New music.

As regular readers may know (if there are any regular readers left these days, blogging having slacked off so much), I was in a band once. Well, I still am, and we have done a thing.

It's been a hell of a while — the last time we gigged was our tour of Scotland, back in the Autumn of '05 — but new stuff is now very much on the way. The thing what we have just finished (Yes! Finished!) is this here remix of Lamb's Butterfly Effect:



I hope that brings you some enjoyment.

If you want to keep up with our news, we are on Facebook. If you don't, we're still on Facebook. It's not all about you, you know.

Cheers.

Clueless.

The BBC costs billions of quid a year. Apparently, one of the advantages of this expense is that we get world-class news reporting and factual programming, which is nice.

Wikipedia, conversely, is famously free.

Today, Wikipedia has blacked itself out (quite ineptly, it has to be said) as a protest against SOPA. The BBC's news division apparently does not see the irony in publishing this headline:

Without Wikipedia, where can you get your facts?

It does rather lead one to wonder: without Wikipedia, where are the BBC getting their facts?

This actually happened.

I live for headlines like this:

Man misses mouse and shoots roommate, revealing child rapist

A Utah man who was trying to kill a mouse ended up shooting one roommate and getting another arrested for child rape, while a fourth roommate slept through the whole thing.

There's a lot of it about.

I'm ready to believe in karma now.

I note with interest that CNN don't care if you commit libel, don't care if you commit treason, don't care if you clearly demonstrate both brazen mendacity and a total lack of conscience about it — whatever, they'll hire you. But listening to Heather Mills's voicemail? What are you, a monster?

It really does do the heart good to see Piers Morgan being bitten so hard in the arse by his own low character. After being sacked as editor of The Mirror for knowingly publishing fake photos on the front page, committing both libel and treason while he was about it — action that should have made him unemployable in the news media and, come to that, everywhere else — he somehow managed to parlay that into an inexplicably successful media career, eventually getting one of the highest-profile current affairs jobs on the planet, all the while telling anyone who asked that he was sacked for opposing the Iraq War — as if a British newspaper editor could possibly lose their job for that.

Well, CNN have belatedly noticed what the man is actually like. He may yet weasel his way out of his own written confession, but it does look a lot like his career is quite wonderfully screwed. Hey, he might even end up in prison. It's a Christmas miracle!

It says a lot about Bush Derangement Syndrome that the public was happy to forgive this man for libelling British troops to further the cause of the enemy but draw the line at his eavesdropping on one of the most unpopular women in the country. People are odd, but hey, they're finally right.

When all you have is a hammer.

This is an amazing and alarming video of a helicopter crash.

The pilot, who walked away with minor injuries, was helping to put up a Christmas tree in Auckland, New Zealand when the chopper’s blades clipped a wire and it spun out of control.

OK, surviving this is amazing, but I do wonder exactly who managed to have this conversation —

"We're going to put up a Christmas tree."
"I'll get the helicopter."

— without anyone saying "Er... hang on."

Give 'em a Chanel suit and they think they're Hitler.

Mary Portas:

We need a more sophisticated understanding of what is a good deal for consumers looking beyond price.

Translation:

I want to drive up prices for everyone in the country in order to force them to fund my preferred lifestyle.

It must be lovely to have all that spare time on your hands to wander up and down a street buying all your veg and meat and bread and things in separate shops. I imagine it was very pleasant for women in the days before they had to go to work.

Another letter to Mark Steyn.

Mark Steyn's latest Happy Warrior column is utter tripe. He appears to be under the impression that no engineering or invention worth mentioning has happened since the 1950s.

Their first car is no different from my first car. Which was no different from my grandfather's first car. To be sure, they've dispensed with the hand crank and rumble seat and installed a GPS and iPod dock, but essentially it runs on the same technology as a century back. Which are the faster-moving times? The age that invents the internal-combustion engine? Or the age that plugs a Justin Bieber download into it?

....

Imagine that Vermont class a century ago, the summer of 1911. The Model T had just gone into production a couple of years earlier, the age of manned flight had gotten off the ground. And they had their version of Justin Bieber downloads, too ... There were so many inventions for singers to sing about, they had no time left to sing about the novelties of their own industry, in which the wax cylinder was about to be superseded by the 78-rpm phonograph record. In the years that that Vermont Class of 1911 had been in college, the Nickelodeon had led to a boom in what we would soon call motion pictures. And yet, what with all the other things going on — with electrification and the internal-combustion engine enabling man to conquer both night and distance, time and space, and other footling stuff — these exciting showbiz novelties were generally regarded as peripheral to progress. Instead of the be-all and end-all of it. In the second decade of the 21st century, technological innovation means we're thrilled if Apple invents a device for downloading Katy Perry that's an eighth of an inch slimmer than the previous model. So today, instead of songs for the age of invention, we have inventions for an age of songs.

So I just had to write to him again.

Dear Mr Steyn,

Speaking as someone who generally agrees with you (apart from your reliably wrong film reviews), I was very disappointed to read your laughably inept "Gliding On Empty" piece.

You claim that the first half of the Twentieth Century was the bit where all the invention happened, because that's when inventors concentrated on vehicles Mark Steyn can travel in, while no engineering worth mentioning has happened since around 1950, because cars and civilian planes haven't changed all that much in that time and computer technology doesn't count because it is possible to use computers to listen to Justin Bieber records.

Can anyone play this game? Let me have a go. Just as Ipods are useless because they don't get us from New Hampshire to Mongolia any quicker, the automobile was a crap invention because I can't use it to peel oranges. And just as modern computers are essentially trivial because we can listen to Katy Perry on them, so the aeroplane is an evil invention because it was used by Stalin.

It will be news to every mechanic in the world that modern cars are "no different" to the cars of a century ago. "essentially it runs on the same technology as a century back" you claim. Yet most mechanics under the age of thirty don't even know how to deal with a carburettor, because they've never seen one — because the modern car engine, while still operating essentially on the principle of internal combustion driving pistons, has been continuously refined and improved beyond all recognition. And I like the way you dismissively mention in passing that they've "installed a GPS", as if building and maintaining a network of satellites orbitting the Earth that enables a small handheld device to pinpoint its exact position to within centimetres is a trivial exercise.

Of course, the modern technology you dismiss can be used for some things other than the ones you mention. Mobile phones not only allow us to listen to music but have also enabled billions of people to get connected to the global communications network without the prohibitively expensive building of old-fashioned cable-based networks. Since communication is the key to human progress, that's rather a big thing. Computers can be used not only to listen to records but to control power stations, compose symphonies, maintain life-support systems, and perform some truly astonishing feats for the military — including the control of the modern fighter jets you ignore. "Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to biplanes to flying boats to transatlantic jetliners in its first 50 years, and then for the next 50 it just sat there," you write. But it wasn't air travel that progressed in this way; it was aeroplanes; commuter travel is merely one way of using them. And what happened with planes is that they continued to become more and more advanced, progressing far past the speed and acceleration and comfort that any mere passenger would be willing to put up with while drinking G&T and watching a film, so the latest planes, which are inconceivably amazing compared to planes from the 1950s, aren't used for commuter travel. Mind you, Burt Rutan flew a plane into space a couple of years back, and has now teamed up with Richard Branson to found Virgin Galactic, who have every intention and reasonable expectation of selling tickets for spacerides to us plebs. Of course, they might play music during the flight, so presumably it's not real progress, then.

You say "In the second decade of the 21st century, technological innovation means we're thrilled if Apple invents a device for downloading Katy Perry that's an eighth of an inch slimmer than the previous model." Yet the reason computers keep getting smaller is that teams of engineers keep figuring out ways to make subatomic particles do what they're told in increasingly complex and innovative ways. The quantum ratchet is a truly impressive invention, even if you can't ride in it.

I can put an entire university library in my pocket. Or I can put a record label's entire output in my pocket. The fact that you don't much like the latter doesn't make the former unimpressive.

Yours sincerely,

Joseph Kynaston Reeves

OK, that's quite enough writing to Mark Steyn. I'll figure out something else to blog about now.

Still not quite right.

Kellogg's have angered the God of Nominative Irony.

Protesters, rioters, and nimbys.

While it's nice to see the BBC and The Guardian outraged by violent criminality for once, a word.

For many years, The Guardian and their pet broadcasters at the Beeb have been unable to report on rioting and thuggery without tripping over their own nuance. As long as the danger was elsewhere — Manchester, Belfast, Liverpool, Tel Aviv, Tony Martin's front room — it was an inevitable part of BBC reporting that we have to understand the thugs' grievances, their sense of frustration, why they feel "forced" to act in this way by [insert this week's pet cause here]... the hallowed root causes. Some observers might even have mistaken this stance for some sort of principle.

We now see that it is not.

Put looting and barbarism somewhere where the journalists of the BBC and The Guardian like to have lunch, put riots in the streets where they live, let the thugs damage that wonderful little Italian bistro that does those simply darling pistacchio biscotti, and suddenly root causes are about as popular as the Tories. They can't blame the bastards quickly enough.

Does anyone think we'd be seeing even remotely similar reporting if the riots were in Northern Ireland? Or would that just be Ian Paisley and Margaret Thatcher's fault?

Conversion.

I would like to thank everyone who is emailing me in response to my now-famousish letter to Mark Steyn. I'm going to answer some of your points here.

So far only one correspondent, Gerry from Western Australia, has managed not to miss at least some of my point, brilliantly summarising my problem thus:

utility is just not good enough.

Thanks for that, Gerry: that's what I really should have titled the post.

I would like to advise Rich, who summarised my question to Steyn as "Is belief in a revealed religion a necessary basis to a moral society?" that no, that's really not what I said. First of all, I didn't ask Steyn any question at all, beyond the implicit "Would you be so kind as to write a considered reply to this even though you're probably rather busy promoting your new book?" Secondly, I'm talking about society's resilience and lengevity, not its morality. And finally, I didn't ask, I stated that religious societies tend to be stronger and more resilient than secular ones, and I further pointed out that this is not because religion is a necessary basis for a strong society; it is because atheists are too bloody stupid to keep the baby when they chuck out the bathwater. Or vice versa, probably.

Whilst I appreciate the kind and surprisingly personal emails from Christians — unlike most atheists, I do understand that you believe that I am going to suffer horribly if I don't convert and that you are therefore engaged in a quite genuine act of kindness when you try and persuade me that your God exists, so I don't respond rudely, though neither do I pay a whole lot of attention because I really have heard it all before — it is still (a) not going to work unless you perform a miracle, 'cause that's what I'm like, and (b) completely missing my point. Please read the post again, and note that I did not ask whether God exists. And then think about it a bit and try to realise that, in this context, whether God exists doesn't even matter.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that God exists, that it's the Christian God, and that all us atheists are wrong. Well, so what? The Christian God has opted, in recent years, to go down the no-proof-offered path because faith is apparently what matters to him and evidence would spoil all that. Fine, no problem, I get that. But what that means is that the existence of atheism in society isn't going to go away because some Christians talk earnestly to some atheists. We are, as Douglas Adams put it, not convinced, and evidence is what convinces us. In requiring you to convert us without it, your God is giving you an impossible task. You might well make some headway — people do convert, all the time — but, absent proof, this is going to take you, at the very least, a couple of centuries. Tough break.

So secularism is here to stay. And while I understand that our American Christian friends (who are emailing me), with their long history of absolute freedom of religion, might not see the benefits of secularism, I would politely like to remind them that every one of us in Europe lives in a country with a history of brutal religious wars and that secularism is therefore very welcome here. We don't want our governments to be religious. It doesn't end well. Which is part of what I was getting at in my earlier post.

Secularism is here to stay. Arguably, it is weak and prone to take-over and/or defeat by any strong culture. Arguably, that is already happening. Arguably, a strong religious streak through society would make that more difficult and less likely. Even if it's not already happening, it would still be good to take steps to ensure it doesn't happen in the future, as our society is pretty excellent and worth preserving. But, given that many millions of us simply are not religious and are highly unlikely to become so any time soon, just how useful is it to point out that Christianity is an effective solution? I agree that it is.

But utility is just not good enough.