The Charlie Hebdo Killers Were Not Muslims

 General, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Jan 102015
 

(Stolen from a Facebook posting)

Sounds daft doesn’t it? Because the killers themselves would have claimed they were doing it for islam. And of course there are plenty of feeble-minded bigots who are now attacking muslims and islamic places of worship.

Now don’t get me wrong: I have no patience with organised religion and think anyone who believes in an imaginary infectious friend in the sky needs their head examining. But they have a right to believe anything they want.

They just don’t have the right to inflict it on the rest of us.

Within any community (religious or otherwise), there are two sorts of people, and yes I’m being overly simplistic here. There are the majority who go along with the community and obey the dictates if they are not too inconvenient. And there are the zealots who take it to the extremes. And amongst the zealots there is a deranged minority who want to inflict the standards of their community on everyone. Some of them use violence to do so.

Now there was some idiot on the news today who claimed that despite Charlie Hebdo publishing a cartoon insulting to christians, that it wasn’t christians shooting journalists. True enough, but it there are christians murdering abortion doctors and harassing those entering abortion clinics, so it is not as if there are no christian terrorists.

Now comes a bit of a leap of faith: These terrorists whatever their faith, have more in common with each other than their co-religionists. They all espouse an extreme form of their faith, are compelled to inflict it on everyone, and resort to violence to pursue their goals.

Their most significant attribute is terrorism and not their religion. Their crimes overwhelm their faith and make their religion irrelevant.

An alternative way of looking at it is a quantitative approach. There were 3 killers involved in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket. The number of muslims in France is not known precisely, but a figure of about 3 million seems a reasonable approximation for this sort of calculation, which if you work it out makes the number of killers in this incident just 0.0001% of the muslim population of France.

So why were there only three killers? Because muslims as a whole are not terrorists.

Besides which, there is nothing we could do to annoy the killers more than to deny their islamic nature.

Ebola in the UK: Don’t Lick Any Strangers!

 General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 312014
 

Which is ridiculous of course. You could lick every person (including the nurse who was incubating Ebola) on flight AT800 (the plane from Casablanca to Heathrow that carried the nurse) without catching Ebola; plenty of other things! But not Ebola.

Ebola is hard to catch. You have to come into contact with infected bodily fluids which isn’t likely to happen if you share an airplane cabin.

So of course the press is overreacting in it’s usual way resorting to scaremongering to push sales. It is pretty obvious given some of the wild stunts they have come up with that we cannot trust the mainstream press to accurately tell us what is going on :-

  1. The Daily Mail wants the planes involved to be disinfected. Why? Without going into graphic details, unless the nurse was exuding bodily fluids on her plane journey there is no risk from getting on a plane that previously carried someone who was incubating Ebola.
  2. They wonder why returning health care workers were allowed to travel onwards using crowded public transport. Ignoring the fact that treating returning heroes as pariahs is contemptible, there is in practice no risk in allowing people without symptoms to travel in public.
  3. The nurse was allowed to travel onto Glasgow after raising concerns and after being tested for raised temperatures. Apparently her raised temperature was not considered to be significant (there’s lots of things that can cause a raised temperature) and she had no other symptoms.
  4. They are making contact with fellow passengers and are testing two other patients “just in case”. Well of course they are – with something as nasty as Ebola, you take precautions a step or two further than is strictly necessary but you don’t wander off into the realms of the ridiculous.

The press is of course announcing the review of procedures for dealing with those arriving from West Africa whilst implying that things were not up to scratch. Well of course they are reviewing procedures – procedures should be reviewed regularly whether or not there is a problem.

In practice, the only people in this country at risk from Ebola are those who have worked with Ebola victims – either in West Africa, or by nursing those who have caught the disease there. In reality, the rest of us currently are at a risk so low as to be negligible. Even everyone on flight AT800 and the BA flight to Glasgow.

Xmas Rail Chaos: Time To Stop The Holiday Works

 General  No Responses »
Dec 282014
 

So we have another story about how overrunning maintenance work on our railways has caused travel chaos. One of the things to remember is that we only hear about the overruns and not the successfully completed work. I would not be surprised if only a tiny minority of work overruns.

But that isn’t much comfort to those caught up in the chaos.

Somewhere within National Rail, there is a department that decides when engineering work can take place, and they will have made a calculation to determine when the least “costly” overruns can be scheduled. They probably make this calculation based on the number of travel hours lost.

But perhaps they are not considering the quality of those hours lost. Some travel is more valuable than other travel; not in simple economic terms, but including other factors such as the amount of distress caused.

Holiday travel is a bit different to everyday travel in that :-

  1. People tend to travel further and make more connections. Disrupting their travel could well leave them stranded in an unfamiliar environment.
  2. More “vulnerable” people travel for holidays – children and old people – who are less likely to cope well with the disruption.
  3. Frankly most normal people value their holiday trips higher than their work trips; missing a day’s work because you cannot get in is mildly annoying, but missing a holiday is devastating.
  4. Lastly, making alternative arrangements is much more possible during normal working hours.

Of course nothing will change because all this will make no difference to those in charge who have chauffeur driven cars to take them everywhere and who regularly get their ears bent by industry pressure groups.

Special Treatment for Former Members of the Armed Services?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 212014
 

Yes.

But why? Apparently there is something special about serving in the armed forces – special enough for the mythical (it has no legal basis and so is in fact not a covenant at all) Military Covenant to be a popular phrase. And even a factor in determining government policy.

But why does someone who has served 20 years in the Army catering corp deserve more and/or better services than an NHS nurse who has “fought in the trenches” (including volunteering for work in the Ebola-stricken countries in West Africa)? And who is most likely to suffer from PTSD? A nurse up to his arms in blood and gore? Or an Army cook who is up to her arms in spuds?

And when you come down to it, anyone who suffers PTSD – even a banker who has smashed up his Ferrari – needs special treatment.

Perhaps those who have been in the armed services should be first in the queue for specialist treatments but those programmes should be open to all who need them.

And perhaps the “Military Covenant” should be extended into a “Public Services Covenant” to include those other public servants whose jobs put them in harm’s way – the police, fireman, ambulance drivers, nurses, etc.

Muting Smartphones

 Computing, General, iPhone  No Responses »
Dec 182014
 

Today I happened to come across a story about a priest who uses a signal blocker to stop phones from shrieking, bleeping, or blurting during church services. Very possibly illegal, although it’s quite understandable.

After all a church service is just like a theatrical performance and the distraction of phones is likely to put people off. We need more quiet at times – such as in the theatre, church, the quiet carriage in a train, or even a meeting room.

But a signal blocker is going too far – if there is an emergency, we need to be able to use our phones. And asking people does not work – there are always a few people who won’t bother to silence their phones. Not necessarily because they don’t care, but sometimes simply because they don’t think of it.

Rather than blocking phones, we need to tell phones to silent themselves automatically.

And it could be quite easy to do. In quiet zones, simply broadcast a well accepted SSID (“QUIETPLACE” perhaps?) and configure phones to automatically mute themselves when they see such an SSID. It would require support from phone manufacturers as most of us wouldn’t bother if we have to set something up – or even just install an App to do it, but it’s certainly possible.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries