Volvo Netherlands is issuing schoolchildren with cycle helmets.
Dear Volvo, you are issuing children with equipment to protect against what, precisely? It isn’t the effects of crashing into cars, is it? Aha, you produce those cars, don’t you! Tell me, once you’ve got all the children wearing big orange headwear, will you move onto the adults, will everybody in the Netherlands wear an Anti-Volvo Protection Device? Will the whole world be dressed up to protect against the dangerous effects of the products you sell?
Tell you what, I’ll save you some expense. As you acknowledge in your press release, “prevention is always better than cure”. So how about – here’s an idea – you stop selling cars in the Netherlands? You could even operate a return scheme where you take back Dutch people’s cars in return for … well they won’t need a helmet anymore, how about a nice box of chocolates? Maybe a Brox, I’d quite like one of those.
I had a little collision with one of your cars a while back and it really wrecked my bike, do you think I could have a new one? I’m afraid the car got a bit dented as well, would you still take it back thankyouplease?
P.S. Your press release uses the statistic where helmets reduce 85% of head injuries. This was discredited years ago. Lose it.
Gordon met Gillian, now Dave’s just met Elizabeth. Mr Cameron is our new Prime Minister and the end of the world is nigh, or at least it is if you believe some people I know. In the age of slacktivism, facebook is littered with friends – even the Christian ones – “crying”, “afraid”, “mourning”, “doomed” … in a generally apocalyptic frame of mind. Horror of horrors, the hackneyed R.E.M. song is doing the rounds again.
Let me get this straight, I didn’t vote Tory on May 6th. I don’t entirely trust David Cameron. I certainly don’t look forward to the coalitions, bickering and cuts that will define the next couple of years. However, as Christians, shouldn’t we see all this from another perspective? David Cameron may have just gone to see the Queen, but I serve the King, who holds the world in his hands and who will still be on the throne long after the Cameron administration has been reduced to an historical footnote. Rulers and dominions may come and go, but I answer to a higher power. By him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. So do not worry, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.
Yes, the future’s unknown and yes, bad things will happen. Were I feeling particularly grim, I could quote from Luke 12: I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him. However, I’ve got a better idea: let’s look on the brighter side. Whatever may come, we have a Lord whose house has many rooms, who will never leave us. To quote the psalms, The Lord is my light and my salvation – whom shall I fear? Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will feel no evil, for you are with me. Whatever happens in the next few years, our place in God’s kingdom is assured. God is bigger than any government and he can fix anything they break.
Not convinced? Okay, let’s suppose for one moment that the prophets of doom are right. Margaret Thatcher was the antichrist, now Cameron’s coming in for the kill. This is, in fact the end of the world. Well, in that case, Jesus is about to return. There’ll be a new heaven and a new earth, every knee will bow down to the Lamb and he’ll wipe every tear from our eyes. If that’s our future, I think I’ll cope.
This article also was originally written for the SCM site at www.movement.org.uk.
Dear Nick Clegg,
I grew up in Sheffield Hallam, and am now at university in York. The Lib Dem PPC for York Outer, Madeleine Kirk, repeated Baroness Tonge’s disgraced and debunked allegations of organ farming in Haiti by Israel, and also stated that “the power of the Jewish lobbies in Washington and Britain” are the reason a full arms embargo has not been imposed on Israel (link). The latter statement reeks of conspiracy theory to me, and both statements appear antisemetic. I find Ms Kirk’s subsequent apology, “I recognise that the allegations against the IDF’s humanitarian operation in Haiti are completely unfounded and utterly reprehensible. I was not aware of the allegations when asked about them at the hustings and responded without considering their full implications” to be totally inadequate – if Ms Kirk is unable to consider the implications of her words before damning entire states, she is unfit to be a politician.
I find this casual rubbishing of the Jews to be totally unacceptable and hope you will remove her from her candidacy, even at this late stage. Antisemetism is surely the complete anathema of every liberal value that we in this country hold dear.
I eagerly wait to hear what disciplinary action you are taking against Ms Kirk.
Yours Sincerely
Gregory Melia
The Daily Telegraph have gone in for some creative headline writing today. This makes Alistair Darling jokes look tame, I love it! It links to this comment piece about how Cameron’s conservatives are targeting Edd Balls’ seat in an attempt to create a ‘Portillo moment‘.
David Cameron’s Conservatives are the “same old Tories” as they were under Maggie Thatcher, according to many.
Could this be baseless scaremongering by those who have nothing better to say because they have no leg to stand on? Could the proponents be wearing 30 year blinkers? I think not. I believe that some clever Labour scientists have discovered a 30 year timewarp in British history. In that case, what else can we expect from this election?
Tony Blair, it turns out, was James Callaghan, part of the good old, Same Old Labour.
