Herald & Post Columns The Herald & Post, and anyone related to them take no responsibility for anything I write on here. This is all my own work, and consequently, my own fault.
There’s a big debate at the moment about allowing scientists to create hybrid animal/human embryos – the apparent implication being that if we allow it, we’ll eventually become infested with soulless half-man-half-monkey chimeras, sort of a race of Wayne Rooneys and George Bushes (which is a horrifying thought), who opponents fear will overthrow us and force regular humans into servitude, in a Planet of the Apes style scenario.
Fortunately, this isn’t the case – they only want to use the embryos for research, and to help cure diseases and that sort of thing, and they’ll have to destroy them all after two weeks, as legally they can’t keep them any longer, so there’s no chance of monsters. Yet.
I think humanity is going to have a problem though, when the scientists are successful in using these hybrids to cure all diseases – they’ll have nothing to do. So I think we should head off the challenge of thousands of scientists queuing up to cash their giros now, by empowering them to create and breed full human/animal hybrids.
Sure, you could complain that it’s “not natural”, but neither is wearing clothes, using technology or going on Trisha to resolve personal family problems, in most species at least. Besides, isn’t turning the future into something akin to the X-Men a cool idea? Think about it – people will have ‘powers’. Well, sort of.
Super-humans, fused with elephant DNA whilst in the womb would grow up to have enormous brains, and would presumably never forget anything. Taking the black and white striped pattern from zebra DNA will enable humans to evade any predators – simply by standing in a crowd of zebras.
Customising the human genome for specific jobs could be useful too – give our soldiers the anal scent glands of skunks, and they’d be a formidable fighting force – no one would want to go near them.
Teachers have always tried to control kids by claiming to have eyes in the backs of their heads- geneticists could have the power to make this a literal reality by giving them bulging frog-like eyes that can see in multiple directions. And who would complain if we had teaching chimeras that improve discipline in schools? I mean, as long as nobody was stupid enough to name the chimera Muhammad.
If scientists could engineer some real life centaurs too, we’d be the best in the world at athletics – and our footwear industry would double in size with twice the number of feet to cater for.
From a purely creative point of view, this is the only way we’re going to keep humans interesting. We’ve beaten evolution – we’ve invented technology that helps people survive and reproduce much quicker than natural selection can weed out the weak. Artificially designing improvements to our genetic make-up using our own intelligence is the only way we’re going to improve – if we’re not careful, if we stay the way we are for a few million years, other animals might evolve and usurp our position as top of the food chain! Consider this a warning.
Last Summer, my friend Katy and I went down to the Natural History Museum in London and made a stupid video, where I pretended to be a creationist, and went around, “debunking the science”. If you didn’t catch it, take a look:
I thought that my video was far too ridiculous - but remarkably, some commentators on YouTube (and indeed GodTube) took it seriously. As if this isn’t mad enough, it turns out that some creationists have stolen my idea. Check out this video below - they’re totally ripping me off - but unlike me, they’re totally sincere:
The horrible thing is that its better than my video. There’s so many great lines - I wish I’d thought of them…
“How do you know?”
“I come here for facts, not somebody’s fantasy”
You’ve got to love the Daily Express. They can’t write about Maddie any more, and the Diana Inquest is nearly over, so they need a new issue they can write about to death on their front page. The weather? Nah, it’s spring now so things will be getting better. What about vilifying the Muslims? Brilliant idea! No one loses with that!
The front page today screams about a “FURY OVER PLAN TO TEACH KORAN IN SCHOOLS”, suggested by the National Union of Teachers - the sensational revelation not being that they want to teach kids about the Koran (this already happens), but the idea floated by the NUT, which in the Express’s world has already become a concrete plan, is that they want to invite Muslim Imams into schools to preach - and its been nicely illustrated by a photo of some MUSLIMS in school in BANGLADESH. That is exactly what things will like if this madness doesn’t end.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think this is a stupid idea - I don’t think religion has a place in schools outside of history and sociology lessons or as a perverse exercise in critical thinking, but the Express seems indignant that:
The National Union of Teachers’ conference also said existing religious schools – almost all of them Christian – should have to admit pupils from other faiths.
Not other faiths! They might disrupt the institutionally Christian hegemony with their unspecified and miscellaneous characteristics!
But hang on… where is the “FURY”?! Oh, that’s right, an obscure MP is a bit pissed off:
But the proposals prompted immediate outrage. Conservative Party backbencher Mark Pritchard said: “This is just further appeasement for Muslim militants.
“We should just follow the existing laws on religious education, which state that it should be of a predominantly Christian character. All this will do is further divide many communities that are already split on religious lines.”
That’s quite a bizarre non-sequitur. Apparently by schools being more inclusive by not isolating anyone (apart from secularists, it would seem), that will split communities?
But then, this is Mark Pritchard. He isn’t really in touch with reality. Mark Pritchard is the man who wasted several hours of limited parliamentary time last year complaining about Christianophobia and how Christianity is apparently under threat. Y’know, despite it being the official state religion, having guaranteed Bishops in the House of Lords, aka the legislature, being practised by millions of people, and having the shops open for less time on Sundays, just for them.
Call me a godless revolutionary, but surely we could do away with all of this faff by having secular schools, and y’know, if they must, let people practice their religions privately?
According to a recent poll by Ipsos MORI, the polling firm named after the placeholder text in Microsoft Word, you probably don’t trust me.
Apparently, only 18% of people trust what journalists have to say – compared to 90% trusting doctors and 86% trusting teachers. The only people who are trusted less are black-and-white striped shirt wearing masked men who carry bags around with “swag” written on the side.
As someone who is a bit like a journalist, – I only differ in that I don’t have to do any research, fact check, or have qualifications proving my competence – I find it particularly fascinating. Sure, I’m probably a horrible liar, but only 18% of you would believe me if I admitted it.
The politicians are in the same boat as journalists – everyone apparently mistrusts them too, with again only 18% of people believing what politicians tell them. It’s a bit of a problem for them, because it means that if an honest politician, like Conservative MP Derek Conway, wants to continue the family business and pay his son lots of public money to do not very much work, everyone – especially those liars in the media - complains about it!
As you might expect of me though, I think I have a solution for this crisis of trust in politics. Like a lot of my ideas, it’s inexcusably blatherskite, and unlike trying to use the word “blatherskite” in a sentence, it just might work: politicians could tell the truth for once.
That’s not to say they tell nothing but lies all of the time now – it’s just the culture of spin means that they’ll tend to dress up everything they say to make it sound better than it is. The old adage is that you “can’t polish a turd”, but politicians would give this a damn good go anyway, smearing it everywhere, spreading the mess far and wide, spoiling everything else in the process.
Its just like how if you’re told by someone that they “go to university in Cambridge…”, it sounds impressive until after you’ve finished making an impressed “Ooh” sound and they say “…to Anglia Ruskin”.
I think the Prime Minister would be much more likeable if rather than defend the Iraq war, he just came out and said, “to be honest, invading Iraq was just a running joke at Cabinet meetings…we all thought it was just the joke bullet point at the bottom of every meeting agenda, but then Tony went and took the joke too far”.
Similarly, if David Cameron would just come and out admit that he’s a bile-fuelled robot with a plastic face that emits platitudes, we’d come to love him rather than distrust him.
I guess the only problem with this approach would be that it could make foreign relations slightly tenser. Even the most incompetent spies could probably pick up on the hints if the Gordon Brown were to publicly admit that he thinks George Bush is an idiot or that Nicholas Sarkozy’s new wife could “do better”. Because obviously all high ranking politicians do is gossip about each other.
Even though I’m 20 and a militant atheist, my parents have continued to do the honourable thing and buy their son a couple of Easter eggs. After all, how else am I supposed to celebrate Jesus’s death? The egg presumably representing his chocolatey exterior, and Toy Story 2 on the TV representing his love of Tom Hanks.
I had a bit of a crisis this morning though - one of my eggs was a Mars Celebrations egg. As you might expect, it looked horrendously nice - I think the curvature of Easter eggs must make the chocolate extra decent, or maybe the neurones in my brain were firing extra hard upon seeing a familiar brand, kicking a psychological process into action - the trouble was though there was a looming question: is it suitable for vegetarians?
You might remember that there was a load of hassle last year when Masterfoods, the company that make Mars, Malteasers, Celebrations and so on, switched to using murdered animals in their products, and I ended up writing perhaps the most passionate and emotional blog entry I’ve ever written (my blog entry on the Janjaweed Militia was more tempered). Eventually, they did a massive U-turn on their decision when they realised that it might create some bad PR for them.
This is all well and good, but if you read the small print, it turns out that Twix, Bounty and most importantly, Celebrations are still tainted with the foul stench of death. The question is… what about the actual physical egg? There doesn’t seem to be any documentation one way or the other on that. I couldn’t care less about the individual chocolates, as they’re not special - I need to know whether the egg contains any animals. I almost literally need to find out the answer to what came first… the chicken or the egg?
I’m tempted to risk it… as it does look really nice. Hopefully Masterfoods have an irony department, and have picked up on the fact that it would be hideously ironic if the symbol of new life was manufactured using the murdered corpses of several old lives.
What should I do, readers?
Update: The egg has been consumed. I hope nothing died for my enjoyment of it.
I think generally, I’m quite thick-skinned. This isn’t just an excuse for being fat either - when people criticise me, I like to think that I can take it and learn from the experience. I mean, I have survived eight rounds in the ring with Anne Robinson, so I must be pretty good at it.
I got an incredible e-mail this morning from someone who didn’t leave their name, but I think its much better than the last piece of hate-mail I received.
“Upon reading your article(s) in the ‘herald and post’, i have come to the inevitable conclusion that you sir, are a gaping cunt of gargantuan proportions. i find your opinions inexcusably blatherskite.
“Feel free to continually fellate yourself all over the pages of the paper, safe in the knowledge that your reply to this (if in the paper) will literally be shat upon’t.”
Yeah, I had to look up the meaning of “blatherskite” too. It turns out that it means “foolish gibberish”.
The weird thing is though, that upon reading it I didn’t break down into tears (I was already crying for an unrelated reason), I actually took it as a sort of badge of honour. Or more accurately, it was further evidence that people were actually reading. Clearly this person felt angered up enough to go to their computer, search the internet for me, then send me an angry diatribe. The greatest authors and film makers spend years trying to produce content that will evoke and emotional response in the audience, to try and get a reaction. Schindler’s List and Titantic cost millions of dollars to make and countless man-hours of hard work by thousands of people - yet I’ve proved that its much easier to make someone’s blood boil and provoke their emotions that way. All it takes is calling the general public idiots, or something.
This does worry me though. If I’m treating criticism as a sign that I’m “doing the right thing” then how am I better than the Westboro Baptist Church? They love it when people get angry about them. I’d claim that its a case of what Nietzsche famously said: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” - but that’s obviously wrong. Take getting your legs chopped off, for instance, or a non-fatal bullet wound.
In retaliation for this I’ve done the most logical thing and set up a Facebook Fan Page for myself. I already have six fans - that’s only seven less than Heather Mills… and everyone thinks she’s great!
As if further evidence were needed that we are the cumulative product of millions of random mutations and not created perfect in the image of an almighty creator, I think I can manage to articulate another reason: shaving is a pain in the arse, eh?
I try to shave as little as possible, as it is literally one of the most tedious routine activities imaginable. How scraping naturally occurring hair off of one’s face every day ever caught on, I don’t know. The number of hours, days, weeks in one’s lifetime wasted by this activity must be mind-boggling. Think of all of the extra progress humankind could have made if we didn’t waste our time. Is it any wonder that some of the most influential people in history, such as Marx, Darwin, and Plato all had such impressive beards? They didn’t waste their time staring in the bathroom mirror.
I quite like having a straggly little beard myself - I think it makes me look well ‘ard. As it turns out, I’m actually a massive wimp - I couldn’t beat up a woman wearing glasses or a small child, let alone the sort of nutters that you get hanging around outside of railway stations who try to mug you. Having some facial hair, especially when it’s messy and uncontrolled like mine is, it gives me that sort of vagranty look, without actually having to go to the trouble of frequenting crack houses or buying a dog and a piece of string to tie around its neck. I like to think that potential adversaries will look at me and think “I better not mess with him, his facial hair makes him look too tough for me to fight”.
