Dealing Death

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, says that calls for assisted suicide and euthanasia reflect a society that does not know how to deal with death.

Hang on – I would suggest that positing a mythical afterlife, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, most certainly reflects a group of people who do not know how to deal with the empirical reality and finality of death.

Sorry

Sorry for the hiatus, but I’ve been rather busy and one of my staff has resigned. Good for him that he’s moving on, but with a headcount freeze it means a lot more work for those remaining to man the barricades. I now have to achieve 10% more with 25% fewer resources. Simple sums says it ain’t going to happen.

Talking of apologising, John Healey, the UK Housing Minister, is being castigated by the Conservatives and the media for having the temerity to tell a self-evident truth during a radio interview.

He was talking about home repossessions and said: “Sometimes it is impossible for people to maintain the mortgage commitments they've got ... house repossession may be the best thing in those circumstances.”

He’s 200% spot on. Would you rather cut your losses and pass the debt to the bank, or struggle to service a debt that will only take you further into perdition and penury? Lose your albatross and at least you can rent somewhere for much less.

The Conservative shadow minister turned on the crocodile tears and suggested he apologise to those having their houses repossessed. Would a Conservative government help prop up unsustainable debt? I think not. Gross hypocrisy if you ask me. It’s kind of helped me make up my mind as to where my vote is going.

“Minister – are you going to apologise?”

“No.”

“Then will you apologise for not apologising?”

“No.”

“Will you resign for not apologising for not apologising?”

“No.”

“The will you apologise for not resigning?”

“No.”

Bloody arseholes! Harrumph.

Got a customer visit in Cornwall today, so we're going to stay there for the weekend with the Caravans – it’s Caravan’s birthday on the 14th, as well as Valentine’s Day. Yet another excuse for card manufacturers to scam us with their hideously priced wares.

It's 3am and I've been up for an hour and a half - Railtrack (or whatever it's called now) has decided that the early hours are ideal for doing some work on the tracks and using jack hammers.

Here's a question for you to ponder; when you lose an object in a dream, why on waking are you convinced you've also lost it in reality, even though you know you were dereaming?

Kittens, Logs and Kittens

We’re wondering whether to put a cat flap in for the kitten or to just give her a set of keys so she can let herself in.

Hay and I were discussing the virtues of men and women. She remarked how women were more like cats, hissing and spitting whenever another woman appeared on the scene, whereas men were more like dogs, they sniff each other’s bums, wag their tails and then play together.

Had more logs delivered over the weekend and discovered that a ‘shed load’ is a load and a half. Some were quite short lengths and I got Caravan to drill a few holes in them so we could drop tea lights into them. I think we’ll go into production and sell them on eBay.


I’m going to be hideously mercenary now and generate a lot of comments.

Fine Old Italian Names

Don't you agree that it's getting a bit silly when the Italian Six Nations rugby team contains players whose names are Craig Gower, Luke MacLean, Paul Derbyshire and Kaine Robertson?

The team you play for should be decided by your passport and not that of a gandfather 6 times removed.

Spotted on the M25

Love it!

Political Discrimination - And Piss

This is a natural extension to yesterday’s post.

Religious people demand that they should not be discriminated against because of their beliefs (despite the fact they are the worst discriminators themselves). Belief is belief – i.e. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof. A religious belief is thus identical to a political belief (as otherwise we wouldn't have numerous political parties each holding different views) and if religious people have legal dispensation against criticism of their beliefs, then political beliefs should similarly and logically be legally immune from criticism.

I don’t think so!

Belief in a specific religion, like a political belief, is not something one is born with (although it could be argued that if born into a Muslim or Christian fundamentalist family there’s little choice involved, but that’s more to do with enforced indoctrination). One has conscious control over the choice of one’s religion, as evidenced by the fact that people can easily lose their religion, trade it in for another or even come to religion late in life. Given that taking to religion is a conscious decision based on choice (although not necessarily a rational one), it cannot be logically argued that religion should be included in any list of attributes that should be immune from discrimination or criticism; in fact the more ridiculous and untestable the belief the more rigorous the criticism should be. Simples, as they say in a well known advert in the UK.

