid choice to me.)

The Catholic Church is quite happy with face value adherence. It can buy any number of nominal believers with schools that produce reasonably good GCSE results and have a lower level of shootings and stabbings.

D’oh. Sorry, a bit of an error there. As it happens the Church doesn’t have to buy the believers by funding its schools with its own money. It gets its school funding from the state…..

As it turns out, the state is the organisation that is swelling the ranks of nominal Catholics by mysteriously continuing to choose to fund religiously based schools. Does the state want to bring about loads of Catholic conversions?

Someone explain to me again why this is a reasonable spend of public money.

We don’t hate you, RITA

Posted on Thu, 10 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

I was well ready for a good bit of comical idiocy, after a dull workday (in which the PC clock seemed to prove that the time was passing so slowly as to have gone into reverse.)

A new comment on TW’s post Who’s lying – Corbett or God? seemed promising. It was full of threats to pray for us and claimed to be from

The founder of your much hated RITA

Duh? Do I even know a Rita? Surely I’d remember that I did if I really hated them? I click the url that comes with the comment.ink. No such website. Google RITA, nothing remotely rapture-related on page 1.

Bah. Have to read comment carefully to spot that RITA means “rapture in the air”. Put the full phrase in and to find mention of RITA.

One linkin the Google page is to the Prophecy student blog. I’m not sure if this is by the poster or just a link to admired text from another site, but it says

“IN FOUR WEEKS YOU’LL BE WITH ME IN HEAVEN”

Four weeks from when?

Monday, September 10, 2007

Have I died and gone to heaven, then? Blimey. It’s just like the crappy old earth was.

I found quotes from “Rapture in the Air” on Armageddon Online. However, these have got to have been put there by someone for a laugh, so I guess this doesn’t count. Otherwise pages of googling and no result.

HTF am I supposed to work up a decent level of hatred on this slim basis? I can’t even manage mild dislike yet.

America, you are getting really scary

Posted on Tue, 8 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Stop it now. You were doing so well with your legal system actually starting to work and your advisers starting to tell the truth, and then you just have to go and spoil it, don’t you? You are getting really scary. I really don’t want to be Raptured. Most of the people on this planet don’t. Maybe that’s just us.

These items were on the BBC today:

(Minor insanity) Huckabee saying that Gitmo is too luxurious. Hmm. I would hate to see the neighbourhood that you live in, Huckabee. Even round where I live, which is often seen as a bit rough, waterboarding is not yet considered an everyday occurrence.

Bizarrely, Huckabee (the name invites so many parodies that I’ll resist the challenge) said that the Gitmo prisoners were mollycoddled, considering their crimes. Well, the prisoners in Gitmo haven’t actually been convicted of crimes. They certainly haven’t been tried and found guilty of anything. Isn’t that the whole point of Gitmo? If there was any valid evidence against the prisoners under national and international law it would have been used to convict them. The US, being inconveniently hamstrung by national and international law, delierately stuck this abhorrence on a place that it can represent as beyond any normal constraints.

(Major insanity) American warships supposedly threatened by a suicide attack by Iranian speedboats? Argh. Argh. Arch. Must I keep saying “Argh” until more appropriate words come into my head? I know think that all <strike>non-Yanks</strike> Iranians are dumber than a box of Twinkies but, hey, c’mon, dudes. Surely, by the beard of Loki, the US voters aren’t going to swallow this bull excrement. Your faithful allies are never going to fall for the same trick twice.

Iran is a state that you claim (directly in the face of your own intel) is almost a nuclear power. You expect us to believe that it is ready to declares war on the most powerful country in the world by ramming warships with speedboats. (For a start, we all know the torpedo has been invented. )

This WMD stuff and imminent-attack-danger Pearl Harbour stuff doesn’t work anymore. The Iranian nuclear threat didn’t work. You characterised last year’s captured Brit sailors and marines as “spineless” for refusing to act in a mad gung-ho way that would have started a war with Iran. You don’t have a blank cheque that lets you draw on the support of your allies and the compliance of the UN for ever.

Get over it. Just accept that you have to pay more for your oil…

The power of prayer

Posted on Mon, 7 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The Pope made an apparently unprecedented call on Catholics to pray for ever to get rid of paedophile priests.

