It’s not my fault. I didn’t write it. I’d just like to point this out from the start, given that the latest MyDoom variant is going after the RIAA. I think the existence of hacktivism is pretty much established now.

But really, these are obvious targets. Microsoft – yawn. SCO. The RIAA. Why not branch out a little? For instance, why not target odious race hate site Stormfront? (Not safe for work, not that I’m linking to the Nazi bastards anyway.) Or godhatesfags.com? Come on, people. Do something useful here.

I said I wouldn’t talk about Gay Marriage, so I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to talk about Bush proposing an Amendment about it. Look, it’s not going to happen. He knows it. Everyone knows it. It won’t pass. It’s a publicity stunt for the Christian Right, and an attempt to move the agenda away from Iraq and the economy. Okay? If you’re suddenly shocked that the President of the US is kissing up to homophobes, where have you been recently? I don’t know whether he really believes in this stuff or whether it’s just posturing, but it doesn’t really matter that much – he’s obviously determined to go down that route. Personally I hope he continues; it’ll just split his support further. I feel a bit sorry for people like the Log Cabin Republicans, it must be hard on them, but really, what did they expect?

Oh, and I might rewrite bits of this blog in PHP. Not content with an unholy (and probably gay) mix of HTML, SHTML and pure Perl, the time has come to learn something new and confuse myself even further.

Last night I caught reference to something called “Fat Tuesday” on the news, and was surprised not to have heard of it, except that it’s actually a translation of Mardi Gras which I have heard of. Perhaps the confusion over how to pronounce “Gras” finally got too much. This particular story concerned the reaction of the good burghers of Philadelphia to this day of revelry, which was entirely rationally to close all the bars at the same time as in England.

Because if there’s one thing we’ve learnt in England, the best way to avoid alcohol-related violence is to

1. piss people off
2. encourage them to drink a whole load very quickly to make up for the shorter hours
3. send them all out onto the streets at the same time

This has been practiced by police forces across England since the First World War and the result is that there is no alcohol-related violence anywhere in the country. Yes, that’s right, none at all. I would be quite safe wandering around any provincial town or indeed city at 11.05pm on a Saturday wearing lipstick, looking at someone’s bird or just not wearing Burberry. Furthermore it has had the additional effect of almost entirely eliminating alcoholism. The only alcoholics we have in England are French, or crypto-French.

Thus I must applaud this decision by the Philadelphia PD. It makes me feel right at home.

…what?

This is quite astounding. From a Salon article about abstinence “education”:

“Unmarried couples who become sexually active tend to stop communicating on all levels,” teens are warned in the student workbook for the Reasonable Reasons to Wait program. A workbook for Choosing the Best Path includes this question: “Circle the item(s) that can be totally eliminated through the use of a condom? Infertility, isolation, jealousy, poverty, heartbreak, substance abuse, AIDS, pregnancy, cervical cancer, genital herpes, unstable long-term commitments, depression, embarrassment, meaningless wedding, sexual violence, personal disappointment, suicide, feelings of being used, loss of honesty, loneliness, loss of personal goals, distrust of others, pelvic inflammatory disease, loss of reputation, fear of pregnancy, disappointed parents, loss of self-esteem, leaving high school before graduation.”

The answer, according to the teachers guide, is “None.”

Then students are instructed to “cross out the item(s) that can be eliminated by being abstinent until marriage.

According to the teachers guide, the correct answer is “All.”

If only I’d waited until I got married to have sex, I’d never be isolated, jealous, heartbroken, depressed, embarrassed, personally disappointed, lonely, distrustful or lose my self-esteem. I wish I’d had this sort of education when I was at school. I’d be so much better off now.

Cynical as I am, I still find it a bit jarring that not only are children being taught lies and scare stories to please head-in-sand conservatives and fundamentalists, but it’s actually mandated that they do that. Well, not precisely. If schools don’t teach abstinence-only they lose funding, and if you’ve experienced the constant begging from US schools you’ll realise that this is not a light matter.

