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.

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.

Here in Britain, the Government has no direct say over education. An organisation of professional teachers, educators, experts, define the national curriculum which all students are tested against. There are caveats, many I do not like, such as that government funding goes to religious schools which is a horrendous abuse of taxpayer money to merely further a non-educational aganda.

My readers in the States are not so lucky. It seems that most states have a Board of Education, elected to place based on how well they can campaign and many of them aren’t even educators by trade but career politicians using it as a stepping stone. The perfect platform from which to launch a war on education.

In Texas, Don McLeroy heads their BoE and is perhaps the least qualified person to do so. He’s devoutly anti-education, a Young-Earth Creationist and most likely a Flat-Earther. This is a man who thinks that reality is taught in The Bible, The Koran, The Torah, The Talmund… A man who wants mythology to take the place of reality in the classroom.

It should come as no surprise then, that his latest exploits managed to perk the attention of this usually UK-centric blog (I’m getting there, I promise!). In three years, a panel of experts, teachers and educators were revising the English curriculum for Texas. This work of 36 months was then totally ignored and a small insular group of ’social conservatives’ wrote a new one up right there and then, according to their own beliefs and agendas. Politicians, not educators, not teachers, invented a new curriculum with little to no educator or teacher backing overnight.

It doesn’t stop there. This trainwreck carried on through the BoE, McLeroy actually dismissed members who raised concerns that he was rushing through and denied counter-arguments to be made. 9-6, the new ’standards’ were forced past.

Now you may be wondering, what do a bunch of foreigners who decide they don’t want to teach English have to do with us? Well first off, it’s the invasion of education being led by the religious right. They want to indoctrinate children early and often; Science (oh boy, this’ll make for some fun posts) is next on the agenda.

Most importantly this tells us all what damage religion can do when allowed into education. These are people who don’t privately live their own lives according to whatever book they worship, but want to force that onto other people, onto their innocent children. Does this seem evil? Only something that distant foreigners would do? It’s happening here and now in the UK! Already the government, free to sponsor whatever schools it likes, funds Christian, Muslim, Jewish schools who have a very tenuous grasp of reality and teach their dogma as science! To make matters worse, that dogma is then forced through examinations under anti-discriminaton laws.

In the UK we taxpayers do not just pay for religions we may not agree with, but we subvert the worth of our childrens’ education. Is “Allah did it” as valid an education as a thorough understanding of Genetics and Evolution? The Government wants you to think it is and it’s made laws to make sure it is. Your child, busting his nut to learn his Science, gains the exact same grade as a student at some church school who writes “because my god said so”.

It must end. Religion has its place, but that place is not in any publically funded sector. Public funds must not be used to forward any religious agenda. Let us not continue making the mistakes that our backwards American cousins are making today. Let’s prove that we can do it better.

I often wonder if there’s no spin that talentless tabloid hacks won’t put on an article to force forth their agenda. European consumer protection laws which would require faith-healers, mediums, clairvoyants and astrologers to disclose the accuracy or effectiveness of their ’service’ are being spun that “genuine religion is being discriminated against” by the ignorant hacks at the BBC News Magazine.

What is glossed over is that these scammers are selling a product which does not work. It doesn’t matter if the scammers say they believe it works, they are selling in many cases unregulated unlicensed untested medicine which performs absolutely no function. How many times have we read the stories of the children, parents taken them to faith healers, homeopathic practitioners or other ‘alternative’ medicine have died due to lack of treatment for easily curable ailments? Too many. Far too many. Jail time would be light treatment for these dregs of society.

By disguising their horrible scams (often preying on the bereaved or vulnerable I might add) as genuine religion, which it is nothing of the sort, these con-artists think they have a free ride to sell their at best useless and at worst dangerous products and schemes. If we’re jailing fake timeshare con-men and fraudsters in other endeavours, isn’t it about time we started taking a look at these fraudsters? After all, if their schemes do work and are worth selling, why are they so upset about legislation asking that they show it like any other business has to?

What’s the problem?

Is there nothing too absurd? Finally, is there nothing too outlandish or instantly wrong that the blogosphere won’t parrot it as The Truth?

This time it’s a laughably wrong press release from an otherwise-credible British university who’d do very well to distance themselves from this quackery very quickly. An impact event, which may have been the root of the Biblical disaster of Soddom and Gomorrah (and here’s us thinking all along it wer them thar queer folk, y’all). Go on, have a read. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. I’m about to tear it to pieces so small they’ll leave no trace…

(Their words in italics)

There’s a giant landslide in Köfels, Austria which some early researchers thought was possibly related to an impact event.  This was around the time of Eugene Shoemaker’s work on impacts and the first time we started to actually realise that yes, Earth should have been hit quite a few times in its past.

