This is the end, beautiful friends, the end (maybe)

I feel I may need to go away for a while… dream it all up again

Shameless Scam Of Tipping

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-shameless-scam-of-restaurant-tips-842807.html

Charlie Brooker Writes…

Liked this Charlie Brooker rant in the Guardian, so thought i’d just post it in here….

I’ve got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory - that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.

If your waking life is mundane, it’ll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they’re all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins - when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you’ll spend each night dreaming you’re the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.

All well and good in the world of dreams. But if you continue to believe you’re the Emperor of Pluto after you’ve woken up, and you go into work and start knocking the boxes around with a homemade sceptre while screaming about your birthright, you’re in trouble.

I mention this because recently I’ve found myself bumping into people - intelligent, level-headed people - who are sincerely prepared to entertain the notion that there might be something in some of the less lurid 9/11 conspiracy theories doing the rounds. They mumble about the “controlled demolition” of WTC 7 (oft referred to as “the third tower”), or posit the notion that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming and let it happen anyway. I mean, you never know, right? Right? And did I tell you I’m the Emperor of Pluto?

The glaring problem - and it’s glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut - is that with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.

Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you’re talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there’s one thing we know about humans, it’s that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.

It’s hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for goodness sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.

That’s just one broad objection to all the bullshit theories. But try suggesting it to someone in the midst of a 9/11 fairytale reverie, and they’ll pull a face and say, “Yeah, but … ” and start banging on about some easily misinterpreted detail that “makes you think” (when it doesn’t) or “contradicts the official story” (when you misinterpret it). Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of “evidence” and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.

And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point - that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off - they huff and whine and claim that unless you’ve sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun “findings” before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.

Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there’s a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he’s wrong, do I?

Look hard enough, and dementedly enough, and you can find “proof” that Kevin Bacon was responsible for 9/11 - or the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, come to that. It’d certainly make for a more interesting story, which is precisely why several thousand well-meaning people would go out of their way to believe it. Throughout my twenties I earnestly believed Oliver Stone’s account of the JFK assassination. Partly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selective) way the “evidence” was blended with fiction in his 1991 movie - but mainly because I WANTED to believe it. Believing it made me feel important.

Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you’re part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time. You’ve seen through the matrix! At last you’re alive! You ARE the Emperor of Pluto after all!

Except - ahem - you’re only deluding yourself, your majesty. Because to believe the “system” is trying to control you is to believe it considers you worth controlling in the first place. The reality - that “the man” is scarcely competent enough to control his own bowels, and doesn’t give a toss about you anyway - is depressing and emasculating; just another day in the cardboard box factory. And that’s no place for an imaginary emperor, now, is it?

Ed: for conspiracy theories… read religion too… in my humble opinion…. eg  not allowed to say its nonsense until youve read every word of chesterton or barth or stott whoever whoever. Embrace a conspiracy theory/faith and suddenly you’re part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense.

Leather on Willow

The sound of leather on willow, the creak of lower middle aged men stretching and grimacing … no its not yada yada (add your own)… last night QMonkey turned out for the local churches league cricket team.

I’m happy to report that we won! March Road Methodists made 105 for 7 and we (Hope Chapel(a mates team)) majestically rose to the challenge to finish on 106 for 3.

I am, of course, pretty rubbish. It was my first match for quite a while and I actually found it really nerve wracking. I was fielding at ‘Mid On‘, hoping like billyo that the ball would come no where near me. But as it is with these things the first ball was wacked straight at me. I held my breath, waiting for the moment that I would drop an easy catch and people would say things like ‘hard luck’ ‘it looked easier than it was’. Then I noticed it was going way over my head… so I did this dramatic (almost slow-mo) dive and yelp. Then when I missed it (by a mile) managed to paint a look on my face that said… ‘I really wish that had been lower’ ‘ I would def have caught it, it was in my zone’.

I was bought several Guinness in the pub afterwards, for being Irish (of course)… which topped the night off nicely.