Wow. That looks as if it will be about as effective as the Church’s previous efforts then….. Seeing as prayer is so useful to regrow limbs, for iinstance.

It appears that the praying will be a job. Every parish is supposed to appoint someone. What a wierd role that would be.

Advertising Spam

Posted on Sun, 6 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

A very funny post about Treet (a Spam-alike product) on Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes moved me to investigate the “food” product Spam.

Short of being 4 weeks into a global catastrophe that wiped out all other foodstocks except canned meat, the actual substance will never pass my lips. But the high-kitsch Spam site is fantastic. It seems to be online just to mock its own product. It even tells you about a Spam Museum. The look and feel is totally consistent: “John Walters collaborates with Disney.”

(I will definitely look more sympathetically at unwanted emails from now on. )

HJHOP’s canned meat extrusion product of choice doesn’t even try for retro art status. I couldn’t find a Treet website, let alone a minor kitsch masterpiece. I did find a Wikipedia entry.

While very popular, Treet does not have SPAM’s cult following.

How good is that? A cult following for something that compares unfavourably with the cheapest dog food.

Come on, Treet. Must try harder. If Spam can get there, what’s wrong with you? You started out on the wrong foot with a brand name that makes it look as if you were too lazy to proofread the copyright application. Your produce seems to be potted meat product for people too dumb to spell a short word. (I guess the Beatles got away with it, though.)

Look at Nice biscuits. They blatantly aren’t. They went down the same route as you, but they didn’t make that crucial spelling error. Learn from their example.

Getting smarter and smarter every day

Posted on Sun, 6 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Despite the evidence of the senses, there is a claim that intelligence is increasing. What? Well IQ scores are supposed to be increasing. A thought-provoking blog on Comment-is-Free discusses this idea and refers to a recent book by Flynn who identified what is called the Flynn effect.

There is much discussion on Wikipedia and elsewhere about possible reasons for the effect, some of them very plausible – such as Flynn’s own argument that rises have taken place only in the area of hypothetical thinking and reflect technological development. This is very interesting (the effect of cultural change on cognitive skills.)

I just doubt if IQ scores can really provide evidence that people are getting smarter,

IQ? The whole concept has a historically-based whiff of spuriousness (unjustified claims of cultural-neutrality, invention of the evidence, use to justify racist and sexist ideas, basis for divisive forms of educational selection, etc.) This spuriousness can’t be dispelled by adding in even more dubious extra “intelligences” to console those who score badly on the main tests.

All the same, used by scientists, with regards to the fact that the scores follow a mean distribution curve, they can tell us things about how able people are at showing specific skills. The main skill required is knowing how to pass them. There is nothing wrong with a test that works like this. The waters just get muddied by us all assuming that they reflect anything else than performance on a narrow set of indicator questions, when these are presented in a particular way.

Like crosswords. Cryptic crosswords defeated me, as a child, until someone explained that you just need to get used to the ways of thinking needed to do them. With knowledge of a few simple rules and a certain level of aptitude for making verbal associations, they become easy. Did I get cleverer in the short time between having no idea how to do crosswords and actually getting great pleasure from the works of Aruacaria? Far from it.

IQ tests are devised by humans. Are the people who sets them all geniuses? They must have superhuman IQs. They know ALL the answers. Who are these gods amongst us? They even possess the keys to knowing what intelligence is. Or, at least, if we think IQ really measures “intelligence”, we must take it that these really are the cleverest people on the planet.

They are academics. No surprises that IQ tests seem to work best as predictors of how someone will perform in a formal academic setting, then. As I said earlier, this would be fine, if we just stopped there and didn’t assume the tests can tell us about “intelligence” itself.

Pop science has helped to spread the idea that IQ tests measure intelligence. Helen Joyce, who wrote the CIF post, said:

The Flynn effect throws up some startling paradoxes. If, as seems to be the case, the average person from 1900 would score around 70 on a modern-day IQ test – which would put them on track for a diagnosis of mental retardation….

Wait a minute. IQ scores get standardised round 100. The distribution of scores follows a bell-shaped curve. The average score in 1900 would be, wait for it,…. 100.