But this view lost favour as a much better understanding of impact sites developed in the late 20th century. In the case of Köfels there is no crater, so to modern eyes it does not look as an impact site should look. However, the evidence that puzzled the earlier researchers remains unexplained by the view that it is just another landslide.

I did a bit of background reading here, what evidence puzzled us? It turns out that there’s a lot of glass in the landslide material as well as shocked quartz. You don’t get shocked quartz quite like this from any other process. Not even a supervolcano has the amount of pressure required. If you have shocked quartz, you have an impact, it’s that simple.

Or is it?

Well, no it isn’t. Quartz is very hard and highly resilient. It survives most erosive processes and can be transported by them for thousands of miles. Shocked quartz tells you there was an impact event and, if enough of it in a given stratum, when it happened. Of crucial importance, it doesn’t tell you where.

There is a large (by normal standards, you can find shocked quartz literally anywhere from any one of the millions of impacts Earth has suffered) quantity of shocked quartz in the material from the Köfels landslide. It being a landslide, of course, we don’t have clearly demarcated strata to give us a date. The quartz could have been formed millions of years ago.

The glass, however, was not. We can date that quite accurately. We use numerous methods and put an upper and a lower bound, independently, on it. We get bounds of 16,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago. That’s fairly recent, but glass is formed all the time on Earth. A good landslide has a lot, a hell of a lot, of energy. This actually melts the rock inside it and forms glass! All that rock rubbing against each other during the landslide, powered by a mighty fall, manages to heat through friction hot enough to melt. We should expect glass at such a landslide and indeed we find it. This is not evidence of an astrobleme (a formation caused by an impact event).

Of course we learned a lot about astroblemes and their effects on Earth since Shoemaker’s pioneering work. Glass and shocked quartz can only form from a ground impact. Not only that, but a pretty hard one. The Köfels site is quite a bit larger than the famous Barringer Crater in Arizona which, a Google Image Search will quickly tell you, is very recognisable. It’s also five times older than the Köfels event.

That’s the summary. Here’s the rebuttal, where I get my fun.

It was found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the Royal Place at Nineveh, and was made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC. It is an astronomical work as it has drawings of constellations on it and the text has known constellation names. It has attracted a lot of attention but in over a hundred years nobody has come up with a convincing explanation as to what it is.

Nobody knows what it is in over a hundred years, but it’s an astronomical work. Eh? Assyrian scribes used well understood languages and even at 700BC, pre-dating the Old Testament, the language wasn’t that archaic that we can’t translate it. If we don’t know what it is, how do we know it’s astronomical?

With modern computer programmes[sic] that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

Go download Stellarium. It’s free, open source and very good. Planetarium software has been around for the last twenty years that I know of and most likely much longer. That’s your “modern computer programme”. Now, why would an Assyrian scribe be copying out the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer 2,400 years before him? Why would he even know the language? Could you read a language we used 2,400 years ago, such as Ancient Hebrew; No, you can’t, not perfectly or without ambiguity. If you could, there are a LOT of Biblical theologians who’d like a very close chat with you. Can you imagine how difficult it’d be for a scribe in 700 BC to manage such a feat?

No reason is given for our Assyrian scribe’s diligent historical documentation.

Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night, but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space.

There are two points here. First, “the same as any other night” means we have a lot more ‘pages’ from this notebook, but we’re given our answer…
…has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time…

Woah, maybe not. Now is this tablet mysterious and untranslated, or do we have a whole load of other tablets to compare it to? We can’t have both, yet this is exactly what the press release just said.

Now secondly we have an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it’s in space. If I quickly do a spot of maths, we can put it, say, 1,000km up and it’d be about 4km across and still discernible as a distinct shape. It could be 500km up and 1km across, that’s fine too, if possibly moving a little bit too fast; Consider that a lower bound since at orbital velocity it’d cover that 500km in about three seconds. No problems there, but do take notes.

The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.

Certainly possible even by naked eye methods. We can ignore the atmosphere because it’s just not going to alter the path of something larger than about 500m travelling between 20km/s and 50km/s, it’s through the atmosphere in a matter of seconds. Then we can just integrate back into an orbit. An error of one degree is pretty huge for an orbit, but we can get a very vague idea of the direction the object was travelling (but we can only guess at its velocity really). So tell us more…

…the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth[sic], that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.

