The not so earnest Adam Rutherford (no relation) on genes rather than physics

There will inevitably be silly comparisons drawn between Brian Cox’s big budget Wonders series and Rutherford’s somewhat lower budget Gene Code, but we should treat all such comments with the contempt they deserve. There’s room in the modern digital schedules for science programmes of every genre and cost from 1970s OU style chalk and talk lectures (though preferably without the big ties) through to the cinematic grandeur of Brian’s efforts [my take on #wonders media coverage].

We should rejoice in all of these attempts to use the medium of television to educate us – while, one also hopes, entertaining us.

While I also love considering the profound questions thrown up by quantum theory, relativity, and cosmology, you have to admit that modern physics is a bit fucking weird. My original background was in genetics and biochemistry (though both sciences have come on a lot since I studied them and I can’t claim to have studied them very hard) and I had been really looking forward to being entertained by Adam’s Rutherford’s series safe in the knowledge that he was not going to come on and open with something like: “Ever since scientists first started looking at chromosomes they have wondered whether chromosomes go on for ever or if the two ends join up again in the 57th dimension”. You know that genes, at least, are something you can try get your brain around without giving yourself a migraine. But that is not to say there’s anything easy about genes. If physics is like an old fashioned library (albeit an old fashioned library stocked with some pretty queer books) genetics is like the internet.

Whether you know a little or a lot about genetics (providing you have a sense of curiosity about the worlds within us and without us) you will enjoy The Gene Code and I urge you to watch it.

Here (if anyone’s interested) is what I took away from the first episode……..

First a bit of basic genetics: The master tape of instructions for what goes on inside our cells is (as most are probably aware) a series of long strands of DNA (AKA “chromosomes”). From these master copies, our cells make lots of RNA copies (a bit like the building contractor keeping the approved drawings safe in a locked draw and making lots of slightly dodgy photocopies to hand round to the builders on site). From these RNA copies of the genetic code, our cells make proteins. Proteins serve two main functions in our bodies: they can be structural (like the proteins that make up our muscles) or regulatory (like the enzymes – which are also proteins – that make things happen inside – and sometimes outside – our cells).

The understanding described above gave rise to Francis Crick’s “central dogma of molecular biology” [see here for eg] which is that (though there are different formulations) “information flows from DNA to RNA to protein”.

Information flow:
DNA -> RNA -> Protein

Now here’s the wonderful thing about science: Almost before the ink was dry on the first statement of this “dogma”, scientists (including Crick himself) begun to make discoveries that (kind of) challenged it. Contrast this with what happens vis-à-vis the central dogmas of any religion or “alternative” medicine one might care to think of.

Proteins (called “polymerases”) can duplicate strands of DNA and RNA, so information can flow from DNA to DNA and from RNA to RNA.

Other proteins (“reverse transcriptases”) can make DNA from RNA – a mechanism used by some viruses such as HIV - so information can flow from RNA to DNA.

With the emergence of “Mad Cow Disease” and the flurry of research into prion proteins that episode prompted, came confirmation (long suspected – arguably from as long ago as the 1930s) that information can flow from protein to protein.

Proteins can also, it has been discovered, bind to chromosomes and “switch” sections of DNA on and off and those switch positions can be inherited. This is not quite information flowing from protein to DNA, but it’s pretty damn close.

What made me sit up straight in my chair watching The Gene Code was Adam Rutherford’s report of recent discoveries concerning a gene that is (or was) responsible for changing the positions of recombination “hotspots” (the points at which, as Adam splendidly demonstrated using only a pack of cards, chromosomes from each parent break and join with one another to swap sequences of DNA) from the positions where those hotspots existed in the human/chimp common ancestor.

It turns out (Thx @AdamRutherford on Twitter) that the gene in question produces a protein that helps to cause DNA mutations that lead to the hotspot position changes. But these are permanent changes to the DNA sequence that are occasioned by the protein product of another gene.

So is this a case of information flowing from protein to DNA? Not sure myself. It’s an essentially philosophical question and I would need to think about it some more. But it’s certainly fascinating – well at least to a nerd like me.

So next time you read that “boffins have discovered the gene for Daily Mail allergy” (or whatever) please bear in mind that it’s almost certainly a bit more complicated than that – and more interesting too.

Oh and watch next week (2011 April 25) at 09:00 pm on BBC4, and let’s have even more science on TV.

[show times for the gene code]

Is Melanie Phillips racist? Judge for yourself.