So I’ll only shave whenever I really have to, like if I need to impress someone for a job interview or whatever. Its a shame that we’ve been socially conditioned to think that “cleanly shaven” is facial-hair-code for “organised and professional” - all it says to me is “spent five minutes vainly worrying about their appearance instead of curing diseases or wiping out poverty”.
There is a downside to not shaving though. When I literally have to, because I’m out of practice, I’m not very good at it.
The trickiest part is my sideburns. Last time, upon realising that one was longer than the other, I shaved the longer one - of course, this then led to the other one now being too long, so I shaved the other side too. This happened a few times, so things became a bit tense as I realised that I was gradually working my way up the side of my head, and sooner or later they’d be no ‘burn left to even out, and I’d be dealing with genuine legitimate hair. It was horrible knowing that if I continued to mess up, the outcome would get worse and worse.
In the end, I got them almost right, but just to be on the safe side, I’ve made a point of never looking anyone face to face, and remaining in profile so that they can only see one side of my head - so they can’t see my asymmetrical face and judge me.
I had an excellent day yesterday - I went down to London to meet my nerdy mates from my other website. Here are some exciting photos of me looking really popular in the company of other people:
Chris, Lottie, Barney, Kyron, Ant, Me, Sam, William, Shark, Kat and Dan. Not pictured: Katy.
Dan bothering a mime.
It being Easter, we thought we should respect the religious aspects, and celebrate Jesus’ death by recreating Leonardo’s Last Supper.
As luck would have it, Barney looks a bit like Jesus. And Sam looks a bit like Mary Magdeline. And I played the part of Judas. The other apostles were perhaps a little less enthusiastic.
Spending about eight hours with me is difficult enough for anyone, really. Unfortunately, William’s Jamesomalley tolerance was slightly less than eight hours, so he ended up punching me.
But it was fun. I may have another tale to tell about this in a few days.
As I’m a high-flying successful celebrity, I’ve been asked to contribute to a new journal that’ll be given to prospective students at my university, to try to encourage them to choose my uni over other (better) universities. I was asked to write about my experiences on the course and how it has led to my involvement in wider politics and so on. And because I’m running a bit thin on the ground for content at the moment, (”Alistair Darling looks like a badger” has been done by everyone), I thought I’d share it with you. Because the weak gags are worth repeating, obviously.
I’ve been studying International Relations and Globalisation for three years now, but I’ve kept it a big secret. It’s not because I’m ashamed that I’ve chosen an arts degree over something weighty and scientific, like physics or homeopathy, but because I’ve discovered that the second the phrase “international relations and globalisation” is mentioned to an outsider, it’s met with a blank stare and a look of bewilderment. Nobody really knows what Globalisation is – not even the academics, who seem to spend half their lives arguing over what it is.
So I’ve been telling people that I’m studying “politics”. Which it sort of true, but is also a horrible lie. In other words, the course is setting me up perfectly for a career in politics.
The course is excellent, as if you’re the sort of political junkie who stays up late to watch election results programmes or can name more members of the shadow cabinet than you can professional football players, then “revision” is your normal behaviour anyway. Even if you’re not as phenomenally boring as I am, you’ll still think it’s excellent. Why? Because International Relations is about tackling issues.
The questions debated in seminars are not abstract mathematical problems or reading too much into the alliteration Shakespeare used – students of international relations are tasked with solving real political dilemmas. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the legality of the Iraq war, the role of multi-national companies in the international system – in the last three years I’ve been discussing them all, presumably because the politicians have got so fed up and frustrated with everyone in the middle east fighting, they’ve delegated it down to undergraduates for them to fix for them.
The other great thing about the course is that it empowers you to participate in the greater political debate in a way that you actually feel like what you’re saying matters. When you express your political opinions, people will actually be under the impression that you know what you’re talking about, whether you actually are or not. I’ve been writing about politics on the internet for a couple of years now, and according to one poll, have the 251st best political blog in the UK – just one spot below the disgraced Jeffrey Archer, of all people. It turns out that lots of influential people have read my blog, and so I may have ever-so-slightly, indirectly influenced major policy decisions… which is a scary thought.
So come and study International Relations and you could maybe one day be as rich and successful as I wish I was!
I’m not sure I’m selling the course quite as well as they’d like.