Uh oh. Atens do not orbit “close to the earth”, they simply have a semimajor axis inside Earth’s orbit. They cross Earth’s orbit, that’s it. Some of them do anyway. There’s nothing about resonance and, indeed, a resonant object would never impact Eath, because it’s resonant!

This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming[sic] angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point.

Wow. Just…wow. It’s not possible to be more wrong in a single sentence than the sentence beginning “The in coming…”, it just can’t be done.

First off, we have to vapourise AT LEAST a kilometer wide asteroid. Now remember Newton’s laws? Of course you do. Whatever force vapourised that asteroid was IMMENSE, provided by the mountain. However, there’s an equal and opposite force provided by the asteroid on the mountain. The mountain would be not just rubble, but a crater at least seven kilometers wide. You cannot “clip” a mountain at over twenty kilometers a second, vapourise an entire kilometer (remember, that’s a lower bound) asteroid and still be left with a mountain or, indeed, anything near the mountain.

Refutation one: The mountain still exists and it should not. An impact solid enough to vapourise that much rock (or metal, if iron-nickel asteroid) is more than enough to vapourise five mountains.

As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide).

Continuing the trainwreck, we have a five-kilometer ball of superheated plasma, rock fragments and general badness, presumably with a sizable proportion of its initial 20-50 kilometer PER SECOND velocity. Everything between that mountain and Köfels would have been utterly obliterated by the air shockwaves alone. We’d see a layer of soot in the valley floor, recently of course, about a foot thick.

Refutation two: The valley is just as it was when the last glaciers were retreating 10,000 years ago. It should not be.

Refutation three: The valley should contain tremendous proportions of sidereophile elements, such as iridium. It does not.

When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.

Well this wasn’t written by a geologist that’s for sure. It doesn’t matter if you hurl a ton of rock or a ton of feathers at a surface, you still hit it just as hard with just the same energy. Just pulverising the rock? Five kilometers down, perhaps, but locally on the surface? No. A five kilometer wide ball of twenty kilometer per second superheated debris is going to leave a hell of a mark. We call these marks craters. It doesn’t matter if you get one crater, or two, or six, or sixty thousand microcraters (in, for example, quartz, sand and glass). At that kind of speed, you get craters. And when you get craters, you get the stuff blown out of them. The stuff blown out doesn’t much care for the initial direction of the impactor as to where it goes, it’s more or less symmetrical along the line of flight, as much goes back as goes forwards.

Refutation four: WHAT? You can’t support a point using physics that doesn’t work! The ejecta blanket would be at least twenty metres thick, where is it?

Refutation five: We see oblique craters on the Moon, Mars and Mercury too, but they’re only formed by impacts under around three degrees, not six.

No amount of literary sleight of hand or abuse of physics can hide a complete ignorance of the laws of physics. So okay, let’s burden on through this cesspool of wrong.

Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

He’s clumsily describing an ejecta fall-out. Molten rock falling from the sky after being blasted up there by…by the formation of a crater. Oops. Also, where are the burns? We’re quite interested in the archaeology of 4,100 years ago and do numerous digs, but we don’t find people immolated, we don’t find soot and ash from trees. The predictions made by this theory just are not supported by evidence.

Why, also, do people not record the next ten years or next century as “the years without summer”? I don’t care how you do it or what happens on the way in, you dump the kinetic energy of a kilometer of asteroid on Earth and you’re going to make a hell of a mess. Stuff’s going to go flying everywhere and fine dust will linger in the high atmosphere for decades. A few poxy volcanoes can trigger global temperature drops, imagine what a kilometer (at least!) of asteroid can do!

Guess what? Our two researchers (one a rocket engine engineer, the other a space infrastructure engineer, NEITHER geologists or linguists) have a book for sale about it all! They never do explain why the glass was formed at least 8,000 years ago and their magic happened 4,100 years ago.

Because a hillside falling away as the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago is just too boring and happened in too many places around Europe.

Hot on the news that Tony Blair hid his strong religious views while Prime Minister for fear of appearing a lunatic (which one would agree with, those who hear voices in their head telling them what to do tend to be, regardless of whether those voices pretend to be gods or not) is him now claiming that faith should have a stronger role in politics.

What?

Every single time any form of religion has got involved in politics, it has resulted in widescale repression, oppression and curtailment of freedom. In something as serious as running the bloody country, we need calm rational minds, not the irrational gibbering of someone hearing voices in his head from a ghost in the sky.

