Protection against psychics

Posted on Fri, 18 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

UK psychics are objecting to a change in consumer protection law that would prevent them making misleading claims. (So, that would be ALL their claims, basically.) Until this change, a prosecution could only be brought for deliberate fraud.

On the BBC webpage, the public face of the psychics protesting this are the Spiritualist Churches (which survive on the proceeds of the collection box) and “a spiritual healer, shaman and “space clearing consultant” who clearly believes that she provides a genuine service for her fees.

Oddly, I’m in two minds about this. It’s not that I don’t think that profiting from telling nonsense to unhappy people is pretty evil. That is almost too obviously true to bother mentioning.

I just feel a bit uneasy about criminalising yet another aspect of foolish behaviour. Where do you draw the line?

Surely, the more mainstream religions would fall foul of this law. You can hardly prosecute someone for channelling an imaginary dead relative, if you are going to allow other people to claim that their deity will take you into paradise after you are dead.

On the positive side, the law might provide me with good grounds for demanding endless prosecutions of the popular press – or, at least, getting out-of-court settlements from them to stop my newly-litigation-hungry self. Quite apart from the fact that the papers make misleading claims about society every day of the week, those daily horoscopes are definitely not matching up with my reality.

The Office of Fair Trading says enforcement of the new regulations will not target sessions like this or churches, instead being more likely to be used against foreign mass mailshot fraudsters extracting large sums of money. (BBC report)

Note the use of the word “foreign.” You might wonder if that means that our own lovable-cockney-villain mass mailshot fraudsters will be exempt, then. At the risk of being a broken record, I seriously resent the casual fostering of foreigner-hatred that is increasingly passing for public discourse in the UK.

So this is an anti-spam law? I am confused. I thought fraud was already a crime, although observers of the higher reaches of the property and banking industries might not see much evidence that this is true.

I will take it that this new law implies that internet fraud isn’t actually a crime yet. so I am hurriedly drafting some 419 scam emails, as we speak….. Although, maybe I should just engage the apathy-sketchpad blogger to do my email composition He has one of the funniest examples of scammer-scammed correspondence that I’ve ever seen, complete with web forms he created just to drag the scammmer further and further into his trap.

Photographers become new enemies of the state

Posted on Thu, 17 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Greetings, any time travellers who’ve accidentally crash-landed in the present. If you’ve come from ten years ago, say, you really have my sympathy. You may find some things are a bit of shock. I bet this little story will come as a surprise, for a start, but this is just one of the subtle but wonderful improvements we’ve made to your superficially identical world.

Labour MP Austin Mitchell has tabled a Parliamentary motion in support of photographers’ rights.

As a time traveller, you may have idly wondered about the elongated metal rectangles and darkened globes that you see everywhere. They are not uninspired art pieces. These are cameras. CCTV cameras. They don’t need any “rights” because they already have them all. (They are theoretically under the control of some data protection law that says you can have any footage of you but Dom Joly showed, on television last week, that you have a 0 out of 35 chance of getting it.)

It turns out that it’s only the meat-based photographers who are short of rights. The humanoids with visble cameras, with lenses and lens caps and a carrying strap and a bag full of odds and ends. These humanoids are increasingly being challenged for taking pictures. Camerabots are free to take pictures of whatever they want. I think it’s guaranteed in Asimov’s Forth Law of Robotics or something.

The BBC page mentions a photographer who was stopped from taking a picture of a soap star switching on Christmas lights. (I will pointedly not wonder why anyone wants a picture of a Y-list celeb showing that they are capable of operating an On switch.)

The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera.
After explaining he didn’t need one, he was taken down a side-street for a formal “stop and search”, then asked to delete the photos and ordered not to take any more. (from the BBC)

A licence? To take pictures in public place? Where do we get these handy licences? I might need to pick one up when I get my next mp3-player operation licence and my permit to read on the bus.

Even Austin Mitchell has found that he’s been stopped from taking pictures:

Mr Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, was challenged twice, once by a lock-keeper while photographing a barge on the Leeds to Liverpool canal and once on the beach at Cleethorpes.
“There’s a general alarm about terrorism and about paedophiles, two heady cocktails, and police and PCSOs [police community support officers] and wardens and authorities generally seem to be worried about this.” (from the BBC)

The BBC shows a Metropolitan police poster that asks the public to be vigilant about people taking photographs. (I couldn’t find mention of it on their website.) Hmm, that will be people taking photographs in public in London. That was “London”:a popular (if sometimes inexplicably so) global tourist destination. Tourists: you know, the ones with the cameras.

