Day 2697: The New Tax-Cutting Party

Tuesday:


As the IFS (Institute for Funny Statistics) takes Chancellor Sooty to task for his one-year fix that will leave people worse off again next year…

And Mr Balloon – once more choosing the ANCIENT BRITON approach to policies: going naked but for his blue war paint(!) – tackles the Prime Monster on the same subject…

…it's GOOD to know that at least the LIBERAL DEMOCRATS have got some IDEAS for making the TAX a bit fairer and bit simpler and – dare we say it – a bit less!

Mr Clogg has made a speech explaining HOW and WHY.

Now, personally, I think that our SHORT TERM objective has got to be bringing BORROWING under control. At the moment Sooty is the Mr Micawber of Finance Ministers…

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six: result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six: result misery."

To which Sooty might add: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure: two aircraft carriers, two international wars, two tax cuts for the middle classes, 2% for the police: result election catastrophe!"

With his tax-cut-con-cover-up-bribe Sooty is now borrowing to cover the gap between his current spending and his current income. This is the route to DEBTORS PRISON.

So, as I say, the most important thing is to close that gap.

Obviously there are only TWO ways to do it: tax more or spend less.

What I am really pleased to see is that Mr Clogg recognises that we have reached, or at least are near to, the TOP END of the amount of tax that the people of Britain are willing to let the Government take.

Mr Frown – like you could forget that HE was the Chancellor… and STILL IS! – has done this through SLY and UNDERHAND methods: mainly by drawing more and more people into the 40% Higher Rate tax bracket by not putting up the tax bands as much as the increase in salaries; and by squeezing the central Government grant to your local council so that they have to put up the Council Tax, hitting the lowest paid disproportionate harder.

Of course, I say "near to" the top end because although Mr Frown seems HAPPY to have DOUBLED the tax take, squeezing THREE-HUNDRED BILLION pounds more out of ordinary working folks, he does seem quite happy to let super-rich individuals and big business get away with TWENTY-FIVE BILLION pounds of tax avoidance through (entirely legal) loopholes and non-dom status.

(Think about THAT when the headlines are screaming "Record Benefit Fraud"
over the news that the government has lost a whole ZERO-POINT-ONE-FOUR billion in benefits.)

Mr Frown's making the tax system more COMPLICATED has positively ENCOURAGED these people to get their highly-paid tax accountants (or more strictly speaking highly-paid partners in accountancy firms who then employ relatively averagely paid drones to do all the work) to find them all the cracks and crannies that the "great one" has accidentally (or accidentally-on-purpose) left for them to hide their money in.

By making taxes SIMPLER we also make them FAIRER, by having the rich companies and individuals pay their share – not pay MORE than their share, not SQUEEZE them till they SQUEAK, but at least stop the LUNACY that means they pay a lower tax rate than their CLEANING LADIES!

Using that money to take the lowest earners out of tax ALTOGETHER would be the way to spare them from Mr Frown's doubling of the 10p tax band that DOESN'T mean running the Government Credit card so far into the red that it MELTS!

This would be both REDISTRIBUTIVE – readers from the Labour might want to refer to their history notes to find what that means – AND fiscally neutral, not putting the tax burden up any higher than it already is.


Of course, if we CAN'T put taxes UP any more then LOGICALLY this means that we have got to think very hard about what SPENDING we would be willing to CUT.

And that is what Mr Clogg is going to do: he already has a target of twenty billion pounds of spending that he wants to redirect to be spent BETTER, but now he wants to go even further and start to find ways to reduce the tax burden.

Personally I think that spending money on body armour rather than aircraft carriers might be a good start, but there is also the way that Mr Frown's loves his BYZANTINE Tax Credits so much that he splashes them around with gay abandon on anyone fitting the right social profile – in work… married… with children… first name Gordon… etc. By targeting the benefit on the people it's SUPPOSED to benefit – i.e. the least well off – then you can be considerably less WASTEFUL.

Oh and there's the exciting way that with all of their special advisors, the Labour are now basically running TWO Civil Services in parallel. Probably room for some savings there.

What is most important about all this, though, is that Mr Clogg has seen where the Liberal Democrats principles have put us in a place away from the other two Parties.

While Mr "Loopholes" Frown and Mr "tax cuts for dead millionaires" Balloon pursue the DUBIOUS HONOUR of sucking up to the rich while borrowing to meet their spending commitments, only the LIBERAL DEMOCRATS are offering to CONTROL spending, CUT TAXES and STICK UP for the low paid, the hard working, the ordinary people of Britain.

PS:

Yes, I do KNOW that Dr Who says: "logic, my dear Zoë, merely allows you to be wrong with authority." The problem is that in that instance Zoë was right and Dr Who was wrong. So there may be some IRONY involved in using the quote to criticise people who use LOGIC.

Day 2696: Hybrids, Chimeras and Talibaptists… oh my!

Monday:


(In fairness, they're more like TaliPAPISTS in this country.)


Yes, obviously, it's the return of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill and the attempt by an alliance of Social Conservatories and Roman Theocrats to HIJACK the issue as an excuse to start a CULTURE WAR against science.

The media are, typically, giggling about the fact that several of Mr Frown's own Cabinet DEFIED his personal plea and voted PRO-LIES.

But surely the far more worrying development is the Conservatories AS A BLOC throwing their weight behind a discrimination, superstition, anti-choice agenda straight out of the book of Victorian values.


On the CRUCIAL votes, the Conservatories were top keen to vote against the modern liberal country that Great Britain has become, and cocksure enough to do it blatantly.

On reducing the abortion limit to 22 weeks, the Conservatories voted 134 (plus 2 semi-detached Independent Conservatories) in favour to 27 against (Liberal Democrats were the most divided on this difficult issue though thankfully leaning the right way overall: 23 for and 32 against)

On the question of whether the law should insist that a daddy is necessary to have a child, the Conservatories support was 144 to 12 for legislating against any family that does not fit their ideological catalogue.

On trying to ban the use of hybrid embryos they WERE more divided, 80 in favour and 64 against, but the majority of the Conservatory Party were still on the opposite side to the PROGRESSIVE will of the House and (on this occasion) their own leader, Mr Balloon.


Losing the fight to embed the patriarchy in law was Mr Vague's Dad the former Conservatory leader, Mr Iain Drunken Swerve, or IVF as he is known.

He was at pains to emphasise that just because he thought that Lesbians (no, NOT from Lesbos, let's not go THERE again)… just because he thought Lesbians were thoroughly inadequate to be parents, he was NOT being HOMOPHOBIC – he wouldn't go so far as to say that some of his best friends are gay daddies, but some of his best friends are… senior Conservatories.

The whole business is about pinning people down and making them live the way that the Conservatories WANT them to live. But people do not need the Conservatories' permission to live their lives, and thankfully the House of Commons agrees.

So instead Mr Drunken Swerve's "need for a father" will be replaced by "supportive parenting", which seems MUCH more sensible and allows for recognition of all of the DIFFERENT kinds of families that people are able to come up with for themselves.


The argument over abortion, led by the Conservatory MP Ms Nodding Doris, was almost MORE sinister, not least because of the way it was suddenly attached to the Embryology Bill out of the blue.

I am not really QUALIFIED to spout about the abortion issue. But if there is one statistic that convinces ME, then it's THIS:

Britain: abortion legal: 20% of pregnancies end in termination.
Brazil: abortion illegal: 30% of pregnancies end in termination.

That certainly LOOKS like the way to save BABIES (and MUMMIES, who are JUST as important) is to give mummies CONTROL over their own squishy bits reproductive organs. That means being PRO-CHOICE. It means education. It means contraception. It means equal rights and equal pay and job protection and a whole lot of other things too. But all of those things add up to giving the power and the decision to the mummy.


However, the debate isn't as simple as the yes/no question over ALLOWING abortion at all. No matter that that's what the anti-abortion campaigners want, they've realised that – for now – they're not going to be able to wind THAT particular clock BACK to the Dark Ages. So instead they are adopting SALAMI TACTICS.

Daddy Richard says: they want to kill abortion by slicing it up piecemeal.

I say: Yeuch, icky metaphor daddy! [Daddy Alex AGREES!]

The scientific consensus is that we put the limit on abortion at 24 weeks because up to 24 weeks the chances of a baby surviving on its own are really quite low.

Obviously, this led to all the news shows going out and finding someone whose baby HAD survived being born at 23 weeks and then – rather disingenuously – NOT interviewing the NINE OTHER MUMMIES whose babies had all DIED.

Also, the chances of survival drop off AMAZINGLY quickly: from below one in ten at 23 weeks to below one in ten-thousand at 20 weeks (in fact in the most recent survey no babies at all survived being born so early).

But you can SORT OF see that people might think that given that there is SOME chance of survival at 23 weeks and a tiny chance at 22 weeks then MAYBE there is some justification in letting MPs decide to lower the limit, just on the precautionary principle, so we're covered as science gets BETTER at saving very early premature babies.

This is a TRAP.

Because the REAL danger here is that MPs choose to take the decision AWAY from Independent Scientific Advice. Essentially that would mean that you take the science OUT of the debate and then just debate on SENTIMENT.

And once you've got THERE, it's much, much harder to defend the right to an abortion with inconvenient things like COLD HARD FACTS, when the other side can say: "ooooh, just look at the li'll BABIES!!!"

(Actually, they say that a lot already – but at least you can counter it with: "yes, but the SCIENCE says…")

Fortunately, as you know, MPs decided to stick with the scientific advice.

But we still need to be aware that the HARD-LINE Conservatories have STILL scored a victory by getting their AGENDA to the centre of political debate. The Progressive Movement is STYMIED so long as the choices being presented are between the STATUS QUO (which Conservatories love) or going back to their Fantasy Fifties (which Conservatories love).

One thing is for certain: the ONLY way to make sure that you don't replace a barking mad power-crazed authoritarian Labour with barking mad power-crazed authoritarian Conservatories… is to make sure there are enough LIBERAL DEMOCRATs to keep the s HONEST!

PS:

One OTHER effect of this bill is that "Saviour Siblings" will be allowed.

This is GOOD: I think Mr Jesus could DO with a sister or brother to help him get out more.

Day 2693: On Expenses Encore

Friday:


You MAY remember that a month or so ago, I told you how Mr Speaker of the Housemartin had decided to waste a whole lot of everybody's time and money by going to court to try and keep MPs expenses secret.

Well, today he had his day before the beak and the judgement was that he'd wasted a whole lot of everybody's time and money by going to court and no, MPs expenses were NOT going to be kept secret.

We'll find out the answers by this FRIDAY. Just in time to be BURIED by Mr Frown's bad-news day.

Mr Clogg got in EARLY with his own expenses declaration.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7400952.stm

This is GOOD, because he has been calling for more OPENNESS and HONESTY about MPs pay and it is better to show that he has nothing to be afraid of.

On the other fluffy foot, people seem to have made a bit of a FUSS over the fact that he needed to spend seven thousand pounds on repairs and carpets for his constituency home.

"It's a CRUMBLING OLD EDIFICE, and we had to put in a SUPPORT to keep it up. But now we've got the SUPPLIES and we've got CONFIDENCE, I'm sure we can make it liveable,"

said Mr Clogg.

(I wonder if the Torygraph might have gotten the WRONG end of the STICK, though!)

Fortunately, Mr Speaker Housemartin is not going to waste any MORE time and money and has dropped plans to appeal the case.

Day 2691: Unidentified Frowning Object

Wednesday:


According to the EXPERTS, Great Britain has NOT been visited by ALIENS.


Which somehow FAILS to explain what PLANET Mr Frown is living on!


As with last year, Mr Frown's commitment to open government extends to sharing with us the Parliamentary Bills (or "Ragbag Proposals" according to Mr Clogg) that we are going to get rammed down our throats presented for our considered opinion during the next year.

Mr Balloon claims that all these bills are STOLEN from his secret stack of policies that he's not telling us. And that's not a surprise: there's no substance here at all.

The full list contains eighteen proposed bills, but as with the summer television schedules, there are a whole lot of REPEATS.

In particular, Welfare Reform (make the scroungers do more courses), Crime and Policing (more ASBOs for binge drinkers) and Transport security (terrorism at airports) all sound VERY familiar.

And similarly, the Education Bill and Health Bill will be more of the same tinkering, with "access to information" meaning more tests and "control of budgets" meaning more targets. Mr Balloon was VERY keen to claim that all of this "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" is exactly what the Conservatories would do too. Which just goes to show how empty of plans he is too.

Meanwhile the Coroners Bill is clearly going to be yet another go at robbing powers from our ancient justice system to stop an uppity judiciary daring to argue when the Government does something a bit wrong like getting hundreds of our soldiers killed.

And, in a prelude to the DOG-WHISTLE tactics that the Labour have adopted for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, there will be more Immigration legislation, in order to set up the already-set-up UK Boarders Authority and (we can but presume) give them the power to BARCODE everyone who comes into the country.


The MEATY part of the proposed policies was, naturally, REACTING to EVENTS, and NOT LEADING them.

Proposals for new Banking Regulation, (which obviously won't work because Mr Frown isn't going to pay for any inspectors to ENFORCE it), were obviously inspired by the whole Northern Rock/toilet interface fiasco. And a Saving Scheme (for people without any money to save) is obviously a half-decade-too-late response to the whole economy being run on the never-never.

Offering £200 million to buy at a knock down rate the homes of people who can't sell them in order to rent them out to people who can't afford to buy, is clearly a desperate measure to prop up the housing market much needed offer of help to "hardworking families" hit by the Credit Crunch.

It also even manages to seem a bit PALTRY when you remember that: (a) average house prices are still over £200,000 – so Mr Frown's largess amounts to, er, a thousand houses; and (b) Sooty dropped £2.7 BILLION on the economy the day before.


Don't get excited about the Constitutional Reform Bill, though: it's just formalising the superficial re-arrangements that Mr Frown has already decided upon, like letting MPs vote on invading Middle Eastern countries on flimsy to false prospectuses.

Speaking of which, we will apparently also be ratifying the Third Geneva Convention. Just so you know when we next help the Monkey-in-Chief to BREAK IT!

PS:

Actually, you are probably MUCH more interested in the "British X Files" which have been opened, revealing our pictures of UFOs.

Or possibly not.

Expert opinion: it's all twaddle!

Which brings me back to Mr Frown's Queen's Speech…

Day 2692: Relic Box of Einstein's Hairdo

Thursday:


Four things that Professor E is famous for:

Number 1: E = mc2

Number 2: Sock phobia

Number 3: Turned down the presidency of Israel

Number 4: "Mr God does not play dice"

Except it turns out that that last quote ought to be: "Mr God does not play dice… because he's IMAGINARY!"

Mr Albert often referred to Mr God POETICALLY, something that's been used as a sign of BELIEF. But, in this forgotten letter, he lays it out a bit more BLUNTLY:

"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

The question of Mr Albert's belief, unbelief, respect for the traditions and history of his people, or general sense of wonder at the fact that the world can even be understood at all shouldn't amount to any part of a hill of beans, certainly not compared with his HUGE contribution to our understanding of the positively BRAIN-WARPING ways in which our universe works at a very large scale.

But that hasn't stopped his words being USED (or AB-used) by the more ZEALOTIC religious types as evidence of a big famous scientist who believed in Mr God. As though that would actually make a difference to the Mr God real/not real question anyway.

Well, I think they probably WON'T want to do that any more!

Day 2695: Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Sunday:


And speaking of insects…

Our planet Earth is very BEAUTIFUL, but also very FRAGILE.

And you don't need one of THESE to cause the End of the World.

We have come to think of the countryside as permanent and unchanging, and shortage of food, famine even, as a thing that only happened in the DARK AGES, but this could all go rather horribly wrong because some of our most VITAL workers are under THREAT… and we don’t even really know why!

No, it's not schoolteachers, it is the humble, industrious Honey Bee and the soft and gentle Butterflies!

Bees and Butterflies actually do the most important work of all, pollinating our plants and crops so that we all have FOOD to eat. Clever scientists might have made fertilisers that help crops grow, but that's no good without SEEDS and seeds need pollen to be carried on little insect legs from one plant to another.

Apparently, one third of the United States' crop species, including such species as almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and strawberries, all rely on bees for pollenisation and the bees are DISAPPEARING.

Even Dr Who knows about it! (Unless all these BEE references are a CLUE to something else!)

Mr Saint David of Attenborough has launched a butterfly rescue centre
to try to help, but really this is a BIG job and it definitely needs some Government action.

Never mind roads and airports, it is these friendly insects who are our vital INFRASTRUCTURE and we should be investing in rescuing them, and rebuilding their populations.

A world without bees and butterflies would not just be less lovely to look at… it would be very hungry INDEED.

PS:

Also, I LIKE sticky buns with honey!

Day 2694: DOCTOR WHO: The Unicorn and the Wasp

Saturday:

The moving FLUFFY FOOT writes, and having writ moves on…

I say whodunit is DADDY RICHARD with the DOCTOR WHO REVIEW on the JUBILEE LINE!

Here's the Evidence

As charming, whimsical and entirely flyaway as one of Lady Eddison's picnics on the summer lawn, this was an absolutely topping way to while away a warm summer's evening*.

One part pitch-perfect period costume-drama with sparkling cast and sumptuous setting; one part rollicking Doctor Who monster chase, and what a monster; one part laugh-out-loud black comedy… one thing that it wasn't, of course, was an Agatha Christie mystery.

Despite the "whodunit" element – or rather, "who's the giant wasp wot we know wot dunnit" element – there are none of the true Agatha Christie motifs here. In a typical Christie mystery, the first fun is to spot the victim: this is easy, of course, because they'll be going out of their way to make certain that you think they deserve to get done in. At the same time this sets up all and sundry as potential killers. In particular – and especially if it's a Poirot tale – there'll be a young couple in love (possibly secretly), one or both of whom will be suspected of the deed. And a young woman who's no better than she ought to be who actually did it. Everyone will have an alibi and the police, no brighter than their buttons, will arrive and "hilariously" get it all hopelessly wrong.

(Christie was also notorious for overlooking almost entirely the "below stairs" classes – goodness, the servants could never have a motive for offing their betters or the Empire would crumble! – a habit that was, of course, gently parodied in "Gosford Park". It does make it a little odd when "The Unicorn and the Wasp" ventures down into the kitchen as though it wants to nod to "Gosford Park" but hasn't quite got the point. On the other hand, this does allow us the sweet introduction of a gay agenda/Lady Chatterley crossover moment, which obviously Donna spotted in an instant, and the outrageously funny "Ginger Beer" moment. Doctor Who in-joke and rhyming slang all in one.)

Here, there are no confusing "red herrings" (in fact, no one is presented as having a motive for the murders) and no "impossible alibis"; the police never arrive and the young lady who's no better than she ought to be turns out to be guilty of an entirely different crime.

Actually, I don't want to be unkind, but might not the title better have been: "The Wasp… oh and there's a Unicorn in here too… a bit". Ms Robbina Redmond was rather woefully underused, which was a great shame as she was charming fun as both flapper it-girl and unconvincing "cock-er-ney" burglar-ette.

I will endorse the suggestion, already seen on the OG forums, that she be the companion for series thirty-one in 2010. In fact, Ben Aaronovitch has already written her (re-)introductory scene. It's the one where she slips away from the party at a country house, tiptoes upstairs to the master bedroom, deftly springs open the safe… and finds the Doctor sat inside saying: "so, what kept you?"

But what, actually, was she for here? And why was she seen loading her pistol in the flashback – she's a cat-burglar not a highwayman! The problem is that her story – a cunning, stunning theft of the Firestone jewel – simply doesn't have room to fit in alongside the Cluedo murders that are going on.

Yes, sorry, I've given the game away haven't I: this isn't Christie, it's Cluedo – or for the American reader "Clue". In the podcast commentary, writer wit and raconteur Gareth Roberts admits to having been ever so jealous of Russell Davies getting the gig of writing an episode of the TV series based on the board game. So we get Professor Plum Peach with the lead piping in the Library; Miss Scarlet Redmond with the revolver in the bathroom; the Reverend Green Golightly with the Giant Wasp's sting in the… no, that one doesn't work.

In fairness, Christie would occasionally draw a great big old deus-ex-machina out of the hat in the form of facts suddenly know to the detective that the reader has been denied ("Evil under the Sun", for example, has Poirot know of a previous case just like this one). So the sudden: "ah ha, it's whoever is forty" leap is not completely without precedent.

Even so, it is slightly to miss the point that Christie's detectives – Poirot and Marple both – would solve the case psychologically and not reductively, whether by supreme intellect or insight gained from a lifetime of observing village life.

We almost get to that point here, when the Doctor realises that they need Agatha's genius for understanding motive. Unfortunately, the motive turns out to be that the alien wasp has been basically driven a bit bonkers by uploading Dame Agatha's own novels.

(Ironically, the villain being villainous because they are "just mad" is something that Gareth himself has railed against in the past when he praised the work of former Doctor Who producer Graham Williams for… giving villains proper motives.)

This isn't Christie, but then neither are two of Doctor Who's other "Christie" stories: "The Robots of Death" (the one where all the butlers did it) and "Black Orchid" (the one where the butler gets done).

Ironically, the most successful pastiche is Pip and Jane Baker's "Terror of the Vervoids". "Successful" is a relative term of course, but what success it has is by having the Doctor Who monster plot no more than tangentially connected to the whodunit… the monstrous Vervoids are, technically, the motive rather than the murderer.

Quite simply, the two genres just don't mix here. This Doctor Who is about pace and energy (yes, that is Graeme Harper behind the camera again, fantastic as always) and "a serious amount of running"; Poirot would never run anywhere ever, and the detective story is all about the slow build up of plot and the slow unlayering of character. That's why chasing and being chased by a giant wasp – brilliantly realised though it is – feels jarring. It's a sudden intrusion of the wrong kind of story: we're expecting a clue in the locked bedroom, not the villain waving a big sign that reads "it was ME!" and saying "BUZZ!!!!!".

In Doctor Who we're trained by the economy of the show's format to believe that everything that is said is both important and true; in a detective story we believe everything we hear to be either chaff or deception – again, the commentary remarks upon this dialectic. They also point out the revealing irony that in the "flashbacks" sequence, it is only the Reverend whose words match the images we see of what he was actually doing.


But then I'm missing the point myself, because this was a comedy drama, not a serious attempt at homage at all. In that context, it's entirely right that Agatha Christie should be reduced to the popular stereotypes: body in library; sinister butler; everyone gathered round at the end as the detective ticks off who did and didn't do it. They're all lightly mocked along the way, particularly in that fabulous "flashback" scene, and also in the almost Clouseau-esque "I have gathered you all here" scene, which Donna is watching like it's live television before ending up suspecting everyone including herself.

