Apathy Sketchpad

According to Blog Her, Barbara Couley is Not Real. But she is real. I know she’s real because she sent me this email:

from: Barbara Couley <barbaracouley@gmail.com>
to: taylor.andrew@gmail.com,
date: Jan 8, 2008 8:07 AM
subject: Follow Up Email For Paid Text Link Advertisement!
Hi,

I sent you an email few days back, I am interested in purchasing text link advertising on your website http://www.apathysketchpad.com/. Let me know if interested and we can discuss further details as well. I can make a good offer to make it worth your time.

Let me know!
Thanks
Barbara

I told her I was interested, which was bad of me, but I’d do it again. She sent me more details. The formatting’s gone a bit since I pasted it, but it was fairly bad to begin with.

Hello!

Thank you for your reply and interest. I am interested in purchasing permanent placement of text-links on specific pages of your website. 

• I would be paying one time fee and paragraph will stay lifetime.
• Per page there will be a placement of  5-7 text-links.
• The text link advertisement itself won’t be more than 125 words
• Contents will be customized and well matched with the theme of your site.
• The content will be unique and won’t be spammy.
• You will have the right to get anything edited through us which you disapprove of.
• The links will be between the post and the comments section.
• It should not get archived in any way or move off the page.

Here is an example to better understand what I am looking to place on your web site.

Red colored links below the Google adds.

http://www.shwetz-online.in/blog/2005/11/29/nav-2006-review/

Blue colored links below the iPhone toolkit add

http://www.dotalex.com/?p=10

 specific pages with price are given below:

 $20 each page

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2003/06/02/col-daria/

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2003/06/09/col-sbsp/

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2003/06/02/col-happy16/

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2003/06/28/col-contradictionary/

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2002/11/21/col-adamscar/

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2002/11/22/col-daveanddick/

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2002/11/28/col-deadlines2/  

 

Looking forward to your reply.

Kind Regards,

Barbara

Gosh, that would be $140 altogether, just for advertising on pages nobody ever looks at, which given the current exchange rates is approximately one pittance. I asked her for “a sample of the content that would appear on [my] site”.

I shall have  the content for your web pages written, once you agree to make the deal. otherwise, it will waste the payment i shall make to my writer.

If you want to be sure about how these paragraphs will look like with the text links in them , you can review that in the examples i sent to you in my last mail.

regards,

Barbara

Well I wasn’t about to agree to anything without seeing what it is. That would be silly of me.

I had a look at the text on the example webpages you linked me to, and you’re right, it does fit fairly nicely with the sites, but I’m puzzled as to why you need a writer to come up with it for you. It’s not as if it’s going to get into the Richard and Judy Book club, is it?

If you don’t want to employ a writer, send me the links you want and I’ll have a go at writing something — then it will fit perfectly with my site.

Andrew

I am nothing if not generous. Except perhaps cynical, mean, bored, fairly tall, tired…

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for getting in touch.

If you would like to write the paragraphs on your own( for no additional fee) , I am fine with that. I shall send you the keywords to be embedded in the paras as anchor text.

Also, if my writer writes the paras, even then you will have the right to edit the content (except the anchor text) as per your prefernce.

Please let me know what you think of this.

Thnaks,

Barbara

No additional fee? What a bitch — I just saved her “a payment to [her] writer”! Nevertheless, I agreed, and she asked for my Pay Pal ID. Fortunately, I have kept it up to date by responding to every single email that said “you mush enter your password at lycos.nl/freeuserpages/notaconmanhostly/scams/paypal/fairlyconvincing.htm to prevent account closure!”. I told her I’d rather get all the details sorted before we started exchanging money, so she sent me this:

Hi Andrew,

I attached an excel file with

• the URLs I want the paragraph on (column A),

• keywords (column C),

• URLS respective to keywords(column B) and 

• written  paragraphs(coumn D).

Now, you are free to either place the paragraphs(coumn D) or to write the paragraphs yourself (by using the URLS in column B and keywords in column C)

Please let me know when you finish with this so that I can review them and make the payment to your PayPal account for this permanent deal.

