banter

The situation with the BBC is not wholly of its own making. The corporation has been pressured to be popular, and, simultaneously, a public service broadcaster. And many people moaned when it was a public service broadcaster, during the patriarchal age of broadcasting. Now people are moaning that things have gone too far the other way. Quite correctly. My argument against popularity at the expense of quality is fairly simple: If the BBC makes programmes in popular formats, that are of the same quality as those available on commercial channels (or worse), there is nothing to distinguish it from the commercial channels. Making questions about the license fee inevitable. That is the situation today.

The assumption about an audience, needed to arrive at a conclusion of inaccessibility, is worrying. Accessibility is totally wrong. The most patriarchal thing since Abraham is that broadcasting needs to be accessible. I don’t necessarily think there’s an assumption people are stupid, but suspect there’s an assumption people are not interested in complexity. So, as a result, controversial issues turn into tabloid, bite size chunks, which alarm people irresponsibly, or presentation heavy documentaries, light on detail and low in accuracy. Maybe people being turned off by politics, science, the arts, and current affairs, is, in part, because they associate it with ‘accessible’ broadcasting. People sense that they’re being spoken down-to.

There should be an assumption that the majority of people are not stupid, and that complex subjects should be presented to inform. That is a different assumption from accessibility, because it assumes the viewers are intelligent and capable of learning. That not everything in a documentary needs to be so dumbed down it is accessible to the majority of viewers. People are capable of looking things up that interest them. The BBC used to produce decent fact sheets. As such there is zero replay value in many BBC current affairs programmes, and documentaries, because the information within them is so light very few people would have a problem with remembering their contents. Unless distracted by the special effects, and music track.

The BBC needs to compete to survive and in order to compete, with the other channels, many of whom are now producing documentaries of acceptable quality, the BBC needs to produce documentaries that are better. They desperately need to take a step-backwards. Until the late nineties BBC documentaries were the envy of the world. The BBC is the broadcaster best placed to attract the next David Attenborough(s) and needs to do that right away if it is to survive.

And the BBC could. Because the talent tucked away in places like BBC 4, a channel that receives a tiny fraction of the license fee and speaks for itself. Likewise Radio 4. Accessibility should be regarded as a failed experiment.

It virtually goes without saying that producing reality television, from talent shows to DIY, when everyone is doing it, makes the BBC less distinguishable from the commercial channels. Sacrificing long-term survival for short-term popularity. BBC 3 is, to my mind, schizophrenic, veering between sub-Channel 4 youth television, and, occasionally, decent drama/comedy. Half of what is on BBC 3 is done on commercial channels, and often better. I don’t think there is a dearth of talent - the talent is out there – the BBC needs to aggressively seek it out.

Someone needs a big brush to sweep away accessability and replace it with talent. Talent should reflect the subjects they’re involved in. There should be no more broadcasters covering subjects that leave them so out of their depth they look stupid.

Much of the above applies to the rest of the media but I don’t care about them as much as the BBC. I would like to be able to mock foreign friends about how much better BBC documentaries are than theirs. I felt smug when I could do that.

Tonight’s local election coverage on BBC News 24 is, aside from David Dimbleby, completely crap.  I am currently watching Jeremy Vine do a really shit American accent, dressed as a cowboy, reading out truly woefully described statistics about the Liberal Democrats.   It’s really difficult to watch.  It’s as if someone has decided that local election coverage needs to be fun.  Fun in the sense of   BBC Children’s Television fun.  My eyes feel soiled.  I hope someone puts the Jeremy Vine clip on YouTube because I did not make this up but doubt anyone will believe me.

Reality television, and derivatives, are mostly crap because they attract attention whores and drama-enhancing producers.  It rarely documents.

I think I’m on safe ground saying shows about people with ugly and/or embarrassing medical conditions, are a modern freak-show.  Especially reality television that deals with disfigurement. Such programmes often have fuck-all to do with the people they purport to document – I’m not being callous - it’s just that disfigured people are cheaper than actors and the make-up is better.  Quite often they get paid peanuts in the process. The documenting comes second to the sights and sounds. But…

If people can be desensitised to disfigurement, is it a good thing for disfigured people?  If viewers become desensitised to disfigurement, in real-life they will stare less, and, maybe, be less afraid.  Which would be a good thing.  However, given the tenuous and complex links between violent television and violent behaviour, it’s probably difficult to say that desentisation will lead to better treatment of disfigured people.  In the same way that it can’t be said violent television is ever the primary factor contributing to violence. I don’t think freak-shows, aside from supplying an income to the performers, improved the lot of disfigured people.  Still, I’m an optimist, I hope that there are positive side-effects to the modern freak-show.

