2016 A Bad Year? Try 1914, 1918, 1939 or 1945!

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Dec 302016
 

Everybody keeps whinging about how bad 2016 has been.

A few old people died (and some not so old people). That’s sad, but it happens every year. And yes some of your childhood heroes died – that’s what happens when you get older.

And yes a few bad political things have happened in 2016.

But is it somehow specially bad? Try comparing it with some other notoriously bad years :-

1914 Start of WWI which eventually killed millions of combatants.
1918 The beginning of the so-called Spanish flu pandemic which eventually killed up to 100 million people around the world.
1939 Start of WWII which eventually killed millions of combatants, and we learned just how evil humans can be when they put their minds to it.
1945 The first use of nuclear weapons.

So however bad you thought 2016 was, there have been a few other years far worse.

Are Humans Evolved To Eat Meat? Not so much!

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Dec 292016
 

As a vegetarian (who doesn’t intentionally go around prophesying) I often encounter the hackneyed old “but we’re evolved to eat meat”. The obvious response is that just because we’re evolved for a certain kind of behaviour does not mean we should necessarily follow it. And of course, it’s not true – we’re evolved to be omnivores not carnivores.

But here’s the thing: Eating certain forms of meat exclusively for a moderately extended period of time can cause death by what is effectively starvation. As a very rough rule of thumb, the wilder an animal is, the leaner its meat is likely to be. So any of our ancestors who ate nothing but meat were likely to be at best severely malnourished and likely to die young.

Of course our ancestors didn’t eat like that or we wouldn’t be here. They ate anything they could get their hands on – animals that didn’t run fast enough, proto-vegetables, grains, fruits, nuts. Anything that wasn’t poisonous.

We’re also evolved to eat more than we need. The idea is that we store fat in reserve for hard days ahead, but these days any “hard days” rarely involve lack of food. Another example of how we should be prepared to intelligently disregard evolved eating habits.

Does this mean we should all become vegetarian? No, of course not. There are plenty of reasons to stop eating meat, but this is not one. It may be a good reason to eat meat less frequently – have high quality meat three times a week rather than junk meat seven times a week.

The New Defence

The Morality of Drone Killings

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Dec 282016
 

There is an interesting video from 33c3 dealing with drone killings :-

As an aside, one of the thing that makes the Chaos Computer Club congress more interesting than many security conferences is the attention given to more “political” issues.

Drones offer the enticing possibility of tackling terrorist groups without putting people at risk, but the reality is somewhat different.

  1. Drone killings are in effect an act of war against the citizen(s) of a foreign country; very often where war has not been declared. To put it into perspective what if the UK operated drones in the 1970s and targeted US citizens who were helping to fund the IRA? And sometimes these actions resulted in “regrettable collateral damage”?
  2. Why is it not possible to provide information on targets to the law enforcement officials in the country where the target is living? It is possible that the law enforcement officials are compromised in some way of course (for example the US authorities were often against dealing with IRA terrorism), but not in all cases.
  3. Who decides that a target is so evil that they deserve death from the sky? The obvious solution here is a higher court order rather than an arbitrary decision by the military, although secret court orders are almost as bad as arbitrary military decisions. At the very least, such court orders must be made public after the death of the target.
  4. Just how reliable are drone killings anyway? How many times have we heard of “collateral damage” (the sanitised version of “Ooops! We killed the wrong people.”)? And how many times have we not heard of collateral damage? Many videos of drone killings show vehicles being targeted which leads to the most obvious problem – you do not know that the target is within the vehicle and you do not know that he or she is alone in the vehicle.
  5. “Spinning” the effectiveness of drone killings by counting all “military aged males” as militants unless they can be demonstrated to be innocent (i.e. guilty until proven innocent) is about as despicable as it gets. You cannot claim to be in the right if you resort to such claims.

It is all too easy to claim that we’re all under threat from terrorism and that anything that might reduce that threat is justified. But criminal activity by governments is never justified.

The Meaning Of Christmas

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Dec 162016
 

Without doubt, there will shortly be a pompous old fart moaning about how the meaning of christmas is being lost in the swirl of holiday celebrations. She (or he) will be droning on about the religious message. Only christians are supposed to celebrate, and are supposed to stick to the script – heading to a church in the middle of the night to listen to a pompous old fart drone on about some weird stuff.

Poppycock!

Not that I object to people wanting to listen to a pompous old fart droning on about weird stuff – that’s their choice. What I object to is being told I have to celebrate Christmas in their way. Despite the name, I can decide to celebrate it any way I want.

Now I could go on about how Christmas is merely a new name for a mid-winter festival that has been going on for thousands of years, or that some christians avoid Christmas like it sprang fully formed from the mind of Satan. And I probably have in the past, but that is beside the point.

For whatever reason, it has been decided in the western world (and a bit further) that most of us will have a few days (or a week) off work in the middle of winter for a break. And we choose how to celebrate.

To me, Christmas is about family and friends. Getting together and relaxing for a while – a few hours, or a few days.

Happy Winter Solstice from this pompous old fart, and celebrate it any way you choose.

Winter Is Coming

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Dec 092016
 

Story.

So a lawyer at HBO actually sat down and wrote a vicious take-down notice targeting a 13-year old autistic girl. Shame on HBO.

In some senses it is perfectly legitimate – HBO owns a trademark on the phrase “Winter is coming” and are legally required to protect their trademark to keep it. Now you could quite reasonably argue that a trademark on such a simple and widely used phrase is something that should never have happened.

But any normal rational person (even a lawyer) should stop and think: “What am I doing here?”. Shouting at a 13-year old for doing nothing more than painting a picture and giving it the wrong title without thinking “No, despite the legality of it, this is just wrong.”?

HBO needs to admit it is in the wrong here.

 

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