What's your theme song?

I really love the work of Beep! Beep! It's Me.

For some reason, this sort of stuff really appeals to the introverted undergraduate in me.

And I haven't been one of those for about 15 years.

Anyway, this is a site where you answer 3 or 4 questions and find out what your song is.

Mine's Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. Bit surprised at this, although, like all blokes, I was a Floyd fan in high school.

Your Theme Song is Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd

"There is no pain, you are receding. A distant ship�s smoke on the horizon. You are only coming through in waves." You haven't been feeling a lot lately, and you think that's a good thing. The comfortable part is nice... but you should really work on numb.

What's Your Theme Song?

No leads, chief, but I know this medium...

The Amazing James Randi is recovering from his surgery.

He's in a much better spot now to be able to write his excellent weekly column which appears here, but can also be accessed via an RSS feed here.

One that concerned me this week is his take on an AFP officer who was suspended recently for consulting a psychic.

I've gotta say, this is a DISGRACE!

(Not Randi's take, that is, but the fact that the officer concerned was merely suspended.)

Barry Williams is quite correct. This officer should have been sacked.

What is truly worrying is that the AFP take pride in recruiting people who think rationally. This is a bit of a shot to that part of their reputation.

As an aside, Randi takes what appears to be umbrage to the AFP’s "spokesman for homeland security" who is quoted as saying:

"I think, perhaps, this fellow has watched a few too many of the US detective shows."

Randi is only half right, though, when he suggests that Australians only buy this type of show to satisfy our desire for woo.

Granted, quite a few Australians like to watch these shows.

But then, so too do Australians also like to watch TV shows such as Buffy and Smallville.

Australians, I recall, also lined up in droves to watch such gritty realism as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Star Wars.

Given that Australians generally should be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction for shows like these, what's stopping them doing the same for others?

What Randi apparently seems reluctant to accept, is that Australians may hunger for woo because the ideas themselves were planted in Australian viewers by the very "US detective shows" that he seems keen to defend.

Randi's point about Australian-made TV shows pandering to the same beliefs is moot if it appears that these have been developed to "cash in" on a market created from scratch by a US-made show.

Certainly, we have a chicken-and-egg question here, one which Randi appears to have, in his haste to defend the good-ol' US of A, to either have mistakenly missed (my suspicion) or ignored outright (don't believe Randi would do this for one moment).

The AFP spokesman was 100% OK to make this joke about "US detective shows" without any sort of qualifying statement. We (the Australian public) know what is meant by this, and I think that is enough.

However, the AFP now have to fix the situation by sacking the officer responsible. Only then will they be able to fix their reputation and proceed with "normal" policing duties.

A point that Randi would be the first to agree with.

So how badly damaged is the AFP's reputation?

The very fact that they're being reported on Randi's website for what appears to be a major cock-up speaks volumes about how the skeptical world views this sort of thing.

Rest assured, this is being communicated around the world as we speak, and none of it is flattering.

Jokes will begin to fly. People will get irate.

Eventually, someone will lose their job over this. Maybe not immediately, but there would have to be an enquiry of some sort.

But the end result could be a good thing - the force will be told to not do this sort of thing. Explicitly.

Which, hopefully, will mean that it won't happen again.

As a postscript, this poor soul has been nominated 3 times for a Bent Spoon award. Good work, constable.

Clash jumpers - so what is the deal?

Eddie McGuire has had another go at the AFL over clash jumpers.

This time the AFL are going to make his beloved Pies wear a clash jumper.

The smartarse response initially from Magpieland was a suggested clash jumper that was, rather than white stripes on a black background, black stripes on a white background. A lot like their original jumper, actually.

The AFL rightly hit this suggestion for six, so el presidente Eddie has weighed in and told the AFL that Collingwood don't wear anything other than back and white stripes.

McGuire has a lot of pull, but I doubt that even he will be able to weasel out of this one.

So what is the big deal? Why, says the media, are we only hearing about jumper clashes now? Isn't the system of dark shorts at home and white shorts away meant to solve this?

These arguments are tired and old and have very little basis in reality.

About 10 years ago, which is about a third of my life, the media was pro away jumpers, or clash strips after beating up an incident in a Melbourne vs Essendon match.

What happened in that game, and my memory is about 75% on this, is that a Melbourne player somehow handballed to James Hird who ran past with his jumper down over his (white) shorts.

And every year this gets blown up again after a similar incident.

But hang on, someone is asking, dark shorts and white shorts are traditional, aren't they?

Wrong again. Tradition is black shorts and white shorts. Sometime about 50 years ago or thereabouts, the black shorts became dark shorts to reflect the wishes of clubs like Carlton, Geelong, Melbourne etc who noticed that they were playing at home in shorts that were not in one of their colours.

Clubs like St Kilda, West Coast, Adelaide, Port and the Doggies are already comfortable, and so are their fans, with what is a very simple proposition - clash or away jumpers.

This is the final say that I'm going to have on this matter, so I'll have it now.

Clubs should be made to adopt a "home" strip and a "clash" strip.

Clubs who don't comply, will be considered to have forfeited.

McGuire and co at Collingwood can move into the 21st Century on this, or they can get stuffed.

At the very most, it'll only be twice a year, anyway. Really, what is Collingwood's problem?

Easter re-visited

I was recently prompted to re-visit an old post of mine ("Uoy Sevol Natas") that I stuck out there in April 1998.

My post was an attempt to put two and two together on some logical inconsistencies that struck me about Christian dogma.

More recently, I have become convinced that it will take a mind a lot more powerful than mine to put it all together in a way that doesn't use God's "get out" clause. That is, His "ineffability".

To gist my post from that period, the key points that I made were as follows:

1. At least some of the Bible is a lie;
2. God was not a good bloke;
3. God is a homophobe;
4. Judas Iscariot was a saint;
5. The Holy Spirit is none other than Satan; and
   
6. God is neither perfect nor omnipotent.

Anyway, it was with some interest that I read an article this week about a Gnostic Gospel according to Judas which has been recently discovered.

On top of this was an interesting doco on the ABC, narrated by Christopher Eccleston, which investigated who was responsible for Christ's death, called "Bible Mysteries".

Now, while I'm not so quick as some to judge who did what to whom, it always struck me that pinning the blame on Judas Iscariot was more a convenience thing, if nothing else.

What Bible Mysteries did was examine who the prime suspects were, and narrowed it down to three:

• Pontius Pilate
• Caiaphas; and
• JC Himself.

Leaving JI out as a suspect caught my interest.

Actually, in hindsight, I'm gunna start calling him by his name, or at least his "surname". JI sounds a bit like "Jemaah Islamiah".

The doco went through and itemised why it believed that these three were responsible.

I felt that Pilate's inclusion was clutching at straws a little bit.

Basically, Pilate told everyone that he was washing his hands of the whole thing. Well, what was he to do, really?

Caiaphas, Annas and the rest of the Sanhedrin had whipped up a lynch mob which was out for blood. Should Pilate have encouraged them by saying that this gathering was illegal and that if they didn't disperse, there would be carnage?

Pilate, as governor of Judaea, a self-governing Roman province, would not have had any interest in potentially losing troops from the local garrison if he could help it. Yet Pilate handed JC over to the mob despite the fact that he considered Christ to be innocent - again, what was he to do?

The Council of Nicaea sealed Pilate's fate by stating unambiguously that "Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate", indicating that Pilate should shoulder some of the blame for this, but is this warranted? Anyone would have caved in to this mob.

After all, when threatened by the church, Galileo recanted his views. We don't regard Galileo as having "sold out" - we regard Galileo as having been sensible.

Caiaphas was an obvious choice. But no Annas?

It does appear that Caiaphas would have had more impetus to shaft Christ - after all, he was the current sitting high priest. Annas was 'retired'.

I sided with the producers on this one.

If anyone killed JC, it was Him.

The evidence was compelling:

• Christ came in to Jerusalem in what would have been a pretty defiant entry that would have ruffled a few feathers.
• Christ was out to get attention when He unleashed a six-pack of whup-arse on the commercial activity in the temple forecourt; and
  
• He did, point blank, command Iscariot to betray Him.

I had to agree that if anyone was out to get Jesus here, it was Him.

The programme's producers were perhaps a little oblique about this, but the truth of the matter is that they could have summed all this up in a few short sentences:

1. He had to fulfil a celebrated prophecy by dying and coming back to life again.
2. He had to give just enough powerful people the shits for them to want Him dead
3. What better place to annoy a concentrated bunch of powerful people than the biggest city in the area, home to the Sanhedrin, and capital of the province?
4. How better to get noticed than by running amok in the temple forecourt?
5. He had to arrange for someone to betray him. Judas was a pawn who was used.
6. He had to be put to death. This would have been easy if you had got the first 5 of these points right.
7. As high priest, Caiaphas would have been forced to do something. Threatening the power of the high priest by claiming to be the Son of God probably sealed it.
8. Pilate would cave in to a lynch mob. "Incidents" would have been frowned upon back in Rome.
9. To summarise, Christ himself played everyone like they were accordions. Not even Macchiavelli could have done it nearly as well.

As far as I can tell, Christ was dead lucky that he wasn't born in this day and age.

Except for a few African countries, lynch mobs are harder to whip up now.

People tend to forget your name if a few thousand others get massacred at the same time.

2 and a half crosses for stringing me along. 2 more for actually having a Semitic-looking cast.

Vatican: condoms don't stop Aids

Just have a read of this. It's yet another one that Beep! Beep! has found.

I had to look at this several times to make sure that it wasn't April 1.

Seriously, how can anyone support a church that endorses the spreading of life threatening diseases just to support its own dogma? It's pretty awful.

Tell him he's dreamin'.

In this article penned by David "Kochie" Koch, Peter Costello has given himself 5 weeks to look at ways to reform our horrible tax legislation.

In it, Koch takes a swipe at Costello for even suggesting that 5 weeks is enough time for a serious review.

I have to say that I agree with Koch, here.

5 weeks is an appallingly short timeframe to fix what is some of the silliest legislation in the world.

Lets look at some facts on the our beloved tax laws.

The Income Tax Assessment Act is not one, but two acts of parliament - one from 1936 and one from 1997.

Together, these two acts total over 10,000 pages.

Not including Tax Rulings made by the ATO or the case law interpreting the Acts.

Wikipedia points out that the laws themselves have been amended that many times, that there is actually a sub-sub-sub-sub-section in the ITAA 36 that is denoted as Section 221YHAAC(2)(e)(iii)(A).

The problem with tax in Australia stems from the problem with the law in Australia - consistency is not considered to be important.

Take, for example, juvenile offenders.

In most states, you can be tried as an adult from about age 12 onwards.

Yet you can't vote, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, have consensual sex, and quite a lot of other things until much later on. Usually age 18. Or thereabouts.

Thus, it appears, a 12 year old can think and reason criminal acts the same as an adult, but can't think and reason a how-to-vote card.

Staggering.

Other inconsistencies abound, so we can verifiably conclude that dealing with the law in Australia is a truly diabolical process.

Tax law pretty much takes the inconsistency approach, creates more exceptions and buts and leaves us with the underlying conclusion that all Australians fudge their taxes in one way or another.

Not just that, but tax law in Australia works on the basis that you are guilty until proven innocent. Fairly much different to every other criminal law in Oz.

Koch even points this out in his article.

Over the years, these little discrepancies have piled up into a huge, scary monster.

We have a Tax Pack of over 100 pages, where we once had a little form to fill in (I don't remember this - it's something that Koch points out).

Anyway, tax reform requires a bit more than a small commission looking at it over 5 weeks.

Koch mentions that the commission itself consists of Costello, Peter Hendy and Dick Warburton.

The performance of Warburton, though has not looked promising.

Not long after this commission started, Warburton was heard to remark that compulsory superannuation should be considered a tax on business.

I suppose that minimum wage could also be considered a tax too, eh Dick?

Goose.

So we await this commission's findings.

I would like to say "...with baited breath..." but I have absolutely no doubt that any changes recommended by the commission will be cosmetic at best.

Martin Bryant is not news. Official.

This article from Crikey points out some problems with political correctness.

A few in the media have pointed at an article on Martin Bryant in the Bulletin and concluded that it should not have been written. Apparently we should pretend that it didn't happen for fear of all the usual things.

Let's just put this in perspective.

It's 2006. Ten years since the Port Arthur Massacre.

This single act resulted in what is well and truly the greatest legacy that the Howard government will leave behind, that is, a government with enough guts to pursue gun control.

Yet the media is saying that a "well researched and written article" (Crikey) is not news?

Once again, Crikey is right on the money, here. What I don't get is that political correctness is being milked for popularity's sake (take a bow, Peter Blunden and Neil Mitchell).

Funnily enough, political correctness gone berzerk is what Blunden and Mitchell specialise in pointing out.

A strange old world, this one.

Beep! Beep! It's Me. Cogito Ergo Sum. I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear.

I don't know where Beep! Beep! gets these, but this is brilliant.

Beep! Beep! It's Me. Cogito Ergo Sum. I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear.

