11Feb05 — 0

Excuses, Excuses

If it’s any consolation to you, my last remaining reader, as you vainly reload this page expecting new material, I have at least been getting out a bit more over the last few days, even as far as Wales. There, Auriol and Peter treated me to a superb meal, a browse through a couple of photo albums, and a good old argument about how exactly to go about saving the World. Thank you for all that, and thank you also for the Left liberal, “Abolish All The Bad Stuff Happening To The Little Black Babies”-style T-shirt you mischievously bought me as an early birthday present. Perhaps some crunchy granola, tree-hugging honey will see me wearing it and instantly fall in love. How am I supposed to sustain my free-marketeering, neo-con, libertarian, reptilian reputation with friends like these?

09Feb05 — 0

Class War

Last Friday I went to the Cambridge Union Society to watch the Town versus Gown boxing. I should explain to non-Brits that the Cambridge Union is Cambridge University students’ debating chamber and cross-college social focus. Several members of the various Thatcher cabinets were elected officers at the Union when they were undergraduates. Friday night’s event had nothing to do with warming-up for Parliament, though. Tattooed comprehensive-educated locals went knuckle-to-head with Cambridge students whose school fees were bigger than their opponents’ take-home pay.

The venue was much smaller than the place where they normally have the equivalent Oxford event and there was no doubt that the townies were on foreign territory in their own city. I suspect that there are few occasions in serious professional boxing when you hear a watching crowd chant the name “Hugh” over and over again as their favourite jogs out into the arena. It was like being trapped in an oak panelled cage full of baboons with trust funds.

To give you some idea of the sharpness of the divide, I didn’t have to pay to get in. I was just waved past the door to join the knot of townie boxers. You could almost hear the reasoning of the fellas on the door: “Mixed race, shaved head, six-foot, 180 non-wobbly pounds—put him with the pleb bruisers.” Just after I arrived, one of the real boxers from an earlier bout was briefly turned away. He almost missed the start of the women’s fight which, to my intense satisfaction, went to a local girl. She beat someone called Meredith, who lost despite a real height and reach advantage and, I later discovered, was something of a media favourite. I was also told that this wasn’t just down to her being prettier than you would expect. When I saw her fight she seemed to me to be as fit and technically proficient as Tim Henman. Sadly, she also had his killer instinct—a serious enough handicap on the tennis court, never mind in a boxing ring. After the bout, I overheard one of the University women say, “Well that was a retriever against a terrier.” Living in this town, sometimes I wonder what century I’m in.

After most of the rest of the fights went to future members of the establishment, I joined Hot Wheels Helena and Her Boy for drinks in the bar where, to my bemusement, there was a drum-and-bass DJ playing. Not only is that stuff undanceable, it’s just so five years ago. What is it with young people these days? Everywhere you go it’s hopeless retro. Don’t they have their own music?

06Feb05 — 0

In Installation Hell

I am quiet because I am busy fixing a computer. Sorry everyone. I did take a brief break on Friday evening. During that interval I watched two young women hit each other very hard in front of a baying mob—not on screen; in the flesh. Naturally I’ll ‘Blog that. In the meantime, please feel free to wander the real world, thinking bad thoughts and doing good things. Currently I am receiving email normally, but there’s no guarantee I’ll respond to it with my usual promptness. Buy a mug!

03Feb05 — 1

Internet Blues

Woke up this morning.
Had no emails.
I’m not that unpopular.
My server just failed.

If you tried to email me between midnight GMT and now then your message has disappeared into the ether. Sorry! Please resend it.

01Feb05 — 1

The Gurgitator’s “Belt Of Fat” Theory Confirmed

Courtesy of the Anonymous Economist and friends I now know more than I want to about competitive eating. The one fact I already knew—that many of the best eaters are thin—has been further explained by this statement from the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE). Yes, they exist; their monthly journal is called The Gurgitator. They even sell get an official mug. I didn’t know that two of the most celebrated eaters are women: Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas and 19-year-old newcomer Kate Stelnick, but now you do.

