Clarkson, Clarksoff

I see that Jeremy Clarkson has finally been suspended by the BBC big-wigs; it's not clear what for yet though I suspect most people could take an educated guess.

Top Gear used to be a good programme, it was original and novel for its time, but for me for years now it's been formulaic, predictable and by definition mostly boring. Millions still love it of course, most middle aged, middle class, fat, slightly balding men (who like Rugby and own an Audi, Porsche, Range Rover or Barbour jacket) I know, treat it like some kind of personal philosophy mantra; a political manifesto for petrol heads. I don't subscribe. My sense is that it's really just a simple template for a TV programme, a celebration of ignorance Benny Hill style; or possibly faked ignorance, that's dressed up as "a bit of fun". What bugs me though is that often, real bigotry is camouflaged in this way too, this uncertainty is possibly even the reason for it's success?

Perhaps you're the kind of Top Gear fan that likes the "one of the lads" feeling you get from hearing three old curmudgeons saying sexist or racist things out loud on prime-time TV, saying what needs to be said; sticking it to the nanny state who have insulted your manhood by making you adhere to a ridiculous speed limit when it's quite obvious you're easily skilled enough to drive as fast as you like on the A34! Or perhaps you think this really is "edgy comedy" and therefore to openly enjoy it means you're clearly not sexist or racist, no no, you're hip enough to know it's all just a joke. Either way, a knowing nudge and a wink would probably affirm your brotherly "cool wall" bond but not for the reason you think. Then there are all the recurring controversial themes like climate change denial, homophobia, mocking the disabled, cultural stereotyping and the constant slagging off of electric cars like the Tesla Roadster (this was very murky in my view) and many others - whatever your soap-box subject, there's clearly something for everyone, even a bit of religion bashing!.

Clarkson clearly exploits a particular crowd and has grown very wealthy on the back of it, good luck to him, such is the way of things. I see no evidence that his audience object in the slightest, quite the opposite and whatever happens I'm sure he'll be enjoyed by many via his various media outlets for years to come. I'm not one for banning or censoring, Clarkson can say whatever he likes, he is a Genesis fan after all and people do know where the switch channel button is if they're offended. I do however think it might just be time to freshen this BBC programme up a bit, get some new (younger) blood in to tackle the road transport challenges and powertrain controversies of this century rather than last; in a humorous way of course; anti-Clarkson types like Frankie Boyle or Charlie Brooker perhaps?

And on that bombshell...

Festival of Wood

My local craft brewer (Siren Craft Brew) held a little shindig on Saturday to celebrate the combination of beer and wood; namely the aging of certain types of beer in various wooden casks (i.e. casks that previously held things like whiskey and cognac). Some mates and I spent a rather fine afternoon setting the world to rights and supping numerous samples of the amber (sometimes yellow, sometimes black) necker.

The beers I tried were as follows,

Kernel, Biere de Saison - A light, citrus, sour, wine barrel aged Saison (4%) from keg  7/10
Siren, Sound Wave - West Coast style IPA, hoppy (5.6%) from keg 7/10
Harbour Ales, Barrel Aged Dunkel - Bordeaux barrel aged (6.8%), vanilla, cream and hops 8.5/10
Wild Beer Co., Special Sourdough - Aged Saison style beer, sour and citrus (4%) 4/10
Siren, Broken Dream - Porter style, coffee, chocolate, thick creamy (6%) 7/10
Mikkeller, Spontantripleblueberry - 1kg of berries/litre, thick, reddish, beer smoothie (10%) 7/10
Siren, Liquid Mistress - Red IPA, raisins, hoppy (5.8%) 7.5/10

All followed by a Chicken Dhansak and Pilau rice, life is good.

Camouflaged ego's

Next time one of those (know-nothing) management guru types tells you "there's no i in team", suggest that they check their "A-hole", which will be tricky as they will almost certainly be speaking from it at the time.

Good as gold

So the Apple Watch is here, a range of models from $349 right up to an eye-watering $17,000 (£11000) for some of the 18 carat gold versions. Unbelievably there is no difference (functionally) between the cheapest and the most expensive models meaning that the price differential is purely down to the materials used. I'm not sure I'd pay £11K for a lump of cheap gold; but then I suppose this product isn't really aimed at technology buyers like me, more your aspirational types perhaps. Still, I think it will do well and so I've already started playing around with the Watch Kit which is Apple's SDK (software development kit) to see if I can get inspired to build a couple of apps for it; the gestures and haptic features in conjunction with the inter-device connectivity (which they make really easy) are particularly interesting for business oriented notification style applications.

Discoveries

Big ideas helping and enriching so many, had by so few; nice little poster although I'm not sure that developing "XML" is in the same league as "On the origin of species" or special relativity somehow?

Flying solo?

Just heard the news that Harrison Ford has crashed landed his plane into a golf course in Santa Monica; hope everyone is OK.

Lucky guy..

Saw this video doing the rounds today, it's a guy in Australia who was unfortunate enough to have an epileptic seizure whilst sky-diving. Luckily for him his jump partner who was filming had the wherewithal to catch up with him and pull his rip-cord; a feat of supreme quick-thinking and spacial awareness! Apparently the man regained consciousness at 3000 feet and managed to land his canopy OK; I bet there were some beers bought in gratitude that evening!

Perfect tribute

I'm taking some time off bitching about religious perversion and idiocy; their delusional clap-trap is so pervasive and depressing that sometimes you need a break to recharge the batteries on more positive and inspiring things. Here's a picture taken by NASA astronauts from the ISS, it's a LLAP tribute to Leonard Nimoy who died recently and played Spock in Star Trek, one of my all time favourite film franchises and a staple TV series when I was growing up as a boy.

Avijit Roy

This was the moment that author and Bangladeshi blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death while walking home from a book fair in Dhaka; his wife Rafida was also seriously injured losing a finger in the attack. Avijit was an Atheist and author of a well known free-thought/secular blog which promoted rational thinking in his native Bengali language.

Islamism, it's insecurity and ingrained victim-hood psychopathy would appear to underpin this murder (again) it seems not a single day passes when we don't hear of some violent attack against an act of free-speech or indeed any unfortunate soul who dares hold a different view to these thugs. The people that suffer the most are the poor sods who have to live alongside or under the heal of these groups, mostly Muslims of course; its hard to imagine what that must be like. The closest perhaps is that it's akin to being held in a WWII Japanese POW camp, where the psychopathic guards feel free to beat you to within an inch of your life at any moment for a completely random infraction, all the while stealing your food parcels and burning letters home; the stress and feeling of hopelessness must be unbearable. Here's a link to his last ever article you can see what a reasonable, peace loving and enlightened chap he was.

