What’s Next?

The New Sins turn out to not be handed down from the Vatican on high, watch Damian Thompson bemoan the Catholic Communication Network for not correcting the story until 24 hours after the interview, and even then not that effectively.

That Daily Mail story has been updated to fix the grammar in the title, but is also now full of slutty, slutty photos. You feel there should be some kind of rule about newspapers using photos they find on the internet for commercial purposes. Maybe they have agreements with the social networking sites that they can have the rights on photos that are so disgustingly filthy the public has a RIGHT to see! Because this is real news you know.

BBC NEWS - British women ‘raped’ in Jordan.

This may be a symptom of the fact that this heading writer is unsure on when to use apostrophises or quote marks but what does that title say to you? I’m getting “It wasn’t rape really” or “well…that’s what they said”.

There are a million ways to do this heading better. I understand that as nothing has been proven as such yet so ‘British women raped by THESE SPECIFIC MEN’ might be pushing it, but what was wrong with ‘British women raped in Jordan’? What really are the chances they’d make it up? Hell, ‘British women claim rape in Jordan’ still sounds better. Another one: ‘Jordanian men charged with rape of British women.’ See? Factually accurate without being dismissing! ‘British women ‘raped’ in Jordan’ just conveys the impression that rape isn’t a real thing or that something happened, but no no, that wasn’t rape!

The article doesn’t say if they were drunk, but if they were that definitely excuses it. Everyone knows it’s not rape and entirely their fault if they were drinking. That’s practically law.

The Pope talking in Latin America tells people that their ancestors were “silently longing” for Christ and seeking God “without realizing it”.

See, I always thought “she was longing for it” wasn’t a good excuse for rape, but hey what would I know, I’m not the Pope.

He also said it wasn’t an “imposition of a foreign culture”, you really can’t make this up…

And another petition to avoid!

‘The government, green lobby groups, and most of the media, claim that there is consensus amongst scientists that global warming is a proven scientific fact and that mankind is responsible. This is absolutely untrue. There are a huge number of scientists that dispute the claim, and a plethora of scientific evidence against it. The government is grossly dishonest to claim otherwise.’

There’s one thing I’ve never really understood: say there’s a worldwide conspiracy of scientists and governments all eager for everyone to believe in global warming - What’s in it for them? What could possibly unite thousands of scientists and governments in perpetuating this lie?

Today I got an answer from someone: ‘So they can put up taxes!’ Yes, I too find it convincing that numerous democratic governments have convincingly kept up a huge conspiracy, bribed thousands of scientists, generated reams of false data and, of course, suppressed all those nasty dissidents (leaving the oil industry to teach us the truth) just so they have a little more money.

And more! We can’t possibly show ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in schools without counter-balancing with the equally valid ‘Great Global Warming Swindle‘.Teach both side of the issue? Next people will be wanting to teach creationism alongside evolution….

I’m staying off this site. It’s only going to make me stressed.

I’ve put some links to e-petitions I’ve signed up to in the side-bar (They don’t bear much promise of being more than a bit of fun however). Looking around the site I found some truly worrying ones, not necessarily for the sentiment but for the sheer idiocy the full text contains. Take this pro-faith school petition.

Let me take it word for word.

As the Virginia Tech massacre was clearly the result of both too much and too little gun control, people are understandably desperate to find ways to prevent future attacks short of arming everyone or taking all the guns away. The fact that there is a common physiological profile raises hopes that if such people were identified sooner, it could all be avoided. The trouble with this is it simply isn’t true. A Safe School Initiative study concluded that “There is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence”, whilst a number of characteristics were common (’loners’ make up a third of all attackers), there is no overall pattern, making a desire to try and identify all those who fit the obsolete ‘bullied, loner with violent tendencies and a motive for revenge’ even more folly than if it was true in all cases, because surely there are many more people that fit the profile than are going to become shooters.

Let’s crack down on the mythical school-shooter profile! Let’s treat every lonely, depressed, teenager as if they’re going to walk down the corridor with a gun tomorrow. Take the case of this student in Illinois, as part of a creative writing project he wrote a piece that ’so disturbed’ his teacher that he was arrested. ARRESTED after writing an essay! Apparently you can be arrested for ‘disorderly conduct’ as a result of writing an essay for a class assignment. The essay was described as ‘violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location’, grounds for perhaps shifting a student towards a counsellor maybe, but arrest? (Another unsettling sign of increasing overlap between schools and the US justice system).

The worrying thing is that whilst fellow students seem to understand that this is a gross error, they seem to acknowledge that people who write violently should be viewed with heavy suspicion. The 2002 US Secret Service study revealed that “The largest group of [school shooters] exhibited an interest in violence in their own writings, such as poems, essays or journal entries (37 percent)” but we must remember that it is only 37%, violent writings are no indications of a future massacre. In a world where Lewis “Scooter” Libby (VP Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff), author of “The Apprentice”, a book described as “an everyday tale of bestiality and paedophilia in 1903 Japan…[and] packed with sexual perversion, dwelling on prepubescent girls and their training as prostitutes” can have security clearance and films at least as violent as anything Seung Cho’s wrote gross millions worldwide, treating every lonely teenager who writes something violent as a murderer-in-waiting just serves to further isolate people who probably already have enough issues to deal with without being treated with this suspicion.

