Apathy Sketchpad

The other day I posted about Dr John Briffa’s rant against p-values. He has since then posted some responses, in the form of several comments under the original post and a whole new rant. Er, I mean, blog entry, of course. Not “rant”!

His thesis remains much the same: no matter what anyone does, since science can’t prove a negative, we can’t be sure MMR doesn’t cause autism. Which is true, but of course can be applied to any stupid hypothesis you care to come up with. In his recent post, which is called “Why the MMR-autism ‘war’ is far from over”, he says

What I am saying though is that there’s a huge pile of anecdotal evidence and some experimental evidence too which supports the idea that MMR vaccination might cause autism.

This really isn’t true. The Cochrane Collaboration examined 139 studies about MMR (not all about MMR-autism) and concluded that

No credible evidence of an involvement of MMR with either autism or Crohn’s disease was found.

In any case, this always goes the same way. There’s a bad study done that “suggests” something, in this case that MMR might cause autism, and a load of people latch onto this for some personal reason, then when someone points out that the research is rubbish they deny it. Eventually the weight of evidence becomes so great that the course of least resistance is to drop that one tiny part of their stance: their position switches to “that study was bad, yes, we can see that, but our theory is still right”. If you ask them to show some non-bad research that supports their hypothesis then they’ll go and do a literature search vast (if not rigorous) enough to put any PhD student to shame, before coming up with some bizarre study about giving vaccinations to chimps or something, and I always look at those and think “hang on, where the fuck did that come from? You’ve been ranting about how bad MMR is for years, and this is the first time you’ve mentioned that study. In fact, you were ranting about MMR for years before it was published! How do you expect to convince me that that’s influenced your opinion in the slightest? I want to see the evidence on which you’ve based your opinions, if there is any.” Of course that doesn’t invalidate their chimp-based study, but it does show that they’re starting with a conclusion and then collecting evidence to support it, when they should be starting with evidence and basing the conclusion on that. Once you’ve established that, the last thing you should do is to criticise their evidence — it’s much quicker for them to find more shaky evidence than it is for you to dismantle it, so they’ll always be a couple of steps ahead if you let yourself get drawn into that fight.

The evidence used to persuade us of the safety with regard to autism is simply inadequate. The fact is, I don’t know whether MMR causes autism or not. But then again, it seems neither do those who insist it is safe.

He also says

Now, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that those of the pro-vaccine lobby will want to claim that this blog is scaremongering by making out that MMR vaccination causes autism.

I agree with jdc about that quote.

And while the reason that the debate rages on is usually put down to the likes of Dr Wakefield and the parents who believe their children were damaged by MMR, the real guilty parties here have been our Governments whose intransigence regarding proper, definitive research in the area has inevitably left a huge question-mark hanging over MMR.

That’s plain wrong. As I said in his blog comments (assuming that he hasn’t deleted them, although he’s been good to jdc’s, so I don’t want to imply that he will), it would be unethical to do that study: if the study group was large enough to show the effect (which even anti-MMR types claim is very rare, even when they’re demanding that all three of their children were hit by it) then you’re deliberately avoiding giving a potentially life-saving vaccination to at least hundreds of children, on the basis that a few ill-informed, untrained, tabloid-reading morons think there might be a risk. There’s no way that would ever get past an ethics committee.

You have to be a little bit detached and just accept that the so-called link between MMR and autism is, in fact, just made up. That doesn’t prove it’s false, but it puts its odds at much the same level as other made-up hypotheses, such as “cider causes shortness” or “MRI scans cause blindness”. (I just pulled those out of thin air.) Doing huge studies to attempt to disprove things you’ve made up would be a tremendous waste of time, and that doesn’t change just because they were made up a long time ago by someone else and then relentlessly repeated by bad journalists and angry but unqualified mothers.

I heard through Pharyngula about Kieffe and Sons, a tiny little Ford dealership in California, have been running an advert saying “Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Kieffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don’t tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up.” Ford don’t seem to care, so there’s a little boycott on by atheists.

Which probably isn’t a major problem, but the AFA, which I think stands for the American Fundamentalist Assholes, are boycotting them too for “promoting a homosexual agenda”. So Ford are now basically selling to Muslims, Hindus and gay Christians.

The AFA say

Last fall, in a meeting with AFA, Ford agreed to stop funding the homosexual agenda. However, after a group of angry homosexual leaders met with Ford, the company reneged on its agreement and announced that they would continue their commitment to support the effort to legalize homosexual marriage.