That’s my post. I expect a comment list to beat all others!!! (not)

Sexy New Political Ideas

The Sunday Times is very good at spotting intellectual trends. When they print an entire piece on some new thinking, it is an important sign that a change is taking place.

This is cut and paste from The Times website (i deemed it quite interesting)

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Here are five of the hottest intellectual ideas now making an impact on politics. Dry as they sound, they are the sexiest ideas on the political scene:

1. Social Norms:  This is based on a simple observation - people copy each other. We take cues from others in our peer group about how to behave. This is a more powerful social force than legal restrictions. Could we, for instance, increase the amount given to charity simply by telling people how much more everyone else is giving? Want to know more? Read Influence by Robert Cialdini, Herd by Mark Earls and The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris or my article.

2. Reciprocal Altruism: Why do we help those who are not blood relations? Surely this wouldn’t be a good evolutionary strategy? Well, it turns out that it is. We help others because we believe they will reciprocate. In order for this to work, game theory demonstrates, we have to believe we will be interacting with the same people repeatedly. Reciprocal altruism makes the argument for strengthening local institutions. Want to know more? Read The Oakshott lecture by David Willetts, and Natural Justice by Ken Binmore or my article.

3. Situationism: Is there such a thing as society? It is not just reciprocal altruism that shows that there is. It is also situationism. People behave differently when in different situations. They conform to expectations and group norms. Individuals have different dispositions but this is only part of the reason they behave as they do. Phil Zimbardo’s famous Stamford prison experiment, while hardly a conclusive scientific experiment, showed how telling individuals they were guards or prisoners changed the way they behaved. This idea is, for instance, helping change Tory ideas on crime. Want to know more? Read The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo or my article.

4. Prospect Theory: Thirty five years ago, innocent A level economics students would ask their teachers “but what if the consumer isn’t rational?”. It would patiently be explained to them that rationality was a modelling assumption, that could very easily be relaxed. It turns out that relaxing the assumption has produced the most interesting work in economics over the last three decades, winning a Nobel Prize for Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Prospect theory considers how people actually make decisions. It looks at, for instance, the ways people weigh up risks. It leads to a richer understanding of the way consumers respond to the design of policy. Want to know more? Read Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein or my article.

5. Cognitive Dissonance: In 1957 the psychologist Leon Festinger first put forward this idea explaining how people cling on the commitments they have made, twisting the truth round in their head to make it consistent with their existing view. Its importance for social policy is that individuals try incredibly hard to fulfill commitments they have made, verbally or in writing. Particularly when made in public. Cognitive dissonance is part of the reason why married couples stay together (in order to make good their commitment). Want to know more? Read Yes! by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini and When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger or my articles on political strategy and marriage.

Make your own petrol

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece

I’ve never been so unoffended

Martin Brundle is under investigation for using the word ‘Pikey’ during a broadcast of the F1 race in Canada. Apparently seven (7) people rang in to complain.

A couple of issues here (you can sense my ranting tone can’t you), first SEVEN people rang in and it makes the BBC news? Maybe the Qmonkey readership (8, at last count) should all ring in to complain about something for the laugh. Maybe Terry Wogan’s chuckle or Laurence Llewellyn Bowen’s snobbery.

Offence is a weird thing, I think I blogged about this a while ago. It seems that people go out of their way these days to be offended - how thin skinned.

I consider myself to have the authority to make universal statements on behalf on mankind. Fair nuff?

Here it is: I hereby announce that there are no longer any offencive words only offencive intent. If someone sings a song about’ hanging with his n*ggas’ that’s perfectly fine, if someone else sings a song about ‘hanging n*ggas’ its not. Also, there are no BAD words - who on earth decided that there was? If someone decides to use a certain word because he feels it is more deceptive then who’s to say he can’t, and why should anyone be offended?

Moral responsibility to the rest of the world?

