A quick recap on God

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I am not a practicing Christian
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or Muslim
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or Jew

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About the only thing I do practice is Onanism. On quite a heroic scale. After 25 years of practising I am now quite good at it.

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However, some of the media coverage concerning the tsunami is starting to get under my skin. Many news outlets, in search of 'thoughtful' angles to cover the tsunami story, have started kicking out that tired old war-horse …

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'If there is such a thing as God why would he permit such terrible suffering'

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The implied conclusion is usually that there is no God.

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I have just sat through a discussion on BBC's Newsnight featuring a Catholic Cardinal, someone from the Muslim Council and an academic atheist. On a points basis the atheist won.

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He shouldn’t have. The problem is that the Pro God lobby is usually represented by religious people who inevitably start talking about subjective concepts such as faith. The atheists always seem stronger because their arguments usually sound somehow more scientific or rational, even though they are not.

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At the risk of repeating myself …

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Atheism is no more scientific than a belief in God. Both are belief systems that cannot be proved or disproved by our existing scientific techniques.

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If someone can come up with a scientifically testable hypothesis that disproves God I'd love to know.

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Anyway, back to the question of the moment, if a benevolent God exists why would he permit such suffering?

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Well, he's God. That means he's cleverer than we are and it is pretty arrogant of us to believe that we can second guess the motives of a far superior intellect and petulantly declare that God doesn't exist because he fails to meet the expectations that we set for him. Also, we cannot for a second pretend to know how he goes about his business. For all we know, in the moment before those tsunami victims left this life, God could easily have provided them with a whole lifetime of experience in an instant. If God had created a World without pain or struggle where all of us lived cosy predictable lives, dying in our sleep at 95, we would not develop as individuals. The very reason for us being given life and individual personalities would be negated. The fragility of our existence should inspire each of us to live the best life that we can; for the benefit of those around us and ourselves, right now and for every waking moment. God has already compensated those people killed in the tsunami. Those of us left on this Earth should learn the appropriate lesson and get on with living decent lives.

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Now, of course, this could all be bollocks. However, it does answer the question without ducking the issue and cannot be proved or disproved scientifically. It is a self-consistent belief system; like atheism or the belief that elephants and butterflies share a common ancestor. I would suggest, however, that the God-based explanation offers a more satisfying explanation for the reason for our existence, the trials we live through and a guide to how we should live those lives.

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And I don't even go to church.

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I want to be a corporation

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I've been having trouble with Tiscali, my ISP, lately and wrote an email to their customer support people just after Christmas. Unusually, they replied the next day to tell me that 'yes, your local broadband circuit is near to full capacity and we have booked a local upgrade that will take place in 14 days'.

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Now, the fact that my ISP has been delivering me 1960's acoustic coupled modem speeds at a 21st century broadband price is probably of little interest to anyone except me, but it got me thinking …

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How would Tiscali feel if I wrote to them saying that my monthly payment would be delivered 14 days late or that, due to high levels of demand in my area, I would only be able to pay 20% of their charge this month? Presumably they wouldn’t be too chuffed. Nor would they be over the moon if they had to make ten telephone calls to me on premium rate lines to chase up that payment.

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But it's not just Tiscali is it? Miss a plane by five minutes and the airline will screw you royally. However, if it decides to delay your flight by a few hours or cancel it altogether the airline will, um, screw you royally. Ditto for banks. And credit card companies. And insurance companies. And pretty much any company really. Peculiarly for supposed democracies, companies always seem to have the law on their side rather than the individual. Companies also possess the economies of scale to enable them to employ people whose sole function is to jerk you around whenever they make a mistake.

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Companies also

• pay lower tax rates
• can set aside expenses against their income when paying those lower tax rates
• are immortal and therefore, ultimately, can aim to outlive anyone making a claim against them provided they can string out the process long enough

About the only reliable means I've discovered to take on companies that attempt to drag me through a Dungeons and Dragons style labyrinth of Indian-based call centres is to:

1. find out the name of the parent company Finance Director, then
2. fill out a small claims form with his name at the top, then
3. fax a copy to the company head office with a note saying I'll be popping the claim in the post to the court the next day

This normally works a treat, as the bozos at the other end usually reckon that it's more cost effective to give me my money back than face a tirade of poop from a Head office PA when the summons pops into their in-tray. This technique is a winner but only works if a clear loss has been incurred and the total claim is less than £500. In all other situations the individual has no option but to swivel and maybe do a little whistling as well.

