idiots


Not Ashamed? You should be 4

Not Ashamed is a campaign which would like to sideline anyone who doesn’t adhere to a narrowly defined version of Christianity. I found out about it because Salford’s wannabe holy politico Richard Carvath signed up to the campaign, which was an automatic black mark against it. On December 1st the Not Ashamed crew are going to present a petition to ‘leading figures in public life’ which will say-

WE BELIEVE that Jesus Christ is good news for our nation. He is the only true hope and solid foundation for our society.

WE CALL on government, employers and other leaders in our country to protect the freedom of Christians to participate in public life without compromising biblical teaching and to promote in our society the values that are revealed through Jesus Christ and that have so shaped our nation, for the good of all.

In other words they don’t think the opinion of anyone who doesn’t namecheck Jesus is valid and they want the right to be law breaking hypocrites. The freedom they seek will be to do whatever they can to restrict the freedoms of others, even when those freedoms are legally protected. One or two bigoted registrars refusing to perform civil partnership ceremonies isn’t going to stop them happening, but when they feel empowered to spit the dummy every time the subject comes up they will add unnecessary stress to the proceedings. And the suffering inflicted upon children awaiting adoption but denied perfectly capable parents because they didn’t conform to an agency’s ideal would be even worse.

No metaphysical entity should be used as the foundation for our society. The people behind this campaign should be ashamed for pretending that their beliefs automatically make them better than followers of other, or no, religions.


What are perversion activities, and where can I get some 2

My post a fortnight ago “How To Say Nothing With Numbers” generated a bit of a comment thread as the subject of the post- wannabe politician Richard Carvath- dropped in to prove that he couldn’t understand my point. He’s quite good at repeating his claims over and over after they’ve been shown up and then declaring it a victory. When he stopped doing that he did say a couple of things which deserve some closer inspection.

Carvath is adamant that only 1% of the population is gay. I used this figure in my calculations as well as the old “1-in-10” to get a spread of figures for take up of civil partnerships. The true pink percentage is somewhere between those two figures- different polling techniques in different countries return widely varying results. Carvath sticks to his 1% and implies that as they’re only a hundredth of the population homosexuals are too insignificant a minority to be listened to or to have equal rights extended to. Never mind that it’s how we behave toward the minorities, rather than constantly favouring the majority, which shows how good or bad we are as a society, Carvath is on very shaky ground when he starts dismissing small segments of the population. He describes himself as a “Hebraic evangelical Christian”. I’m not at all sure what that is, and Googling it doesn’t help. A strict search for that exact phrase returns one result (maybe two now). I’m not sure that being a Googlewhack counts as a religion. Maybe he can be put into the “Other Christian” denomination in the breakdown of British denominations, which would make the group he’s affiliated to 0.4% of the population. An insignificant minority, by Carvath’s standards, not worth paying attention to. However, as I’m not him, I don’t think we should limit their ability to marry.

More interesting, though, is a phrase that Carvath started using toward the end of the thread. Apparently, gay couples can’t marry because they’re not sexually compatible. All they can manage are “perversion activities”. Colour me intrigued. These perversion activity things sound quite interesting. What are they, exactly? I asked, but he wasn’t forthcoming with definitions. I really want to know, can anyone tell me what on earth Richard Carvath means when he goes on about “perversion activities”? Suggestions in the comments please.


How to say nothing with numbers 31

I used to analyse data for a living. It’s fascinating to take a whole load of numbers, postcodes and geodemographic data (in my case) and come up with something meaningful, particularly if it makes a pretty map or graphic. I haven’t done any hardcore number crunching for years, and sometimes I miss it. What I did this morning hardly counts, but it was a little bit of fun.

Religious-idiot Richard Carvath did some primary school maths and was awfully pleased with the result. In the last 5 years 80,000 people have entered into civil partnerships. If the population of the UK is 60 million then you just divide one by the other and multiply by 100 to find that a mere 0.13% of the British population is interested in civil partnership! This is so small that it really means that nobody is interested! Civil partnership is irrelevant so we should stop doing them! (We’ll pass over Carvath’s usual bleating about how civil partnerships are destroying the institution of marriage. I don’t think he can comprehend that it can’t be both insignificant and a clear and present danger at the same time.)