If asked what two ways can the people in one country help the people of another country I suppose the answer would be similar to asking any formal human grouping how they should interact and behave to another group. Charity and Physical help when attacked.

Channel 4 recently conducted a poll to construct a list of modern ‘commandments’ among the top answers were the following: Be honest, don’t kill, Look after the vulnerable, treat others as you would like to be treated. There is nothing startling in the list, its basically a run down of the commonly held ethics recognized by pretty much everyone the world over.

“Look after the vulnerable” & “Treat others as you would like to be treated” are interesting ones.

At the micro level, if someone in my family was being harmed, even by someone else in my family, I would like an outsider to feel obliged to step in and help.

But how exactly do these morals play out in world politics?

If another formal human grouping (family/country/ethnic group) is in need, then other groups are morally bound to step in. No mater the cost? This week the hundredth British solider died in Afghanistan, is that a price worth paying to keeping the Taliban out of power? Is it any of our business if others are suffering? If intervening in Zimbabwe cost 1000 British lives and millions of pounds of tax payers money should we do it.? Should we cut money to schools and hospitals and re-direct it to the army so we can afford to save hundreds of thousands from starving in Burma.

It’s very easy to go on TV shaking your head pleading with the government to ‘do something’ to help people in other countries - but what does that actually mean in practice? I guess this is a bit like my ‘no one cares about the environment’ post. No one actually cares about people in other countries if it means that ‘our boys’ have to die to we have to spend a few billion more on guns. Then again who are we to say that the Taliban is a bad thing? when the world is so complicated and moral surety is easy to assert in a vacuum - a little harder to play out our ethics in the real world. Do i jump into the water to help save a drowning child and potentially leave my own child fatherless? Do i approve of my government risking the lives of ‘our’ young soldiers to save the lives of others?

I must stop saying I’m tired

I am genuinely tired, but I gotta stop saying it. It’s like tourette’s, and everyone seems to do it. It’s almost like a status symbol… the more you say you are tired the more ‘stuff’ you must do, and the more worthy you must be.

Maybe how I feel now is just ‘default’, I’ve felt the same for about ten years, so maybe this is just ‘it’, I need to recalibrate my idea of what tired is. Truth is I find time to watch TV, play golf and football, read books and sit in the garden… if I was that tired I could just go to bed, which I don’t seem to do till around midnight.

Maybe it’s a mater of acting like ye are full of beans and tiredness will be taken from ye,

Also, it’s quite boring when someone asks you how you are and you reply with a sigh and a moan about tired you are.

Rockin Robin

This is nothing other than a ‘look what i did!’ post.

picture of a Robin Redbreast, named Tony i believe… captured in mid flight by my photographic luck skills

The tragic comedy of the bouncing washing machine

Act 1: Washing machine breaks down. A day or two passes before we confront that fact that we need to get a new one quick smart. Order one from Comet which is due to arrive in 5 days. In the mean time we had to do shuttle runs to the laundrette (like it’s the dark ages!). Costing us nearly £20, mad.

Act 2: New washing machine arrives. I decided to install it myself, which shouldn’t have been a big deal, I had already extended the water pipe from the kitchen into the outside ‘laundry room’ as well as wiring it up for electricity (I say this as a statement of capability, in defence of what happens next).

Act 3: New washing machine bouncing around the laundry room, and dramatically breaking through the door, and coming to rest half off and half on the step.

Act 3: Instead of taking a step back and thinking why such a thing would have happened, I put it on again on a less manic spin setting. Washing machine blows up and blows the fuses in the house.

Act 4: Anyone ever heard of Carriage Bolts? Apparently they are things which need removed from the back of a washing machine, to stop it bouncing around the room then blowing up.

Act 5: Remove carriage bolts, phone the nice man from Comet to come and look at it, swear blind that you removed the carriage bolts, and have no idea why what’s happened happened.

Act 6: Comet man knows your lying, but decides not to care, and tells you that the new washing machine will arrive in 5 days. Back to the laundrette.