On 13 March 2011 Melanie Phillips published an article entitled "Armchair Barbarism" in which she wrote about the brutal massacre of an Israeli family in the West Bank.

On 18 March 2011, the Guardian reported that Melanie Phillips had been referred to the Press Complaints Commission over this article.

Today,28 March 2011, Melanie Phillips defends herself: How I became a hate 'suspect'

So I thought I'd try a little experiment. I've taken Melanie Phillips's article and reversed it: swapping "Jew" for "Arab" and "Israeli" for "Palestinian". I've also had to change a few other details (see especially numbered annotations) to make the "reversed" "article" make sense.

NB1 I would never have written an article like this myself.
NB2 I do NOT mean to suggest that any of the substitutions I have inserted in this "article" are equivalent to the items I have replaced.


Armchair barbarism

Today the massacred al-Badoui[1] family was buried in Jerusalem. And as anticipated, the moral depravity of the Jews is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media – a sickening form of armchair barbarism which is also in evidence, it has to be said, on the comment thread beneath my post below.

Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as ‘hard-line land thieves’[2] or 'extremists'. Given that three of the victims were children, one a baby of three months whose throat was cut, such a response is utterly degraded.

The New York Times blamed Palestinian ‘defiance’ over renewed ‘illegal Arab sector construction’[2] in the wake of the massacre for throwing already shaky peace efforts into a new tailspin.

So to the New York Times, it’s not the Jewish massacre of an Arab family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Palestinians will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Palestinian policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.

Both CNN and the BBC, meanwhile, along with Harriet Sherwood in the Guardian, gave the impression that this was not a terrorist attack but the actions of an ‘intruder’ -- for all the world as if this was a burglary that got out of hand. CNN said:

Five members of an Palestinian family were killed in East Jerusalem early Saturday morning in what the Palestinian Authority is calling a ‘terror attack’...According to a spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Palestinian neighbourhood of Beit Hanina near the Israeli settlement at Neve Ya'akov around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children.

The BBC similarly reported:

The family - including three children -- were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home, Palestinian media reported...

Honest Reporting finds the BBC treatment of this massacre, all but burying the details of the attack on the al-Badoui family beneath a story about those wicked illegal builders, the most shocking and callous of all this dreadful coverage.

For those who don’t appreciate the role played by the ‘moderate’ Israeli Government in glorifying terrorism and inciting the mass murder of Palestinians, Israeli Media Watch has assembled some recent examples here – including the praise by Netanyah of a soldier who attacked and tried to kill Palestinians two months ago.

(Graphic pictures of the bodies of the slain al-Badoui family are circulating on the net and on YouTube. The relatives of the massacre victims have made them publicly available in order to show the world the full horror of the Jewish barbarism in Beit Hanina. However, I have decided not to link to these pictures. The reported wishes of a distraught family cannot in my view justify what is inescapably a gratuitous invasion of the privacy and dignity of the dead. But read this, and weep.)

What is being deliberately ignored through this travesty of reporting is not just the human tragedy of this terrible massacre. It is the politically crucial fact that it was apparently carried out not by Irgun[3] but by the IDF, the official army of Israeli's Likud government. Likud is the party of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Nakba[4] denier who is the allegedly ‘moderate’ Prime Minster of the Israeli Government – and who not surprisingly couldn’t even bring himself to express unequivocal horror at the atrocity.

This diabolical deed therefore gives the lie to all those who have been supporting, promoting and funding the Israeli Government as ‘moderates’ who deserve to keep the land they have annexed and settled. The fact is that America, Britain and the EU have been not only promoting this bunch of neo-Nazi fanatics and baby murderers. They have also been forcing their putative victim, the Palestinians, to offer them their own throats to be cut, along with that of Arab babies. And these craven governments in turn are being egged on by the bigots, useful idiots and worse of the British, European and -- it has to be said loud and clear -- Palestinian ‘liberal’ intelligentsia.

Truly, this is beyond desolation.

If I had read the above "article", I would have described it as "revoltingly anti-semitic". Over to you Melanie.


