Hattix

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.

It’s a question I’ve asked (and answered) often on my blog. A knee-jerk over-reaction, what does it achieve?

In the case of threats to our freedom, we’re happily destroying that freedom to protect it. Better we sink our own ship it seems.

But it works elsewhere too. Civitas, a social think-tank, have run a comprehensive study showing that our headless chicken reaction to the supposed threat posed by paedophiles is achieving precisely the opposite of what we’d like it to.

Adults are now scared of interacting with children, paedophile has the same social stigma attached that rapist once did; A conviction isn’t necessary, just a suspicion, an accusation, and an innocent life is ruined. The innocent life isn’t that of the child’s, children are well versed at saying what needs to be said, true or otherwise, to get attention: It’s that of the man or woman accused of abuse.

According to Civitas, the spectre of suspicion and distrust has achieved exactly what it was meant to protect. It has poisoned and destroyed the generation relationship between child and adult. Children are now without adult friends, friends who would recognise signs of real abuse perhaps better than the child or his peers or his parents (parents who famously have a rather polar view of their own offspring) would, increasing the ease at which real paedophiles may take advantage of them. Isolated and ostracised the child has nobody external and impartial to turn to or confide in. In our rabid panic, we have spurned the children.

As we busy ourselves in crying wolf over our obsession that children are sexual in some way or that anyone with a camera is clearly a kiddy fiddler, we don’t tend to notice that we’re making paedophiles of normal people. In 2003 it became illegal, very much so, to document a perfectly legal act for the first time ever. If Jack is a normal 16 year old and his girlfriend Jill is a normal 17 year old, they can have a sexual relationship as much as they like. But if Jill sends Jack some naughty pictures of herself to brighten his day when he’s at work, Jack is then a paedophile and may be jailed or worse. His marriage plans to Jill are now off, his plan to work as a doctor won’t ever happen and Jill’s ambition to work as a care assistant is wrecked as neither would pass a CRB check.

Paedophiles wreck lives. In our blind panic, we wreck young lives just as badly. So what does over-reaction achieve? Is it not the precise damage that it was aimlessly attempting to prevent? Who’s worse?

It’s been a while so I have two stories for you.

The first needs no attribution, it’s all over the news. The Government somehow, with great concessions made (bribes), managed to get the controversial 42-day detention bill through Parliament. The Government are trying to spin it as powers needed by the police to combat the “terrorism threat”.

What “terrorism threat”?

We didn’t need to hold an innocent man for six weeks while the well-organized US-funded IRA were bombing the shit out of metropolitan areas nationwide. Yet we do when a rag tag bunch of rabid extremists post vague videos on the Internet?

The Government has proven time and again that it will abuse the Terrorism Act 2006, using its power to spy on citizens dropping litter, on babies crying at night, to monitor private areas…The list goes on.

‘Disappearing’ people for six weeks with neither evidence nor charge is unacceptable.

Our second is related to the exploding Nimrod in Afghanistan. The MoD yesterday flew a Nimrod over London to salute the Queen’s official birthday and, predictably, the relatives of the servicemen lost in Afghanistan are in uproar.

But wait, that’s not the whole story.

While the coroner of the investigation deemed the Nimrod “unairworthy”, he was not an aeronautical engineer, he was not familiar with the DeHaviland Comet or the Nimrod (the Nimrod is a militarised version of the Comet) and likely not familiar with the Nimrod’s essential role in supporting ground forces.

The experts, the aeronautical engineers, the Nimrod designers, the Nimrod ground crew, the people who know what they’re talking about all insist that the Nimrod is one of the safest and most reliable planes in the fleet. We employ experts for a reason.

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.

Are we off the hook? Has nature conspired to save us from our mistakes? No warming for over a decade? Is this great news?

The answer to all the above is “no”. It’s terrible news. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany believe that a natural cycle of cooling will offset partly or completely any warming over the next decade or so. This may initially sound great, a stay of reprieve, but it’s anything but. The findings are largely a result of increased cloud cover caused by increased storms caused by climate change superimposed onto a small existing cycle. It’s bad news because it gives politicians several terms where they have a ‘look at the last five years’ excuse not to do anything; Give a politician the choice of doing something and doing nothing and he’ll do nothing every time.

What’s worse is that change after the cycle is over will be rapid and that it does not affect high latitudes. Antarctica will still lose ice shelf after ice shelf. Arctic pack ice will still be all but gone in five years.

 When the sun dawns on 2020 and the crutch holding us up collapses, do you think we’ll be ready? Call me a pessimist, but I sure don’t.

