Moving forward in reverse...

For those of you that are familiar with this 'blog, you will then know of my loathing for religion. All religion.

But recent events have turned this loathing into a growing fear of what is gradually emerging from the very thick buckle of the Bible Belt of North America that seems to be somewhat at odds with the rise of a similar blind, many-armed monster rising out of the East.

"Cory Burnell [or Charleston, South Carolina] wants to set up a Christian nation within the United States where abortion is illegal, gay marriage is banned, schools cannot teach evolution, children can pray to Jesus in public schools and the Ten Commandments are posted publicly."

I'm not entirely clued up on American law, but what I do know is, the United States of America chose British case law as the basis of its own. Also, like Britain, America has a very clear division between church and state, and with good reason, too.

To that end, Burnell, 29, left the Republican Party, moved from California and founded Christian Exodus two years ago with the goal of redirecting the United States by "redeeming" one state at a time."

A redirection is somewhat of an understatement. But then again, the current president of the United States of America seems to be complicit with such intent and would hardly stand in the way:

"The push comes at a time when Christian fundamentalism is a growing force in U.S. politics, displays of the Ten Commandments in government buildings are spurring litigation and President George W. Bush is touting the evangelical Christian credentials of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers."

More worryingly:

"The organization's Web site says if it does not meet its goal of change, it will work to secede from the United States.

South Carolina was the first state to secede from the union in 1860, and the first shots of the U.S. Civil War were fired from Charleston's Battery onto Fort Sumter."

But things get worse:

"A British-based professor of sociology has testified in a US federal court that intelligent design (ID) is a scientific concept, not a religious one."

For those of you not familiar with so-called Intelligent Design, it is merely a re-branding of the old and tired and thoroughly exhausted Creationist movement.

A change of name is simply one more pathetic tactic in their never-ending denialist vendetta against the scientific community.

"Professor Fuller was called as a witness by the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania to help defend its decision to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes, The Guardian reports.

Subsequently, a group of parents began legal proceedings against the school board, demanding that ID be removed from the science curriculum. They argue that it violates the constitutional separation of church and state, and is merely creationism in disguise."

Which is entirely correct.

Any connection between church and state must be a tenuous one.

"However, Professor Fuller holds that because scientists have inferred the existence of a designer from observations of biological phenomena, it should count as scientific.

"It seems to me in many respects the cards are stacked against radical, innovative views getting a fair hearing in science these days," he said."

My loathing for such talk-speak enrages me to the point of exhaustion.

There is nothing .. nothing even remotely 'radical' or 'innovative' about Intelligent Design:

"But the idea that an intelligent designer might be responsible for complex forms of life is hardly new or even radical. It was first put forward in 1802 by William Paley in his book Natural Theology."

Put simply, Intelligent Design is not an avenue for scientific enquiry. It is instead a means of closing down the very pursuit of knowledge, especially the pursuit of the kind of knowledge that undermines the values that these utterly blind and feckless morons believe in.

Put even more simply, the proponents of Intelligent Design would prefer that we take the word of their god and their teachings as holding to be true and cease and desist all further pursuit of knowledge.

Religion is a cancer. Over the years, we have developed ways of dealing with this cancer, and in time, we have managed to strip away those unhealthy cells and bring life to the dead flesh they occupied.

In time, we will remove them from the very body of society and we will be clean once more.

However, those remnants that now persist are only too aware of their impending demise and like all aggressive agents, their actions become ever more destructive.

In their shallow minds, this world seen through their coloured and blurred eyes would be better left as a baron husk, bereft of life than exist in any way, shape of form bereft of religion.

If there was ever a case for the existence of evil; of which I have yet to have such a thing presented to me, these people are the embodiment of evil, since it is in their minds that such things have a foundation in reality.

"For there is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so."
~ William Shakespeare 1564-1616, Hamlet, II.ii

Merely thinking such things makes them true...

Thought of the day

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
~ George Santayana

"[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."
~ George Bernard Shaw

Well I have my own thoughts about why we are otherwise doomed to repeat the errors of our collective past, and it's a simple if not depressing one: because those who follow are arrogant enough to believe that they can avoid such historic failures and that they believe that there is profit enough to risk failure in any case.