31Jan05 — 9

Crystal Balls

Brian Whitaker in The Guardian—where else?—writes under the heading “Fig-leaf Freedom”:

“portrayals of the election as ‘historic’ are way off mark”

Unlike the election, Brian’s insights will ring through the ages like Orwell’s. He is, after all, the Middle East specialist who wrote of the US Presidential election:

“What interests Arabs most is America’s attitude towards the Palestinian people.”

Mark Steyn (who’s a great deal cleverer and writes better English) has some things to say on the subject of history, about “the Arab street” (whose views rich, white, Western pundits in free democracies divine with such frequency and confidence), and about predictions.

You may think the election in Iraq was a triumph for reason and freedom over the forces of darkness, but, in harmony with Whitaker, I should point out that this minor event was, in fact, little more than a chance for Internet pamphleteers like me to continue our gloating. Nick may have a beautiful family and a dazzling career, but he was foolish enough to bet against my geopolitical instincts. I made a wager with him long before the war even started. Yesterday the people of Iraq won that bet with a few months to spare. Their victory over motley murderers—a victory that naturally followed that of the US-led coalition over a cowardly tyrant—finds its true meaning only through my evaluation of it. Steyn and I were wrong about Bin Laden, but, thanks to millions of brave people, thousands of them now dead, Nick owes me twenty quid.

30Jan05 — 2

There In Black And White

A couple of weeks ago The Today Programme broadcast an item about how a group of psychologists had discovered that people who prepared job applications by hand were more likely to lie in them than people who made applications through online forms. Today invited an “expert” onto the air to discuss this finding: a graphologist. She spooned out the usual pseudoscientific drivel. How pleased I was to read this story today, illustrating (as if we needed more evidence) the uselessness of many journalists and all graphologists.

30Jan05 — 1

Clap Clap Clap

The “file not found” error message on counsell.com features Maryam, the daughter of my friend Nicholas, whom I last saw when I turned up one week early for his and Hind‘s Christmas dinner party. We shared a frozen pizza in his kitchen. Hind was on a train.

This week computational-biologist-turned-epidemiologist Nick became the second one of my friends to be first author on a front-page Nature paper, joining Adrienne, who wrote this [PDF]. Both of them are younger than me and have families. When they come to write the history of late 20th and early 21st century science my name will be there—in the captions of the photographs. I am to biomedicine as Linda McCartney was to popular music.

Nick’s paper is about the spread of syphilis. It’s the result of a lovely idea that I enthused about when he first told me about it on the phone, as I silently cursed his brilliance. It’s the sort of inspired science that can be explained in a way that non-specialists can understand too.

Here’s

Maryam puts on a goofy smile

Maryam now, old enough to be able to pull a mad scientist face. The stuff in the background is everything the Grasslys own, piled up in one room.

28Jan05 — 7

Comedy Genius

At lunch yesterday afternoon we were discussing infinite swimming pools. This led to a debate on how one might construct an infinite waterfall. I said I was going to make an infinite dance record and call it “DJ Counsell versus MC Escher”. The ensuing silence was so complete that the vapour rising up from my fellow diners’ coffee cups was audible. I should have sampled the sound for my next release.

[My middle name is John. Geddit?]

27Jan05 — 1

Have A Break

It is fiddly. It is perverse. Most of all it is sublimely pointless. He doesn’t even like KitKats. Chris Applegate of qwghlm brings us one of the greatest expressions of the geek aesthetic since those guys put a Webserver in a fly.

While I’m on the subject of geek culture and food, this from geek central (Slashdot), where they are voting for the video game that has inspired the most dreams:

Re:Tetris by Jpunkroman on Wednesday January 26, @12:34AM

My roomate last year would routinely unpack the grocery cart and repack it in the middle of the aisle in the grocery store because he played too much tetris and would get bothered when there was empty space in the cart. Fortunely, he never got a tetris in the cart and made half of the groceries disapear. We didn’t have enough line pieces I guess.

