Blasphemy Day

Apparently, it’s Blasphemy Day. It almost passed me by! It’s gone 10:30 PM here in the UK as I write this, but heigh-ho; out there in Internetland there’s still places that have most of the day left to enjoy taking the names of various gods in vain.

Problem is I’m not feeling very imaginative, so I’ll just start ranting and see where it takes me…

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Geometry For Dummies And (Apparently) Climate-Change Deniers

Do you ever see comments that are so astoundingly dumb that your jaw bruises as it bounces off your chest? I have a name for them; I call them ‘why are there still monkeys’ comments. That’s how amazingly, stupefyingly silly I mean.

Yesterday I posted this graph, showing sea-ice shrinkage in the Arctic, on a post about climate change.

It wasn’t much of a post, just a whimsical analogy I thought of that seemed worth throwing out there, and I wasn’t really expecting any feedback off it at all. And I was nearly right in my expectation. Nearly. I did, however, get this comment:

“There are nice satellite photos to misspell[sic] the myth that Arctic ice is shrinking. That is, it’s shrinking in some places (hence you can draw a nice graph) and growing in other places.”

My jaw-thud registered on the Richter scale! After a mildly sarcastic reply, however, I left it alone.

But.

It kept niggling at me; an itch in the back of my mind.

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A Test Of Conviction For Climate-Change Deniers

If you can look at this graph, and not see doom in store for the company it portrays…

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The Rule Of The Saints

After the first English civil war, the country was riven by political divisions, many of which centred upon religious ideals. Seemingly every sect wanted the country to be ruled on grounds stipulated by their own particular interpretation of the Bible.

Most notable among this multiplicity of creeds were the Fifth Monarchists, who believed that Jesus would soon return as King of kings, and that the country should be ruled on purely religious grounds (by themselves, of course), in preparation for that great day. While they weren’t the only ones, by far, advocating religious rule, they actually came within a hair’s breadth of attaining it.

While it would be disingenuous to claim that all the problems faced during the Interregnum were caused by religious schism and bickering, it’s notable that any decently written history of the period generally expends much more wordage on the various religious sects than it does on more purely political issues. Even the various factions within the army, notably the Levellers, were informed more by their opinions on how to run the country according to God’s will (and how to enforce their brand of worship), than any other issue.

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Virus Removal:Drastic Measures

This is another post from the old site that I hadn’t planned on migrating to this one. Not sure why I changed my mind but I did, so, erm, well… here it is.

Though I’ve corrected a lamentably huge number of typos, I’ve resisted the urge to edit several overrun sentences and other grammar/style horrors. They reflect my mood at the time, so ‘let ’em stand’, I say.

Originally published: 01 June 11

I’ve not been around on comment-boards much, the last few days. Here’s why…

Been a busy few days for me. Saturday morning I got some hideous computer virus that played audio advertising at me, redirected my browser to pages full of adverts, and basically made the web unusable. Closing every unrecognised process in Task Manager worked for a couple of minutes, as did booting into safe-mode, but nothing I did got rid of it. So after a couple of hours of restarting, booting into Ubuntu, where I could at least look for suggestions online, and then back into Windows to try them out, I gave up. I reinstalled Windows.

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Gay Soldier Boo’d By Rethuglican Homophobes

When even Daily Fail readers think it’s bad, you just know it has to be a special kind of awful! My favourite comment under the line at the Mail post:

“Keep it to yourself whether you are heterosexual or homosexual.” Santorum says. So, under Santorum’s “DADT 2.0,” heterosexual male soldiers can’t talk about their wives? Or keep a photo of their girlfriend back home posted by their bunk? Wearing wedding rings would be out, since only heterosexuals can marry in many states it would be a dead giveaway. And no comments about breasts or “she’s so hot” allowed at all. It’s an interesting proposal, but a bold social experiment. Unlike the proven effective policy of allowing gays to serve openly, which many US allies have done for years with no ill effects, Santorum’s proposed policy of universal concealment has never been tried anywhere, to my knowledge. At least Santorum’s suggestion would treat all soldiers equally, unlike the original and recently struck-down DADT, which one-sidedly forced homosexual soldiers to pretend to be straight, but puts no penalties on heterosexual soldiers advertising their orientation.
—DMG, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, 23/9/2011 13:22

Gays haven’t been given ‘special’ rights; they’ve been given (some) equal rights.
—Daz

Hat-tip, Psilomelane.

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Grieving Dad Says Tragic Fire A Blessing In Disguise

I don’t know whether to feel glad that he’s found a straw to cling to, or horrified that the nature of that straw means he still worships a being he thinks has done this to his family.