 Politics should be, indeed must be, secular. Is a Jew going to vote for a Muslim? Is a Muslim going to vote for a Christian? No, but all three would vote for a secular leader who isn’t going to favour either of the other two. Politicians should concentrate on the business of running the country not on the business of playing favourites with faith.

 Blair makes the hilariously misguided statement that “the world will be immeasurably poorer, more dangerous, more fragile and above all, more aimless - I mean without the necessary sense of purpose to help guide its journey - if it is without a strong spiritual dimension” and then somehow, I’m not at all sure how, equates this with requiring religion in politics. Is spirituality necessary for a sense of purpose? Mr. Blair seems to think so, he seems to think that it’d be “aimless” and “without a sense of purpose”. One would think a former British Prime Minister would choose his words better than to outright state that several million Buddhists, Atheists and non-practitioners are “aimless”. Once again, religion is a divisive force stirring only hatred and intolerance.

 Faith must not be tolerated in politics. It is favouritism, it’s immoral and downright wrong for a government.

…He’s probably trying to decieve you. Cardinal O’ Brien, Roman Catholic Archbishop in Scotland speaks of “Frankenstein” experiments and “hideous practices” over the Government’s hybrid embryo bill, seeking to provide a legal framework for research to go ahead. It’s quite easy, and Christians are long known for taking the easy way out, to instantly assume these mad scientists in their darkened labs making nightmarish abominations behind closed doors. Take it away, Mr. O’ Brien:

“He is promoting a bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues.”

This is the deception the Christian agenda wants you to believe. It isn’t just deception, it’s bare-faced lies. They think you’re stupid.

The facts of the case, unfortunately for them, are rather simple even for the layman to understand. Scientists need a specific type of cell called a stem cell for research into cures and treatments for horrible diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, they also provide insights into cancer and numerous other ailments. Unfortunately for us, these medical researchers are limited in their supply of stem cells; Stem cells come from human embryos before they’ve actually become a foetus and are still just a mess of cells chugging away with no life of their own. This has drawn ethical fire in the past but has generally been allowed to proceed.

What the scientists want to do is create their own embryos, free from the ethical ground of having to destroy what could (but never would have) become a human foetus. They do this by taking an animal egg cell, any mammal will do, and inserting the nucleus from a human cell, perhaps a skin cell. The resulting cell is a human egg cell, but created from an animal egg cell wrapping. It’s no more a human-animal hybrid than someone wearing a wooly jumper is a hybrid of human and sheep.

This is the entire truth. The animal cell provides the ‘cell machinery’ (the wooly jumper) while the human nucleus provides the instructions of what to do and gives the cell its identity. This cell will then proceed to develop as any other egg cell would and produce stem cells which the researchers can then harvest and use to progress in their understanding of various horrible diseases. These cells would never be brought “to term” or implanted in a mother. Even if they were, it would essentially be human cloning (which is banned) and the resulting child would be entirely human, not some deformed monstrosity. Scientists have no interest in cloning humans, they just want the pre-embryonic stem cells.

It is this research into Parkinson’s Disease, into Alzheimers Disease, into cancer that the Christians hate so much. If people aren’t dying and suffering, why would they turn to their God?

Alright, before I get started with this one, let me make one thing absolutely clear: Sharia law is an abomination.

 Now then, on to the whole Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments. He’s not out of line at all in saying that elements of Sharia are “unavoidable” in the British legal system. We face an increasingly rabid Islamic fundamentalist population and for the most part, our Anglican churches are on the moderate side of over-conservative. We’re a democracy and Islamic groups have proven more than willing to use democracy to elect their own candidates who have agendas more fitting with Islamic idealism.

 The reaction has been, in essence, hysteria and a disgrace to the nation. Political rivalry and posturing means bandwagonners are rapidly jumping to condemn Dr Williams but this is just a symptom of the larger problem.

We allow too much religious interference in our political process.

“Too much” of course being “any at all”. Any church, any faith, has no place at all in politics. That the Archbishop of Canterbury gets to sit in the House of Lords is as much an abomination as Sharia law is and it puts on too much pressure for the church having to conform to whatever political leaning is in effect at the time.

Col. Armitstead, Synod from the diocese of Bath and Wells is quoted saying “One wants to be charitable, but I sense that he would be far happier in a university where he can kick around these sorts of ideas.” This is simply another symptom of the disease infecting our government, that the church leaders can’t kick around those ideas, so to speak, because of their political duties. Duties they should not have.

 It’s time we threw all religious groups out of parliament and let politicians do the job of politicians, priests do the job of priests.