[1] This Arab name is taken from one of the victims of the Qibya Incident where Israeli troops under the command of Ariel Sharon massacred 69 Arabs [Ref].
[2] The notion of Arab "land thieves" is take from this article on "illegal Arab construction" in areas of Jerusalem annexed by Israel [Ref]
[3] Irgun was an Israeli terrorist organization responsible (inter alia) for bombing Arab buses [Ref]
[4] The "Nakba" or "Catastrophe" is the term Palestinians use to describe the episode when approximately 725,000 Palestinian Arabs left, fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. [Ref]

NB3 For the avoidance of doubt, I do NOT assert any sort of moral equivalence between the Nakba and the Holocaust.

Talking Bollocks about Cox

Physicist Brian Cox's current Wonders of the Universe series seems to have set off a chain reaction amongst UK journalists. I can't be arsed to link to all the articles I've read (one exception below) but some common themes emerge. I think the claims made in the press should be subjected to some rational (and empirical) scrutiny..

1) "This mop-topped stargazer revels in the insignificance of mankind"

This from Brendan O'Neill of the Frank Furedi Cult writing in the Telegraph. Brendan continues: "In contrast, today’s cod-Copernicans in the Cox lobby are drawn to the cosmos because its weirdness and bigness feeds their drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life." Hmmm, there must be some more words beginning with “c” one could insert into this sentence to help the alliteration along …. Hey, I’ve just thought of one!

I suppose Brendan would prefer it if Brian revised modern physics and cosmology in order to recognize just how important Brendan O'Neill really is. In any case, the claim that Brian "revels in the insignificance of mankind" is simply false. Utterly false! Brian repeatedly and enthusiastically revels in the fact that mankind is around to witness this stage of cosmological evolution and award it the significance it deserves – read his books!

2) Brian wears GoreTex

The “most expensive GoreTex money can buy” in some accounts. Indeed! He’s on top of a fucking mountain. You don’t need to spend long looking at what Brian normally wears to notice that he is not the sort of chap who gets off on sporting expensive designer clothes. I’m sure he has a mucky old cagoule with rips in it in his wardrobe, but I’m guessing the film crew thought it best if he wore something that would look better on camera. I dread to think what the hacks would have said if he’d worn his own cagoule.

3) Brian is standing with his legs apart

Again, he’s on top of a fucking mountain. There’s a sheer drop of several thousand meters on all sides. It’s windy. He’s being buzzed by a helicopter that has rotor blades and a down-draft.He’s talking about gravity which, I expect, kind of concentrates the mind in such circumstances. Of course it’s possible, in spite of all this that Brian’s just trying to pose in the style of Joe Strummer on the original Clash album but, on the other hand, Brian (as again we are constantly reminded in the media) was in a rock band. In fact he was in two. If he’d wanted to “pose” with his legs apart, he really has had his chances before. He really didn’t need to wait until they put him on top of a fucking mountain.

4) Brian is standing on top of a fucking mountain

I’m sure they’d have preferred to film him on the surface of the planet Zog in the constellation of Hyperbole but I think that was probably beyond the budget.

A lot of science education is about relating weird and wonderful concepts to stuff with which we earthlings are familiar. There’s an interesting and instructive analogy between the 4D geometry of space-time (versus the 3D geometry with which our intuitions are more familiar) and the 3D geometry of a mountainous landscape (versus the 2D landscape you’d see on a map).

Moreover, there are any number of (more subjective) analogies between the grandeur and scale and beauty and longevity of a mountainous landscape and the cosmos as a whole.

Putting Brian on top of a mountain got all this across succinctly and poetically and cleverly in a televisual way which (I hope we all hope) will inspire young people watching to appreciate the wonders of science and consider science as a career.

Nuff said.

5) Brian was dumbing down

A tricky area I admit, but are we really suggesting Brian should have stood in front of a white- board detailing the differences between Mesons and Leptons? In any case, many of the most baffling puzzles of modern physics and cosmology can be appreciated (though, of course, not solved) without understanding the details.

When they are engaging with the general public, it’s the job of scientists to and stay interesting and comprehensible for long enough to inspire that general public. It’s easy to be snobbish about Brian writing for the Sun or appearing on popular radio and TV, but as long as he does not misrepresent his subject through oversimplification (which he is careful never to do) it’s highly laudable that he makes the effort to appeal to a wider audience.

6) Brian has an ego the size of a planet

Bollocks!

Watch his body language! He walks on stage looking as self-conscious as any of us, less used to the limelight, would. He is self-deprecating and always ready to laugh at himself. All this slips away completely, however, when he starts talking, not about himself, but about the ideas that interest him and move him. At such moments he oozes confidence and (yes) shines like a star. He becomes Pete Towshend. Get him back on to the subject of Brian Cox and he reverts to John Entwistle (with a hint of Tommy Cooper thrown in). Funny sort of egotism.