And the shamelessnessness of constantly using the terrorist/paedophile-kneejerk-panic-effect to get us into line. Terrorists with any intelligence would take their pictures on a phone camera or a hidden camera. They wouldn’t walk round with a big obtrusively-lensed Nikon slung round their necks. And I suspect that there is nothing magic about photos for paedophiles, either. If they can see a kid in the street, they can see a kid in the street, whether or not they’ve taken their picture. Do kids magically become invisible to paedophiles when they aren’t in digital format?

*********Asides – related and random***************

1. In a charming irony, there is an incredibly expensive (£250 million, almost $500 million) and laughable plan to get all the Metropolitan police electronically tagged, like so many absconding juveniles. Who watches the watchers indeed? Well, you can watch them with a GPS but you’d better not take their pictures.

2. The Mr Smith story above reminds me of the orchestrated Daily Mail-style clamour for an extension of “stop and search” powers. This man was pulled out of a crowd and searched, apparently on the basis of being in possession of a photographic device with intent to use it.

It’s pretty obvious that Mr Smith didn’t look “a bit muslim” (unlike Jean Charles de Menezes) or the story might have been much worse. And just imagine what would have happened if he didn’t understand enough English to know that he was being “stopped and searched” so he’d just carried on taking pictures at will.

3. This blog gets many more hits when we don’t actually post. (That speaks volumes for the quality of the prose. Yes, I know.)

Mysterious crop squares

Posted on Mon, 14 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Mysterious crop squares, almost certainly the work of our new insect overlords, have been discovered on Flickr images.

The WAT isn’t working….

Posted on Sun, 13 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith seems to have accidentally condemned her own anti-terror strategy in an interview with scandal-sheet New-Newspaper-of-Record,the News of the World.

She claimed that the threat of terrorism is growing:

Ms Smith said: “We now face a threat level that is severe. It’s not getting any less, it’s actually growing.
“There are 2,000 individuals they are monitoring. There are 200 networks. There are 30 active plots.

With the tenuous grasp on logic with which she is increasingly becoming associated, she treats this as a justification for the plan to extend detention without trial for 42 days. She claims the current strategy isn’t working, to the point at which the danger is actually increasing? Why call for a extension of the same strategy?
The BBC reported that MPs of all parties are increasingly unwilling to sign off on this.

Keith Vaz, Labour chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, said ministers did not have enough support in parliament to carry the plans.

Way to go, Jacqui! You can’t get MPs to agree to this doomed and self-defeating nonsense, although you’ve been pushing it for a long time. So, you go straight to the critical-thinking-challenged among the masses and try to fill them with more fear, in a last-ditch attempt to get support for a policy that defies logic.

Jacqui Smith’s nice round numbers raise instant suspicion. 30 active plots? Either a plot exists or it doesn’t. If a government knows about a terrorist plot but ignores it, is it doing its job at all? And haven’t there been “30 plots” for months now? Haven’t any been attempted or abandoned in the interim?

Maybe, there’s a shortage of evidence. In which case the words “suspected plots” might have been more appropriate. And how would the blurry details of these suspected plots become magically clearer if the suspected protagonists are to be held without trial for 42 days?

Selfish human that I am, I don’t like the idea of getting suicide bombed on the Underground. I expect my government to be working to provide some reasonable level of security.

It’s just that I don’t see how this can ever be achieved by strengthening extremism by:
* Carrying out foreign policies that actively make the world more dangerous;
* Supporting communal division by encouraging faith schools;
* Fostering enmity amongst the friends and families of the falsely accused.
* and so on…… I can’t keep repeating this stuff.

Plus, of course, bringing in repressive laws to “fight terrorism” then blithely using them at will…..

I am the Law

Posted on Sat, 12 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Relatively new (to me) general laws named after people that I’ve recently come across:

Godwin’s Law, mentioned in Black Sun Journal “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

Hanlon’s Razor, mentioned in Barefoot Bum: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Brook’s Law: mentioned in someone’s course book “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

There was even a superb post on NewsBiscuit “Archbishop claims introduction of Sod’s Law is inevitable“, very funny if you get the reference (Archbishop of Canterbury and Shari’a Law), probably even funny, if you don’t.