Casting was a treat. Obviously a joy for all Doctor Who fans to descry once more the lugubrious liniments of Christopher Benjamin, on fine form as the loveable Colonel; even more loveable in fact when his deception was blown by an own-goal, and his motive turned out to be the desire to keep the woman he loved. And marvellous to see isn't-she-a-dame-yet Facility Kendal indulging some little comic moments into the otherwise flawless jewel that was Lady Eddison.

But the greatest kudos has to go to Fenella Woolgar for creating a sympathetic and believable Agatha Christie. She managed to be smart but with an air of sadness, a woman just about holding it together in the face of discovering her husband's infidelity and a mind-bending plunge into the Doctor's world of alien insect craziness at the same time, but with a wistful regret that her own opinion of her writing was "competent" rather than "great".

I don't know whether it was whimsical fun or insane self-indulgence to turn large chunks of the script over to name-checking great swathes of Christie titles. There is, I suppose, a kind of aptness to making a crossword puzzle out of a story about the lady who many say turned the detective novel into one. It certainly left the dialogue even more imponderably unsayable than ever, with David and Fenella given the lions' share of trying to make the likes of "The Moving Finger", "Sparkling Cyanide" or "our Secret Enemy" sound naturalistic. Even Ms Kendal struggled with "…he was taken at the flood".

One particular personal niggle, though: Agatha Christie, of all people, would know that "Nemesis" is not used to refer to the murderer – Nemesis, being the Greek goddess of divine retribution, while hardly a "nice" person is definitely on the side of right: Holmes is Moriarty's nemesis; the reverse is not the case; likewise it is the Doctor who is nemesis to the Master, and not the other way around. Our modern usage of "nemesis" as a synonym for "arch-enemy" would have been as alien to her as a giant wasp. Nemesis is personified in the Christie canon as Miss Marple; and the book "Nemesis" is – confusingly to a modern reader – not about Miss Marple's arch-enemy, but about the spinster sleuth's implacable pursuit of a crime.

It was, perhaps, a little bit trite to explain away a real-life mystery of Agatha Christie's life as a Doctor Who yarn. We turned over to BBC4 later in the evening to watch their more serious-minded covering of the same topic, which, apart from having the same registration number for Mrs Christie's car, appeared to be written from a completely different set of research notes. Though, coincidentally, it had a very odd (though completely successful) narrative structure of flashbacks within flashbacks.

There's no reason why you can't do a Doctor Who whodunit, though. See "The Also People", for example, an admittedly much more languid novel written by that Ben Aaronovitch again.

But to do the subject justice, you need a more complicated story (one where, perhaps, it is the Unicorn's dazzling theft of the Firestone that is the trigger for subsequent Vespiform-related events) with more convoluted characters, and more time devoted to understanding them and their contradictions, and less to Doctor Who set pieces like running up and down corridors or getting poisoned (entirely excellent though both of those were). What, in fact, you want is to have done this as one of the 2009 specials, where the extra time would give you room to do all that.

What we ended up with, then, was fairy cake and cocktails in the garden, rather than the five-course dinner with port and cheese to follow. Delicious, memorable, charming, but not quite as filling.


Next time… Shush: "Silence in the Library"

*PS:

And, fortunately for the ratings, an even BETTER one to while away the rain and the cold.

Day 2689: Immortality – It's A Bad Thing… isn't it?

Monday:


As the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill begins to make its way through the House of Commons, my fluffy thoughts turn inevitably to Space: 1999…

No, seriously.

Although the second monster (or man-in-same-rubber-suit-painted-a-different-colour) crazed season got too silly for words, the FIRST season – well known as a cure for insomnia though it many be – has two BIG sci-fi themes: (A) aliens, with ways to strange for us to understand; and (B) immortality, it's a BAD thing.

What's THAT got to do with HuFEB, I hear you ask. And well you might!

But let's just try thinking things through.

Opposition to the Bill really comes from two distinct, but conjoined, sources. First there are the people who want to protect the interests of the unborn embryo (and linked to them are the pro-lifers who are hoping to reduce the limit on the number of weeks at which abortions can legally be performed). Second, there are those who are opposed to the mixing of human and fluffy animal cells on the grounds of" Ewwwwww!"

In fact, the POINT of "hybridising" cells like this is to take the INSIDES of human cell and the OUTSIDES of a fluffy animal cell and make an ARTIFICIAL STEM CELL – thus saving the need to harvest stem cells from, well, unborn embryos… so if they actually applied any logic at all, the two groups of rebels would actually be on opposite sides.

What are stem cells for? Well, they are cells that haven't decided what bit of the body they are going to be YET. So the idea is that you can use them to rebuild almost any broken bits, including bits like nerves and brains that we haven't had any idea how to fix before now.

Now, at the moment, people get old and drop dead because their bodies are constantly wearing out. In fact it's a fair miracle of engineering that they keep going AT ALL. You are under constant attack from the environment, even from things that you think of as GOOD for you – sunlight and oxygen are actually concentrated beams of radiation and a powerful chemical agent respectively (the effect of oxygen on cars is to make them rust, so just think what it's doing to your insides!).

This did not used to matter because most people PEGGED OUT as a result of disease and malnutrition in their early forties. But nowadays we have a whole load of medicines and antibiotics to defeat most disease and (in Great Britain) more food than is good for us. So lots of people are living a LOT longer and we have discovered a whole NEW range of exciting diseases that you get when you get old.

And a lot of them are rather horrid, including especially the ones that melt your brains and turn you into vegetables.

But if stem cell technology lives up to all its promises, then these could be a thing of the past too. Because as bits of your body wear out, you just go down to stem-u-like and grow a new one.

Heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, skin… as they wear out, just pop in a new one. And if your brain goes melty, then with luck and hard work we can fix that too.

Sounds brilliant doesn't it.

You should all be able to live to a ripe old age without any of the suffering and indignities that we fear today.

The question is… how old IS a ripe old age going to be if you can keep replacing parts?

We've already seen the consequences of ONE substantial increase in life expectancy: a now-ageing tide of BABY BOOMERS who have benefited from free education, received generous final salary pension schemes and soaked up all the property in the country leaving young people stranded without a foot on the housing ladder and facing the prospect of fewer and fewer people IN work having to support the retired while trying to pay off their student loans and fund their own pension plans too.

Just imagine how much WORSE it could get if instead of living to ninety or a hundred, the baby boomers live on to TWO hundred. Or FIVE hundred. Or forever!

And if that's not horrifying enough, then remember that you'll have a generation of immortal Generation X-ers living right up there with them and moaning about how they never got to see any of the benefits their parents had, while they struggle to meet the repayments on their PERPETUAL mortgages.
But then globally resources are already running short. The good news is that the rate of population growth seems to decline once a new stable plateau is reached, so with a bit of luck you humans' population will get to about twenty billions and then stop. The bad news is that the planet can only just about support so many, and certainly can't COMFORTABLY support so many, especially with the West taking so much more than its share.

Basically, you monkeys aren't just occupying too much of the SURFACE of the planet, you're looking at taking up too much of its timespan as well.


It doesn't have to be like that.

After all, who wants to live forever? Well, pretty much EVERYONE, I would have thought, especially if you can keep your HEALTH.

But you ARE going to need to start thinking and planning for how to make the world actually WORK when it's full of people who are old.

(And I say this to a planet where people stick the world's deadliest poisons in their faces in the DELUDED belief that killing their expression stone dead makes them look young again!)

Working longer is ALREADY on the cards, but you are going to have to find an equitable settlement between the generations, and find a way to live more within the means of the planet. Or, more accurately, your FAIR SHARE of the planet. Or you are going to have to find another one. (Yes, you knew "Let's Build Rocket Ships" was coming somewhere!)

(Mind you, actually the biggest advantage of a longer lifespan is that it starts to make INTERPLANETARY exploration look more possible.)