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Yes, it's great being a company. They have all the upsides of being people with none of the down. Like us mere mortals, they too can have personalities, travel the world, even sire families. About the only thing they can’t do is vote but, with all the money they save on their taxes, they usually have enough put aside to cut out the middleman and buy politicians direct.

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An excellent recent example in the UK was the proposed introduction of legislation to permit enormous super casinos in the UK. In my entire life I have never heard anyone else in this country bemoan the lack of domestic super casinos. No political party has even placed such a suggestion in a manifesto. Yet, somehow, this proposal appeared from nowhere. The estimated £100m spent on 'lobbying', i.e. free holidays and jig-a-jig, politicians possibly, just possibly, had something to do with it.

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But I digress.

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As a philosophical point, even if humankind were ever to conquer death we would probably be well-advised to reinvent it all over again. Think about who would benefit if such technology were ever available. The richest, the most powerful, the downright naughtiest of our kind. Death is a winner. No matter how cruel the tyrant , how crazed the despot, he is always guaranteed to pop his clogs in the end. Having said that, when was the last time you heard of a head of state or CEO of a corporation dying prematurely? They live longer than the rest of us anyway and, until a time comes when these people can extend their lives even further, companies and other large organisations offer a form of ersatz immortality.

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Yes, I have decided to incorporate myself. Stef plc would have the potential to live forever and be able to set the cost of its lunches, mortgage payments and toothpaste against its already significantly reduced tax bills. Anyone calling me would have to do so through a premium rate telephone number and I could perform all of my secondary bodily functions in low-rent 3rd world countries, attended by a dirt cheap work force. How can I lose?

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Starship Troopers Quote

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'naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor'

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It was a joke. Get it? No-one was supposed to take it seriously ...

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The best course of action was to put him out of his misery ...

Assistance Required

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Gosh, is it the 3rd already.
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That means Iraq will be having its first 'free and fair' elections in less than four weeks' time. Presumably the freedom loving Iraqis will vote for that Tony Soprano look-alike who's currently running the regime and all will be well.
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Once the elections are over our job will be done and our troops can finally come home. I appreciate that Iraq was in an awful mess at one point but it seems pretty much cleared up now. I know this because, last month, my government dished out a series of honours and titles to 50 people in recognition of their successful efforts in rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure.
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The honours included …

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Pentonville prison governor Gareth Davies, who was director of law and order for southern Iraq, was made an OBE, as was Mandana Hendessi, who helped set up the women's rights group Women's Higher Council in Iraq.

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The Bank of England's Simon Gray was appointed OBE for his work with the Iraqi central bank, as was CPA director of reconstruction Ronald Matthews.

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West Yorkshire Police chief superintendent Philip Read was made an OBE for helping to train the new Iraqi police force.

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Kevin Thomas and Warwick Weeks were appointed MBEs for helping to restore water, sanitation and fuel to Basra.

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Mark Clark, Scots manager of the Iraqi football team which reached the Olympic semi-finals in Athens, becomes an MBE.

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David Keen, of the Highways Agency, was appointed an MBE for helping rebuild roads and bridges in Iraq.

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It's all nonsense isn’t it? Presumably, all of these guys will do the decent thing and turn up to the awards ceremony in disguise with a bucket on their heads and collect the awards certificates in plain brown paper envelopes.
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The situation in Iraq is clearly getting worse every day and, God forgive me for saying it, the tsunami story must have come as a welcome distraction from Iraq for the Bush and Blair administrations. Such a welcome distraction that I predict some loon in bacofoil underpants will shortly float the theory that the tsunami was actually caused by Bush. It wouldn't be that difficult actually. A 200mt nuke in set off at sea floor level would have done the job nicely. As it happens, during the Cold War, the Russians did consider targeting the US and UK coastlines with nuke-inspired tsunamis. Imagine the North Sea as a swimming pool and the Russian nuke as a very large fat kid with no friends bombing into the pool and you get the general gist of what was planned.
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And the news from Iraq is terrible. Not only have the insurgents started following the proven principles of the likes of Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Sung Tzu they've always picked up a few tricks from such classic military treatises as Speed and The Specialist. They've now taken to luring security forces into prepared buildings and blowing them all up once they're inside. They've killed dozens that way. The streets of places like Mosul and Baghdad are littered with increasingly clever booby traps. Unlike suicide bombers, the smarter guys setting these traps are benefiting from all that practice and can only get better at what they do. Buses are being destroyed every day and policemen lined up against walls and executed by the dozen. It's a nightmare. The insurgents also appear to be working to an overall plan as well. Most of the American forces are located inland, at the end of long supply lines. The insurgents are targeting those supply lines. If the insurgents ever manage to pick up some 2nd hand anti aircraft missiles from a friendly power and target planes as well trucks, life will become extremely interesting for the coalition forces.
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One of the many Iraq stories that barely dented to mainstream media was the news that US Staff Sgt Johnny M. Horne Jnr. Was found guilty last month of murdering a 16 year old Iraqi civilian earlier this year.
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Apparently, US forces, acting on a tip off, opened fire on a rubbish truck in Sadr City. One of the injured civilians from the truck was so badly wounded that Sgt. Horne decided:

