Holy Cow! Women Bishops at last!
July 8th, 2008 at 15:56

The Anglican Church has finally joined the 20th century this week, and has allowed the ordination of female Bishops - this was one of many brave moves passed at the recent meeting in York of the General Synod - along with declaring that moving pictures on a screen are not actual caused by witchcraft, and that the “popular music” that “young people” listen to isn’t going to cause the very fabric of reality to fall apart.

That last part is a lie of course, though I do think its pretty remarkable that it’s taken this long for the church to decide that women are all right - especially as so many male church officials seem pretty keen on wearing dresses, so you’d think they’d be all for gender equality.

Depressingly though, there’s a large number of church leaders – about a third of them - who are opposed to this and have gone as far as forming a “no girls” club of likeminded churches - throughout my research into this, I’ve been unable to determine whether these churches are all led by eight year old boys.

The reason they’re so opposed to the idea of women bishops is apparently that because (and lets assume the Bible is 100% true, for the sake of argument) Jesus’s disciples were all men… so no girls are allowed. Which is a pretty rubbish criterion to hire people on - maybe Jesus’s all male crew was a coincidence, and they were all hired on merit? The job criteria may have been: must think Jesus is ace; be willing to commute to Nazareth; be a team player – and the most suitable happened to be men? Or maybe Jesus wanted a football team? (His team wouldn’t even have to walk alone on water.) Or maybe they were all men as a consequence of world history basically being one long patriarchy?

The trouble for the church is even though it appears to have finally reached adolescence; it still faces a number of battles with the relentless onslaught of modernity and the passage of time. It can’t be long until perhaps the biggest taboo has to be tackled: the ordination of bishops who have other faiths.

Though I’m not a woman, I still feel as though the church is discriminating against me - I bet if I sent them my CV, they wouldn’t let me achieve my dream of being Archbishop of Canterbury - just because I’m not religious. Just because I don’t believe the same stories as Anglicans, I’ll never get a free palace just across the river from Parliament or the right to a seat in the House of Lords.

It’s madness really – there are probably thousands of women who would be great at doing… whatever it is that Bishops do. Barring people of other religions is just cutting of potential talent. Look at the Pope, for instance – he probably knows his Bible better than anyone, and if anything is probably over-qualified for the job of Anglican bishop, yet he won’t get the job just because he’s Catholic.

This status quo is quite clearly madness.

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Tory leader (sort of) “ruins wedding”
July 6th, 2008 at 17:17

Though I’m a big advocate of replacing the convention of giving individuals names, and replacing them instead with unique alpha-numeric ID numbers, there is at least one benefit I can see in retaining the archaic database-unfriendly tradition: using out of context quotes to attack the Conservative Party.

There’s an incredible story in today’s Observer, about how David Cameron ruined a wedding. No, not that David Cameron, unfortunately:

“Church officials are investigating a couple’s complaint that a vicar threw their two-year-old son out of their wedding ceremony for being too noisy.

“The vicar, David Cameron, asked for the child to be removed when he kept repeating his father’s name. He also ejected a guest who complained, telling her not to ‘make a scene’. “

This obviously paints David Cameron as an unpopular person, who just upsets people, and hates families. Can we really expect David Cameron to act in the best interests of the children? Hmm!

And it gets even better - the little bastard of a son that caused the upset is also named Cameron. Meaning you can take the following quote out of context for massive damage:

“The bride’s uncle, Michael O’Driscoll, said: ‘Cameron wasn’t screaming and crying; he was making baby noises. I’ve never witnessed anything like it.’”

Cameron in “causing a scene and being generally unpleasant” shocker!.

I always knew David Cameron was a bad person.

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Mugabe for Haltemprice and Howden
June 27th, 2008 at 21:39

Another week, another byelection, another humiliating Labour defeat. For those not paying close enough attention, Labour came fifth in the Henely by-election (y’know, the one to replace Boris). Sure, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the Tories would retain the seat, but coming 5th, and being beaten by the Greens and THE BNP, is a pretty good indication that Labour are up shit-creek. If this result is anything to go by, the Prime Minister’s best bet is surely to become a racist?

Worse still, it isn’t over yet for the Labour government - they’ve got yet another by-election to endure up in Haltemprice and Howden, wherever that is, where DaveDave is fighting to retain the seat he lost after, er, resigning. The official Labour “line” is that they’re not even putting up a candidate because the election is a publicity stunt - whilst this has some merit, and brilliantly means that DaveDave is fighting against some amazing joke candidates (Miss Great Britain, David Fucking Icke), it also makes them, and specifically Gordon Brown look weak and scared. You’d think arguing about civil liberties with a man who supports the death penalty would be pretty easy, but alas, Labour won’t even take on an academically easy target.

Though if the Labour Party had put up a candidate, they’d have to do pretty well, otherwise it would be even more humiliating for them. But I think they can overcome this - all they need is someone who is tough, someone who has a track record of winning elections in the face of such strong oppositions. They need Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe is a master electoral strategist - despite the polls in his native Zimbabwe showing that he’s horrendously unpopular, all indications are that he’s going to have an easy victory in the forthcoming Presidential run-off election. Haltemprice and Howden would be slightly trickier, as he’d actually have opponents, but Mugabe is known for his skills in turning elections around.

Hell, even if as the official Labour candidate, Mugabe were to enter into the argument about civil liberties that DaveDave craves so much, Mugabe could put his case strongly forward: he’s got a consistent history of locking people up without charge for well over 42 days, and he even hates all of the other civil liberties too, so is well inline with official government policy (tough on civil liberties, tough on the causes of civil liberties).

If the Labour constituency party were to pick Mugabe as their candidate, they wouldn’t just be getting Mugabe, they’d be getting his great political machine too - just as Labour borrowed Bill Clinton’s “third way” to win in ‘97, they could import the similarly revolutionary “Vote Mugabe or Die”, which has proved incredibly effective in Zimbabwe.

I mean, think about it - if you lived in the constituency, you’d vote for Mugabe, wouldn’t you? I mean, you’d have to.

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Humanity’s value.
June 24th, 2008 at 19:20

One of the key ideas in our society is that “everyone is born equal” and that everyone has equal value- if this is true, then it begs the question: what is the value of a human being? According to eBay, it is 2.2 Million Australian dollars, or just over a million pounds sterling.

We know this because a man called Ian Usher, originally from Yorkshire, now living in Sydney, sold his life on eBay - his house, his car, even his job and his friends - for AUS$2.2m. If the ever reliable Wikipedia is anything to go by, with a world population of 6,704,845,726 people, it means as a species we’re worth over £7150 TRILLION.

Considering that the world’s total GDP, the sum of every country’s economic worth is a paltry $65.95 trillion (2006 est)- or about £33.5 trillion, this makes one thing clear to me: the economic case for re-legalising slavery is unarguable.

Think about it - we can beat the credit crunch, pay off all of that third world debt that the news agendas have forgotten about, and still have enough money left for everyone to have a swimming pool in the back gardens of their mansions - simply by remortgaging the human race. Here we are worrying about how we’re going to pay for things, and yet all this time we’ve been literally sitting on a veritable goldmine of cash.

The cash windfall would be like a lottery win for humanity. With money like this, America could easily afford to stay in Iraq for the next 53,000 years (at a cost of $720m – or £365m - a day) – the only danger would be running out of soldiers to send there.

And don’t get me wrong, this wouldn’t be like the rubbish old version of slavery, this would be a whole new, better kind, as we’d all be in charge. You wouldn’t even have to sell off your entire life - what’s to stop us all becoming like the asset strippers, like James Goldsmith, who bought up loads of companies in the 80s, and sold off the inefficient and redundant parts?

Don’t need that womb as you don’t want any kids, ladies? Sell it off! Don’t need to know all that stuff about Shakespeare and photosynthesis that you accrued from school, hairdressers? Sell it off! Need to teach your enemies a lesson, but you’re a bit of a wimp? Literally hire some muscle!

I don’t even think this idea is that terribly revolutionary - after all, we already sell our labour every time we go to work, and in most cases, there is a direct link between amount of work done and the amount of remuneration. There have even already been cases of companies paying people to get a tattoo with their logo on and stuff - monetizing our entire lives is merely a logical extension of this.

I guess the only problem with this is the, er, horrifyingly, fact that I seem to be happily advocating a form of slavery. Would anyone like to buy my sense of shame? It’s going cheap, and I haven’t used it much, so its in near mint condition.

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I’m a bit worried that in this I come across as some sort of ultra-libertarian anti-taxation crackpot
June 11th, 2008 at 00:43

They, whoever ‘they’ may be – in this case probably mobsters trying to corrupt a politician in a film- say that “everyone has their price”. I quite agree. If this newspaper held a competition where it were to offer a million pounds to any readers who would tongue-kiss an ugly horse, chances are, that for a million quid, you’d definitely at least consider it (though for clarity, this newspaper is NOT offering you money to kiss a horse - you can kiss as many horses as you’d like, but you won’t get a penny for it.)

I point this out because the government do something similar. They don’t pay people to tongue-kiss horses, attractive ones or otherwise (though that would explain why there was apparently a billion pound budget deficit at the Department of Farming and Rural Affairs), but they use the other side of this principle to achieve goals slightly less puerile than the competition ideas in my head.