Ford even gave the homosexual groups a letter stating Ford’s strong commitment to their cause.

On a recent episode of CBS’s Without A Trace, Ford proved to the homosexual leaders the company’s commitment to their agenda. The Ford-sponsored program included a scene of two lesbians passionately kissing each other.

To see what Ford sponsored, click here. (Warning! This scene is very offensive!)

You know, because we all know companies screen every episode of every show they sponsor and condone every scene therein — and because Without A Trace usually depicts nothing but good Christian behaviour like kidnapping people and killings and so forth. Personally, I clicked their link, and I was indeed shocked:

This is an enquiry e-mail via http://faq.afa.net from:
Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>

I was recently directed to your page about the Ford boycott:

http://www.afa.net/ford0323.asp

There was a link which promised me a video of “two lesbians passionately kissing”. However, when I clicked this link, there was a server error, so I must ask:

How can I see some hot girl-on-girl action?

I didn’t expect a reply, but I got one. And here it is, in its pointless entirety:

Watch as the world turns

“America is supposed to be God’s nation.”

Not Israel, then? Okay. Makes sense, I suppose, a country 1700 years younger than Jesus. Sure.

I’m watching Jesus Camp on More4. It follows a group of Evangelicals: they’re exactly how you expect they are. you see them on their awful camp and in their awful churches, and they’re brainwashing children in the sickest way I’ve ever seen — and sometimes rather stupidly. At one point, one of them had a load of mugs with the word “GOVERNMENT” scrawled (really, scrawled — sometimes upside down) on them, and after a short rant about how “corrupt” (read: ‘too secular for them’ — scary) government was ruining America, shouted “who wants to smash this cup?”, then the kids would come up and hit a mug with a hammer. Very strange. At another point, Fischer analogises sin to a cute little tiger cub, explaining how it seems attractive, but one day, “you got yourself a tiger by the tail” — while she swings around what is very obviously a toy lion.

But it’s as alarming as it is stupid: the pastor shouted “who here believes that God can do anything?” and you see a woman raising her children’s hands — one of whom was young enough he didn’t even get his own chair. She has them chanting and clapping and generally acting like she runs a cult.

Which she does.

The terrible bit, though, was in private, talking to the cameras. They say things like “[children] are so usable in Christianity” and don’t realise what that sounds like — and indeed, what it is. The thoroughly shitty Becky Fischer explains how Islam trains its children from the age of five, that they’re trained to use grenades, rifles and bomb belts, then says she wants to see children that willing to “lay down their lives” for Christianity. She understands perfectly that she is pushing an almost military campaign to get Christianity running the world — she believes that Christianity is true, but she uses that not as her chief weapon but as her justification. And she can’t see the hypocrisy. Here is a speech of hers from near the start of the film:

I can go into a playground of kids that don’t know anything about Christianity, lead them to the lord in a matter of just no time at all, and, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they’re so open. They’re so usable in Christianity.

If you look at the world’s population, one third of that 6.7 billion people are children under the age of 15. One third. Where should we be putting out efforts? Where should we be putting our focus? I’ll tell you where our enemies are putting it: they’re putting it on the kids. They’re going into the schools. You go into Palestine, and I can take you to some websites that will absolutely shake you to your foundations, and show you photographs of where they’re taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible camps and they’re putting hand-grenades in their hands, they’re teaching them how to put on bomb belts, they’re teaching them how to use rifles, they’re teaching them how to use machine guns. It’s no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam.

I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as, as they are, er, over in in Pakistan and in Israel and, and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have — excuse me — but we have the truth!

She also talks to a young boy called Levi, asking him what he is expecting God to do for him at camp, and he says “get [him] used to meeting other people”, as that’s always been a problem for him. Well of course it fucking has — he’s an evangelical, which is incredibly annoying, and his mother’s pulled him out of school to teach him a strict diet of creationism, anti-global warming propaganda and bad haircuts. (”If you look at Creationism, you see that it’s the only possible answer to all the questions.”; “Did you get to the part on here where it says science doesn’t prove anything? And it’s really interesting when you look at it that way”.) What did you all think was going to happen there? And sure, he probably will meet people on camp — but they’ll all be as obnoxious and evangelical as him. Real people will still think he’s a dork.

Levi’s mother justifies this “education” by saying

God didn’t say have children and give my kids to someone else for eight hours a day. And if I can homeschool them as well as the school can public-school them, why would I send them somewhere else for eight hours a day? Our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian values. We know when things started changing, you know, prayer got taken out of school, and erm… oh! The schools start falling apart. And now the rest of us are going “Wait a minute! Where is my country?”