After all, if there was any profit in peace, we would have known peace centuries ago...

I want my, I want my, I want my MTV...

Recently, there has been no small amount of furore over here in Britain surrounding the news that the BBC wish to increase the television license fee to one hundred and eighty pounds.

Now, the obvious reaction is that of shock & horror. After all, there are few concessions for the elderly or those on income support, who are often the ones to benefit the most from such a service.

A few years ago, some guy got so fed up with the license fee, he doodled with his telly and fixed it in such a way that there was no way for him to receive BBC broadcasts, and instead only received those from the commercial channels.

This seemed like a good idea and had the potential to open the floodgates to similar schemes, maybe even backed by the manufacturers.

With that in mind, the government whisked through legislation to close that particular loophole in the law and now the license is charged for the reception of any signal, not just that of the men from Auntie.

So over here in Britain, if you want to listen to the radio or watch television, you must pay a license fee for the privilege.

All of this must seem hilarious to Johnny Foreigner, specifically the Americans who will no doubt see all of this as some antiquated, pre-war hold-over that should have been given the heave-ho a long time ago.

In fact, there's a few people over here who think the same thing, and to an extent, I'm one of them.

But you have to consider the alternatives. Most people will just think: “Well, blow that for a load of old shit. I'm putting my money in Rupert Murdoch's back pocket from now on. I'm going to Sky!”

And I say: “Good luck to you, ‘coz you're going to be paying a damn lot more than one ‘undred an' eighty quid every year if you don't want to be watching repeats, shit films and low budget, low-brow documentaries.”

So, after going through the various options on the Sky website, having to choose at least six packages, the grand monthly fee total came to £41.50, which works out at £498.00 per year.

Hmm. Maybe £180.00 isn't all that bad, then?

So as my dad might say, you're as bad burnt as you are scolded.

We have a free view box and we can choose from about twenty channels, most of which are utter crap. So it's just as well that we're not paying for these channels in addition to what we're already paying for.

That said, if there was a fee attached to them, we wouldn't be watching them in the first place.

So all of this circuitous background brings us to the question of what you get for one hundred and eighty pounds. Well, from the BBC at least, you get quite a lot, actually!

Starting with BBC Radio, you get no less than eleven main stations, then there's all of the digital radio, live broadcasts, education, science, entertainment .. well, just go to the website and see for yourself.

And if we then go to the regular BBC Television stuff, you get four main channels, two of which are on free view, plus the 24-hour news channel, kids stuff and politics. Again, go to the website and see for yourself.

That's a point, isn't it?

Almost each and every single program that the BBC put out is backed up with a website. There can't be a single person alive who's sat down in front of a television and not seen Sir David Attenborough presenting some natural history of wildlife program.

For example, BBC Science & Nature is often tied into all of the Learning stuff.

Anyway, that's all well & cozy, but why the price hike? What's that all about?

The government has decided that all terrestrial television broadcasts must be digital by 2012, as dictated by OFCOM.

Thing is, someone has to pay for all of this, and seeing as though the BBC have been the target men for a few years, it seems to make sense that they should pay for this.

Problem is, digital television isn't something that people have been exactly crying out for. So by forcing this change through -- which would effectively kill off ‘old-fashioned' analogue broadcasts in the process -- and making the public foot the bill hasn't exactly endeared the government towards its public.

I suppose a lot of people think that when we pay our license fee, that money goes towards paying for just BBC content, but that's just not the case.

Compared to the likes of America, we have a much smaller population, so there's no way for us to use commercial broadcasting as a means to absorb the full cost of the creation of content and the broadcasting thereof.

I remember going to Los Angeles when I was at college in the mid nineties. I spent eight weeks in Northridge on the college campus.

I remember going into one of the many communal rooms to watch some television. After just ten minutes I had to walk out and find entertainment elsewhere.

The sheer volume of commercial slots was just so thoroughly annoying and distracting, I simply couldn't ‘get into' what I was trying to watch.

It was then that I discovered what all of those little fade-out moments are in American shows that we watch over here.

Even on commercial channels over here, all of those fade-out moments aren't used for advertising.

For the uninitiated, there are adverts before, during and after the opening credits .. which is just mind-blowing.

So it's not hard to see how commercial television in America makes advertising pay.

Over here is Britain, advertising is a barely-tolerated interruption that can on occasion coincide with a toilet break or a chance to grab a drink or something to eat.

So obviously, advertising has a vastly different treatment depending on where you come from. So for me, watching American television was a huge, huge culture shock.

But in saying all of this, who was it that come up with the idea of subsidized viewing in the first place? Why it was the Americans, of course.

And out of this commercialization of the airwaves comes choice and a democratization of content, which is what it's all about in the end.

So clearly with the BBC being at one end of the broadcasting spectrum and American broadcasting being at the other, some balance has to be found that doesn't drive the British public daft in the process.

I think that the time has come to make the BBC bite the bullet and move towards commercial broadcasting as a way of bringing the license fee down.

I think the time has come to call time on a non-commercial BBC...

Frustration is a dish best served luke warm

I've never had much use for trust.

I'm not a naturally trusting person since most if not all of the people I've ever known have exhibited a perfectly timed and precisely executed capacity to let me down at the most inopportune moments.

Notice that last word? Plural, not singular.

So I just don't trust people because by and large, they rarely deserve it and do little to earn it.

I've always had to be self sufficient and do things for myself. But being a bloke, I'm quick to seize the opportunity to rest my head and put my feet up and let others do the work from time to time.

Some might see that as a contradiction; surely that would require trust? Not entirely. Some people are often duty-bound and / or paid to do these things. Trust, it seems, has a price.

However, those days seem to be gone.

As a business owner, you learn to not rely on people because the vast majority of the people you will deal with are not very good at their job.

If you're in any doubt about this, then you've obviously not read my various missives on the subject of rank idiocy and plain common-or-garden variety daftness exhibited by the various businesses I've put my money into the hands of over the years.

Over this past six months, I've found that there is nowhere to run to escape.

Almost half of my working week is spent doing the jobs of the people I pay to do the kinds of jobs that I should be able to just delegate and be sure and safe in the knowledge that said job gets done.

Suffice to say, said job doesn't get done because of the numpties doing them in the first place.

I liken these people to those toy robots that just walk in a straight line.

Should their straight-line path become uneven, they fall over, legs flailing.

Should they walk into a wall, they don't have the sense to turn either left or right, they just continue to walk into the wall.

At some point, the law of averages sort of dictates that I should meet someone or some business that can do that one thing that I entrust them to do without the need for me to call them every day to make sure they're doing what I asked them to, or for me to actually travel through and sit their with them while they do the thing.

Indecision rules and is final. Verbal briefs are a swear word. Deadlines are a waste of time.

So what have I learned?

A job done well is a job done yourself...

A poor head for figures driving me mad...

Yet again, someone has thrust some report through claiming that using a mobile / cell phone while driving is dangerous.

Yet again, we're weigh-laden with a huge body of data telling us how bad this activity can be.

Yet again, the government, the various research bodies and just about everybody else have singularly failed to answer the blatantly obvious questions I've had buzzing around my head since day one of this whole charade coming into fruition.

How can using a mobile / cell phone while driving a car be more dangerous than holding down a conversation with someone sat in your passenger seat?

In fact, I'd say that chatting to someone sat to the side of you is even more dangerous.

You disagree?

Of course you do. But if you read on, you might just change your mind.

The whole issue boils down to human nature. If you're anything like me, then you're a passionate observer of people. And if you're anything like me, you can actually observer yourself, your mannerisms and your way of doing things.

When you speak, unless you're a quadriplegic or an accountant, you use your hands. And if you're imparting a story or something humourous or trying to force your side of the argument in a heated debate, you'll use the rest of your body, too.

It's human nature to do so.

Another thing that you'll do is face the person that you're speaking to and look them in the eyes.

It's human nature to do so.

Doing this while trying to operate the controls of a vehicle traveling at any appreciable speed isn't the safest thing in the world to do.

And guess what? When you're driving, you're often imparting a story or something humourous or trying to force your side of the argument in a heated debate .. and you're using the rest of your body!

But things get worse.

What about smoking when you're driving .. while talking to someone sat at the side of you.

See what I'm driving at?