Why Dont You Blog?

The fashion for apologising for things that happened many centuries ago has now hit the Vatican, which is about to publish a book saying it might have made a bit of a mistake, according to the Times and Telegraph .*

According to the Telegraph,

In 1307, King Philip IV “the Fair” of France, in desperate need of funds, ordered the arrest and torture of all Templars. After confessing various sins their leader, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake.

And the Church quickly declared them all heretics. The new -found paper supposedly shows that pope Clement dissolved the Templar Order but said they weren’t heretics. Though the evidence for their non-heresy seems quite unconvincing, by the standards of the day, considering how little it took for a hedge-witch or a dissenting peasant to get tortured and killed for heresy (by both Catholics and Protestants) over the next few hundred years. It is tempting to suggest that the surviving Templars must have still had a fair bit of that Holy land wealth left with which to buy a relatively favourable judgement.

Now, 1307 is 700 years ago. The Vatican could teach any existing government a thing or two about keeping politically sensitive secrets.

What is the point in this? Given that the Templars were monk-knights, they shouldn’t even have any direct descendants who could accept an apology for wrongs done to their 175th generation-back ancestors. It’s obviously a soundbite thing. The Templars’ much-vaunted “secrets” have been attracting publicity again, in the silly da Vinci Code movie for a start.

Just in case, some people might be put off the Catholic Church because it did wrong in the 14th century, it’s going to apologise and set the record straight. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s not like they are going to make France hand back any of Phillip the Fair’s ill-gotten gains is it?

Much as I hate these ritual apologies to people who don’t exist any more, on behalf of the people who wronged them, but also don’t exist any more, why stop there? Why not apologise for the Crusades and the things the Catholic Church rewarded the Templars for doing? It wouldn’t make any more sense but at least it would show the beginnings of a sense of moral responsibility.

* (Look I don’t read these papers in real life. Honest. But, they are online….)

Popularity: 25% [?]

Charges were dropped against 6 people who were arrested in July, when they protested at a council meeting against the remains of the 4,000 year-old Rotherwas Ribbon being buried under a road.

The road building is going ahead. Hereford Council has a site with its news. It seems that, after unsuccessfully and half-heartedly trying to pass it off as a natural artefact, the council’s arguments are:

• the roadbuilding uncovered it in the first place;
• they’ve done everything they reasonably could to get it investigated;
• covering it up won’t do it any harm;
• moving the road would damage other nearby sites;
• the cabinet office says go ahead with the road as fast as possible

All reasonable points. It still seems a pity that we have to discard irreplaceable treasures just to make yet another road.

There is interesting information on the Ribbon on the Megalithic Portal written by one of the people in our blogroll at the right, Alun Salt from clioaudio

He says:

Archaeologists believe this major find may have no parallels in Europe, with the closest similar artefact being the 2,000-year-old serpent mounds of the Ohio river valley in America.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Who is the godfather of the Internet?

Today’s Guardian Technology page identifies him as Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf, aka the godfather of the net, predicts the end of TV as we know it
Web guru foresees download revolution

But wait. What about

Mark Joyner, often referred to as the “Godfather of the Internet”

according to Articles about cable, dsl, etc?

Or Imperial College’s candidate,

… Imperial College alumnus, Donald Watts Davies, the Welsh computer genius regarded by many as the godfather of the internet.

Or Al Gore?

…Earlier today, Xeni spoke with former Vice President Al Gore, internet godfather and co-founder of Current TV,

(Phew, at least I know who Al Gore is. I have heard of Vint Cerf, but a name so unremittingly stunning would stick in the brain anyway, after one hearing. I have never heard of the others.)

Or this candidate on interandom

.. Carnegie Mellon Professor and “Godfather of the Internet” David Farber

Or this from some sort of podcast scraper list:

Thomas Prendergast, CEO of Inetekk & creator ot the Veretekk Automated Lead Generation & Online Marketing System. .. Thousands know him as “The Godfather Of The Internet”…

From MQ magazine

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is considered by many to be the godfather of the internet.

There are loads more Internet godfathers but I got too bored and stopped collecting them.

How many godfathers does the Internet need?
What does it mean to be an Internet godfather?
Do they insist on being called don and putting horse’s heads in the beds of adherents of traditional media?
Or do they grant wishes, like fairy godmothers? I’ll take health, wealth and happiness if they’re still going. Though I’ve never heard of fairy godfathers. Obviously shoudl have paid more attention to the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson and Andrew Lang’s vari-coloured Fairy books. (That’s a link to Project Gutenberg if you want to make a liar of me and find fairy godfathers aplenty.)

There are so many questions here and I’m a bit stumped by not knowing what even a traditional godfather does. I have a fuzzy impression thay promise to bring up the child they are godfathering as a Christian or mafia member, or both, according to context Give a few gifts in exchange for the family’s votes in some Latin political systems? That’s about it.

Is there a godmother of the Internet? On safer ground here. I know what a godmother does. They grant wishes and turn pumpkins into coaches.

Well I found a paltry two candidates,

Takeaway media says

…according to Esther Dyson, the godmother of the internet, we may even see by 2100 the end of life’s only two certainties, death and taxes.

Well, surely a half-decent fairy godmother should be able to sort those little inconveniences out.

Flash Goddess names Lynda Weinman, although she seems unsurprisingly reluctant to claim the title, possibly because she’s not confident about her scullery-maid-to-princess skills.

Q How do you feel about being referred to as the “godmother of the internet”?
A. I’ve never heard myself referred to as that! It’s an uncomfortable and inaccurate label.

Popularity: 27% [?]

From the BBC’s new department of rose tinted glasses:

At 6.30pm, when in times gone by most kids would be sitting round the dinner table, it is not difficult to find a group of teenage drinkers gulping vodka in a quiet corner of Leeds.
At the side of an old cricket pavilion, I found seven young girls and two older boys sharing cigarettes and alcohol. It is hard to imagine stumbling across such a scene 40 years ago.

Well, no it isn’t hard to imagine it at all. In fact, anyone who has been alive for more than about ten years would probably recognise that as a pretty normal scene to stumble across at any time. Or even, to have partaken in.

“Times gone by” when “most kids would be sitting round the dinner table?”

The natural reaction to this sort of bilge is to mention a bit of history. I am trying to rein this in and not go back to the Viking berserkers. I’ll just say, hmm, 40 years ago? Wasn’t that the approximate time of massive “mods” and “rockers” battles every Bank Holiday? They would never have smoked or drank while they were setting about each other with hammers and axes and bike chains, then….

Are we a nation of amnesiacs?

I can’t claim to have read this - too scholarly for light reading and way too costly to buy, but this book that I spotted on Amazon could put the subject in perspective
Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 (Advances in Criminology) Pamela Cox, Dartmouth.

Note that its time span RUNS OUT in 1950. The blurb says it shows

“.. how certain themes have dominated European discourses of delinquency across this period, not least panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability.”

Where are we now? Oh yes, 2007. So when was this golden age when all young people were playing Cluedo with their chums, camping with the Scouts or Guides, going to bell-ringing practice and volunteering to visit the housebound elderly?

Oh, that must have been in an Enid Blyton book, sorry. So, maybe we should all move to live in 1950s children’s literature.

There are indeed some places in England where the lucky teenage offspring of the rural middle class live like this. But even they are likely to be smoking and drinking when they get together. It goes with the territory of being a teenager.

I am not denying there are some seriously dangerous kids. Three men have been killed in a matter of weeks, just for doing the sane adult thing of speaking up when kids are acting badly.
But that doesn’t mean that every kid with a bottle of cider and a ten-pack of Benson and Hedges is a murderous moron.

Most of them are just normal teenagers, who will learn wisdom partly through doing some moderately stupid things, as we all do. And then forget it all again, of course, when they airbrush their own life history to conform to the Enid Blyton world image that even the BBC feels it has to present to the next generation.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Following links from the site of Foehammer, because he’d commented pretty threateningly to a post by the blameless hellshandmaiden I was led instantly to this post in the Irish Independent.

Right, if you are UK resident, don’t conjure up a vision of the pleasant smiling British Independent. This is obviously quite a different paper. The post url is http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/
forget-lilylivered-liberalism-time-to-take-stand-and-say-we-dont-want-muslim-immigrants-1038583.html
(Was overcome by a strange urge to not actually link there….)

