Sim-O

BBC…

The Church of England’s ruling body will close its meeting with a call for more recognition of the compatibility of religious belief with science.

The motion will urge it to fight back in what is the latest move in a public battle between atheists and believers.

The compatibility of science and religion only goes so far.
The scientist that is also a believer may, for instance, recognise evolution and all the current scientific thoeries as true and look deeper in to how the world works, but ultimately, will come to the conclusion that it all started with god.

An athiest scientist will keep looking.

The motion at the General Synod in London is proposed by Dr Peter Capon.

Many religious people feel they are being gradually pushed out of the public sphere by opponents who are using science as a weapon.

‘Science’ itself isn’t the weapon, rational arguement is. And seeing as religion is not a rational ‘thing’*, then religion is on a loser. Science will one day have all the answers. Although it may take a bit of time.

(*I can’t find the link to which religious person said it recently, so drop a link in the comments if you do)

Dr Capon, himself a former lecturer in computer science, says atheists are misleading the public when they claim science and religion are incompatible.

Athiests are misleading the public? Atheists are using evidence and rational thought. It is the religious folk that are misleading the public with stories and assertions and rules that have supposedly come form god but only come from someone or people with a knack for manipulating people and telling a good story.

Think of it this way. Two scientists, one an atheist and one a believer, after rigorous experimentation and testing and research, after following all the evidence they find about the beginning of life, the universe and everything, they end up ringing the doorbell on the Pearly Gates. God answers.
The religious scientist turns to the atheist and says ‘See. I said it was him that did it. Our quest for the ultimate answer has finished.’
The Atheist scientist looks at God and asks ‘So. How did you do it, then?’

Via Gimpy’s blog (this post about homeopaths launching a hate campaign again Dr Evan Harris MP), I ended up at the Homeopathy Heals site. I will admit that I don’t read homeopathic stuff much. Why bother? It’s a load of old wank. I read various skeptics, if that is the right word for these guys that believe medicine should be subjected to proper trials with replicable, provable results, because they’re a good read with various levels of shock/outrage/’wtf-ness’/humour.

I’m not sure why though, but I though I would have a look at this Homeopathy Heals site. There’s nothing here that will surprise you, but anyway here is my tuppence on homeopathy.

You cannot randomly take homeopathic medicines, as they will only work, when carefully selected, for something that needs curing.

(source)

If a medicine has an active ingredient then there will be an effect, whether you are ill or not. That effect may not be the desired one, but there will be an effect. So, just remind me again why no one can overdose on homeopathic medicine?

Of course homeopaths know that one dose of however many pills taken together in one go, is the equivalent of only one dose, because each dose is a stimulus and it is the time frame that counts.

(source)

Oh, of course. The quantity of the supposedly active ingredient doesn’t matter. One dose of homeopathy is one dose when taken as instructed until someone takes large quantities and then they’re still taking only one dose. What is a dose of homeopathy is elastic, depending on how much you are actually taking.

Presumably then, homeopaths only put a teeny-weeny amount of the active ingredient in their medicine not because only a specific amount is needed or too much will be harmful, but to keep costs down.

But if the dose of homeopathy is a stimulus, it kick starts the body into healing itself, then surely a larger quantity of the bollox-in-a-bottle will stimulate more. Once again, this resulting stimulation may have an adverse effect and make someone iller rather than better, but it would have a effect. Wouldn’t you have thought?

According to it’s practitioners homeopathy is has no side effects. It doesn’t matter how much you take you can’t overdose. It is non-addictive, works fast in acute conditions, slow in chronic ones. Safe for everyone including animals and is cheap (apparently). It has, miraculously, no downsides at all.

It all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? And we know what they say about things that are too good to be true, don’t we.

Via Le Canard Noir
(all links to the Homeopathy Heals site are rel=”nofollow”)

I got a new post up at Mailwatch. Some cunt thinks smoking is good and that smokers do the NHS a favour by dropping down dead prematurely, which obviously all smokers do, except the ones that die a protracted painful death over many years of course.

I didn’t even go into the nightmare that was the comments underneath it.

The brain. That big lump of goo that controls everything about us, that lump of cells that give us our thoughts, that makes sense of the world aruond us, that does things that we have no control over in ways that we don’t know about. It makes us who, and what, we are. Without it we are nothing.

So who’s clever bloody idea was it to put it where it is?

It sits right on top of our bodies, exposed to what ever falls out the sky onto it and ready to be smacked against the ground whenever we take a tumble. It is attached to the main part of us by the flimsiest of connections, the neck, which really doesn’t take a lot to crack or break resulting in the disconnection between the control room of the body and the rest of the machinery rendering us to various degrees of helplessness.

It is packaged inside a hard case that has no softening on the inside. Even when the case is left undamaged by a blow, the brain inside can still be damaged by being bounced against the sides of its’ abode.

It really is a ridiculous arrangement for such an important organ. Intelligent design? If it was, it was a Friday afternoon job.

via Liberal Conspiracy

Well, it’s only day two of the Copenhagen Climate Conference, and already it all seems to be going wrong, a leaked draft treaty that concentrates power in the hands of the rich nations! Could you make this up?