But you also need to learn to stay flexible, open-minded and interested in CHANGE as you grow, to avoid falling into a rut and falling out of your time.

The CURSE of long life is that there are no forevers – everything you know will END; but the BLESSING is that there is ALWAYS something NEW.

There is so much to learn and see and do in the world that who WOULDN'T want more life to try and do it all in!

So that is the ULTIMATE key to living longer… go out there and LIVE it!

Day 2688: Murder by Memoir

Sunday:


I am beginning to think that Mr Frown's problem is a simple one: after ten years of spending his every waking moment devoted to undermining the Prime Monster, he has simply FORGOTTEN to stop doing it!

Let's look at a first draft of Mr Frown's MEMOIRS…

5am: Morning: wake up; phone papers with leak against Prime Monster.

5.01am: Shower: remember that I AM Prime Monster. Kick self.

5.15am: Breakfast: phone Balls; instruct him on daily briefing against Prime Monster.

5.16am: Read papers: full of poisonous briefings against Prime Monster. Reminded that this is me. Bash head on breakfast table. Get face full of Coco-Pops for my trouble.


Mind you, it's not been a good weekend for memoirs if you're Mr Frown, what with Mr Lord Cashpoint's memoirs, Mr Two-Jags' memoirs, and Lady Cherie-on-the-top Macbeth Blairimort's memoirs all coming out in a Sunday Newspaper near you.

The consensus of these TITANS of the Blairimort Era is… that they would all like to cash in quick by doing the dirty on Gordon.

Er, I'm sorry, that should read …that Mr Frown was a vain and greedy man, with the ambition but not the talent to be Prime Monster, who was a shouty BULLY to poor innocent Lord Blairimort, and probably told FIBS about not knowing anything about Cash for Coronets. Which Lord Cashpoint had nothing to do with, by the way.

(The news reporting was probably conflating many years of hard work, but they did seem to suggest that Mr Two-Jabs was organising meetings of reconciliation between Mr Frown and Lord Blairimort by telling Lord Blairimort that he should sack Mr Frown and telling Mr Frown that he should challenge Lord Blairimort from the back benches. Or "mixing it" as you might put it.)

And then overnight, Mr Frank "Potter's" Field weighed in with the accusation that Mr Frown is an UNHAPPY MAN who will probably not lead the Labour into the next General Election defeat.

(A complete contrast to Mr Millipede who always makes it COMPLETELY clear that Mr Frown will lead the Labour to the next election. Right up to the moment that the polls close.)

Still, these are self-serving one-sided opinionated publications. I'm sure there's every chance that they've been sexed up published in full compliance with the known intelligence. So I do not think that Mr Frown should take ANY NOTICE of these! He can rely on the full support from the public…

…who, er, also want him gone.

Day 2690: Sooty's Budget Take Two – Doing the Right Thing in the Wrong Way for All the Wrong Reasons

Tuesday:


What is really TRAGIC is that Sooty's fix doesn't even WORK: certainly the people who lose out are CUT from those earning between £5,000 and £17,000 to just those earning between £7,000 and £9,300, and the amount that the losers lose is a lot less (about £37 a year, rather than £157).

But that's still SUBSTANTIAL gains for those people earning £30,000 while the lowest earners are PENALISED.

I want to know whether this increase in allowance is permanent, or will it be reversed next year?

And there's a SERIOUS question about whether Sooty knows how to do MATHS.

You see our ESTEEMED Chancellor has said BOTH that Higher Rate Taxpayers will not benefit from the raising of allowances AND that he has therefore lowered the Higher Rate Threshold by £600.

Lowering the threshold by the SAME amount as you raise the allowance means that you pay BASIC RATE TAX (20%) on a SMALLER amount of money and HIGHER RATE TAX (40%) on the SAME amount of money.

This Drawing might help:

So you pay LESS basic rate tax and the SAME amount of higher rate tax. That means LESS in total.

In other words, if Sooty MEANS what he says about reducing the Threshold by £600, then ALL taxpayers, and this means especially Higher Rate taxpayers get some tax BACK – it's £120 for anyone earning more than about £6,000.

Not enough to compensate the worst off under Mr Frown's budget, but a nice little freebie for the already quite nicely off thankyou.

Here is a drawing of the WINNERS and LOSERS:

(That big downwards spike at around £40,000 in income comes from Mr Frown hiking up the top end of the National Insurance band. Higher earners pay 11% on an extra £5,200 this year, moving us closer towards having just TWO tax rates: 31% and 41%. Or had you forgotten that National Insurance is just HIDDEN Income Tax?

Average salaries are around £26,000 but I do wonder about the DEMOGRAPHICS. It would be AWFULLY cynical to suspect that that national average is made up of large numbers or workers getting paid around £20,000 and large numbers of managers getting paid around £40,000, because that would mean that FEWEST people benefit from the tax changes.)


Now, I guess it's POSSIBLE that Sooty doesn't ACTUALLY understand how the tax system (which he is notionally in charge of) works. Be FAIR: he's taken over from Mr Frown, who spent the last ten years trying to make it as tangled as possible.

What he PROBABLY wants is to CANCEL out that EXTRA £120 for Higher Rate taxpayers, but without changing the tax RATE. The only way to do that is to make them pay the higher rate on MORE of their earnings, and that means lowering the Threshold EVEN FURTHER.

In fact, you have to lower it by ANOTHER £600. That's £1,200 in total. (Because by making that money taxed at 40%, you are paying an extra 20% on top of the tax that's already being taken. So you need to lower it by £600 because £600 x 20% extra tax = £120)

That would give us a REVISED map of Winners and Losers that looks like THIS:

Obviously, this would draws more people into the band of Higher Rate taxpayers. But that is hardly anything new; it is so normal that it even has a name: "FISCAL DRAG" (which thankfully does NOT mean Mr Frown dressing up as LADY!).

You can probably bet your shirt that even if Sooty reverses the £600 extra on the Allowance, he WON'T reverse the £600 cut in the threshold next year!

Anyway, what is clear from this is that Sooty has not raised allowances by ENOUGH fully to compensate all of the people that Mr Frown DIDDLED in the first place.

And you know, Mr Frown ADMITTED as much in his answer to Mr Clogg at Prime Monster's Questionable Time.


What he or Sooty SHOULD have done, was raise allowances like this, as much as he could, and KEPT what was left of the 10p band. That would have avoided ANYONE having to pay MORE by DOUBLING their starting rate of tax.

By applying Fiscal Drag – though hopefully NOT at the Despatch Box – you could have done this in a way that was FISCALLY NEUTRAL, i.e. it didn't raise any EXTRA tax but didn't cost more EITHER and would have been REDISTRIBUTIVE – letting the people on lower earnings keep MORE of their salary and taking a little extra away from those who are better off.

Which, of course, brings me to the REAL disaster of this sorry business: where Sooty got the money from. And it's BANK of MAGIC MONEY TREE again.

Yes, basically, the Government has BORROWED £2.7 BILLION to hand over to us as a BRIBE to make us forget that they robbed the POOR to pay the RICH another BRIBE.

It's ALMOST "monetarist" (by which I mean "barmy"). Remember how the THEORY goes: to fight inflation, you cut government spending and borrowing to reduce the amount of money moving about; if the economy is stagnating, throw more money into the system to get it going again.

That's what the Monkey-in-Chief and his Neo-con Reaganomic Replutocrats are doing. And where the Monkey-in-Chief's administration leads the Labour are, as always, soon to blunder in after.

Of course, at the moment we have the economy going backwards BUT the cost of imports – particularly food and fuel – are going through the roof. This means that Inflation is going UP, even though the economy isn't growing, and Ms Caroline "Heart of" Flint foresees house prices falling at least 5-10%: it's the spectre of 1970's style "STAGFLATION".

