Hattix

Via any British news outlet you care to name, this story (BBC News) is making the rounds. It’s like we get one of these every month or so, some nutcase refuses to take off jewelry which they somehow associate with their favourite ghost in the sky and goes all lawyer happy about it.

Schools, in this case, have dress codes for a reason. That reason is to keep people equal. Now, flying in the face of equality comes this arrogant whelp who thinks she’s more equal than everyone else.

Being asked to take a steel bracelet off is not a bloody violation of your human rights you useless waste of oxygen.

A religion is not an excuse to break the rules. A religion is not a reason to grant exceptions. Funnily enough, Islam is quite good about this; A believer can be excused symbolism or even prayer if it would be unsafe or rules would prevent it. I don’t know enough about the Sikhs to know if they absolutely must wear a steel bracelet, but I sure doubt it.

What really got me was this hilarious quote from Miss. Headuparse’s lawyer: “Our great British traditions of religious tolerance and race equality have been rightly upheld today.”

I’m sorry? Treating someone specially because they’re a Sikh is somehow “tolerant” or “equal”? This means that treating the Jews specially during the Holocaust was also “tolerant” and “equal”, right?

I don’t care what your faith is. I don’t care if your ghost in the sky is bigger than anyone else’s ghost in the sky (or wherever their ghosts may be), you do not use it as a crutch, as an excuse, to get special treatment. Equality is a great thing, throwing a temper tantrum because you’re not special is just foolish.

Do some people really understand what they’re actually saying? Relating to Max Mosley’s successful defamation trial where the tabloid rag News of The World was deemed to have unreasonably invaded Mr. Mosley’s privacy, we get the Christians jumping in.

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, considers the ruling to be a dangerous precedent and uses the argument of “free speech” while giving an appeal to passion fallacy, claiming that without “public debate or democratic scrutiny” the courts have “created a wholly new privacy law”. You then realise where his agenda actually lies when his next line is “I am deeply sad that public morality is the second victim of this legal judgement”.

He bumbles on “Unspeakable and indecent behaviour, whether in public or in private, is no longer significant under this ruling”.

Is he even paying attention to what he’s saying? Well, the answer is no. The ruling was made because we have privacy laws created by “public debate or democratic scrutiny” and also we have laws against Lord Carey’s “unspeakable and indecent behaviour” in public, this ruling does nothing to those laws.

It’s important here to note that the press can legally invade an individual’s privacy if it can be shown such invasion was in the public interest. Breaching the privacy of a corporate executive to expose corruption is in the public interest. Doing so with the head of a sporting organisation’s private life, which has nothing to do with his public activities as head of that organisation, is not in the public interest. This is the line which the News of The World illegally crossed.

In his ruling, according to the laws of the land, Mr Justice Eady said Mr Mosley could expect privacy for consensual “sexual activities (albeit unconventional)”.

It leaves one wondering, however, exactly what constitutes “immoral”? According to Lord Carey, a spot of light bondage and roleplay is “immoral” and right away I can point out quite a few people in my circle of friends who’re into that kind of thing, would I ever consider them immoral? No, they’re the nicest folk you’re ever likely to meet. One of them, indeed, has spent hours of her time and incalculable amounts of effort raising funds for cancer charities.

By wanting to shackle what consenting adults can and cannot do behind closed doors, Lord Carey is the one guilty of immorality, the highest form of immorality is that of demanding obedience and forcing control where none is necessary.

From sciencepunk comes this amusing image.

I’ll just say that if I wanted to study engineering, I’d certainly not be applying for a place there.

(Hint: The gears won’t turn…)

So the Latest Big Thing that all the morning rags are picking up on is the schism within the Church of England, the ruling body for Anglicans worldwide. Seen by many other Christians as a dangerously progressive bunch of radicalists, we now have homosexual clergy and, horror, ordained women.

Consecrating the filthy, evil scum of Satan and homosexuals has made many Anglicans rather upset, so much so that 1,300 of them are considering splitting off to form their own little ‘traditionalist’ group. If I were Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and functional head of the Church of England, I would think that Christmas, Easter and whatever else had all come at once.

This is a chance for the Anglicans to cast off the kind of intolerant, unfriendly and downright nasty evil that creeps out of your toilet late at night and dissolves your dog.

No appeasment, no compromises, no weakness. “Jesus was never about intolerance” should be the motto of the Anglicans and let these ‘traditionalists’ slink back into their caves, beat their wives and ride their horses to work. Intolerance and hate will never be extinguished from people like that, once ostracised and isolated they’ll turn on themselves and each other and fragment into countless little splinters, each longing to be the mighty oak they were once part of, each thinking it’s their right, each undeserving of anything but our pity.

This one’s making the rounds on the ‘tubes. In summary, an emergency services call was made by a man in Wales about some bright thing in the sky…Which turned out to be the Moon.

It embodies the entire UFO thing, people who are unfamiliar with the sky seeing something unfamiliar to them and guessing what it might be. However, the sky can do a lot of unfamiliar things. Parhelia, iridium flares, satellite passes, planets[1], stars[1], birds[2] noctilucent clouds, tangent arcs, all things unfamiliar to the common man or woman, all things extremely common in “UFO” reports.

 There are two things at play here. First is a memory illusion, people tend to remember something bright as being big even if it isn’t big at all. My brother once said to me in the car “Did you see that big flying light that was following us?” and he described a glowing orb…Yet he’d been watching Venus which was certainly bright, but not at all big. He swore blind that he’d seen a sizeable orb, yet when I showed him Venus the next night, he agreed that was what he’d seen. The second is that memory is not a reliable testimony of events. Memory is half observation and half expectation; You see what you expect to see. If you expect that a bright unfamiliar thing in the sky is a flying saucer, you will see a flying saucer.

[1] Planets and stars may seem familiar to everyone, but few people realise how very bright the planets can become. Jupiter and Venus can be many times brighter than an aeroplane and, being stationary, they appear to follow a moving observer. Venus accounted for, according to the Ministry of Defence, almost 90% of all “UFO” reports when the MoD was collecting them; It isn’t anymore.

[2] Kenneth Arnold famously saw a V shaped formation of small (but bright) lights “like a saucer skipping on a lake”, describing how they jerkily moved. He was seeing geese in migration and, flying over mountains, he was in the shadow of a mountain and they were illuminated by the sun. Birds can look very bright in those conditions. Sunset looking towards a coast will also show you seabirds very brightly illuminated. The jerky motion was added by Kenneth’s light aircraft.