Two pieces of news

There are a couple of news stories this week which boil down to people being massively retarded

First is this article about some English yobs vandalising a 'holy' tree. The headline claims the tree was 2000 years old and planted by Joseph of Arimathea(the bible says this guy donated his tomb to Jesus) but a little bit of reading shows it wasn't anywhere ear that old, the tree has been regrown from cuttings at various times throughout its history and there appears to be no evidence supporting the 2000 year claim although its predecessor has been fully grown since at least the 1600s when Oliver Cromwell and his goons hacked it down. While the tree is an oddity in that it blooms twice a year and supposedly none of its offspring grown from seed do calling it a 2000 year old holy tree is pushing it.

Anyway the point is as far as I am concerned it is just a tree but given its cultural significance the vandalism was almost certainly aimed at pissing of the local Christians, and damaging monuments is just a real dick move.

The other article that interests me is this, it seems that shoppers in wal-marts across America are going to be subject to the short video clip at the bottom of the linked article. This is part of the 'See something, say something' campaign which is getting progressively more retarded. In an attempt to fight terrorism the public are being encouraged to report any suspicious behaviours they see. Sounds sensible right? Wrong, very wrong. First no information is provided to discern a local eccentric from someone planning to vaporise a mall. Next time you are out on the streets, or shopping or whatever keep an eye out for anything suspicious and keep a tally of how many you see. Are those people all terrorists, no, are they all criminals, very unlikely. Now imagine the time it would take for you to report all these events to a police officer. Now imagine the amount of police time taken up if everyone reported every suspicious event they saw. Flooding the police force with false positives is probably the most ineffective way of fighting terrorism imaginable especially since government agencies are already swamped with people reporting possible suspects. Not only does it waste massive amounts of police time it keeps people afraid, then again a fearful population will make rash decisions when it comes to a security/privacy and freedom tradeoff.

"He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither" and will often lose both.

Benjamin Franklin

Al Quida defeats the USA

This isn't about some terrorist attack that has crippled the US beyond repair, or assassination of high ranking officials collapsing the government, this is about fear, America are shitting bricks and in a 'war on terror' that means you just lost. So what is this all about, baby names, here in the UK.

I have just found a news story about how Mohammed is the most common baby name in the UK. Immediately upon watching that some alarm bells should start going off because the presenter is clearly American and the bottom right corner has the CNN logo, why hasn't the British media picked up on this story, I can think of two reasons, it is a non issue and its a perversion of statistics. Here is the official top 10 and this page links to an excel document of the top 100 it is quickly apparent that Mohammed is not the most common name, so how did the story come about. Easy, all variations Muhammed, Mohammed, Mohamed, etc were taken as a single name, I would be prepared to bet my laptop the same can not be said for other names (James, Jamie, Jim or William, Will, Bill etc) so the statistics are utter bullshit.

Even if the claim was accurate so what, minorities often favour traditional names while people with British heritage are more open to all sorts of weird names, and it is only one year so it may just be a fad. Either way it doesn't change the fact that less than 5% of the population is Muslim so they really aren't taking over. Also most Muslims are perfectly normal people so this is not a terrorism issue either.

As for the bigot who would like it to be an indigenous name at the top of the list, only 1 of the top 10 is truly English (Alfie, from the old english Alfred) and one other (Jack, considered independent to but derived from John which is itself a translation of a Hebrew name) is technically English but has roots in a non English name.

So how does all this tie in to my original point, the story was warped and twisted and even then was not news worthy so the only reason it would have been broadcast was a bunch of scared, closed minded attention seekers trying to spread panic and fear. What do terrorists want to do, spread panic and fear. Once people start broadcasting stories like this the media not only publicises terrorist activities they are manufacturing a fear of terrorists without the terrorists actually needing to do anything. They can't scare us because we are already terrified sounds like an Arnold Rimmer line but it is certainly not a solution to anything.