A seriously negative side-effect of this, could be that in order to maintain viewers, medical reality TV will perpetually search for more extreme medical conditions.   In order to maintain shock value.  Like soap operas adding an explosion or violence.  Reality TV will  have to go to poor countries to find people shocking enough. Poor people with extreme medical conditions, on our screen, for titillation. Which, if it generates awareness of medical conditions in poor countries, isn’t such a bad thing.  The next thing is people may empathise. Tourist destinations may be shamed into action.  But..

It could still just be about titillation. I don’t, for a second, think that the majority of medical reality television is made for any altruistic reason at all.  I don’t think it’s immoral and I’m not even sure it’s all that harmful, but I do think it amoral, in that it boils-down to viewing figures, and best commercial practice.   Change will be in response to a changing audience.  I hope people become so desensitised to disfigurement John Merrick could walk down the street naked and people would be more shocked by his penis than his elephantiasis. 

The food sections of broadsheet newspapers are annoying. The featured reciples are cooked by no-one but the authors, such people play boules and feel smug about it, and other such habits. And, worst of all, have witty, yet somehow tasteful, jumpers for informal situations. They are supernaturally smug toss-pots. The other bits of the food section are made up of critics - who think they’re interesting - and a smorgasbord, a panoply, of wanky narrative so refined it would make Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen swoon.

Give me recipes that are good but don’t require fucking around. When I say fucking around I mean by my standards of fucking around. Not some jumped up chef or foodie who hunts down fucking apples from farms that are, naturally (what else would they be?), rustic and genial. Or bits where it says the timing of something is essential. If I want to cook or buy things where the timing is essential I’ll go to a bit more effort than following a recipe from some broadsheet which is essentially toilet roll with print. Like buy a cook-book or get some training.

So. Down with the old media! Surf the net! Never click adverts! Stick it to Hugh Fernley-Wittingstall. Come on! The man’s a cock. Except buy the Guardian on Saturdays, because Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column is in it. Also buy it when Charlie Brooker, (sometimes) Polly Toynbee, or Jon Ronson have articles.

Alternatively, just be grown up, and buy loads of newspapers all of the time and don’t read the annoying bits.

Leave the food bit and life-style section on the train. A foodie may pick it up, cook a recipe from it and choke on a bone, with hilarious consequences. Like they immediately cough up the bone, trip on a roller-skate, do all their own stunts and appear in Phantom of The Opera. Then get killed by a amorous moose while searching for maple fucking syrup.

At the start of the popularisation of the Internet there were a lot of people with dubious Tank-Girl haircuts, William Gibson novel in hand, making wild predictions about Virtual Reality and the like.  Even William Shatner got in on the act with TekWar.   The days of the two Williams.  With the abundance of Internet mania it’s gotten a bit clichéd to go on about how the Internet is going to change things.

Adam Hart-Davis, if you can get over being spoken to like a 5 year old nephew, and his avuncular mien, made quite good documentary called “The Thinkynge Revolution” as part of his “What the Tudors Did For Us” series.  You can watch it here.  Although, of course, future historians may refer to the Internet Revolution as the Pornography Revolution and say things like “imagine if Caxton had done smut”.

I think there should be a general rule of blogging that when you’re depressed you shouldn’t blog.  Almost universally it comes across as self-indulgent shit.  Earlier today I posted a post that in retrospect was so mental it was potentially funny.  In a laughing at a mental tramp bothering people outside of Boots kind of way.  To give you a vague idea of what the post was like, at the end I compared the Conservative party and New Labour to a saggy pox afflicted arse.  I had a mental picture of diseased cheeks belonging to the same arse.   Thing is: I hate people that try to convince people of stuff. It’s not that I object to people expressing their opinions it’s just I think it’s possible that vehemence is a mask for ill-thought out ideas.  With stuff I’m sure about if people agree that’s fine and if they don’t they don’t.  I’m still right. If I’m being vehement it is a sign of not being sure I’m right.  So the long-winded psychiatrists wet dream of a post had to go.

I visited someone in hospital a couple of days ago, on a post-operative ward filled with people plumbed with tubes pumping poo and wee, and I think I’ve picked up the famous shitting lurgies. Whereby you don’t feel all that unwell but have got a bit of a sore throat and occasionally have cramps that precipitate running. So I will not be in London tomorrow. I intend to walk somewhere where there are nearby toilets or wooded cover. I’ll keep a bog-roll in my camera bag. The idea of shitting myself in central London terrifies me.

This is a shit post.  Sometimes I think there’s a collusion between all of the atoms in the universe to smite me, like Job (the proto-Jesus), in the good book.  Fnord.