Borrowing money to give away tax cuts at a time like this is as likely to cause an inflationary spiral (as people spend the money on already expensive imports and drive up prices further, leading to demands for wages to keep up) as it is to kick-start the housing market and get the economy back in action.

Still, VOODOO ECONOMICS always was a STAB in the DARK!

PS:

Naturally, all the media coverage has ignored all of this and instead focused on how EMBARRASSING it must be for Sooty to have to re-write the budget just weeks after saying, er, "I can't re-write the budget"

Pointing and going "Ha-ha!" is much easier than HARD SUMS.

Day 2686: Cardinal Goes Godwin:

Friday:

Always bracing to wake up to my chum, Professor Richard, coming on the radio to dice up Mr Humpy.

"You wouldn't let a politician get away with saying these things without asking where's your evidence?"

"Ah, but when it comes to faith it's a matter of what they believe…"

"Precisely! There's absolutely no reason to take seriously someone who says, 'I believe it because I believe it'."


Unfortunately an hour later Cardinal Carpark Mary O'Conman was on. With his claim that if Britain becomes "spiritually homeless" we'll be like the "godless" regimes of the Twentieth Century, like… the Nazis.

That is just WILFULLY IGNORANT or FLAGRANTLY DECEITFUL. And if your ONE ground for getting a BULLY PULPIT on the radio is just claiming "I'm a wise old man; I know stuff" then you just proved that you don't deserve your job.

Chairman Mao: aggressively atheist, difficult to argue with that; Mr Stalin (not Mr Frown), have to put my fluffy feet up to him too in his own strange making-a-sort-of-religion-out-of-Marxism way.

But not the Nazis.

Mr Adolf was a religious NUT. He based his ADDLED THINKING on some kind of bad-trip mish-mash of Catholicism and the Norse religions, but you can't get away from the fact that he and his goose-stepping loons were on a RELIGIOUSLY-inspired CRUSADE.

Nor, I have to remind you, can you avoid the CULPABILITY for the Catholic Mother Church SUPPORTING him for his campaign against Jewish people… pretty much the MAIN evidence for marking out the Nazis as the Number One in the All-Time-Evil Hit Parade.

And forgive me for bringing it up, but, er, didn't your BOSS – Pope Benelin – kind of used to WORK for Mr Hitler in the Hitler Youth. Oh SURE, it was "compulsory"; not EVERYONE passed up their principles to join, though, did they?

You can just see the PREJUDICE bubbles forming in his be-mitred brain: ooh, the Nazis… they were EVIL weren't they… they must have been ATHEISTS!

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

And all the more IRONIC because he was SUPPOSEDLY on air to big-up the speech he made to say: why don't we talk to the atheists because their non-belief is ALMOST like a belief, isn't it.

The CENTREPIECE of his argument is his assertion that: "The interesting question about atheism is what is the theism that being denied?"

In many ways this is the LEAST interesting thing about atheism.

Certainly, Professor Richard, born and raised in a so-called Christian country, concentrates much of his fire on the Christian myths and stories. And how a lot of them are not very NICE. (Fried cities, murdered courtesans, sacrificing children and fluffy animals and all.) But you have to bear in mind that Christianity TAKES IT AS READ that it's already proved that ALL other religions are NOT TRUE… so someone brought up with that only has to prove ONE MORE.

Of course, for the Archbigot, the UNDERLYING assumption is that someone who does not believe in Mr God has a SECRET belief in Mr God hidden inside them.

Professor Richard would sort-of agree… except he'd say he talks a lot about Christianity because that is the religion that got to him first and tried to BRAIN-WASH him.

His reply would be… well, Cardinal O'Conman, does that mean that you have a secret belief in Mr THOR? And in Mr Sutekh? And in Cuddly Cthulhu? And the flying Spaghetti Monster?

Everyone in the world is an atheist about EVERY religion ever… except at most one. Some of us just go one religion further.

That is to paraphrase Professor Richard, but if you think about it it's self-evidently true. Okay, there just MIGHT be one or two people who actually believe TWO contradictory religions, but that's got to be WEIRD, right? So, really the NATURAL state is to disbelieve almost everything you hear about almost every religion (with the exception of the one you believe in).

Professor Richard said that he had read the Cardinal's speech: never, he said, had he seen someone take five-thousand words to say nothing.

[A: Please sir! Please sir! I have!]

But why should I just take Professor Richard's word for it? So I have read the Cardinal's speech MYSELF.


(Professor Richard was RIGHT, though.)


The Cardinal-Archbigot starts off with a TYPICAL religious ASSERTION:

"No one generates their own faith: it always comes to us through the goodness, example and insight of others: that is the meaning of tradition…"

Except, no… "faith", such as it is, is a response to what we LEARN from other people, but it doesn't have to be from their "goodness" – it is a response to their habit. We learn our behaviour mainly from our daddies and mummies, but also from our friends, school-chums and so on.

No one generates their own ability to SWEAR using bad words either, but you would hardly say that it comes to us through the "goodness" and "insight" of others.

In fact, this is one of Professor Richard's MAIN COMPLAINTS: children are especially adept at learning from their parents, it is a SURVIVAL trait, but it also means that they are IMPRESSIONABLE and especially open to believing ideas JUST because they are told to. He thinks that the idea that there is a Mr God sticks with people BECAUSE it has been IMPRESSED upon them, NOT because they have LEARNED if it is true.


Cardinal O'Conman then quotes Cardinal Henri de Lubac, who tells of a priest who lost his faith. When a visitor congratulated the priest on having finally got rid of this religious nonsense, the priest said, 'From now onward, I am no more than a philosopher – in other words, a man alone'.

Lubac then says that this is true because the priest has left his "home".

The PROBLEM with this jolly little story is that it is basically Lubac saying "I heard this thing that I think is true and you know what, it's true". In fact, it's WORSE than that: it's CARDINAL O'CONMAN saying "I heard this bloke I know saying that he heard this thing that he thinks is true and you know what, when he says it's true it IS true."

What if I tell you a story about a priest who has lost his faith and the Cardinal comes and consoles him on his loss, and the priest replies 'but no, at last I am free of all that pointless guilt and rigmarole'. (At which point, the Cardinal calls for Pope Benelin and his friends from the INQUISITION, but we'll not go there…) Is this story any MORE or LESS true than the one that the Cardinal tells us that ANOTHER Cardinal once told him?

Because, in fact, this is indicative of the problem with THEOLOGY as a whole: it's all based not on things you can PROVE, or even things that you can make a DECENT CASE for, but on something someone once SAID. Ultimately this means it's FALLACIOUS, because it's all based on the "Appeal to Authority" fallacy.

Remember how I was repeating things that Professor Richard says earlier? Did you notice that I also tried to make sure that it STOOD UP to examination on its own MERITS and not just because someone FAMOUS said it?

How many times does a sermon or a Fart for Today begin with something like "Mr Saint Paul once said…"? It's got NOTHING to do with whether that one thing that Mr Saint Paul said is true or false in itself, except that Mr Saint Paul said a LOT of things, and some of them not very nice, especially concerning LADIES and their HATS. What the sermoniser is REALLY doing is STARTING with his answer and then looking up for something that Mr Saint Paul said and using THAT in order to make it LOOK like his answer is more right.

Mr the Cardinal ADMITS as much when he says:

"Our faith is not founded on the conclusions of reason, but it is grounded in the Logos, the expressive Word that comes from God…"

Only he then immediately goes on to add: "…and it is compatible with reasoned thought."

And you know: it REALLY isn't.

All elephants are PINK
Nellie is an elephant
Nellie is PINK

Compatible with reasoned thought?

Davros thought so, but he's an IDIOT.