Interesting events in Finland

It seems that on Tuesday Oct 12th 2010 Finland had a rather large and well publicised television debate on the subject of gay marriage. During this debate it was made very clear that Finlands state church(attended by 79% of the population) opposes gay marriage, and their chosen representatives came across as more than a little stuck up and bigoted. This has had a very interesting result, Finland has a website where people can fill out a form and get out of all the hard work de-registering from the church(the process is legally recognised). Here are a few graphs on the subject, unless you speak Finnish or your browser has a translator you will have to trust me on this, the second graph shows daily resignations over the past 2 weeks at a base level of up to around 300 per day but (at the time of writing) since the debate aired numbers are averaging closer to 5000 and still rising with the highest being just shy of 7000, that's more than a ten fold increase.

The graph next to it shows cumulative statistics for each of the past 4 years, showing that apart from a small bump in February 2008 church leaving has been fairly consistent each year, and is fairly consistent throughout the year until the rate of leaving gently increases over the period of September to December. The thing that stands out is over the past week the number of people leaving has been around half the yearly average. This can be more clearly seen in the bottom bar chart where statistics for each year are shown split into months with Jan at the bottom.

Unfortunately I expect this trend will level off within a week or so, maybe a month if the Finnish people are lucky, then drop down to probably a little over the previous base rate as more people will be aware they can ditch the church and get on with life.

Another impact of this is that the church gets €300 per indoctrinated working adult per year, since this little boom has so far seen in the region of 25 000 additional people leaving, that is a minimum cost of €7.5 million per year. Unfortunately they get almost €1 billion so this is still minor and they can certainly afford it. I am patiently waiting the day when organisations with no benefit to humanity stop getting government handouts and tax breaks.

Lay off the Muslims you bigots

I am going to cover two related topics in todays post.

1) The "Ground Zero Mosque"
Can they, yes. Should they, there is no reasonable argument against it.
Listen to some people and you will get the impression Osama Bin Laden is planning to personally build a Mosque on ground zero as some sort of monument to extremist stupidity, this is shear bullshit of a purer quality than found on cattle farms.
Firstly it is not at ground zero, it is two blocks away and neither site can be seen from the other.
Second the term Mosque is more than a little over inflammatory, a Muslim prayer facility is included, but so are a variety of secular facilities such as a swimming pool and a childrens play area. However there will be other religious facilities in the community centre, namely prayer areas for Jews and Christians, suddenly the building is a little less confrontational isnt it.
Thirdly America has a couple of points in its constitution about separation of church and state and rights to religious freedoms, so even if it was a Mosque denying it would require denying ALL religious buildings regardless of faith.
If they wanted (and owned the land) Muslims could build a statue of Bin Laden taking a dump on ground zero itself, it would be in very bad taste and create a backlash against all Muslims not just the crackpot extremists but there would be no legal reason to prevent it.


2)Burn the Koran day
Can they, yes. Should they, probably not but their call.
As far as I know this was actually cancelled, but I wrote most of this a couple of days ago so its still getting posted.
Much as religious freedoms in the constitution allow the rather offensive and extreme example I gave above they also protect the right of a 30 strong church in backwater Florida to burn other peoples holy books, so if they want to noone can stop them. That being said burning ANY book is incredibly tasteless, a symbol of destroying that which you disagree with, intolerance and censorship of ideas. All books have some value at least in terms of literature or history. But there is more to it than that, Muslims see the Koran in much the same way Christians see the Bible so everyone understands that all this will achieve is pissing off a bunch of Muslims. The fanatics will become more fanatic and a few borderline moderates may slip into fanaticism. All that the fundies are managing on both sides is spreading the illusion that all Muslims/Westerners are bigoted hate filled oxygen thieves hell bent on eradicating the opposite side. This is far from true and the majority of people on both sides are far more open minded and reasonable than the other side gives them credit for, despite the medias efforts to get a good story by making the other guy look evil.

The latest on these issues.