Feeding The Fish

Our current system where the PM decides they have a good chance of winning (having just won a war or adjudged the interest rates perhaps) is clearly stupid. Not only does it lead to time and money wasting non-events like this November, it’s just a power asking to be abused.

The danger with fixed terms is it gives campaigns something to work towards and allows the for absurd US campaigns that have been in full power for months, despite the election being a year away. The advantage of the British system is that campaigns are short and (relatively) inexpensive.

We need more than a fixed date, we need a random number generator. You could set criteria to prevent it happening a week later, perhaps you could also make more full use of the percentage of the vote the government received (or opinion polls) to make less popular governments shorter (an automatic national vote of no confidence).

Whilst I quite like the idea of an complex and mysterious process (it would have to be to prevent second guessing), there are some quite obvious flaws here. The usual standard of Open Source for the program would be important to prevent it being obviously highjacked, but with said mystery there’d always be that uncertainty.I doubt we’re ever going to get to the point where people feel good trusting a computer with this vital function, and this distrust will be important in the inevitable robot uprising.

Still, It’d be pretty neat.

Apologies to all the readers my stats are saying I’ve picked up in the last few weeks for not having anything new, work and other commitments have been draining my blogging time. Also I was showing solidarity with the writers by not writing. That’s totally true and not something I just made up.

On this page of impromptu games I found this disturbing gem:

I work in a biohazard lab and as such rules inside can be quite strict. For example, we are not allowed to carry anything at all in case we drop it, instead we move everything on trolleys. We have an airlock to get in and we shower out every time we leave.

One game we play is microbiological safety cabinet cricket. It basically consists of a ball of surgical gloves (we don’t have much paper in the lab) thrown across the room and then fired back by the batsman using normally long thin metal tin. We give a certain number of runs depending on whether it hits or even goes in different cabinets.

However this does backfire occasionally. Last month we were playing cricket in the lab and my manager struck our ball of gloves perfectly. It sailed through the air and straight into the anthrax cabinet, knocking over a tube of blood in which we had just diagosed positive anthrax (it’s OK, it didn’t come from inside the UK). We had to evacuate the building for 3 hours, and then go in with full breathing equipment to fumigate which takes a little under a week. Meant we did no more work for a while though but the top management have taken to frowning on our little game of cricket.

…If you’re wonder how Foot & Mouth got out of that lab, I suspect this could explain a lot. This is exactly why we’re all going to die of smallpox before the asteroid gets us.

Today the Telegraph published this delightful article entitled “Scrap Christmas, says New Labour think tank” OMG THOSE COMMUNISTS ARE GOING TO BAN CHRISTMAS!

Of course, if you actually read the article you’d end up with a dreadful opinion of whatever sorry excuse for an editor read this story and decided it made sense. The group, of course, make no recommendation of banning Christmas, they merely state that perhaps other religious festivals should be publicly celebrated as well.

If we break it into sections we can see exactly where to disconnect happens:

A group has said that other religious festivals should be marked as well as Christmas.

Then there’s a quote from the group stating this conclusion as well as DIRECTLY stating they don’t want to ban Christmas.

“If we are going to continue to mark Christmas - and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other major religious festivals too.

Now Ann Widdecombe stepped in to tell us that to ban Christmas would not be a popular move. Yes! It would not be a popular move, which besides the fact it’s a stupid idea, is why this report doesn’t say we should. (Also Ann the more you remind people about the established church which doesn’t even represent a plurality of Christians any more let along the country, the more we care about disestablishment).

Then the campaign against political correctness joins the debate by saying that that anyone who wants to ban Christmas is “off their political correct heads”. Yes, quite possibly, thankfully the report recommends no such thing, so we’re all safe from those evil politically correct fairies for another day.

Way to keep journalistic standards high Telegraph! Unfortunately this is but one example of the annual attempt by various hack journalists to tell the masses that Christmas is under attack from political correctness, when no such thing is true. The Labour Humanist did an excellent job here of drawing together the absurdity of this annual myth of the war on Christmas.

I’m sure it’s at least slightly ironic that the last people who actually did ban celebrating Christmas weren’t scary atheists, but Cromwell’s Puritans. As it turns out, the last people to ban Christmas were Christians.