Obama speaks simple truth – gets hammered

Posted on Sat, 12 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The irony. Barrack Obama makes some honest and intelligent observations and he’s treated as if he has personally cursed the voters as morons. The offending quote:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” he said.
“And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” he added.

This is not just unarguably correct but shows that he has some political and social awareness. Obviously the last qualities that you want from a President…..

The irony is the condescension of Hillary Clinton’s attack:

Mrs Clinton said her rival’s comments had been condescending and suggested voters in Pennsylvania did not “need a president who looks down on them”.
“I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America,” she said on Saturday.
“Senator Obama’s remarks are elitist and are out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans, certainly not the Americans that I know.”

So, it’s demeaning to the voters to understand what motivates them but not to flatter them? Obama is elitist? She hangs around depressed small-towns around America with the long-term unemployed. She props up the Sports Bar or eats in Hooters or hangs round the gun club, then?

McCain obviously jumped on the populist “Obama is elitist bandwagon”

An adviser to Mr McCain, Steve Schmidt, said his candidate believed the statement was “nothing short of breathtaking”, and that it was “hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans”.

No, “breathtaking” is when you realise the contempt that political candidates really do have for the voters. Politicians who treat voters as pawns to be manipulated for their votes, to get the big bucks their backers will pull in after the election – while assuring them they really love and respect them – are acting in a way that would be seen as “gold-digging” in the private sphere.

Poor Obama has had to rephrase his speech but he does seems to have stood by its content. I doubt that “regime change” will make much difference to the US. Still, I’m increasingly daring to hope that Obama could actually achieve something.

Welcome to HM Open Prison United Kingdom

Posted on Fri, 11 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Anti-terrorism laws were used to carry out surveillance on a family that wanted to get their 3-year-old into a certain school. The local council tracked them for a fortnight to make sure they lived in the right catchment area.

No, really.

The title was stolen from a comment by Steve Woods on the post about this in The Register. This story is also on the BBC website and a fair number of newspapers.

In a followup BBC article about an interview with the family:

The council has defended its actions, carried out under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).
The council admitted using RIPA laws, which were designed to track criminals and terrorists, on six occasions in total

You may have a problem with intrusive cameras (Well, if you don’t, you should have, if you put any value on personal liberty) but RIPA ups the game quite a bit from them. There’s a very balanced BBC piece on it which, in itself, should put the fear of Odin in you.

It’s not as if this sort of thing should be a surprise. An “anonymous coward” commented on the Register post:

WE were warned at the time that such powers would inevitably be used for trivial matters. The reason is the same as the answer to “why do dogs lick their balls ?” [1]

[1] Because they can.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend

Posted on Wed, 9 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

There are blogs for which the phrase “deeply unpleasant” might have been coined. Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch are among them. I’m making a pre-emptive reference to Godwin’s Law (hat tip: Black Sun Journal) and suggesting that you only have to replace the references to “Muslims” with “Jews” to be mentally transported straight back to 1930s Germany.

But beautiful irony amongst the emetic dross The title is “Wall of silence broken at state’s Muslim public school”:

……Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.
Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day’s schedule included a “school assembly” in the gym after lunch.

Cleverly apostrophised. The reader is supposed to see “school assembly” as a cover for some unspeakable events.

Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform “their ritual washing.”
Afterward, Getz said, “teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day,” was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man “was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered.”

Oh. It’s prayers in a schools assembly, then. Well, I’m certainly against that. But I thought the whole point of these people was that they were all for it? Religious leaders in odd ritual clothes, silly rituals. Not unlike Christianity or Judaism then.

“The prayer I saw was not voluntary,” Getz said. “The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred.”

Let me commit an breach of blogtiquette here. ROFL. LOL. LMAO 🙂 and any other net-words for pissing oneself laughing. (Get lectured about overuse of this by a middle class English youth on You-tube)

School prayer ~= a voluntary thing. Ever.

If it was a matter of choice, kids wouldn’t do it. Kids go to church or the mosque or the synagogue because their parents choose to make them. Similarly, schoolkids (in places such as England) attend prayers in assembly because they have to.

I abhor spending public money on religious schools. I hate to see school students segregated by religion. All carried out by politicians who think that winning the support of a few religious “community leaders” is worth paying for in future communal division. I pretty well abhor religion of any kind.

All the same, there is hardly a non-faith agenda at Dhimmi Watch. It’s just seizing on an issue which it would happily support if it were a conservative Christian school.

Don’t ask me what “Dhimmi Watch” means. I can only guess from the context. No, sorry. I can use wikipedia which says that dhimmi means

“a non-Muslim subject of a state governed in accordance with sharia law.”

Well, there is a huge danger of the US falling under shari’a law, Not.

This site links to Frontpage Magazine along with Jihad Watch. And from this bastion of liberal rationality (*heavy sarcasm alert*) I learn that it’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness week.

For a moment, I assumed that was am uncharacteristically clear-headed vision (given the source) that hatred of Islam was fuelling new forms of Fascism. No such luck. It is of course an attempt to fan the flames of that very monster.

It conflates every wrong ever done by any Muslim anywhere in the world into a monolithic “Islamic Jihad.” It ignores the enormous differences – even conflicts – between countries, sects, individuals. It sees all Muslims as Al-Qaeda terrorists.

These sites present a pure conspiracy-theory style world view. Please, stick to alien abductions, conspiritards. This stuff is a lot more dangerous than looking into unexpected anal probes carried out by ETs. It’s also a lot more prevalent sadly. The JihadWatch blog has Technorati authority of 1,798 and 43,277 links. (If you think of how feebly Technorati catalogues blogs recently, it’s probably got a third as many again.) That blog gets probably a few thousand hits a day.

This is the sort of crap that’s supporting the waterboarding and the Gitmos and the endless attempts to spread the war even further until the Middle East is a crater.

“Concentration camp for children”

Posted on Sun, 6 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Mountain Rock Church seem (insert your own appropriate words. My linguistic range is too limited.) There are preview clips of a compelling, if very disturbing, movie about escapees – especially what happened to their children – on joinusthemovie.com.

The footage of the cult-leader’s wife was amazing. She used so many verbal mechanisms to manipulate weaker characters, in so masterly a way, that I almost assumed this whole section must have been scripted by a genius. Her use of emotional blackmail, aggression and misdirection certainly went some way to answering any questions about whether violence alone could have subdued these people so effectively. It looks more like power backed up by ideology.

One of the anti-cult people described the church as a “concentration camp for children.” There certainly seem to be some universal patterns to the way this sort of inhumanity is expressed, from the concentration camp to the child jail.

In fact I wonder if the Mountain Rock church might choose to relocate to Jersey as the behaviour sounds so similar. Terrifying kids, beating them up, dragging them by the hair and locking them in cellars. (I couldn’t watch that BBC Panarama clip, by the way. A minute or two was more than enough.)

What’s the difference? Well, there’s clearly a difference on the level of damage done, and, on the movie evidence, the Mountain Rock kids were “just” physically abused. Their parents were present, though this is perhaps even more disturbing, given that these adults let their lunatic faith override even the most basic animal instincts to protect your young.

The main obvious difference is in the “religious” justification of the Mountain Rock stuff. There could be blog-pages of discussion here as to whether abuse is inherent in religion itself or whether “religion” is just a subset of a general category of ideological support for criminal actions. Religion is certainly up there as the number one smokescreen for abusing other humans. Its effectiveness rests on a whole handy supporting belief structure, in which the human is basically required to pay constant slavish and adoring obeisance to an all-powerful superbeing who will smite whenever his wishes aren’t followed.

It may be that the Haut la Garenne child torturers had enough real power over the kids in their “care” to be able to do whatever they chose, without needing to resort to some belief system. They seem to have had control over many of the local state institutions for a start… Even so, they were supported by a generally authoritarian Jersey mindset. Plus a UK culture that demonises some children and refuses to see any disturbing reminders of how damaged they may be.

This sort of leads me to a more general point about torture. Not the torture carried out by the secret child-abusers, but the increasing resort to the same dishonourable justifications for places like Gitmo, interrogation techniques like waterboarding. So I’ll have to labour the metaphor about how society deals with troublesome kids.

Bullies, thieves, gun-toting gang members, and so on. Most of them got that way through the malevolence, greed, carelessness or stupidity of adults. When they fight back by becoming at least as repellent as the people who created them in their own image, we seem to think it’s OK to do whatever it takes to subdue them. If it sometimes involves brutality and torture, so be it. We then fail to see that this just makes the problem of there being people with no respect for others infinitely worse.

Hmm, painfully laboured metaphor coming – war on terror…….. Fill in the gaps.

AIG in the UK

Posted on Sat, 5 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The British can’t feel too smug in the face of American gullibility. Ken Ham is busy dipping into our own bottomless well of credulity, according to James Randerson in the Guardian. He’s been on a lecture tour of the UK and seems able to draw a few hundred people to a venue.

The operation in the UK is smaller but still significant, with an annual turnover of around £500,000. One report suggested it dispatches between 30,000 and 50,000 books, DVDs and videos each year.

Let’s hope that most of these DVDs and videos are pirate copies of “Lost” .
Or else that the word “dispatched” is being used in the sense of “disposed of humanely”. Landfill would be my first suggestion, although I know that’s not too ecologically friendly.

Water myths

Posted on Fri, 4 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Make sure to breathe 17,280 times a day. It’s for the good of your health. Don’t forget to take those breaths or your health will suffer.

🙂

OK, there’s no guidance yet on how much air you should breathe. Maybe that’s just because nobody has worked out how to sell air yet. Not so for water. How many times have you heard that you should drink x amount of water a day? You might have even heard that tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer and wine somehow don’t count as containing water. It’s not just the Penelope Keiths either. Even the respectable and respected nutrition advisers seem to give out this tosh. The Food Standards Agency, for instance, presents a sanitised version of the “other drinks may not count” argument.

The British Nutrition Foundation cites unspecified authorities to recommend an amount. More crucially, it says thirst doesn’t tell you when you need water.

Health professionals recommend at least 1.5 to 2 litres (6-8 cups) of liquids a day in temperate climates. The sensation of thirst is not triggered until there is already a water deficit, so it is important to drink before you get thirsty.

So, it’s pleasant to see a public debunking of the “drink 2 litres of water a day myth”. A Penn U study showed that there was no health benefit to drinking extra water.

You don’t get much more of an insistent human drive than thirst. So why do we have so many “experts” telling us that thirst isn’t a good guide to needing water? We may be bad at letting our hunger tell us when to eat. But thirst is pretty basic.

There are a very few circumstances (e.g. heat stroke if you’ve suddenly moved from winter Finland to summer Malaysia) in which your own thirst isn’t a good guide to how much you should drink.

(In any case, I wonder how anyone could drink as little as 2 litres of water-based fluid a day. I’ve had that before lunchtime, if coffee counts.)

Feast of fools

Posted on Tue, 1 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

In homage to the day, I have decided to introduce our non-UK readers to a sample of British fools. Not “fools” in a good way, as are so many characters in fantasy fiction – such the Fool in Robin Hobb’s books. But these are “fools” in a “paid-good-money to spread idiocy” way.

I have to start with Richard Littlejohn. He is the archetypal right-wing newspaper ranter. He would be a shock-jock if he had a Midwest radio show. Which would be tough for the Midwest but would probably raise the IQ of the average Daily Mail or Sun reader by 5 points.

His website claims that

His twice-weekly columns in the Daily Mail and the Sun earned him a place in the inaugural Newspaper Hall of Fame as one of the most influential journalists of the past 40 years.

Shudder. Be very afraid. “Most influential journalist”……… His home page has a modest quote from the Observer.

He’s a distant, bastard cousin of Thomas Nash, Daniel Defoe and Alexander Pope.

No idea who Thomas Nash was, but surely Defoe and Pope are the Premier League to his Sunday 5-a-side League in Droitwich. (*Soccer reference*) Trim the last nine words and the word “distant”.

Apart from the self-promotion, his website exists mainly to sell his books. So it was quite entertaining to come across the transcript of an old radio programme, where Will Self – although not really on his best form – dismissed his work in a Will-Self-signature haughty manner.

Mail stablemate of Littlejohn is Peter Hitchens, about whom we’ve ranted before. His mind seems to be that of a true conspiracy theory nut. The world is simplified for him into a monolithic conglomeration of everything he dislikes, witness his most recent Mail column. It starts:

This week we have a rare glimpse of the true agenda of our new, modernised rulers. They have disclosed their secret, virulent loathing of fatherhood.

This is deduced from the government’s alleged hatred of marriage (expressed by the words on a form), the wording of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (because it says “supportive parenting”).

In fact, the change – never openly argued for by its supporters – is a revolutionary blow at the foundations of British society. It is driven by the thinking of a few Marxist weirdos, including Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse

The idea that government ministers and civil servants have even heard of Wilhelm Reich or Herbert Marcuse, let alone read their works, stops me in my tracks. Are they directing social policy from beyond the grave? Did they have bizarrely prescient views on the HFEA Bill?

(It appears from his next paragraph that the government were idle students 40 years ago and must therefore have imbibed their ideas……)

He next insults the founder of the Brook Advisory clinics that provide contraceptive advice, complaining bitterly that a Conservative government gave her an honour in 1980. She is accused of somehow having caused a rise in the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions. (By providing contraception? Uh?)

Then, he blames banning people hitting their kids. (I am ashamed, as an English person, to say that this one isn’t even true. Shockingly.)

The outcome is the surveillance state, which is supposedly the result of replacing parental authority with state power. I am at least as much against the surveillance society as Littlejohn, but I completely fail to see a connection between the rest of his rant and its conclusion..

I kid you not. This might sound like the opinionated drunk ranting in your local pub or the person with mild Alzheimer’s who collars you at at a bus stop. But it’s what passes for a Daily Mail column.

Which makes one suspect that a disturbingly large section of the British public – who actually buy and read this stuff – is several bells short of even the most minimal fool’s cap.

Fools cap

Big Brother goes Shopping

Posted on Thu, 27 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shoot the messengers

Posted on Wed, 26 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

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

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

What!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other Hitchens rants again

Posted on Sun, 23 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitchens then argues that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m on a roll

Posted on Sat, 22 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

No God blog has

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misplaced ads

Posted on Sat, 22 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Times for the rich

Posted on Fri, 21 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like a rabbit trapped in headlights, I do.

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

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

CGHoP for St Patrick’s Day

Posted on Tue, 18 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

They called out the big liturgical guns to defend themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Minority Reports

Posted on Mon, 17 March, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

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

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

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

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

Deprecated: ltrim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 3030

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Category Archives: Rants

Obama speaks simple truth – gets hammered

Welcome to HM Open Prison United Kingdom

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend

“Concentration camp for children”

AIG in the UK

Water myths

Feast of fools

Big Brother goes Shopping

Shoot the messengers

The other Hitchens rants again

I’m on a roll

Misplaced ads

Times for the rich

CGHoP for St Patrick’s Day

More Minority Reports

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: