Longrider

This little story made me smile. Well, it almost made me laugh out loud.

CHURCHGOERS in Britain are still highly superstitious and centuries of preaching the Gospel have failed to banish belief in omens and portents of good and bad luck.

Indeed?

According to a study, nearly all churchgoers admit to practising superstitious behaviour such as crossing their fingers for luck, touching wood for protection or throwing spilt salt over their left shoulder.

And this is a problem because?

The Christian Church has always been highly antagonistic towards superstition, believing it to be irrational and linked to paganism.

Ah… Of course, competition. Antagonistic is putting it mildly, mind. Rampant persecution along with violent torture and execution of anyone even suspected of paganism is closer to the mark. Of course, one didn’t have to be a pagan to qualify, being the wrong type of Christian was also pretty dangerous, but that’s another matter. That modern day churchgoers should still cling to superstitions really shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, should it?

Dr Francis said that more research was needed into what churchgoers believed and how this compared with what non-churchgoers believed.

Hmm… tricky one, that… non-churchgoers will fall into two broad groups. Those who vaguely believe if pushed and those who believe only what science determines to be true through observation and experiment. The former may indeed be busy throwing salt over their shoulder because it’s lucky – they probably even buy a lottery ticket each Saturday because the purple unicorn tells them that they have to be in it to win it. The latter look upon belief systems as nothing more than superstition, myth and legend and that the probability of winning the lottery makes it a tax on the mathematically challenged. All of which tells us… nothing new.

Dr Francis goes on:

If these kinds of things resist secularisation, so, too, can traditional religious beliefs if people take the trouble to pass them on. It also intrigues me that so many people in church congregations have not tested these practices against the doctrines of their faith.

Given that their faith relies on exactly the same premise; untested superstition; I’m not sure what such an exercise would achieve. I would have thought it entirely conceivable that people prone to accept one superstition would be open to the idea of another. Therefore, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that churchgoers who are exhorted to believe in supernatural beings and occurrences with no empirical evidence to substantiate them, will also believe in lucky four leaf clovers, seven years bad luck for breaking a mirror or good luck from throwing salt over one’s shoulder or the powers of luck from that black cat walking across one’s path (providing you don’t trip over the bugger – that would be unlucky, indeed). It all seems perfectly reasonable to me. Equally, it is entirely logical that a proportion of the population will vaguely believe in luck even though they do not feel sufficiently compelled to attend church – B&Q on a Sunday morning having something of a stronger pull. Others, predictably, reject all superstition. You don’t need a study to figure that one out.

I am not criticising them for that. But it seems to me that those of us who occupy church pulpits and make assumptions about what is in the heads of people in the pews could benefit a lot from just sitting back and finding out what is really in their heads.

There’s no answer to that…

Doncha just love these pointless studies of the blindingly obvious with their entirely predictable conclusions that surprise those who carried them out?

The Observer carries a story today about the EU plans for a childrens’ database containing the fingerprints of all children possibly from the age of six:

British children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world.

The cynic in me sees a justification for the HMG’s national identity register and desire to fingerprint British citizens. The two ideas are so closely linked, I can’t help feeling that maybe this is not so much an EU initiative but a British one dressed up in EU clothing. Mind you, the obsessive statists in the EU are only too happy to jump on a convenient passing bandwagon, particularly where it involves grabbing more power over the populace:

The use of fingerprints and other biometric data is designed to prevent passport fraud and allow European member states to meet US entry visa requirements, but the decision to fingerprint children has disturbed human rights groups.

Hmm, the same arguments here. The United States’ obsessive and paranoid entry requirements. Supposing we don’t want to go to the US and be subjected to their immigration controls? I certainly refuse to while this nonsense is ongoing. Therefore, there is no reason for me to comply with their requirements. And, are we seriously suggesting that the level of passport fraud is so great that it requires the fingerprinting of a whole continent? Really?

‘This is a sea change,’ said Ben Hayes, spokesman for Statewatch. ‘We are going from fingerprinting criminals to universal fingerprinting without any real debate. In the long term everyone’s fingerprints will be stored on a central database. You have to ask what will be the costs to a person’s privacy.’

Quite. Where is the debate? Where is the open analysis of the underlying rationale? Why are we to be treated as criminals by our own governments – and in this case, an unelected, unaccountable body that overrides national parliaments?

Of course, fingerprinting six-year olds will teach them compliance with and acceptance of casual surveillance by the state. We may protest but we are already yesterday; tomorrow belongs to the six-year old patiently waiting in line to be fingerprinted.

When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already. . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Adolf Hitler

We’ve been fed so much propaganda and seen the virtual collapse of the national identity card scheme, that I can’t help but wonder whether this is just another manoeuvre in the game. A means of explaining to an increasingly sceptical British people that it was the EU that wanted it all along and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, so why try? After all, it’s all their fault. “Nothing to do with us, guv. It’s EU rules. More ’n me jobsworth…”

That’s the trouble with all this spin and counter spin. You lose the ability to tell what is real anymore…

George Monbiot was pontificating his politics of envy and spite on Jeremy Vine’s radio programme yesterday. The target of his bile being second home owners. People he regards as among the most selfish in Britain. It’s an old piece, but was reprised by Vine’s discussion:

What greater source of injustice could there be, that while some people have no home, others have two? Yet the vampire trade in second homes keeps growing - by 3% a year - uninhibited by government or by the conscience of the buyers. Every purchase of a second house deprives someone else of a first one. But to speak out against it is to identify yourself as a killjoy and a prig.

Well, as George says it himself, I don’t need to say it. Oh, dammit, I will; the man’s a killjoy and a prig. Not only that, but his inability to shut up and listen while others were putting across their point of view made him an unbearable, self-righteous and obnoxious boor. If he did have a rational argument (he didn’t), it was undermined by his behaviour.

The housing market is just that; a market. It is not a vampire trade, it is a legitimate exchange between consenting parties. Free countries operate that way. People have something they want to sell and others want to buy. They agree a price and the property changes hands. This process is the business of no one outside of the transaction. There are no preconditions beyond having the money to pay the agreed price and nor should there be. Whether the buyer has another home – or a dozen other homes, is also no one else’s business. If the buyer wants to use it for holiday accommodation, rent it out or live in it full time is again, no one else’s business.

The whole thing is driven by supply and demand. At present as George points out, there is more demand than supply, which is driving prices skyward. But to presume that putting second homes back on the market will somehow contribute to solving the housing crisis is, at best, naive and misses all the other contributing factors.

If you travel to Worth Matravers - the chocolate-box village in Dorset in which 60% of the houses are owned by ghosts - you will not find hordes of homeless people camping on the pavements in cardboard boxes. The market does not work like that. Young people from the village, unable to buy locally, have moved away, and contributed to the housing pressure somewhere else.

His logic is riven with assumption. People do not necessarily move away because they cannot buy locally.

Second homes are generally in rural areas or holiday resorts; much like Worth Matravers. The holiday home argument was raging when I was a teenager in the seventies. Then it about English people buying cottages in Wales and depriving the Welsh of affordable homes in their own village. Except that… it wasn’t like that. The propaganda sounds good, but it’s just not that simple. People who want to live in an area and don’t have independent means need to do as we all do; they have to get work. My own locality saw many of the younger generation leave the area as soon as they left school. Not because there was a dearth of affordable housing (that was relatively affordable), but because there was a dearth of gainful employment.

Selling a second home in, say Cornwall, will not help the homeless family in inner London. And, although not explicitly stated, Monbiot’s philosophy seems to revolve around a right to this property as opposed to it being a marketable commodity. Selling a property for a couple of hundred grand isn’t going to make it affordable to that inner city family on benefits. If sold, it is perfectly possible that the property will be rented; but again, in a holiday location it is entirely possible that it will be let as a holiday home or even remain on the market unsold and empty…

Those who find themselves homeless are not the ones who can afford to buy a home, they are the ones who cannot; so releasing more homes onto the market is not going to affect them, only those who have the wherewithal to raise the finance. Those who cannot will remain at the mercy of the council waiting lists. This does tend to suggest that the problem lies in part in a lack of council or housing association homes. Private property is just that and is best left to the regulator most appropriate for it; the market.

Monbiot’s solution to the 250,000 homes he believes should not be owned by their rightful purchasers is a swingeing 500% council tax. Now if there was ever an example of the politics of envy, this surely is it.

If caring about homelessness makes you a leftwing dinosaur, I raise my claw.

That he is happy to live with this label says much. However it is less, it seems, caring about homelessness than it is hatred of people who do not conform to his ideas about social responsibility. The more I hear socialism speak its mind, the further I move from it as I recoil in horror. The vampire here isn’t the property market, it’s something quite different.

Like the SpyBlog, I was puzzled by the announcement that stolen mobile phones will be rendered useless on all networks as announced by Aunty today.

Around 80% of mobile phones will be blocked on all five UK networks within 48 hours of being reported stolen in future, industry leaders have pledged.

Um… Hang on a mo… didn’t that happen already? I mean, the technology for switching them off using the unique International Mobile Equipment Identifier has been around for long enough. It’s a simple matter and as Spyblog points out:

Why did the BBC not ask why this has not already happened ?

This was all promised back in 2002, i.e. 4 years ago, when the Home Office rammed through the useless
Mobile Telephones (Re-programming) Act 2002 which made it a criminal offence to re-programme a mobile phone handset’s International Mobile Equipment Idenifier (IMEI), and controversially, even made possession of “dual use” equipment i.e. a computer and a mobile phone serial or USB cable, a criminal offence.

There is also nothing new about the UK Shared Equipment Identity Register (UKSEIR). This “new shared database set up by all UK mobile phone operators and the Global System for Mobiles Association” was also announced as being operational back in 2002

All of this has had a less than zero effect on “street crime”

Maybe I’ve slipped through a crevice in the space time continuum and it’s really 2002. Otherwise; why is this news and why has it not been happening for the past four years?

