It appears I’m considerably naive. One outcome I was expecting from the Goldacre vs. Barnett incident was, at some point, an act of contrition on the part of Barnett. Not because I think she is honourable – she has made it very clear through her actions that she is not – but because I really thought she would eventually snap under the weight of the attention the debacle has generated. By the time her name was being mentioned in parliament as a consequence of her dangerous actions, I thought she might buckle. Instead, she’s having her agent try and spin the events in her favour.

An Early Day Motion, currently gathering signatures, contained the line,

“expresses its disappointment that ill-informed comments by presenters such as Jeni Barnett on her LBC radio show will continue to cause unfounded anxieties for many parents and are likely to result in some parents choosing not to vaccinate their children”

By now Barnett must surely have noticed that her attempts to delete the posts from her blog were futile. They’re available elsewhere in full, with comments, for everyone to enjoy. But apparently this isn’t enough to have stopped her attempts to spin the situation.

Remarkably, her agent is telling some porkies to the press, claiming her reason for removing the reader contributions from her site was because there were, “hundreds of extremely personal and abusive comments”. In a story published on Journalism.co.uk, agent Robert Common declares that poor Jeni is an innocent victim, presumably hoping no one will visit the original posts and read the comments themselves, as this might slightly detract from his claims.

Of course, Barnett filters her comments, so there is the possibility that she was receiving others that were abusive, and not posting them, and the volume of these may have been more than she was prepared to put up with. That would make for a semi-reasonable reason to prevent further comments being posted to those two articles. However she chose not to do that, but instead to delete all the comments, and then prevent further posting. A very strange decision indeed. The next day she completely deleted both posts from her site. Since commenting on them was impossible (to the point where it would not let you even submit), it’s hard to see why she would need to remove the polite, intelligent debate from her site, let alone remove her own remarks. Unless, as I so naively thought, she had become embarrassed by the bilge she had written. Clearly not.

LBC are claiming that Barnett is also receiving personally abusive email at their station. Barnett does not make her personal email address available, so this can only be to her work address, which I’d bet a fair amount is read by her producer/assistants. Even so, it would be enormously disappointing if those asking her to stop spreading myths, that directly lead to the deaths of children, were personally attacking her. From my experience of the debate over the years, it has tended to be the hysterical anti-MMR brigade who have the greater trouble with manners. As has been the case here, of course, with Barnett publicly abusing polite and informed callers to her show, insulting them on air, and then further insulting them on her blog. (Perhaps this is another reason why she removed them? To hide her indefensible comments?)

The spin from her agent was given space after Goldacre had, reasonably, posted to his own site to discourage people from being unpleasant to Barnett. Despite Goldacre making it clear that both Barnett, and the LBC programme director, Jonathan Richards, had behaved very poorly throughout, Barnett’s agent chose to quote Goldacre’s apologising for any unpleasantness that’s appeared. He didn’t find room to quote when Goldacre added that Richards’ communications were “rather intemperate and unkindly written,” or that Barnett had been, “deeply unpleasant to and about individual people with less money and voice than herself.”

At the same time, LBC are being quite confusingly stupid about it all. Rather than putting their hands up and offering to present the other side of the debate fairly, or apologising for the misinformation, they appear to be digging their heels in. Throwing lawyers around, shouting down the phone at Goldacre, and apparently showing no regard for balanced journalism, what was once a wonderful radio station is now a corporate machine. It’s another sad fact to emerge from the debacle.

So Jeni Barnett is attempting to play the wounded deer, with the mean nasty scientist types reversing up for another strike. I don’t support or endorse anyone sending her abusive emails. I also doubt very much she’s had many, especially when her agent deliberately attempted to suggest that the comments on her blog were equally offensive, when the reality is there for everyone to see and read.

It’s very important that the vast majority of intelligent people who are rationally and critically aware that the MMR causes no demonstrable harm do not get portrayed as the cruel bullies. Especially when the person at the centre of it all was both cruel and bullying to callers to her show who dared to disagree with her motherly instincts. Especially when the likes of the prize fruitcake Melanie Phillips are writing dangerous nonsense like this. MMR is serious business, and the Barnetts and the Phillipses are doing measurable harm. The fight against that can’t be overturned by spinning the perpetrators as victims. These are people directly responsible for the endangering of children, with recorded cases of brain damage and death due to their actions. It’s deadly serious. It’s not about a rich lady on the radio getting called an idiot in an email.

P.S. For another example of Jonathan Richard’s astonishing manners, have a look at this. (The station has since replaced the stolen images on their site.)

On 3rd Feb, Ben Goldacre posted to his Bad Science blog to report the most extraordinary radio broadcast from former TVAM star, Jeni Barnett. During her LBC show, she had spent 45 minutes campaigning against the MMR vaccine, shouting down any who disagreed with her, and perpetuating the lie that there were any connections between the MMR and any long-term disorders such as autism.

The piece of radio was remarkable not simply because it was yet another idiot spreading this dangerous lie, but because Barnett managed to involve every piece of pseudo-science, every misconception, every fallacy, every woo-woo belief, and all the while rejecting any other information presented to her. It was, as Goldacre observed, a textbook piece of bad thinking, and exemplary for those wishing to understand what rational science is competing with.

Barnett responded on her blog to the attention she garnered. (No link, as explained later). She posted remarkable doublethink statements, such as:

“I am not a scientist, I would not claim to be a scientist. When tested on the contents of the MMR vaccine I told the truth. I did not have the facts to hand. Was I ill informed? Yes.As a responsible broadcaster I should have been better prepared as a parent, however, I can fight my corner. I don’t know everything that goes into cigarettes but I do know they are harmful.”

The nonsense deepened as she continued, with peculiar cries of,

“Injecting tiny babies with substances that may compromise their immune system needs to be looked at not shouted down.”

Something with which I’m sure no one disagrees. Of course, MMR doesn’t fit into this category, since it enhances their immune systems, but I think we can all get on board with Jeni’s campaign to stop people injecting these especially small babies with botulism or lead paint. She then declared that her critics wouldn’t be able to present a three hour radio programme, and finished with what proves to have been quite a prescient claim:

“Should anybody from BAD SCIENCE read this I urge you to continue the debate, and if it gets too heated there is always the option of turning me off.”

Meanwhile, LBC’s lawyers contacted Goldacre, telling him to remove the segment of the radio programme from his blog, or they would take legal action. This is, of course, standard procedure for copyright enforcement. You simply cannot post long sections of radio programming without the broadcaster’s permission, even though it was beamed through the airwaves into people’s radios for free, and would be very unlikely to be something LBC could use to make more money. (I’ve a sneaking suspicion it won’t be appearing on many ‘Best Of’ segments.) Goldacre posted about that here, along with many more updates regarding the story.

The comments thread on Barnett’s site filled quickly. It was a mixture of three groups. There were the rational scientists, explaining why she was incorrect, and why her claims were so dangerous. Then there were the angries, who posted to say she was a moron. And there were the anti-MMR brigade, mobilised from their mysterious headquarters, to post links to the websites of the usual suspects. These included the tragic stories of poor parents whose children have autism, and for whom the MMR lie has taken over their lives, leaving their grief and rage misdirected, mostly on themselves. To Barnett’s temporary credit, she allowed all manner of comments through her moderation process, with the weight heavily against her.

This led her to post again, and very sadly, rejecting all the polite and carefully expressed information she had been offered. She wrote in a post titled “Bad Scientists”,

“I thank those of you who have sent me information about sites that may be of use to me.

I thank the Bad Scientist for being just that. Sarcasm doesn’t shift peoples opinions. Making another person feel small because they don’t have a Bad Science degree and then nit-picking over semantics is not the answer either. I care about humanity my way, and you Bad Scientist yours.