The Undercover Diplomat

As the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement approaches, Jonathan Powell tells the extraordinary story of his secret role in the peace process. Narrated by Barbara Flynn.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009v6fc.shtml?src=ip_ra

Interesting, if you are interested in N. Ireland, Politics, Diplomacy etc etc

Another interesting read is this…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

always amazes me how balanced and factual Wikipedia ends up being, its bourne out in the tacking of this uber controversial topic

Istanbul not Constantinople

I feel like i’ve made this point before in a post, maybe im getting blog amnesia but… why do we english speakers insist on changing our names for foreign cities.

That’s not rhetorical, I’m genuinely confused.

E.g. Peking, why did we suddenly start calling it Beijing, it’s not like its pronounced Beijing in Chinese. The French still call it Pekin.

Bombay – Mumbia, Madras – Chenni etc.  Why?

It’s not like theres some rule or etequite that we should name a city as near to what the inhabitants call it. The French call London, Londres. Why do we call Torino, Turin? Firenze, Florence.

There’s gotta be some rule out there.

no reason

Mark the day - 12345 days old!

Today… i am 12345 days old.

How weird is that?  the only day in my whole life that i checked a web site like this… i find that i’m this amount of days old.

I love things like this… i like when the clock says 12:34 pm etc… so this is a major day for me… gotta do something… i know, i’ll resign from my job.

… seriously i’ve just resigned from my job.

Jebus: Martyr or Murderer?

‘Murderer’ is over egging an already well egged pudding - but it has a nice controversial rhythm to it. Anyway, let me tell you a story passed down to me for generations (say).

They say Jebus was born miraculously in a small town just north of Cardiff, a thousand years ago during the English occupation. He was a bit of a thinker and philosopher and when he came of age some people started to say he was ‘the one’, god’s messiah.

As he travelled into Cardiff one spring morning crowds gathered to greet him as their saviour, he didn’t do anything to correct their assertions so the rumours grew - as they did quite often in those times. He did a bit of a speaking tour talking about god and hinting that he was their long-awaited messiah, but then things started to go a bit sour.

There had been rumours of wondrous miraculous happenings, so a caravan of the sick and the needy started to follow him around. One day he was on the way to a wedding when some people stopped him and said… about 10 percent of our children die before they reach the age of 2… what can we do about it? But instead of telling them about water purification, antibiotics and general child heath care (which if he was god, he would have of course known) he said… sorry, I’m on the way to a wedding… but you’ll like this… while I’m there I’m gonna take some of that pure water which you need, and then I’m going to turn it in to wine, yazam! We is going to par-tay. The villagers used their god-given rationale and knew that this couldn’t be the actions of a loving god so they continued their messiah search.

It kept happening… one day on the way to a friend’s funeral… a group mothers came to him and said, our children have all died in the last month of an infection, dozens more are sick, they were innocent kids who we loved, if you are god can you be merciful and raise them from the dead? He said… hmmm , nah sorry… but tell you what how’s about I resurrect my mate Lazarus instead. The mothers where less than impressed, especially when he refused to give them any hints as to why infections spread in the first place (which he of course would have known).

The mothers decided that if someone had this kind of power, yet chose not to use it (apart from the odd party trick), and chose to let these innocent children die that it was tantamount to murder, or at least man slaughter, certainly not the actions of a loving god - so they continued their search for a messiah. Jebus wasn’t the one. There were later rumours of a personal resurrection, but he’s conveniently lifted himself up into the clouds to heaven… the mothers rolled their eyes with a chuckle and continued to worship Yahweh like they always had.

But maybe the problem was that their minds where too small to comprehend the wonder of why Jebus was actually god’s son, and if only they had opened their hearts a little more to Jebus they would have believed… as opposed to following the non-related Jesus of Nazareth who WAS of course, the one, as his actions and the evidence is a lot more compelling.
Happy Easter