John Walker's Electronic House

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.

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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:

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A while back I emailed a “political” party, the Christian Peoples Alliance (sic), to ask them if they could include an apostrophe in their party’s name. The reply was astonishing. They told me, straight-faced, that they’d focus tested the name and people prefered it with without the apostrophe. Nothing could possibly bring more confidence in local government leaders, eh? Democracy in action!

After some more recent correspondence, I focus tested myself, and it turns out I prefer to spell their name, “Cruel Hatemongers”. Here’s why!

As a result of my request, I found myself on their mailing list. Most of it is mindless local government nonsense, a lot of it is ghastly attempts to prevent Muslims from building mosques, and then this delightful press release arrived:

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Ooh, three of my favourite things combined: bemoaning Derren Brown, tricksy mathematics, and slagging off homeopathy!

I hadn’t even heard that Derren Brown had a new show, until Tim IMd me to let me know it was great. I read the summary – Derren Brown reveals he has a system for winning horse races, and proves it – and sighed. Same old trick from him – do a crappy magic trick and dress it up as paranormal powers, while saying how he doesn’t believe in paranormal powers. I bemoaned to Tim that it would just be a trick, wah wah. Tim clearly smiles to himself, and lets me know that might be the point of the programme.

(You can get hold of it via Channel 4’s abysmal 4oD service. Assume I’m going to ruin any surprises below.)

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Thanks to Tony who pointed me toward this wonderful news story:

NHS trusts ‘reject homoeopathy’

Here’s an excerpt:

“NHS primary care trusts are slashing funding for homoeopathic treatment amid debate about its efficacy and the drive to cuts costs, a study has suggested. More than a quarter have stopped or cut funding for such services, research by the GP magazine Pulse has found. The Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, the country’s largest, confirms it has lost eight contracts in a year and referrals are down by 20%.”

Skip, skip, dance, dance.

It’s still utterly terrifying that qualified doctors – people with medical degrees – are falling for this woo-woo bullshit. And that they can come out with statements like,

“The homoeopathic hospitals provide a specialist service that has helped hundreds of thousands of NHS patients over the last 60 years and has extremely high levels of patient satisfaction. They are particularly well equipped to treat patients whose complex chronic health problems have not been effectively treated by conventional medicine.”

He somehow forgot to add, “We’ve never produced a scrap of evidence that anything we’ve done in those 60 years has had any effect beyond placebo and basic counselling,” but I’m sure the BBC just cut him off or something.

Don’t forget that homeopathy is deadly. Yes, it’s laughable, but it’s also vile and cruel, preying on those whose symptoms are imaginary, the frightened and dying, and those too stupid to know better. And it’s murderous, deliberately preventing people from taking effective medicines, such that they die because they drank a bottle of water. Nevermind how many conclusive studies come out proving it utter crap, we just go around and around the same pointless pole of stupidity.