a Synod in the right direction.

Even the most liberal Christian will acknowledge that as archaic as the staunch traditionalist view is on gay clergy, it is at least based on something explicitly stated in the bible.

The arguments against women as priests before and as bishops now are altogether more to do with interpretation and supposition. The Internet and academia are littered with essays written on this subject from both sides none of which have the direct word of Christ or God on the matter. There is the primary argument that we should follow his example and he only chose penis wavers to be fishers of men. However on that note no vicar can eat pizza, Christ didn't. Archbishop don't get on that aircraft, is is not approved by the demonstrative school of rules about following the apostolic succession.

The secondary arguments are mostly based on readings of the Epistles, the salutation to Junia (along with Andronicus) in Romans "my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me" Vs 1 Timothy and "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection" with of course the attendant debates about authorship of those letters.

In any case we can but speculate about the motivations for the all boys club, so why do some people hold that there opposition to the ordination of women is a gospel truth?

Frustration at this nation

I have railed before at people objecting to something third or forth hand when they haven't checked the original story. I have also covered (along with many others) the extremes you get with commenting on mainstream news stories. This story about some research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation follows the pattern, I found the report a few clicks away from that page but it is quite a way down the page, after a large number of comments all suggesting that because there was a suggestion of suing public transport that it had to be all done in London because no other tons or cities shave public transport, before someone else who has bothered to read it points out that most of the work was done in the Midlands of England with London having a check group along with Wales and Scotland. Why they couldn't have read the report I don't know.

The other great thing the comments highlight is that because the result isn't exactly right for them the commenters have to do tedious and pointless maths to show how they are special, missing somewhat the point of statistical benchmarks they are there to measure populations against not you you self centred idiot, they are there to inform policy to ensure that more people, preferably everyone has a decent standard of living and it is unlikely that any policy maker is going to specifically draft something just because the 43 doesn't run at the right times for you to get to work so you drive or you have a large student loan due to re-sitting a year. Get a grip.

Flash bang wallop

Philip Gwynne, of the West Yorkshire Casualty Reduction Partnership, which is responsible for speed cameras in the county, said: “Mr Fielden was doing what any other loving husband would do pointing out where something was possibly being done wrong and he attempted to do that using the laws of physics. “However, the judge has ruled that as in any other situation English law can over rule the law of physics. “Maybe it is time that we left physics in the classroom and allowed cameras to get on with the job of raising lots and lots of lovely money for us. How dare people challenge the universal truth that these things are far cheaper than real police officers.”

I must declare an interest in that I know the Fieldens, but I don't know any of the specifics of the case. Other coverage suggests that it wasn't just a simple case of attempting to blind the court with science in order to get off a fine, but that the camera was set up contrary to the manufacturers instructions. While I picked Mr Gwynne's comments as the easier target for satire the more worrying quote from the Examiner article is “I hope the large costs in this case will cause other motorists to think carefully before mounting spurious challenges.” from Trevor Hall, managing director of road safety support for the Association of Chief Police Officers, in other words, stop complaining peasants and accept what your lords and masters tell you, questioning us will just lead to punitive costs. Only those with large amounts of money should be given a fair day in court, the rest of you back to your mud.

Is it really bothering God?

I have already posted what I think about the current schism in the church over homosexuality. It looks like the idea of a split in the church is in the offing again. The booklet for the 'Gafcon' meeting in Jerusalem says

"We want unity… but not at the cost of re-writing the Bible to accommodate the latest cultural trend."

by latest cultural trend I assume they mean not persecuting your fellow man for being overly fond of his fellow man. I am also not 100% convinced that setting up this rival to the Lambeth Conference they are in any way promoting unity. Oh well if they do decide to bugger off out of the Anglican Communion I won't miss them and it saves me having to become a Scottish Episcopalian (after all it is vitally important to identify which church you don't get round to going to).