They use taxes to try and manipulate our behaviour; on the basis that we won’t do whatever it is they don’t want us to do, if it gets too expensive for us to do it.

For example, ‘green taxes’ are being used to encourage us to treat the environment better than we have been doing - like the plans to introduce a congestion charge to Manchester and the extra tax on cars that have high emissions are there to make people think about using public transport instead of using their cars.

Similarly, the government removed the lower ten percent rate of tax to try and manipulate the behaviour of the lowest earners. They’re trying to encourage the poorest people in society to become richer, so they don’t get hurt as much by taxes

In a way, this is quite a terrifying prospect: how can we claim to have any sorts of freedoms, or even free will if the government can control what we do simply by hitting us where it hurts: in the wallet? Sure, so far they’ve only used these taxes for benign reasons, to make people smoke less and help the environment and so on… but then how many steps can it be until things get a little more bizarre?

What if we end up with a noise emissions tax, to tackle noise pollution? Will we all have to talk in whispers and will heavy metal bands have to switch to play acoustic instruments? This could lead to a sort of “noise emissions trading” scheme (similar to what has been suggested for carbon) where you can buy and sell noise credits- though I guess this wouldn’t be such a terrible idea for people who live near airports and want to shut the planes up, and it surely couldn’t be too long before people band together to buy up all of Jeremy Clarkson’s credits and silence him.

In fact, thinking about it, if the government were in clever about it, they’d manipulate us by putting a tax on voting for anyone but the Labour Party. Or at least force anyone who votes for the other parties to kiss a horse.

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“The path to enlightenment has been delayed due to a signals fault between Luton and Bedford”
May 29th, 2008 at 23:28

So, I was browsing the East Midlands Trains press release archive (yeah, it’s the sort of thing you do when you’re unemployed), and in amongst the tedious news about timetable updates and corporate partnerships, this leapt out at me:

“On Friday 23 May East Midlands Trains played host to a very special passenger. His Holiness the Dalai Lama travelled on the company’s 14.55 from St. Pancras International to Nottingham. His Holiness was travelling to the city to give five days of teachings.”

Christ on a bike. This means that the DALAI LAMA, must have sped through the small, unimportant, somewhat incestuous, Tory safe-seat in which I live - in fact, His Holiness must have passed a mere few hundred metres from my house. This is particularly notable, as he must be the biggest celebrity we’ve had in a ten mile radius since Frank Bruno opened the Carnival about 15 years ago.

EMT, who seem pretty chuffed with this PR-coup, posted some photos for proof:

Unfortunately for his Holiness, it looks like had to put up with the gurning East Midlands Trains chief executive for the entire two hour journey. No doubt they exchanged stories about what its like to be the spiritual leader of millions of Tibetans, and what it’s like to be in charge of an important transport artery linking London with places like Luton and Kettering. Looks like the EMT guy managed to work his magic and charm his Holiness with his dreamy eyes though:

“So the other week I was campaigning for human rights in Tibet and highlighting abuses by the Chinese occupiers to the United Nations Security Council”

“Yeah, I was having my photo taken with a sausage”

It does make you think though, what do you do if you get on the train and see the Dalai Lama. Do you say anything? Exclaiming “You’re the Dalai Lama!” would be pretty stupid, as he probably already knows that - he was discovered to be the 14th incarnation when he was four years old, so is probably well aware by now.

Similarly, sitting opposite him and just reading your book or newspaper with your iPod in as usual seems a bit of a waste - and staring at him would be even more awkward than it is when you forgot your stuff and have to just stare at the person opposite.

And what if you’d reserved a seat and when you got there found the Dalai Lama sitting in it? Do you turf him out? Actually, I’d quite like to be able to tell the story of how I kicked the Dalai Lama out of my seat.

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Literally the most pedantic post ever.
May 18th, 2008 at 14:35

I’ve got a confession to make, everyone. I think that I’m a Grammar Nazi. Don’t worry, that’s not too much like a real Nazi – if you’ve ever been on the internet, chances are you’ve met a Grammar Nazi. Grammar Nazis are those people on message boards and chat rooms who will complain and discredit you based on whether or not everything is spelt correctly and is grammar perfect, rather than the actual calibre of your argument. I only realised that I was a grammar Nazi when I realised that I was judging people on this criteria.

There are certain grammatical traits that, almost as a reflex action, will suddenly make me switch from a point of respecting someone to actively reviling them.