Sadly, conflicting reports suggest that this case might have been dismissed, but I have an inkling that we're getting closer and closer to a case that actually goes the distance against a religion.

My Night out at the Commonwealth Games

I went to see the gymnastics on Saturday night at the Commonwealth Games. They're currently being held in Melbourne.

Now, for those of you who don't know, that is, for those of you outside the remains of what used to be the British Empire, these are kinda like the Olympics, but only for countries in the Commonwealth of Nations.

Which naturally means that countries like Australia, South Africa and Canada dominate the medal count, rather than the USA and China.

Kinda like big fish in a small pond, though, cause the only other countries there are little tiddlers like Jamaica, Mozambique and St Helena.

Points if you can tell me where St Helena is without looking it up in an atlas.

Anyway, I went to see the women's gymnastics. I use the word "women" advisedly - most of these girls were scraping to see over the age of 12.

In fact, I think that I could count up those of teenage or older on 1 hand. Why did I bother typing "...or older"?

All that was missing was the pushy parents.

Gymnastics requires routines on different "apparatuses". These routines are then given a score by a panel of judges.

Routines are marked on degree of difficulty, a checklist of required moves and "artistry".

This is quite a bit different to what can best be described as "objective" sports in the games schedule.

In an objective sport, there is no ambiguity. Results are based on heaviest lift, highest jump, first past the post, furthest thrown, most targets hit, most goals, most points etc.

In subjective "sports", of which gymnastics is one, one certainly wins by gaining the most points. But the points themselves are based on the outcome of whatever is in the collective head of a panel of judges, all of whom are going to have different opinions vis-a-vis the artistic component.

Methinks that there is a bit too much scope for judges to display some artistry of their own when preparing their assessments.

Anyway, by the end of the night, Chloe Sims became Australia's youngest gold medallist of the Games by a long, long way. We got to noisily sing the national anthem and go home.

Funnily enough, I think that the crowd has had enough of this gold medal blizzard that Australia gets whenever this carnival is on. I only heard one half-hearted "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, Oi, Oi!" all night.

Back to little Chloe. Sims scored the same number of points as the Canadian silver medallist, Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs, but she won on a countback as per FIG (Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique) rules.

This was beaten up by Melbourne's newspaper for the truly illiterate, the Herald-Sun (Monday 20 March) into a scandal. In an article that was clearly not even considered good enough to go online, idiot journalist Mark Stevens (with ghostwriter Selina Steele) went fishing for quotes in order to drum up some sour grapes, and the best that he could do was these:

Asked if hometown judging was alive and well, Canadian coach Carol-Angela Orchard said: " I think there's always an advantage to be at home."

Questioned further if Australia was enjoying a good run from the judges, Orchard smiled and replied: "Yeah."

Fourth-placed English competitor Imogen Cairns was clearly gutted after being pipped [for the bronze medal by Australian, Hollie] Dykes.

When asked if she was gutted (my emphasis - Stevens & Steele must have been in a hurry) to miss out on bronze, Cairns said, "Well, we're in Australia."

From all of this, Stevens/Steele came up with an opening paragraph of:

Tensions are mounting in the usually genteel sport of gymnastics, with both England and Canada inferring they have been victims of hometown judging decisions.

Sorry, Mark, Selina or whoever wrote this pice of crap. You cannot infer squat from the quotes that you have provided.

The best that you could do after needling these poor souls for God only knows how long was Cairns' quote. Given that Cairns is, most likely, a pre-nubile, I personally wouldn't trust that her opinions accurately reflected the English gymnastics hierarchy. If she has actually reached pubescence, I would put even less stock in anything that she has to say. Adolescents can be a hysterical bunch.

Now the Herald-Sun is never actually going to win awards for "Fair and Balanced" journalism (for Chrissakes, Rupert, grow some brains, morals and something vaguely approaching honesty) but I do have to say their sport coverage is usually pretty darn good. That is, of course, when Scot Palmer isn't writing.

This article was stellar rubbish of the highest order, but it does beg the question: would this piece of mind-numbing schlock have been written if gymnastics was an objective sport?

I think not.

What surprises me most about this whole affair is that I have been able to write an article on gymnastics without once mentioning how uninterested I am in it. I've done well.

Stevens' article on the other hand - I give it a 5 for the degree of difficulty (he is a footy writer, after all) and a perfect zero for the artistic component.