 

Thank you very much,

 

Barbara

The file attached was this. Have a look. It’s good writing, that! But I thought I could match it…

Here’s what I thought of for some of the pages. I think this would be in-keeping with the theme of my site:

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2002/11/28/col-deadlines2/

Many people in this century use numbers for counting with. Counting things that you have less than none of is stupid, but mathematicians have invented Negative Numbers for it. You can get such numbers by subtracting large positive (or “proper”) numbers from smaller numbers. For example, 70-290 = -350, 70-298 = -358, 70-620 = -690, 70-536 = -606, 74-134 = -208. You cannot just make shit up, though. For example, MB2-423 is not a sum.

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2003/06/09/col-sbsp/

Monopoly is a game where you buy hotels. Depending on which version of the game you own, these may be new york hotels or london hotels . It is usually considered cheating to negotiate discounts on hotels with the banker. No version of the game includes cruise port hotels.

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2002/11/22/col-daveanddick/

If american airline was a sport, it would almost certainly be played in some kind of american airlines arena. Getting in would require american airline tickets, but if you couldn’t afford that you might have to make do with a cheap airline ticket. A favourite snack at these events might be aeroplanes with ham and pineapple on top, which would be called hawaiian airlines .

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2003/06/02/col-daria/

Tom cruises chosen religion is one of those silly cult ones. his younger brother, nile cruise, is no better. The carnival cruise reviews in his latest book is rubbish, but Cruise gives it high praise, probably because he met a nice girl there, by using some of his best cruise lines. Playing poker with him is a nightmare because he pauses for ages and then at the last minute cruise deals .

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2003/06/02/col-happy16/

Most buildings have flights of stairs in them. Offices have commercial ones; homes have domestic flights. New technology is producing larger and larger staircases, and scientists predict that soon we will be able to build flights to boston. If you want cheap flights students are good people to talk to because they work for less than fully qualified stairsmiths. At the top of one flight airline tickets can be found. You need these to watch the sport.

Would these be okay? I shall do the others later. Can I ask why you’re buying links to http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/, by the way? It would seem sensible to wait until the technology is more viable.

Andrew

I think I got the gist across.

Hi Andrew,

Yes , everything looks fine so far as you chose.

I am an independent webmaster and choose the pages/sites/links after my heart .You are right, but I just happen to pick and choose as I come across anything that interests me :)

Looking forward to establishing a happy business relationship with you,

 

Best Regards,

Barbara

I was by this stage more than a little confused. I can only assume Couley (which is clearly not her real name) is trying to get PayPal IDs, though I don’t know what she can do with them.

Gosh, that’s very altruistic of you, isn’t it? Paying strangers to promote random websites just because you like them.

But have you ever considered registering at http://del.icio.us ? It would be far cheaper in the long run.

Andrew

That was over a week ago. I think I lost her. Probably she registered a del.icio.us account after all.

I wonder if she’ll want to advertise on this page…

Today I watched, for the first time, an episode from series two of The West Wing, called The Fall’s Gonna Kill You. A sub-plot is that Donna is terribly concerned about a fax from NASA which says a Chinese satellite is going to crash to Earth and nobody knows where or when. Everyone else knows that kind of fax comes once every couple of weeks, but nobody tells Donna because it’s amusing. Josh comments that something’s fallen out of orbit every day since we started putting it up there, and nobody’s ever been hurt by any of it.

A few hours later, this arrives in my Google Reader feed, via the BBC:

Satellite could plummet to Earth

No details of the satellite were given

A “large” US spy satellite has gone out of control and is expected to crash to Earth some time in late February or March, government sources say.

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity said the satellite had lost power and propulsion, and could contain hazardous materials.

The White House said it was monitoring the situation.

A spokesman said “numerous” satellites had come out of orbit and fallen back to Earth harmlessly over the years.

How great is that?

I just have one question:

What the fuck is a “Quantum of Solace”?

Bond films are meant to be called short snappy things like “Thunderball” or “Moonraker”, phrases with the word ‘die’ shoehorned into them, like “Live and Let Die” or “Die Another Day”, or something like “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” or “Casino Royale” that’s just jam-packed with Bond imagery. Or anything with gold. They could have called it “Die in the Springtime” or “One Shot Kill” or “Goldmaster” or anything.