It seems that the world leaders are failing us in a big way, but this is hardly unsurprising. In the last blog, I highlighted the fact that there are too many vested interests that stand to lose large amounts of money, and this is borne out by the attempt to push through a deal that will mean the developing world has to bear the brunt of emission reductions. Of course, this is the only logical thing to do for western big business, as it is obvious that their profits simply cannot exist alongside business practices that treat the climate with respect. Capitalism and the natural environment are simply not compatible.

The question is, where do we go from here? Just yesterday, we heard the conference chairperson, in the opening speach, telling us that this is the last best chance to make an agreement on cutting emissions, yet a day later the only agreement on the table will merely protect the profits of a tiny minority. That the fate of mankind is left in the hands of those who apparently represent us is a farce… We don’t just need disobedience, as Naomi Klein has called for, we need something that will revolutionise the way that we run the world economy…

Two students, one a great friend of mine,  from the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands are cycling from the Hague to Copenhagen, raising awareness of the threat of climate change along the way. To make it more difficult, they are doing it on dutch granny bikes! They are relying on locals putting them up on the way, and are doing it on a shoe-string budget.

Follow them and send the messages of support!!

Their aim is to get to Copenhagen to for the demonstrations at the farce that is to be the latest Climate Change summit.

The UK send off demonstration is Saturday December 5th in London, meeting in Grovesnor Square at 12pm, to encircle Parliament later in the afternoon. We need to urge our governments to do more, but unfortunately it seems as though they are unable to fight the interests of the oil companies and big business.

This is unlikely to happen within the current economic system. The threat of reduced profits means that rich nations are unable to reach an agreement with the developing world on reducing emissions. Markets need to be protected, companies need to remain ‘competitive’, profits rates upheld, and the system needs to grow. And grow, and grow.

However, even the planet has limits – it cannot support limitless growth, but the system is unable to function without it, so we keep heading down the path of environmental destruction full speed ahead. We know how to stop it, but are we strong enough to put on the brakes?

Just a quicky about a couple of tweets from Nadine Dorries.

From the surrounding tweets, Nadine is arguing against the governments drugs policy, and how effective it is. I don’t know the exact argument but you don’t need to here as the statements made by Nadine are absolutely ridiculous and even I could do better.

http://twitter.com/NadineDorriesMP/status/6168531952

Lamb made the point that based on statistics, alcohol is more serious than drugs. I’ve never seen anyone selling booze at a school gate.

Can you guess the reason Nadine has never seen anyone selling booze at a school gate? Could it be something to do with shops and pubs? Kids aren’t stupid, why would they be risk getting into trouble by buying booze from a dodgy bloke outside school in full view of the authorities (teachers and other people that will report them) when they can just as easily get lashed on drink bought by themselves or their older looking mates from an off-licence?

http://twitter.com/NadineDorriesMP/status/6168961615

I’ve never heard of anyone stabbing or murdering someone or trafficking for a drink and our Prisons aren’t full of alcoholics.

The MP for Mid-Beds has never heard of drink dealers stabbing and murdering each other because the criminal element has been taken out of the system. The business of selling alcohol has been put into the hands of proper, licenced business men. The role of contraband booze has been left with the the small guy that does a booze cruise and sells to his mates or the big criminal gangs that make counterfiet vodka. The role of the nasty vicous bastards you get in the middle of the drugs trade is non-existant because you either need lots of equipment and time and an investment and the demand for hooky booze is negligible and so not enough money in it. Drugs are easy money.
Prisons also may not be bursting at the seams with alcoholics, but you can’t walk around a prison for very long with out bumping in someone with a problem…

Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what estimate he has made of (a) the number and (b) the proportion of prisoners diagnosed with alcohol problems in each prison in England and Wales, in each of the last 10 years. [265702]

Mr. Hanson: A number of studies have provided a picture of the alcohol-related problems experienced by those entering prisons:

Research(1) carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 1997 stated that 63 per cent. of sentenced males and 39 per cent. of sentenced females reported a hazardous drinking pattern in the year before coming into prison. This figure rises to 70 per cent. in the case of young adult offenders. The numbers who are physically dependent on alcohol, which can be defined as those who need alcohol detoxification (Tiers 3 and 4 of Models of Care for Alcohol Misusers (MoCAM)), are much lower at around 8 per cent. of females and 7 per cent. of males.

The Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SCPR) study(2), a large national longitudinal survey of newly sentenced adult prisoners, reported in 2008 that 36 per cent. of the sample could be classified as heavy drinkers. However, heavy drinking—defined as drinking more than twice the recommended sensible daily limits—is not directly comparable to the hazardous drinking category used in the ONS report.

http://twitter.com/NadineDorriesMP/status/6169016126

Off licences don’t control housing estates and publicans don’t run brothels, control child prostitutes and fund trafficking from booze.

Would drug dealers be able to control housing estates and fund people trafficking from drugs if drugs were legal like booze? I strongly doubt they would.
I also doubt that drugs fund people trafficking and prostitution to as greater extent that is usually portrayed.
Criminals are in drugs and prostitution for the money. That’s why there isn’t a black market for alcohol as there is for drugs. Think about it. Why would you break the law for lots of work, lots of hassle and no reward? Are criminals using prostitution as a loss-leader, like Tesco does with milk? Of course not.

The points above are supposed to be argueing in favour of stricter, harsher drug laws. They fail completely.

Mid-Beds, this is your MP. Please learn from your mistake at the next election.

Oh, and drugs are bad, mmkay?

Update:
Two more posts on the same set of Dorries tweets, the first from JDC325 who has more detail on the figures and stuff, and the second (via JDC325) from Mark Reckons which contains this nugget of comedy…

[Nadine tweets:] When I visited a womens prison, 100% of inmates were in for drugs related offences. 100%

As El_Cuevro tweeted, HM Prison Service says that 33% of female prisoners are in for drug offences. Nadine’s figure of 100% can only be because she must have visited a drug offenders institution.

In a recent debate at Kings College on the future of capitalism, Martin Wolf, one of the main proponents of global capitalism, and principal economic spokesperson for the City, argued that we can not easily change the nature of global wealth inequality, as people in the developed world would not be prepared to give up what they already have. In a defence of capitalism, and in response to one of the questions from the floor, he challenged the audience as to whether they would all be prepared to give up half of everything they owned for redistribution to poorer countries.

http://www.youtube.com/user/adycousins#p/u/7/hYpHLnlUrFg

The argument that in order to achieve any kind of large structural change to the economy there must be a trade off against current standards of living is one that is very popular in capitalist circles, and often repeated, yet it hides the real structural factors that prevent any meaningful change. This type of argument is even used by those who see capitalism as merely a least worst system, but who cannot envisage any other way of challenging the status quo than ’sharing’ the costs.

In the example of global poverty, we  (the general population) are asked to give up our current (modest) living standards to help others. However, this hides the real causes of global inequalities, such as  the production of goods based on profit rather than human need, the resources wasted on illegal and immoral wars and the reification of the financial sector over the productive sector.

Within developed countries like the US and UK, income inequality is already increasing, so the cuts are already happening to some extent:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/08/tax-system-reform-weath-inequality

Although not everywhere:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/21/executive-pay-bonuses-goldmansachs

The cuts that need to be made are not in the living standards of the population and public services (which compromise the social wage), but in the income of the wealthy, the bonuses of the bankers, nuclear weapons and war, and corporate profits. We need production to be realigned to meet human needs, and we need to stop pretending that gambling on stocks and shares contributes anything to society as a whole. We have the greatest productive capacity in the history of mankind, yet we are still unable to feed, clothe and shelter the world. We don’t need cuts in wages, jobs and production to help the capitalists cope with the financial crisis, we need them to accept cuts in their profits and their wages.

The same argument is seen with regards to climate change. We are told that we need to ‘reduce or energy consumption’, or pay higher prices if we don’t in order to cut global emissions.  We need to fly less, drive our cars less, use less power at home.

These mechanisms barely touch the tip of the iceberg, but are an ideological drip to prepare us for the higher prices and ‘trade-offs’ we will be forced to make in the future. Of course, when they say ‘we’ need to fly less , they don’t mean everyone. As fuel prices rise in the future, the poorest will suffer first.

But this trade-off, the acceptance that we must expect lower standards of living if we are to save the environment also hides the real structural factors that need to be tackled. Firstly, we need huge investment in green energy. We have the technology, but this would cut the profits of the current global energy companies, who will only invest in clean alternatives once they have squeezed every ounce of profit out of coal, gas and oil reserves.  As somebody once said, we need to make sure the shit doesn’t get into the pipe, not try and sieve it out once it has got into the water. We need to produce energy clean, not focus on just using less of it.

Secondly, we need cuts in the amount of SUV’s and oil guzzling over sized cars, in the number of cars in city centres, and of  government subsidies for car manufacturing industries. We need investment in public transport systems designed to fulfill the needs of the people, not the profits of the transport companies.  We need cuts in rail and bus fares,  not increases. We need to get rid of intellectual property rights and patents that prevent the spread and sharing of beneficial technology, and to renew commitments to global climate change agreements, and not worry if these cut into the profits of the minority.

We need cuts, but not the sort the City and Government have in mind!

I was a little surprised to find this paragraph in the Times…

The concentration of THC, the active compound, is much higher than in the past. But since no one has ever overdosed on marijuana, it’s difficult to say why that matters. Yes, if someone has a history of mental illness, it’s not that smart to experiment with the cannabinoid receptors in the brain. But it isn’t smart for such people to take any drugs — or too much alcohol — for that matter. For most people, stronger pot merely translates into a need for less of it to get the same effect. Too much and you’ll likely nod off — and wake up later with no hangover. If pubs served pot rather than beer, crime rates would plummet.

A newspaper, a Murdoch owned, big circulation newspaper writing some sense about cannabis. No scare story, no exageration, and it’s not a quote from some stoner, either. The reporter, Andrew Sullivan put those words together.

Lets see more of it, please.