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"the best course of action was to put (the victim) out of his misery."

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So he did. In front of witnesses and in spite of the fact that the injured man's brother was begging Sgt. Horne not to. So much for morphine then. Hands up anybody who would want to serve in Sgt Horne's platoon? 'Ouch! Sergeant I've caught my thumb on my Humvee door … Bamm Bamm Bamm!'
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Sgt. Johnny plea bargained, was found guilty and got three years. Despatch an innocent wounded Iraqi kid with no more compassion than for an injured dog or horse and get three years. That's really going to go down well with the locals isn’t it?
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In the few instances where this story surfaced in the US and UK media, the circumstances surrounding the murder were usually reported along the lines of …

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Previous military court hearings have heard that several troops fired on a group of Iraqi men placing home-made bombs along a road in Sadr City, an impoverished Baghdad neighbourhood. Soldiers from the same battalion arrived on the scene to find a burning truck and casualties around it.

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which is classic Bush/ Blair style spin. Even though there was absolutely no connection between the bomb planters and the truck you are invited to believe there was by the simple act of placing two sentences next to each other. It's not really lying is it? But it's not telling the truth either.
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I'm not suggesting that American soldiers are any more murderous than anyone else. Look at it from their point of view. Everything around them has the potential to blow up at any minute. The locals hate them as occupiers. They are surrounded by an utterly alien language and culture. There's no solution to the mess in sight. They're twitchy, jumpy and nervous and just want to make it home in one piece. As one wag recently put it 'We've stopped trying to win Iraqi hearts and minds and are making do with putting bullets into Iraqi hearts and minds'.
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I am slightly jealous of the Iraqis and their situation for one small reason though. Imagine the potential of living under occupying troops who will act on tip offs but are too nervous to check if the tip-offs are accurate and just blaze away regardless. The people who live in the flat upstairs from me have been really ticking me off lately. If we were living in Baghdad I could supply the army with high quality Intel about their subversive activities, pocket a few hundred dollars reward and withdraw to a safe place before the artillery got going.
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Now there's a cheerful thought.
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Felíz ano nuevo!

Merry Christmas from London Underground

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actually, what I should have written was 'Felíz año nuevo!', as opposed to wishing anyone who comes across my blog a Happy New Anus; as I also (accidentally) did in an email sent to several colleagues in an office in Mexico a few years ago.
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I only remembered that particular faux pas recently; in the wee small hours of New Years Day actually. My next door neighbours had clearly dusted off their 'Can’t Sit Down for Six Weeks - Hi NRG Party Mix CD' to entertain their guests; and us. Yes, we all saw 2005 in to the loud strains of Erasure, Pet Shop Boys and Dead or Alive.
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I'm not complaining really. Just because we weren't having a party we didn't expect the rest of the World to follow suit. We had decided to stay in this New Year's Eve with a decent meal, a bottle of reasonable wine and movies. Curiously, ITV decided to mark the transition between 2004 and 2005 by showing The Wickerman; warning viewers beforehand that 'this film contains sexual scenes and pagan rituals', which is the first time I've heard that particular caution on terrestrial British Television.
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We had also agreed that we would spend some of the evening discussing and agreeing personal and shared goals that we would hold ourselves to over the coming year. We didn’t get round to that in the end and the list so far, a couple of days later, contains only two items …