Here’s a quote:

Sod’s Law has already been introduced in some parts of the UK. New Welsh secretary, Paul Murphy, introduced his own version of the law in Wales this month. From 1 February ‘Murphy’s Law’ dictates that anyone who applies for a public sector post will be interviewed by panel that includes the driver you crashed into on the way to the interview or an ex-girlfriend who found you in bed with her sister.

Wikipedia beat me to the punch in my plan of listing all the laws that are named after someone. It has a whole page titled List of eponymous laws. Most of them are standard Boyles’ Law-style Laws but they also have the new ones.

Linus Torvalds is the only person whose Law was named for his first name.

Linus’s law — named for Linus Torvalds, states “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.

I can’t find a single female. That’s not to say that there are no females in the list. I don’t know. I not only never heard of most of these people, I’ve never heard of most of the Laws. Nor can I think of when they might apply.

I’m taking it that they are general principles. Otherwise the temptation to break ones like

Reilly’s law — of Retail Gravitation, people generally patronize the largest mall in the area.

would be well nigh overwhelming. It’s a bit wishy-washy anyway… “generally.” Much I would like to flout it by going to the smallest mall I could find, it seems a bit too unprescriptive for a full-scale law, so hardly worth the effort of breaking it.

# Rothbard’s law — everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.
# Sarnoff’s law — the value of a broadcast network is proportional to the number of viewers.

I am not at all convinced by Rothbard’s law. Otherwise I’d be running a housekeeping service. And Sarnoff? What. Any business’s value depends on the number of its customers. What sort of a meaningful Law is that? How did he get his name stuck on a Law on the basis of so banal an observation?

I’m leading up to a point…..

It’s about time there was a Law coined by a female, so I am volunteering. Following Linus, I’m going to use my first name. (Well, my first name as in nom de blog.) I thought of plundering Oscar Wilde’s work for all those pithy sayings, presented in an arch Law-like way. Too cowardly, and it would be breaking a plagiarism Law. Here’s my first humble effort.

Heather’s Law: “Any general observation is more likely to be be presented as a Law the more closely it approaches a truism”

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.

Comment spam up by 76% percent

Posted on Thu, 10 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

I made up the number. Spurious statistics are so convincing.

Spam is definitely up though, as you know very well if you have a blog. If it weren’t for Akismet, this blog would be buried under the weight of it. A year or so ago, a few comment spams would be waiting in the Delete queue every couple of days. Now there are about 60 a day. And the buggers are growing in length. There are single spams with lists of keywords and links long enough to fill a few sides of A4. (Letter for those used to US paper sizes.)

Calculated across the whole lifetime of this blog, there have been 9 comment spams to every post. (That’s a real statistic. I didn’t just make it up, honest. I even used Calculator.) Given that Akismet wasn’t installed for a many months and that most of these spams have arrived in the past few months, the ratio of spam to post is currently very much higher.

My plan was to list the most ludicrous. But they aren’t even funny. They offer porn, online medicines, cars, loans, yada yada, yada. I imagine that even someone who is desperate to buy any of these would think twice about clicking on a link on a spam comment. In fact, is it even remotely possible that someone without an attested mental illness has ever clicked on one of these links in blogspam?

More sophisticated spams aim to pass a cursory blog-entry Turing test by using stock human phrases. Ofteb in a mechanical “translated-from-the-Finnish-using-Babelfish” way. E.g. two of this evening’s crop are “very true statement, we have gotten in much trouble on that notion historically.” and “Hi! Without taking into account the issue of establishing a stone by God, which he won’t be able to pick up, how do you think, may be something in this world, what can God never see?”

What? The characters come from the Western European standard characterset; the words are in an English dictionary; the sentences have nouns and verbs and punctuation – generally including a liberal use of the exclamation mark!!! But the phrases might as well be in a management report for all the sense they convey.

Some comments fake having read a blog post, with generic comments that could apply to any post – “Interesting post on *name of blog* today” – or claims that they haven’t quite understood what you were saying but want to know more. Well, they’re bots, ffs. Of course they haven’t understood your post. You were addressing a mammalian readership.