I have little sympathy for those that say that the bible is the word of God and inviolate because they are all so selective in which practices they think we need to return to in order to be good Christians, which parts of a rule set designed for a desert people thousands of years ago we should pay attention to, I would have much more respect if they had 100% courage in all their convictions. I also suspect that they don't follow all the rules about food that are in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, why are these any less important that who you fuck given most of us eat more in our lives than we screw? I shall leave you with one of my favourite pieces of writing on the subject from the West Wing.

Jed Bartlet: I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an "abomination"!
Jenna Jacobs: I don’t say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President. The Bible does.
Jed Bartlet: Yes it does. Leviticus!
Jenna Jacobs: 18:22.
Jed Bartlet: Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I wanted to sell my youngest daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown Sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?
(Bartlet only waits a second for a response, then plunges on.)
Jed Bartlet: While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff, Leo McGary, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself? Or is it okay to call the police?
(Bartlet barely pauses to take a breath.)
Jed Bartlet: Here’s one that’s really important, because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads? Think about those questions, would you?

Sick to my stomach

Even if I didn't think David Davis was right to make the stand he has.

Even if I couldn't find myself able to support a tory campaign.

I have just had the greatest motivation to support his campaign, Kelvin Mackenzie probably standing as the Rupert Murdoch candidate in the in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. I would rather Alan B'Stard stood for his old constituency. The worst point in his monologue espousing the pro side of the debates on 42 days, CCTV and ID Cards was that the innocent have nothing to fear. Tell that to Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yezza the Nottingham university academics detained over attempting to do research, the teenager summonsed for holding a placard summerising a High Court judgement on Scientology or anyone within the reach of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad sporting an Irish accent during the 70s.

I now have to go find a really strong anti-emetic.

Note to the drivers of Sheffield.

174 Box junctions. These have criss-cross yellow lines painted on the road (see 'Road markings'). You MUST NOT enter the box until your exit road or lane is clear. However, you may enter the box and wait when you want to turn right, and are only stopped from doing so by oncoming traffic, or by other vehicles waiting to turn right. At signalled roundabouts you MUST NOT enter the box unless you can cross over it completely without stopping.

We have some particularly noxious box junctions in our fair city which often get themselves into all sorts of trouble due to people forgetting these fairly simple rules. The worst is probably this one which is plagued both by drivers coming up the dual carriageway queuing across it but also, and much worse for traffic flow, busses turning right from the east of the picture not understanding that while they are allowed into the box they are not suppose to stop diagonally all the way across it blocking people from crossing the junction in any direction.

There are many things painted on our roads that may not be necessary for their safe and efficient use (Kensington and Chelsea have created a lot of comment being minimalist on the High Street). I also understand that there are often junction layouts where things seem to have been put their because the town planner hates drivers. I really don't think box junctions are necessarily one of these things and certainly not in this particular case. People could do well in understanding that just sometimes these road markings are in place to help and not the mark of an oppressive state.

IANAL

I kept getting people asking me to sign this: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/dancers/ I couldn't find a new Violent Crimes Reduction Bill so decided the one it probably referred to is the Violent Crime Reduction Act of 2006. But none of that matched what the petition was saying, still I thought some of its provisions are about to be subject to a commencement order. At this point I asked the Internet for help.

The key bit appeared to be the talk of "historical re-enactment" and "sporting activity" which led a friend to point me at this statutory instrument from April. Which amends section 141 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 in the same way that the VCRA '06 did. However as far as those dancers are concerned I can't see that it repeals the added defences that VCRA '06 added to CJA '88 which included "the purposes of theatrical performances and of rehearsals for such performances". From my reading various licensing acts and bizarrely the NI factories act I feel that an argument that a dance performance counts as "theatrical" has weight, but as it says in the title of the post IANAL^[1].

I await the governments response, to see whether they make a similar point or suggest that the petitioners are right.