My recipe for attempting to cure someone of religion is to get them to read their espoused scripture from cover to cover, note the inconsistencies, hypocrisy, logical fallacies and physical impossibilities and analyse the result using their rational faculties. The problem is they are invariably unwilling to do so, as it would destroy their belief and thus their carefully constructed view of themselves, creating an uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance in the process. No-one, except the emotionally robust, likes to be told they are wrong about a belief in which they have invested much emotional effort, even when they themselves are doing the telling.

Before questioning anyone about their belief in God, you should ask them which God - there are so many to choose from.

The new kitty was racing around the caravan last night doing the wall of death, followed by a touch of ghost wrestling.

An extract from Wiki that may educate you – it did me:

The word "urine" was first used in the 14th century. Before that, the concept was described by the now vulgar word "piss". Onomatopoetic in origins, "piss" was the primary means of describing urination, as "urinate" was at first used mostly in medical contexts. Likely, "piss" became vulgar through its use by lower class characters such as the reeve and the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century work The Canterbury Tales. "Piss" and its association with vulgarity has led to its current classification as obscene, as well as its use in such colloquial expressions as "to piss off", "piss poor", and others.

I'm thinking of auditioning for the position of Old Sodbury Village Idiot. Do you think I stand a chance?

Logic & Rationality

There’s a growing campaign to get Pope Ratzo barred from the UK as an undesirable due to his opinions on homosexuals. I’d go so far as to have this nasty cult proscribed as a banned organisation under the Human Rights Act. The pope needs telling that his omniscient God is plain wrong on a whole host of issues - and has been found to be so on a number of occasions since the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment.

Let’s analyse the situation. The law of the land denies anyone the right to discriminate on the basis any attribute over which an individual has no control, such as their colour, race, age, disability or gender. This seems to me to be morally incontrovertible and a universal truth in this enlightened age of ours. Given that one’s sexuality is not a choice but a given, it follows logically that discrimination on the basis of sexuality should be included in the list of forbidden discriminations. There’s no other way of looking at it other than to say discrimination on the basis of sexuality is ipso facto as irrational and morally repugnant as discrimination on the basis of colour.

Now the church believes that that homosexuality is a sin. It therefore follows a priori that the church must be morally wrong in this belief. Given we have free speech the church is nonetheless free to believe what it wills, however, it should not be allowed to act on this belief when it comes to a selection process, else it will breach both the law and rationality, and surely God is the supreme example of rationality.

Similarly it is also irrational and morally reprehensible to discriminate against women priests. If these orders to discriminate on the basis of gender or sexuality are a direct commandment from God, then this God must be guilty of irrationality. Now God is defined (by the church) as being perfect in every respect, which must include the attribute of being supremely, indeed perfectly rational. The church must therefore recognise that this divinely inspired order to discriminate is not in fact a divine order at all but the product of a misinterpretation or deliberate misrepresentation of God’s divine and perfectly rational will. To do otherwise makes God imperfect and destroys in an instant the concept of God as defined by the church itself.

The only defence against the above is to say that homosexuality is indeed a choice. If it is a choice and homosexual people can easily choose heterosexuality, then it follows that heterosexual people should find it relatively easy to choose homosexuality – a choice I can guarantee that none of my heterosexual readers would find even conceivable. Did you choose your sexuality?

To quote the Royal College of Psychiatrists: “Despite almost a century of psychoanalytic and psychological speculation, there is no substantive evidence to support the suggestion that the nature of parenting or early childhood experiences play any role in the formation of a person’s fundamental heterosexual or homosexual orientation. It would appear that sexual orientation is biological in nature, determined by a complex interplay of genetic factors and the early uterine environment. Sexual orientation is therefore not a choice.”

In conclusion, if the church is to set itself up as the upholder of morality, it is then acting hypocritically and with all the rationality of an arch bigot when it comes to sexuality and gender. The only possible way it can justify its actions is to declare, against all reason, experience and scientific evidence (but since when did reason have anything to do with religion), that homosexuality is a choice and that it can be ‘cured’. This is like shouting at the top of your voice that the earth is flat, or the universe was created 6,000 years ago. Hang on – didn’t the church at one time proclaim these incontrovertible facts?

The church will resort to reying on pure emotion rather than reasoned argument, which unfortunately is a tactic that usually wins the day due to the hoi pollio not taking at all well to thinking. This is borne out by the Amercian attitude to healthcare, people's belief in the efficacy of atioxidants and the MMR fisaco.

Anchors Aweigh!