7) Me

You could, I suppose, call me a “fan” of Brian Cox (though my respect for him predates his current TV star status). I do not, however, fancy Brian or have a “man-crush” on him or regard him as some kind of saint. I am sure he has all the failings and annoying habits that the rest of us mere mortals have. All this said, I get deeply pissed off when journalists (who typically understand about as much about science as I understand about the rules of American Football or the plot of Emmerdale Farm) traduce a fellow geek as a substitute for doing something that would – if they were capable of doing it – actually be interesting: Engaging with the fucking ideas!
/rant

Blackwell's bookshop and the art of deception UPDATE

UPDATE

Just had a very apologetic phone call from manager of Blackwell Art and Poster Shop at 27 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BS and had my £2 refunded. They were in the wrong, I was in the right but they are very honourable people and have put things right and if you are ever in Oxford you should visit their splendid shop.

Dear Sir / Madam

I visited your store in Oxford yesterday and bought about £40 of goods. I came away feeling I had been cheated out of £2 – a relatively small sum I concede, but I’m not the sort of person who simply lets such things go.

Let me explain the problem as follows (using prices rounded up do the nearest pound for simplicity):

If I had gone into your shop and bought 3 prints at £4 each under the “3 for 2” offer I would have paid £8, saving £4.

If I had then gone back into your shop five minutes later and bought another 3 prints at £6 each under the “3 for 2” offer I would have paid £12, saving £6.

So far so good. I would, by this time, have saved £10.

What I did yesterday, however, was (ignoring my other purchases) to buy exactly the same items as above under exactly the same offer, but all in one go. I only saved £8 - £2 less than I should have saved.

The reason (explained when I complained) is that the computer grouped my purchases thus: (£4+£4+£6) + (£6+£6+£4) and I saved 2 x £4. I was told that this policy was explicitly stated on the offer signs which explained that the cheapest item goes free.

I find your policy here misleading to the point of dishonesty. Either your computer should employ a more sophisticated (and fairer) algorithm or you should inform you customers in advance that they would be better off making separate purchases if making multiple “3 for 2” buys.

I suppose I could have taken this further within the shop, but I was too taken aback to complain further at the time. (Your staff were perfectly civil but quite convinced they were in the right.)

Upon further reflection, I feel as though I have been cheated out of £2 and I should like to have this money returned.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully

Mike Ward


PS Blackwell Art and Poster Shop at 27 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BS is a simply wonderful shop which I frequent and which I would encourage you all to visit. They should, however, refrain from these (I assume unintentionally) misleading promotions!

AV - not my first preference

The best electoral system, without doubt, is STV in multi-member constituencies. Since AV is all that's on offer in the coming referendum and since (at least in some scenarios) it's an improvement on FPTP I shall, albeit with a heavy heart, probably vote in favour. I worry that a "no" vote will be taken as a "no" to any attempt at electoral reform. (There's a reasonably good guide to the different systems here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-lses-simple-guide-to-voting-systems/)

Having said all that. there some serious flaws in the proposed AV system and I wish to focus here on one of them.....

Most critiques of AV focus on its main drawback, which is that it is not a proportional system. There is no guarantee that it will not produce barmy national results (such as the party with fewer votes winning the national election) just as the current FPTP system sometimes does (twice in my own short lifetime!).

I've constructed an highly contrived but simple example which shows one way in which AV can go wrong even within a single constituency:

Let us assume we have a very small constituency with 9 voters and 3 candidates: the usual Labour, LibDem, and Tory. Let us further assume that the preferences of these 9 voters are as follows:

*	Lib	Lab	Con
voter1	1	3	2
voter2	1	3	2
voter3	2	1	3
voter4	2	1	3
voter5	2	1	3
voter6	2	1	3
voter7	2	3	1
voter8	2	3	1
voter9	2	3	1

Where "1" = first choice, "2" = second choice, and "3 .... okay you get the idea. ;-)

The problem with the current system (FPTP) is clear: Labour wins with 44% of first preferences even though the other 56% didn't have Labour as their first choice and both the Labour and Conservative voters could clearly live with a Liberal victory.

So what does AV give us?