The article by Keven Myers - which meets with MC F**hammer’s approval as a sign that people like him are writing for official mass media - has the title
Forget lily-livered liberalism, time to take stand and say we don’t want Muslim immigrants

I guess you have already got the flavour of this post. The clue’s in the title. In fact, it is, if possible, more offensive than the headline suggests, so I’m not going to repeat any of this stuff here.

Hmm. Ignoring the content, with a shudder, I thought “Surely this is illegal?” The Commission for Racial Equality is about to be subsumed into some Diversity Ministry, but it does still exist. There are definitely still laws against stirring up people against minorities in the UK. (I’m not saying this is definitely the solution or that a prosecution would do any good. It would probably just make people like this feel martyred and persecuted and make them even more dangerous … hmm, this argument sounds familar from when I was posting about the cartoon demonstration arrests….)

Maybe they don’t have hate-crime laws in Ireland?

Light bulb comes on above my head

Ahha, so maybe that’s why he published this stuff in Ireland?

Hmm, Ireland, with its massive displaced Muslim population? Not. When on earth did this Muslim immigration to Ireland take off? I suspect that the percentage of the Irish population of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or North African origin is minute (Don’t make me Google the Irish Census.)

So, let’s look directly at this article and say “Hmm, targetted at the UK, then. But he hasn’t got the face to publish this here because he knows he would be prosecuted”

Now, I guess you are thinking “Kevin Myers? Traditional Irish name. Must be a local lad. Why would he even think of publishing in England?”

Well, Kev is no stranger to the higher reaches of UK publishing, either. And, in case you think I got a Dublin broth of a boy confused with some Oxbridge-graduate journalist, this is the title of a piece in the UK’s Daily Telegraph a paper widely seen as a “quality” daily.

I wish I had kicked Susan Sontag

And this appears to be an obituary, ffs. It was written a week after her death and, basically, exults in it.

After sneering at her for being an “intellectual”, he genuinely says that he wished he’d kicked her, basically for being intellectual. He refers to Dr Johnson and Bishop Berkeley to make this seem more of a literary reference than a threat. Can’t say it convinced me. Wasn’t Dr Johnson himself the ultimate 18th century intellectual?

Bear with me here, I am going somewhere with this. He met her in Bosnia, where she was putting on Waiting for Godot.

Meanwhile she ostentatiously disdained us hacks even as she sedulously courted us. It was a grotesque performance. My real mistake was not radioing her co-ordinates to the Serb artillery, reporting that they marked the location of Bosnian heavy armour. My own life would have been a cheap price to pay.

Funny you should say that Kev.

Because Bosnia, Kosovo et al also come into this blog, pretty well by accident. I’ve started to notice how free fanatical anti-Muslim folk are making with the-bits-of-former-Yugolavia story. And not in a good way.

Quick history lesson. What happened in the-bits-of-former-Yugoslavia in the late 1990s? Attempted Anti-Muslim genocide. Well not actually “genocide”, because these people were all pre-war neighbours - Yugoslavs - of very similar genetic background. The word will have to do though. I’m less than happy with using the “ethnic cleansing” eupemism of the time.

So, I think you can assume that mentions of Serbia or Bosnia are in themselves calculated to cause actual fear in Muslims.

Well, on the site of the bafflingly monikered 1389, who is right in there with MC FoeHammer in growling at hellshandmaiden, I see the full flower of this in the signatures to a petition.
This take sup about a third of the blog,

Notice that most names that are not publicly anonymous carry the surname of a Serbian leader &/or war criminal. (Maybe these are just very common names in Serbia. My point stands)

There are two possible explanations. The far-fetched one is that the members of hate-dynasties are just instinctively drawn to this sort of thing, as flies are to excrement. And are all given to reading blogs in English and signing US petitions … Hmm.

The second one is that the people adding names here have deliberately used the names of genocidal Serbs. Even on the most charitable interpretation - that it’s what passes for a joke in these circles - it’s going to cause fear to Muslims. It certainly strikes the fear in me and I’m an atheist.