Naturally at times like this people look out for something to blame and the hope that it can all be easily explained, but the fact remains that there is no standard school shooter and there is as of yet no intelligent way to go about preventing the psychology that creates them. An FBI report stated that:

“One response to the pressure for action may be an effort to identify the next shooter by developing a `profile’ of the typical school shooter. This may sound like a reasonable preventive measure, but in practice, trying to draw up a catalogue or `checklist’ of warning signs to detect a potential school can be shortsighted, even dangerous.”

Sooner or later America has to examine not only the issues of ‘why’, but address the gun proliferation that that makes these individuals so much more dangerous.

George Monbiot takes apart the recent channel four documentary on global warming that seems to be making the rounds:

Cherry-pick your results, choose work which is already outdated and discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The Twin Towers were brought down by controlled explosions; MMR injections cause autism; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence which appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question.

But for the people who commissioned this film, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited – like Martin Durkin and a certain nutritionist of our acquaintance. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.

Wikipedia! That abode of knowledge, free for all people to edit and read, committed to providing an encyclopaedic and unbiased point of view!

HA!

As we all know, Wikipedia is anti-conservative, anti-Christian and anti-American. What we need is another encyclopaedia that isn’t stifled by political correctness, liberality or impartialness. An encyclopaedia that doesn’t wimp out and use CE on their date - I present Conservapedia! The encyclopaedia that isn’t afraid to get the truth out.

For example, Unicorns!

‘The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times. Christian apologists have advanced various arguments that the biblical unicorn was not a fantasy animal. ‘

Controversial!

The Entirety of the Descent of Man article really covers the main points:

“Charles Darwin wrote Descent of Man in 1871.

A quote from the work reads:

‘Civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate the savage races throughout the world … The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.’

Many believe the evolutionary ideas have contributed to racism.”

Damn those godless racist evolutionists….will they ever learn?

And now I feel bad, because I was going to mock it because most of the articles read like a 15-year old’s history notebook…but that’s exactly what it is. Conservapedia is at least in part a communal reference point for home-schooled kids. Wikipedia is often too detailed for the notes needed for school kids and I can see how something like this could be helpful. Sure there’s the occasional humorous turn of phrase, like in the Gutenberg article:

‘Some historians claim that the printing press had already been invented in China before Gutenberg, but this is debatable as no one in the West was aware of it.’

But I think we have to let it slide. What’s really worrying is that this is a reference guide with no pretence at being impartial. Its half-school notebook and half-propaganda piece, the Evolution article is completely undeserving of the name, an article on a Hate Crimes Bill states one of the problems with the bill as:

‘ Someone who murders a gay person could get sentenced to life in prison while a person who murders a grandmother coming back from the store with cat food would serve less time.’

…Cat Food? Really? It’s comical, but someone writes it and doesn’t want these children to think any other way. God forbid children encounter anything that might challenge their worldview.

It’s depressing, but is Wikipedia any better? Is there anything to their list of complaints against it? It’d be silly to say there was no bias in Wikipedia but it’s hardly as systematic (and obvious) as Conservapedia. To be fair, the discussion pages show there are people who recognise how ridiculous some of the articles are, but they’re argued down by bullying admin. There probably is room for a Conservapedia that isn’t ridiculous, that really does draw attention to any slight liberal bias in Wikipedia, but it can’t do that while these small minded people run it.

I don’t think I can ever get tired of this site, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the kids who are raised in this little ideological bubble.

Carbon-neutral airline takes flight

Silverjet is running a ‘carbon’ neutral airline service from Luton to New York, where £10-15 of the £1000 ticket is spent on carbon offsetting projects.

A consistent tit-for-tat offsetting scheme has yet to be created, different groups sell the same amount of offset for different prices and there’s much disagreement on how effective the projects are. If there’s no way to tell if the offset paid actually helps remove the carbon, it’s comparable to the medieval church selling indulgences. If we really want to deal with air travel carbon we need to stop further expansion of international flights and flat-out stop domestic ones. If airline travel is this destructive, it cannot be justified when alternatives are readily available.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Cameron hint on cannabis medicine

“It is right that it’s criminal because if you
decriminalise you increase the availability and make it more difficult
for parents who are trying to keep their children away from drugs.” - David Cameron

Is that really a good reason? If that’s the prime reason why it shouldn’t be decriminalised, then that’s a little concerning. If for the sake of argument it’s said that cannabis is no more harmful than alcohol, should it be withheld from adults purely because it’s impractical to prevent children getting their hands on it? The concern is valid, but not in itself a good reason to favour criminalising it.