That’s right, the Social Democrats never split off (so why the Lib Dems exist, I don’t know), Clause Four was never dropped and we should be recovering nicely from a winter of discontent (hey, maybe this is really true). The unions, far from caving in, should still be able to hold the the country to a three day week.
If Blair was Callaghan, that means that Brown is Michael Foot. Things are looking up in that case, as this year’s manifesto is the longest suicide note in history. I look forward to seeing the new (same old) David Thatchon (Margaret Catcher?) win a landslide election victory very soon.
I have just one request. Now we have this wormhole, could Nigel Farage and Nick Griffin both disappear down it?
If one thing’s bound to wind me up, it’s people of any political stripe trying to claim Jesus for their cause. I know plenty of leftists – it’s an occupational hazard of the eternal student – and I’m sick to the back teeth of the argument that goes, “We’re nice to people, the right wingers aren’t, so Jesus would be socialist.” On the other side of the fence the American right’s line goes something like, “We protect unborn babies and those lefties are rampant secularists, so Jesus would vote conservative.” Through all this, the British right look confused and carry on going to church, not quite aware that the CofE is in the hands of the s*cialists now, the ‘Tory party at prayer’ moniker being replaced with ‘Her majesty’s alternative opposition’.
There’s one main problem with claiming Jesus for your cause: Jesus didn’t fit into neat categories 2000 years ago and he still doesn’t today. A Jewish friend told me that Jesus was technically a pharisee, even though he got along infamously badly with the rest of the pharisee crowd (Pharisees were a religious grouping who could possibly be viewed as the evangelicals of their day, but who Jesus criticized for their addiction to laws). The title given to Jesus, “The Christ/Messiah*” was a political title given to the one who would deliver Israel from captivity and usher in a new age of God’s justice, but as we know, his idea of “Christ” was very different to the idea held by anyone else – it involved his own death, the ‘offence of the cross’ and a widening of God’s kingdom from Israel to the whole world.
It’s easy to paint a picture of a left wing Jesus; Feeding the poor, siding with the oppressed, talking truth to power, forming a community of followers in Jerusalem who shared everything they had. Then again, painting a traditional right wing Jesus isn’t so hard either: he stood by every smallest letter of the law (Matthew 5:18) and preached that you’ll face judgement on your own, the state of your soul is your own individual responsibility. He upheld a strong view of marriage and had no problem telling people when they were in the wrong.** The one political statement from Jesus that I can’t fathom, is his economic manifesto: “Give unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s, and give unto God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21). I’ve never quite worked out what it meant. Ideas, anyone?
A few years back, Jim Wallis wrote the book God’s Politics with the strapline, “Why the American Right Gets it Wrong and the Left doesn’t Get it”. He got a lot of things right. Jesus cares both about your own personal morality and also about the world, so neither the traditional leftist or rightist moralities are totally right, but they both contain an element of truth, and shouldn’t be rubbished. We concentrate on one or other sphere because we’re fallen, but Jesus cares about both. If we were perfect like he is, we wouldn’t need to vote along party lines of Left or Right, we’d simply do what was right.
As a Christian, it’s important that I put my politics under Jesus’ authority, just like any other part of my life. That means that for my view on any particular issue, he gets the last say – my politics should be bound by my theology and should submit to what I feel is the will of God. However, as I hope I’ve illustrated, it can be difficult to know quite what Jesus’ view of politics would be, since the will of God doesn’t fall neatly along party lines. We know the long term goal of politics, a society where the wolf lies down with the lamb but the medium term vision can be all too unclear. What we can know for sure, however, is how we should behave politically in the here and now, where our ends should never justify our means and we should examine each little action we take by God’s criteria:
And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
*These titles are equivalent. The first comes from greek, the second from hebrew.
**Is this story the first example of compassionate conservatism? Jesus tells the woman she’s in the wrong (“Go and sin no more”) but unlike the other men, doesn’t try to punish her for it.
In the news today, Catholic adoption agency Catholic Care has won the right to continue operating, without complying with the Government’s 2007 Sexual Orientation Regulations. This means they’re allowed to continue their work without offering kids to gay couples on an equal basis, which would contravene their Catholic beliefs. CC is the last of the Catholic adoption agencies, the rest have shut down or severed ties with the Church due to these regulations.
Jonathan Finney, of gay rights group Stonewall, isn’t at all happy about this. Says he:
“It’s unthinkable that anyone engaged in delivering any kind of public or publicly funded service should be given licence to pick and choose service users on the basis of individual prejudice.”
This is one of those quotes that suddenly throw a new light on everything and reveal where people are really coming from. Couples looking to adopt are apparently “service users”. That’s funny, I always thought that the people being served here were the kids and only the kids. Adopting a child isn’t something to do for your own gratification, so it sounds to me like Stonewall have put the cart before the horse. So, many congrtulations to Catholic Care!
If my view on the subject is worth anything, I’m glad I had both a mum and a dad. That’s not to diminish the work done by single parents by the way, but their situations can’t be classed as ideal. I don’t agree with the adoption agency’s stance, since having two mums or two dads has got to be better than growing up in state care. However, I find it ridiculous that the government see fit to lecture the Catholic Church on morality – it’s like a primary school kid telling their teacher how to do maths. I also feel that if this issue was really about getting more kids adopted (rather than a stick with which to beat the Catholic Church) the state could be a lot more inclusive of orthodox Christians – I have it from a social worker that anybody expressing anything but the Nu Labour party line on sexual ethics, would be excluded from adopting. Double standards, anyone?
I’ve invented something … I’ll call it the verify-o-meter.
When the internet* was invented in the 1960s, people thought it would be used for file transfer and for remotely operating computers. What actually happened was … email. Since geeks first started shooting the digital breeze, people have pontificated pointlessly online. Nowadays, many people’s main experience of the net amounts to various forms of online chat, through what’s known as Web 2.0.
The web’s a great place to chat but it’s also a bizarre, bad place. Much of what you read online is uninformed drivel and many of the people are freaks**. Lots of them are so used to spouting unverifiable rubbish, they’ve lost all conception of actually checking their facts. You can point this out to them, but in the multi-threaded world of online debate, you’d soon spend your entire life*** doing other people’s research, rather than putting forward your own points.
What’s needed is a simple, easy method of verifying someone’s ability to do their own background checks and a metric that can be used to rank the value of someone’s opinions.
The value of your opinion should relate to the level to which you’re informed on an issue. Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, so they should be helpful here. I propose that any argument made in an internet discussion should be weighted according to how far down a Google search you need to look to find confounding information.
For example: Say that someone tries to convince me that horses have three legs. When I type “horse” into Google, the first result is a picture of a four-legged horse. There are about 146 million results for “horse”, but the very first result confounds my online friend’s argument. He obviously hasn’t bothered to use Google to verify his point before he made it! He therefore gets a very low score.
Let’s say another sparring partner holds forth on a subject but the first fact that scuppers any of his points is 900,000th out of 1 million Google hits. He may very well have done his research, but missed this obscure piece of information. He therefore gets quite a good verifiability score, 90%. These verifiability scores can then be used to weight the theoretical ‘punch’ of an argument, ensuring that people’s arguments are given less notice if they’ve obviously not checked them beforehand. The easier a subject is to research on Google, the less value is attached to an argument showing evidence of that research not having taken place.
I name my unit the voogle, which stands for “Verified by Google”. You as an internet user will possess from 0 to 1 voogles, depending on how many obvious blunders you make.
With a little technical innovation, the voogle could be used to create an automatic ‘ignore’ list, like the manual ones found on many discussion boards. First, an algorithm needs developing which will search Google to reliably establish the lowest page rank of any confounding information****. Next, someone needs to host a ‘voogle server’ that can store details of all web users’ voogle scores. Lists, forums, social notworking sites etc can then have code written to look up each user’s voogle score on the central server, then fade users’ posts depending on their voogle score. The posts of a user with a perfect voogle score (ie. one who always researched to exclude silly errors before posting) would have perfectly clear letters while the posts of someone with a voogle score of 0 (ie. a troll) would be totally blanked out and someone in between (ie. a lazy or stupid person) would appear in a hard-reading grey colour.
My metric is the voogle and my method could revolutionise the web. Who’s with me?
I am also publishing this on www.halfbakery.com, the home of half-baked ideas.
*Okay, I mean the ARPANET.
**Like me. I’ve made over a thousand posts on two internet forums, leaving aside the one I administer.
***A life that you should be spending doing something else. Admit it, if you’re chatting online, you’re procrastinating from work. I should be writing something else this very minute.
****If you’d like to do this as a PhD, talk to EPSRC to get some funding. I’d fund you, but I’m too tight.
Dear Hugh Bayley,
I write concerning the state of the Millennium Bridge river crossing. For the past three weeks it has been covered in snow and ice, and there has been no evidence of any gritting or other clearing activity. I am a research student at the university and have recently moved to South Bank, and consequently need to cross the river every day. On my bike, I have found it necessary either to dismount and push across the slushy snow of the field, bridge and Maple Grove, or else to make the significant diversion over Skeldergate Bridge.
While I understand that snow clearing has largely been restricted to arterial routes, Millennium Bridge must surely count as such. South Bank is one of the major student areas for York University and thousands of students such as myself make use of the bridge every day, in addition to local residents who need to travel to Fulford and Heslington. Since York is a cycling city and over 13% of journeys are made by bike (2001 census), surely the city could show some commitment to the idea that not all important journeys are made by car, and clear snow from this major route across the south side of York on future occasions?
I look forward to hearing your response.
Yours Sincerely
Greg Melia
Cc: Councillors for Micklegate, Bishopthorpe, Drinhouses & Green Party councillors.
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