There would need to be 2 rounds:

In the first round, the results would be: Labour 44%, Lib 22%, and Con 33%. Since the LibDems come out last, they would be eliminated and the second preferences of those who voted for the unsuccessful LibDem candidate would be taken into account. This would give final totals of: Lab 44% and Con 56% - a Conservative victory.

This is a rather unsatisfactory result since, just looking at the figures in the above table, I think most fair minded people would conclude that the Liberal candidate was the best compromise given the range of preferences expressed.

The problem here, with the straight AV system, is that it gives second (and lower) preferences (once they are counted) the same weight as first preferences. Straight AV also ignores the second preferences of those who vote for the most successful candidate in the first round.

Why not simply weight each preference (in the counting system behind the scenes I mean - I'm not advocating a more complicated voting system)?

If a first choice got 3 points, a second choice got 2 points and a third choice got 1 point, the results in the above table would give: Lib 37%, Lab 31%, Con 31%. A LibDem victory.

This would be almost as easy to count as FPTP (only a single round required) and (in this example at least) produces a result which accords with our intuitions of "fairness" and the "best compromise".

I have made this example as small as possible and chosen the figures carefully to illustrate the point, but the example is not particularly far-fetched and could (in its fundamental features)easily be repeated in a real election on a larger scale.

In Which Melanie Phillips Refuses to Outline her Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem

Dear Melanie

I read your Address to Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media with interest. It is clear from this document – and the large number of other articles you have written on the subject of the Middle East – that you do not support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state. You believe that people of Jewish faith or ethnicity* have the right to settle anywhere within the biblical land of Israel as citizens of Israel, but you do not believe that people of Christian or Muslim faith and Arab ethnicity currently living outside the currently internationally recognized borders of Israel have the right to settle within those borders or, indeed, much in the way of rights as to where they settle outside those borders but still within the biblical territory. You do not accept that the Arab population within the biblical land of Israel but not living within the currently internationally recognized borders of Israel should be given the right to become citizens of a future Israel with expanded borders. (Please correct me if I have any of this wrong).

So now my question:

What is your proposal for what should happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants of these territories when you (and people who think like you) eventually get your way and Israel is expanded to include much or all of the biblical territories?

I have tried to make no judgements about who is right or wrong here and have tried to avoid opening any arguments about the historical background to the current situation. I am genuinely intrigued as to what your proposed solution is to the question I have raised. I cannot find the answer to this question in any of your extensive writings on this subject.

Yours sincerely

Mike

*I separate out these two facets of “Jewishness” because a number of members of my family have the right to go and live in Israel (or the areas Israel currently controls) under the “Law of Return”, but none of them are actually religious. Their recent ancestry is German rather than Middle Eastern.


Melanie's reply:

Your message displays a quite astounding degree of ignorance; virtually every one of your assumptions is based on a false factual, historical or moral premise. I have no intention of wasting my time answering you. There is ample information on my website already, were you able to understand it -- which clearly you are not.

Do not bother me again.

Melanie

Interesting that Melanie took the time to reply to me but did not use that time to correct any of my "assumptions" about (I'd call them "descriptions" of) her views or to answer my question.

I have read Melanie's website in some depth. I have read her forthright views on evolution, abiogenesis, and climate change and her descriptions of the various conspiracies amongst the world's scientists to keep us all misinformed in these areas. I also have read her extensive writings on the situation in the Middle East. While there is a great deal of material advanced in favour of Israeli policy - past and present - I have searched in vain for any proposals as to what should happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the territories in question under any future scenario that would be acceptable to Melanie P.

I think Melanie owes (not necessarily me but) her general audience a response here.

Why I’d be more than proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor in my family

Reading Sarfraz Manzoor’s moving article about the reaction of some members of his family to his marriage (to Bridget, who is white and not a Muslim) I began to muse on what sort of circumstances might prompt me to refuse to speak to my brother. I suppose that if I heard that he had disowned a member of his family because that family member had fallen in love with someone of the ”wrong” colour or the ”wrong” religious tradition*, that would do the trick.

After all, if someone cannot see for themselves that this kind of “not like us” view of other sections of humanity is morally repugnant, it is hard to think of any common starting point for any sort of discussion about ethical matters, or indeed about anything at all. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

I think Sarfraz Manzoor’s relatives who continue to oppose his marriage and who continue to refuse to talk to him are very lucky indeed that Sarfraz still seeks reconciliation with them. I find it hard to imagine that I could ever be so forgiving in similar circumstances.