How to De-stabilise Rational Thinking in 10 Easy Lessons

After the arse-kicking that they received in the Kitzmiller vs Dover case (also known as Scopes II), IDiots have been strangely quiet.

But don't discount them. They'll be back. And they'll be back in a way that means that when they do, all us rational folk will be needed for the showdown.

After all, there are plenty more battlefields out there that haven't even been fought at yet.

Evolution is just one of the possible targets that they could name. They could come back with a sneaky attack on the Big Bang, Gravity, the list is too big to mention.

In the fallout after this case, attention has been focussed back on the Discovery Institute, the shadowy right-wing thinktank that has been pushing the ID line.

What is most disturbing is that, amidst all the double-talk, wheeling and dealing and spin, the Discovery Institute seems to be ashamed to acknowledge their admitted religious agenda.

You wouldn't think so if this really was all there was to it.

Anyway, back to the story at hand.

What appears to be the case is that up to this point, the boys and girls over at the Discovery Institute have been going out of their way to introduce a concept called Intelligent Design into the science classroom through a process of deliberate confusion called "Teaching the Controversy."

Teaching the Controversy is simply asserting that a controversy exists where there isn't one. Great trick, if you can pull it off. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation are particularly good at this.

What is certain about Teaching the Controversy is that it is designed to exploit a weak point identified fairly early on by the Discovery Institute. The weak point that I am referring to is that many people don't know what science actually is.

Disgraceful, really.

Mark Nutter is a bloke who keeps a very interesting blog on reconciling religion with science called, Heaven is not the Sky.

Nutter has identified a top ten, an "action plan", if you like, for sabotaging science in the name of religion.

These read as follows:

1. Focus on a vague, generalized group of presumed antagonists (e.g. evolutionists, “Darwinists”) whose motives are always presumed to be corrupt, dishonest and evil.
2. Emphasis on atypical examples of cases that make a theory (e.g. evolution) look bad, generalized to imply that the whole theory is bad.
3. Attacking a scientific theory (e.g. evolution) on religious, non-scientific, or pseudo-scientific grounds, rather than by offering detailed scientific explanations whose specific, verifiable predictions are a better fit for the observed data.
4. Manufacturing phony challenges to the legitimacy of a theory (e.g. evolution), and inflating the credentials of those challenges.
5. Manufacturing spurious and unsupported alternatives to a theory (e.g. evolution) and using non-scientific channels to get them acclaimed as “scientifically superior,” so as to displace the challenged theory.
6. Manipulating the educational and political system to control public perception of scientific information independently of the scientific process.
7. Spreading distorted information and false information about a theory (e.g. evolution) and/or the people who support it.
8. Maintaining a facade of false neutrality and objectivity while clearly working to promote a monopolistic agenda.
9. Claiming to promote scientific research while never doing any actual research beyond looking up materials that can be used to try and discredit the target theory (the “Hollow Curiosity” indicator). Note that this failure to produce any documented results is often masked by complaints of “censorship” by mainstream science, despite the fact that until you do the research, you have nothing publishable for mainstream science to censor!
10. Tight PR controls on all media outlets (including blogs) owned and operated by the creationists themselves.

My questions are these.

Firstly, there are many religious types who don't approve of what 'mentalists like the Discovery Institute are doing.

Why don't they have a serious bash at destabilising the 'mentalists? The vast, vast majority of Christians (and I will specifically single Christians out here. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc all seem to be immune to all this silliness) simply do not support literal interpretations of the Bible.

In fact, if you were to ask them, and promise them confidentiality, I would hazard a guess that 9 out of 10 Christians do not even support the notion of Biblical inerrancy.

Secondly, this goes for scientists and the rest of us.

Up to now, the PR nous displayed by scientists has been atrocious.

Kitzmiller was won through sheer dumb luck. Luck in that it was lucky that the plaintiffs had such a good case and a decent legal team.

When the IDiots attempt to pull another one over on the rest of us, they will come better organised.

It is time for scientists to go out on the attack and lauch a PR blitz of their own.

And there is a really, really good reason why this is the case.

In the next few weeks this blogger plans to examine the concept of Dominionism. Is it just another wacky conspiracy theory? If not, then what is it?

Even if it is pure codswallop, wouldn't you feel more comfortable if our friends with pointy heads were at least getting out there and making themselves known?

Because if they don't, and our fundamentalists come a calling, normal people are going to feel safer with them than the forces of logic and reason.

And this has the potential to return us to the dark ages.