What was most interesting was that none of the people asking me to sign the petition could point me at the proposal they wanted me to sign up to oppose. Why do I think that is important, because I feel that petitions with fatuous, inaccurate or pointless messages should be kept out of the way, the government love them as they help camouflage the really important ones in the system. It could however, in this case, just have been difficult to find. These days of course pretty much everything is online, but when you come to these pieces of legislation that are added to over the years by order and amended by later bills, it can be difficult to work out exactly how the relevant legislation looks now. There are shiny databases out there that purport to collate all this information, but they all seem to be proprietary and I don't even seem to have enough status to get a free trial.

^[1]If I had the time and the money I would love to at least do an OU law degree if not actually go the whole hog to lawyerdom. If I had even more time and money, going back to University to do it for real now I understand the value of learning could be a great experience.

Late term abortion

Nadine Dorries has shown herself to be utterly able to deal with any facts before. First her accusations against Ben Goldacre over stealing data that was published by her committee. Then falling for 'the hand hope' rubbish. Now a group of specialists in neonatal, perinatal and paediatric medicine and epidemiology read the comments of the house Science and Technology committee that "it was recognised that published peer reviewed UK evidence is lacking to answer the question of whether the survival of infants born at 23 or 24 weeks has improved in recent years." and did a study comparing 1994-9 with 2000-5. The study looked at all infants born in the region in question and concluded:

Survival of infants born at 24 and 25 weeks of gestation has significantly increased. Although over half the cohort of infants born at 23 weeks was admitted to neonatal intensive care, there was no improvement in survival at this gestation. Care for infants born at 22 weeks remained unsuccessful.

So what was Nadine's reaction?

This report is the most desperate piece of tosh produced by the pro-choice lobby and it smells of one thing, desperation.

To use a particularly childish, but I think apposite response no you are. This isn't opinion, this is science, the only way this could be bunkum is if they had made the numbers up, which given these are numbers that are a matter of public record isn't really a feasible idea. There isn't even any complex statistics in the research to confuse someone not versed in epidemiological methodology, they key point pretty much boils down to: is an increase to 19% from 18% between two five year periods a significant one? I don't think it is difficult to accept the conclusion that the answer is no.

The really great thing is that Nadine asks the question "No improvement in neo-natal care in twelve years? Really? So where has all the money that has been pumped into neo-natal services gone then?" to which the answer is in the report! "The proportion of infants dying in delivery rooms was similar in the two periods, but a significant improvement was seen in the number of infants surviving to discharge". Nadine thinks that those using science and facts have shot them selves in the foot with this report, I think she has shot herself in the head with this reaction.

London has appeared to have developed an annoying whine

Ok so I don't live in London, the mayoralty is still important, the capital can quite often be the only part of the country tourists see, the Olympics are coming up oh and like the rest of the country I'm having to stump up cash for the place.

So while Boris is so far an unproven force in running the city, he did win an election, fair and square. Yet the Internet is alive with people complaining about the how the result came about. The first group are just plain bitter and nasty, they are the ones infecting the place (especially commenting on sites like the BBC and Comment is Free) with complaints that Boris got in due to all the people in the suburbs who voted for him, They aren't proper Londoners, they don't have the right Postcodes, winge winge. To the best of my knowledge the definition of the bounds of Greater London haven't changed dramatically since 1965 so these have always been the people electing the umbrella layer of local government, even in the days of the GLC. But I don't recall any lobbying  for them to not be part of the Authority before so this must be just sour grapes.

The other set of whimpering is about the voting system and that it caused problems. Some people such as the greens are even saying their supporters were too stupid to vote for them which seams a bit ungracious if you ask me. I think civics lessons are a good idea in general, but I don't think how to vote should trouble the curriculum for too much of the total time for them, given that it is a really simple process. I will be eagerly awaiting the report on the counts that will be produced by ORG but so far no-one is reporting chaos on the scale of the Scottish elections of last year, so I doubt that it really was such an issue.