Parliament had a vote last week to decide whether or not there will be a referendum on whether we ratify the thrilling new European Reform Treaty. The parties all had their positions cler - Labour didn’t want a referendum, the Tories did, and the LibDems got the wrong end of the stick entirely, and thought they were discussing whether to actually be in the EU or not. Idiots.
Nick Clegg really has baffled me with his party’s ridiculous stance: “forget the treaty, lets have a referendum on whether to stay in the EU or not”… which is mental. Its like the LibDems have seen the polls and have thought “the public want to vote on something… so lets give them a poll on any old question, just not the important one”. It’s a bit odd to say the least, as no one (apart from some crackpots on the lunatic fringe) have actually said that being in the EU in general is a bad idea… its like two people arguing over whether they prefer Adam Hart Davis’s science programmes or his history programmes, only for a third person to suggest that rather than pick science or history, everyone decide whether they like Adam Hart-Davis in the first place or not… which is stupid, because that’s not up for discussion, as it goes without saying that everyone thinks he’s great.
I’m quite pleased with the result though - I don’t think there should be a referendum. I hate to agree with Ken Clarke because agreeing with a Tory is like intellectual self-harm, but having actually watched a bit of the debate-on-whether-to-have-a-referendum on BBC Parliament (because I was trying to do literally the most boring thing I could have been doing at that time), he said that people elect politicians to make the important decisions for them*, because lets face it… why should we listen to the man on the street? What does the Sun reading white-van driver know about the finer points and technicalities of managing European integration? If the man on the street was in charge, we’d have bought back the death penalty and would have constructed a giant wall around Britain with robotic lasers that automatically target immigrants. The general public are idiots.
I can, however, sympathise, with the crackpots who think more highly of the general public than I do, and think that the ignorant masses should get a say, as that’s what democracy is all about, isn’t it? If I was deciding whether we should have a referendum or not then, I’d have a caveat that the public should be informed. And if they want the public to be informed, then the general public must be engaged and interested. Which is more difficult than it sounds.
European-level politics are supremely tedious to all but the most enthusiastic technocrats. What do the public care about? The Common Agricultural Policy? Nah. Trade tariffs? Nah. Representation and democratic deficits? Not even that. There’s literally nothing in the new treaty that is even slightly interesting. Being partially colour-blind and only able to see beige and being partially deaf and only being able to hear Heart FM are the only things analogous to the contents of the treaty.
Hell, I’m a politics student and I haven’t read the new treaty, nor really know what it contains, because its so supremely dull, and I imagine I’m in the tiny minority who might stand a chance of being interested in this sort of thing.
I think if they want a referendum, they need to change the treaty to engage the people and reflect things they’re actually interested in. Which is why I think if there is going to be a referendum, the treaty needs to have provisions for reforming the Eurovision voting system**. Fuck qualified majority voting thresholds, that’s what the general public really care about.
Lets face it - the only European political issue that can really get people worked up is the annual outrage over the political voting during the Eurovision Song Contest - when Cyprus always give Greece 12 points, and the ethnic mish-mash of former-Yugoslavia all voting for their respective mother countries, and the Balkan bloc-vote, and so on. This is obviously in greater need of reform than the European Parliament, because how can it be fair that Malta, population approximately 4, have the same voting weight as Germany, population 82 million? Especially on an issue as important as who has the best song.
If the government wanted a referendum on the treaty that they’d be guaranteed to win, all they have to do is get into the treaty a clause weighting each country’s voting weight to be relative to their populations make up 75% of the points, and then satisfy the small countries by making the final 25% of the points awarded come from an equal number from each individual state - pretty much the same system as you have in the US government, with the House of Representatives having congressmen from each state relative to their respective populations and then the Senate having two senators from each state.
This could be a revolution in European politics as what goes on Brussels will become relevant to the people of Europe - come May 2009 they’ll be a tangible event that people can associate with an EU decision. So who’s with me?
(* Chomsky, in the introduction to Media Control, also gives barring the public from managing their own affairs as a definition of the concept of democracy… which makes me feel a bit better about things)
(** I know Eurovision has nothing to do with the EU, but the EU should take it on board as a core competency)
.JPG)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.JPG)