A man whose family died in Brisbane’s worst house fire believes the tragedy is a blessing in disguise because it will attract more followers to his church.

Taukinukufili Taufa ran the Church of Baptism with Fire & Holy Spirit out of the Brisbane house which caught fire last month.

The blaze killed Mr Taufa’s wife, daughter and three of his grandchildren as well as six other extended family members.

Mr Taufa said God speaks to him directly and he believes in baptism through “heavenly fire”.

Read the rest of this story at NZ Herald

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A Correction. Nay, A Reversal!

Those who read my earlier post about the California couple claiming religious persecution by their local authorities will know what I’m talking about. For those who didn’t; you might want to have a quick shufty at it, or this will make no sense at all.

Thanks to Randy (with whom, I must say, I’d probably have little in common politically, but fair’s fair; he gave me the info I was missing) I must now tell you, Dear Reader, that I was wrong. Shocking, I know, but it happens to the best of us…

It seems the couple do indeed have enough room for all the vehicles to park off the road, so there’s no case to be made, it seems, for their Bible study gatherings having caused any obstruction. According to the Capistrano Dispatch:

Stephanie Fromm hosts a Bible study on Wednesdays that draws about 20 people, while Chuck Fromm’s Sunday-morning gathering draws as many as 50. But in the neighborhood of large homes on even larger lots—the Fromms live in a 4,700-square-foot home on a parcel that also has a corral, barn, pool and huge back lawn—Stephanie Fromm said parking was never a problem. Neither was noise, she said.

“There’s no singing or music,” she said. “It’s meditative.”

Providing that’s true—and I have no reason to doubt that it is—then I can see absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t have the right to do whatever they want on their own property. They don’t seem to be using a private home as a business or creating any kind of disturbance, and I don’t particularly care whether it’s Bible studies, swinger-parties or a chess club; if it’s somehow against the law for people to gather as a group in someone’s home without causing a disturbance for the neighbours, then, on the facts I have, that law is unjust and needs to be fought.

So, unusual though it may be for me to say this of religious-type people (not ‘persons’, damnit!), I wish them good luck in that fight.
—Daz

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Yet More Faux-Persecution

In odd juxtaposition to the Woking car-park story I mentioned the other day, comes this story from Fox News, telling of a California couple who’ve been fined $300, allegedly for holding Bible-Study sessions in their home.

Many right-wing Christian bloggers seem to have picked it up and are touting it, as are the couple themselves, as religious persecution. Oddly, though, when they copy-paste the story from the Fox site, they all seem to skip this paragraph:

“The Fromm case further involves regular meetings on Sunday mornings and Thursday afternoons with up to 50 persons, with impacts on the residential neighborhood on street access and parking,” spokeswoman Cathy Salcedo said in an email to The Los Angeles Times.

Someone does, to be fair, state that they live in a semi-rural area and haven’t caused parking problems, which could indeed point to it being a case of some officious big-wig applying the letter, not the spirit, of the law. I have to wonder, though; if there really have been no problems for the neighbours, just how did officialdom become aware of the situation? Someone must have reported some sort of problem. Be that as it may, I can’t see how this could be construed (by anyone not actively looking for an excuse to do so) as religious persecution. The nature and content of the meetings in question doesn’t appear to have had any bearing on the case.

It’s worth noting, too, that the phrase ‘semi-rural’ doesn’t mean a thing. I also live in a semi-rural area. My street is still a residential street, though, and enough vehicles to carry fifty or so people—especially given the habit of right-wing types of carrying two people in a car the size of a small tank—would make it near-on impassable.

Looks like yet another case of religious folks thinking they should have special privilege, to me. But then, I’m a nasty old baby-eating atheist; what would I know?
—Daz

Edit: After getting new facts, I’ve published a very strong correction to this article.

P.S. What is it with folks who feel the need to say ‘persons’ instead of ‘people’? It’s not that it’s grammatically wrong, as far as I know, but it always reads or sounds very clumsy to me. Even ‘individuals’ is better; though not much.</inconsequential rant>

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Html Codes For Common Symbols

I’ve got a collection of tables and text-documents containing the html and Alt+ codes (hold alt, whilst typing the relevant digits on the number pad) for various symbols that either aren’t found on the keyboard, or are, but sometimes need to be added to a web-page in code form. The best example of the latter would be the less-than, <, and greater-than, >, symbols. <Put any text in a web-page between a pair of these, and it’ll disappear from view, so if you need to use them, you’ll need to use the code instead of just typing the symbols.>

Anyway, I decided to make a table of the ones I find I need most often, so as to avoid having to keep wading through the whole collection. Then I thought, why not share it? So, after adding in a few that I know by heart, and applying some formatting to make it all look a bit more presentable, here it is.

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