Quantum of Solace, indeed… I never heard of such a thing.

Pah.

It’s a bit old now, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to blog as part of my apparently ongoing project to document and mock everything the new, crazy Pope says and does wrong from the moment of his appointment to shortly after the moment of his death, after which (much as he thinks otherwise) he will not say or do anything.

He was not-very-recently scheduled to give a talk, on the subject of… er… nothing very much, at La Sapienza university, but the talk was cancelled after large numbers of scientists complained. They said the Pope shouldn’t be allowed to talk at a now-secular (the university having been founded by an earlier and probably saner Pope) research institute after What He Said About Galileo. Eventually the talk was reorganised for a later date, and the Pope tried to claim the triple-whammy of association with the university, victim, and victor. Personally I think he came out of the whole thing looking like a twat, but then that’s much the way he went in so no harm done.

For those who missed it, the now-pope, 17 years ago and long before he was pope, defended the Catholic Church’s treatment of Galileo way back when. (For those who missed that too, Galileo pointed out that the Earth orbits the sun and not the other way around. The last Pope, John Paul II, was happy to admit Galileo was right, as to be fair is the new one, but where Benedict XVI loses my respect is that he condones the actions of the Church at the time when they banned all his books, forced him to recant and locked him in his house until he died.)

Of course, the Church was quick to leap to Ratzinger’s defence:

The Vatican has dismissed some of the protestors [sic] as anti-clerical activists, and have said that others have misunderstood Benedict’s remarks, made 17 years ago.

…

As Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict said that Galileo had turned out to be correct about the earth revolving around the sun, and that subsequent biblical scholarship had rejected literalist readings of texts that had been taken by the Church to deny this.

Nevertheless, he said, Galileo had been dogmatic and sectarian in his statements at the time, and the Church authorities had acted reasonably given the levels of knowledge available then.

So, his defence is that Galileo, though now-demonstrably and -clearly right, was too dogmatic for the Pope. So they banned his books and humiliated him and locked him in his house for questioning their beliefs, but that’s okay because he was a tad dogmatic. In any case, “the levels of knowledge available then” were the same as the levels of (relevant) knowledge available now: there was no proof that the sun orbitted the Earth. As such Galileo was surely perfectly free to doubt it, yes? No. It’s as if the Pope believes that the Church is free to demand that everyone follows their thinking on any issue right up until the moment that it can be definitively proved wrong and everyone agrees. Another fun paragraph from that article is here:

Nevertheless, there is no doubt but that the Vatican is extremely embarrassed by the incident, which will strengthen the hand of those who argue that religious belief and scientific enquiry are incompatible – a view rejected by those involved in science-theology conversations, but spreading widely among non-specialists.

That reads like it was written by one of those strange people who study theology as if it was a proper subject. The incompatibilities (or lack of them) between science and religion is a philosophical area — we can’t prove it. Sure, it’s easy to point out that science is based around the idea of questioning all knowledge and demanding proof of all claims, whereas religion is based around the idea of believing what you’re told, preferably without any proof, but some people will say that they don’t accept that and even though they’re obviously wrong, they’re not demonstrably wrong. They just have to chase you back until you hit an assumption (say, “logic holds” or “the universe exists”) and declare their assumption equally valid.

And I just bet that they’re using the phrase “non-specialists” to mean “atheists”. That’s what it usually means in this context: it’s the mindset that thinks you can’t disprove religion without studying it for years. It’s a bit like saying “you can’t prove Ï€ doesn’t equal four without checking every decimal place”. After all, the view they ascribe to “non-specialists”, “that religious belief and scientific enquiry are incompatible,” is the view held by Richard Dawkins, the esteemed biologist, professor for the public understanding of science, and author of The God Delusion. I think it’s fair to call him an expert in the field.

But they’ve decided what’s true and anyone who disagrees obviously just hasn’t studied hard enough. Damn those dogmatic astronomers!

You may recall, some time ago, a blog called Quackometer had to remove a page about the Society of Homeopaths because the Society of Homeopaths* threatened his hosting company with legal action. Well, he’s in trouble again. Just the other day, his godawful web hosts, Netcetera (you may have noticed some more Google- than user-oriented keyword selection going on here), received a letter from a lawyer representing a quack called Joseph Chikelue Obi. In case that page also gets taken down, here is a cache of it on Furl.net. Here are Furls of the offending two posts: Right Royal College of Pompous Quackery – Dublin; Ethical Quackery, the Monarchy and Kate Moss.

The problem is that Joseph Chikelue Obi says that the posts are “defamatory”:

Our clients hereby give you formal notice that they are determined to sue you directly for the highly defamatory contents contained on the website should you fail to immediately shut down the website and delete all of the defamatory material relating to the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Dr Obi and our clients` lawfully registered Trademarks.

Nowhere is it stated exactly what parts of the pages are defamatory or what the complaint is, because that would give Andy Lewis (who runs the site) chance to remove only that part. Also, of course, because the Quackometer pages are backed up with published reports in newspapers which Joseph Chikelue Obi has chosen not to sue, although he’s not really planning to sue Lewis or Netcetera either: he just saw the reports about the time the Society of Homeopaths threatened to and (having not read them very carefully at all) thought “maybe I can get the annoying pages taken down”. I mean, look at this ridiculous letter:

In case the defamation continues beyond 12 noon on Monday the 21st of January 2008, we are instructed to hold you fully liable to the tune of £1 Million (One Million Pounds) per day, together with additional punitive damages relating to the many months during which the defamatory material had and has been globally accessible via your server.

One Million Pounds? That’s ridiculous. That’s just a made-up number. It’s designed to sound Big And Scary, so Netcetera bow to his will, and it worked, because Netcetera are cowards. They clearly don’t care about anything but getting as much money as they can and keeping out of trouble at any cost, and I really don’t expect any more from them. I don’t expect any more from Joseph Chikelue Obi either: his college is imaginary, he’s been suspended for misconduct, he takes people’s money promising them everything and gives them nothing, newspapers advice people to avoid him, charges £250 to hear recorded phone messages, refused to turn up to his own GMC hearing, and his qualifications are highly suspect.

The next paragraph of the letter shocked me, though:

Kindly note that Google has already blocked the highly defamatory material from appearing on its search engines in the Republic of Ireland, and is currently in the process of extending the ban to other countries.

I honestly expect more from Google. Aside from the fact that I can’t for a second see how Google could possibly be labelled liable for libel when all they did was tell people that someone else has written a webpage pointing out that some newspapers published articles containing information that was probably true anyway, it doesn’t seem to fit with their general politic. I’ve written to Google, but not long enough ago that I could reasonably demand an answer yet. Here’s some (well, okay, most) of my email:

I understand you have recently removed some pages from your index after a legal threat: http://www.google.ie/search?q=quackometer+obi

…

I’d like to know how sites are checked, when this kind of threat is received, to see if they are genuinely defamatory. Having a policy of “not using an editorial viewpoint to determine the ranking of results” ( http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=4115&query=editorial&topic=&type=) and a policy of removing defamatory content at the request or threat of individuals concerned seems to be somewhat at odds with your stated “[strong belief] in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results” (http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39334&ctx=en:cuf2). The web’s democratic nature only works if you allow both sides of a story equal rights to your search results.

… If the world’s leading search engine happily indexes his own pages and third-party pages which sing his praises, but removes all pages which criticise him or highlight his past “misadventures” … then anyone searching on his name or ’services’ will be left with the false impression that he is a universally-praised and wholly uncontroversial man with no detractors, which is simply not the case.

This clearly leaves a situation where your search results are not only factually inaccurate, they are not even a true reflection of the content available on the web. It might be more helpful to simply return no results at all.

If nothing else, the “websites removed” notice should be placed in a more prominent position: A search for Obi (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Joseph+Chikelue+Obi&btnG=Search ) returns the “defamatory” page as the very first hit, whereas the notice about its removal on the same search at google.ie is right at the bottom of the page, where many users simply won’t see it.

Google has a reputation, and to some degree I think an obligation, for providing unbiased search results and that is not what you are doing in this case. At the moment I feel badly let down. Is there anything you can tell me to allay that?

It’s actually remarkably hard to email Google. Their website is awful by modern standards. You can’t easily contact them.

---

*It’s well worth using the phrase “the Society of Homeopaths” just to make “the Society of Homeopaths” a link to one of the blogs that reposted that blog about what the Society of Homeopaths did. It boosts its ranking in a Google search for “the Society of Homeopaths“.

I’ve just added a new feature to my blog. Users can now “star” any post they like. When you star a post, it will appear at the top of the “recently starred” list on the right hand side of the blog. It will stay there until other people push it off the bottom of the list by starring other posts. Since I presume almost nobody will use this feature, this means that lots of people will see a link to the page you star.

I read the other day about how to put popular pages on a list using Google Analytics, and very clever it was, although it seems a massively over-engineered solution. So I thought for a while and came up with starring. I think it should be a little more interesting — this way the pages like How To Crack Captchas which feature heavily in search engine hits because apparently people just love cracking captchas won’t drown out that one person who randomly happened across a two-year-old rant and liked it. We shall see, though.

You can’t have the same page on the “starred” list twice. Starring a page already on the list will just bump it back up to the top again. At the moment, the list is set up to display ten posts (once people star ten posts), but that could change. I keep meaning to redesign the sidebars anyway.

I’m not really sure why I called it “starring” when there isn’t a little star graphic. Maybe there will be one day, but probably I’ve just been spending too long using Google Reader. If anyone would like to add this to their WordPress blog, they should get in touch.

Californication isn’t a word. It is, however, a song, and it’s one that uses the relatively uncommon rhyming pattern ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAA’. This is phenomenally lazy, because there are so many, many words ending in ‘-ation’, including nouns and verbs, that there’s one for almost any definition you can think of, so finding rhymes for ‘californication’ is very easy, even setting aside the fact that the most common one they use is made up. Not only that, but the lines are so long that you can get across a fairly complex message before you have to use an ‘-ation’ word Given all this, you can pretty well sing about anything using this rhyme pattern without having to think very hard. Observe:

The aim of golf is to get the ball in a very small indentation.
It’s proving very popular as a means of recreation.
You even get a little car to save perambulation.

Sherlock Holmes was very good at crime investigation.
He almost always used the process of elimination
To figure out, beyond all doubt, who did the perpetration.

Daleks represent the Kaled race’s last mutation.
Their stock-in-trade is murder which they call ‘extermination’.
They were designed inside the mind of Mr Terry Nation.

Science has given us more effective medication.
There’s no risk of autism from the MMR vaccination.
That was the conclusion of The Cochrane Collaboration.

A problem is termed complex if its time of computation
Grows exponentially with a parameter’s alteration.
And it looks best when it’s expressed using big-‘O’ notation.

So why the hell is the song still nonsense?

A while back, there was a story about a woman named Nadia Eweida, who was suspended from her job, a check-in worker with British Airways, because she refused to comply with their uniform code which required her to remove her crucifix necklace. I mention it only now because the employment tribunal she took BA to has concluded. (Honestly, I could do Religious Crackpot Of The Week if weeks had names.)

For what it’s worth, here is my take on it (and therefore also the correct answer, and it also applies to the girl suspended from school for refusing to take off her ridiculous chastity ring): she has no case. The crucifix necklace is an entirely optional part of the Christian faith, and is very possibly a sin. Nobody is being discriminated against; this is just a bog-standard uniform rule which she happens not to like. She can get a job elsewhere. (Or elsewear.)

Of course, you could argue that if she really believes that a crucifix necklace is a requirement of her religion then she is being discriminated against, but that would be wrong on several levels. It’s still an important argument to make, though, as the rebuttals are informative. First, it’s wrong because it assumes that the religious discrimination occurs when she isn’t allowed to follow her religious rules at work and someone of a non-necklace-requiring religion (such as Christianity) would be. This is false. The same rules (no necklaces) apply to both. Discrimination would happen if she was allowed to wear necklaces and people of other religions weren’t. Mostly, though, it’s wrong simply because the alternative would be that all religious rules trump all company policies and laws in all cases, and that would be ridiculous because religious laws may as well, for all the grounding in reality they posses, just be made up on the spot. Someone could start a religion whose scriptures were a wiki and they’d suddenly find themselves high above the law, looking down on all the policemen and saying, “ha, you look like ants! And, like ants, I could kill you all and you couldn’t stop me!”

Of course, real life rarely gets these things right. In this case, it was got so badly wrong that British Airways offered Eweida £8,500 (that’s about a billion US dollars) to settle out of court, although this was mostly just an effort to get the bad press to go away. Eweida, though, much to her credit and the furthering of justice, told them exactly where they could shove their money, and then said “I’m speechless really because I went to the tribunal to seek justice,” when the judge correctly ruled in BA’s favour. Eweida demonstrated further that she has failed to understand the issues at hand in her own story by adding “I cannot be gagged about my faith. It’s not over until God says it’s over.”

I wish more people took that attitude — if enough do, it’s statistically likely that at least one will be struck by lightning soon after mouthing off.

The Catholic Church does a lot of things that are bad, but it also does some good. One of those things is that, particularly since the new Crazy Pope took over, it provides a never-ending stream of examples of all the bad things religion does. Here’s the latest one, and it might be the stupidest yet. This is what the Pope intends to do about the paedophilia scandals in the church (from the Guardian):

The Vatican has called on Catholics to atone for the sex abuse scandals that have engulfed their church in recent years by taking part in what may be the largest global prayer initiative ever seen.

Cardinal Cláudio Hummes told the Vatican’s official daily, L’Osservatore Romano, that every diocese in the world should name a priest to work full-time on the arrangements for the “perpetual adoration” of the eucharist. This would involve parishioners taking turns to keep a round-the-clock vigil in front of a consecrated host representing the body of Jesus.

The initiative has all the hallmarks of the thinking [sic] of Pope Benedict, and would certainly not have been launched in this way without his full support.Hummes, the head of the Vatican ministry for the clergy, said a letter had gone to “dioceses, parishes, rectories, chapels, monasteries, convents and seminaries” calling on them to organise groups of “adorers”. The aim was “to make amends before God for the evil that has been done and hail once more the dignity of the victims”, who had suffered from the “moral and sexual conduct of a very small part of the clergy”. He did not indicate how long he saw the adoration continuing.

The Times said a little more:

Cardinal Hummes said that the aim was to put a definitive stop to a scandal that … [he said] was exceptionally serious, although it was probably caused by “no more than 1 per cent” of the 400,000 Catholic priests around the world.

So that’s okay, then. Thousands of children have been abused, but the Pope has a plan. He’s going to have “a round-the-clock vigil in front of a consecrated host representing the body of Jesus*”. He’s going to ask people to watch bread. I can see that helping a lot, presuming it was the bread that was abusing all those children.

Partly I object to this because it’s moronic, but to be honest, that doesn’t matter. This represents a huge number of people who are, in all probability, going to do as he asks and keep a close eye on baked goods and think they’re helping. Not only is that time that could be better spent actually doing something, but by creating the (not very realistic) illusion of action it will discourage those people from really taking any in their remaining free time.

And to a point you have to respect it, because if the Pope really does believe that looking at food will solve the problem then he’s doing exactly the right thing, but then, if the Pope really does believe that looking at food will solve the problem, then he’s an idiot, so don’t feel you have to respect him more than you would a cucumber. That would mean he thinks that an all-merciful and all-powerful God will refuse to do anything about a spate of paedophiles in his own organisation unless enough people sit around “adoring” him for long enough. How many high-ranking Catholic officials have failed to point out how absurd that is?

It’s hardly worth sitting here trying to make the Pope look stupid. It’s like trying to make fire look warm.

He even has a silly hat.

---

*…or as the Pope would have it, a consecrated host which is the body of Jesus.

The first Religious Crackpot Of The Month this year goes to Patrick O’Donoghue. There are those who would prefer I call him “the Right Reverence Patrick O’Donoghue”, but I won’t be doing that. I think that people’s relative reverence and honourability is something they earn by their actions and not something they’re granted by their job titles. And, since this doesn’t appear to be 1992, I won’t be using the word “right” as an intensifier. Patrick O’Donoghue is shockingly ignorant, not least of the rules of chess: despite being Bishop of Lancaster, he is moving decidedly backwards.

He has earned this dubious honour by sending what the Guardian called “a 66-page document” to all the Catholic schools in his diocese, though I’ve found it and it is in fact a 68-page document with two blank pages at the end. (It’s a PDF; they recommend Foxit to read it. I don’t know what’s wrong with Acrobat Reader; possibly Adobe refuse to condemn abortion or something.)

He is by no means the only crackpot mentioned in the article — the Vatican body who endorsed his document must be at least as stupid as its author — but he is the most vocally insane of them all. So let’s be explicit about why he in particular is getting this award. (It is perhaps worth noting that if I had my way, this letter would never have existed as there would be no faith schools to receive it, although if I really had my way there would be no bishop to send it either.)

Normally I’d be saying that he, like most other winners of the prize, is placing religious teachings above basic safety advice, but in this case that would be being far, far too kind. The teachings he’s advocating are barely even religious — there’s not a single word in the Bible about condoms. This isn’t religion. Religion is when someone writes a book which, centuries later, is found and taken far, far too seriously. What we have here is a large organisation deciding that something is bad and dictating that all their followers will believe it too. This isn’t religion: this is cult behaviour (though there’s less difference than most people would care to admit).

Worse still, he doesn’t consider that he is putting it above basic safety advice because he disputes that condoms can prevent AIDS.

Parents must insist on continence outside marriage and fidelity in marriage as the only true and secure education for the prevention of AIDS. Parents, schools, and colleges must also reject the promotion of so-called “safe sex” or “safer sex”, a dangerous and immoral policy based on the deluded theory that the condom can provide adequate protection against AIDS.

Exactly why he thinks this is unclear. At no point does he bother to explain how a 120 nanometre wide retrovirus can penetrate seventy thousand nanometres of rubber in only a few minutes. This paragraph cites a book called The Truth And Meaning Of Human Sexuality as its only source, so I did a quick Google search and discovered that the book in question was published by The Catholic Library, and its full text is available on their website. To save you the bother of looking, the paragraph is a direct quote from the book (paragraph 139; as we know, Catholics believe that any sentence with a number is true) and the book doesn’t justify it any further either. Presumably they just believe unquestioningly whatever would best serve their agenda if it were true. (That, one might argue, is very much the idea of religion in any case.)

He also repeats the Vatican’s anti-Amnesty International stance:

Schools and colleges must not support charities or groups that promote or fund anti-life policies, such as Red Nose Day and Amnesty International, which now advocates abortion.

To be fair to him, he also suggests some non-abortion-condoning alternative organisations, but I can’t imagine any of them have the resources Amnesty do, and in any case, Amnesty International do not advocate abortion! He goes further, though (and I should mention for the sake of integrity that the ellipsis below represents a 38-page break, much of which I didn’t read):

Anything that evokes wonder and reflection about the fundamental questions of human existence in Science, English, or Art, for example, is an opportunity to teach the truths of the faith.

…

Under no circumstances should any outside authority or agency that is not fully qualified to speak on behalf of the Catholic Church ever be allowed to speak to pupils or individuals on sexual or any other matter involving faith and morals. Nor should a Catholic school or college ever refer a pupil to an outside agency for advice or counselling; such is the prerogative only of the parent.

That’s nothing more or less than indoctrination: under his system, a pupil in a Catholic school is not allowed to talk to anybody except Catholic representatives about any aspect of religion or emotion (or, probably anything except mathematics, and even then the distinction between the numbers three and one is probably taboo). This will lead to them being effectively brainwashed, exposed to only one ideology every day for 15 of their most formative years. He says in the Guardian that this is “absolute rubbish”, but then he would say that, because apparently he’s a total bastard who will say anything if he thinks it will get people on his side.

Like most religious crackpots, O’Donoghue utterly fails to understand the meaning of the word “secular”. Like the current incumbent Specifically Mormon Crackpot of The Year, he seems to think that it is itself a religion. He demonstrates this very neatly when he says “the secular view … may not be presented as neutral information”. The whole point of secularism is that it is completely neutral. It considers all ideas purely on their own merits, affording none any special treatment regardless of what various religions may say about them. O’Donoghue would presumably prefer the “woo” version of neutrality, where all ideas are given equal credit regardless of their relative merit. This system is in reality as neutral as giving poorer entrants in a competition a proportional head start so that all players have an equal chance of winning: clearly it benefits the worst and removes any incentive to improve, and only a really stupid sport would do that.

In fact, he appears to be falling into another brain-trap more commonly associated with quacks than crackpots: he’s adopted an Us And Them mentality. Creationists do this, by describing anything that contradicts creationism as “evolutionist”, including the Big Bang theory, geology and abiogenesis, which have nothing at all to do with evolution. Homeopaths call anything that contradicts homeopathy “allopathic”, including vaccines, chemistry, epidemiology and basic scientific methodology. Here, O’Donoghue would appear to be saying that anything which contradicts the Vatican’s random assertions is part of some “secular” conspiracy. Let me let you in on a little secret: there is no secular conspiracy. It just wouldn’t work. It’d be like herding cats. There is no “secular view”: secularism is not a religion, or an ideology or a political affiliation; it’s just a single idea (that religious teachings should be ignored wherever possible) with a name. Most secularists agree on other things too, but that’s largely because great — or at least, non-awful — minds are known to think alike.

He wants teachers to discuss “the ’sacrament of marriage’” and to “insist that contraception [is] wrong”, all while criticising secularism for being insufficiently “neutral”.

I’ve not read the whole thing. I don’t think I could do that to myself. Luckily, the document (called “Fit For Mission? A Guide”) ends with a summarised list of “actions” for schools. Here are a few of them (word for word):

• Create/enhance respect for the doctrinal and moral truth safeguarded by the Pope and the Bishops
• Challenge TV broadcasts, films and books … that are disrespectful, suspicious and scornful of Christ and His Church.

It should be noted at this point that Jesus, being long dead by the time it was established, has never publicly endorsed the Catholic church and would in all probability loathe it as much as I do.

• Promote films and books that build up trust and enthusiasm for the faith.
• Ensure support is given to Chaplains so they can complete their role, including evangelisation and catechesis through proclamation of the Word.
• Provide opportunity for the governing body to discuss and pray about this document.

What the fuck? How will that help? Does he think God is going to personally reply and say “yeah, it’s not a bad document but I didn’t like the font”?

• Teach the Trinity
• Use the Core Curriculum of the Catholic Church

…whatever that is; Google doesn’t know.

• Teaching and Learning for the profession of faith
• Ensure active participation in the Liturgy is encourage [sic]

He actually considers liturgy a basic human need, presumably alongside oxygen and nutrition (assuming he doesn’t think those are “deluded theories” too.

• Teach the real presence from a Young Age [sic]
• Promote our call to holiness
• Ensure [not 'encourage'] regular prayers for vocations
• Ensure that no outside authority or agency … is allowed to speak to pupils … on … any matter involving faith and morals
• Ensure that pupils are never referred to an outside agency for advice or counselling
• Carefully scrutinise Year Planners to ensure they do not promote the services of organisations incompatible with the Church’s moral teaching
• Teach meditation on the Word of God
• Teach Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
• Arrange weekly adoration of the Blesses Sacrament [sic]
• Teach Devotion to Our Lady and the Rosary

(It’s not mentioned whether this devotion should be weekly or not.)

• Ensure [not 'encourage'] meaningful memorisation of basic prayers
• Teach Devotion to the Saints

Honestly, those last dozen read like some kind of scary cult handbook. Because that is precisely what this document is. It is a guide to how to effectively hijack a child’s state-funded education and use it to brainwash them into your religion, thus ensuring a nice supply of minds (and money) in the future. That people would do such a thing is still shocking to me, and that they would then be widely thought of as good people is almost as bad.

You can email the team behind the report at Mission.Review@LancasterRcDiocese.org.uk. I intend to. (I will of course blog any and all relevant correspondence.)

Edit:

They also have something they call a “blog”, but is in fact just a boring newsletter powered by WordPress. The skin they’ve chosen for it was designed by a girl who “at an early age [decided for herself] that there are no gods or supernatural forces”. Presumably they will take more care than this when “scrutinising” those Year Planners.