Our firm belief is, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who love Jesus, and people who don’t. And I want my kids to grow up knowing, you know what, it’s, it’s a good thing to be a Christian.

One child, Rachael, is so far gone that she prays over her bowling ball (which promptly goes straight in the right gutter) and then wanders up to the woman in the next lane and says

Hi, erm, God’s just telling me that he… You’re on his mind, and he just wants to take you and he just wants to love erm you, and he has special plans for you and your life, and he just wants you to be able to follow him with your whole heart and–

–and then the woman says “thankyou” and she wanders off, leaving a little booklet.

Fischer also spend a good solid minute praying over her PA equipment, just to be on the safe side. That was just surreal. She was listing potential electrical faults and commanding God and Satan to lay off for that night. You can listen to a clip at Kidology, as well as the cup-smashing madness. (Kidology is a Christian group, and it’s hard to find an opinion about the content of the film on the site.) Also she says that President Bush “has really brought some real credibility, erm, to the Christian faith”.

Yeah, that’ll be it. He’s got credibility in spades, Bush. She even has a cardboard cutout of him that she talks about as if it’s real. To be fair, it might as well be for all the useful input either one gives.

The bottom line is that I don’t really think there’s anything in this film that I didn’t know was going on — I’m just shocked by how openly the perpetrators will admit that they’re using the same tactics as their “enemies”, that they’re “using” children because what they learn at that age is pretty well stuck there for life, and so forth. Sometimes I think that these people are deluded but basically trying to do the right thing, albeit in their own wrong-headed way — but now I’ve seen this I’ve no sympathy at all. They know what they’re doing.

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I’ve just been pointed to a fantastically bad article about statistical significance on the blog of one Dr John Briffa, former natural health columnist for the Daily Mail, no less. He says:

This tells us, supposedly, whether there’s some real effect or change going on, or it’s merely something that’s most likely to be due to chance. Statistical significance in scientific studies is denoted by what is known as the P (or probability) value. A value of less than 0.05 is generally regarded as denoting ‘statistical significance’.

Sounds fine so far. Except, I do feel compelled to point out that the choice of 0.05 as a cut-off is utterly arbitrary. It’s a value that the scientific community agree on. It’s a consensus – it’s not carved in stone like some irrefutable scientific truth. If the scientific community decided that 0.01 was going to be a cut-off, then less things would be ‘statistically significant’. If the limit was set at 0.1 then many more things would be deemed significant. When we understand this, we begin to see just how arbitrary a lot of scientific ‘findings’ really are.

And that’s all true, although the fact that p<0.05 is a totally arbitrary choice isn’t exactly a secret. We all know it. Often, people will demand p<0.001. That’s why we quote p values rather than just printing “yes” or “no”. It’s a bit like saying “People over 6′2″ are considered ‘tall’. Except, I do feel compelled to point out that the choice of 6′2″ as a cut-off is utterly arbitrary” and then saying that therefore tallness isn’t a useful concept in real life.

One commenter said

yes totally agree
“science”.. statistics.. are black and white
life is grey, a vague misty kind of grey

so it’s clear that his plan is working. Medical science is anything but “black and white”. It’s all about measuring and weighing risks and benefits. About p-values and error bars. Confidence intervals and placebo effects.

There ends Briffa’s explanation of p-values. He hasn’t bothered to explain what they are and doesn’t plan to. (In fact, a p-value is roughly defined as the odds of getting a result that good if the hypothesis you’re testing is false: if you get a high p-value then there’s really no reason to think your hypothesis is true.) Instead, he charges straight into a badly thought out analogy:

Let’s imagine someone decided to do a big study on road safety. Let’s say they counted up the number of times someone, somewhere, crossed the road. And now, let’s imagine, they also count up the number of times someone gets run over (and hurt or killed) as a result of crossing the road. Now, I’m writing this on a plane and can’t even check if these statistics exist. But I think it’s reasonable to assume, that compared to the total number of road crossings, the number of people being knocked down is likely to be very small indeed.

Now imagine we applied some statistical ‘wizardry’ to this (with that arbitrary P value, remember) It’s not too difficult to imagine that one would turn up a result which shows: ‘crossing the road is not associated with a statistically significant increased risk of getting run over.’ Now, many doctors and scientists would interpret this finding as evidence that crossing the road is ‘safe’. However, we all know that while most of the time it is, sometimes it’s not.