To all of you Bad scientists, who are SO angry with me, good luck with your research. Should you fall ill I will attend you as best I can with my motherly love. Should I fall ill, as a non paid up member of your club, will you administer to me? And should I refuse your drugs then what?”

The final paragraph is the most remarkable. That she would reject everything in favour of the bullshit links she received to John Stone and Andrew Wakefield’s misinformation is not too surprising, especially after she had previously stated that she didn’t care if she was wrong, she was going to believe it anyway. But to imply that those with qualifications (something that, pleasingly enough, disqualifies them from having a perspective in Jeni’s world) would leave her to die because they disagreed was incredible. And then the last sentence… huh? Then you’d die by your own choice, you peculiar person.

Meanwhile, the internet began doing what it does best. Not letting things go away. The phenomenon known as The Streisand Effect kicked in, where an attempt to silence something makes it an awful lot louder. When Goldacre could no longer host the LBC segment, he suggested that maybe it could be divided into “fair dealing” chunks on a series of blogs, which he could coordinate on his site. He believed the clip was too valuable to lose. Of course, the internet is more efficient than this, and within minutes the full 45 minutes was hosted in a number of places. You can hear it at Wikileaks when their servers can carry the load (you can also make a donation to them to help keep their servers going). And don’t tell anyone, but it’s also here. And the transcripts are coordinated here.

Not letting awkward things go away is one way in which the internet leaps into action. Another, of course, is spreading the information. Goldacre has a popular following, writing a regular column for the Guardian, and articles exposing a-medical nonsense in various newspapers. But his blog-based following is generally restricted to those already on his side. The story was picked up by bloggers and written about all over the world. And thanks to the recent explosion in the popularity of Twitter, the tweeting was cacophonous. Then the great grandfather of Twittering mentioned it, Stephen Fry. It’s been re-tweeted a kerbillion times, and Goldacre’s site is creaking under the pressure (fortunately it’s hosted by Positive Internet, and they will be working hard behind the scenes to keep it going).

The noise was loud enough for even The Times to pick up the story, David Aaronovitch writing a good summary of the events. I would imagine that today, post Fry-tweet, it will be further reported.

Jeni Barnett, meanwhile, has made the most astonishing choice. Yesterday the 200+ comments across both posts mysteriously vanished. Then this morning, both the posts went too. Her site has removed the incident entirely. Quite what she hopes to achieve by this is unclear, but presumably she’s under a great deal of attention, and she’s not having much fun. From reading previous entries on her blog, Barnett is obviously a very emotional and insecure person (I say this as no slight – this seems to be the most recurring theme in what she writes about) and she must be having an extraordinarily hard time. However, if she thinks deleting her own references to her vociferous attempt to prevent children receiving vital vaccinations will help, she doesn’t know the internet at all well. Both posts, and all the comments, are here. For those of us taking part in the discussion in her comments starting a few days ago, her deleting them is remarkably unpleasant. While the first post received a great deal of offensive nonsense, the second, “Bad Scientists”, contained a wealth of intelligent, polite individuals writing sensibly and helpfully. Her deletion of it was fairly grotesque. Unfortunately for Barnett, nothing gets deleted on the internet.

At the same time as all this unfolded, with remarkable timing, a series of stories regarding the MMR scandal appeared. The first was the news that thanks to the drop in MMR vaccinations, the herd immunity in this country had been lost, and measles cases are rising at a terrifying rate. 2008 saw a 36% increase on 2007, as was revealed on Friday. A disease that was almost eradicated in the late 90s is now killing children again, because of people refusing to take the perfectly safe vaccination, all thanks to one despicable man, Andrew Wakefield.

There’s no point in reproducing the Wakefield story here, but this is absolutely essential reading to not only catch up on exactly how Wakefield single-handedly caused the deadly scare, but also the extraordinary depths to which it is alleged he falsified the data. Of the twelve children followed in his study, The Times demonstrated that some were diagnosed with autism before receiving the MMR, and others have never been diagnosed with autism, nor indeed did they ever manifest the bowel disorders Wakefield claimed was the cause. What this story doesn’t repeat, however, are the revelations from two years ago that Wakefield was paid over £400,000, that he failed to declare in his study, by the lawyers trying to build a case linking MMR to autism. It is mind-boggling.

This is why Barnett’s mistake was so huge. Finally, after a decade of this hideous man’s work having somehow dominated, despite dozens and dozens of further studies failing to reproduce the results, and the MMR being repeatedly proven safe, the tide in the media is beginning to turn. Newspapers that perpetuated the myth are beginning to report the truth. This hopefully means, along with the recent revelations as to the depths of Wakefield’s malpractice, the tide might begin to turn.

(PS. Nothing to do with the above, but another example of when the internet won’t let someone undo history is here, and it’s a fun one.)

So there’s a final part to the US election results that needs to be added. It’s the wretched, miserable part, but it cannot be ignored. It’s the spiteful pill dropped in the water. California’s Proposition 8.

It made what should have been a jubilant Wednesday into a bitter tasting victory. Obama, a man many hold up as representing hope (and indeed is already delivering on it, with plans to end the human rights abuse of Guantanamo Bay, and reversing Bush’s plans for devastating oil drilling and his prevention of stem cell research), never said anything against Prop 8 in the time he campaigned, rather prevaricating and embarrassingly avoiding an issue he knew would lose him votes.

Somehow the people of the defiantly Democrat California voted in favour of this most hate-driven bill.

It just doesn’t make any sense. I can attempt to understand the reasons why people say they are against homosexuality (although that sounds as mad as being against weather). I get that this is born of the fear of otherness. I get that people are infected by religion that tells them to hate certain people. I get that people are terrified of their own sexuality, and want to destroy the subject. I cannot sympathise with any of these people, but I recognise that they think these things. But I just cannot comprehend how anyone can take issue with two people getting married.

It’s such an aimless hate. Generally people will pick on promiscuity when they want to pronounce what’s wrong with gay people (while seeming oddly quiet on the same subject applied to heterosexuals). Faced with a couple who want to commit to one another for life, who are in love and want their partnership to be recognised, how does this hate not at least dampen? And how – just how – does gay marriage translate in people’s minds to be in some way “harming” marriage itself?

This is what’s so utterly moronic about the whole thing. They are not only campaigning to prevent same-sex marriage, but with such an astonishing volume of bilious hate have passed a bill that could legally divorce all those who were previously married, because they claim that it was in some way endangering marriage itself.

And it’s such a stupid, stupid lie. One marriage doesn’t change another! If I should ever get married, it will likely be to a Christian, and we will declare our love before God and the church, and our faith will be the reason behind that marriage. I cannot understand how any marriage, from two drunken strangers getting married in a drive-thru in Vegas, to a loving gay or straight couple publicly declaring their commitment in the next town, can in any way do harm to my (currently imaginary) relationship. Because it obviously can’t. It’s sheer, bleeding-eyed madness to suggest otherwise.

So a couple in love who want to spend their lives together, in a recognised commitment, whether before God or themselves, who are the same sex – how on Earth could that change anything? You know how it can change it? I reinforces it. It recognises the sanctity of marriage, and celebrates it. It nurtures the concept of marriage.

I felt hope when Obama won. Not because I believe he can change the world – in fact I fear he will be remembered as one of the most vilified and loathed presidents, as the actions of the Republicans bear their fruit throughout his term/s and a stupid majority level him with the blame – but because people made the choice that I believe was most right. America proved everyone wrong when it was said they weren’t ready to elect a black man. That gave me more hope in people. It was a hope so quickly undone when Prop 8 was officially declared as passed. Where I’d felt pride before, it was replaced by disgust. That Prop 8 was ever proposed generates a great deal of horror. The idea that a minority of people were so spiteful as to try and dissolve marriages of loving couples because of their own, private prejudices, was depressing and painful. That a majority – that more people were in favour of this than against it – look, I’m an optimist. I get teased for my faith in humanity by my friends. It took one hell of a blow on Wednesday. Just what? What? Is this where we are as a people?