Re:Tetris by mtnharo on Wednesday January 26, @01:39PM

Should have bought more baguettes

27Jan05 — 0

Harsh But Fair

Much as it pains me to write this, it turns out that Sisyphus had one legitimate grievance. This post of mine might be interpreted to mean that the organisation formerly known as Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI) questioned the existence of “mass” “graves” in “Iraq” and the “arrest” of Saddam Hussein. I am happy to say that they did not. They merely archived a news list which they run. As CASI itself puts it on its own Website:

“CASI works primarily by distributing accurate information about the situation in Iraq. It maintains the largest electronic discussion list on the sanctions in the UK, and an informative website.”

though every collected message carries this disclaimer:

“Views expressed in this archived message are those of the author, not of Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq (CASI).”

So, the claims to which I referred were made by a member on (or forwarded by a member to) such a CASI list. I’m happy to clear that up and to apologise for any misunderstanding.

In doing so, I also recommend the most recent message archived by CASI (now Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq), from 22Jan05. It is entitled “Media lies” and is cut-and-pasted from this original article on the Media Monitors Network site. Although the vocabulary and style may be familiar, I think it says something fresh and relevant to us all on this, Holocaust Memorial day. Don’t let my quotes [I have removed the footnotes and corrected the formatting] from the head and tail of the piece stop you from popping over there now to read the whole thing. It is a revelation:

Proof has been obtained of massive UK and US mainstream media lying over Iraq. The startling NEW evidence has not come per se from the research of brilliant humanist writers such as John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, George Monbiot, Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali although these great writers have long exposed the dishonesty of mainstream media. This appalling secret has not been revealed by a latter-day Deep Throat connected with the top management of Anglo-American mainstream global mass media.

No – the source of this new evidence of massive media fraud has come from readily Web-accessible archives – with a bit of unwitting help from the extremely dangerous but talkative US Administration handmaiden, prospective US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

…

It is quite natural in a tribal sense for the political, media and business leaders of societies to put the best constructions on the actions of their people. However such bias in public reportage should not extend to non-reportage of genocide or other avoidable mass mortality (e.g. the extraordinary non-reportage of horrendous famines in British India up to the forgotten World War 2 Bengal Famine that killed some 4 million). Indeed Holocaust Denial is illegal in a number of countries including France and Germany. Yet holocaust denial is exactly what is being practised unashamedly by Western media today. The neo-con democratic imperialist agenda is already being applied to Iraq and Afghanistan and there are increasing noises that Syria (an oasis of Islamic-Christian religious tolerance in the Middle East) and populous, increasingly democratic Iran will be. Indeed Condoleezza Rice in her recent interrogation by the US Foreign Relations Committee has menacingly specified Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe for US attention.

According to the latest UNICEF report (UNICEF, 2005), the total under-infant mortality in 2003 was 110,000 in Coalition-occupied Iraq, 292,000 in Coalition-conquered Afghanistan and 1,000 in the invader and occupier Coalition country, White Australia. This largely-avoidable infant mortality in these war-ravaged, Coalition-violated nations thus totals over 0.4 million PER YEAR vastly in excess of the horrendous circa 0.2 million death toll from the recent Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy.

Insistent EXPOSURE of the horrendous human consequences of UK-US democratic imperialism (democratic Nazism) is crucially required to halt this carnage and prevent its further extension. Peace is the only way. Exposure, sanctions, bans and boycotts against Anglo-American democratic imperialism (democratic Nazism) is the only way forward for decent humanity. To that end it is vital that everyone recognizes the pervasive, holocaust-denying lying by commission and omission of the Anglo-American-dominated mainstream global media.

27Jan05 — 12

Credo

And now for some distinctions that will be lost on our new visitors, particularly Sisyphus who believes all Muslims are Islamists so anyone, like me, who thinks Islamism is dangerous therefore hates all Muslims. That’s an interesting thread to follow and one which, by its lumping together of all adherents to a particular faith according to his own prejudices, makes Sisyphus an “Islamophobe”. There’s something horribly fascinating about watching a man crush himself with his own argument.