My previous entry today seemed to me to be pretty innocuous. Until, that is, Akismet alerted me to a trackback. A trackback that led to a porn site; a porn site specialising in feet, no less. It’s a wordpress based site and I presume that it has some sort of auto search facility looking for particular key words and phrases. A quick glance at my entry reveals one such (update – I removed the offending phrase). If it was a person, they would have ignored my entry as there is nothing remotely erotic about it. At least, I didn’t think so…

As I don’t want to be associated with porn sites, I’ve amended the entry’s slug, disabling the inbound link and banned the IP of the site. Neither of these have worked unfortunately. :dry:

I’ve tried removing the relevant phrase along with a completely different slug. Hopefully that will work.

With all this summer weather (long may it continue), there is a storm brewing about the state of men’s feet. British men have traditionally failed to dress down elegantly. Mind, you, some of those I’ve worked with manage to look like they’ve spent the night in a skip when wearing expensive suits, but that, I guess, is another matter. It used to be that at the first hint of decent weather, men would wear sandals over feet shrouded in socks with the most inelegant, shapeless shorts they could lay their hands on…

Now, things are a changing…

It’s summer, it’s hot, and everywhere you look you see bared flesh. And it’s not just women in short shorts or men with no shirts at all. In the streets of Britain, sandals and flip-flops have become de rigueur, feet showcased as if on display. Pop into a shoe shop and you will find sports sandals, all-terrain sandals and sandals with names like the Wraptor alongside the thongs and Birkenstocks. There are even toe-capped sandals for the more demure man about town. Even the most kneejerk stereotypical of Guardian readers would have to admit that “sandal-wearing” no longer does it. Sun readers wear sandals now.

So there you go, the Guardian is no longer the sole domain of the sandal wearers… yeah, I know, it was bad, but I couldn’t resist.

Not everyone is pleased by this, though.

One anti-sandal blogger (and there are many) sums up the issue as “the shoe God never finished and the men who don’t care”. There appear to be two main branches of objection. The first is that men look stupid in sandals, and that men’s sandals are themselves stupid-looking. The second is that men have ugly feet. Men’s feet are shaped like spades. They smell. The toes are hairy, the toenails are often cracked and yellow.

Can’t say I’ve looked that closely, myself. My first reaction is probably along the lines of “so what?” Why should anyone get worked up about people allowing their feet to be seen? Plenty of other countries are full of men wearing sandals. Bad feet are no worse aesthetically than beer bellies. Is it anyone else’s business? But, then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Tim Dowling takes a look for himself and finds that the stereotype isn’t necessarily the case out on the streets:

Wandering the streets in recent weeks, I did notice how surprisingly well groomed were the feet of many besandalled men: the toes tanned, the nails smooth and peachy pink, the feet shapely and clean.

Well, yes, that comes as no surprise. Some of us take care of our feet just as we take care over the rest of our appearance. I wear sandals from the first hint of spring to the first tendrils of frost. As a consequence, my toes are nicely tanned, well pedicured and I’m happy for them to be on display. There may well be unnamed bloggers and journos out there who object. Be my guest. Object away. See if I care.

And advice from the Graun if you are thinking of wearing sandals:

The brighter the colour, the better your tan will look. Be aware that sandals with big straps will leave you with tan lines. “Just like swimwear, keep the thong as small as possible to avoid a tan line,” Dauvergne says.

Don’t buy sandals with Velcro on them either - you’re not backpacking in Australia.

Oh, bugger, That’s all of those rules broken…

Sometimes people come here for the oddest of reasons. Here are a selection of key phrases people have put into search engines that brought them here:

• how to deal with blackmailers
• pity the poor potato
• jehovah s witness tie pin
• circumcision long-term prognosis
• silly story
• real life paedophile grooming
• 32mm flexi pipe waste pipe
• nude neighbour

I do hope no one is disappointed… While a couple of these are pretty obvious as I’ve written about them, others, well…

I noticed that this blog had found its way onto Blogshares. A year or so ago, I’d asked for my old blog to be delisted once I discovered that it was included on their system. Yes, I know it’s just a game and, yes, I know that they are trading using the links as a means of pricing blogs. However, as I mentioned when this cropped up last time, I am one of those cranky bloggers who objects. I object because I disagree with the idea that pinging weblogs (I don’t) or Technorati (I do) somehow makes my blog “fair game”. Sorry, it is my intellectual property and if people want to use it as a trading chip in their game, they should ask. They don’t, therefore, I object. Comparisons with Google, Technorati et al just don’t hold up. A playing chip where people trade in your name is not the same as a static listing in a search engine and no amount of attempted justification changes what is an unethical practice carried out without peoples’ knowledge or consent.

To be fair to Blogshares’ technical support, delisting is effortless and quick (although I still believe it should be opt-in rather than opt-out); they removed Longrider Blog from the system within half an hour of my polite request. Thanks, I appreciate it. This means that the person trading as Spin Trekker no longer “owns” 80% of my blog. Maybe I’m being picky, but seeing my work blatantly plagiarised (yup, it’s happened) irritates me less than someone trading in and “owning” my blog.