People voted against love. That’s fucked up. We’re in a terrible, terrible place.

As I started writing this, I saw Olbermann has commented on the subject, and captures the hurt this hate has created. He too seems just bewildered, hurt and disgusted by this most awful of results.

A friend of a friend also makes some wise and passionate remarks about it here and here.

Thursday night wasn’t good to me. I’d been remarkably lucky on Wednesday, flying to Seattle, going straight into the developer’s offices after getting off the plane, then wandering the town finding somewhere to eat, and heading to bed by 10.30pm (6.30am in my head). The likelihood of the first night in America is waking up around 5am, because your brain, as tired as it might be, is certain it’s 1pm and it’s ludicrous that you’re still in bed. Wednesday night/Thursday morning I woke up at 3.30am and was a bit disappointed. Then fell back asleep until my alarm woke me up at 8.30. Amazing – 10 hours sleep.

So Thursday was spent in the offices, followed by dinner with a few lovely people who worked there, and then back to my hotel. I had a lot to write before my flight home, leaving from the hotel at 4pm Friday. 4000 words needed to be written, and I had figured I’d do some Thursday night, and as much as possible on Friday. But getting back to the hotel Thursday evening, I was already exhausted, and went to bed at 10.30pm again. I set my alarm nice and early so Friday could be all work, and fell asleep by about 11. And then woke up at 1.30am. I rolled back over to go to sleep, but that didn’t happen.

(continue reading…)

Obviously the standard of journalism on the BBC News website has never been that stellar, but at least once a week you’ll find a piece that’s just so awful you rightly become more suspect about everything else they publish. While it’s tempting to forgive them due to their current campaign to sneak in many naughtily ambiguous headlines, and increasingly irreverent captions, it doesn’t quite address the rubbish that gets slung up in response to half-interesting stories. For instance, this drivel about Enid Blyton.

Blyton was an absolutely fascinating woman – a terrible, noxious individual whose spite was targeted against anyone who might cross her path, including one of her own daughters. She was intriguing tabloid fodder in a pre-tabloid age, who was also generating children’s books at a rate of one per fortnight.

Pullman’s comments in the BBC piece are absolutely spot-on – she was a terrible writer with no skill for prose – but for one thing. Not only did she write books that compelled her target audience to keep turning the pages to find out what would happen next as Pullman says, but she captured a spirit of adventure like no one else. Not out of great crafting, but I suspect because of the lack of it. There was something pragmatic about her delivery, where elaboration on a description would be a waste of time when she could be moving on to the next incident. It makes the books laughable to read as an adult, but for a kid it was perfect. Who cares what kind of blue the sea was. It was blue, and the children were going to swim in it, inevitably discovering a cave and overhearing a conversation between some smugglers. Pullman’s an interesting example – his books are beautiful. Compellingly crafted and riveting. But that was for me as an adult. I’m fairly sure as a kid I’d have been horribly bored by his descriptions of Oxford, just waiting for a bear or witch to finally show up.

The BBC story came about because of the publication of The Famous Five’s Survival Guide, which they describe as, “a reunion of sorts for the four young sleuths and Timmy the dog.” A reunion “after a 45-year hiatus.” And this is why I’m cross. Certainly this is not a matter of great import, but it’s absolutely empirical proof that not a glimmer of fact checking is perfectly acceptable at the site, no one needing to bother to researching a story before writing it. Exactly how hard would it be to have looked on Amazon for Famous Five books, to instantly discover that there were many of them written in the 1980s? Er, not very hard at all.

Or to remember that there was a TV series made of the Blyton books in 1978? And another one made in 1996?