I have not broached this with my daughter, Sarfraz is already spoken for, and if I were to meet him personally on a regular basis I’d probably break down and suggest he refrain from using a Van de Graaff generator to style his hair; but, these minor caveats aside, I’d be very proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor as my son in law.

Telling anyone in my “community" about this would not be a problem, since the only community I belong to is humanity.

*I use the term religious *tradition* advisedly since neither my brother nor I believe in any sort of supernatural overlords, but we are both, I suppose, “cultural Christians” who celebrate Christmas and Easter albeit in a largely (though not completely) secular fashion.

The Students are Revolting

Of course there’s always the argument that high fees will discourage talented poor students from applying to university; but that argument is a non-starter because Conservative politicians don’t care about poor people – that is, after all, why they became Conservative politicians.

No, any successful arguments here have to concern themselves with the only thing Conservative politicians actually do care about:

Money!

Raising student fees will, we are told, “save money”.

This, of course, is bollocks. No money will be saved, the money required will, ceteris paribus, be exactly the same. The only real questions are about who should pay this money.

In the past, the tax-payer paid.

Now students pay for their own education by borrowing money and paying it back later – when they become tax-payers – and, in future, we may move to a “graduate tax” where students pay for their own education - by borrowing money and paying it back later when they become tax-payers - but they pay the money back through the tax system.

Now, one of the things about PAYE tax is that everyone in the country is essentially means-tested each year to make sure they are paying the right amount of tax. Low earners pay less tax. High earners pay more. We used to use some of this money for paying student fees.

Instead we now means-test students before they apply to university to see if they are entitled to a loan, then we means-test them in a more detailed fashion to see how much of a loan and what types of loan, they are entitled to. Once they leave University and get a job we means-test them regularly to see if their income has passed the required threshold for starting to pay the money back and then we calculate – on an on-going basis- how much they have paid, how much interest is due, whether they are still earning enough to continue paying back, how much they still need to pay, and what size the instalments should be.

All this alongside the normal means-testing conducted by the Inland Revenue on all its PAYE “customers” (as I believe we are known these days) each year (though perhaps there is some pooling of information).

I think it goes without saying that the infrastructure required to make all these calculations and to police the loans system is enormously expensive. Far from saving money, this system devours money as Eric Pickles devours pies.

“But making the tax-payer pay for other people’s education isn’t fair” bleat the Conservative politicians and newspapers - for whom fairness is and always has been the very scourge of the earth. Even the esteemed @DAaronovitch (for whom I have a lot of admiration and who does care about social justice) has presented versions of this argument.

The only people I can see who were “unfairly” treated by the system we had before student loans were high earners who did not go to university. They, though their higher taxes, were paying for education from which they themselves never benefited.

Except, that they did benefit. They benefited because everyone benefits from a highly educated workforce; and they benefited because they spent three years earning money when their peers were living in relative poverty in order to acquire an education.

So we need to save money and rescue the Liberal Democrats from the dreadful bind they now find themselves in.

Simple!

Abolish student loans and pay all university fees by raising income tax for the better off.

Let's just fucking do it!

Template letter to MP regarding the #TwitterJokeTrial

I have sent an email based on the template below to my local MP using http://www.writetothem.com I hope as many people as possible will do the same.

In spite of what I say in this letter, I strongly suspect (though I pretend no legal expertise) that the real problem is not the 2003 Communications Act itself, but the perverse interpretation of that Act by the CPS and the lower courts. It will, however, take a huge amount of time and money to get this matter before a high-court judge. In the meantime I think we should press our MPs to clarify the law to prevent it being mis-used in this way.

NB It is always better if you write to your MP using your own words rather than someone else’s, but please all feel free to use whatever you like from the example I provide below - I assert no copyright!

Please be polite and avoid making personal attacks on any of individuals involved!

Dear Ms/Mr/Dr MP

I write to express my grave concern at certain provisions of the Communications Act 2003.

As you may be aware, a trainee accountant called Paul Chambers was successfully prosecuted in May 2010 for “sending a menacing message”. His conviction was upheld at appeal; the High Court Judges at his most recent appeal were unable to agree on their interpretation of the law; and Mr Chambers faces a further appeal in the High Court at the end of June this year (2012).

Paul Chambers’s “crime” was to vent his exasperation at a travel delay by making a (perhaps somewhat ill-judged and tasteless) joke about blowing up a local airport on the “microblogging” site known as “Twitter” – much as our former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman vented his exasperation with modern architecture and town-planning by calling for the bombing of Slough.