Time up for Sheffield Airport

Sheffield Airport is to close for good as that BBC news story suggests a bunch of people are trying to save it. Why bother? Here it is compared with Finningley at the same scale, one is a quite a bit bigger than the other. You will also notice that the main runways are aligned in different directions, one is better aligned for the prevailing wind conditions than the other. I'll leave you to guess which one...

What-a-Mess

The cuddly puppy of the cabinet Andy Burnham wants to criminalise football fans who sell their spare ticket to a mate according to Dizzy. Actually having read the DCMS's response it is much worse, they want to do this and they don't want to do this, they want to help the consumer and the promoter and ask the secondary market what they think. They want refunds to be more available where the consumer needs them but not burdensome on the promoter if they get lots. It really looks like they took the original Culture, Media and Sport Committee report as loose leaves and a stack of random notes on the subject submitted by everyone in the department and then let the office afghan puppy loose on the two piles. After ten minutes anything even slightly legible was picked up, dusted off and passed to the typing pool with instructions for it to be transcribed verbatim.
I think there is a sensible middle way to all this, require that the promoter has to either accept refunds (and outlaw utterly disproportionate "fees") or allow the tickets to be resold at only at face value.

Ad industry in lack of originality shocker

With their coverage of the IPL alongside several flavours of rugby I am watching a reasonable amount of setanta sports at the moment. As with most cable television channels the adverts are in predictable blocks, lots of Guinness and Magners during live rugby for example. As it gets late of an evening, it moves towards SMS based flirting and recently lots of instances of this advert for Berocca. Which if you have had any exposure to popular YouTube videos you will recognise as a rip off of Here It Goes Again by OK Go. Of course borrowing from other peoples creative works by advertising executives is nothing new, it is some years now since an advertising agency watched the Hudsucker Proxy and decided to drop a car off a building in the snow and have it stop just above the road. It is also unlikely to ever stop the thinking it saves them leaves them more time to snort coke of the pert buttocks of recently legal boys.

Illegal to say illegal

I really wish it was illegal to say something was illegal when it wasn't. Some pubs do it when they don't want to serve certain drinks that look wrong to the untutored eye like a Black and Tan or snakebite. Instead of being honest with the customer and saying "the landlord won't let us" or "it is against the pub company policy" they lie about the law thinking people are less likely to argue.
It happened to a woman in front of me in the supermarket the other day, I don't know if it was bad staff training that meant the checkout staff didn't realise the difference between the law on the sale of Paracetamol and painkillers in general, or perhaps he just thought ibuprofen contained paracetamol, or it is a badly implemented a company policy but still.
I suppose it would just be another law that people objected to you pointing out to them (oh the irony) given they generally go into utterly nasty defensive mode when you call them on their mistake/lie and given how shitty people are when you point out they are breaking the rules themselves; this mostly happens with traffic regulations and the smoking ban, not had to say "excuse me, do you know holding up a building society with a shotgun is against the law" in a while.

It isn't often

The original opening of this post was "It isn't often that I find myself agreeing with Iain Dale" but the truth of the matter is that it isn't often I agree with anyone.

In this case Iain is reporting an incident of people wanting to stifle the freedom of someone to hold certain views and speak about them at a consultative meeting. In the end he was  allowed to speak, but had to leave the room while the discussions were going on. I fundamentally believe that freedom of speech is paramount even if you are in the filthy business of being a campaigner for smokers rights and a passive smoking denier. I just feel that this sort of rubbish will get more prevalent.