I would never poach a quail egg. Quail eggs are OK. Nothing special. Small eggs. You eat them and think “hmm. That’s OK”. I won’t eat hem unless someone else is buying them and someone else is cooking it. This isn’t an issue of snobbery. I feel the same way about black pudding. And beer. And newspapers. You don’t have to prepare beer unless you are opening a can or pouring it yourself. That’s preparation of a sort.

You can prepare newspapers by finding discarded newspapers on the train, scrunching the pages into loose balls, and putting them in a big pile in your back garden. Then joyfully spunk methanol all over them (from a spare lens cleaning kit), and set fire to them. Shouting “I’m burning the media, man – and I didn’t even pay for it”. (I have no respect for people who burn flags because, often, they’ve bought the flag. It’s mental). Then read the websites of the newspapers you have burnt without ever, ever, clicking on the advertising links.

Even if they’ve got a potentially good deal on a camera advertised or a featured book written by the sub-editor’s wife’s nephew. Then, much later, when the awful realisation dawns on you that you’ve made a Jeremy Clarkson/K Foundation-like statement (I suspect they’re one and the same). Hang your head in shame and drink Ribena. To wash down a fish-finger sandwich. And have a good hard think.

There are qualities that exist in all great film-drama characters that are hard to pin down. It is too simplistic to say that the characters have depth or complexity because some great film characters aren’t complex and don’t have depth. An element may be that while a part of a narrative, at some point in the film, (or even all of it) a great character’s motivations are not obvious to the viewer. So elements of the character are open to interpretation and the character is interesting as a result. Another factor may be the freshness of a role. As defined by the script and/or director and/or acting skills. A memorable character - because they’re novel and a benchmark by which others will be judged. And, I suppose, the pathos or revulsion the character can elicit from an audience.

All in varying proportions. Of course. One day a twat will paid peanuts to put together a shoddy equation for the benefit of a cinema chain. Who’ll pump out press releases on the unsuspecting public like bukkake. Mopped up by the news.

This post is defunct. The video in question has been removed. It was a Rolling Stones Cover so bad that comedy could not be derived from it. Deleting it was the right thing to do. I quite like Tay Zonday and all, he’s self aware - it’s a good act, but that was too much. He should stick to his own stuff, which is funnier, and tolerable to well adjusted ear drums. This post is not defunt. FFS x 100.

What follows this paragraph is yet another [1] reason [2] that copyright should be extended on music here in the UK. So pensioners like The Rolling Stones and The Who and Cliff Richard can maintain their royalties for stuff they did when they didn’t have bits of their bodies wearing out. Apparently they’ve “poured money into the British economy and enriched people’s lives” and “They are not asking for a handout, just a fair reward for their creative endeavours” according to Roger Daltrey. He has good hair. For an old guy. So he must be right. Plus, I like fishing.

One of the most excellent things were music copyright laws to be extended would be that bands like the Rolling Stones or their representatives or whoever handles that sort of thing can authorise things like this:

Tay Zonday does Start Me Up

I think we can all agree that extending musical copyright is a good thing. Like fuck.

[1] Bullshit.
[2] Cos there are no reasons. What reasons do you need? Oh Oh Oh Oh.

Check this link out. Then check out the prices below.

I heard an impassioned debate about those lens in a shop today. I don’t quite get it.

Last few weeks I’ve been doing some reading about photography and have had the pleasure of consulting a few experts. Pro-photographers, by and large, have a few requirements that casual(ish) photographers don’t have: specifically lens build quality, auto-focus speed/accuracy, and lens speed. If they miss a shot it costs them money and they operate in environments like sports venues, or hanging around waiting for some female celebrity’s tit to pop out. Ergo there is sound economic value in professionals spending upwards of £1000 on a lens.

In the world of home audio there are a group of people commonly referred to as audiophiles. Some audiophiles think things like $7250 audio cables produce higher quality audio than cables costing a fraction of the price. Even though it is highly improbable they do. Lenses can’t be directly compared to that situation, but there’s a point to be made nonetheless. With lenses things can be measured (see here). However, the real-world differences, on a standard sized photographic print, or even on a standard LCD monitor, may be difficult to distinguish unless the viewer is a photographer or familiar with the lens. Unless it’s a truly terrible lens.

For instance certain types of lens tend to have greater variance across price brackets. Often, but not always, the differences among zoom lenses are more apparent than fixed focal length lenses. Although that is a bit misleading: as ever the biggest factor in any photograph is what you are photographing. An interesting photograph taken with a mediocre lens is still interesting, while a boring photograph taken with an excellent lens is still boring. Fixed length lenses are interesting in terms of cost/performance.

Case in point 50mm prime (=fixed focal length) lens for Canon and Nikon digital SLRs (DSLRs). As looked at in the forum post linked above. Here’s the Canon prices:

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 MK II < £75
Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM ~ £250
Canon EF 50mm f/1L USM ~ £1000

Here’s the Nikon prices:

Nikon AF 50mm f/1.8D ~ £80
Nikon AF 50mm f/1.4D ~ £250

The build quality between the cheap lenses and more expensive lenses is quite pronounced. Particularly with Canon’s F/1 from their top of the line L range. I question how many casual DSLR users require that sort of build quality. Ardent casual photographers may benefit from the lenses in the £250 bracket. But I question whether that is clear cut. If, at a guestimate, the cheaper lenses break twice as often as the ~£250 lenses, and presuming it happens outside of warranty (making lenses that often break down during the warranty period makes no sense) , buying another cheap lens (or even having a spare or two) works out cheaper than the original cost of buying the ~£250 lens. That’s a scenario, quite frankly, pulled out of my arse, but a big question is how often the cheaper lenses break down under the usage of an average DSLR owner. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t place a bet either way whether the cumulative life of three cheap lenses (costing less in total) would outlast the ~£250 lenses or vice versa. MTBF info and the like is difficult to find.

There is a stop difference between the ~£250 lenses and the cheap lenses. In some situations that could be the difference between a sharp shot and blurred shots in low light conditions. On the other-hand it’s an issue somewhat mitigated by camera burst mode and acceptable ISO-300+ exposures on DSLRs. The +3 stop images stabilization of newer Canon (IS) and Nikon (VR) shake reduction is an indication of what is considered significant in terms of gaining stops in the age of DSLR/sensor based photography.

So I guess it’s nice if you’ve got the spare cash, but to hear the argument I overheard today you’d think a lens was the only factor in taking a photo. I’m no expert, or even a serious amateur, or even that good a photographer, I’m a hobby master, but I’ve listened to enough people to know that lens quality beyond ‘acceptable’ isn’t the most important thing about taking a picture. And that some pointless arguments go on in camera shops and that there’s a lot of unnecessary snobbery and lusting after lenses among amateur photographers. Check out this comparison with a $5000 vs. a $150 camera.

I like this classic because it sets up the next sentence, thus saving me words.   This can’t be distinguished from parody.   FFS.

I’m sitting, alone, in a cold room, in underpants, eating a microwave curry.   A fairly posh one, lamb something or-other with apricots and a hot sauce.  With whole seeds.  The first problem only applies to this curry and cannot be generalised to all curries:  Apricots.   Apricots are foul.  They add nothing to the world.  Apricots could dissapear and people would move on pretty quickly.  Elton John would not play at their funeral.  Conspiracy theories would not be fomented.  The second problem applies to all supermarket curries and can be generalised:  Too much sauce.  There are very few curries that benefit from too much sauce.  Dansak benefits from an excess of sauce.

What I end up doing with a lot of supermarket curries is eating a third of the sauce with the meat and/or vegetables and tossing the rest in the bin.  Which is wasteful.  I think supermarkets put loads of sauce in their curries not because they think the public wants sauce but because it means less meat and/or vegetables.   It’s akin to serving steak and chips with a big pile of chips and a piddly little steak next to it.   Or a single asparagus in a bucket of sauce.  The ratio is fucked.  I feel like I’m being punished for being a lazy bastard, for not cooking, by supermarkets that have adverts that make projectile vomiting look pleasant.  Less sauce please: Asda, Morrision’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose.  Don’t be cunts.

I don’t give a flying fuck about David Cameron flaunting the rules of the road on a bicycle. The thing with Cameron is; he started off OK, but got pulled in all kinds of directions by the interests surrounding him, and when elected he’ll swing further to the right and will tolerate/exploit stuff he knows to be wrong. He’ll excuse it by deferring to ‘people being concerned about N‘ and he’ll ride them like a donkey rather than tell anybody they’re wrong, like a grown-up, with a grown-up face. See Broken Britain. In The Sun. As PM he”ll paint his bike black, get mudguards , and go out hunting peasants with his fox-gun. Probably.

If I were David Cameron post-bike scoop I’d market myself as a maverick prepared to bend the rules to get the job done. Dr House MD, on a bicycle. Minus the Vicodin. With legs that work. David Cameron with a Vicodin habit would break Broken Britain’s broken back. The Vicodin straw. The kids look up to Cameron - the street youth. Hipsters, fidget godivas, and Vicodin, all being David Cameron’s fault. Prompting apocalyptic headlines in The Daily Mail, Armageddon in The Sun, and wanky, serious discussion, with mostly idiots, in The Broadsheets. Fuck them! What does David Cameron want with them anyway? Dr House MD wouldn’t give a fuck. Oh, and The Mirror are a bunch of twats too. Just to be even handed and all. The newspapers are crap by-and-large because a great deal of the people that read them are idiots.

Certain Nasdaq tech stocks have, in my opinion, been unfairly tarnished by the fuckwitted problems in the financial sector. They are bargains and had I the cash between one and two years time I’d be laughing. During the dot-com bust it was horrible to watch loads of companies that were fundamentally sound dragged down with idiotic companies. The stock for companies that survived could have been picked up dirt cheap. Had I the foresight to invest, which is easy in retrospect.

The market hasn’t bottomed by any means, but here’s my theory, pulled out of my arse: 1) The tech sector is going to reach a bottom faster than other sectors, not quite as fast as Eliot Spitzer reaching a bottom via an escort service, but within two months. 2) The exact time a bottom is going to be reached is difficult to predict, but less so in the tech sector (there’s unlikely to be bad news to come) than other sectors. But a short loss is worth swallowing for the long term gains. 3) The risk in much of the tech sector is different from other sectors because of transnational assets and sales. It’s diverse rather than localised risk.

With regards of everything other than tech - it’s not bottomed yet because there’s more bad news to come. Anyone that thinks that isn’t the case is being naïve. The Fed does not make moves of the magnitude made over the weekend without reason. History will tell. What I hope is that rationality wins the day, everyone calms down, stops thinking in the short term, and most markets bottom in the next few weeks. But what I hope, indeed, what I say, is pulled from my arse, and is a poor excuse for a blog entry. And could be bollocks.

Here’s what I’d buy, in my imaginary bet:

Intel (Nasdaq symbol INTC) - $20 is not a fuckload off it’s 8 year low and is a bargain. Intel is going to dominate the chip market for the imminent future. Hasn’t been hit by stocking up on a twit load of flash memory.

Nvidia (Nasdaq symbol NVDA) - $20 is nowhere near Nvidia’s lows, but Nvidia has shown surprising resilience in the face of competition from AMD (inc. ATI) and Intel, in both the on-board graphics/motherboard market at the graphics card market. Huge global sales/assets.

Sun (Nasdaq symbol JAVA) - $16 - post acquisition of the ubiquitous MySQL, is a bargain. There will be more webservers and more MySQL. Doesn’t matter which Linux distribution a webhost runs, they still need MySQL.

In two years time I’ll find out if I’m right or not.

Early Sunday morning I was listening to Russell Brand’s radio show and he mentioned one of his and Matt Morgan’s YouTube videos (The Weatherclerks) and how it’d only gotten a thousand hits. That is quite a pathetic amount of hits for a video that had been on YouTube six months. The problem is the way the videos were released. The first set of his unseen old-school (sort of old-school, post drugs) videos were disseminated via ‘Warren Kelp’ (an obvious sockpuppet) with some bullshit about the videos being found in a skip. That was all well and good, but the only people that would come across the videos were people specifically searching for Russell Brand. The largest proportion of his fans are ordinary people and are not going to do that. I saw the videos soon after their internet debut and featured them on this blog, but I, and people that come here (hello!) are elite internet ninjas. Many of whom have seen or heard of Russell Brand prior to the last couple of years (like me; he was funny out of his head on smack, back in the day in dingy Islington pubs, and he’s still funny minus the smack in front of audiences of hundreds. That’s a hell of a transition). Releasing the videos to the baying hordes, even with a celebrity name attached, is no good without doing internet basics like building up an internet audience (which is totally different from a telly/stand-up audience, and will become increasingly important in the next few years).

I think YouTube is proof that people will watch things that aren’t normally featured on television or the screen. Every celebrity should own a basic HD camera, such as the Canon HV30 (see note, it’s important), which produces good quality video without much technical complexity, or cost, or barriers to just switching on and filming. Buying a more expensive camera means more fucking around than is necessary, and nobody busy wants to fuck around. Buy a camera that doesn’t require training to use (the HV30 is excellent and produces excellent video). Film mundane stuff (people are interested in the mundane of any celebrity), stick it up on YouTube, build up some e-fame (which is like real fame, but with significantly less money) and profit. Videos a minute or two long. Below ten minutes of your life a week. Stick to basic editing, using the software that came with the camera, upload it to YouTube. It’s not difficult. Why more celebrities don’t do this is beyond me. Especially if they realise what the Internet is going to do to TV – like Tay Zonday does here. The time and money invested is minimal for hedging your bets on the Internet vs. TV question.

Then, the next time something like The Weatherclerks is released, far more people will watch it.

Note:

Canon: this is technically a plug I will sell my soul for a EOS 1Ds and a few professional lenses. I’ll even take the Nikon D3 off my shopping list for this year. In fact every photo I’ll produce this year with the EOS 1Ds will have “this was not produced by a Nikon D3” as an unobtrusive watermark. If, on the other-hand Nikon are reading this – quick - send me a Nikon D3 with several pro lenses – get there before the competition. It’s the first rule of business. There’s not many things I’d whore myself for, but for either one of those cameras I would cave in, contrary to the advice in this Bobby Conn video.

I think part of the problem with the media coverage of the financial world is that it is unable to see things in shades of grey. The term recession, for instance, is often used as if it’s equivocal with a depression. It’s not. It’s quite possible to be in a recession and, aside from certain parts of an economy, not have a substantial impact on the fundamental things that affect people. The current situation in the US is bad, but nothing on the recessions of the 1980s or 1990s. It’s going to be bad for upwards of six months, particularly in the financial sector (I reckon there’s a great deal of bending the truth regarding liquidity, to keep baying morons from panic selling), but everything else will recover quickly, which will, in turn help the financial sector. And I hate to agree with George W Bush, the fundamentals of the US economy, even in its current state, are better than people think and shouldn’t be underestimated.

Consumer spending has not been affected terribly by the problems of last year. There is a lag, but it could be that many people who are now in trouble with their mortgages were not big consumers because the percentage of their income was eaten by their mortgage was already high. So the knock-on effect to the economy of defaults and loans may have been severely over estimated. And, I suspect, this is reflected in today’s US inflation data. Prices were kept low because people weren’t prepared, or able, to pay more. Oil and grain prices are to be watched as components of the CPI, and the wider international situation. There’s a fuck load of people in West China who have yet to start consuming with the rest of us. I done-gone-think there’s going to be linear growth in world consumers over the next decade as the 700 million odd people in rural China increase demand.

I think the major problem with the last four years of US economic policy is that the fed severely underestimated the stupidity of the market and how it’s often led by mood rather than rationality. If people panic it will get much worse, if people listen to Bush, and they should, because he’s right in this instance, the recession will be a bit of a pain but nothing like being kicked in the balls. Bloomberg’s coverages has been better than the competition in terms of neutrality and the rationality of its correspondents. As an armchair economist I hope to get my hands on some raw data in the next few weeks and see if I’m talking bollocks.

I’m an atheist.  I don’t believe in god, a spirit, or the supernatural.  I think we die and that is it.  Life is immensely precious. 

I think Scientology is a religion.  In terms of what is a religion and what isn’t a religion, I can’t distinguish one set of nonsense from another. I’d define a religion as any collective belief system that involves a supernatural belief in the spirit.  Scientology may charge huge sums of money.  But there’s people that believe in it.  The money they charge doesn’t invalidate it as a belief system.  Imagine taking the potential earnings of Jesuit monks. There’s some very clever Jesuits.  Scientology is no more stupid than any other religion.  But it still deserves criticism.

The ways ‘they’ (I’ll get back to they) have pursued people with litigation, and their attitude towards critics have not given Scientology a good track record.  I say ‘they’ because, I imagine, your average Scientologist has as much to do with litigation, smear campaigns and the like, as your average Catholic has to do with sodomising choir boys, or your average Muslim has to do with suicide bombing.  I.e. Nothing at all.  It is unrealistic to think of Scientology as an homogeneous organisation.  It no doubt it has its sects and its bad apples.

With regards of ‘fair-game’: I would not like to clash with certain sects from any religion.  If anyone takes their religious book seriously, you’re in a fuck load of trouble if you cross them. One thinks of the Amalekites, or extreme Islamic sects that regard outsiders as Kafir, or interpretations of the Bible in the Middle Ages, or the way Christians regarded Jews.  Many of those things are in the past for mainstream religions.  But, like Scientology,  mainstream faiths should not be thought of as homogeneous organisations.  There are sects and individuals from widely recognised religions that have views that are utterly vile.  Mel Gibson’s father is a good example of Catholicism gone wrong.

So, are people right to protest Scientology?  Absolutely. The record of litigation against opponents of Scientology is something they should be ashamed of.  In purely practical, amoral terms, it doesn’t seem to have worked.  If anything it has made the situation worse.  And the money they charge is a valid thing to criticise.  Their attitude towards the media, specifically removing clips of Tom Cruise, was anti-free speech, and should be criticised.  Abuse of things like the DMCA and asymmetrical litigation through attrition are problems of our age.  People with loads of money, suing people with little money, until they give up.

The bad things that have happened within Scientology are an emotionally charged issue.  I cannot rationally say that any of the things that have happened within Scientology (notably the Lisa McPherson case) are any better or worse than things that have happened within mainstream religions.  Even limiting the scope of inquiry to the Twentieth Century.  In mainstream religions there have been deaths, suicides, exorcisms, child abuse, extremism, racism, financial irregularities and more. 

So lets not, for a second, think that mainstream religions are any better. But two wrongs do not make a right.  The behaviour of other religions doesn’t justify the things Scientology stands accused of.

Fundamentally speaking, I’m a wimp.  I can’t bring myself to be anti-religious - people have a right to make up their own mind.  My belief is that all religion is wrong.  That’s my choice.  Other people have theirs.  It’s not my place to be evangelical about my beliefs or to tell others what they can and can’t believe.  The thing that pisses me off about religion is when it steps outside of its domain.  Interfering with politics, science, and law. That is as bad as atheists expecting a say in theology or giving advice on the ’spirit’ (whatever the fuck that is). 

I don’t think anonymous is anti-religious either. 

People have as much right to criticise religion as religion has to criticise atheism.  Free speech is the way it should be.  I think we live in a better world if there is critical dialogue between people who disagree.

The best thing that Scientology can do in response to anonymous is to prove everyone wrong by not attacking well meaning people in masks.  If they attack ‘anonymous’ they are proving all of their critics right. Scientologists have a right to practice their faith and people have a right to peacefully protest.

I am going to take pictures and to lurk.  In real life anonymous is new shit and therefore interesting. If anyone wants to meet up, or is going, or wants to go, drop me an email.   I’ll be lurking around all day. 

Links:

London Lulz.

There is a video doing the rounds on the internet of a US soldier tossing a puppy off a cliff (click here to watch it). It purports to be shot in Iraq. It looks and sounds real. Cruelty to animals is wrong. But I think it has to be placed in context. Caveats apply:

If you’ve ever been to a country that has a problem with feral dogs, you’ll know that dealing with wild dogs can be a total pain in the arse because they’re unpredictable. They’re mostly scared of people, because, as scavengers, they’re chased away with sticks and shouts. Other times, with children, or if they feel threatened, they’ll bite, and in packs they can attack. They can carry rabies and present a public health issue. Under Saddam Hussein the infrastructure in Iraq was held together with bubblegum, duct tape, and tyranny. After the invasion, the coalition political leaders, those so keen on war, had no decent plan, at all, to deal with the aftermath. Rather depressingly, it’s been repeated by politicians calling for a pull-out of Iraq; with no detailed plans to deal with what happens next.

During the invasion, and its aftermath, all of the pest control, public services, and public service infrastructure, were destroyed, looted, or both, here’s what Donald Rumsfeld had to say at the time:

“Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things … stuff happens”

The destruction of public services was allowed to happen. Simple things like pest control were looted out of existence - and worse was to come. The people who dealt with practical things, the people running ministries, what was left of them, emigrated to neighbouring states like Jordan and Syria, or were fired in the de-Baathification of the Iraqi state. As a result wild dogs are a bigger problem in Iraq today, than they were prior to the invasion. And they were a problem prior to the invasion. Tossing a puppy off a cliff isn’t the best form of pest control, but placed in context, it’s different from someone buying a puppy in a pet-shop specifically to toss it off a cliff. It’s still cruel and it’s still wrong, but given the situation soldiers are in, dealing with the arse-end of geopolitics, it is, to my mind, forgivable. Many people seem to be more incensed at a soldier tossing a dog off a cliff than they are about the situation soldiers have been left to clean up.

I have a bad back. At the moment I go to bed at night thinking, by fuck I’ve got a bad back, and I wake up thinking, by fuck, my bad back has returned. I know the cure to this ailment. It’s a form of distraction therapy pioneered in the treatment of many rock stars. For £50,000, of someone else’s money (essential), a morning, I could be woken up by nude models throwing money at me. It wouldn’t, strictly speaking, cure the bad back, but mornings would at least be tolerable. It doesn’t work with piddly amounts of money because fifty pence pieces and pound coins hurt.

Manuals are often written with a lack of humour so acute they’re funny.  I’m not expecting “so … three men walked into a bar and … eleemosynary arse burp, bumped their head on it”  between paragraphs in a D80’s manual.  The tiger tank had a funny manual which was distinctly unfunny in context (1).  

What objects warrant manuals?   I think, much like many a wanky wankster, had they the balls,  that for every ontological entity there is a manual that is real or potentially real.  Manuals for everything.  The previous three word  sentence is same as the sum of the sentences that preceded it which is something I done-gone-did to make a point about semiology (2).

I am tired and typing, and typing when tired, is something you can read,  a great deal, on blogs. One day it will be up there with clichéd dialogues started with the phrase “bloody awful weather, how’s the wife?”.   Fuckers.  People in general, that is. If we didn’t procreate it’d be a pretty short-lived species.   We’ve not even reached the record of the trilobites (3).

Tripping over a freshly killed rat in the dark is jarring. My cat brought a huge dead rat into the house. I tripped over it in the hall. It was squishy and still warm. Rigor-mortis had not yet set in. It had no pulse. It must have been six inches long and looked kind of peaceful. I tripped over it in the hall. Cats are bastards. The rat is in the kitchen bin.

Thought of the day

Ultimately cats are animals.

I don’t like arbitrary celebrations such as New Year’s Eve.  As far as I can make out, New Year’s Eve is a celebrations of the Gregorian calendar - a cycle of roughly 365 days.  Which doesn’t make a great deal of sense.  Every day is New Year’s Eve  if you count from 364 days ago.  Aside from that, the Gregorian calendar, it’s history, is fucked.  The ultimate celebration of roughly 365 days is your birthday.  I think we should ditch New Year’s Eve and have better birthdays.   I think it would save money.  In about 300 years time, after another Enlightenment, there’s going to be a metric time system/calendar based on subdivisions of a solar year.  As such squares would fuck up metric time because of all their watches and shit picture calendars.

Waitrose and Marks and Spencer’s definitely make the nicest crisps.  I say make, but  they probably delegate the making of the crisps, the preparation of the potatoes, the whole gamut.   All kinds of flavours too.  I think that when people talk about crisps in the context of crackers they confuse foreigners.  The crisps I just ate were made in Denmark on behalf of Marks and Spencer’s.  They were slightly orange.  There are orange kangaroos.  Is there an orange kangaroo in Denmark?  This blog has been taken over by one of those spam bot things that puts together messages that look vaguely like they mean something but don’t.

Prestige replicas
 
Most popular watches

Rolex Datejusts | Cartier | Hublot |Panerai
 
Most popular TIFFANY & CO. JEWERLY

Tiffany & CO Earings
 
Most popular PENS

Mont Blanc Rollerball | Gucci Roller | St Dupont Ballpoint
 

There’s a guy on MySpace that collects the polythene wrappers from promotional toys.  He catalogues them.  He like Radiohead and The Killers, and has an Andy Warhol themed MySpace page.  He has 600 Scandinavian MySpace friends.  It’s great the MySpace brings like minded people together.  It’s a wonder and a blessing of our age.  There’s another guy who only speaks via his mobile phone, using text speak, and, according to MySpace (at least), is friends with Sting.  MySpace friends with Sting.  I heard a funny story over Christmas about lady from Michigan who set up a MySpace page for her dog.

Shockingly she started getting stalked, which peaked with her house been broken into, leading to the arrest of a 24 year old sociology post-grad student from Cardiff (UK).  Upon arrest he confessed his romantic intentions towards the dog and was placed in the custody of state mental health services.  It was barely reported in the press.  People should stress MySpace can be dangerous.  It has edge.

I was sitting eating cheese with my friend Megan when lightening struck and their was a power cut.  I woke up. To find there was a thunderstorm outside and there had been a power cut.  And that I wasn’t friends with Megan and I’d run out of cheese.  Life’s like that.  One time, hiding behind a mud bank, while a farmer paced beyond with a shotgun, in a cold, grey Suffolk winter, having been chased by pigs, I can remember thinking “by God.  I’ve got cold feet.  And they’re wet”.  Porcine pursuit is scarier.  Being chased by angry future bacon  is disturbing.  Farmers get bored.  And shotgun shot isn’t lethal from a distance.  A pig will chew your bollocks off.

Although the porcine pursuit may have been motivated by curiosity rather than anger.  What kind of idiot hangs around to find out?   I was over the fence faster than George Blake. That night, lying on an insulating mat, on a slab of stone, in a very flat field, in Norfolk, I looked up at the sky and thought “there’s more black stuff than stars.  It must be better”.  And fell asleep for a bit, only to be woken a short time later by a coach load of UFO hunters from Birmingham, who I amused with drunken tales of being abducted by UFOs, which they bought wholesale, until I brought UB40 and the Second World War into it. Talking colons while lecturing about the bombing of Coventry was over egging the story.