You know what puzzles most genetic scientists? That there’s any controversy at all. After reading about a field of GM potatoes being grown nearby to myself I figured I’d do my bit to set the record straight.

There never was and never will be any health risk to humans from GM foods. It’s quite simply impossible. There is, however, quite a large health risk to humans from starvation.

The high priests of the anti-GM movement (Largely “greens”, paradoxically) have founded what approaches religion with their hate filled rhetoric which has no foundation in reason or fact.

 The basics of genetic modification are really simple. Genes control what proteins a cell manufactures and how. What we do is take a section of this control code that does something we want it to do and add it to the existing code. In the above link, the potatoes, the scientists took a gene which makes the potato roots emit a certain chemical, which nematode worms use to locate roots to eat. They then broke the gene so it doesn’t work; The roots no longer emit that chemical, the worms can’t find them, the potatoes aren’t killed.

We could do, and have done, the exact same with selective breeding. If you think your pet dog isn’t genetically modified, think again. It’s not a wolf, we genetically engineered it into the dog by thousands of years of selective breeding; This is genetic modification. Same for the cow from the auroch. The pig from the boar, the chicken, the turkey, all staples on our dinner tables, all genetically modified and not found in nature.

What science is giving us are tools to do those same modifications in years rather than in millennia. Now we can directly modify the traits and characteristics of plants and animals; A good example are fungal infections in plants. We can spray on bacteria which poison the fungus, or we can include the genetic code from the bacteria which produces that fungicide into the plant’s own genome and make plants which are immune to the fungus and we don’t need to spray on the bacteria.

So what’s the problem? Well, we make ’supercrops’ which could escape into the wild and out-compete native plants. Which, of course, we’ve been doing for millennia! Rapeseed plants (Canola over the Atlantic) are springing up all over the European countryside. Wheat grows wild, but doesn’t even exist in nature. This environmental ‘disaster’ that the high priests of anti-GM preach their sermons on isn’t just a ‘disaster’ but it’s already happened and has been since we first invented agriculture 8,000 years ago! As we can see just by looking outside (I can anyway), the original forest of Britain has been almost entirely obliterated to make room for agriculture. The prairie of the US has had its herds of bison massacred and wheat planted, roads cut across it.

We’ve already done the disaster. Let’s just make the best use of the land we’ve claimed so we don’t need more. Genetic engineering allows us to make that best use. The anti-GM high priests would rather have us slash and burn rainforests than be content with what we have already; With that objective in mind, can they ever label themselves ‘environmentalist’ with a straight face?

It’s a rule of reality, the more controversy something generates, the more idiots are attracted to it. I should name that after myself: Wayne’s Law of Stupidity.

 Grand Theft Auto IV is upon us and we have the usual crazies jumping out of the woodwork. Jack Thompson’s in there, as always, trying to play the media for all its worth with his tired old ‘murder simulator’ rhetoric and at least he takes issue with the violence.

Make no mistake, GTA is about violence. Alright, so is almost every other video game available anywhere, in some form or another, but GTA sells best so attracts the most parasites.

 It all started when the kids who shot up Columbine were found to have played DoomII. That’s rather like finding out that they used guns or that they ate food, what kid that age didn’t play DoomII? Do they want to ban food as well as games? 

To the parasites’ credit, most of them no longer have a problem with beating an innocent bystander to death with a baseball bat. No, the problem now is with the presence of strippers and prostitutes. “There are women in this game! They will corrupt our children!” scream the high-jihadists. The same dangerously psychotic people who will then give this game to their children! It’s RATED Mature, that’s 17+. No retailer should sell it to a child. So who will provide it to the children then? Their parents? Say it ain’t so!

Parents are quite happy buying their precious little snowflake DeathGoreBloodyMess II then dumping them in front of the electric nanny for a few hours while the kid gets on with digitally dismembering digital people. Only the really desperate for attention (Hi Jack!) would have any problem with that, regardless of how wrong it may be.

 That same parent then buys DeathGoreBloodyMessWithWomen II and there’s hell to pay!

Isn’t it the parent’s problem?

Posts made since the 19th of April have been lost. This is, of course, entirely my fault. I run this server, own the hardware and bandwidth. A while back, I turned off MySQL backups to isolate a problem with the backup script. You can see where this is going: I didn’t turn it back on. The server has been happily backing up everything it has except the databases.

A disk underwent some impressive filesystem corruption, so was recovered from backup: Backups which did not include the MySQL databases. MySQL was able to recover its database, but lost recent entries as a result.

 Oops.

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?

Shamelessly re-created from here.