Others shamelessly flatter your writing style or your blog in general. (“Good portal!” “I like this work!”) The idea must be that the recipient is so blinded by recognition of their innate genius that they fail to notice it’s a spam and let the comment through. My head is at least as easily turned by dumb admiration as anyone’s, but even I have to pass this unsolicited admiration through reality filters.

In fact, these spams really annoy me because sometimes I do just want to comment on someone’s blog to say “Good post.” I’ve got nothing witty or pertinent to contribute. I just want to let the writer know I enjoyed it. But, the fact that it makes me seem like a comment spammer puts a stop to that.

A major irritation caused by spams is that we often accidentally delete real comments that have ended up in the spam pile. If you are commenting from an academic IP, it’s pretty certain that your institution’s email has been used to pour out spam, so Akismet is likely to block you. For a blogger, s it’s sometimes too much effort to pore through 40 comments on the offchance that one is a real person. So, real comments get thrown out, in a baby and bathwater scenario.

Comment spam costs pretty well nothing to create, so whatever the producers charge their customers must be pure profit. Bah. Some bugger is making money while you’re wasting your precious life-force deleting the latest missive from “daniel@msn.com” (a regular spam commenter whom we’ll probably all recognise).

Akismet does a fair job of dealing with it. I don’t know what other solution there is – or if it even matters as more than a stupid waste of bandwidth.

I obsessively look up the IPs and locations of the worst ones. Toutatis only knows why. (Most of the IPs will be spoofed anyway.) But I can glare at Riga or direct withering scorn at Hong Kong on Google Earth and feel that “I’ve got your number”. That must count for something…

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.

Who is stealing my life?

Posted on Tue, 8 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Idly browsing HJhop’s blog, I looked at the post What the critics are saying about HJHop.

As funny as ever, a mixture of plaudits and insults.

I was pleased to see this blog was in there, and even our uber-prestigious silver cup thing award was proudly displayed. Idly thinking, “it’s about time I posted some new favourites. I might even Photoshop a novel silver cup” and ….

Oh shit. The date on his post was May 5, 2007….. Even assuming that this was somehow posted the day after he got the award, that means almost a year – a year – has passed. My life is circling the event horizon….

So, I suspect it’s taken me a year to even notice that HJHop post. It’s obviously taken me even longer to pick a new Top Ten, because I haven’t decided on one yet. I’ll set a new Top Ten date for this year’s, then, and pretend it’s an annual award.

Ah, I’ve just found my old top ten post, “October 27th, 2007” Phew. I’ve snatched half a year back.

Still, I’ve committed myself now. I’m going to choose 1 May, because that is the day I always wash my face in the dew to stay beautiful forever. Old English superstition folk custom. As far as I can tell, it works 🙂 (Rain usually has to stand in for dew. Even suspected dog-piss at a push. OK, I’m not 100% sure that I can recognise dew, but it’s the thought that counts.)

So, 1 May it is. If anyone wants to corrupt the judging panel – by offering cash incentives or posting brilliant blogs – you have a couple of weeks or so left to try. There may even be an updated award icon but that isn’t a promise.

What is prayer, anyway?

Posted on Sun, 6 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

There’s very interesting post on the un-biblical nature of Prayer in schools on GodBeGone.

It made me aware that I have no real understanding of what the word “prayer” means. The biblical quotation on GodBeGone suggests that it’s basically supposed to be thinking or meditating, but with reference to an invisible friend.

Well, OK, I actually relate to that, in a historical way. I can remember being four years old and speaking to my invisible friend in the airing cupboard. I don’t think I expected much of an answer, let alone thought I’d get any requests answered.

I don’t believe that meditating on the wonders of the universe counts as prayer, if you don’t direct it at an invisible friend. Otherwise, “prayer” would describe any transcendent response – e.g. to a walk in the wilderness – and would have no specific meaning at all.

Morning prayers in school involved mouthing ritual phrases and sneakily peeking around, while pretending to look down at the floor. It genuinely never occurred to the child-me that this was supposed to have a spiritual dimension. I assume the purpose was to let the teachers settle in to a day’s work and/or to teach us the patience of the queue. (That lesson didn’t take either.)

And the holding your hands in front of you in an arrow shape? (I can’t remember having to do that at school. Maybe we didn’t have to.) Why? Is it a prayer targetting device? Prayers might not reach the man in the sky if we just let them fall.