Apparently Mervyn King is after giving more of our money to bankers. We need to find a way to try and protect the vulnerable sector of their customers without feathering the nests of the directors and shareholders.

mistakes do happen

One of my favorate blogs at the moment is one where those poor buggers in retail vent their frustration at customers who never get it, no matter how polite and appolagetic you are. While some UK based stories appear it is mostly stuff from the other side of the atlantic.
Mostly because over here in supermarkets the customer is always wrong. I was in a popular high street brand recentley. Despite warning the checkout opperator that I had an unusual bulk perchase offer she rang it through individualy, when I was insistent she was over charging me, she called over the suppervisor who again told me I was wrong. Then after they both went and checked the special offer poster and leaflet she took 5 minutes to work out which barcode to scan. I know how difficuld this can be like explaining to people why when the have taken one tin of beans from a four pack and the till wants to charge them full price. They could have erased the whole thing in one simpld way, "I'm sorry about that" instead as I walked out they talked behind their hands, I was an awkward customer.

In another story the head of Public Protection at Liverpool Council is calling on the BBFC to give 18 certs to films featuring smoking. Perhaps if he went and asked the councils licencing dept about how the whole thing works he could cut out the middle man. BBFC certs only work in cinemas on the sufference of the council.
Sorry for any typos, mobile blogging is currently spell check free.

The angry post.

Several people asked me what I though of the idea of making our children swear an oath of allegiance. I didn't post it before because a blog post with "Oh do fuck off" in 1440 point lettering could offend.

The list of people who should try and find something more constructive to do, because at the moment they are just wasting everyone's time utterly, includes Lindsay Hoyle, the ASA and of course Jacqui Smith. No she hasn't done anything much new, she is just still banging on about ID cards. I think we should have a locked cage match between her and Bruce Schneier about how her scheme just won't work.

In other news the following are true of course: I am angry at the poor performances the rugby and cricket teams put in, congratulate JW on his record, I'm hopelessly optimistic about the results from the next test for each team, thoroughly board with both the US primaries and the stupid mud slinging in the London mayoral elections. Oh and it is nice to see a bunch of my friends finally seeing Delia for what she is, useless.

Grrrrrr

Very tired today so my apologies if this turns into more of a rant than I intend. My favourite moderate newspaper has been running a campaign to bring back the death penalty. I'm not going to have a go at the paper for pandering to their readership, or that readership for being who they are. My bile is reserved for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who while is happy to rail against embryological research and campaign against abortion can't bring himself to say that the death penalty shouldn't happen full stop. What kind of spineless wet is the man? What constituency is he worried he will alienate if he does? What part of "Thou shalt not kill" does he not understand? Has he never in his fifty-two years in the church read the Sermon on the Mount?

The other thing that caught my eye this morning was this piece from Iain Dale about an email he had received. On one hand I agree about the nanny state, there is far to much proscription in schools as was show over the child who wasn't allowed to ware her faith based ring a while back. On the other very little of the discussion is about the most important line in the original email: Of course, they ripped the kitchens out of this school years ago. We shouldn't be making rules about chocolate or going to the chip shop to get the kids to eat healthily, we just need to give them the old the cardinal points of fingering a murder suspect, motive, means and opportunity. Opportunity means a canteen in every school serving a good selection of balanced meals, means means they should be priced to the market^[1]; motive is the difficult one, I would hope that if we get a generation of children growing up under the previous two conditions they may develop a taste for wholesome food on their own. That is almost certainly rank optimism, it may even be just as gullible to suggest that teaching this generation domestic science may catch their kids but I just fear that there are some people that consider obesity like benefits as a right.

While I'm probably not going to go as far as Dizzy and say that Jacqui Smith's new seizure plans are "quite possibily the most anti-liberty, anti-justice policy ever", since I can think of a few that could well be considered worse including most of the anti-terrorism measures, anything that makes peacefully protest less lawful, compulsory or even effectively compulsory by hanging essential services or benefit entitlement on them ID Cards, I do think that (almost miraculously) she has continued the tradition that each Home Secretary is more fascist than the last, this runs all the way back to Kenneth Clarke (it is fair to say he wasn't to the right of Kenneth Baker).

^[1]Of course beanz meanz heinz(scroll down to 1967, I love that factoid)

You can set your watch by it

The rules are:

1. BBC announces new way of getting their content
2. Within hours someone complains

This time it is the putting of content onto iTunes, Iain is saying that the BBC are making him pay twice.