MC F**Hammer told hellshandmaiden to remember 1938. Oh look. “1389″. Phew, I can stop googling 1389 to find out if it’s a word in some impenetrable new version of l33t. It’s an anagram of 1938. I have to hand it to them as the first time I’ve ever seen a number turned into an anagram. Well, except for people trying to store phone numbers secretly. Surely they aren’t trying to hide the 1938 reference.

Well, what happened in 1938? Buggar, my school History lessons are so out of date. I learned History before the GCSE syllabus was mostly about the Third Reich, so I can’t be certain. Well, I can’t be more than remotely certain. Reichstag Fire? Krystallnacht? Invading the Sudentenland? Annexing Austria? I don’t know lads. You tell us.

By the way, I am not saying these people are connected and I’m not building a conspiracy theory out of it. I am just picking a few threads from the Web.

Popularity: 20% [?]

The Boston Globe has an article purporting to show that Newton believed in Intelligent design so he couldn’t possibly get a decent post in a modern university.

They reach this conclusion via a mode of rhetoric that makes you want to chew your own arm off. It’s like one of those long drawn out jokes in which the punchline is supposed to come as shock.

That is, they characterise the beliefs of an unknown professor in a succession of paragraphs that are supposed to make you think he’s a real extremist fundamentalist.

Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely “intelligent design” but out-and-out divine creation.

Of course, Dawkins’s name gets drawn in, Dawkins somehow having the ultimate say over all academic appointments in the fundy worldview. Read the rest of this post

Popularity: 39% [?]

On Discovery Civilisation (UK version) today, Tony Robinson claimed to have unearthed the “real” heir to the British throne. (I assume this was a repeat of old programme, which I never saw. Noone needs to catch history and science programmes on terrestrial TV if they have cable…)

Humbug! “Real” heir to the throne, indeed? It turned out to be an English Lord somebody who was living in the Australian desert. As an English Lord, albeit no longer owning stately acreage, it was hardly a surprise to him that he was an aristocrat. He hardly needed the genetic fingerprinting, but it got thrown in anyway , so the progarmme seemed more like serious science.

This is the sort of nonsense that passes for history programmes on TV. How do you define “real heir” to the throne? It appears you

• ignore 6 centuries of history, in which the monarchy was abolished and reinstated, and in which contenders to the throne have been imported from Holland or brought as marriage partners from Greece and Germany
• assume the House of Windsor (nee Battenburg) is somehow functionally identical with the House of Tudor
• go back no further than the Plantagents. No need for stressful searching out of Harald’s family or Cnut’s or Aelfred’s, let alone the descendants of Boudicca and the other pre-Roman ruling families
• base your whole claim on one missing marriage from the times of the Plantagenets
• assume the whole nature of royalty is passed on in the blood rather than struggled over in the real world

This is taking the history - the struggles over power and wealth - out of History and replacing it with a strange genetic determinist alternative pesudohistory.

I have ranted before about how TV archeaology’s 3-day-limited bulldozing of sites makes it necessary to find something amazing everywhere - or at least to make an impressive 3-d graphic reconstruction if the best find is a chipped piece of pot.

Is there now also an audience for this absurd genetic determinism? Some dumbing down is more than stupid. It can distort the very nature of how we understand history and society.

You were good in BlackAdder, Tony. In fact, you can get a better understanding of the past from the average Black Adder episode than from 30 Time Team episodes or, Toutatis forbid, Real Royal Family shows.

Popularity: 24% [?]

“People urged to vote for Stonehenge” says the BBC. Vote for Stonehenge? I didn’t know there was another election but maybe an ancient monument could make a better job of running the country than the current political parties, so I’m game.

In fact, this instruction is to do with English Heritage wanting us to vote for Stonehenge, currently languishing well below the bottom of the candidates list, as a new 7th Wonder of the World.

Unusual use of the word “new” there. Surely Stonehenge is older than most of the original 7 wonders, let alone the “new” ones.

The 7 Wonders of the World has a horrible shouty website (though this may be a case of the “pot calling the kettle black” after some of my attempts at creating sites in the past few days, although I had teh grace to bin most of them.) It has so much movement that it makes you feel vaguely nauseous. Which is neither here nor there, except it doesn’t inspire much confidence in the taste of the judges.

To get back to the point, despite being a slavish devotee of megalithic monuments and a lover of Stonehenge, I can’t see that Stonehenge counts as much of a “World Wonder.” Avebury is much more impressive for a start.