People like to think this kind of bullying and intimidation couldn't happen here in the UK, I believe they are wrong about that. We don't even need to concern ourselves with the thuggish behaviour of certain Islamist groups we only need to read the drivel pumped out by the likes of Eric Pickles MP who sounds just like a proto-theocrat when he says "Faith should no longer be treated as a personal hobby which should be for the few". For those people besotted by "magic" (as Pickles clearly is), after centuries of privilege and protection any dissenting voice threatens to break the spell; that's why such voices are heard as an "attack" and not the reasonable argument that they invariably are. In the end Secularists simply want there to be parity between all religions and none in the public square, such that no specific group has a privileged platform upon which to proselytise (as Pickles so blatantly abuses) or impose its supernatural beliefs on others, is that too much to ask?

Islamist tools

This is what ignorance looks like. Sometimes it amazes me when religious people here in the UK moan and bitch about their faith being "attacked" by secularists for simply expressing contrary views using words and pictures, they should get far more excited about their fellow religionists if you ask me!

Take a look at the morons in this image; these wannabe theological Einstein's are so insecure in their beliefs that they feel the need to destroy artefacts from a civilisation that died over 2000 years ago; as if it represents some kind of threat to their Deity. All we can reasonably conclude is that God is not that "great", he clearly needs help from Wickes DIY! (it's good to see Thor being celebrated here, nothing like getting completely hammered!)

The only positive I can draw from these images is the certainty that all religions, creeds, countries, cultures and Gods eventually die out and are consigned to the dustbin of history; for some that day cannot come soon enough.

It's true, for me...

You have to laugh at the way some of our religious brothers and sisters defend their pet delusions; for example by trying to argue that science is "just a belief system" like theirs. They freely toss words around like "theory" and "proof" in arbitrary and obfuscating ways. They say things like, "the fact I personally experienced the spirit of Jesus when I was at my lowest ebb of depression is proof that God cares for all of us, whereas Evolution, well, that's just a theory". They must hope that creating such conflation and false equivalence somehow deflects people from engaging with their assertions and negates them having to justify themselves, heaven forbid they might suffer "offence" a word that is increasingly coming to mean simply "disagree with".

This is how the game goes... suggesting that a particular behaviour or idea is irrational or divisive from the logical/rational or secular perspective becomes an "attack", simply pointing out that what we understand about reality makes the religious position highly unlikely becomes "scientism", questioning subjective and out-dated traditions becomes "militancy", expressing your views via a personal blog or newspaper article becomes "stridency"; you get the idea.

Let's face it, apologists everywhere would like nothing better than for Science and Secularism to keep it's nose out of religion; in fact they would prefer it if religious ideas were protected from criticism completely via blasphemy or ridiculously "PC" hate-speech laws and many support violence to that end. What they universally fail to admit or acknowledge is that Religion so often oversteps it's boundaries and "interferes" unjustly with people's lives that any possibility of quid pro quo with secularists disappeared long ago. My own view is that the question of free-speech is not one where a solution can be found half-way; either we have it or we don't, it's a binary thing. We must allow a plurality of views and protect none; ideas must stand or fall based on their own merits. Unfortunately for the religious they have no objective way of showing the rest of us that their ideas are true, rationalists have evidence, the superstitious have only faith.

When you think about it, Science is one of the the only (major) fields of Human endeavour that demands scrutiny via peer review, even then it's not perfect, cheats and scoundrels sometimes get away with murder, but even so, religion has no such checking mechanism and therefore the scope for hucksterism is many fold. When was the last time you heard a politician or a priest announce that they'd welcome more robust rebuttal, more evidence against their position or more universal exposure of the weaknesses of their arguments, imagine what that would even look like..

"What we really want is more critical thinking and evidence based scrutiny of ALL religions taught from junior school upwards; teach kids to think for themselves and not just accept authority" - said no Pope/Bishop/Rabbi/Mullah ever.

When you hear a believer say "it's true.... for me" that's the precise moment of self deception; they know it, you know it but they have too much invested to admit that.

Keep your enemies closer?

Saudi Arabia shows again today that it's ruling elite subscribe to a system that treats subjects as property, their lives can be given or taken away according an ever changing (and politically expedient) interpretation of certain verses of their holy book, and by definition, the convenient ignoring of other verses.

A man from the Northern town of Hafr al-Batin apparently uploaded a video clip of him tearing up a Koran (which he owned) and hitting it with a shoe, a Saudi court has sentenced him to death. Shown above is our King in waiting Prince Charles who is as thick as thieves with the Saudi royals and judging by this photo is either practising his Sun Tzu by keeping enemies closer than friends or is so callous that he's indifferent to the human suffering that this backward regime imposes in the name of it's inhumane and immoral ideology, Wahhabism; let's all hope it's the former.

The books always go first...

It would seem that ISIS is intent on reversing every hard won civilised norm from the last 500 years, burning people alive, beheading, slavery, genocide and to round off all that - now they're burning books. Apparently the public library in Mosul has been raised to the ground by a mob of these Islamist cult followers and the many rare books and manuscripts housed there are no more.

Despots throughout the ages have always done this, from the Christians at Alexandria to the Nazis on Kristallnacht; the more insecure your intellectual foundations then the more likely it is that you need to erase the learning of the past in order to inculcate your own dogmas. If ideas stand on their own two feet (i.e. they're good ones) and can be argued through reason and evidence then you don't need censorship, pogroms or apostasy to protect them, it's as simple as that.

And the Oscar goes to...

Its that time of the year again, when the Hollywood great and good congratulate themselves on another year of creativity and cash-flow. As a film fan I tend toward the more "independent" end of the spectrum, I usually find mainstream Romance/Comedy/Action films a bit "formula" these days, there is the odd exception of course. For example, I particularly liked the geek orientation of some of the top films last year, I thought "the theory of everything" and "the imitation game" were both excellent, as was Boyhood. For me the only general category that seems to be pushing boundaries these days in Hollywood is Science Fiction. I think largely born out of the revolution in CGI that has happened in the last 10 years but also the effect of latching onto the wonderful comic-book hero narratives that came out of the 50's and 60's especially from the houses of DC and Marvel. Pixar would also be pivotal in my book and of course, later this year we get JJ Abrams version of Star Wars, something eagerly awaited in our household.

I don't pay much attention to the Oscars (Eddie Redmayne deserved one for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking) but I did read a funny story about the "Razzies" which are essentially the "anti-Oscars" handed out for the very worst films of the year, the "golden raspberry" for worst film of the year was awarded to Christian film "Saving Christmas" by creationist, science denier and all round dimwit Kirk Cameron of "banana-man" fame (worth a watch if you need a laugh); many commentators suggested that this film, described as having "no cinematic value whatsoever", may even clinch the coveted "worst film of all time" award, high (anti) praise indeed!

What's that in old money?

In praise of Fahrenheit; it's more organic...

Memories

Watched a documentary on the Prog-Rock group Genesis last night, called "together and apart" it tracked the story of their formation, evolution and demise spanning almost 4 decades. All the main twists and turns were covered, bust-ups, fall-outs and theatrical excesses but I must admit the band members all looked pretty good for a bunch of old gits in their mid-60s and the film really captured something of the group "dynamic", really fascinating.

What struck me most was that listening to clips of the classics spanning their entire discography it was amazing they had so many memorable songs and also how those albums provided a kind of soundtrack to my life. Not that I didn't love other bands as much, I did, but for every album shown I could remember precisely where I was, who I was with and what I was doing; it left me with the feeling of a real journey. I'm sure many other people feel this way about this music, it was that kind of music; these days my kids look at me in horror at the thought of listening to a whole album in one go, it seems the world prefers things sliced up into smaller pieces these days.

I'm working from home today as I have a raging sore throat and burgeoning cold but the upside is that I have Supper's Ready blaring out at full blast!

Double standards

Dinosaur deniers?

I came across a stupid web-site today called "Christians against dinosaurs" it's basically a site that claims dinosaurs never existed and fossils are a conspiracy by scientists against the delusion that the Earth is only 6 thousand years old (as per a literal interpretation of the Bible). Now, this is such a stupid idea that this web-site surely has to be a fake, a spoof, but then again religiously inspired ideas can be so dumb sometimes that you never know, it could be real..

In the video this woman claims that fossils are not bones but rocks (kind of true) but then goes on to say that scientists excavating fossils carve out the intricate shapes themselves, complying with previous notions of what the bones of a particular dinosaur should look like. (if real) this lady clearly has never been fossil hunting, she should try it, anyone can and it's great fun and nothing like she imagines.

Below is a picture of a fossil my son found last year on a trip to Charmouth beach in Dorset, it's a 200 million year old Ammonite (we found lots), if he carved this out using his bare hands in the 5 seconds it took him to cleave the rock and turn around to show me I'll eat my left testicle.

You may well ask how I know this fossil is 200 million years old; that's another wonderful story of scientific discovery but rather than going into that now perhaps we should see if "Christians against dinosaurs" make a video about radiometric dating methods too; at least then we'll have a low-tide mark of ignorance upon which to build.

Round up

For a change I thought I'd do a quick round up of stories so far this week that grabbed my attention sufficiently to form some kind of opinion, here's a selection..

Designers: I notice that Apple design guru Jony Ive is in the news for slagging off a phone design concept from rival firm Motorola; in doing so he perfectly illustrates why he's a designer and not a businessman. First rule of sales, don't get caught publicly slagging off your competitors, especially on subjective matters like design, it just makes you look like a dick. This market is big enough for all kinds of players and design isn't necessarily the most important factor for many people; no point in alienating potential customers by intimating that they are "wrong" if they don't buy into your particular philosophy. Like many creative people he has an air of arrogance about him which he almost certainly doesn't see and which I suspect is also instrumental in his undoubted success. He has strong views on things and is single minded, a strength and a weakness rolled into one; this is one of the reasons why he's probably best exploited in Apple by being put on a pedestal in a glass box and told to make the latest widget "shiny" and not speak to people, a case of less is more.

Football: We've all become accustomed lately to re-awakening phrases and words that most of us thought were consigned to the dustbins of history; words like "blasphemy" and "apostasy" along with phrases like "offending the prophet". I notice this week that we need to re-open yet another pointless tribal bullshit term, "football hooligan". Along with large swaths of the Islamic world it would appear that some Chelsea fans still inhabit the past; a past where it's reasonable to be intolerant, racist and homophobic and where those who threaten mindless violence get their way. It's a shame that there isn't as much public outcry when some poor soul is violently abused by a Government in say, Saudi Arabia or Egypt as when it's Neanderthal Chelsea fans on the Paris Metro. I'm not a football supporter so I wouldn't like to comment on what action is needed to sort this out at Chelsea, but hardcore football fan Alistair Campbell has 10 ideas that look pretty reasonable to me.

Atheists: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA has been in the news lately, an Atheist (Craig Hicks) murdered three Muslim people by shooting them, apparently over a parking dispute. Many apologists and left leaning commentators in the USA (and some here in the UK) have been jumping on the bandwagon of "militant atheists" and "atheism inspired hate crimes" and you can't help but feel that such people have been yearning for such a combination of events to occur. Was this a "hate crime" inspired by Atheism? Well the honest answer is that we don't know, but fortunately the killer is still alive so we can ask him. Until that happens as part of a due process of Law all we can do is go on the evidence and that evidence would suggest not. America loses roughly 30 people PER DAY to gun crime and the vast majority of those are simple inter-personal disputes between people living in the same locale. In a society where getting access to a high powered weapons is trivial (and positively encouraged) it's no wonder that every-day arguments escalate all to easily.

Russia: As the polemicist and political commentator Christopher Hitchens once said "We will live to regret the conversion of Russia into a heavily-armed, self-pitying, chauvinistic theocracy." I worry that recent events in the Ukraine and now possibly lining up in the Baltic might just prove him right. Russia has it's own interests and those interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the "West" this is a plain fact of life and should be factored in. But, any reasonable person must look at some of these alignments and raise questions. For example, Russia is the biggest supporter of the barbaric Assad regime in Syria, it supplies significant quantities of weapons (10% of Russian military exports) that are essentially the only thing keeping him in power. The thought of another "cold-war" and endless proxy wars in places like the Ukraine, Georgia and Iran fills me with a real sense of foreboding; the Human species was lucky to get through the last one without nuking itself to ashes, the balance of probability is not in our favour to survive another.

Bad science

So here's a map of the USA (from Slate) with creationist schools marked as coloured dots like little colonies of bacilli on a Petri dish. There seems to be some definite concentrations of this religiously inspired wilful ignorance or as enlightened people would call them "educational black-spots", these include Tennessee and Mississippi followed closely by Florida and Indiana.

The "Christianisation" impact of this kind of abandonment of reason on the American economy won't be known until these students enter the work-force but I can't help thinking that in some places the religious right are raising up the least scientifically curious generation in several centuries, ironically just at the point in history when we have the biggest Human challenges to face. Questions such as climate change, food production, energy deficit and environmental destruction. No doubt these kids will be eminently well qualified to pray for deliverance from these threats and will excel at telling each other feel-good allegorical myths by candlelight (when the power goes out)

Science is used as a political football in many places (including the UK) the more the opponents of progress and change make it look the same as "just another opinion" the easier it is for them to insert their own particular flavour of dogma and scripture into the public arena. We see this all the time with things like climate change and so called "alternative medicines" where the masters of the anecdote ply their trade in fear, obfuscation and doubt; sucking in unwary recruits with sound-bites of certainty born of conclusions that are engineered to be immune from testing.

Along with the rise of theocratic, radical lunacy in the Middle East this fundamentalist regression in the heart of a leading secular nation paints a depressing picture; to me it looks like an object lesson in how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Galileo refuted..

Here's something funny; this "Cleric" in Saudi Arabia confidently asserting that the Earth doesn't spin because he personally can't understand how you can get in a plane and fly to China if it was.

The moral of this story is that if you're going to understand reality beyond your own personal incredulity then you need to read more than one book!

To win the lottery... you have to buy a ticket

Here's a question I hear quite often.

"Why should we waste UK taxpayer money on academic research for things that we can't use or sell?"

It sounds like one of those "Daily Mail", UKIP, common sense, ordinary bloke holding a pint kind of questions that everyone nods sagely to without really being invested in finding a good answer; a bit like "would we have more jobs if we had less immigrants?" Unfortunately reality isn't as simple as most people would like it to be; the answer to almost every question ever asked is "it depends"..

Here's a worrying statistic:

The amount (per head of population) that we spend on science and technology research and development in this country has gone from £89 in 2010 down to £75 in 2015 (adjusted for inflation) it has steadily declined for the last 4 years. In contrast China has tripled it's equivalent budget since 1995, and will invest roughly 16 times more than the UK this year ($163Bn vs. $10Bn). To put the £10Bn number in perspective, people in the UK will spend roughly $7Bn on their pets this year.

Here's a great statistic:

The critical question for me is, will we continue to see statistics like the second one unless we fix the decline suggested by the first?

Miracles

An old one but worth reminding ourselves...

Nicely put

Commentary from Canada on the recent phenomenon of anti-vaccination campaigners - surprisingly hard hitting for this kind of program. I particularly like the phrase "displaying the intellect of a dead tree stump" and will be using that line in future I'm sure.

I suppose it's inevitable that whatever advance is made in whatever field of human endeavour (or even the suggestion of an advance), no matter how impactful, there will always be an opposer or two keen to crawl into the light and blame their misfortunes on it; as a wise man once said, an amateur "expert" is someone who can tell you exactly how something can't or shouldn't be done, but little else.

Victimless crime

You have to wonder what kind of strange logic lead the Irish government to introduce a new blasphemy law in the 21st century (the only European country to do so), a law which is frankly illogical from top to bottom.

Predictably there are now Islamic apologists over there getting all hot under the collar to test this new law over the publishing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons claiming that the depiction of Muhammad meets the condition necessary for a prosecution in that a) "its grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion" and b) "thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion".

Let's take a minute to pick this apart;

- Firstly, not all Muslim sects feel that the depiction of their prophet is insulting; in Iran for example the Shia population actually make art depicting the prophet that they hang in mosques and in their homes; so whose version of Islam are the Irish government going to take as correct, and won't that (by definition) be insulting to the other versions?

- This law would appear to encourage people who wish to prosecute for blasphemy to behave in an "outraged" manner in order to meet the laws conditions; "outrage" is what people with no reasonable argument hide behind and also very easy to fake - I wonder how "outrage" will be objectively measured; number of burnt flags perhaps?

- Countries that are run by tyrants who use blasphemy laws to silence opposition and crush free-speech (Saudi/Pakistan) are pointing to Ireland as a benchmark with which to justify their own human rights abuses under the banner of blasphemy; is this really the most admirable example to set?

- Why does the Irish government deem that religion is somehow different from any other deeply held belief or idea that human beings might sincerely hold (or none)? Why would they not prosecute someone for being grossly offensive about a football team or a political party or style of music; would a fine of 25,000 Euro be appropriate for scribbling a dick on a poster of Roy Keane at the bus stop?

- What if one person expresses a belief in a God that is grossly insulting to a different persons belief in a different God?; who would trump who? Wouldn't the banning of one expression of sacredly held beliefs against another set of sacredly held beliefs end up in an infinite regress?

- What about freedom of expression?

- What's the definition of sacred and what legal test can be applied to distinguish it from any other deeply held, unfalsifiable or supernatural belief? Could a belief in fairies be "sacred" if the believer held it strongly enough?

I don't envy a legal system that aims to administer such a law fairly and justly; it just seems far too riddled with holes to me. Fortunately there are many voices in Ireland (religious and otherwise) who share this unease; Eoin O'Dell a senior lecturer in law at Trinity College labelled it "literally medieval" and polls conducted in 2014 showed less than a fifth of the population supported it. There is growing pressure to hold a referendum on the matter, for the sake of European solidarity against the forces of anti-free speech and intolerant religions let's hope it happens soon.

Arguments revisited

What with recent revelations about microphone equipped smart TV sets apparently being able to record living-room conversations and transmit them to mysterious "third-parties" over the internet perhaps we all need to be more careful about who's listening to (and watching?) our private lives.

This video is a perfect illustration of the problem, the keen eared cockatoo perfectly mimics the venom and vitriol overheard when residents of this home have been knocking seven verbal bells out of each other and seems delighted to remind everyone of how those arguments played out (hilarious). Its a shame cockatoos aren't compulsory members of investment banking boards, we all might learn something.

Priestly deception

Sometimes I get the impression that certain people are on the fast-track of life; regardless of how competent, resourceful or intelligent, they're going to end up being your boss and making more money than you because, well, just because. Stephen Green the ex-Chairman of HSBC bank looks like such a person to me; with a name like "Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint" he was probably born into a family that made more money than yours going right back to the Norman conquest when the right to fleece everyone else was ordained by God himself (and the small matter of a fleet of ships containing archers and cavalry); not his fault of course, such are the random twists and turns of history.

Some careers must seem like a trip to a giant Michelin star cafeteria; for starters we have a top boarding school followed by Oxford or Cambridge and then for main course we pick from McKinsey and/or the City of London washed down with a vintage magnum of Civil Service and then to cap the meal off we gorge on flambéed Investment banking, Cabinet Minister topped with Quango chief and a selection of exotic holiday homes from the Retirement trolley. Nice work if you can get it, as my old man used to say. Now, none of this strikes me as a problem if the people receiving such privilege are ethical, competent, hard-working, charitable and leave the world a better place than they find it. As it now transpires HSBC under Mr Greens leadership looks like it was helping a significant number of it's (rich) customers to avoid paying tax and therefore facilitating them breaking the contract we all have as evolved primates to invest in the societal infrastructure used to make our wealth in the first place; perhaps there was a warped sense of entitlement prevalent here or maybe Mr Green knew nothing about the scale of the fraud, either way he was either bent or incompetent and needs to answer these criticisms.

Greens example illustrates some important philosophical life-lessons for me, firstly as an ordained (Christian) minister and author of a book on corporate responsibility what people say is rarely a foolproof indication of what they believe or how they act when they think no one is looking. Scepticism is the most valuable sense we have, it's hard not to conclude that he was either astronomically cynical and hypocritical or some kind of patsy. In plain language, born to rule doesn't mean capable of rule.

Jab at anti-jabbers

Topical at the moment. I know many people like these stereotypical liberal fuzzy thinkers; very nice, reasonable (usually "spiritual") people who just don't seem to accept that reliable, peer reviewed scientific evidence trumps "feelings" 99% of the time and the other 1% is when we're all being scammed or there has been a dreadful mistake. Even then, the odds of not getting side-effects from a modern vaccine are still better than dying, unprotected, from a preventable disease like measles or mumps and this is before we look at how anti-vaxxers are reducing herd immunity to dangerous levels. Then again I guess if your world-view doesn't value evidence then its pretty pointless me trying to convince you how important and reliable empirical evidence is!

After all we could go back to the good old days when humans used no manufactured chemicals, no drugs, no antiseptics, no vaccines and everything we ate was organic, problem was, we mostly kicked the bucket aged 35 years; the number of dopey 50-70 year olds that seem to need constant reminding of that is a reliable, evidence-based source of amazement.

Did someone say "cut"?

Love it - ridicule and humour is a great way to deal with wannabe tyrants.

Some Gods are more equal than others

Many people will have seen the video of Stephen Fry talking about his view of a theistic God in an interview on an Irish TV program last week (see above). In the cold light of day it's simply an articulate statement of one of the main arguments against the existence of the Christian God (and some others) The broad argument is known as "the problem of evil", i.e. how can there be an all loving, moral, beneficent man in the sky when there is so much pain, evil and suffering of innocents in the world, it simply doesn't make sense. It's not a new argument and has probably been around for thousands of years, certainly there were Romans and Greeks who documented this thought; actually the Greeks had a much better idea, as Fry points out, at least the behaviours of their Gods conformed to our experience of reality i.e. their Gods were unabashedly random, petty, capricious and vindictive.

No doubt religious apologists of all stripes will now respond with indignation and the stock responses to this argument; totally childish and inadequate responses (which they always are) like, "God is mysterious" or "that's not my God" or "it's the work of the devil", which as explanations are about as insightful as saying "shit happens!" Over the years the number of lethal phenomena that are unexplainable has diminished enormously; things like earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes, plagues, crop failure, floods have all been explained by natural processes, nothing in recorded history has ever gone the other way, i.e. something with a natural explanation that is better explained by a supernatural one. For some of us this is a logical and rational reason (among many) to reject the whole "God hypothesis", for others it's a reason to find ever smaller indistinct gaps to insert their God into.

Back when religion was in charge of meme creation in the west we used to think disease was a punishment (some people still do) from God for contravening some petty rule or not grovelling enough to him.  Fortunately thanks to the enlightenment and science we now we have a germ theory of disease and an understanding of genetics which explains things properly. Clearly, we don't yet know all the answers in terms of prediction and prevention but we can take comfort in the knowledge that very smart people dedicate their lives to work on such problems and the rate at which these kinds of inflictions are yielding to science holds great promise for the health of future generations. As a side-note I was pleased to note the comments of the Arch Bishop of Canterbury regarding this interview, he reiterated the point that in our (modern) society people should be free to express their views, even though they may conflict with the deeply held convictions of others. Justin Welby himself has expressed similar doubts in the past all very reasonable and progressive; perhaps he's an Atheist too?

Leaders of Greeks

I must say that I'm beginning to admire the straightforwardness of the recently elected Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Whilst many would argue that his ideas on national debt are a bit too blasé evidence suggests that he may be more openly true to his beliefs than many other (similar) politicians and is certainly no slave to tradition.

Normally Greek Prime Ministers are sworn into office via a religious ceremony conducted by the Archbishop of all Greece; Engineering graduate Tsipras is an Atheist and has informed the current Primate that his services are not required, the swearing-in ceremony will be a secular one. However if there are religious ministers who would prefer some supernatural theatre with their oath taking then a suitably religious person will be on hand to stand in for the creator of the Universe; who is clearly much too busy killing African children to be there himself.

Austrian food

I just spend an enjoyable couple of days skiing in Austria with a couple of mates. I haven't been to that part of the Alps for many years and it made a nice change to see how things have moved on and developed in the past 20 or so years. I must say the lift system in places like St. Anton and Ischgl is second to none, nice big covered chair lifts and comfortable cable cars, some even with heated seats! The slopes were very busy, especially on Saturday but overall everything moved along quickly, I can't recall having  to wait more than a few minutes at any lift, which is not the case in some resorts.

The only thing that hadn't moved on much seemed to be the food and the drink available. Lot's of pig based meals and fizzy beer; not that there's anything wrong with this of course but even after only 4 days I must confess I was struggling to work up the enthusiasm for yet another sausage or rasher of bacon. One rather strange looking dish which seemed to be ubiquitous was the "currywurst" (see picture above) There were a couple of variants but it was essentially a big bratwurst kind of sausage that's cooked in a spicy sauce and then smothered with curry powder, typically served with chips. I had heard of this before but never seen one so I had to try it. For me the experience was a bit like eating a McDonald's burger, i.e. seems like a good idea at the time but was instantly regrettable; I suspect that like the infamous kebab (from a van) here in the UK this is a popular choice after a few beers. On the subject of beer, unfortunately the beer revolution going on in the rest of the world doesn't seem to have reached Austrian ski resorts yet; not much choice available that I could see. Perhaps the bars there are even more tied into particular brewers than most pubs are here? In any case Austrians still have a way to go to match the more enlightened French or the even more enlightened Americans when it comes to apres-ski refreshment!

Friday means salvation

Seems fair..

Pot shots at American sniper

I saw the film American Sniper the other day, it's a well made film in a very populist style but I have to question the veracity of the underlying storey (even allowing for the normal Hollywood manipulation)

Firstly we're introduced to Chris Kyle (the real American sniper) watching the twin towers falling with his wife at home in Texas and in the very next scene we see him in Iraq! If I remember correctly the Iraq war wasn't specifically to do with 9/11 but to do with WMD?  Anyway that's quite a small quibble; the main issue for me was the apparent ease with which the "hero", a fairly low grade NCO, could apparently do what he liked on the field of battle and order everyone else around to essentially go along with his wild hunches and personal vendettas (I know several military men who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and they say it's just not like that, the chain of command was much more rigid). Throughout the film the main character was being haunted by a mysterious baddie in black who was supposedly an opposing sniper who had won a shooting medal for Syria in the Olympics; the problem is that the film has this sniper operating for different (and opposing) Sunni and Shia factions at the same time; all pretty unlikely.

Finally there's the mental torment and regret that Kyle suffers in the film as he ploughs his way through the men, women and children of Mesopotamia, turning them into corpses and chalking up notches on his McMillan TAC-338 sniper rifle. All very powerful depictions of the moral spaghetti that was Iraq but somewhat at odds with Kyles own accounts of the same events in his book (of the same name) In the book Kyle comes across as someone who loathes the Iraqis (calling them "rag-heads") and felt happy that everyone he killed was evil. Bible bashing Kyle clearly states that his main purpose and preoccupation was the protection of his own troops "whatever the cost", but in reality I suspect the truth is somewhere between the dehumanising training that snipers like Kyle must surely receive and the Budweiser fuelled "all-American" banter invented in Texas bar rooms that someone thought might earn a few dollars if put in a book.

If you're looking for a (not too serious) hero/action adventure war movie that's well made and well acted then this may be a film for you. If you thought the Iraq war was morally reprehensible and felt that it was being run by a bunch of red-neck who-ha's and attention seeking lap-dogs for dubious reasons, then this film will probably confirm every suspicion you ever had.

Dawkins fanboys

This made me laugh out loud today - superb

WARNING: The messages Dawkins is reading out are from religious people so expect some hateful language designed to threaten, denigrate and vilify; but worst of all expect horrific scientific ignorance. (not safe for work, or civilised society)

Some might argue that this is just an example of people exercising their right to free-speech, well not entirely. Here we (mostly) have a bunch of people attacking a man, an individual; NOT the ideas he promotes, a classic example of an ad-hominem attack, which in plain language means slagging someone off when you don't have a good come-back; it's a very common tactic among critics of Dawkins since most of them have pathetically few substantive rebuttals of his position (and let's face it most of his arguments are neither new nor his) or can't be bothered to actually find out what he really says. I really don't understand people who fail to distinguish between themselves and the ideas they hold at any particular point in time, people deserve respect, ideas do not.

Fortunately Dawkins shows the correct way to deal with assorted insults regardless, i.e. with humour - religionists take note.

Cutting to the chase

Blasphemy laws - Protecting the ridiculous from ridicule...

Wise investments

Oh no, once again you have destroyed my scientific theory with your expert knowledge of theology and the Bible.... said no one ever.

Can anyone think of an example where modern Science claims X and the Bible/Koran/Torah claims Y and on investigation Y turned out to be the correct/best answer?  No, me neither.

Origin of the universe, the Earth, human beings, flora and fauna, slavery, genocide, global floods, the exodus, Adam and Eve, causes of mental illness, education, medicine, most of cosmology, female emancipation, evolution and most of biology all incorrect in the holy books; all subsequently corrected/improved over the last 400 years through scientific and philosophical enlightenment; it makes you wonder. For books that have so much human capital and emotion invested in them being perfect, they seem to be pretty useless at explaining anything useful.

But... many people still don't accept modernity, they prefer to contort and twist these ancient books in a vain attempt to extract sense from them, they seem to have some inexplicable yearning for an imagined past where such myths and legends were real; a past that never really existed. For most of our ancestors the further back you go in history the more their reality consisted of random and lethal violence, inequality, pain, hunger and terror of a world of disease and natural disaster that made no sense. It can be easily shown that our present day western democracies are, as a matter of fact, the most peaceful, predictable and fair societies that have ever existed (on planet Earth at least..) and the vast majority of people get to live much longer (thanks to science) to enjoy them.

Don't believe me that (sane) people today still cling to superstition and myth? Take a look at this recent BBC program debating religion, science and evidence, the best bit for me is when the scientist asks the Bible scholar "could you clarify what a demon is please?" (he couldn't); is this a marginal viewpoint? Well, unfortunately no, Saudi Arabia, a nation of 30+ million Muslims executed someone for "sorcery" only last year and there still over 30 nations worldwide that will prosecute you for blasphemy (the ultimate victimless crime!) including some Arab countries that will kill you for it.


Some people seriously need to get some perspective on our place in the universe and re-calibrate their beliefs, ethics and goals. Take a look at this latest image from the NASA Hubble space telescope; it shows the Andromeda galaxy at an unprecedented level of detail, every dot on this image is a star, like our Sun, probably with planets circling around it; some of which may well host life. There are something like a hundred million stars in this galaxy which is around 40,000 light years away from us; just let that sink in for a second, then realise that there are over a hundred million galaxies like this in the visible universe, and here we are killing each other over cartoons of a desert war lord that died 1,400 years ago.

Muslims, get with the programme!

Maajid Nawaz unleashing a torrent of common sense in the direction of those Muslims who don't seem to understand the value of reciprocation, solidarity and community integration and who are upset at the content of the letter sent to them today from the Communities Secretary requesting that they think about ways to explain how Islam "can be part of the British identity". The MCB (Muslim Council of Britain) has rejected this letter and doesn't see why it should be part of any solution to the problem of Islamism in Europe. Either these people really don't get it, or even worse, they are part of the problem! Either way I can only see more trouble ahead unless moderate Muslims start to "man up" and take some responsibility for helping to find solutions to this issue and be seen to do so; purging the MCB of unhelpful laggards would be a good start.

Is anybody out there?

Raif Badawi (who I mentioned on Wednesday) has had his flogging postponed this week on "medical grounds". A doctor apparently decided that his "wounds" had not healed sufficiently for them to be re-opened again this week (a Saudi court sentenced him to 1000 lashes, 50 per week for 20 weeks).

I haven't read or heard about any significant Muslim outrage or "offence taking" about this other than from the commendable @MaajidNawaz  ; an interesting side note is that Saudi Arabia have executed 9 people so far in 2015 one of whom was a woman who despite pleading her innocence to the end was beheaded in public without any form of aesthetic. Capital punishment is not unique to Saudi of course but why this backward country feels it's necessary to hack at peoples' necks with a sword in what appear to be half empty car parks (see picture above) seems perverse in the extreme, it's almost like they want incriminating pictures to leak out. A very dark hearted society indeed, and by all accounts getting darker as the pressure to reform increases.

True colours

I see that the Pope has finally "come out", no, no, not what you're thinking. Catholics should still think gay people are sub-human, unless they're Cardinals of course, then it's OK so long as they keep their mouths shut and don't get caught, such is the way of the Lord.

No, the pope has revealed what he thinks about free speech and by Jove he's all for it! it's a fundamental human right according to him. The Pope is absolutely for Catholics being able to make up all manner of horse shit to lecture everyone else about; regardless of how offensive it is. Women must abandon their reproductive rights, non-believers are going to burn in hell, gay people must deny their sexual identities and live sterile lives, condoms are worse than AIDS and on and on; the very definition of offensive, sanctimonious clap-trap that the rest of us are subjected to ad-nausea, and guess what.. we don't have to respect these views but we must tolerate them, this is the essence of free-speech. Of course as with everything religious, there's a but, the Pope says free speech is fine unless it involves criticising or mocking someone's faith, that's verboten! Boy, those religious johnnies really stick together don't they. A case of do as I say and not as I do, such a wonderfully simple philosophy for the in-group.

As everyone knows, the most destructive forces in the in the realm of religion (which is somewhere between Mordor and Narnia) are honest enquiry, reason and evidence; the man in the big hat can't be having any religious person exposed to that kind of Kryptonite! The faithful are clearly not faithful enough to deal with it (in his eyes) and after all, the creator of the universe is now so utterly pooped after shitting out all that dark matter that he needs good Muslims, Jews and Catholics everywhere to punch anyone on the nose for daring to suggest (especially if it's presented in cartoon form) that an evolved primate on a small rock in an insignificant galaxy might think Godly beliefs or actions that are inspired by those beliefs are in any way infantile, hypocritical, barbaric, immoral, criminal or plain dumb! Faith must be viewed by everyone for what it truly is, Captain Americas' impenetrable shield or the ultimate invisibility cloak; protecting it's wearer from the laser-beams of critical reason or the ruthless gaze of ridicule.

And so, you can probably tell what I think about this patriarchal hypothesis, fortunately I'm not alone, many other, more talented people than me sum it up much more eloquently and put it to music, so, in the immortal words of Tim Minchin.


Fuck the Pope!

And yes this song is designed to offend and shock; but it's not even on the same scale of offence and shock as covering up the abuse of thousands of small children - that's kinda the point; some people need to calibrate their morals.

A Flogging for a blogging

Just in case you don't pay much attention to the really offensive acts going on in the world (as opposed to the blasphemous kind) this poor chap is called Raif Badwawi. He lives in Saudi Arabia (first mistake) and for the right royal crime of "writing a mildly edgy blog that criticised religion" he has been sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1000 (public) lashes (50 a week for 20 weeks) I can imagine his diary makes for quite a depressing read at the moment. Raif was lucky in that the prosecutors originally wanted to charge him with apostasy (simply leaving his faith); the sentence for that is death. So the next time someone tries to convince you that this whole Islamic blasphemy thing is just a few bad apples then slip this guy's name into the conversation and mention the fact that his homeland alone has a population of 30 million, see how they like them apples.

Does anyone now feel the urge to take an AK-47 to the Saudi judiciary? No, I didn't think so, even though such an act is truly offensive to any decent, moral and fair-minded person. Perhaps what is more telling is that you will struggle to find any Muslims getting overly upset by this, certainly none that are prepared to satirise such cases in public.

Here's an idea

Jesus and Mo. bang on target as usual (metaphorically speaking)...

Religion poisons everything

So folks, this is what all the fuss is about!

Any reasonable, rational person can see that the purpose of this cartoon is to make a political and (memorable) satirical point by provoking an emotional reaction; the clue is in the name, i.e. to provoke something you need to be provocative. Now, you may not agree with the point or the need for a cartoon or even the need for any kind of reaction at all, but if you're a person who has an apologetic bent and thinks "murdering people is bad, but..." you need to ask yourself a deadly serious question. Exactly how far are you willing to have your own views suppressed by (spurious) Islamic blasphemy laws? At what point do you start self-censoring; keeping your most heart-felt beliefs to yourself for fear of being attacked by aggressive intolerant people who demand that you submit to their parochial world-view? How about your religious views? Because let's face it, those will be the first to go.

Every single freedom we have, including religious freedom, had to be talked and written into existence, often accumulating significant human suffering along the way. Freedom of speech, the right to criticise, mock and question ideas underpins freedom of assembly, due-process, universal franchise etc. i.e. all the freedoms needed for a pluralistic and democratic society,  and without it we are lost to the whims of tyrants and confined to societies that are red in tooth and claw.

Do apologists and (left leaning) liberals really think this fight is about ink and pencil drawings or racism or unacceptable offence? Of course not, let's be honest with ourselves, it's about power. The crime of blasphemy was conceived by the powerful in order to exert authority over everyone else; a mechanism with which a ruler may exert his (because its always a "him") dogma over the ruled. The way it works is by exploiting the delusional spell cast over the credulous so that they fanatically suppress dissent in the name of the imaginary authority whose interests are magically aligned to those of the ruler. It's a perfect system, to question the rule is to commit the offence; any fool can see why free-speech is an anathema to blasphemy. Western secular societies realised this during the enlightenment three hundred years ago when the philosophical and ethical arguments were essentially won; it then took us two hundred years to (mostly) get rid of the offence from our various legal statute books (there are some anomalies - Ireland I'm looking at you!) There are of course non-religious forms of blasphemy (state-dogmas, like in North Korea), but since non-religious ideas are subject to scrutiny by universal logic and science (unlike religious ideas) they are much more easily shown to be spurious or proven beyond doubt to be wrong; the unfalsifiable nature of religious ideas makes them amenable to much more leeway in this regard.

Our challenge now is that we are living through the emergence of a dark hearted cult in the shape of Islamic fascism (ISIS, Boko-Haram, Al-Qaeda, Wahhabism et al.) who want to exert power on the world stage. Part of that plan is to force us to implement Islamic blasphemy rules within our secular societies, been there, done that, no thanks. We should not give an inch and I applaud every single publication here in the UK who have published this image and I noticed that even the (normally lilly-livered) BBC had a fleeting glimpse of it on their news report this morning (bravo!) hopefully someone in the UK will re-publish this magazine so that people who are pro-enlightenment values here can buy it here in volume, this isn't about insulting Muslims, it's about not accepting being told what to think!

When I think of the resources that will now have to be expended on security and all the money that will now be spent on weapons and training and surveillance it fills me with a sense of exasperation and foreboding for the future. I think about all the better ways that that money and energy could be spent; solving problems that our species actually has, for example climate change, energy sufficiency, health-care, education and so on, and my conclusion is that the divisive ideas underpinning religions, in the vast majority of their forms, truly do poison everything.

Bad day for freedom

#JeSuisCharlie

The sleep of reason

Horrific news from France today, Islamic gunmen stormed the offices of a French newspaper and opened fire with automatic weapons, then executed police officers trying to stop them. I use the word executed because that's the correct term for when someone puts a gun to the head of an injured (and incapacitated) opponent and pulls the trigger. There's a video on YouTube right now (I won't link to it and I doubt it'll be up there for long) taken by a bystander from the roof of an adjacent building showing one of the terrorists doing precisely this.

So, innocent people are being summarily executed by Muslims on the streets of Paris for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time and office workers slaughtered at their desks for the crime of drawing a cartoon. I hope that now people will now think twice about giving any credence to the relativist cosmopolitan elite who are so fond of saying that violence of this kind has nothing to do with Islam; as no doubt that will be their response. Perhaps Angela Merkel will re-think her nauseatingly transparent PC condemnation of the Pegida rallies across Germany this past weekend and perhaps the next Islamic apologist or left leaning media commentator who starts an article or interview with the sentence "the majority of Muslims are not terrorists" will ponder that (albeit correct) statement and think about Germany in 1919 when a small aggressive group of similarly anti-free-speech fascists started their journey into the light; within 30 years that little ideological experiment culminated in the deaths of roughly 50 million people and the moderate (silent) majority proved utterly irrelevant.

Accurate inaccuracies

I read with amusement that the Egyptian government have banned Ridley Scott's new film "Exodus: Gods and Kings" because of "historical inaccuracies".

If their complaint was that the film is inaccurate because it shows a well fed (white) Welshmen (Christian Bale) running around the Western desert in 13 BC then fair enough, but, apparently their objection is that the film shows Jewish slaves building a pyramid and the Red Sea parting as a result of an earthquake. Now any proper historian knows that Jews didn't build the pyramids (they were actually built much earlier than the Moses story) and that the Red Sea was in fact split open by a huge invisible man in the sky with a vindictive and narcissistic personality and an unhealthy fetish for one particular Canaanite tribe. According to the Egyptian "cultural" minister the film therefore represents a "Zionist" version of history.

Clearly these Egyptian dullards don't appreciate the target audience for this film, i.e. American Christians; who (as countless polls attest) are about as uneducated on matters of the Bible, world culture and geography as it's possible to be! Say "Egypt" to the average mid-western red-neck and not only would they point to Alaska on the map, the only noteworthy historical thing they'd be able to tell you about it would be "the pyramids!", well, that and possibly how hot Elizabeth Taylor's breasts looked sprinkled with half and half.

I haven't watched the film yet nor do I intend to until it's free, but from the clips I have seen I doubt it will hold my attention unless the directors cut has lasers and kick-ass aliens in it, although, then it might be more believable?

Enemies of secularism

Read this article today. I found it enlightening and for me it clarified some of the benefits that a properly secular state offers it's citizens by highlighting some of the big disadvantages of trying to operate parallel legal systems i.e. religiously founded systems like sharia or religiously based privilege like unelected Bishops in Parliament.

I'm in favour of a strictly secular state, one where there is one law (that evolves by consent) which applies to all persons regardless of irrelevant factors such as sex, race, religion, sexual orientation or favourite football team. In practice, allowing a number of parallel systems would inevitably lead to a conflict with this basic position, for example, what happens when numerous parallel legal systems clash, which should take precedence?

Take free-speech for example, it would seem rational that free-speech is synonymous with freedom of conscience and therefore freedom of religion (or none) but still a large number  of religious people have sought and continue to seek to protect their ideas from criticism under the historical shield of "blasphemy" or more recently the modern equivalent of "taking offence", the latter being a slippery slope to the former in my opinion. This is not a new idea, almost all religions (or sects) that have achieved a majority position (usually violently) within a state apply some kind of censorship in their favour; from English language Bibles to The Satanic verses. It seems to be an inherent weakness in the foundations of practically all religions that the followers feel its structural and intellectual integrity is so weak that they need to protect it at the point of sword, letter of the law or threat of a fatwa. It's only increasing secular pressure applied over centuries that seems to move a culture beyond this infantile state.

150 years ago John Stuart Mill nailed the reasons why free-speech is a necessary pillar of any civilised society, he said in "on liberty",

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

I suspect it's the "exchanging error for truth" part that people have a problem with but even to this day, you can't fault his logic without admitting the insecurity of your own position; religious or otherwise.

Worried

As usual the marvellous comic xkcd clarifies things for us; in this edition we have examples of what we should and shouldn't be worried about in real life compared to what happens in the movies or on TV (acknowledging the fact that many people prefer to think they exist in the latter)..

2014

Whoosh, and another year rushes by.

In the spirit of annual reviews I can confirm that for me 2014 was a good year, not the best, but in the general scheme of things perhaps a top 10 candidate (so far) I'd like to think I've learnt a few things this year, hopefully more than I've forgotten and the highlight was simply the number of family holidays banked, a total of 5 in the year which is a record for me. As for what next year may bring, who knows, let's hope the global economy picks up deadly diseases are vanquished by science and people focus less on their delusions of power and entitlement and more on solving some of those stubborn retardations that previous generations would have assumed we'd grown out of by now (yes Middle East I'm looking at you).