He seems to be trying to implicitly conflate probability of an event occurring with statistical significance. He’s implying that because accidents are rare, the results of a study will be statistically insignificant. In fact, if a prospective study looked at people crossing the road (the tests), and the same number of other people sitting at home for the same length of time (the controls) then if even six of the test subjects got run over, your p value would be less than 0.05 (assuming the controls all survived). If eleven of the test group were hit by cars then you’d get p<0.001 level significance. You can test for very unlikely events and get good p-values; you just need a large sample space. In this case, you need to look at enough people that six die. That’s probably a much bigger number than is at all feasible, so in fact, you’d do a retrospective case-control study. You’d locate a group of people who were killed by being hit by cars, find out how many of them were crossing the road at the time, and compare that to the proportion of the general population crossing the road at any given time. I suspect you’d find a big (and statistically significant) difference there. That’s how we test for rare events. His analogy proves nothing at all.

That said, he’s right that one could do a study that shows no link. That’s pretty easy: we all know that crossing the road actually is very safe considering how many times most people do it. The point is that that study would not say “crossing the road isn’t linked to death by car accident”; it would say “we have not found a link between crossing the road and death in car accidents”. It certainly wouldn’t prove that no such link exists, and no competent scientist would ever claim it did.

The point that he is attempting to prove by this is as follows:

An example of where statistical significance appears to have got in the way of a constructive debate on the subject is vaccination. Our Government here in the UK, most doctors (I suspect) and many commentators would have us believe that vaccination, including the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination (MMR) is ‘safe’. Many will not even entertain the thought that there may be a problem with MMR.

That’s totally untrue. Of course injecting pathogens into people has associated risks. Nobody with any relevant knowledge is claiming otherwise. The claim is simply that the risks are tiny compared to the benefits, and that autism isn’t one of the risks.

Science hasn’t proven that there’s no risk. Science can’t do that: you can’t prove a negative. It’s possible that there’s exactly one person in the world whose body is set up in such a way that the MMR jab would cause them to become autistic. In that case, there would be a risk, but it would be impossible to detect it unless (indeed, even if) your study contained that one person (in which case the risk would go away when the study was done anyway). So we’re stuck? No, not really.

We know that all the ‘evidence’ that MMR causes autism is, for want of a better word, shit. It’s rubbish. It is insignificant. We also know that a number of better studies have found no risk at all. So yes, it’s still theoretically possibly, but why should it be true? Crossing the road causes car accidents? That figures. We don’t need epidemiology to convince ourselves that that’s pretty likely. But “MMR causes autism”? Why not “MMR causes tallness” or “MMR causes hair loss” or “hats cause kidney stones”? None of those have been absolutely disproven either. There’s absolutely no reason for it to be true, except that many people irrationally believe it to be true, and their beliefs can all be traced back to a load of scary stories published together in a right-wing, anti-scientific propaganda tome. And in Dr Briffa, it even has people standing up for it by harping on about “the limitations of science”. (He has form on this.)

What we have here, then, is a religion. Classic case.

BBC News tells me that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said in a statement (how else does one say things?) that it would be impossible to close the thoroughly illegal and indefensible prison at Guantánamo Bay because of

that irreducible 70 or 80 [prisoners] who you cannot let loose but will not be charged and will not be sent home.

…

“The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home.”

…

Yet these 50 to 70 prisoners could not be charged either, he said. This is presumably because there is not enough or no evidence against them.

If there’s no evidence against them, let them go. If their home countries won’t take them, let them go in America — if you didn’t want them in your country, you shouldn’t have dragged them there in handcuffs (see later). If there’s evidence, charge them. That’s how legal systems work in all countries except for fascist dictatorships.

And maybe some of them will go on to commit acts of terrorism after you release them. Well, that’s the risk you take, but the fact is you’re not fighting individuals. You’re not even fighting an organisation. You’re fighting an ideology: extremist Islam. The individuals don’t matter — keep one in prison and another will attack you, and he’ll be angrier. You don’t fight AIDS by killing the HIV-positive.

The aim of extreme Islam is to turn the world into a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. You don’t respond to that by becoming a fundamentalist Christian dictatorship as the Republicans would seem to. If you don’t respect the fundamental human rights of your prisoners — against whom you can’t even construct a case — then you’re no better than the terrorists: you think you can get away with this stuff because you’re the Goodies and they’re the Baddies but to torture the enemy and imprison them indefinitely without trial is to lose sight of why you’re the Goodies. Western civilisation is better than fundamentalist theocracy purely because it’s democratic and transparent. It’s more important to society that justice is seen to be done than that justice is done. The government must remain answerable to the people, and the Bush administration seems to believe it is above them. It abuses their rights, lies to them, and does so in secret — strictly, of course, Guantánamo Bay is in Cuba, where US laws do not apply. The Bush administration rather pathetically thought that people would be placated by this. The contempt they show for their citizens here is shocking: they think that although the people should have to live according to the law (including people in other countries if they might have some oil handy), the government should be free to get around these laws in whatever way they please. In fact, the government are the people who it is most important that the law applies to — there’s very little else to keep them in check.

If you respond to fundamentalist Islamists with no respect for human rights by becoming fundamentalist Christians with no respect for human rights then the terrorists lose, but so do you and so does everybody else.

You’re just different Baddies.

The Times recently reported that Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, presumably angry at narrowly missing out on this month’s Religious Crackpot award and determined to win the next one, has decided to launch an attack on the MPs who voted against the baseless and unhelpful reduction in the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 22. He’s also been given a lengthy column in the Telegraph, which is full of vague generalities and gently anti-science twaddle.

The Times quotes him as saying

Many people on all sides of this debate agree that 200,000 abortions a year is too many

which is fair, since he did say that. My initial reaction to that quote was to think that it’s a mildly stupid thing to say, because without a change in the law, the number of abortions could fall dramatically if more people worked together to foster a new understanding and approach to relationships, responsibility and mutual support. It’s safe to assume, though, that the Times took this quote from the Telegraph’s column, where he says

There are many people of all sides of the abortion debate who yet agree that 200,000 abortions a year is far too many. Even without a change in the law, the number of abortions could fall dramatically if more people worked together to foster a new understanding and approach to relationships, responsibility and mutual support.

He’s acknowledging that we don’t need to change the law to improve abortion rates, but he wants to do it anyway, presumably for some other, less well informed reason, such as he thinks God wants him to. He goes on to say

What we are dealing with are profound ethical judgments which are informed, but not determined, by the insights of science. Our views will be shaped not only by scientific facts but also by our basic understanding of what a human life is, and also our philosophy of life (which may or may not be informed by a religious belief). Science cannot replace ethics.

This is all true, however his argument here is that his views, which are “informed” by his rampant delusions about the nature of reality, should be the law for everyone. He’s cunningly glossing over this by saying things like

The Church puts forward its teaching, but does not seek to impose its views nor indeed to tell any individual how to vote.

but we already know that that’s a lie. The very same newspaper he wrote in reported that

Peter Jennings, spokesman for the Archbishop of Birmingham Vincent Nichols, said: “I would encourage all Catholics, Christians and members of all faiths who support the value of human life to think very carefully before they put their ‘x’ beside a name at the next general election.

“I would have thought no member of Parliament who voted against human life deserves re-election.”

Okay, so he didn’t explicitly instruct anyone, but that kind of semantic loopholing is so pathetic as to just make him look worse. Amusingly, a few days before that it also reported, quite specifically and explicitly, that Murphy-O’Connor is a raging hypocrite. And he is. We know this because his Telegraph article says

The gift which the Christian faith brings to all these discussions is a vision of humanity in which every human life has infinite value and dignity because it is made in the image and likeness of God. Whether or not we share this vision of faith, cherishing life and protecting the vulnerable, especially those who are unseen or unheard, is a central value of every society that wants to flourish.

Oh, we should “protect the vulnerable”, should we? Is that what we should be doing, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor? Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor who, in 1985, as Bishop of Arundel, allowed a known paedophile to work as a priest? (He did re-offend at his new parish.) We should “protect the vulnerable”, should we? Should we protect them even if they want to tell reporters where the man touched them?

Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor has now agreed that boys abused by the priest should receive compensation, but as part of the settlement they were required not to speak publicly about what happened.

Murphy-O’Connor is duplicitous and untrustworthy. He shouldn’t be allowed to hold a high-profile position in any organisation, much less one which considers itself a guardian of morality (however incorrectly). He certainly shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near politicians.

I’ve switched my RSS feed to full-text, so you don’t have to visit the site any more unless you want to post comments, or link to it, or look at anything but the blog posts. I’ve also moved the main feed to Feedburner, in case that makes my life better somehow. So, now you can read all my posts in your feed reader, except for this one, which cuts off moments before the really Read the rest of this entry »

from:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
to:    bhassan@coralwave.com
date:    Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 3:52 PM
subject:    MY BELOVED ONE

My Dear Good Friend,

It is with tears that I am writing this message to you from a hospital bed,

I am Mrs Helen DICKSON. A widow to late Mr. David DICKSON, who worked with Elf Petroleum Company in France for nine years before he died in the year 2002. We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.

Before his death we were both born again Christian. Since his death I decided not to re-marry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $18.5 Million with a Bank in Benin Republic Presently this money is still in the custody of the Bank in Benin Republic.

Recently, my Doctor told me that I would not last for the next Eight months due to cancer problem, but I know that my doctor is not God. Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a Church, Organisation or good person that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein.

I want a Church, Organisation or good person that will use this fund for Orphanages, Widows and other peoples that need help and also propagating the word of God and to endeavours that the house of God is maintained.

The Bible made us to understand that “Blessed is the hand that giveth ” I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians not even good at all because they are the one that are responsible for the death of my husband in other to have all my late husband properties and I don’t want my husband’s effort to be used by those that conspired for his death or for ungodly things.

This is why I am taking this decision, I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosoms of the Lord. Exodus 14 Vs 14 says that “the Lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace”.
I don’t need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presences of my husband’s relatives are around me always. I don’t want them to know about this development and I know that with God all things are possible to those who trust in Him and to those who work by faith. As soon as I received your reply I shall give you the contact of the Bank in Benin Republic.

I will also issue a letter of authorization to the bank that will prove you the present beneficiary of this money. I also want you, Church or Organization to always pray for me because the Lord is my only Shephard.

My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that wants to serve the Lord must serve Him in spirit and truth. Please always be prayerful through your life.
The Government normally assist me financially and materially,
after all tranzactions been made, this enable me given more funds.

Contact me on this email address or in hel_dickson@live.fr and any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another good person, church or organization for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein. Hopping to receive your response immediately,

Thanks and Remain blessed in the Lord.
I remain yours sister in Christ.
Mrs Helen DICKSON

They’re always very religious, are 419 scammers, and invariably Christian. Probably because they think it makes them appear trustworthy. This is one of many ways they repeatedly demonstrate how little they know me, although emailing me in the first place is pretty well sufficient for that.

from:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
to:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>, hel_dickson@live.fr
date:    Sat, May 10, 2008 at 5:23 PM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

David Dickson is dead? That’s a tragedy. He will be missed.

Still, though, $18.5 million… That’s a real bobby-dazzler. You could buy a lot of orphans food with that.

I understand chips are cheap.

Andrew

This next message arrived twice, in a giant font:

from:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
to:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
date:    Fri, May 16, 2008 at 12:49 PM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

My Beloved brother Andrew,

Greetings in the name of our lord and Saviour Jesus Christ

I thank you very much for your concern towards me this period; I pray that the almighty God will bless you abundantly in Jesus name Amen.

Thank you for your reply and sincerity so far and I pray that the almighty GOD will protect you as you set out to help in making sure that these money reach to the less -privileged in the society.

I am very happy despite my painful situations here in this hospital for knowing a faithful true Christian like you who has the true love and fear of the almighty GOD, For I could see Many people unaware of the Right Path of GOD this days of end time.

Sincerely I got your email contact address when I was searching for a person or organizations that will be of a good help to me; as my situations are getting bad each day.

Please I will like to tell you a little detail about my self first and why I decided to do this, and I hope that you will understand me, I have no single fear in telling you all about me, only that you have to see this as a humanity work of GOD that need sincerity, faithfulness, and trust please don’t see it as a chance to make your self rich.

I got married to my late husband about eleven years ago and since then we where living in happiness although that we had no child, until when the wicked world that is full with bad wicked people came with death, then when he is about to die that he called me and make me promise him that I should make sure that this money will be given out to the less privileged and the poor who are suffering in the world, But I did not give this money out according to my late husband wish since then till now that I am very sick to death and I am praying for GOD forgiveness.

Three months after the shock of my husband death I started having pains inside me, I went to the hospital to see my doctor then it was discovered that I have this bad and dangerous sickness, which since then I had undergone various medical test and operations just to see if I can safe my life but (ooh GOD, Here now I cant stand up or can be able to see that my late husband wished is done by myself.

The worst of it is that my late husband relative and brothers wanted me to die just for them to come and inherit all my husband wealth and properties, so none of them came to see me in the hospital now or ask me how I am for they are happy that I had no child of my own, so that is why I had make up my mind to see that these money will out from here and that it will be given out as the wish of my husband before I die as my situation and conditions now cant allow me to do this myself.

Please I am now writing with tears so I will like to stop here until when I will hear from you and if possible I will like to see you face to face and also if you can please send to me a copy of your picture.
Right now you are all that I have as my brother, sister and best friend so please try as much as you can to make sure that this money is used as I had told you even if I die, for I cant tell what tomorrow will bring to my life as of now.

Please do not see this as a chance of getting rich but take this as a help, and as a humanitarian work of GOD no matter what you will gain in it, is only the almighty GOD will reward you back.

Please after reading this mail reply back to me, with your phone number and your country codes so that i will call you to talk with you and also then I will give you all the documents concerning this money with the bank and tell you how to contact the bank for the transfer.

Thanks as I wait to read from you soon
Mrs Helen Dickson.

A trip to Google Image Search later, and I sent this:

from:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
to:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
date:    Sun, May 18, 2008 at 4:03 PM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

Helen,

I was glad to get your letter. I always look for quality pieces of mail. I was sorry to hear of your illness. That’s a bit of a duffer.

Please find attached my photograph. I trust that yours is beautiful, because David was known to always look for perfection.

Especially in porcelain.

Andrew

I attached this picture.

from:   Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
to:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
date:    Mon, May 19, 2008 at 9:29 AM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

Good morning Mr. Andrew,
your message is received. It’s content is understood. I also got your picture. But you have to send me your phone number, the zip codes of your country so that i can call you and discuss with you before i send you all the documents concerning this money with the Bank contacts.

Thanks,
Mrs. Helen Dickson

Do countries have zip codes? Who knows. They do now…

from:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
to:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
date:    Mon, May 19, 2008 at 9:53 AM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

Helen,

Unfortunately I do not own a telephone. I tried to buy one at Ockshun, but I missed it for a bid.

The zip code of my country is GB1 4SG. I imagine my street has one, too.

Andrew

I realise now just how emotionally powerful my telephone-buying story is, because I got this by way of reply:

from:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
to:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
date:    Tue, May 20, 2008 at 9:03 AM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

GOOD MORNING ANDREW

THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME THIS MESSAGE. YOU KNOW, I WOULD LIKE TO BE YOUR FRIEND TO GET SOME KNOWLEGDE BECAUSE YOU ARE MORE BRAINY AND MORE WISE THAN ME. I AM TELLING YOU THE TRUTH. MY REAL NAME IS MAURICE, I HAVE JUST FINISHED MY STUDY IN COMPUTER MAINTENANCE. SO I NEEDED SOME MONEY TO OPEN MY OFFICE BECAUSE I DON’T GET ANY BODY TO HELP ME FINANCIALLY [MY PARENTS ARE NOT ALIVE], THAT WHY I AM DOING THIS UGLY WORK. BUT FROM TODAY, I STOP BECAUSE OF YOU.
EXCUSE ME

MAURICE.

Attachment (click to enlarge):

Hold on, what? This has never happened to me before. Can this be real? I can’t figure out where a scam might go from here, but then… the telephone story wasn’t that moving, was it?

from:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
to:    MAURICE. <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
date:    Thu, May 22, 2008 at 10:31 AM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

Dammit, why does this always happen when I meet a nice girl on the internet?

This never happens really. There are a couple of people who could stand to get quite offended if that’s not made clear.

from:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
to:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
date:    Fri, May 23, 2008 at 4:50 PM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

GOOD MORNING ANDREW,
I RECEIVED YOUR MESSAGE. DON’T WORRY ABOUT THIS KIND OF THINGS. IT HAPPENS TO HUMAN BEEING. NOT ANIMALS. I AM SORRY OK ?

Er, okay. I’m wholly unsure if I should have any sympathy for this guy. I mean, he is, or was, a criminal, but he has at least apologised, and clearly he’s also an idiot.

from:    Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>
to:    Helen DICKSON <hel_dickson7@yahoo.com>
date:    Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:56 PM
subject:    Re: MY BELOVED ONE

You’re right, I imagine this almost never happens to a gazelle. I can’t even imagine that most of them have email.

Andrew

I’ll keep replying as long as he does, and I think maybe I’ll try my telephone auction story on a couple of other scammers in case they turn straight too. But in the meantime, I think this is the end of the story of Maurice and his Amazing Educated Rodents. (At least, I assume there are rats in his house and they’re smarter than him.)

On Monday, a small red card appeared in my postbox. It said that the Royal Mail had tried to deliver a package to me but that I wasn’t in (for once they had bothered to press the intercom). A trip to their website later, I got a confirmation saying my item “will be delivered” to the Post Office down the road from my flat for pickup on Wednesday. Great. What a fantastic service.

No. Not really.

On Tuesday I got a second email, saying that in fact they weren’t going to do that.

Dear Mr Taylor

Thank you for requesting redelivery of your item.

I am sorry to inform you that the delivery office cannot take your item to the post office you requested, as it is out of their area/is not able to receive these items.

Please note if your item is a Special Delivery we are only able to redeliver to either the address held on the item or a Post Office that accepts this service.

Please can you re-submit your request for redelivery to your home address free of charge, an alternative address or Post Office within the same postcode area as the original delivery address.

The Post Office we’d originally requested (and they’d “confirmed” it would be delivered to) was technically in a different postcode area to my flat — by what must be all of one hundred yards — and was quite happy to hold onto Mariokart Wii when that was too big for our letterbox, although that was three weeks ago, and that’s a long time in the postal service (unless you go second class).

The email said I needed information from the little red card. This was impossible because my flatmate had picked it up by mistake and I didn’t know where it was. Instead, I phoned them up and explained the problem, and they were happy to redeliver the package to any Post Office I cared to nominate — providing it was in one of two postcode areas chosen apparently at random. Neither one was convenient, but they refused to back down, so I had to make do. They said I could pick it up on Thursday. That’s hardly ideal; it’s now taking four days to get a package from their own delivery office, to their own post office, in the same town. For an organisation whose only function is to move objects around the country, that’s a bit shit. It also raises the question of what would happen if I posted a large package to the Varsity flats in the same building as the Post Office. Presumably they would be willing to redeliver to the flats there for zero pence, but would refuse to accept fifty pence to deliver to their own office on the same street.

I did suggest that they opened the package and post the individual books through the letterbox, as they’d all fit fairly easily, but they said they couldn’t do that either. Apparently there are rules against that.
So yesterday, Thursday, I went to a poxy little shop that had a Post Office instead of a back wall. All very quaintly medieval. There was an Islamic sticker above the window, which isn’t remotely appropriate for a publicly owned body, and downright perverse considering it’s the Royal Mail and most of the royals are at least nominally Church of England. I explained who I was and what had happened, and he got the package down from a shelf.

Then he put it back up again and said that I couldn’t have it without the card. By this point he was basically just teasing me.

Well. I was at most half-sure I knew where the card was, but I wasn’t totally convinced there was any way for me to get it and in any case I was not going to go there again: it’s a long way from my flat to the random assortment of Post Offices that have the facility to accept incoming mail — I don’t mean to overstate this point, but that’s a facility which my flat has and is the sole purpose of the Royal Mail’s existence. So I explained to him that I wasn’t told I’d need the card, and I didn’t have the card and it was impossible for me to ever get the card, and he shrugged and looked at me in that way that people behind counters have that means “not my problem mate”, and I think he thought I’d leave. The fool.

I continued to stand there, and I gave him my look that means “if you want to serve the woman behind me then it has just become your problem”, and I don’t know how much of that came across, but he had a bit of a think and after a while he got a bit of paper, wrote down that I’d took the package, and made me sign it, and gave me the package — after checking my ID against my driver’s license. (On a similar topic, a sign next to the window listed acceptable types of ID for some service or other, and one of them was “full (not provisional) driver’s license”. That’s crazy. There are no extra ID checks between them. Essentially, they were basing their assessment of your identity on your ability to drive.) Presumably if someone else had come the day after with the little card he’d have shown them the paper, said “you collected it yesterday, look, I have a signed bit of paper to prove it” and given them his “not my problem” look. I realise now I’m criticising both of his available options, but the point is really that he should never have ended up in that position, not least because if they’d just been a bit more persistent with the intercom they’d have been able to hand the thing over in person on Monday — there was someone in.

All of this took most of the week, involved a long walk, and cost me an extra fifty fucking pence. I know that’s a pathetic amount of money but I very much resent being charged extra for all this extra hassle. That guy was lucky I didn’t have much copper on me.

And they have the nerve to call this their “local collect service”. At least two of those words are lies.

So again I ask: why should I care if they close a load of local Post Offices if they’re not going to use the ones they’ve got?

I can’t imagine what part of this anything thinks is remotely acceptable.