Huffington Post today seems to have dedicated itself to deifying Barry “Barak Obama” Soetorto. At least a third of America is eager to join in if the number of commentes on each nauseatingly sychphantic post are anything to go by.

Erm – sorry to spoil the party but those HuffPosters are all lavishing praise on Obama because of the colour of his skin and overlooking the man’s glaring inadequacies.  Example:

This morning we in the United Kingdom are informed that “President Obama” has said if  our government does not close the tax havens of Jersey and Guernsey in the Channel Islands he will close them.

Does he realise:
He will be but is not yet president of The United States Of America
The United Kingdom is not part of the United States
The Channel Islands are not part of the United Kingdom, they are Sovereign territories which means The Queen of England is head of state but the islands are independent states with their own Parliament.
Tax havens such as The Channel Islands, Switzerland, Luxembourg etc. play a vital role in world trade. Close them, you piss off Russia, China, most of the oil producing nations, most of the African tyrants Mr. Obama numbers among his friends (or blood relatives in at least one case) and of course Britain and the other EU nations. Most of the world in fact.

Instead of inflating Obama’s ego which is already out of control citizen journalists should, should they not, be reminding him that he is elected to run the USA not the rest of the world?

And given Mr Obama’s ignorance of geography, diplomacy and international law I think the Democrats are being very foolish in pillorying Sarah Palin for a slip of the tongue, especially when we remember Obama’s forged Birth Certificate (the one he had made up this summer) gives his father’s nationality as “African.”

We British satirical bloggers are sharpening our claws, knives etc. If we were not all atheists we would be thinking Obama was a gift from God.

Another Obama supporter who is not l,ikely to be setting foot on this planet any time soon. Forgetting that he is a deluded fantasist who has not yet stated a policy on anythin, lel alone the tough issues, how can Barak Obama formulates a policy that will reduce abortions without upsetting the religious right.

Look, the fundies hate recreational sex as much as they hate aboutions. The only way to reduce unwanted pregnancies is to offer free contraceptives, condoms, pill, morning aftrer pill. The pro-lifers abhor all of these, their position is abstinence only. The Republicans have failed to reduce aborion is because abstinence doesn’t work, never has, never will.

So what has Obama to offer? And would he want to offer anything, after all his ex best buddy Jeremiah Wright preaches that Planned Parenthood is a WASP conspiracy to exterminate the dark skinned races.

If you want to abort any further idiot articles on this topic you have gestating, read my article A Short History Of Contraception (Part 4) which deals with the modern era. (1 to 3, linked from the article deal with earlier periods of history. ) http://www.greenteethmm.com/aborcon4.html
More on Democratic Convention
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

In one of those articles where a right wing wonk tries to show he is really on the case, David Aranovitch here attempts to rubbish the case that the internet is having a dumbing down effect of the English speaking democracies.
The Internet Shrinks Your Brain

The writer tries to appear cool by suggesting that the web has a positive effect in society.

Well apart from the kind of people who needed to get out more and make some friends before the web came along what can we say. The internet is not a thing, it affects nothing one way or the other.

It is the dross people find on the web that is fucking their heads up.

Arianna,
You have to stop encouraging Americans to delude themselves about Obama. It’s to be expected that his campaign manasgers will big up everything he does, and obviously the Presidentia election is of enormousr interest as the outcome will affect everybody on this planet (even if Obama gives little indication that he actually lives on this panet. But…
Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, Michael Tomasky was ranting about the significance of Obama’s meeting with Maliki as if these two nonentities had solved all the problems in the middle east in one short conversation. Maliki have never actually been in control of anything in Iraq, he is seen by other regional leaders as America’s puppet. Obama is a faily low ranking Congessman in the USA.

Similarly the Brandenburg Gate thing is pissing off a lot of people. Obama will not speak from “in front of The Brandenburg Gate” as his campaign, he will actually speak from in front of a monument remodelled by Hitler to celebrate the glories of the Third Reich. All this proves of course is Obama is so far up his own arse he will not see the light unless his throat gets cut.

Given all the things going for the Democrats it is amazing they have managed to pick possiblt the only candidate who could actually lose this time. Blined by vanity and arrogance he runs around acting as if he is already President, not just of the U.S.A. but of the World.
More on Barack Obama
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

he reaction of BarakObama and his campaign managers to the cover cartoon of New Yorker magazine shows another serious deficiency in the Democratic candidate. As well as a lack of policies, lack of honesty and lack of experience he totally laks a sense of humour. Not only are he and his suppoters not going to get any jokes made about Little Black Barak, they are going to play the victim card every time someone makes a joke about him.

But some of us have a lighter take on politics and share the view that anyone who takes himself that serriously does not deserve to be taken seriously. Having said that, we do not want to spent the next three and a half months having our ears bent by Obama supporters every time someone makes a joke about fried chicken or comedy ears.

So for the benefit of people who think all politicians are lying shits, here are a few acceptable jokes you can do about Brak Obama.

An Arab, a Jew and Barak Obama walk into a bar. What a fine example of an integrated community.

On a routine flight, the aircraft carrying Barak Obama and his campaign team few into the Bermuda Triangle. When the plane crash landed nobody was hurt but they were on the beach of an Island in a Kafkaesque parallel universe. As the team searched for things that might help them survive walking around for many hours in the hot sun. At last the Senator found an old oil lamp. He gave it a rub to see if the metal was corroded under the seaweed. Suddenly a genie appeared and said, “You have called me and now I must grant you three wishes. What is your first wish?”
“I’d like a glass of cool clean water that refills itself when somebody drinks it,” said the Senator.
You sure you wouldn’t prefer beer, champage? the Genie asked.
No, water will be fine, said Barak.
BING, the glass appeared in his hand and sure enough filled up as quickly as he drank it.
“And what can I grant you for your remaining wishes”, the Genie asked, “Tasty food, secure shelter, a bevy of beautiful virgins?”
“I’ll have another two of those please,” said Obama, “one for the thirsty of Africa and one for the thirsty of Asia.”

Michelle Obama was seen today wearing combat fatigues and with her hair in an afro. What’s wrong with that, retro feminist is one of the hottest looks this season according to fashion experts.

What’s the difference between a 747 and Barak Obama? A 747 stops whining when it gets to Heathrow Airport…………………………..and Barak Obama is a successful African American politician with a good change of being elected President.

Stick with those and not even an Obama nut can complain.

Obama’s Missing Sense Of Humour

Being totally sceptical about the hype engine that drives the internet I always enjoy reading Andrew Keen’s very well thought through demolitions of self styled “Web Experts.”

The lastest fires a broadside at some crank named Krimmage (sound like the name of a cartoon character) who thinks You Tube is our best weapon in the war against terror, citing the absence of “censorship” (that’s quality control to those of us who love plain English) as a means of dishing the Islamist propaganda posted by Al Qaeda groups.

Poor Mr. Krimmage, typically of webheads he does not understand that Web2 or Wiki open sites are a great way to promote static “web 1″ pages where significant and carefully presented content has a much longer shelf life.

Read the full story on Andrew Keen – Wikiterrorism

This article in HuffPost’s green page had people asking if it was serious or a joke but aparently the author is deadly serious. Is a gas fuelled BBQ more environment friendly that a charcoal one? If we are being picky then an open cooking fire is the best, especially if we factor in the emmissions caused in making the BBQ hardware. In the end it makes little dfference if you are cooking grain fed meat on your fire. That involves using 8 pounds of food to create one, tearing down rainforest which in turn leads to erosion of fertile land and expansion of desert. We all have to change our lifestyle.

McCain says Obama’s word cannt be trusted. News from the American election, John McCain who changes his position more often than a porn movie actor, has accused Barak Obama of untruthfulness, indecisiveness and hypocrisy because Obama seems to change his position on every big issue according to which audience he is adressing. Words like pot and kettle come to mind

Remember the scandal of Maidstone hospital, where the boss had to resign over dirty wards after an outbreak of MRSA. Well the hospital management has not learned its lesson as Iain Dale reports. On a visit to a sick relative, Iain’s partner noticed a complete absence of cleaing staff and evidence that janitorial duties were being neglected.