Oh, and what about the choose your own adventure Famous Five books? Were they written in the last 45 years? All fourteen of them. Oh yes, that would be during their terribly unpopular 1980s. A hard decade for the five of them.

The piece is just one man’s poor memory of things he might have read about the books. It’s a mess of ignorance, published on one of the world’s most popular and trusted news sources. Of course it doesn’t matter a great deal in this isolated case – it’s about that dreadful old racist’s storybooks getting another reinvention. But it would be nice if the person employed to write it knew that it was “another”. Or had bothered to check. I mean, I got all the way through this without having to check Wikipedia, but for hoping to find a link for the choose your owns at the end there. Had the BBC stumbled upon this little known site, they might have spotted them too.

Poor.

Ben Goldacre points out a wonderful moment in last night’s Newsnight, where Paxman introduces a clip about “Brain Gym“. This is some utter bilge being taught in primary schools where children are encouraged to wave their arms around in such a way that the electrical circuits in their bodies connect balancing the left and right halves of their brains… Oh good grief.

You can watch the clip by following this link, which you really ought to. It starts about 21.30, unless you’re Stuart Campbell, and then it starts last Tuesday.

What I most want to share is the interview with the inventor of Brain Gym after the report, in which Paxman is at his sneery best.

Paxman: You say in your teachers’ manual here when you talk about hook-ups that they connect the electrical circuits in the body. What exactly are these electrical circuits please?

Paul Dennison: Well it’s my opinion that we are electrical, that we do have circuits and connections, and when we bring our energy to the midline, to the central point, we are breaking out of the reflex to go from one side or the other to bring things back to the centre where we can be calm and relaxed.

Pax: You say that it’s your opinion that we are electrical, Mr Denison. Are you medically qualified?

PD: No, I’m not medically qualified. I’m an educator. But I study and read and uh. The uh. There are studies to show that we do have electrical… acupuncture and other procedures are based on the fact that there are electrical circuits in the body. And we are building on the shoulders of these people who have been doing these things for thousands of years.

Pax: Is the fact that you’re not medically qualified explanation enough for statements in this teachers’ manual of the kind that “processed foods do not contain water”, which you know is apparent nonsense.

PD: Uh… So the… We’re interested in helping children and these things work and we explain them the best we can and we are going to edit the manual and rewrite it and we appreciate your help and helping us point these things out. [obscured by Paxman] to the best of my ability to help children and help teachers have a context to why they are doing the movements.

Pax: But if your manual can contain idiotic statements like that, is there any reason to believe anything else in it?

PD: I do believe those statements are true and I will prove…

Pax: You believe processed food contains no water do you?

PD: I had a context for that statement meaning that pure water is more immediately active and available to the brain and that I’m not attached to either, but that was the explanation I had at the time.

Glad that’s being taught in schools then!

I detest April Fool’s Day. It’s a vile and stupid tradition that essentially boils down to, “Telling Slightly Plausible Lies Day”, rendering all news sources utterly useless, and entirely contrary to their purpose.

“HA HA! I wrote something that could be true but isn’t, and YOU believed it!”

Yeah, er, well done. That’s lying. You’re a liar. Shut up and go away.

However, it seems I can be swayed by good CGI. Screw you, BBC, that’s quite good.

(I also don’t mind that the two decent cartoon sites (and Questionable Snoretent) have mucked their URLs about – that’s not lying, just being daft).

Today’s most vile human being is… Feargal Sharkey!

Formerly the lead singer of the Undertones, and formerly worth oxygen, the appalling cretin said this to The Register, when defending the role of copyright for musicians, and opposing sharing of music:

“Invariably, it’s artists and creators who are at the sharp end of this food chain, and they’re the ones that will get to the stage that they’ll give up and go and do something else – because they have to pay the rent, pay the gas bill and feed themselves, buy shoes, and deal with all the things normal people expect to deal with in life. So people have to realise there’s an implication in this.

There’s been all this play about FairTrade coffee and FairTrade sugar – but what about FairTrade bloody music?”

This sell-out corporate shill just compared having his album downloaded with living as a slave in a developing nation. I’m lost for words to describe how utterly, poisonously foul that is.

Nevermind the extensive stupidity of making an argument about people expecting to get paid “at the end of the week”, in defense of an industry body that’s currently fighting to have decades of extra copyright for artists who did their week’s work over fifty years ago, and still believe they are entitled to infinite profit for eternity.

The interesting point he makes, which is hopefully true, is that when sharing music does finally destroy the recording industry, and it becomes recognised as the strangling evil on music that it has been for the last one hundred years, most people will walk away. And thank goodness. That will be the most glorious day. I cannot wait for 90% of musicians to stop, leaving only the 10% who are in it for reasons that matter.

A couple of weeks ago, the equally viciously stupid Roger Daltry stated (without irony) that thousands of musicians had “no pensions and rely on royalties”. And therefore they should be entitled to perpetual profit from work they did decades earlier. Um? So if I don’t get around to setting up a pension, do I get this too? No? Oh, it’s only musicians who are special enough that if they’re too stupid to have arranged a pension, they deserve special rights? I see.

And these guys are winning the debate. It’s terrifying. But the good news is, Feargal Sharkey will always have made that comment about Fair Trade, and even when the RIAA and BPI own the copyright on our own circulation systems, he’ll be the despicable human being who said that. Well done Sharkey – look what you’ve become.

After touting the idea for the last year, Bush is going ahead with his plans to give every American a $300 “tax rebate”. Costing the country $80bn, its intention is to give everyone an economic boost, and push away thoughts of a recession.

It’s like someone trying to bump-start their car’s ruined battery. Rolling it down the hill to get the engine to come to life, and hoping that it will be enough to reach their destination. It seems so implausible a solution, and so incredibly likely to cause the economy to break down a few metres further down the road.

I avoid conspiracy theories as resourcefully as I can, but when America’s education system is collapsing through a lack of funding, and $80bn is pissed away in meaninglessly small chunks of cash – a couple of new golf clubs, or a third of that month’s rent – it’s hard to ignore that terrifying feeling that the Bush administration – indeed the entire government who have approved this move – would rather see America get stupid, and shut up for half an hour while they spend their present. (It’s hard to immediately pin it down to electioneering, because the recession fears are happening right now, as well).

I have a thought for a response to this, but I’m the other side of the world, and not involved. But this seems like the right idea:

A massive campaign should now be organised to encourage all those who are willing to give their $300 to a single fund. A fund that is given to the American state education system, or something else similarly in crisis which the government are not spending money on. In fact, Bush gave me the idea. Quoting the Scotsman:

“President Bush first proposed the giveaway earlier this year, arguing that a stimulus package would work better if the people, rather than the government decided where it was to be spent.”

The implications of this statement are so terrifying. As if everyone getting a stupid £150 is going to allow them to change anything. But how about taking him at his word? Let the people decide where the government should have spent this money. Get organised, recollect all this money that’s being sent out, and then give it back to the state such that it can only be spent on those issues intelligent Americans believe need it most.

Can this be done? Surely such a move would receive massive amounts of publicity? It would get news coverage, simply because it would be confusing to them by its apparently altruistic (despite being anything but) behaviour. Surely the intelligent media would get behind such a project, and enough would get involved such that billions could genuinely get fed back into the system where they belong?

A couple of people have pointed out to me that my emails to Sid Cordle have been less than ideal.

I believe that satire is a powerful and effective medium for causing debate and anger. And I do not regret using this. However, I do regret being a poor representative of Christianity, which I believe is the case when my position appears rooted in hate. So to address this, I’ve written back to Cordle, apologising, and restating my position in a more direct and less hostile manner. Here it is:

(continue reading…)