If you were to misuse the word “random”, my respect for you would drop so rapidly that you could admit to being a card-carrying supporter of Robert Kilroy-Silk and I wouldn’t think any less of you – because it wouldn’t be possible to go any lower. What bothers me is that people – lets be honest here, exclusively teenagers – tend to use the word to describe exclusively non-random things. Run a Google search for “it was totally random” to see what I mean. I think perhaps the only sentence in which the word “random” can be legitimately applied, given the causal nature of events, would be “My random number generator generated me some numbers… they were totally random!” – But for some reason, you never hear teenagers talk about their random number generators.

Talking of “strategy” in situations when there is no “strategy” involved bothers me too – Deal or No Deal being the worst offender as contestants’ talk of their strategy at picking boxes at random (maybe this is the only other acceptable usage of the word ‘random’?). I struggle to watch sport on television for similar reasons, because whenever they interview football players and talk of strategy, as when they say “we’re going to try and get in early and put some goals away and outflank the other team”, or whatever, all I hear is them saying “We’re going to try and score more goals than the opposing team”. This isn’t so much a “strategy” as it is “explaining the rules”.

Its things like this that make me literally fume with anger. Well not ‘literally’ fume- as that’s my third point. I really hate it when people misuse “literally”. This is most toxic when its misused in conjunction with a figure of speech – for example, “I’ve literally just let the cat out of the bag”, would cause me to ask why you were keeping a cat in a bag in the first place.

The horrible and unfortunate thing about misusing “literally” is that I do it – it started when I began deliberately misusing it in conversations for “irony”, but because I’ve done it so often its worked its way into my every day vocabulary – I literally cannot help myself.

Ten points to anyone who picks grammatical errors that I gone done in this post.

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PLO Talk
May 8th, 2008 at 16:36

Apparently, Gordon Brown was on This Morning, er, this morning. Presumably it was because he was looking for the Today programme or Newsnight studios, but accidentally took the wrong door and ended up in an interview so soft it may as well have taken place in a ball pool.

Poor Gordon’s been having a tough time lately, though, facing rock bottom poll ratings and his own party sharpening their daggers, but in the face of so many problems, he’s done the classiest thing possible: started talking about his son, who has cystic fibrosis, in a bid to appear more human and less dour-honey monster.

As underhand as this tactic may seem, it is understandable given the current political climate.  Even his own party in Scotland are calling for a referendum on Scottish independence, and I’m sure from Gordon’s point of view it’d really be the icing on the cake to not just have all of that economic doom and gloom to come and kick him in the face, but be the Prime Minister who presided over the break up of the United Kingdom.

This would be particularly bad for the PM, a Scottish man, as he would induce the ire of the anti-immigration press: foreigners aren’t just coming over here and taking any old job, they’re taking probably the most important job there is.

Scottish independence would also be embarrassing for the country in international institutions, like the UN. Having to sit behind a little sign that says “United Kingdom” on it when Scotland is independent will be like how Egypt must have felt when it called itself the “United Arab Republic”, despite Syria, the other Arab state that it had brief political union with divorcing it ten years before it admitted it had no friends, and reverted back to “Egypt”.

So not only is protecting the Union important for Gordon Brown, but its also vitally important for the country-at-large. The trouble is, I don’t know if Gordon Brown is the man who can ensure that Scotland remains a part of the UK. We need a strong leader, a man who will do whatever is necessary to keep Scotland under English control.

But who do this? I think the obvious answer is that we need Israel’s far-right Likud party in power here. They’ve done a top job of oppressing Palestinian nationalism and keeping them down and under control. If only Ariel Sharon weren’t in a persistent vegetative state following a coma, he’d be just the man we need to ensure English dominance of the entire Greater Britain region.

Having dealt with Yassir Arafat in the past, Sharon would be adept at negotiating with another international pariah who the current Labour government won’t deal with: Alex Salmond. Sharon is the sort of man who would send the tanks rolling in without a second thought, and impose curfews and break international law to the point where the Scottish would give up any claims to independence, and be too caught up with campaigning for their own human rights. Thereby neutralising the question of Scottish independence.

The only way this could possibly backfire is if Hamas come to power in Scotland and refuse to recognise England’s right to exist.

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Armchair Psephology
May 5th, 2008 at 23:51

Does anyone else feel sorry for the government? They were mauled in the local elections, given a figurative kick in the face in London and to top things off, all of the pollsters are predicting a gigantic Conservative majority after the next general election which as it hasn’t happened yet, is pretty much akin to claiming that “my dad could beat up your dad”.

But I can sympathise it’s not nice to think that everyone hates you. You’d have to be dead inside if you wouldn’t give Ken Livingstone with his peg-nosed voice a hug after seeing him getting beaten by a bumbling toff who doesn’t seem capable of organising his hair, let alone a major global city.