Perhaps someone from the BBC could get in touch to explain why licence fee payers are now expected to pay £1.89 to watch a programme they have already paid for through the licence fee

While this is technically true, it isn't new and it isn't a rip off, the BBC have been selling on their content after free transmission for years, I would estimate that the biggest single supplier of DVDs to my collection is the BBC. Aunty gives everyone in the UK an opportunity to watch a programme on the television, usually several times, then you get 7 days more to watch it on iPlayer or your rich content providers "listen again" service (Virgin Media's has a slight annoyance, I don't get the whole 7 days to watch a programme as the clear the previous weeks content from a day at midnight) and these days you then probably get repeats on one of the many cable channels. If after all that you still haven't seen it but you want to you go and buy it. What the iTunes move is trying to do is make that last bit easier, not impinge on all the other ways you can get the content that have been paid for by the licence fee, in fact it is trying to make it easier for a specific group of people, those that don't buy the DVDs (and thus pay for more BBC programmes to be made) but go hunting for video captured copies of the content to download of the internet. What the BBC are hoping is that enough of these people will think it is easier to pay the money than spend the time trawling for downloads to make the whole project worthwhile. It would be interesting to know how much of the technology to get this done was already there in the iPlayer backend that cost most of the money that people were complaining that the BBC spent on the project.

Or maybe Iain is right, we have paid for this, let us ban the BBC from commercialising the content, pull the DVDs from the shelves and pull the cable channels they partner in. Of course shutting down the commercial arm of the BBC would mean the licence fee having to be raised by about 20% but that has to be worth it if we have already paid?

The name is Morris, Philip Morris

Licence to smoke

Health for England have coughed up a proposal to bring in a smoking licence, somewhat similar to the Rod Licence you have to obtain from the environment agency if you want to go fishing. Now I dislike both activities about as much but thanks to the recent smoking ban they both happen outside in the drizzle away from me. Apparently the bureaucratic nightmare involved in obtaining the licence will persuade people to give up as that is the easy path.

Let us examine some typical users shall we, your average Gruaniad reading smoking  hippy is unlikely to be put off by the forms neither is the stereotypical low income single parent who has already filled in thousands of forms for tax credits and free prescriptions etcetera. Oh hang on, why bother separating these people out, they are all in one category, addicts, they will do anything for a fix, why do these people think a little paperwork is going to get in the way?

Graham Calvert is a loser

The BBC and other news outlets are carrying the pathetic whining of a man who through his own actions spent lots of money doing something incredibly stupid, gambling. We will come to his specific reasoning as to why he thinks he is justified later, but first the compulsory complaint about the inexorable slide down into the fiery pits of a hell where no-one is personally responsible for their actions and they have to point the finger at the other people that *could* have stopped them, probably with the other hand outstretched for a handout.

Mr Calvert is contending his bookmaker is liable because he asked them to put him on their "self exclusion" list for six months, this means his account would have been in a state where he couldn't use it. As far as I can tell from the media coverage this is what happened. He then opened another account and gambled with it. Now there could be an issue here if he used the same credit card that should have been marked as excluded with his original account. But if he opened the new account with a new card then there is nothing the bookies could have done to stop him.

Take this hypothetical situation: Graham Calvert is not the only person with that name at his address, his father or son is also Graham Calvert, if they try and open an account they should be allowed to, no matter what their relation has done. In fact it is stronger than that, if William Hill refused them because of the suspended account they have just revealed that the other Graham Calvert has a suspended account and thus a gambling problem. They have just committed a very serious data protection offence.

"I think it was irresponsible of William Hill exploit me the way they did. It has ruined my life."

The bleeding heart crowd agree with his statement that he has been exploited by a nasty company when he subverted their systems and opened another account. Why can't he just show some backbone and get on with putting his life back together?