You can compare it to the similarly nonsensical-but-mandated drugs education initiatives, which are on a larger scale and extend outside of classrooms. (My favourite latest one implies that smoking dope will make you go out and crash your parents’ car. To which the obvious solution is “get so baked that you can’t even get off the sofa, or remember what a car is”.) It’s all about

1. the Benjamins – lots of money goes to Christian abstinence and drug “education” groups, and important rich people would be less rich if certain drugs were legalised. Not to mention the War On Drugs’ useful side-effect of allowing the USG to arm and fund various regimes, poison people and in fact invade countries if it feels like it. So I won’t. *whistles innocently*
2. pleasing a certain ignorant, moralistic section of the population (and making yourself look like you have faith and values and are thus someone to vote for). The great thing about these campaigns is that, by repeating yourself loudly and clearly over and over again, you get to dictate what this ignorant moralistic section believes in. They’re not particularly interested in what they’re moralising about, they just want to feel superior to people and tell them what to do, so create a social environment where they can do that and they’ll be happy. You could start a Lemons Kill Kittens campaign, and as long as you repeated “lemons kill kittens!” enough times people would start boycotting lemons, ostracising lemon-users and supporting random lemon testing in schools.

If I was a parent in this country I’d sue the government for the time I had to spend correcting all the bullshit they’d just told my kid.

And last word to a Bush advisor, which chimes in quite nicely with the various reports about distortion of science by the Bush administration:

In a 2002 story, Newsweek quoted a top Bush adviser who dismissed the data showing that the only effective sex education programs are those that teach both abstinence and contraception.

“Values trumps data,” the adviser said.

Silly scientists. Research exists to justify policy decisions, like intelligence.

Nothing from me for a bit because I’m feeling crap and I hate everyone. Also, nothing whatsoever is happening in my life and I’m not sufficiently interested in anything outside of it.

Here are some things I’m not going to write about:

• Gay marriages, Constitutional amendments or any of that
• Anyone’s war record (who gives a shit?)
• Nader running for President
• Arnie possibly running for President some time in the future
• Anyone who may be, will be or is running for President, past, present or future
• That thing about the Pentagon and global warming (read it ages ago, keep up)
• Random drug testing in UK schools
• Whatever the latest Blunkett immigrant-bashing proposal is
• Anything you might see on what passes for the news on either side of the Atlantic

But if I see anything to do with penguins, I’ll post that, obviously.

I might try listening to some music, or something.

Evening. I have a somewhat unpleasant and persistent headache (the parasite trying to escape from my skull, I expect) but I’m hoping that a slight rant will alleviate it.

I was reading some discussion earlier on today on the subject of equal pay for women. I think it’s fairly well established that it’s not uncommon for women who do the same jobs with the same hours as male counterparts often get paid less; that’s not really what I’m discussing here, though it appeared to be what a lot of the correspondents concerned were. For the record, one person was putting forward the idea that statistical male/female wage differentials are down to women not working as many hours because they’re just not dedicated enough, and going away to have babies and similar weakling female stuff. Not interested in getting into that, all the stats I’ve seen as well as anecdotal evidence tell me that the above position tends towards the “bollocks” end.

No, the interesting thing for me was that some people appeared to be surprised that this was the case. I put it down to a combination of two things, really, in my patronising way: firstly a faith in the concept that the free market will eliminate injustices (or that it has anything at all to do with human concepts of justice), and secondly an idea that what you are paid actually reflects what you do. These are both cock.

I’ve come across many people who would actually tell you that the reason people don’t get what they deserve is that the market is insufficiently free, and if they didn’t get it when it was free then they wouldn’t deserve it. This is basically faith healing (“if you don’t get better when you pray, you’ve not prayed hard enough”) and the proponents never seem to put forward a reasonable expectation of how a “free market” knows what is fair. Of course it doesn’t. People have enough trouble making judgements like that; how would anyone assume that unregulated capitalism as a system would somehow gain an intrinsic ethical component? It’s an economic system. It’s blind. Even discounting the historical precedents, I don’t think it’s unfair to discount that whole mode of belief as pseudoscience.[1]

The way round this is to say that if the market doesn’t give you something, you didn’t deserve it anyway, a.k.a. “life’s not fair”, “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?”, “tough shit sucka”. This is an interesting derivation of morality from eventuality and not one to which I personally subscribe. Life isn’t fair, no. Only people can be fair. So we have to use our influence on life to make things fair. But that’s not really what I’m planning to write about here, before I get too sidetracked onto a rant against proponents of the wisdom of the invisible and bloody hand.

What I’m more interested in is the tacit acceptance of that, acceptance that’s almost subconscious by now, that becomes shock when there’s an obvious disparity. You mean people don’t get paid what they deserve? Clearly there’s some problem here! The system is that people get paid what they deserve, so a correction is surely needed!

No, that’s not the system. What you earn has nothing to do with what you “deserve”. The classic example of this is the “wages for homemakers” concept, which in some hands is a useful tool for pointing out that actually, people (usually women) who run households but don’t get paid by anyone for it do actually still do something significant, and in other hands is a terrible selling-out to the monetarist creed. It arises also when you consider such things as maternity leave. Because, really, why should someone give you money for not being at work so you can have kids? You’re not engaging in any sort of contract, you’re not being of economic use to them.

The reason why people get maternity or paternity leave is nothing to do with exchanging work for money; it’s because they can’t get away without doing it. Either you’re in the fortunate position of being so valuable to your employer that they really, really don’t want to lose you when you get back, or, more likely, they’ve been forced to do so by law. Because if they hadn’t been, you’d be out on your ear, or perhaps you’d not have been employed in the first place, seeing as how you’re a potential sprog-machine and all. (The more enlightened employers might hire you on production of a valid “tubes-tied” certificate.) And paternity leave? That’s not even medical, you can still work.

What you earn is purely a function of what other people are prepared to give you. Do I deserve a salary over three times that of many people in this country? Christ no, not by most standards of “deserving”. I don’t even work hard, as is obvious from this blog; I can’t even play on the Protestant work ethic. If people want a society where economic resource distribution is connected with anything except your raw ability to acquire said resources[2], they have to actively do something about it. Legislate. Go on the streets with guns. Whatever. It’s not going to come automatically from any ghost in the machine, and anyone who tells you it will is laughing behind your back. And thus rants the increasingly embittered commie for today.

Entirely unconnected to that, I’m currently listening to a track by Pink Steel called “We Fight For Cock” that contains the line “Cock is my business, and business is good”. God bless Warren Ellis.

[1] This is not what all free-market proponents believe, of course. Yeah, I know that.
[2] It is interesting how some are quite happy to defend the rights of multinationals to accumulate wealth purely because they can do it but not, say, carjackers.

Much as I love the BBC, the scientific education of its staff is not something to be proud of. In general, you can never trust any scientific detail you read there (not something that’s exclusive to the BBC, all media sources have the same problem, but they’re the targets today).

Here’s the story, but hopefully they will edit it. So here’s what it used to look like (highlighting is mine).

Five times the speed of light, eh? You could launch a missile that hit someone in the past! That would definitely defeat any defence system! Not too sure about the maneuverability, but trans-finite physics has never been my strong point. Clearly, what we need now is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a defence system in case we’re hit by a Russian missile travelling backwards in time, from some unidentified conflagration in the future! Or, in fact, invade them now. Pre-emptive defence gains another notch. Don’t just worry about what they might do in 45 minutes – worry about what they might be able to do tomorrow that will affect us yesterday. You can invade anyone based on that, everyone in the universe becomes a clear and present immediate danger. I look forward to seeing evidence of a DeLorean-shaped weapons research trailer coming from Baghdad, any minute now.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have discovered the worst ringtone ever.

Someone somewhere in this office has a phone that plays one of those anonymous jolly tunes mostly belonging to ice cream vans and the sort of sabotage noise-making toys people give kids specifically to annoy their parents. You’d know it, and it probably has a name, but I cannot think what it might be. It goes “da-da-da da da, da-da-da da da, da-da da da da da da-da da…” but CIA have modified it to put a “miaow” at the end of each line. Yes. A digitised miaow.

As is mandatory for people with appalling ringtones, the owner of this terrorism leaves it for a good minute before answering, presumably because they are paralysed with mirth when it starts. I can just imagine their eyes lighting up and a grin spreading across their little Nazi face when they hear the notes begin… they reach for the phone and then they hear the miaow! How funny and yet adorable at the same time! Creasing up they let it go a bit longer. Yes! It does it again! So cute! Imagine the sort of sarcastic sneer that my face is twisting into as I write this. It’s actually getting quite painful, but it keeps the muscles in trim.

Downloadable ringtones are the Bontempi organ of the 21st Century.

Looking through my Yahoo! Briefcase, I discovered some wallpapers that I made ages ago. By ages I mean November 2001, when the net was still steam-powered and nobody had heard of spam filters.

Microsoft® Lobster (97K)

These Are Not Fish They Are Art (118K)

There’s one with penguins too, but it’s not that good. I can do better nowadays.