Of course, that number is meaningless. For a start,around 19% of the country’s population is aged under 16. Take them out of the numbers and you have an adult population of around 48.6 million. Do the maths again and now 0.16% of the adult population is in a civil partnership. Still a tiny proportion, you might say, but this is still a flawed number. Most of the population aren’t gay- the majority of people would qualify for a “normal” marriage.

Carvath has insisted that only 1% of people are homosexual, a more commonly held figure is 10%. So between 1.65% and 16.5% of those eligible have taken up civil partnerships since they were introduced. How many heterosexual marriages have there been in that same period?

Well the Office of National Statistics says there were 232,990 marriages in England and Wales in 2008. Perhaps the Scots don’t get married. Rounding that up to 250,000 to give the straights a chance, that’s half a million people getting married every year, 2.5 million married people within five years. Between 5.2% and 5.72% of the straight adult population has got married within the last 5 years. If homosexuals are really as tiny a minority as Carvath likes to think then the numbers actually show that they’re over three times more likely to get civil partnered than straights are to get married. More realistic figures give marriage the threefold advantage over civil partnership.

The article Carvath cribbed his figures from crows about an increase in the number of civil partnerships being dissolved- 351 in 2009. Per thousand people married, this means that around 8.75 will get divorced. For the record the equivalent number for straight marriages in 2008 was 11.2. So it’s not clear what they were trying to prove.

What has my data mining proved? Mostly that if you want meaningful statistics you have to do a little bit of work establishing context etc.. It’s not clear whether Carvath was behaving like a tabloid- working out the worst looking number and assuming his audience are too dumb and gullible to question it or spot the logical flaws- or he really thought he was doing some clever analysis. I’m normally a charitable chap, but experience tells me that the latter is more likely than the former, not that either speak well for the man.


The shallow end of the meme pool 8

During the election I subscribed to a load of political blogs’ RSS feeds. After it I unsubscribed from most of them. Foolishly, I revisited the two most obnoxious of them again recently.

Richard Carvath stood as an independent candidate in Salford and Eccles, the seat retained by Hazel Blears and polled 384 votes. He claims, loudly and repeatedly, that he would have done better if the media, the big parties and homosexual-perverts hadn’t conspired against him. Homosexual-perverts is a favourite phrase of Carvath’s. He can’t just say homosexual, it has to be homosexual-pervert. He may have read somewhere that you can reinforce your message by using your preferred phrases regularly until the reader starts thinking in them as well. But he’s gone overboard- the Carvath blog is overloaded with them, every sentence employs a piece of similar wordplay, all of it of a level which should embarrass anyone over the age of ten. Homosexual-perverts abound, homophobic registrars who refuse to perform Civil Pervertships are conscientious objectors honoured with the title of Decents. I’ve seen him use the phrase Guardian-perverts as well, and it should be obvious who Barack Obortion is. I’m sure he thinks it’s all very clever, witty even, but it just looks like the ever less coherent ramblings of someone with serious mental problems.

Carvath is on a mission from God, the voice in his head. He recently had a nasty accident whilst climbing, breaking several bones and damaging his back. If it had happened to any of his growing list of homosexual-pervert enemies (which is anyone who points out how nasty his beliefs are) he would no doubt be crowing about how God had punished them for their sins. Because it happened to him it’s somehow a form of blessing and all part of his invisible friend’s holy plan. I can only hope he gets better mentally at some point as well as physically.

Real Street is the blog of Stewart Cowan, a Scottish evangelical christian who has yet to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t like. Recent favourites include a bus advert which is going to turn us all into Muslims and how trying to cut down homophobic bullying in schools is secretly a plan to legalise gay paedophilia. Cowan doesn’t mangle language as much as Carvath, but he does like to grasp at anything which he feels supports his prejudices whilst dismissing all evidence against them. The Daily Mail and conspiracy loving tabloids are right and anyone answering him with facts and basing their replies upon reality is obviously deluded.

Cowan has a couple of tame commenters who’ll up the frothing at the mouth quotient when necessary. English Viking hates foreigners who come over here to work and improve their, and our, lot. Ancient Danes and Norwegians who popped over for a little recreational raping and stealing are obviously okay, though. Len wants you to know the Truth and accept God, because science, reality and not hating people just because they’re different is obviously the work of Satan.

The natural response to the likes of Carvath and Cowan is this-

XKCD- someone on the internet is wrong

But in the long run that’s just a waste of time. They enjoy being wrong, and feel that having all the flaws of their arguments pointed out somehow proves their case. It’s far better to ignore them or point out elsewhere just how stupid they’re being today.

Which is what I know I should do, and what I shall try to do, but I’m not making any promises that I won’t pop over there occasionally and slap them on their own blogs.


Political blogs- let’s get local 2

John Ottewell writes for the Manchester Evening News and also posts on their political blog. His is an informed and relatively neutral (the paper ran a campaign against the BNP during the European elections, which he has defended) voice on the politics of Greater Manchester.

But what of the many candidates for Manchester seats?

There are 28 constituencies in Greater Manchester, to become 27 in this year’s election.

Let’s start where I live-

Manchester Withington’s MP is John Leech, the first Liberal or Liberal Democrat to win a Manchester seat since 1929. His blog is johnleechmp.wordpress.com.

The Conservative candidate is Chris Green. I can’t find a blog from him.

Lucy Powell, the Labour candidate, has a website with a news feed. Which is almost a blog.

James Alden is the Green candidate. No blog though.

Bob Gutfreund-Walmsley is standing for UKIP.

Yasmin Zalzala is a former Lib-Dem now standing as an independent who has claimed that she was run out of the party by racists.

There may be other candidates, from parties even more minor than UKIP, but these are the ones I found listed.

Manchester Gorton, where I used to live.

The incumbent is Gerald Kaufman. No blog, or even website as far as I can tell.

Caroline Healy is the Conservative candidate.

Qassim Afzal is the Lib Dem candidate. He has an official site, but it’s a bit sparse.

Justine Hall is standing for the Greens.

Oddly enough, the BNP don’t seem to have a candidate in the constituency that includes Longsight. I guess even people who are that stupid aren’t that stupid.

This is, unsurprisingly, taking a while to compile. Let’s round out this post with the constituency of another high profile MP. I work in Hazel Blears’ constituency, and end up reading the Salford Advertiser more often then my own local paper, so it’s probable I know more about what’s going on there than here. As part of the boundary changes, Salford becomes Salford and Eccles this year.

Hazel Blears is an odd looking little woman best known for causing trouble for Gordon Brown. Nothing that looks like a blog on her official site, but there’s an RSS feed so maybe the news items will get pulled in by my reader as they update.

Matthew Sephton is the Conservative candidate.

Norman Owen is a Lib Dem councillor standing for MP.

Robert Wakefield is the UKIP candidate. The Salford UKIP blog‘s one and only post dates from 2007 AND IS ALL CAPS AND TOO PAINFUL TO READ. It’s possible that Mr. Wakefield is the author of a novel about the crusades. He should talk to my UKIP candidate, who’s a bookseler.

Tina Wingfield is the BNP candidate. No site or blog that I could find, but I did subscribe to the BNP blog, because the ulcer doesn’t make me feel queasy enough.

Steve Morris is standing for the English Democrats. I don’t think the Steve Morris I’ve found results for is the same person.

David Henry has been chosen to stand on the Hazel Must Go platform. His site’s minimalist at the moment.

Joe O’Neill is standing as an Independent, though he’s a Lib Dem councilor. He hasn’t even bothered to write over the placeholders on his official Salford Council page, so I’m not expecting any web presence.

Last, and certainly least, is Richard Carvath. He’s standing as an Independent, on the More Self Righteous and Homophobic Than Anyone Else platform judging by his blog. Everything’s a conspiracy, it would seem, intended to turn our children into French speaking Muslim homosexual perverts or something.

I’ve subscribed to the feeds I’ve found, but I’m using Bloglines, which can be temperamental, so I don’t know how many of them I’ll be able to follow reliably. I’m not a wonky political blogger, I won’t be loading Spinneyhead down with policy discussion. It’s more likely to be anything outrageous that candidates say that’ll make it here.

Further constituencies may be added, these are the three that mean the most to me. If you’d like me to look at yours please tell me. Likewise if you know of any candidates I’ve missed out.


Are small breasts illegal in Australia now?

Australia’s government seems to be going through some sort of moral panic at the moment. This press release from the Australian Sex Party details new and dumb restrictions on the content of adult material. Depictions of female ejaculation are to be banned, presumably because someone- like Queen Victoria and lesbians- doesn’t believe it really happens. (TMI, but I’m confident I’ve seen it in real life. Not as spectacular as porn would have you believe, but definitely not urine and something more than mere lubrication.)

Another, even dumber, crackdown is on models with smaller breasts. The Sex Party asserts that material featuring models with A cups is being restricted because, somehow, it’ll excite paedophiles.

I just read 25, 000 Years of Erotic Freedom by Alan Moore, which is basically a long essay on the history of smut with ample illustrations and gorgeous packaging. One of his conclusions is that the state of the eortic arts in the English speaking world (actualy he just calls out Britain and the US, but I think we can add Australia now) is so awful precisely because of the efforts our governments make to restrict discussion of sex.

There’s too much low quality, demeaning and insulting (to both sexes) porn out there, and it’s not because there’s too much freedom. It’s because many of the people who would create interesting, challenging, life affirming, sex positive and gorgeous work are scared off by the threats of censorship and worse. By saying that one aspect of women’s sexual experience is too vile to be discussed and that a particular body type (a body type I prefer- I’m Not Safe For Australia) shouldn’t be seen, Australia’s government are doing great harm and little, if any, good.

Right. I’m off to draw a page of comic art which may be illegal in Australia.

via BoingBoing Ms Naughty and several other sources


Sign this petition

I’m a bit behind the curve when it comes to commenting on the proposed Digital Economy Bill (here’s one professional writer’s opinion, and here’s another’s). Frankly, the fact that Peter Mandelson is in any way connected to it should be enough to convince you it’s going to be awful.

Sign this petition on the Number 10 website to register your disapproval. It only relates to the proposal to cut people off from the internet for no good reason and without the necessity of evidence.

I’l try to investigate it all more thorouighly, but I don’t know if I want to be depressed and angered that much.


A N Wilson’s stupidity is thermonuclear

Perhaps Wilson and Melanie Philips are conducting parallel experiments in just how moronic they can make their opinion pieces and still get published. The flaw in their methodology is that they’re writing for the Daily Mail, a “newspaper” with a policy of champion ignorance amongst the middle classes.

Wilson’s piece- Yes, scientists do much good. But a country run by these arrogant gods of certainty would truly be hell on earth is one of the dumbest, least coherent bits of writing you’ll read outside of a Creationist museum. It is rightly being ripped to shreds in the comments. Of course, the paper itself is unlikely to print any of the replies to the piece, sparing their more Luddite readers from reality.

If Wilson continues in this vein it won’t be long before he’s writing about how pixies can save the economy and the dangers of immigrant trolls living under our motorway bridges and decimating the English goat population.


Jim Carrey wants to kill your children!

Carrey, and even moreso his girlfriend Jenny McCarthy, are the celebrity faces of America’s growing anti-vaccination movement, which claims there’s a connection between childhood vaccinations and autism despite there being absolutely no evidence for it. The publicity they get opens the door for conmen selling ineffective, and often dangerous, autism treatments. It also leads worried parents to opt out of getting their children jabs, which not only puts their offspring at risk but also those of others. Amy Wallace took a look at the problem for Wired. As with anyone who shows up pseudo-science these days she’s already received threats and been the victim of half arsed character assassination attempts.

I’d call for a boycott of Carrey’s films, but he’s pretty much guaranteed it already by appearing in such total crap. The Grinch wants to kill your children. Pass it on.


There is no health care system in the world that could cure this level of stupidity

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

From something called Investors’ Business Daily, which has now removed the line after so many people pointed out how stupid it was.

via Dispatches From The Culture Wars


The drunk on the bus

Note Written as a comment on this post at Dr Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge. I’ve included a link to the internet loony’s site, though my IP’s blocked from it so I can’t vouch for it working.

I’d forgotten I was banned from Gribbit’s world. His insight isn’t worth the minimal effort it would take to change my IP address and get round the block.

Very early this morning, on the way back from a night out, I had an encounter that reminded me of Grib and his ilk. A scruffy, unshaven and very drunk man took the seat in front of me on the bus and demanded to know my age. He had the look of the loon, so I humoured him hoping it would shut him up. It had the opposite effect. Based upon my age he jumped to the conclusion I was an academic (flattering for a drop out such as I) and labelled me a waste of space.

He claimed to have been a major in the Paras and started pacing up and down the bus, repeating the waste of space accusation and lecturing me about how people had died for my right to be a waste of space. Or something. I didn’t exactly ignore him, just in case his violent rhetoric should change to actual violence, but I didn’t try to engage him in debate because that would have been pointless.

In the end the bus driver threw him off a few stops before mine.

If the drunk remembers the encounter, which is unlikely, it will be as him giving a waste of space academic a deserved dressing down before being unreasonably ejected from the bus. Gribbit and the like are the drunks on the bus, but at least it’s only virtual so you don’t have to put up with the drizzle of spittle as they foam at the mouth


Drunken Twitter arguments are always fun

I guess I’m a trouble maker. Not in any malicious way, it’s more that I think sometimes people need to be mocked. And I’m the person to do it.

I noted around the inauguration of Barack Obama that there are a few American blogs determined to pile on the hate. I subscribed to the RSS feeds of a couple for entertainment.

One of the more loony of the bloggers- the guy who posted lots of “Obama = Hitler” rants with bad photoshops of the new President in SS garb- has stopped taking comments on his site because so many people pointed out the weaknesses of his arguments. However, he’s on Twitter so, when I got home on Friday night a little drunk and still slightly timeshifted, I sent him links to blog posts that took apart a few of his assertions on climate change. He didn’t take it well.

I sent him a few replies then went to bed.

In the morning the nut had taken his offence and turned it into a blog post. I won’t bother linking to it because he’s blocked my IP, or possibly the IP of anyone outside the States, and doesn’t merit any Google juice. If you’d like to know just how stupid the post was, Kevin Beck at Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge has assessed the bile for me.

I’m thinking of naming a bad guy in Sounds of Soldiers Gribbit. What do you say?


I, for one, welcome America’s new Marxist-Nazi-Muslim-Liberal Hive overlord 3

Today Barack Obama becomes US President. Unfortunately, he’s not the Messiah, just a politician with far better ideas than the guy he’s replacing. Even given two terms he probably can’t completely clean up the mess left by Bush and friends, but at least he won’t try to make it even worse.

A post on Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge pointed out that today would be a great time to take another look at the rightwing sites I followed during the election and see what sort of idiocy their self pity generated. There’s the post linked in the article, which suggests that any “liberal” success is down to some sort of Hive mind. Because like minded people working together for a common goal is a Socialist invention somehow. The same guy Godwin’d (again, I’m sure he did it multiple times during the election) a few days ago, because trying to sort out the banks is the first step on the road to the concentration camps.

Stop the ACLU jumps on the too-tired-to-do-any-original-thinking bandwagon with a similar post and tries to stop global warming by quoting a guy who doesn’t seem to know what he’s rebelling against.

Michelle Malkin has an open thread for people who want to moan about living in a democracy.

Little Green Footballs tries to place the blame anywhere other than the Worst President Ever and the stupidly dangerous pair that wanted to carry on his good work.

You know, I sort of miss these idiots, but I don’t know if I have enough time to follow all of them. Maybe just one RSS feed, to sample the madness? They are, after all, embodiments of the sort of beliefs I’m giving to the bad guys in Sounds of Soldiers.

Update Take nine and a half minutes to learn why these people are so wrong and deluded-


This is why Barack Obama got elected 1

Or one of the reasons, anyway. People like this were against him

Congratulations, moonbats. You finally have your revenge for being forced to look at all those flags after 9/11. This is a day of celebration for everyone hostile to America and the principles of individual liberty for which it stands. Enjoy it while you can.

There are people lowdown enough to know in advance who and what was elected yesterday, and to have voted for the Moonbat Messiah anyway. What they have done to this country is beyond forgiveness.

But an ultra-radical leftist like Obama could not be elected in a center-right country, or even a center-left country, without a great deal of deception. Thanks to a radicalized liberal media willing to sacrifice its own long-term credibility to put a leftist in power, Obama was never publicly vetted. Moderates did not vote for a real person, but for a two-dimensional phantom temporarily conjured into being by hype.

The opposition made the swindle easy to pull off. After eight years of a lousy incumbent, it presented a still lousier replacement, an inarticulate, uninspiring centrist universally reviled by the conservative base. Now the Republican Party knows it must either purge itself of RINO mediocrities like Bush and McCain or go the way of the Whigs.

Bush’s subpar performance will soon fade from memory, as Obama’s malignant collectivist ideology and lack of qualifications become impossible for the media to hide. One way or another, the full extent of his radical past and associations will become public knowledge. As promised by Plugs Biden, Obama will be tested, and he isn’t likely to pass.

We’ve had awful leaders before. New York’s atrocious affirmative action mayor, David Dinkins, gave way to Rudy Giuliani. Jimmy Carter gave way to the only great president of our lifetimes, Ronald Reagan. America will turn toward greatness again, once it realizes it has been tricked into temporarily embracing disgrace and decline.

Can you say bad loser? And then laugh at the poor pathetic fool as he rages against a sane electorate.

I shall probably now unsubscribe from the right wing blogs, at least until I feel nasty enough to laugh at stupid people again.


Barack Obama’s naked mama, and other stupid stuff from America’s right 2

The US right wing blogs I’m reading are getting desparate as they realise how pathetically their candidate is doing. One post from today is so moronic it’s funny. Stop The ACLU (still not getting a link, even if they didn’t delete my last comment there) got an email from some perv who’d been checking out vintage porn and swore he’d found a naked picture of Obama’s mother. He immediately went searching (it must have been hell for him to stare at all that pulchritude) and dug up some more, on which he used his finely tuned forensic skills to determine who Barack’s secret father is.

They are taken before Christmas by the decorations and unopened presents. Also a stereo and records that an expert could confirm as jazz records are in view.There is a distinctive grain to the wood floors. I do research including genealogical and had downloaded everything I could find. Not much. So when I saw the picture, I locked on the the ear lobes, chin, eyebrows. It is she. A nude photo,not distasteful, but posed, I believe, by a mature man who knows what he likes, including jazz and now we know young girls. One could ascertain the location of where the photos were taken.

And the shoes..not indigenous to Hawaii,but maybe not unsual for Helen Canfield Chicago socialite and Marshall’s second wife. The photos are important in the sense that they explain the going to Chicago and the immediate acceptance by the hard left, if his father is Frank Marshall Davis, not just his mentor

It’s Christmas- see, the man’s a genius- and there are records “that an expert could confirm as jazz records”- because only black men listened to jazz records at the time- and a distinctive grain to the wooden flooring. There, it’s conclusive. Apart from the shoes….. Oh, the shoes.

On November 5th this guy’s going to be sitting in his basement, wanking over his supposed pictures of Obama’s mother and crying because the rest of the world just can’t see what he sees.

Elsewhere, one supremely homophobic homeschooling mother is no doubt seeing a jump in visits to her blog after several people (me too now) have linked to her post fantasising about blowing up faggots. You could ask her to replace her various epithets with Christian and ask if she’d like to read the passage that results, but she’ll just ignore it, because she’ll only pay attention to answers with “Scripture instead of another meaningless cliche”.

The right wing isn’t going on about the ACORN voter registration scandal they invented as much. This is probably because the only person so far arrested for voter registration fraud is a Republican and cases against ACORN are being dropped all over because they’re baseless.

But it’s not all bad for McCain. One key group has come out in support of him- Al-Quaeda sympathisers.

Note I’d like to point out that there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking at images of naked women or men, vintage or otherwise, I was merely calling him a perv for satirical purposes.

Indeed, if he’s looking for a particularly good source of gorgeous naked women I’d highly recommend Domai (affiliate link). Many of the beauties there are from former Soviet republics, so he can have the added fantasy of only being able to see them because Ronald Reagan defeated Communism. Or, if he’s closeted- like I suspect so many of these guys are, he could try maleperfection.net (also an affiliate link).