What is worrying about the law here is that:

1. there was clearly never any intention by the author of the offending joke to menace anyone;


2. no message was ever sent to the airport or anyone connected with that airport; and
   


3. nobody who read the joke – Paul Chambers’s “followers” on Twitter (at whom the joke was directed), the staff at the airport who found the “tweet” (by searching on the internet for mentions of their airport), or the police (to whom the tweet was passed on) – felt menaced.

If Mr Chambers really had sent a menacing message to an airport designed to make them fear he intended violence he would have been, quite rightly, charged under the Criminal Law Act 1977.

Instead, the CPS decided to prosecute using the 2003 Communications Act and the court decided that a tweet can be a menacing message under Clause 127 of that Act regardless of whether the person writing the tweet intended menace or anyone actually reading it felt menaced.

This is absurd.

There are, literally, trillions of passages of text on social networking sites and on the internet in general that could, if taken completely out of context, conceivably be found menacing by somebody somewhere. It seems that the 2003 Communications Act puts anyone who publishes anything on the internet at risk of criminal prosecution if any of his or her words (stripped of their original setting) could be misinterpreted as threatening in some fashion.

This does not only impact private individuals like Paul Chambers, commercial users of the internet are obviously impacted too. If we are all forced, when publishing things on the internet, to avoid any form of hyperbole or metaphor or figure of speech that could, if taken literally in some imaginary context, imply “menace”, we are clearly an intolerable situation.

The 2003 Communications Act obviously needs to be amended as soon as possible. I hope you and your colleagues in parliament will give this matter your urgent attention.

Yours sincerely

etc

The Pope and paedophilia - are we being fair?

Pope Benedict XVI's opening salvo during his recent visit to these islands was a blatant attempt to link “aggressive secularism” in the UK with Nazism in Hitler's Germany.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

I also recall the regime's attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a 'reductive vision of the person and his destiny' (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

[...]

Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society.

In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate.

(ref)

Now I (like the Founding Fathers in the USA) am proud to be an aggressive secularist and, as an aggressive secularist, I rather took exception to Pope Benedict's remarks. [Of course - unlike many of the Founding Fathers - I am also an atheist - though I hope not an aggressive one - but this distinction seemed to be rather lost on his Holiness.

Had I had the honour of an audience with Pope Benedict, I might have pointed out that Hitler was brought up as Catholic. He never renounced his faith and indeed claimed he was "fighting for the Lord’s work" in "warding off the Jews" (ref). I would have then seen fit to mention Pius XII and the Reichskonkordat (ref). And finally I should have pointed out that (although we all know the circumstances at the time and if he had not brought this up I should not have mentioned it) POPE BENEDICT REALLY WAS A FUCKING NAZI HIMSELF!



Having said all that, I do feel slightly uncomfortable with the way in which the following list of Catholic sins is constantly repeated by people on my side in this matter: opposing contraception, misogyny, homophobia, spreading AIDs, opposing science, promoting woo, opposing measures to relive poverty, wasting the lives of millions by filling their heads with guilt and mysticism and demanding their adherence to a barmy worldwide cult, and (finally) buggering children.

Spot the odd-one-out!

On all except that last item I say “guilty as charged”. But that last item is slightly different. Of course the Catholic church are guilty of the sexual abuse of children on a massive scale and they are guilty of covering this up and allowing it to flourish and continue. You can also see how the insistence on priestly celibacy and a cult of secrecy facilitated such practices. Nonetheless, while the Catholic Church really does preach that the use of condoms and oestrogen/progesterone pills (not, as far as I am aware, much discussed in the Bible) is evil and really does preach that women are lesser beings and homosexuals are an abomination, the Catholic church has never actually preached paedophilia.

I can see why people might think I am splitting hairs here, but I don’t think I am. After all, if Hitler really had been an atheist rather than a Catholic, I think I should still have objected just as strongly to the Pope's comments.

I have yet to read a single book by an atheist in which it is claimed that genocide is a good thing – still less a book in which it is claimed that the goodness of genocide is a necessary consequence of an atheist perspective.

Pope Benedict hates gay people because of his professed beliefs. Pope Benedict tolerates child abuse in spite of his professed beliefs (presumably on purely pragmatic grounds - albethey miguided pragmatic grounds). While we should accept neither child abuse nor homophobia, we should accept this important distinction.