Were IQ tests even invented in 1900? Not according to Wikipedia.

The term “IQ,” a translation of the German Intelligenz-Quotient, was coined by the German psychologist William Stern in 1912 as a proposed method of scoring early modern children’s intelligence tests such as those developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in the early 20th Century.

The first Binet test was produced in 1905. Hmm. In 1900, no one had seen an IQ test because there wasn’t one.

Is this pop-science idea the outcome of some deranged thought experiment, in which we have to imagine both the IQ performance of dead people and a variation in the whole way of working the scores out?

The attempt to look at changes in IQ scores over time can have some comical results.

Neisser estimates that if you extrapolate beyond the data, which shows a 21 point gain between 1952 and 1982, an even larger gain of 35 IQ points can be argued, however Arthur Jensen warns that extrapolating beyond the data leads to results such as an IQ of -1000 for Aristotle (even assuming he would have scored 200 in his day

There are ways to compare scores over time, if you use actual tests and record the results. These should all show a mean of 100 though, so it’s only changes in the shape of distribution curve that would have any explanatory value and these changes are likely to be limited.

Getting people of different ages to do the same tests comes up against the possible effects of changes in the brain over time. In any case, the academic basis of the test questions would depress the scores of older people who were educated in different topics and were not practised in academic thinking.

Getting younger people to do both old and new tests then comparing the scores would tell us more about the part that general social levels of knowledge play in the tests than it would about the intelligence of the test subjects. In any case, surely the scores on the old tests would have to be normalised to 100, so we’d still only be able to spot changes in the bell-shape…….?

1930s research done by Luria, a Soviet-era psychologist, was quoted by Flynn. Central Asian peasants’ answers to “IQ” type questions designed to identify their thinking processes supposedly showed Luria that they thought practically rather than hypothetically. Read the extract on CIF and the image of a peasant (at the time when Stalin was hammering the agrarian sector) stonewalling a potential government spy just leaps out at you. White bear/black bear? 🙂

It certainly does show a much higher level of practical intelligence than Luria seems aware. Practical political intelligence. Plus a fair amount of hidden hypothetical reasoning. Rather than some mentally bound peasant incapacity to think beyond the present, as Luria seemed to imply.

Almost ironically, it seems that Luria learned some lessons about the value of adopting “practical” thought processes pretty quickly. He soon had to make some drastic career changes to avoid Stalin’s attentions. Post-war, he tried to get back into neuro-surgery but

“His plans were interrupted for several years when he was removed from the Institute of Neurosurgery during a period of particularly virulent anti-semitic repression.”

My point here is that Luria was obviously hugely more academically skilled than the central Asian peasant. so he assumed that his thought processes were somehow more advanced. He didn’t credit the peasants with the same capacities for critical thinking as himself because his own social/cultural biases limited his interpretations of the evidence. We all do it, including the interpretors of IQ tests.

Too long for a comment

Posted on Sat, 5 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

This post is really a reply to an unfeasibly large comment (ref is to Viz, for UK readers) but it grew unfeasibly large itself, so I thought it would have to grow up to be a post

“Rafael” is sadly neither a Mutant Ninja Turtle nor a Renaissance painter. Even more sadly, it’s not one of the supreme beings from the obscure CU_T pantheon to which Black Sun Journal often refers.

He/she is some sort of Christian who posts incomprehensible and unreadable comments. This blog got two from him/her today. I can only assume the words get copied and pasted from some central store, which is by definition a waste of hard disk space. The comments don’t relate to the posts, at least as far as I can see.

(To be honest, I just assume that s/he is mentally ill, but I decided to try to treat the comment seriously, because I feel guilty about dismissing someone just because they aren’t clever or rational. OK, I couldn’t stop some sarcasm seeping in but nobody’s perfect right.)

Rafael

I am impressed that your comments achieve the length of shortish novellas.

All the same, I have to say that ” the monkeys with typewriters” idea clearly has some way to go before it produces the complete works of Shakespeare. Props for trying, anyway..

I have decided to treat you as a human being, on a temporary basis, and actually address some of your points. I am even going to get sickeningly preachy. This annoys the hell out of most people but I guess religious folk must be used to it.