Despite your spending more time here and writing more than me or anyone else, it’s my ‘Blog, Sisyphus. I don’t have to provide definitions of either Islam or Islamism for you, neither do I have to conform to your ideas of what is or isn’t worthy of comment. You’ll find all the definitions you need here and a guide to the myriad examples of faulty reasoning you have illustrated with your comments here. I recommend the latter book to all students who, like you, have difficulty in constructing robust arguments. Your output, however, is too obviously broken to provide any useful teaching examples.

Here’s the first distinction. For the record, my post about injuries caused at a stoning ceremony made no criticism of Islam or of Muslims. In contrast, this post does. I believe that the metaphysical beliefs of most practising Muslims are wrong. I also believe that the metaphysical beliefs of most practising Christians are wrong, as I believe that the metaphysical beliefs of most practising Jews are wrong. I’m not pointing out the latter two facts because I feel I am obliged to be balanced, but because I want to make my disagreement as wide-ranging as possible, that people understand just how fundamental it is. I believe that, if I wanted to, I should be free to devote all of PooterGeek’s content to criticism of the theory and practices of Islam. I don’t, but I wouldn’t have to apologise for it if I did.

I don’t believe all religious activities are wrong or even that religious belief is generally bad for people—quite the contrary: religious people often do good and great things for the glory of their gods and atheism tends to make you miserable. I do, however, believe that all religions are wrong in the philosophical and scientific senses about the nature of human existence. Further, the practices of most faiths include activities to which I object. I object to many of them on PooterGeek. I have never previously objected to any of the practices of Islam here, but if I feel like it, I will, even until agents of this government foolishly try to stop me. In parts of the country where I was born (in a Catholic mission hospital, as it happens), making such declarations in public would be rather more dangerous. I am proud that now I live somewhere where I am free to deny ghosts and fairy tales and passed-on lies and denounce the crimes they are used to justify.

I write the above because yesterday morning a Muslim friend phoned me up to tell me that my “recent posts” were “unacceptable”, and not because of anything else demanded of me here in the past few days from obsessive-compulsives with a craving for public humiliation. While he was on the phone, I asked my friend to click on the “Religion” subject link that PooterGeek helpfully provides while I ran through with him the targets of my previous posts on that subject in reverse chronological order. You can try it yourself now. I haven’t changed anything on this site since then. I read through twelve without hitting a single one that even mentioned Islam—never mind Muslims—before I had to get to an appointment. Sisyphus likes “patterns” and “statistics”. Despite my supposedly being an “Islamophobe”, exactly none of my posts about religion criticises Islam—never mind Muslims. It is the greatest achievement of my current hecklers that they have actually prompted me to write one that does.

These other posts were—unlike my stoning post—often direct attacks on the beliefs and practices of other faiths. So, apart from not being critical of Islam—as many of my others were critical of other religions—what was distinctive about that entry on PooterGeek? The difference was, after my posting it, a pair of ideologues rewrote it in their own bigoted terms and condemned me for what I hadn’t said.

Returning to my bright and thoughtful, but wrong, telephone correspondent, what is “unacceptable” is the harassment of individuals for criticising systems of thought and criticising public practices—not criticising people, not criticising cultures, not even criticising faiths (though I wouldn’t apologise for those either), but for criticising ideologies and actions. You can believe in God, Allah, Yahweh, Santa Claus, or the Great Pumpkin. I will disagree with you, but I would never deny you your personal delusions. If, however, you want to burn witches, mutilate the genitals of children or, indeed, indulge in ceremonies that result in death and injury then I am going to exercise my right to mock, if I feel like it, or not mock, if I don’t. It’s something I would go to jail for.

In this particular case, as I have pointed out repeatedly, I didn’t mock. Now I am mocking. Stoning ceremonies of any kind are very silly indeed. The deaths they cause are not funny. It is precisely because I believe that dying is a serious matter (there not being an afterlife) that I spend my working days trying to find ways of postponing other people’s deaths and that now, in my free time, I formally denounce superstitions that cause fatalities. Whoever the practitioners are or however they choose to describe themselves their actions will always be morally wrong. People (actually only two so far out of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of regulars at this site) can call me a racist, or an Islamophobe, or a parakeet until they explode with synthetic indignation, but it won’t make me so. Stones are not demons. Bread and wine are not flesh and blood. Religion is no excuse for evil. And Heaven help us if we ever legislate it so.