• Make some News Year's resolutions (Both of Us)
• Transform myself into blob of pure energy (Stef)

and I'm not even too sure about the second one.
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It's not that we're overly anti-social it's just that we've done the wander round the centre of London thing quite a few times now, we've gone abroad, we've partied at friends' houses. This year we didn't have the va va voom. We probably should resolve to do something more extrovert and spectacular next New Year's Eve as, by many people's reckoning, there are only seven left.
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Yup, you possibly heard it here first, Armageddon is currently scheduled for 2012; December 21st to be precise. Now that 2000 / 2001 passed without much in the way of terminal catastrophe, the Millennial types out there have settled on this new date. I first heard 2012 mentioned years ago at a fringe lecture given by a man who had spent fifteen years of his life 'staring at Mesoamerican coffin lids until the hidden stories were revealed to him'. Apparently, the Mayan 'Long Count' calendar for this particular version of the World (four out of five) started in 3114BC and ends in 2012AD. Since that lecture I've noticed 2012 gradually sneaking into all sorts of New Age Literature and conspiracy-based web sites. A gradual fusion of ideas from a wide variety of origins has taken place and it is now not uncommon to come across conspiracies along the lines of 'George Bush and his Satanic Masonic Zionist Cabal are conspiring to bring about a global catastrophe to make the World suitable for their Alien Overlords in 2012'.
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The Mayan calendar certainly does run out in 2012, unlike the Mayans themselves who expired a thousand years before that. And you can never be sure can you? Maybe I'll stock up on canned food and shotguns sometime in 2011; if I'm still around and haven’t managed to transform myself into that blob of pure energy.
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An Australian priest was on TV yesterday telling us that the recent tsunami and a couple of chunky volcanic eruptions at the same time are God's warning that we should prepare for the End of Days and Final Judgement. Yup, that's the God we all want to hear about and believe in 'Do what I frickin well tell you or you're toast f*ckers'.
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And is that particular idiot priest suggesting that the tsunami somehow cleverly distinguished between the righteous and the non righteous when it came slamming in?
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To be fair, I do sense that something unpleasant is in store for the World at some point in the next decade or so. There's a curious sense of hopelessness and nihilism in World politics and business today. No-one, and I mean no-one, is offering a vision of a better future. We can choose from a wide-variety of potential agents of World destruction merrily brought to our attention by the media. The lies of politicians and multinationals are becoming more transparent and their behaviour more blatant. But that's another blog.
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Every cloud does have a silver lining though and Armageddon would finally put an end to the annual, way above inflation, increase in UK train and bus prices. After this year's price hikes it now costs me £4.60 to travel three tube stops into town and back again. It would be more palatable if our trains weren't so rubbish but Londoners are in the curious position of simultaneously having the most expensive and worst transport system of any major city. And every year it gets even worse and even more expensive. You really do have to live it to believe it.
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However, I can cushion the effects of the rises by investing in a pre-paid electronic ticket, known as an Oyster Card. It's great system. You charge up the ticket with money and then London Underground deducts a random amount from you whenever you travel. After all, how can you prove that you DIDN'T travel from one of end London to the other six times in one morning?
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Yes, the future is here. It's electronic and there's no way you can prove it's ever wrong. That's progress for you. The same people who brought us the Oyster Card have also brought us other wonderful advances such as 'Chip and PIN' and electronic voting machines in places like Ohio and Florida. In the bad old days, before progress, you could prove someone had fraudulently used your credit card or illegally imposed a psychotic US President on America and the World by demanding to see the signed payment slip or box of voting papers. Forget that old fashioned rubbish, now you can cheerfully have your spleen ripped out through your wallet and read about innocents murdered in your name around the Globe without any hope whatsoever of redress.
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It's interesting to think that the average reality TV show now has more concrete evidence to support its voting results, in the form of phone records, than the US presidential election in certain key states.
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And remember, 'It's all for your convenience' …
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Favourite 2004 Picture 7/7

Street Sign, Borough SE1

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I've just spent half an hour trying to figure out my favourite picture from 2004. The process isn't aided by the fact that I am (a) drunk. Start the New Year as you mean to continue it and all that.

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I've decided that it is an impossible task to select my best or favourite pictures from the last 12 months. They're all my children. Some are a little out of focus, shaky or incorrectly exposed but they're all my babies regardless.

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I've picked out seven that appeal to me at this drunken moment in time but I just know thatI'll wake up tomorrow feeling guilty that I've offended all their little sisters and brothers ...
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Favourite 2004 Picture 6/7

Eastbourne

Favourite 2004 Picture 5/7

Kensal Green Cemetery

Favourite 2004 Picture 4/7

Francesca

Favourite 2004 Picture 3/7

RC's Hillbilly Diner, Arkansas