Visiting Stonehenge can be a deeply dispiriting experience. The car park, the gift shops, the shuffling walk round in a circle - making you feel you are either an extra in a remake of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or in a WWII queue for dried egg to which everyone else has unaccountably brought a digital camera. And is not afraid to use it.

Not to mention English Heritage’s new plans, which appear to be an excuse for destroying the landscape even more, in order to create even more of an ersatz “Heritage” experience. Will a vote for Stonehenge just encourage them?

Popularity: 21% [?]

There are some comprehensive lists of Roman and Greek gods and goddesses in Gregory Flood’s Lists of Roman Godds and Goddesses.

These were people who didn’t mess about, if they found themselves without a handy god for any occasion. They just made one. There’s a god called Scabies, ffs. (of Itching, in case you wondered).

How did we get from the complex and changing pantheons of the Greeks and Romans and Vikings and Yoruba and Egyptians and indigenous Americans, etc, etc. to the dull God of Abraham? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

There’s an analogy between loss of diversity in species and loss of diversity in beliefs. As humans have shaped more and more of the environment, more unique and colourful species tend to give way under human pressure on their habitats. So, we see the lowest common denominator species prospering. The rat, the cockroach, the pigeon, the housefly all doing very well. (Basically all grey and able to live on s.ite.)

Pantheons reflect a human-centred worldview - a capacity to look for patterns in the universe and human society and to express our innate capacity for transcendence. The list of available gods can be revised in an ongoing basis to accommodate new ones when the old ones don’t work. Human rulers were happy to promote themselves to Godhood, whenever they felt the need.

This suggests that many people were aware that their religions were human constructs but could square this with the social and psychological benefits they got from their rituals. Compared to this, worship of one God seems willfully unsophisticated, and leads to inherent logical contradictions and a need to smite the ungodly.

The one God has expanded to take over the mental and social space we have for deities, dominating whole societies and lives. As far as I can see, this represents an flattening of mental diversity, as when one species - that can live well amongst humans whether we like it or not - replaces the variety that could co-exist in a more fertile environment.

Popularity: 20% [?]

How do you get broadband if you don’t have an Internet connection?

Answer: You phone someone with a net connection to do it for you.

Explanation: TW is currently offline due to having to move to a place in which only the most intrepid ISPs will offer the most minimal services. Thanks to the world-class silliness of Virgin media tech support service, I have also very recently spent another two weeks offline. I will spare you from the uber-dull details, solved eventually again by the Cafe-Nero-style lad who seems to be Virgin’s only competent techy. It was hellish, in a very mild sense of the word “hellish”, true, but, nonetheless, you wouldn’t choose to do it.

In fact, how does anyone live now without being plugged into the matrix of the Net?

Even given the willful Luddism that stops me from doing Internet banking or shopping, I genuinely can’t imagine how we lived before the Internet, let alone before PCs. It’s not that I wasn’t alive, then, either.

But, to be honest, I can barely conceive of there not being an Internet. If ever anything felt like historical inevitability, it’s the world wide web.

How did we get information? Despite dumping industrial quantities of used books on charity shops every time I move, this house is still a book depository. But, it never has a book with the right information when I need it.

Which is always ten minutes ago, because of the “instant information gratification” expectation that has come along with the Internet. So the library won’t do either.

In fact the local library, which was limited enough (with romantic novels, improving multicultural children’s books and fishing hobbyist books filling about 70% of its shelves) has been more or less replaced by a caffeine-beverages-free Internet cafe. The incommoding books got sold off for pennies, even adding a few volumes to the aforementioned book depository.

I seem to remember it was possible to write letters, take photos, contact people, do calculations, play games, draw pictures, play music and so on. It seems unlikely that we did them much, though, given how bloody hard it is to do any of these things without a computer and a net connection.

Pencil and paper are OK. At least they are portable. But, have you tried using a manual typewriter? A calculator? Well, you just wouldn’t, would you? You might as well get out the slate and abacus.

Have you tried even using your PC without the Internet, recently? It’s OK for playing music and doing 3d rendering. After that it’s like playing frisbee with a dog with its back legs cutoff.

Popularity: 20% [?]