1. THE PURPOSE OF MAN’S EXISTENCE
Who we are? Why are we in this world? Where are we going?

This is a silly question. Your answer is even sillier.

2. GOD’S PLAN God has a plan.

Why do I think this? Can I count the ways? Here’s a few, anyway…

I think it is tragic that people can’t find meaning in life without having to take it secondhand from an old book and/or from an imaginary friend, in whose galactic program they are a minor sub-routine.

It is depressing to see how little value our species attaches to the astonishing facts of the existence of the cosmos or biology or consciousness.

It is baffling that religious people have such a hopelessly degraded view of their own supreme being that they see it as a firm but (un) fair big Sky Daddy.

Even more baffling is that the big Middle-Eastern SkyDaddy – who can supposedly do ANYTHING in the miracles line, somehow chose to communicate with humans only through words that got written down centuries ago. This seems particularly mean to his human subjects, given that literacy wasn’t exactly universal then.

This Supreme Being is even so bizarrely twisted as to set up a whole planet just to play silly games with its human inhabitants. Like creating imaginary fossil records because he knew that, in a few thousand years, his human serfs would come up with scientific theories about them. This, apparently because he was setting humans up for a test to check that they would believe the magic book over the evidence of their rationality… And so on. (I am not saying that you believe this, given that I haven’t read more than the start of your comment, but it’s a common fundy YEC “explanation” for the inconvenient evidence.)

If you can’t see how amazing the real world is and need to follow someone’s words, I am going to quote the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. ” [My emphasis]

I know this is anthropomorphising “life” but it’s poetry, not a holy book, so YOU DON’T HAVE TO BELIEVE IT. It’s a metaphor. It just expresses a feeling that life is its own purpose. (This feeling is generally enough soul-food for those of us who don’t fear/worship BigSkyDaddy.)

If there was a creator entity, it would be so infinitely beyond human comprehension that we could never even begin to imagine it, let alone follow the workings of its “mind” and assume it has some “purpose.” Purpose is a human construct. What “purpose” could an infinite, ubiquitous, all-knowing Being have? It’s everywhere, remember. There’s nothing it can’t do. There being only one of these, it wouldn’t even have its own kind to relate to. Why would it even need any means of communication then? Htf could it even be conscious in any meaningful sense. Our human consciousness develops through interaction. We’d clearly have the advantage over it, there.

If there was a big entity that could control the movement of galaxies and order the behaviour of electrons inside the atom, wtf would we imagine for one minute it was also mad enough to create conscious beings just to get them to say how great it was?

We are nowhere near even knowing what is in the Universe or within ourselves e.g. what is a dimension? what is space? what is matter? what is energy? what is consciousness? where is our consciousness? The only way we can approach these ideas is through the amazing human capacity to think.

Why would we throw away ways of thinking (rationality, science, skepticism) that actually work to develop our understanding the workings of the universe, (i.e. purpose, as conceived in human terms – the only purpose we can conceive of) to go for big skydaddy myths? Especially, when the use of our minds can bring us some of the greatest pleasures in life?

And why would anyone base their morality and belief system on someone’s interpretation of a few old books? I love fairy stories and myths, myself. However, I find it usually helps to be able to distinguish between stories and reality. The average pre-school child can do this quite easily.

If your god existed, it would be truly malevolent, so it’s lucky that it doesn’t, really. It’s still a pity that most of the planet believes in some variant of the evil sky daddy and bases the actions that would be hardest to justify in human moral terms on it.

Like a proper doorstep god-botherer, I am going to suggest that your life is empty and that you can only fill the spiritual void by appreciating your real existence. 🙂

If you would like me to leave you with one of these handy leaflets….

Pipex is Still Terrible

Posted on Fri, 4 January, 2008 by ATGW

Well, any long time readers of this blog will know I detest Pipex (my ISP – I refuse to link to them). It is terrible. It has abysmal customer service and for most of the summer I was without a connection at all. When they finally got round to fixing it what speed the ADSL used to have was truly gone.

Sadly, thanks to the terms and conditions the ISP is allowed to impose, I am obliged to remain with them for another four months at least. This is gutting when the net connection is barely faster than dial up.

I have spent the first three days of this month trying to connect to Thinkbroadband.com to see what my actual transfer speeds were. However, the connection was too slow for the speedtest to run. How bad is that? Fortunately, today things have picked up a little so here is this months graph:

What is really shocking about this graph, is not just the massive downwards trend it shows, but the fact that the really slow connections aren’t even on it. This graph only shows when the connection speeds were fast enough for me to get the speedtester to run! Very soon the early “fast” days will drop off the graph and it will just be flatlined crap speeds.

It is infuriating that, in this day and age, it seems impossible to get a consistently fast data connection. I am paying for a service which advertises itself as an “8mb connection” yet I barely scrape over 2mb. As soon as I can get out of this contract I am going with Virgin Media Cable broadband.

I have been with Pipex for about five years now – until very recently they were wonderful. I would have recommended them to anyone. However, in the summer they were taken over by Tiscali (who I have hated in the past) and things have plummeted like a lead weight.

Why in the name of Toutatis would Tiscali (who already had a reputation for being crap) buy a good ISP and then turn it to rubbish? What on earth is the point of that? Are these people mad? (Note: Virgin did the same with Blueyonder/Telewest…)

Anyway, before I get ranting about the stupidity of corporate takeovers, I will end here with the exhortation that you never, ever recommend Pipex (or Tiscali) to anyone you have even a passing regard for. Terrible ISP is an understatement.

As atheist as it gets?

Posted on Thu, 3 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Sunk in post-holiday torpor, I somehow missed the full flowering of the avowed atheist’s (TM) atheism in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on 30 December.

Bear in mind Brendan O’Neill is someone who introduces his own blog with this blurb:

One of this country’s sharpest social commentators’ (Daily Telegraph)

What country are they talking about? (Although, the Daily Telegraph probably wouldn’t recognise sharp social commentary even if it was poked in the eye by it.)

In the blogpost I’m talking about, O’Neill pours even more scorn on public atheists than he bestowed on the Archbishop of Canterbury. His victims are Dawkins, Hitchens et al.

The new atheism
There is more humanity in the ‘superhuman’ delusions of the devout than there is in the realism of the hectoring atheists

Blimey, can you plagiarise yourself? Weren’t these pretty well the exact words he used in the Spiked-Online article about Rowan Williams. (Well, except for the “monkeyman” bit. Maybe the Guardian found that too offensive for the subhead? ) He must be really really proud of these phrases.

I am as atheistic as it gets. But I will not be signing up to this shrill hectoring of the religious. The new atheists have given atheism a bad name. History’s greatest atheists, or the “old atheists” as we are now forced to call them, were humanistic and progressive, critical of religion because it expressed man’s sense of higher moral purpose in a deeply flawed fashion. The new atheists are screechy and intolerant; they see religion merely as an expression of mass ignorance and delusion. Their aim seems to be, not only to bring God crashing back down to earth, but also to downgrade mankind itself.

And so on. In so doing, he brings up Darwin and Marx, apparently “old atheists” – whose words must therefore provide the all-wise authority that this “atheistic as it gets” person apparently can’t live without.

Indeed (in the second article of his that I’ve decided to savage) he yet again takes Marx’s words completely out of context, to somehow derive a meaning that is the opposite of what the man was saying. All the same, it wouldn’t matter if O’Neill hadn’t got it wrong. If historic figure X believed the moon was made of paper, their success in another field wouldn’t make it true.

This doesn’t stop O’Neill referring often to Marx, as if some acknowledged wisdom in political philosophy made everything Marx said true. And, most bizarrely, as if Marx somehow agreed with O’Neill that Dawkins et al should just shut up.

For Marx, religion had to be abolished because it made man despicable; for new atheists religion exists precisely because man is despicable, little more than a monkey.
New atheists will continue to ridicule the religious in 2008. But there is more humanity in the “superhuman” delusions of the devout – in their yearning for a sense of purpose and greatness – than there is in the monkeyman realism of the hectoring atheists.

Oh, look, there’s the “monkeyman realism” stuff again. How odd that he hates the whole idea of evolution but seems to worship Darwin.
Here’s the “superhuman delusion” quote again. Again, ffs. Look, Brendan, it just wasn’t that good. Sorry.

And, surely, Marx didn’t believe religion “made man despicable”. Blimey, I doubt that even the allegedly “hectoring” Dawkins and Hitchens would go that far. IMAO, Marx (and other classical social scientists) saw religion largely in terms of its social role of providing ideas that support social relations. (Generally 19th century intellectuals tended to look at how things work in the real world.)

If this is what “being as atheist as it gets” looks like, can we have an atheist competition to see if its possible to get more atheist, please?

Avowedly atheist? You made a vow?

Posted on Thu, 3 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

There’s a post on Spiked online where the (“avowedly atheist”) editor whines about Archbishop Rowan Williams (Head of the Church of England – I think) on the apparent grounds that Williams is not rabidly irrational enough to be a proper church man. Not enough “fire and brimstone,” apparently. Pays attention to Dawkins, even.

Williams apparently had the audacity to talk about not buggering up the planet in his New Year’s address. So have a few other Christian notables. This has got Brendan O’Neill pretty annoyed, to the point where he complains about Williams’ “smug face” and ” social-worker voice”

His sermon was indistinguishable from those delivered (not just at Christmas but for life) by the heads of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Williams did not speak about Christian morality; in fact, he didnâ€™t utter the m-word at all. He said little about menâ€™s responsibility to love one another and God, the two Commandments Jesus Christ said we should live by. Instead he talked about our role as janitors on planet Earth, who must stop plundering the â€˜warehouse of natural resourcesâ€™ and ensure that we clean up after ourselves.

What? You are complaining because he didn’t make unfollowable narrow-minded pronouncements about “personal morality” and had the gall to discuss issues of genuine morality? Did I misunderstand something here?

(Maybe he didn’t just repeat meaningless injunctions to love each other, possibly because these religious wallpaper-style admonitions don’t actually appear to work.)

One thing that really ignites O’Neill’s easily sparked avowedly atheist ire is:

in his Christmas sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury quoted extensively, not from the Bible, but from Richard Dawkins, who is considered by many to be the Rottweiler of the New Atheism.

So, just let me recap here? Signs of a churchman’s taking onboard rational scientific arguments and daring to suggest that it might be immoral not to leave a working planet for future generations are BAD?

At a time of such low horizons, is it any wonder that some people still do cling on to God, and seek transcendence from mundane everyday life through a belief in divinity? There is more humanity in their â€˜superhumanâ€™ delusions than there is in the monkeyman realism of eco-Christians and New Atheists

Monkeyman realism?

He is saying that he despises a churchperson who accepts evolution and argues for a broader concept of what ethics are than you can find in a old book of fables. The implications of his words are that a bible-thumping creationist hypocrite would somehow be better.

Don’t fret Brendan. There are more than enough of these to go round. The Phelps are maybe a little too extreme even for your taste but plenty more bible-thumpers would fill the patriarchal priest role you prefer. (Tip. Wingnut daily is a good place to start looking for them.) The Islamic faith has a good few as well.

Any danger of the world’s religions becoming too ecological and rational is greatly exaggerated. So you can sleep easy in your bed and stop worrying about dangerous atheist rottweilers, Brendan.

Data insecurity

Posted on Wed, 2 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Th British government is planning to make the distribution of hacker tools into a crime, according to a post on the Register This is an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act, included in the Police and Justice Act 2006, but unlikely to become law until May, 2008.

Hmm, hacker tools? What does that mean? On first thought, it must include anything you can do on a PC. What about Visual Basic for example? Any Unix Distro? Windows?

OK. Let’s assume that all the standard OSes and applications won’t be included. What about relatively innocuous programs like snort and Ethereal, which let you monitor what’s happening on your network? Plus all the other programs you might use to secure a system – password crackers and stress testers.

The Register points out that many “hacker” tools are used by sysadmins to secure networks.

The problem is that anything from nmap through wireshark to perl can be used for both legitimate and illicit purposes, in much the same way that a hammer can be used for putting up shelving or breaking into a car.

Apparently, the government has stepped back a bit from this mad direction by adding something about the intent to use the software, after industry concern, but the Register says that it’s still going ahead with the plan “to prosecute people who distribute a tool, such as nmap, that’s subsequently abused by hackers.”

LightBlueTouchpaper site says:

the complexity surrounds â€œdistributionâ€, if a good guy runs a website and a lot of bad people download the tool from it, has the good guy committed an offence?

The point is well expressed on Spy-Blog which also draws attention to the shockingly poor global rank of the UK for privacy:

The United Kingdom, is still, to our shame and to public fear, ranked in the worst category, i.e. an “endemic surveillance society” alongside the Russian Federation, China, the USA and Malaysia etc.
The incompetent Labour government has managed to further increase the size and scope of its “surveillance state” activities, without any effective transparent checks or balances. They have not achieved any extra “security” as a result of this snooping and spying on the public, but they have further lost public confidence and trust in centralised government bureaucratic systems

These “anti-hacker” activities seem particularly poorly timed, given that the past few weeks have seen the most crucial private data of millions of UK citizens’ having been randomly distributed in the UK and even the USA.

And, oddly, not due to the ultimate cunning of nefarious hax0rs. Due solely to the incompetence of government agencies and subcontractors. Hmm.

For example- this story from spy-blogbuggers belief. MI5 emailalert sign-up shambles

Astonishingly, MI5, the Security Service, part of whose remit is supposed to be giving protection advice against electronic attacks over the internet, is sending all our personal details (forename, surname and email address) unencrypted to commercial third party e-mail marketing and tracking companies which are physically and legally in the jurisdiction of the United States of America, and is even not bothering to make use of the SSL / TLS encrypted web forms and processing scripts which are already available to them..

Happy New Year!

Posted on Mon, 31 December, 2007 by ATGW

In case neither Heather or myself get the chance before tomorrow (GMT of course), this is just a quick Happy New Year to all our readers – even those whose calendars don’t change over at midnight 🙂 . We will try to get back into the swing of lots of ranting about idiocy as soon as the holiday season allows us.

Time going backwards

Posted on Thu, 27 December, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Some old photographs on the BBC’s website show the young Benazir Bhutto. She wore standard international 1970s clothes – a vaguely “ethnic” dress in one picture and a silk blouse in another. She didn’t just lack an all-covering tent/veil – she wasn’t even wearing a headscarf. She looked wealthy and confident. Hardly surprising, given that she was the Pakistani Prime Minister’s daughter. You could be looking at a young female member of the Kennedy clan. She could have been a privileged young woman from any cultural background. Becoming Prime Minister in her own right must have seemed an achievable goal, even at that age, with the example of Indira Gandhi in India.

Her assassination was clearly horrific. It even took in a couple of dozen other people, in what could almost be the textbook definition of overkill. That is, Benazir Bhutto had already been shot dead by the time the assassin blew himself and the surrounding crowd up.

I have no knowledge of what the killer expected to achieve or what his beliefs were. The BBC site suggests that similar attacks are being directed against the ruling party and other opposition parties and hence her assassination is indicative of a general regional destabilisation.

However, Benazir Bhutto’s murder still has unusual international resonance, just because of the rarity of her career. A woman Prime Minister elected to power in a Muslim country. Twice. So huge numbers of Muslim voters and Muslim clerics didn’t have a problem with her lack of hijab, her high-powered education, her outspokenness, even with seeing her naked face.

(At least as rare in the non-Islamic world. You can count major female political leaders on the toes of one foot and still have two to spare.)

She was a successful and powerful woman in a country set up as Islamic from its very first day. How likely is it that a Pakistani woman from a similar background could even be photographed in such an innocent way today, let alone that she could achieve political power?

Wasn’t the 20th century supposed to be about progress? It looks as if the world of 40 years ago was much more modern and progressive than today’s world. So why not all vow to devote the next century to returning to medieval values, so that, when we fail dismally to achieve that goal, we might actually find we’ve sparked some advances.

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Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Category Archives: General

Death by chocolate

We are suckers

Rewarding hypocrisy

We don’t hate you, RITA

America, you are getting really scary

The power of prayer

Advertising Spam

Getting smarter and smarter every day

Too long for a comment

Pipex is Still Terrible

As atheist as it gets?

Avowedly atheist? You made a vow?

Data insecurity

Happy New Year!

Time going backwards

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