Prayer through the television and over the Internet? If prayer is targetted meditation or group membership affirmation, how are these supposed to work?

My most recent acquaintance with prayer was at an aunts’ funeral. The occasion was very moving, with beautiful, funny and affectionate speeches from her sons and grandchildren. Despite the setting – a lovely country church – the “religious” component was limited to one prayer, made by the vicar.

I watched and listened. I didn’t even understand – until my brother bizarrely congratulated me for refusing to bow my head – that I wasn’t doing the right thing. Bizarre, because I certainly wouldn’t have thought a funeral was a suitable occasion to proclaim non-belief. I would have willingly bowed my head and made the pointy hand gesture if I’d thought anyone would care. It wouldn’t have been prayer, though, or would it?

Like most non-believers, I tend to see prayer as special pleading in pursuit of a goal. Flatter the omnipotent one and he won’t smite you. If you are really obsequious, he’ll even give you thinks you want or solve your problems. Even unselfish prayers for world peace or someone else’s recovery from illness seem to depend on an idea that there’s a creature who COULD do whatever you want but is refusing until you ask nicely and say “please.” There must be more to it than that, though.

This is a serious question. I would really appreciate any sincere and non-lunatic ex-religious or currently-religious responses. Especially, about the public prayer stuff. What exactly is prayer? What does it feel like when you’ve done it successfully? Why do you do it? Are there lots of different definitions with different meaning?

Anthropology and the sociology of religion provide answers at the social level – strengthening group cohesion; magical rituals, spreading values, etc. These characterise behaviours, though, rather than what prayer means to an individual.

“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.

Red Russians

Posted on Sat, 5 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Black Russian squirrels attacked and killed a dog.

This story turns out to be a couple of years old, so its appearance in today’s Most read sectiion of the BBC website might be an overrun April Fools Day joke. But this more recent one about Scottish squirrels definitely isn’t a spoof:

Red squirrels get their own tsar

I hope for their sakes that they also get their own kremlin and politburo so they are properly organised to defend themselves against any Black Russian squirrels who try to claim him back.

New Dr Who series

Posted on Sat, 5 April, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

There’s a hallowed Whydontyou tradition that this blog has to get out a quick comment on any new Dr Who series. The first episode was OK, on balance.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Catherine Tate (a UK comedian) and it was a national embarrassment to see Tony Blair mouthing her catchphrases (worse even than his Simpson’s cameo.) Her Dr Who character just seemed like a more sympathetic portrayal of half of her standard comedy characters. All the same, she’s very gifted and wasn’t as irritating as she might have been.

It was telling to realise that I was actually hoping for the return of Billie Piper, although her apperance seems to have just been a two-second teaser. According to the Register, Lily Allen was the top assistant choice in November. I don’t know if that was just a wild Register rumour or if it’s still a possibility. IMHO, the best assistant in the new set of Dr Who series has been Freema Agyeman.

The space ship effects were good. I’m a sucker for well done 3-d graphics and good special effects.

(Except for the hanging bit, which was exactly as silly as almost every other “hanging from the side of a building” scene ever. I mean, just try hanging from anything, even if your life DOESN’T depend on it. If you can manage 15 seconds and you aren’t an experienced mountain climber – total respect. Or try and find a multi-storey building that doesn’t generate its own wind system. )

Cultural refs:

A merge of the Supernanny and Anne Robinson stereotypes of bossy female Englishwomen. There aren’t many recognizable examples outside the TV world and some newspaper columns, but, hey, that’s the world now anyway.
The supposedly increasingly fat UK population is a really popular topic, of course. Here the idea was that excess lard turned into a life form, which was an entertaining idea.
People’s endless desire for any diet pills that will magically trim fat.
Office work. Office blocks. Those cages that hold the window cleaners who don’t actually have to abseil down the side of your building.
Alien visitor, crop circles and random conspiracy theories. Need I say more. Obviously, they usually turn out to be true in Dr Who.

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.

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

Protection against psychics

Photographers become new enemies of the state

Mysterious crop squares

The WAT isn’t working….

I am the Law

Obama speaks simple truth – gets hammered

Welcome to HM Open Prison United Kingdom

Comment spam up by 76% percent

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend

Who is stealing my life?

What is prayer, anyway?

“Concentration camp for children”

Red Russians

New Dr Who series

AIG in the UK

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: