Apathy Sketchpad

I do so wish that some websites would quit living in the past. I tried to subscribe to one by RSS, via Google Reader, today and discovered they didn’t have a feed. What good is that? But they did have an email alerts option. now, I don’t really want that. I subscribe to loads of sites, and I end up with, most days, 5-10 emails and 40 or so new RSS items. I do not want them mixed up, and I don’t want to have a new email account to deal with, either. So this is my solution, and it’s working pretty well: Read the rest of this entry »

I start with three lists:

Things I hate about Windows Vista:

• The Start Menu no longer unfurls. It opens up in the original little panel (the one where your recently used and pinned programmes appear in xp), with a scrollbar if it’s too long! It’s neater on the screen this new way but it’s far less convenient to use. There’s no apparent option to change this without reverting to the Windows ’95-style menu. I can’t see why this change was made except for the sake of changing things. I suppose it means you don’t have to slide the mouse as far, but I don’t like to use the mouse for the Start Menu. I do that with the keyboard. Well, I used to…
• …because now, when the Start Menu appears (no matter how I called it up), focus is given to the search box, meaning there’s no keyboard shortcut to open the All Programs menu. This is decidedly inconvenient. Worse still, if I click this menu to open it then focus remains in the search box, so I still can’t navigate the menu with the keyboard. There’s simply no excuse for that. Sometimes I actually don’t have a mouse plugged in. The only way to get to the Start Menu by keyboard is to tab there from the search box, or to arrow key up to it. And when you’re there, it’s harder to navigate by keyboard as everything you’ve looked at is all in one long list rather than the neat hierachy of an unfurling menu.
• When I do click the “All Programs” button, it changes to a “back” button so I can get the pinned items back if I want. However, this also happens if I hover over it for a while. This means that if I hover for just the wrong time before clicking, I can activate “All Programs” by hovering and then immediately dismiss it by clicking “Back” the very moment it appears. That’s bad interface design, and it’s bad interface design to patch up a problem caused by the bad interface design I was just discussing, which itself is bad interface design which has directly replaced some rather good interface design! At no point in that chain did Microsoft apparently think that some people might not like the result.
• The “run” command is hidden by default. This is inconvenient for advanced users, and makes providing tech-support over the phone that little bit harder. Win+R still works, but it breaks compatibility with old instructions and it’s harder to explain to people less tech-savvy than average.
• It keeps pestering me for permission to do every little thing. “Yes, you may copy the file. Yes, you may copy that one too. Yes, you may create a folder to put it in…”
• One last Start Menu thing, before I move on: in the bottom right of the menu is a little button marked with the internationally recognised “on/off” symbol. I pressed this button assuming it would shut down my computer, or at least bring up a menu allowing me to do so. Instead, it put the computer into standby mode. Not helpful.
• I did find a way to change this so that that button shuts down the computer properly, but I still can’t find a way to hibernate the PC without assigning it to that button, assigning it to the main power button on the case, or putting the computer into sleep mode and waiting for it to timeout. Hibernation (the thing where you can shut down your PC properly but have it remember what was running and in what state) was one of the best new features in Windows xp, and in Vista it’s all-but gone.
• I don’t like that the new look can’t seem to decide if it wants to be Sleek And Black or Lovely And Blue. Also it has a sharp horizontal edge on the sides of active windows that always looks like it’s a real interface object when it’s in my peripheral vision.
• Old software, even xp software, doesn’t (in the general case) work on Vista.
• The icons. They’re realistic and all, but that’s not really the point of icons. They’re less informative than the old ones.
• If I click the DVD drive in Explorer when it’s empty, the drive opens so I can put a disc in. There’s no way to close it from the software. That’s annoying, especially since 90% of the times I browse an empty drive it is by mistake. And it’s a pointless feature anyway, since the kind of granny-user this kind of thing is aimed at will have Autoplay turned on. They don’t need to browse the drive.
• File search is gone. It’s just gone! Windows Explorer has a search box, but it’s wired up to some strange indexed search, which appears to be a not-as-good version of Google Desktop Search. The only way I’ve found to search properly, by filename, is to call up a Console window (using Win+R as all other methods of getting to it without a mouse have been all-but removed) and use DIR /S /P. What possible excuse is there for removing that? That’s one of the basic things you expect an OS to do! They’ll be removing Windows Explorer next. Or at least stripping it back until it only browses the Documents folder. It’s strange that every year Linux becomes more and more an OS that anyone could use and every year Windows becomes less and less an OS that any serious computer user can work with. It seems to me that soon Linux will become the de facto OS for professional settings and Windows will be purely the reserve of the so-called ‘silver surfers’ who just want to write email easily.
• I don’t like that the Start Button encroaches onto the main screen space. It looks nice, I suppose, but there’s no need for it. It stops doing this if you resize the taskbar.
• The shortcut icon overlay is far larger than it should be.
• It’s too easy to turn a folder view into a search results view in Explorer. When you do this you lose your place on the directory tree. Sure, there’s a back button to help, but I don’t want to have to use that. That’s not where that functionality normally is, so that’s not where I will look. If you want to add “stacking” (which looks like it might sometimes be useful, but not anything like often) then damn well implement it properly.

Things I like about Windows Vista:

• It’s a little smarter about grouping Taskbar buttons than xp was (see below).
• It has a “no to all” button in large file operations.
• The Start Button now expands downwards when you resize the taskbar, to ensure the bottom-left pixel of your screen (or whichever corner you keep it in) always calls up the decidedly unsatisfactory Start Menu. This is good, as the corner pixels are the ones you can’t overshoot with the mouse, and are therefore the easiest to reach. (This is why Macs have the menu bar along the top of the screen. It’s a clever usability feature.)
• Unlike in Windows xp, the modern-looking windows can be coloured any way you like. That’s always a good thing.
• The Alt-Tab functionality is much better.
• The word “my” is gone, as is My Network Places, the most useless fake-folder ever.
• I like the idea of blurring things behind transparent windows (presuming it doesn’t do it to all translucent windows, which is something I’ve not had chance to check).
• The user account folder is neater now.
• The fade-to-black when you log in is nice.

Things I hate about Windows in general which Vista should have fixed but didn’t:

• Taskbar grouping is too automated. I should be able to right click a group and force it to break up into separate buttons. I should be able to drag buttons from groups onto the main taskbar. I should be able to drag buttons onto each other to combine them. This action currently does nothing and my suggested functionality would pose no danger of the user breaking anything, so there’s no reason not to implement this change.
• It’s just shockingly bad at estimating how long things will take. I appreciate it’s hard, but once it did give me an ETA that was longer than the total age of the universe.
• Internet Explorer, the world’s worst browser, is still inextricably linked with the shell.
• The recycle bin is still nothing more than a poorly-implemented version of a genuine file undelete/shred system.
• The Fonts folder still won’t let me access my actual *.ttf files. Similarly, I still can’t arrange a folder of *.mp3 files by size: only by artist, album, length and so forth. That’s not useful if, say, I want to see what I can get in the last 3.2MB of my (non-iPod) MP3 player. I can work around this by lying to Windows about what kind of folder it is or using the console, but I shouldn’t have to.
• File extensions still default to “hidden”. I suppose the rationale for this is that Average Joe User doesn’t understand file extensions and might break something by pissing about with them, but really, the warning box when you changed one was fine. All that needed changing was that the buttons on that box should have read “use original extension”, “use original filename” and “change anyway”, rather than the single “OK” box that deleted the lot. That would have been fine.
• A lot of work has been put into the new Minesweeper game, and it still gives unsolvable games (i.e., games where you can end up with a 50/50 chance there’s no way to resolve without guessing).
• The system tray expand/collapse button points and animates sideways even when the taskbar is vertical.
• Folders like “Documents” still have a kind of non-canonical path. I can browse in Explorer to “Public”, but I can’t access that path in the Console. I can, however, access “C:\Users\Public” which refers to the same folder. That annoys me. It also makes designing applications that bit harder.

Things I hate about Windows which I haven’t had a chance to check in Vista:

• Windows Update reboots the computer without my permission. That is unacceptable. I can think of very little Microsoft could do to more pro-actively ruin my day, with the possible exception of their existing anti-piracy measures.

Changes in Windows Vista which I am indifferent to:

• The new Windows Explorer. It has the “details view”-style headers there all the time, for fast sorting, and the folders bar has been collapsed into the “related places” box, with file information appearing in an oversized new status bar. I declare this about exactly as good as the old Windows Explorer, though to be frank neither are great. Also, it no longer has a menu bar. What’s with that? And the window has no title, except in the taskbar button. That’s weird to me.
• When you minimise or restore a window, it animates very nicely from one place to another, but it doesn’t do it if you maximise or unmaximise it. I would like this change if it was consistent, but it’s almost exactly offset by the annoying inconsistency of it.

While I’m on a similar subject, I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated lately at Microsoft Office Outlook. I’m using version 2003 at the moment; I have no idea how much of this is fixed in later versions, but it’s infuriating. It has a major identity crisis, that program. The interface has evolved, but the use of it hasn’t. Where before we had a list of emails which you double-clicked to read, now we have a Preview Pane where they appear after a single click. This is a definite improvement, however the controls haven’t been updated to reflect it: double-clicking an email still opens it in a new window, so now I have two copies of the email. Double-click should open a reply window. GMail’s web-based interface gets it pretty-well exactly right, so I don’t see what’s stopping Microsoft doing it.

The search annoys me as well. If I click a folder after doing a search, particularly if it’s the folder I just searched, it should be obvious I want everything in that folder to appear, not just those that match my old search term. I’m done searching now. I want to go back to normal use, but no, I have to click “clear” on the search bar to make my search go away. It’s so unintuitive.

It baffles me that Microsoft can make programmes with so many amazing features and never ask themselves what a good way to arrange them on the screen would be. Periodically they’ll do something crazy like overhauling IE until nobody can use it, but then they try to innovate! I don’t want innovation in the user interface. There’s a fine line between an innovative interface and a difficult one — if you’re doing new things, they’d better be either really subtle, really obvious, or just so much better that it’s clearly worth investing the time to learn them.

It frustrates me that Microsoft focus so heavily on making the new version of Windows prettier and simpler and so forth and they do nothing for people like me: people who know how to work a computer and would very much like to be allowed to do so. It’s as if Microsoft just aren’t interested in us. From my point of view, their OS has got steadily worse since about 1998, while the competition has got steadily better. If enough advanced users switch to Linux then it’ll get software support, and then there’s be no reason for Average Joe User, browsing Dell.Com, to shell out the extra £60 for a different OS that he isn’t allowed to reinstall if it goes wrong. That would be crazy. And if that happens, Microsoft will lose the OS monopoly.

I can’t see that happening. Not at least for a good long time. But it’s looking far, far more plausible than it did ten years ago.

There’s a shortage of Nintendo Wiis at the moment, because they’re popular and it’s Christmas. This has led to crazy people suggesting that Nintendo have engineered this shortage deliberately, which is true only in the rather weak sense that Nintendo’s objective is to sell consoles rather than horde them in shops. The fact is there’s no reason Nintendo would do such a thing – the only people who profit from a Wii shortage are canny eBay users. Nintendo make more money by selling more consoles. This is very basic stuff. Nintendo know this.

Nintendo’s PR company know this too, because they’re Very Clever Scientists. They’re a company called Cake, and they’ve done two pieces of Very Clever Science lately. The first was for Nintendo, and it was a study into how much energy you burn playing Wii. And it turns out, it’s not much. Though they have to be commended for doing a proper, albeit very small, trial and publishing the result anyway.

Cake’s other recent foray into the world of Very Clever Science was for The Children’s Society, a charity whose beliefs are fairly self-evident. They have issued a press release called “Have a mathematically perfect Christmas!”, in which they say (and you’ll have to imagine the phrase “sic” in brackets liberally sprinkled on this quote like some kind of Latin Christmas snow):

The University of Plymouth has Christmas all worked out! Professor & programme director of the School of Applied Psychosocial Studies, Rudi Dallos, has calculated the scientific theory for a perfect Christmas, it is:

PX = 8F x 4P + 23£ x 8F + 3 G +3 W + 2W:3C + 5T:1NR
_____________________________________________
3D

Professor Rudi Dallos devised the formula, which guarantees a perfect Christmas for families across the UK, to compliment the new Christmas book from The Children?s Society…

The perfect Christmas formula (PX) considers the number of family members (F), cost (£) and number of Christmas presents given (P), number of walks taken (W), number of games played (G), the amount of wine and chocolate (W:C) consumed and the ratio of turkey to nut roast (T:NR)!  Divide all that by the total days (D) you spent with your family and you have the perfect Christmas!

There are many, many things wrong with this, so let’s list just as many as we can find! But first, an aside. Obviously I’m in favour of charities in general, and I don’t know much about this one but it sounds like something I’d approve of, but this kind of thing is very bad for the public perception of science and while it annoys me when companies shit all over important things to turn a quick buck, charities should know better. I tend to think they should avoid doing things that will damage society, especially since they’re doing it on the back of donations. So, on with the list…

• This is not a “scientific theory” until he has proved it. That’s what the phrase “scientific theory” means.
• If he did prove it, it would still not be a theory, because it is an equation. That would be a law. The theory would be the underlying mechanics. It is not possible to “calculate” a theory.
• If it was possible to calculate a theory, and this was a theory, it would still not be true that Rudi Dallos had calculated this one. It would be more accurate to say that he had made it up, and more accurate still to say that he’s whored his name out to it.
• There is an equals sign in the numerator of a fraction. I am willing to give Dallos the benefit of the doubt here, as Cake’s typesetting skills are not great (unless their client really does spell their name with a question mark). This is also, I assume, why the lower case letter ‘x’ is used in place of the multiplication sign, and why a row of underlines are used in place of division. And to be fair, their typesetting is just marvellous compared to The Daily Mail’s version of this formula, which not only replicates this error, but duplicates the division so that revellers have to spend nine days with their families every day in order to have the prefect Christmas.
• The symbol “W” is used for two quite separate quantities.
• The pound sign goes before the number, genius.

And then there’s the subtle stuff. Some people have suggested that this equation suggests that one can have an infinitely good Christmas by spending zero days with the family. Personally, I think that’s reading it wrong. The letters are really units rather than variables. I think this is really a definition of a new constant PX, which is in the unusual mathematical units “man (presents + pounds) + games + walks + ml/g + turkeys per portion of nuts) per hour”. (In the Daily Mail’s version, this is per hour squared, making it some kind of bizarre festive acceleration constant, like a kind of Yuletide gravity. Possibly you are expected to buy everyone four more presents every day for nine days, a bit like Hannukah or that Twelve Days Of Christmas song.) That said, it’s still open to the same kind of abuse — if you don’t drink alcohol then you can’t have any chocolate or else the ratio is upset (that, or you have to have some chocolate to prevent undefined divisions), and if you only have one family member then you have to counter this by — I swear this is what it says — spending only 9 hours with them, and in that time playing three eighths of a game, taking three eighths of a walk, eating 166% more chocolate and nut roast than you’d really like.

If you want to spend less than £23 on each of your presents, you can compensate by spending less time with your family so the ratio is the same, however to balance the rest of the proportions, you also have to give proportionally fewer presents, go on fewer walks, and play fewer games. And eat more chocolate and less turkey. It also places no upper limit on how drunk you can get provided you’re willing to balance it with chocolate.

What we have here, you see, is not maths. It’s one of those crappy adverts that says “you plus our product equals profit er I mean happiness”. “The perfect Christmas is 4 presents each for 8 family members, £23 each for 8 family members, 3 walks, 3 games, 5 times as much turkey as nut roast and 3 times as much chocolate as wine, all over 3 days.” It’s nothing more than a description of a perfectly nice Christmas phrased a bit like maths. Then written as a formula.

And it can piss off.

Here is a delightful crank. This lot, who appear to be headed up by someone called — really — “Jacco van der Worp”, believe that the world will end in 2012, upon the return of Planet X. Shockingly, that seems to be one of the less mental things they believe.

Their opening page seems to be fairly standard Aliens Are Here Look At The Crop Circles fodder…

If you still have any doubts that the 2002 Crabwood formation is genuine, you need to watch Maurice’s latest video that details the process of using his computer program to make a crop circle.  After viewing it, you’ll see that it would be impossible for debunkers or hoaxers to recreate the 2002 Crabwood formation in a single evening, let alone a single month!

(Yeah, well done you: you’re not as good at computer programming as cynics are at flattening wheat. Therefore aliens exist. Actually, the circle makers are really clever and it’s impressive how much ingenuity goes into making these things interesting.)

…which at first I took in my stride, as I’m used to that kind of thing from this kind of nutcase, but it doesn’t seem to connect to the main thesis, which is “OH NO A BIG STAR IS COMING TO KILL US”. They get from there to here by… er… suddenly stopping talking about aliens and starting talking about PLANET X. That page has five videos about Planet X, of which I watched the first two.

The first was incredible (literally): it raises a load of issues, such as “are things like megatsunamis and superquakes just sexed-up words news companies use to make natural events seem more exciting or is there something more sinister going on?” and then immediately jumping on the stupid option and acting as if that’s the sensible thing to do. Then it concludes that all kinds of mechanical failures are really caused by the gravity of “planet X”.

The second was even better. It explained all about the hunt for Planet X (which was pretty accurate up until the point where scientists realised their mass estimation for Neptune was wrong and the correct mass didn’t support the idea that Planet X existed, which the video oddly failed to mention), then it demonstrated Scientific Proof (their words) that Planet X exists, by citing a 1983 report in US News And World Report and a 1992 NASA press release. That’s it. And the NASA one doesn’t exist. I typed some of the quoted text into Google and got only one hit, and that was the self-same Planet X cranks’ page!

And better still, the 1983 report put this body 50 billion miles away and the 1992 report put it 7 billion miles away. The logical conclusion? Clearly they are the same object, and it’s heading towards us with an average speed of half a million miles per hour (.08% of lightspeed), which must be well above the Sun’s escape velocity at that distance (though it obviously wouldn’t be travelling straight away from the Sun). Their theory is that the gravity from this object is affecting the Earth. This is clearly untrue: the Earth is in freefall, and therefore doesn’t experience any effects of external gravity except when viewed from elsewhere.  We can’t even detect the gravity of the Sun. This is General Relativity in a nutshell: the Sun’s gravity cancels out exactly with our acceleration towards it and the net effect on Earth is zero.

All of this assumes the Earth has zero size, but that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption given that we’re discussing distances of billions of miles. The difference in gravitational field from one end of the Earth to the other would be, even with the most generous 7-billion-miles-away numbers (I don’t really know what numbers should be used here; if this thing was really hurtling towards us at that speed it’d have got here in 1993, not 2012), would be (according to Google Calculator) 7.1 × 10^-18 ms^-2, which is to say that if you dropped a ball in that gravity it would take almost 17 years to fall one metre. And we’re not talking about the effects on 7km-wide planets — the video is talking about the effects on small Minnesotan road bridges. Even a generous mile-long bridge would have to wait a millennium and a half for that ball to drop its single metre. 1500 years!

Yeah, I can see how that kind of stress could be causing ‘mega-tsunamis’.

I’m always amazed at the crap people will narrate.

It’s that time of year again, where the more deluded Christians unite to righteously whine about the “war on Christmas” being waged by atheists, secularists, politicians, and basically anyone else who identifies themselves with any word other than “Christian”. This bothers me.

It bothers me because of the inherent hypocrisy of it all. They get on their high horse about “the true meaning of Christmas” because they think that anything with a Christian name (not a christian name) must be a Christian thing. They criticise non-Christians because Christ’s name is now attached to a largely secular festival, and that’s true, but slightly backwards.

Christmas, in one form or another, appears in almost every culture that’s ever inhabited a temperate climate zone. There’s often a religious excuse behind it, but Yule, Saturnalia, Juvenalia, Mithra’s birthday, Hanukkah, Diwali, Hogswatch, and any of several winter solstice-based celebrations are really little more than convenient times to have a much needed party to cheer everyone up during what, historically, was an otherwise unpleasant and dangerous time of year.

The Christian church managed to attach itself to this celebration sometime in the fourth century AD, and in some parts of the world they did even manage to turn the festival into a primarily religious one, but frankly if they didn’t want the name of Christ to be attached to a largely secular festival, then they shouldn’t have attached the name of Christ to a largely secular festival. How was that a smart move?

Okay, so I realise that the Christians saying Christmas is under attack now are not the same Christians who made the decision to conflate Jesus’ birth with Saturnalia sixteen hundred years ago (only Jews live that long), but it really annoys me that they think they’re crusaders for some moral truth when in fact they’ve failed to do even the most rudimentary research. They assume they know what “the true meaning of Christmas” is because they’re Christians and the idea that Christian zeitgeist might be mistaken doesn’t occur to them.

And even that I could tolerate if they were arguing for something better than “everyone must stop having fun and act solemn now, because we say so”. Just stop whinging, shut the hell up and have some mulled wine. You might actually be happier if you join in the fun than if you stubbornly refuse to enjoy yourself unless the Bible says it’s okay.

I was watching The Late Edition on BBC4 the other week, in which Marcus Brigstocke (or Marcus Laughingstock as my spell checker would have it, seen here pretending to be David Tennant) had a long and excellent rant about religion in politics which I agreed with on every count. He’d done much the same thing the previous week, and I couldn’t help noticing that while he talks sense, 10 Downing Street talks bullshit and government departments dodge questions and talk in vague platitudes. And the same is true of other topics. It was around that time that I realised I would honestly vote for him ahead of most of the current candidates for high-ranking government posts — okay so he has no political experience to speak of, but at least he’s honest and basically right about most of the issues he talks about.

It worries me that a comedian would seem like a better leader than the people elected to lead. I don’t know exactly why this might be, but here are my current hypotheses:

1. Comedians are not immediately thrown out of the job if they’re discovered to have a personality. Politicians are. Frank Skinner is an alcoholic and he’s had a string of high-profile TV shows. Charles Kennedy is an alcoholic and he was thrown out by a strange kind of mutiny. Russell Brand brags about womanising and yet when Bill Clinton had one affair he was removed from power, despite having been elected democratically (twice) and by most accounts doing a good job. For every politician whose career was ended by a scandal, there’s a comedian who did the exact same thing and went from strength to strength afterwards — and often they’re not even funny. The idea that politicians should be perfect stand-up family types with not even a petty crime in their history (except fashionable ones) and who’ve never offended anyone in any way is an unreasonable standard and the only people who will ever seem to pass it are very boring people who have no idea about real life and convincing liars. They end up trying to make out they have a personality by releasing cookbooks or telling us what’s on their iPods, when what I really want to see is some evidence that they have an opinion on something. The recent trend for MPs to have blogs is a good start, but they’re mostly pretty shockingly dull. When they can say what they like on their blogs and be accepted as human that will have worked. Who cares who’s in Parliament if they’re just going to  be a face and a suit going through all the same motions as everyone else?
2. Comedians don’t have to be universally liked. Monty Python’s Life Of Brian offended loads of people, but that didn’t matter because they couldn’t vote against it. Comedians profit when people like them but lose nothing when they offend other people. They’re very much allowed to say what they think, whereas politicians are expected to tread carefully about anything remotely controversial — which is downright fucking stupid when you realise that “anything remotely controversial” is probably their job. We’ve ended up with a system where candidates cover up who they really are then the public choose between them based on what little information we’ve been given, then the successful politician will try to improve our lot but basically his top priority will be to avoid saying anything that anyone might disagree with. How anything is supposed to get done in that system I have no idea.

Now I wonder if it would be possible to be elected to Parliament by being honest, without really caring too much who you offend and hoping that people will realise that you’re really no worse than the other candidates but are at least honest and admit what you’ve done wrong, tell them what you think so they can make an informed decision, and openly try to do what’s right instead of what’s the least unpopular. People have, of course, tried this, but they’re mostly Kilroy-Silk type weirdos whose honest opinions are mental. I’d like to see someone try it out who actually has a chance. Someone with sensible opinions.

And preferably, someone who isn’t written by Aaron Sorkin.

There are more than a few “social networking” sites. Facebook is the site of choice for students, Scrabble enthusiasts and ex-students, MySpace is the site of choice for chavs, bands and morons, and Orkut is the preferred site for… er, other people. Exactly who uses The Richard Dawkins Social Networking Site is a mystery to me, although that’s principally because their sign-up form doesn’t work.

Another is FluxLead. But unfortunately, FluxLead are total scumbag cunt-twats, a slightly-tautological word I made up to increase the vitriol contained in the link text, which I know is used to characterise websites by search engines. FluxLead put a lot of stock in this. I know this because their principal form of advertisement is trackback spam on blogs. I have many of their spam messages in my database, although I’ve set my blog up not to show them to you. If you do a Google search for “Trackback from FluxLead”,  you’ll find a number of websites they’ve hit (currently 37), and that excludes ones not indexed and ones that deleted it: you won’t find their attempted spam on this site on Google. One of these, though, is the second hit returned by searching for Fluxlead, so probably this page has a chance of taking that spot.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of writing them off right away for this, though. There’s no reason at all to think that they aren’t lovely people who set up a website with the best of intentions, then naïvely hired a really shitty marketing firm who trained spambots to inject spurious blog comments linking to Fluxlead in order to increase its PageRank. So I asked Fluxlead about the links.

Somebody at [ip.xx.xx.xx] just placed an irrelevant advert for your website on my blog, in the form of a trackback.

I do not appreciate having my website hijacked as a billboard for anyone without my consent. Do you endorse such spam, and if not, why am I receiving it?

This was the 10th of October. They’ve had two months now to answer that question. They’ve not taken even the basic minimum effort to appear reasonable. So I am left only to assume that they’re unprincipled scum. This notion is confounded by the fact that they’re very obviously not simply “a social networking site”, but it very obvious Facebook rip-off. They have a narrow, dark-blue-on-white website with a big, friendly deep green “sing up” button… The key difference, though, is that Facebook looks like a professional job, and FluxLead looks distinctly amateur. The terms of service are badly punctuated and laid out, and the whole site is littered with shitty clip-art. It looks rubbish.

It seems to be not doing too well: one of the “newest members” is called “ronnie”, and it won’t let you duplicate usernames.

I am glad they are failing. Serves them right.

AMBULANCE SHAKE-UP ‘POSES RISKS’!

Not least to the poor chap inside.

These are all a little old now, but I think they’re fairly important stories. They were all in the news within the last month or so:

• Jose Mestre is a Portuguese man in his fifties. In his teens, he developed a tumour on his face. It was pretty noticeable; not something you’d easily miss. Fortunately, it was entirely operable.
• Emma Gough is a 22 year old woman from Shropshire. She recently gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy. There were complications during pregnancy, but luckily the hospital staff were trained and equipped to handle the situation.
• Dennis Lindberg comes from Washington State. He has leukemia, but again he was lucky that there was ample medical equipment to save his life, or at least to significantly prolong it.

In any reasonable society, those would all be happy stories, but Emma and Dennis are dead and Jose is alive but the tumour is now so big that he’s blind in one eye, can barely eat, and is having increasing trouble breathing. That, and he looks like a troll painted red. And this is all because the three of them refused point blank to accept any form of medical treatment that might involve a blood transfusion.

They did this because they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of a cult which defined itself in 1931 and has somehow managed to amass 6.7 million members since. Wikipedia (the free encyclopædia that anyone can edit but the moderators will just change back) currently describes them as follows:

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe only their religion represents true Christianity and expressly teach that no other religion is Christian. Witnesses consider the entire Biblical canon, excluding the Apocrypha, to be the inspired word of God. They do interpret some scriptures literally, but they believe that biblical writers and characters often employed symbolism, parable, figures of speech, and poeticism. Thus, they insist that they are not ‘fundamentalists’ who they feel are in error in taking a strictly literal view of the Bible. They hold that the Bible alone should be used for determining issues of doctrine [although] interpretation of scripture and codification of doctrines is considered the responsibility of the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Watchtower Society, who run the cult, describe them thusly:

Actually, Jehovah’s Witnesses are interested in you and your welfare. They want to be your friends.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy defines The Watchtower Society, who run the cult, as:

A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be first against the wall when the revolution comes.*

They do believe some pretty weird stuff, not least that playing chess is a sin and much to George Orwell’s presumed relief the world will end in 1975. (To be fair, most of them don’t believe this any more; like all other cults they have a governing body who can decide that inconvenient beliefs weren’t true after all.)

Now, I’m all for religious freedom. If people imagine that an invisible man will make everything okay in the end then that’s just lovely for them, and in some ways I envy how easy it must be to get through life in such a pathetic state of denial. But there has to be a limit to these things. Jehovah’s Witnesses can trace the origins of their religion. It goes back, in one form or another, as far as  Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s, when it was simply made up, by reading the Bible with the emphasis in different places. When you’re looking at a set of beliefs that you can trace back to their conception, that should suggest that they just might not be the ancient and timeless words of Jehovah God. Add to that the Jehovah’s Witness tradition of tithing: the Watchtower Society gets a cut of members’ wages, and it gets to tell them what to do. Now call me a cynic, but if I was a heartless manipulative bastard, that’s exactly the kind of organisation I’d found.

Aside from the direct cost, through tithes and donations, this cult has a wider, indirect cost to society: Emma Gough’s children now have no mother. Fortunately, she was married, but the cost to the public had the father not been known or not been alive would have been far greater. Jose Mestre’s surgery, which he’s finally agreed to have now that technology allows it to be done without blood, will cost far more than it would have had he accepted it forty or fifty years ago, and that extra money has essentially been wasted. Had this been an NHS case then that could have been your money he’d wasted, or even your operation that wouldn’t have gone ahead because his face was there first. And Dennis was fourteen years old.

Fourteen. He’s deemed, at that age, too young to vote. Too young to drink alcohol. Too young to have sex. Too young to marry, to buy a house, or to enter a legal contract. And yet a judge ruled that he was quite up to the job of choosing death over blood transfusion, despite the fact that he’d obviously been indoctrinated into a cult by his wicked step-parents.

At some point you have to accept that this goes beyond religious liberty. People are being brainwashed into effectively killing themselves, they’re sending off money to an organisation whose stated aim is to get more people to kill themselves in the same way, and they’re causing all kinds of difficulties for everyone else. They make organ donation really difficult, too, which kills other, random people — or at least does not even the bare minimum required to help them, which is selfishness in the extreme considering that they’re dead before they stand to lose anything by it. The carbon footprint of people opening their heated-living-room doors to the knockings of Jehovah’s Witnesses on cold days is incalculable (if only because I can’t be bothered to do the calculation).

Is your religious liberty more important than the country’s right not to fund pointless medical care and the upbringing of children whose parents could have easily been saved? It is more important than stopping powerful men from exploiting the vulnerable for money by selling them a spurious and unverifiable paradise? Is it more important than a man’s right to have a face? Is it more important than a child’s right to live?

I believe in freedom of religion only because I object to any kind of “thought crime”. The idea that someone could be prosecuted for being wrong about something (or for being right about it) is abhorrent. But that belief does not extend to giving people the wholesale right to implement all their wacky beliefs. If you refuse medical treatment, then fair enough, but don’t come running to the state when you need more expensive treatment further down the line that you conveniently don’t object to. It is not the job of the state to bail you out if you make a bad decision (unless of course you are the head of Northern Rock).

The heads of an organisation who cause this much death and take this much money from people by promising them an invaluable reward, which conveniently cannot be verified until Judgment Day comes at some unspecified point in the future** should, by any reasonable standard, be in prison. (This ties in neatly with my preferred definition of “cult”: any religion with a living leader or governing body.)

Instead, they are given tax-free status and allowed to open schools. What the fuck is wrong with the world?

In any reasonable society, those would all be happy stories. Clearly, we do not live in a reasonable society.

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*This may not be true.

**The third coming of Jesus, since they believe the second coming was in 1914 but nobody noticed.

A few days ago, M. le Prof d’Anglais nominated Mitt Romney (as if that’s a proper name) for January’s Religious Crackpot of the Month. I thought about this, but eventually decided that I wasn’t going to lump him in with people of other faiths, purely and simply because that’s what he wants us to do.

Romney, for those of you who don’t know, is one of the 2008 presidential candidates. He’s hoping to be the Republican candidate, and if successful (which he probably won’t be), he’ll have to face an election against the Democratic candidate — probably either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as I understand these things from watching The Daily Show.

Recently he made a speech about faith in America, hoping to get the votes of the huge numbers of Christians in America  by pretending to be one. He was introduced by a man who’s noted for saying that an atheist could never really be a true patriotic American (which is offensive in itself but is downright terrifying when you consider than man used to be the president), so to drive the point home, Romney is shown on his website standing in front of no fewer than eight American flags. I shall now paste a cut down version of his speech, which is available in full on his website, because he’s actually proud of his insane beliefs.

Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America’s greatness: our religious liberty.

…

There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. … Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

Just to interrupt Mr Romney there, this argument is fantastically weak. He’s implicitly equating “religious freedom” with religion itself, and he’s implicitly equating “in the context of the weighty threats that face us” with “in politics”. It’s cunning phrasing, and if I’m generous then I assume he doesn’t know he’s doing it (not least because he’s got a team of lackeys to write this stuff for him).

A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.

Remember this, and see if he goes back on it.

Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.

Ah, so he’s a secularist, that’s good to know–

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

Ah, no, no, in fact he’s an idiot. “The religion of secularism”? That’s a bit like saying “the number minus” or “the colour invisible”.

We cherish these sacred rights, and secure them in our Constitutional order. Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are guaranteed the free exercise of our religion.

…

And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion – rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.

Throughout his speech, which you can watch on his website and which sounds more like a sermon than a political address,  you may notice he keeps making implicit anti-atheist remarks like “freedom requires religion” and “our constitution was made for … religious people”.  Now antisemitism is not encouraged, so how does he think America would tolerate an anti-atheist president? Well, the fact is that for the most part they would (and have done before), because America has a very strong anti-atheist brigade, to the point where many atheists face much the same problems telling their parents of their apostasy as gay people did admitting their homosexuality all those years ago.

He says  “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty has a friend and ally in me”, implying that he is no friend or ally to atheist Americans, or indeed agnostic or Buddhist Americans. That’s a pretty large chunk of the population — I think it works out around 10%. One in ten Americans would not have an ally in the president. That’s alarming. He repeatedly asserts that religious freedom is important, but the idea that someone might exercise that freedom by opting out of the whole ridiculous charade seems to offend him — which is a bit fucking rich when he said in the same speech that “religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree”.

He said this, you see, because he is a Mormon*. He wanted to make sure that everyone was clear that he was a religious man of faith, and that they should support him because he’s religious and has faith, but he wasn’t going to start telling them exactly what his faith is, because of course that “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution”. I think he imagines that the First Amendment is something he can apply as and when is convenient, which makes sense considering his wholesale support for Guantanamo Bay, torture, wiretapping and basically whatever else anyone feels like doing to those nasty fundamentalist Muslims (who apparently are also not covered by the phrase “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty has a friend and ally in me”).

Instead, I have created a special award, Specifically Mormon Crackpot, just for him, and as he’s the only Specifically Mormon Crackpot we’ve had, and since it’s December, I can safely award him the award for the entire year, all at once. Which is quite fair, I think, since he so plainly deserves it.

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*Apparently, Mormonism is one of those religions that don’t let you have any fun. It seems that someone once decided that Christianity was doing it wrong, and that they had the proper version, so in that sense it’s kind of like a cult version of Islam. And here’s a support site for its victims. Most religions have one or two of these.