They Walk Amongst Us

I recently found myself in the uncommon predicament of being a captive audience to a creationist, suckered into what I foolishly presumed could be a containable round of banter by his outwardly not only functional but even rational air. I am obviously far more sheltered than I had presumed, believing myself insulated from the bulk of that Dark Age-horde by the moat of the Atlantic. But Britain is of course is no safe haven after all: whilst religion is, amongst its original demographic, in terminal decline in a country that has few other claims to being the most developed on Earth, the fundamentalism of immigrant African Christianity and a booming Islamic population ensure a constancy in the total mental energy expended by the populace on obeisance to an imaginary overlord.
The energy is firstly spent on believing in books that have authority by virtue of being so old that no-one knows exactly who wrote them or even which bits to follow and which to ignore, which is nice in two principal ways: there's the satisfaction of being able to define yourself as a true believer because of the existence of people who believe otherwise, and also in that all the inconsistencies and variable interpretations of the said texts give plenty of opportunity for debate with similarly-minded individuals, which is a nice hobby with the fantastic bonus of a feeling of seriousness and devoutness.
Secondly, as with a child excitedly taking the potty containing its first independently delivered poo to its parents, the discoveries made must be shared with everyone regardless of whether they want to hear it or not, and this takes up a tremendous amount of energy too. Under no circumstances tell the child that you were already aware of the possibility of pooing all by yourself, nor that it is at the end of the day just a poo.
Anyway, back to creationists. The individual in question saw himself as a scientifically minded type and had gone to the effort of finding out the degree of probability of life as we know it springing up on a molecular level: clearly, minuscule. Unfortunately, his faith also required him to accept time and space as infinite. And therein lay the rub. As with monkeys and typewriters, given infinite time and space, a probability of, say, merely 1 in 10 to the power of 23 (the figure is endlessly debatable but you can call it 1 in 10 followed by a billion zeroes if you like; it doesn't matter a jot for the sake of the mathematical principle) of the first proteins and, thereby, life arising actually equates to it being 100% probable and therefore certain to occur at some point in some place. You don't even need to read up on Hoyle's fallacy to grasp this.
This is a horrible threat to a literal-minded creationist. Effectively, it means that deliberate design of life by a creator is not a foregone conclusion and the doubt is something that cannot be lived with.
Still, all hope is not lost: climate-change deniers can continue to find succour in the backing of mercenary and/or demented individuals calling themselves scientists. And likewise individuals exist to feed the devotees of intelligent design and their ilk their daily bread with fabrications on missing links, misunderstandings of what evolution means (no, it does not mean we evolved from monkeys or that there should be sabre-toothed cats the size of houses around by now instead of domestic moggies) or propaganda painting actual non-missionary scientists as people who claim to have all the answers (or alternatively must know sod all because they call many of their findings theories rather than facts!) and are probably in league with Satan anyway.
I admit I might not have got quite as hot under the collar if the man in question had not been a schoolteacher. In science.

Ät skit Sverige

Is all. How can you feel for a country whose Eurovision entry's chorus is 'I will be popular'?

The Bin Laden with False Expectations

'USA! USA!'
It seems churlish to tap throngs of ecstatic Shermans on the shoulder on this day with any patient explanation of how little having finally shot their baddie-in-chief matters, or indeed how little good finally making a solid martyr of him will do. It's all about closure, after all. And vanquishing the end-of-level boss. It's what God wanted.
Still, who says that Bin Laden was really born in Saudi Arabia? Show us the birth certificate now!

Censimilia

The defence contractor Lockheed Martin is now tasked with organising the 2011 UK census. This has understandably provoked a knee-jerk response against the whole process in a part of the populace. This is a chronic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water: however objectionable sub-contracting yet another governmental function may be, however repellent it is that it's farmed out to merchants of death (a tobacco company would. for example, be a more ethical choice), censuses do actually need to be carried out. Without a record of the structure of the country, allocating public funds for essential services becomes a matter of guesswork and leaves further room for regionalised nepotism besides that. It's infantile to suppose that the fact that it involves an American corporation somehow makes us more vulnerable - as if any corporation actually belongs to any single country any more, as opposed to being just a vehicle driven by its pool of shareholders' interests - and doubly so to shoot ourselves in the feet by boycotting the process. It's as indefensible as refusing to vote: opting out does not give you power, it just means, instead of having a voice which may seem so faint it's drowned out, you really exert no influence at all.
I still wouldn't recommend working for them, though. Let the census fail through service inefficiency, not through the public being unhelpful. And when we reach the age of porcine aviation, we might yet get a system that doesn't feel dirty for having to participate in.

I ain't going on no goddam plane, fool!

You may say that it's easy enough for the inhabitants of Stockholm, Helsinki or Moscow to express dismay at the poverty of BAA's attempts at Heathrow to cope with a meagre amount of snow, when they get that experience without fail every winter, and far worse. But it really is staggeringly pathetic, considering that we're talking about the world's largest international airport having only two runways and nothing set in place for the eventuality of an actual winter - denial of Britain as a northern country being a treasured national foible - as is British Airways' ingenious sidestepping of the issue by cancelling all flights to destinations that, strangely, other airlines were perfectly happy to continue flying to, presumably reasoning that they'd get less grief from passengers whose Christmas they'd fucked if they didn't let them come to the airport to air their complaints. Meanwhile, back to BAA: the Government offers them the Army's help in snow clearance; a rare opportunity for those defence billions, otherwise spent on drills and wargames of largely intangible benefit, to be put to real use, and BAA turns them down with snide inferences to snow clearing as the business of specialists. Which they so clearly are (and the tanks used as snowploughs at Moscow Sheremetyevo are figments of the imagination). As opposed to BAA being penny-pinchers whose only concern is to avoid loss of face.
There was a man who would not get off the ground under any circumstances, against all rhyme or reason, and had to be pressganged each week to make that flight. His name was B.A.

Pre-emptive Strikes

So England and Russia both want to stage the 2018 World Cup. But what do you do when you're internationally synonymous with corruption, crime and drinking yourself to death? Simple, really: get that shot in first against your rival. Incendiary farcical propaganda has a rich tradition in Russia, and clearly it didn't die out with communism. The motives behind it have changed, however: it's no longer just a matter of self-aggrandisement for a dictator, but rather cold profit for a cabal of oligarchs - don't expect the Russian in the street to benefit if they get their tournament.
Do remember, however in choosing this attack plan not to put all your eggs in one basket. The wheels of the decision-making process also need oiling.
England's bid is primitive indeed; we clearly have a lot to learn.

Hate It When Stereotypes Become True?

No choice here, I'm afraid: this one goes back hundreds of years and it now seems to be true: the French are terminally lazy en masse. By now, the rest of the Western world has largely absorbed the idea that we all live much longer and can't handle a quarter of the populace no longer chipping that much in to provide for themselves, despite years of punitive health insurance, employers' pension plans et al. that they paid up for in all good faith. Except France. With the lowest retirement age in the EU, you'd have thought they could accept that just maybe all the other 30 or so countries around them had actually seen the bigger picture and perhaps a rethink was called for.
No, what France does is go on strike whenever they're individually hassled. That they do this in a more co-ordinated way than Italy just makes them an even bigger mess in a way; they've combined banging their heads against an inflexible government with blind devotion to their unions and abandonment of basic reason. At least when the Italians strike, they only get to the first step.
The retirement age across the whole EU has to be standardised, at the very least, at 65, male and female. Nothing else is economically viable. I know I want to have the choice, at least, to work until 65, preferably 70.
I do realise that individual unions in France have more than just that figure to contend with: educate me. At the moment, I'm just not convinced.