As for you, Sisyphus and “Anon” (Benjy), I am bored, as most people here I am sure are, with your your lies, your libels and your persistence (however apt). Most of all I am bored with your stupidity. You won’t believe me, but I like it when people come here and disagree with me in a way that truly makes me think. There was a brief period yesterday where you threatened to start an interesting and informed (if irrelevant) argument about Iraq war casualties, but you even managed to blow that. You are now barred. Do you think me intolerant? If so, that would be the last and only time you have been right. It makes no difference. On PooterGeek, I am God. Now fuck off.

26Jan05 — 5

A Day In The Life

Leasey: Hi, Damian. Who are your new friends?

PG: The naked one with the beach ball painted grey and labelled “rock” is Sissy; the one in the cape and eye-mask is Benjy.

Benjy: You LIE. I am ANON, crusader for TRUTH and JUSTICE.

PG: Nice cape, Benjy.

Leasey: Are these weirdos coming to the cinema with us?

Sissy: “Sissy”! “weirdos”! The clear subtext of your reactionary labels is that you are a homophobe who despises those who are emotionally troubled. They are classic slurs from a New Labour apparatchik.

PG: They come everywhere with me these days. All the time.

Leasey: Oh no.

PG: Hey, you don’t have to sleep with them.

Sissy: Miss Leasey, do you know your date mocks the cultures and misfortunes of brown people?

Leasey: He mocks everyone, though mainly himself. And he is a brown person—though he’d be browner if he didn’t spend all his free time indoors writing strange stories for his Internet friends. And he isn’t my date. He’s my gay-friend-who-isn’t. Apart from his trousers, obviously.

Sissy: He is not a real brown person. He is has been turned by Blair, Blunkett, and Bush into a poodle of oppression.

Leasey: Whatever.

PG: So how do you feel about seeing Team America tonight?…

Benjy: To laugh at the deaths of [in grave unison with Sissy] one hundred thousand Iraqis?!

26Jan05 — 0

Snapping Again

Woohoo! I finally won an Ebay camera auction and got a mint condition Dynax 5 for sixty quid from the efficient and polite hitchin2001. This is a bargain price for a gem of a camera. Watch out family, friends, and random strangers: I have my third eye back.

24Jan05 — 52

If He Existed He’d Be Laughing

“THREE Muslim pilgrims were killed and 500 others suffered light injuries as they jostled to perform the ‘stoning of the devil’ ritual near Mecca, Saudi newspapers reported today.
The crush was triggered by the arrival of ‘a large number of African pilgrims carrying their personal belongings’ at the site of the stoning in Mina called the ‘jamarat’, the daily Okaz said.

The paper quoted Saudi Health Minister Hamad bin Abdullah al-Mane as saying that a number of pilgrims also fell down as a result of the scramble to stone three concrete blocks symbolising the devil.

21Jan05 — 12

Brief Break

It’s going to be quiet here over the next couple of days, but everyone else I link to in that column on the right seems to be ‘Blogging like crazy lately so you should be able to find entertainment via my ‘Blogroll while I sort out a couple of things in meatspace.

20Jan05 — 3

Watch Out For Those Feeble-Minded Tavern Girls

Following on from my James D. Watson link, yesterday a colleague of mine lobbed me a review copy of DNA and the Criminal Justice System by David Lazer. Click the smaller image below to see an interesting diagram it reproduces from a textbook in use in the early half of the twentieth century (unfortunately it’s impossible to give a more precise date from the context).

Eugenics bollocks

[click to enlarge]

Gossip has that, at the peak of the race to sequence the human genome, the acute shortage of manually dexterous workers needed to make the “final push” for the sequence was answered by another Nobelist (and bearded real ale drinker) hiring lots of barmaids to work on the project. But I wouldn’t repeat gossip here.

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