Momentous news! My blogging started in 2007 as an e-Bay advert for my Dutch barge. Yesterday I accepted an offer on it from an unknown investor, possibly based in Saudi Arabia and potentially related to the Saudi Royal Family – although this is pure speculation. He could also feasibly be Russian with a keen interest in Chelsea Football Club. There’s a higher possibility of him being a recently divorced father of two who needs a cheap place to live.

Negotiations were protracted, took all of 30 minutes and Peter Madelson – the UK Trade & Industry Secretary – was not required to intervene.

At least I’ll no longer be paying several grand a year in mooring fees and the house build can progress apace. The proceeds of the sale should allow us to get the walls up and a roof on the house by the end of this year.

The amount agreed on was nowhere near the amount I was looking for, but one has to learn to cut one’s losses in the current economic climate. The thing was starting to become an albatross around my neck and a financial drain – as all boats are unless lived on 365 days a year.

The question now is whether the mission being accomplished should herald the end of by blogging days?

Equality for Euthanasia in Grand Fenwick

Pope Ratstinger MCLXXXXXIV has come out of the closet and wants the Catholic church to be free to promote its particular brand of bigotry and hatred. He has told his capos to oppose the British government’s equality bill citing that religious communities should be free to act in accordance with their beliefs. If religious communities should be free to act according to their conscience, then why not secular communities? Why not the Klu-Klux-Klan? Why not the BNP? Why not the Nazis? What justifies religious communities being treated as a special case, other than the fact their supreme leader is invisible and hasn’t uttered a word in 2,000 years?

To quote Bertrand Russell: “You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the coloured races, or even mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

The author of the marvellous Discworld books, Terry Pratchett, has ignited the right to die debate. In deciding whether someone should be allowed the right to die the question to be asked is Cui Bono – or who benefits? A tribunal should be empowered to decide whether anyone had been unduly influenced by those who would benefit. One method of ensuring someone who wishes to die cannot be influenced by children who stand to inherit is for the state to sequester the assets of anyone who is assisted to die, such sequestering to be put into effect when the other partner (if there is one) kicks the bucket. That would sort the leeches from the carers.

China is a tad miffed that the US is selling arms to Taiwan. I’d like to know what the Chinese are afraid of – a threatened invasion of China by Taiwan?

• Taiwan; population 2m,
• China; population 1.3bn

That’s like the Isle of Man sending an invasion force to mainland Britain; shades of The Mouse That Roared.

Fluffy Things

I thought I’d attract a flurry of oohs and aahs by writing about fluffy things.


Over the weekend my younger daughter gave us the above kitten to look after for a while. This kitten is not a kitten as you or I would imagine a kitten; it’s a mutant 5 fingered life-form with opposable thumbs – it’s an evolved kitten, a Superkitten. Its paws are designed for using tool such as screwdrivers, torque wrenches, fish filleting knives and can openers.

If you don’t believe me then look at the photos below. I swear they are not doctored.



It’s something called polydactylism and here’s an entire website of photos of polydactyl cats. The benefit is that we can go away for a weekend and leave the cat with tins of food and a tin opener, although we’ll have to hide the laptops or else she’ll be e-mailing all her friends.

Protesters in Liverpool have been staging a demonstration against Boots the chemist chain selling homeopathic remedies. Their plan is to simultaneously take a massive and potentially fatal overdose (if homeopathy is to be given any credence) of homeopathic remedies.

When you think about it, an ordinary glass of water has, during its existence as H2O, been in contact with literally thousands of other chemicals. Therefore, homeopathically speaking, it must be a miracle cure for every disease known to man. If you understand the faulty premise on which homeopathy is based, then you’ll appreciate the irony.

Remember Dr Andrew Wakefield, the guy who started the MMR scare? One of the medical delegates at the seminar Hay was at last week commented that he and the media did the medical world a great favour by scaring people off the measles vaccine. They proved that not taking the measles vaccine to the extent that herd immunity was lost (less than 83%-94% being vaccinated) would result in measles epidemics – and it did. If researchers had wanted to conduct a trial to test the hypothesis the ethics committee simply would not have allowed it. Wakefield and the press managed it though and it was the best ever controlled trial.

I’m preparing for the annual Old Sodbury Hideous Haemorrhoid Competition, which is to be held in the village hall next weekend. The competition is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year.