It ISN'T compatible with reasoned thought and here is WHY: the PREMISE (elephants being pink) is false (just look: there is PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE all over my diary to PROVE it false). And, and this is the killer, "reasoned thought" requires that you CHECK YOUR PREMISE.

"Revealed truth" (daddy says: look up oxymoron) "Revealed truth" means that you SKIP the important REASONING part of "is this a REASONABLE assumption to base my logic upon?"

And you end up making NONSENSE statements about Nellie.

Cardinal O'Conman says that faith should be about TRUTH not about the social benefits.

(Actually, of course, he doesn't: being a THEOLOGIAN he bases his argument on what someone ELSE as said, so he cites an unnamed Muslim cleric saying that Pope Benelin said it and then backs it up by citing Mr TS Eliot saying it too, but you get the point.)

The PROBLEM, once again, is that "Does Mr God exist?" is a TRUE/FALSE question. It is one or the other. It is not an answer that should change depending on who you are asking.

Cardinal O'Conman said that he had been at PRAYER so he had not listened to Professor Richard (which makes for an INFORMED response, I do not think) but if he had he would have heard him say that.

"Does Mr God exist?" OUGHT to be susceptible to inquiry.

And you really OUGHT to be able to ask the "is this a REASONABLE assumption to base my logic upon?" question.


Getting to the GIST of his sermon, the Cardinal then put forward the suggestion that theists and atheists have a lot to talk about.

(Well that's TRUE, but I SUSPECT that he meant on the subject of RELIGION, rather than Liberal Democracy.)

His suggestion is that religions' folks should use their DOUBTS about their faith to talk to atheists because a wobbling faith is JUST like not believing in something just because it's written down.

This, of course, is where he starts on the "atheists really just WANT to believe" cant.

"In his recent book about death, 'Nothing to be Frightened Of'," says the Archbigot, "Julian Barnes begins with the words, 'I do not believe in God, but I miss him': this is the dilemma of so many people today. But where does this sense of 'missing' God come from?"

His answer seems to be that we all need a bit of LOVIN', a bit of MEANING, a bit of giving us a HUG when we are LOW. And that's where Mr God comes in.

Well, frankly I think that that's a bit RUBBISH!

I think that people are BETTER than that: the strength to live your life, to bear up under your troubles, to be happy lies within you and in your family and your friends.

Cardinal O'Conman goes on further to try to explain this feeling of "missing Mr God":

"A baby is called to self-consciousness by the love and smile of his mother…. It reveals four things to him: 1) that he is one in love with his mother, and yet he is not his mother, and so Being is one; 2) this love is good, and so the whole of being is good; 3) that this love is true, and so being is true, 4) this love is a cause of joy, and so Being is beautiful

"And of course, when you talk about the reality that is one, true, good and beautiful (what Thomists call the 'transcendental attributes'), you are talking about God."

Well, call me old-fashioned but I THINK what you are talking about is your MUMMY.

In fact, Dr Freud would say straight away: you feel the loss of the love of your MOTHER so you feel the need for a REPLACEMENT love, the love of an INVISIBLE FRIEND.

Yes, of COURSE I am oversimplifying. I am only eight [R: seven]; I am not a DOCTOR of PSYCHIATRY!

People have a sense of needing of something other than themselves, not just because their earliest bonding memories are of their mummies, but also because humans – like elephants – are communal creatures who actively form communities and links to each other. That ability to CONNECT – EMPATHY, if you like – is at the root of all of humanity's strengths. It just also contributes to the weird side-effect of empathising with all sorts of other things too: television programmes, political parties, soft toys, pet names for cars, imaginary friends (I mean ACTUAL imaginary friends, rather than being disparaging about Mr God this time).

You can't say that all of these are REALLY just because people are secretly searching for a Cuddly Cthulhu in their lives, can you?


You see, what Cardinal O'Conman clearly fails to realise is that for the atheist having doubts isn't a big deal.

I understand that if you DO believe, then it is one of the RULES that you have to, well, believe it. And this means that some people, when they find they don't, actually, totally believe all of the mysticism that they are asked to, find themselves WRACKED with DIFFICULTIES. For the believer, DOUBT is bad because it can be PAINFUL and it makes you feel you've let the side down.


Mind you, it probably DOESN'T help that the "side" is telling you that you are in actual physical danger of going to HELL! Believers are told that if you STOP believing then you are REJECTING Mr God and that leads to PUNISHMENT in the hereafter which if course you believe in. This makes having DOUBTS even MORE painful.

And, just in case the imaginary hereafter turns out not to exist, SOME theists have been known to practice precautionary punishment i.e. burning, stoning or shooting by a religious mob! Which is even MORE PAINFUL STILL!!

In CONTRAST, the rationalist, existentialist atheist doesn't give TWO HOOTS. Keeping an OPEN MIND is actually part of the deal. So, certainly, you can entertain the odd "well MIGHT it be true" notion and it DOESN'T shake your world.

Because, and this is what the Cardinal will find really SHOCKING, atheists do NOT spend all day and all night going round ACTIVELY DISBELIEVING. WE just don't waste our time with it. There is much more FUN to be had.

So, when you say: "oh we believers should go out and talk to atheists about our doubts and win them over," I'm afraid my response is: DON'T WASTE MY LIFE, GRANDDAD!

Anyway, clearly realising that he's just advocated DOUBTING Mr God, the Cardinal starts rowing back sharpish.

"We should remember that the proper response to God is that of faith, not absolute certainty"

he says before reaching for yet another quote:

"Si comprehendis, non est Deus, said St Augustine: 'if you understand, it is not God'."

Ah, the "Argument from Incomprehensibility"; I'm afraid it is just another FALLACY.

You do not need to be able to UNDERSTAND Mr God to at least show some effect of his (or HER) presence!

I don't comprehend QUANTUM MECHANICS either, but I can still prove to you that it exists because – gosh wow – the SEMI-CONDUCTORS in your computer are allowing you to read my diary over the Wibbly Wobbly Web.

You could say that Mr God is OMNIPOTENT and chooses to make his presence INDISTINGUISHABLE from his absence. That would mean, though, that there is a scientific and understandable reason based in physical laws of the universe for everything that happens everywhere ever. (Because otherwise you could spot Mr God by seeing where the rules are broken.)

I quickly add that that is NOT the position of the Catholic – or any other – Church. Because otherwise prayer would definitely be pointless. In fact, ALL religion would have to be pointless, because if it wasn't then Mr God would AGAIN be giving himself away!

So religions MUST assume that MR God makes a difference. A NOTICEABLE and, more importantly, COMPREHENSIBLE difference. In which case, it's not unreasonable to say: what the blinking Nora IS it?


But the Cardinal isn't having any of THAT. He says:

"The atheism we see around us today perhaps flows from an apologetic which attempted to prove God’s existence independently of any religious tradition or faith…"

There you go: we're back to saying that elephants are pink. You can't prove Mr God's existence independently of saying: "well it says so in this big book I've got". Hmmm.

The "Argument from Tradition" – it's really just the "Argument from Authority" in a older frock. Yes, it's another FALLACY.

So as he draws towards his conclusion, the Archbigot says: "I was extremely fortunate to have been born in to a loving family which gave me a sense of meaning and of 'home'."

Once again, by 'home' he means faith and the Church.

Here's the thing, your eminence. Most people, eventually, have to LEAVE home. It is sad and scary but it is a necessary part of life. It's called GROWING UP.

It is what EMPOWERS us, let's us make our own choices and just get ON with our lives.

Atheists are NOT Nazis. That's childish name-calling. They are quite the OPPOSITE: Nazism is based on the Fuhrer Princip, that of the supreme wisdom and authority of the leader; Atheism is about NOT investing power in some supernatural figure, whether human or divine.

And it's about NOT staying at home relying on mummy and daddy, but going out and FACING the world, and its fears and its wonders and its beauty.

And it's time you LET us.

Day 2685: Ant 'n' Dec's Award Night Takeaway

Thursday:


It's not EVERY week where the bosses of ITV find themselves in the same dock with GENERAL FRANCO, both accused of fixing the popular vote in a talent contest.

In some ways it's actually MORE shocking to deceive the public about the votes in the awarding of an award than it is to cheat people who are entering a fixed phone-in competition.

It's like HUSTLE, isn't it? There, you know that ACTUALLY it's criminal but the code of the con means that there is always an "OUT". You don't HAVE to choose to play – it's only because you think you can get something for nothing that you end up getting nothing for something.

That's not the case for all those people voting for Ms Catherine Tate (and let's be fair, those voting for Ant'n'Dec or any of the other losers either): they didn't CHOOSE to do it because they thought there was a REWARD, they were doing it to register how much they ADMIRED their chosen artists. For ITV to decide it would ignore those results and pick the winner that suited their agenda… well it means ITV counted the votes of ALL of their viewers as worthless.

I imagine that the BBC thought that this was a good week to bury the latest news of its own phone in/Eurovision financial misdoings.

We have, however, watched a rather marvellous speech by Mr Stephen Fry about all of the GOOD things that the BBC does too. Obviously my daddies were THRILLED that he should mention his earliest and most exciting TV memory as being the first episode of Doctor Who. But it was much more than that, a whole essay on why "Public Service Broadcasting" is only possible when it is in an environment like the BBC where trailers after EastEnders can prompt people to watch a programme about the Guttenberg printing press on BBC4, where there is a public service in nurturing talent, allowing it to grow (and sometimes fail – where else than the BBC would "Blackadder" have got a second series?) along the way to mega-success.

Mr Stephen's conclusion was that where some countries spend money just to put flowers on the roundabouts because it makes things just a little bit nicer, in this country we spend money on the BBC and it's flowers on the roundabouts times a million.

I agree… but in fact I would go further. The whole WORLD is better because it has the BBC in it – our news, our dramas, our nature shows, our kids' telly: they all play well above their league. The BBC is one of the few things that still make Great Britain GREAT.

Someone should give them an AWARD! Oh, they did – only ITV took it by 'mistake'.

Day 2683: The Vice of the Clintons

Tuesday:


No, no, no, this is NOTHING to do with her HUSBAND; this is the question of whether Senator Hillary-Billary is now willing to settle for being Barry O's Vice-President, and if that is why she is staying IN the contest which she has very probably lost by now.

The BIG WIN for Barry O in North Carolina and only a narrow victory for Hillary-Billary in Indiana put a great big stopper in her resurgent tide and, more importantly, made the money dry up and super-delegates declare for Barry O, turning him back into Barry MO (…for MOmentum, you see!)


Even though Hillary-Billary vowed to continue the fight, people were already noticing that she had toned down the anti-Obama rhetoric, and was positively CONCILIATORY to the young Dumbocratic super-star.

(Always remembering that Hillary-Billary is a lady who thinks "marriage guidance counselling" means punching Billary-Hillary in the head until he can't remember his latest infidelity.)

She's going to get another mini-boost from a win in the West Virginia Primary, but not enough to take off again, much less reach the stratosphere where Barry O is comfortably cruising.

But she will once again make the case that only she can reach out to the blue-collar voters that other Dumbocrats can't reach. But do you think that that's starting to sound more like an appeal that "You need me ON SIDE" rather than "You need me AS CANDIDATE"?

(Some people are also pointing to the SUPERSTITION that whoever wins the West Virginia Primary always becomes candidate. Well, gee, when they come nearly LAST it's not difficult to see how THAT could happen. Plus, not good territory for a Clinton: Mr Billary-Hillary famously BROKE the superstition that whoever won in the New Hampshire Primary became President!)

The BIG question is whether – in the interest of the Party – she'll drop the threat to make a HUGE STEAMING MESS of the Convention by taking them to COURT over the Florida and Michigan delegates who got themselves disqualified by holding their primaries too soon. Hillary-Billary vowed to get them seated – but maybe a deal where she conceded to Barry O in return for them being let in without a RUCKUS would be the best solution all round.

Although they would add hugely to Hillary-Billary's total, they wouldn't put her in the lead, and indeed almost certainly she can’t win even WITH them – plus Barry O chose to not even be on those unlawful ballots, so there's a bit of a question mark over how many of those delegates she genuinely picked up on merit. I’m not sure; I think he chose not to be in Michigan, but was there in Florida. Have to check. But either way, he didn’t campaign.

A couple of terms as Vice President might not be as good as going directly to Pennsylvania Avenue, but it's better than a slap in the face with a wet electorate. And it would give her the opportunity both to reassess what was right and wrong in this year's campaign, AND to show a kinder face to Americaland.


Mr God Bless Amnesia!

Day 2677: Lesbians are So Gay – A headline with at least SIX possible meanings!

Wednesday:


The Greek Island of LESBOS is famous for exactly ONE thing: and let's face facts, it ISN'T the olive oil exports and it's not the Petrified Forest either.

And yet, apparently, it has come as a bit of a SHOCK to the people of Lesbos that the name of their island might actually be used HOMONYMICALLY.

They are just a LITTLE bit behind the times with this news, what with the term "Lesbian" having been used to describe ladies of the gay daddy persuasion since at least 1732 and probably a lot earlier.

What this means is legal action.

So, the Lesbian (inhabitant of Lesbos) population of Lesbos (circa 100,000) want to take on the Lesbian (lady gay) population of the whole of the world (at least 26,000,000*) some of whom MAY even live ON Lesbos.

*of a global population of 6.6 billion 100 out of every 201.3 people are lady people and surveys show the number of ladies self-identifying as Lesbian ranging from 0.8% (Australia) to 1.3% (America)

Not counting CATS.


Well, good luck to them with that, as the saying goes.

You can SORT OF understand the feeling that you don't like the way that language has EVOLVED and would rather hang on to the past meaning. Obviously, for MANY YEARS, uptight old-fashioned spinsters of all conceivable genders would write into the Daily Torygraph to protest that the perfectly respectable word "GAY" meaning "HAPPY" was being applied to gay daddies to mean that they were HAPPY about being gay daddies and wasn't that too awful for words. Certainly words like "gay".

But now the wheel is on the other fluffy foot, as it were, and I well remember all of the FUSS that was caused when Dr Who's friend Rose said to him: "you're so GAY!" meaning "you're a bit RUBBISH!".

A LOT of gay daddies (HAPPY daddies) thought that it was a bit gay (RUBBISH) that gay (GAY) was being used to mean RUBBISH (gay) and not gay (Captain Jack).

But you cannot turn back the clock. Except in the Autumn.

On the whole I think that the Lesbians suing the Lesbians is a SHAME. They should be more ACCEPTING of the AMBIGUITY. After all, it means that their Island has a UNIQUE SELLING POINT with TOURISTS, and one with a DOUBLE ADVANTAGE – first, you are ATTRACTIVE to lots of nice, well-behaved ladies or lady couples with fewer than average dependents in tow, meaning more disposable income to spend on charming olde worlde crafty knick-knacks. And second, you are NOT attractive to the drunken ÜBER-HETERO stag-party type who would much prefer to smash up your pubs and vomit noisily on your picturesque cobbled streets. I believe that this is called a WIN-WIN and you should EMBRACE it.

Not necessarily literally if you are a BOY Lesbian. (From Lesbos.)

Mind you, Daddy Alex tells me that the Conservatories have had a sparkling new idea straight from Laboratoires Nineteen-Fifties: all that Lesbians need is a GOOD MAN.

It's like Mr Ian Fleming never went away, isn't it.