I feel sorry for Gordon Brown as well. He spent ten long years wanting his job, looking on enviously as Tony got all of the glory and the women (well, Carole Caplin), only to find that when he finally got it he was rubbish at it. And those bullies in the media, the opposition and even some of his friends aren’t letting him forget that either.

Things are apparently so disastrous for the government that there must surely be another explanation. I mean, surely they’d do something if they were really worried? This is why I think that this could be a bluff, and all part of an elaborate plan. I think the government are actually being horrendously clever, and are adopting an underdog strategy.

After all, everyone likes supporting an underdog - both in the literal sense (the tramp in Lady and the Tramp) and the figurative sense - if these were Biblical times, everyone would be routing for David against Goliath, and even in modern times, underdogs are still pretty popular. The Iraqi insurgents aren’t exactly anywhere on the “likeability” spectrum, yet quite inexplicably, they’re still going strong against the combined might of the British and American armed forces, so there must be some people who still likes them.

Maybe appearing as the underdog is the government strategy - if they can get their poll ratings as low as possible, they can call a general election, and the theory will be that people will go to the voting booth, and see the new Labour logo, which is a picture of Gordon Brown with puppy-dog eyes, and they’ll be a mass-outbreak of sympathy for the government, so everyone will vote them back in.

Sure, getting their rating any lower for this plan to work is going to be pretty difficult for them - getting rid of the lower starting rate of income tax, resulting in the poorest people being taxed even more was a pretty spectacular move, so it is going to be difficult to top.

Maybe they could start another hideously unpopular war by picking on a country that everyone likes? What about Scotland? The PM isn’t exactly Alex Salmond’s biggest fan, and there are stacks of evidence that suggest Scotland has nuclear weapons. Admittedly, they’re our nuclear weapons, but that reasoning didn’t stop the Americans going into Iraq.

So sorry if I’ve rumbled your plan, government, but in a perverse way that might actually help you - as it’ll mean you’re in even deeper trouble.

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Homeopathy
April 28th, 2008 at 17:34

This may seem familiar to you if you’ve watched this video.

I’ve been reading up on homeopathy recently - it’s an alternative form of medicine to the sort of thing you get in hospitals. It’s “alternative” in the sense that unlike regular medicine, it doesn’t actually work.

To cut a long story short, the premise is that “like cures like” - homeopathists reckon that if you treat an illness with something that causes similar symptoms to the illness, then you’ll be magically cured. For example, Samuel Hahnemann, the bloke who came up with this concept reckoned that he’d beaten Malaria by ingesting some bark that caused shivering and joint pain, a bit like how malaria does. In other words, it’s basically the same as claiming that if you have an illness where you feel like you’ve been punched in the face, the best cure is a punch in the face.

You might have noticed my cynicism when I describe this - don’t get me wrong, it’s not baseless or misplaced. I’ve been conducting a scientific experiment of my own to test whether or not homeopathic remedies work.

Now, I haven’t had any major illnesses recently, so rather than use homeopathy to fix myself, I instead decided to use it to see if I could enhance myself - having watched Superman Returns recently, I’ve decided I’d quite like super strength, so I decided to conduct an experiment to see if homeopathy could give me that.

To make a homeopathic remedy, you generally have to dilute down something bad and toxic using water - to the point where, after several iterations of dilution there is something like (in the case of a popular ‘flu “remedy”) one molecule of the toxic substance to 10 to the power of 400 molecules of water - so it’d actually be surprising to find a single molecule of the stuff in the “remedy”.

As luck would have it, I have this resultant “drug” literally on tap at home - it’s called H20 or “Water”, to give it its “street” name. So I’ve been conducting the experiment with great care - apparently some water junkies have water making up 83% of their blood, and according to the Office of National Statistics, based on 2005, 5.1 men in every million have died from inhaling too much water (”drowning”), so its pretty dangerous stuff. But in the interest of science, I have persevered. For the past month, I’ve been taking a daily dosage of the homeopathic drug I concocted by turning on the tap and holding a glass underneath.

The results, as you might expect, were disappointing - unfortunately homeopathy has not given me super strength, or even any other super powers. I can’t lift up cars and throw them at my adversaries or anything. So my official scientific conclusion is that it “doesn’t work”.

There are, however, some people who claim that it does work, but in the same way a placebo does – if you think that taking something will make you better, you’ll psychologically feel better, which will make you actually better… but with this approach you have to be wilfully ignorant in order to get a reaction.

So, er, sorry if I’ve just ruined the placebo effect for you by telling you a bit about why homeopathy doesn’t work at all.

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