A Conservative blogger says he enjoyed Cherie Blair’s autobiography. That’s a sign of how bad it really is.

What does Henley Mean for the Lib Dems? So was the by-election a disaster for the Liberal Democrats. Opponents are quick to write off the third party but though unspectacular their vote could point to a positive trend.

The Great Internet Scam – Part 1.

You have all read about internet scams but would you believe me if I told you the internet itself is a scam. The original idea, to share information between computers on a universal platform was fine. The World Wide Web, the notion of opening up computers so it was not necessary to be an authorised user was fine in that it was intended for trusted members of the academic and business communities. It was still fine when the World Wide Web came along because that started off with the intention of letting trusted members of the academic and business communities search for information across all connected computers instead of having to be provided with a specific location for their target information.

It all started to go pear – shaped when Microsoft and their buddies, while telling us they were opening up a whole new world to everybody, in reality opened up our internet connected PCs to all the hacking, phishing, spam, viruses, trojans, worms and plain bad mouthing that all the sad, inadequate wankers, arseholes, dickheads scumbags, slimeballs, penis enlargement peddlers, breast enlargement hucksters and snake oil salesmen in the world could throw at us.

It would have been very easy to stop the stream of dross but nobody was willing to. All members of civilised society accept there is a need for rules. We are not allowed to kill or hurt others just because we are stronger. We are not allowed to take other peoples’ stuff. We are not allowed to drive on whatever side of the road we choose, not go through red lights without stopping. Its all basic common sense really and the same common sense should apply to the net.

Unfortunately the people who saw the internet not as a tool to help us exchange information but a massive opportunity to make money had advertised “cyberspace” as a place where people could be free. And a lot of otherwise sane, rational people grabbed the opportunity to show they did not really understand the meanings and nuances of the word “free.” They invited the phishers, hackers, etc. etc. right into their computers via the insecure internet connections.

This launched a multi billion pound industry for internet security software. And for every package sold Microsoft picked up a licence fee. Only a few pennies every time but would you rather have a penny a few billion times or $10,000 once. (“ummm divide by ten and by ten again arrrum hmmmm knock off two zeros and…duh! they’re getting rich on all those pennies.”) Too bloody right they are!

But worse was to come.

By the time we had loaded virus scanners, trojan catchers, worm wranglers, watchdogs, and firewalls, all containing several bits of code licensed by Microsoft, to the Pentium PCs they were not powerful enough to run the internet – friendly operating systems and all supporting software we had run out and bought because “the world wide web would be our gateway to a Brave New World. Even when we were using a simple text editor with all our security software running, data flowed through the CPU like molasses through a fine sieve.

So we bought Pentium 2s. Then we obediently upgraded to Windows 98 or 98SE, some gullible souls actually did the three upgrades, 98, 98SE and Millennium Edition which really should have been called Still_Win95_but_works_properly(ish)_at_last.

For a while all was well. But Microsoft and their cohorts in the megascam business had ideas about how to screw us for even more money. We were complaining that most of the content on the web, when we could find any content that is, was dross.

“That’s because you technological dinosaurs haven’t got broadband screamed the megascammers,” telling us the web is a visual medium and if we wanted to see interesting, meticulously produced content we ought to be streaming video to our desktops. They lied of course. Television is a visual medium and at a different level so are books. The internet is a data medium. There are no pictures on the internet, no sound or video material. The only things stored on all the servers in the world are lots of tiny charges of stored static electricity. The pictures you see exist as pictures on your screen, the sounds you hear are created within your speakers. The World Wide Web only shifts streams of electricity around. Ones and zeros; and nulls of course, nothing at all. Because if there was no nothing how would a computer recognise when a thing was something. Computers might be cleverer than those nerdy types at Microsoft and Adobe and Google but that does not mean they are endowed with many practical abilities.

We all got broadband, many of us because we thought the bright boys at Microsoft and Google must know what they are talking about, were conned into it, some – old computer pros like me who remember programming computers the size of a house and offering 256k RAM – because we were bullied into it when dial up facilities were downgraded so much it was impossible to get a connection. And whoa! a brave new world opened up to us and we could spend jolly hours watching advertising zwinkies, fartlighting videos or if we were really cool dudes, maybe watching a lonely teenage girl commit suicide online or a bunch of terrorists behead a hostage.

There had not been such great live entertainment since the days of King Henry VIII and the great thing was everybody could see it. In King Henry’s day only a few hundred could gather on Tower Green in front of the Tower of London to see Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard get the chop. With the Internet millions can watch or even save the video to hard drive and mail it to their friends. So finally we were starting to understand what the www was about. Its purpose was to turn us into an ignorant, bloodthirsty mindless medieval mob. Oh and to part us from our hard – earned of course. Never forget the money.

With Broadband came a whole swathe of new security problems from which Magnanimous Microsoft were only too willing to protect us – at a price.

The price was Windows XP (standing for Xtra Pennies I assume) Another new operating system.Despite promises that the code for Windows XP was more elegant and less resource hungry than previous editions of Windows it soon became clear that a Pentium 2 CPU running it could process data like, well like road tar fresh out of the freezer flowing through a fine sieve. So we all would have to buy Pentium 3s.

And we did, in spite of the fact that what the majority of us were doing on our computers could have been done on that 486 we threw out ten years before, had a decent operating system been available.

The next step towards winning the battle for hearts, minds and bank balances was to introduce 64bit computing. The technology had been around for a while, Digital Equipment launched the Alpha AXP, a 64 bit server designed to run Unix, in the mid 1990s. It was a super machine. But it was sold as a server because the main, in fact the only, advantage of 64bit computing is that it enables an unimaginable amount of memory to be addressed, which in turn means lots of processes can run simultaneously. A personal computer is, as the name suggests, designed for use by one person (personal – of a person, geddit Mr. Gates?) If anyone has ever tried using more than one application at a time, I mean using, not letting sit idle in background mode) they will find it is like trying to ride two horses with one arse, difficult. So the technology scam cartel needed to give us a compelling reason to buy 64 bit computers to sit on our desktops.

A few people were always going to be drawn by the idea of having at their fingertips more processing power than the Cray supercomputers used by Nuclear and astrophysical research installations like M.I.T. and CERN But the geek market would never be big enough to recoup the millions invested in reinventing the 64bit wheel.

The answer was Windows Vista, an operating system so overblown, so inefficient, so badly programmed by inadequately trained script kiddies supervised by people who think Second Life is a real place that it needs a 64bit processor with a gigabyte Random Access Memory just to run itself.

There has been resistance so far to 64 bit computers and to Windows Vista. But slowly we will be forced to upgrade. New document formats will be introduced, incompatible with our old software, new communications protocols will demand newer technology. The whole market is structured around making us throw away perfectly good stuff with years of life left in it.

It would be impossible to cite all the examples of the great internet scam but every time you find yourself being told you will have to buy or upgrade new hardware for the sake of compatibility or adequate performance bear in mind that it is another few pennies to all those software companies that hold patents on a few lines of code hidden somewhere deep in the software. And then ask yourself “do I really need this or will it just lead to more purchases to make my other stuff compatible with it.

That is how the great internet scam works.

Boggart Blog probably the funniest blog on the web

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A few weeks ago I was involved in a bit of a kerfuffle with the boy scientists from The Bad Science forum. One of the more intelligent and articulate commenters eventually asked why science gets such a bad press?

Or it could be because we see so many stories like the two below.

Researchers at Herriot Watt University and Strathclyde University claim to have proved older people have difficulty using new technology because physiological deterioration in connections between cells in the frontal lobes of the brain causes them to be easily confused by unfamiliar things.

Typically the “scientists” involved in this study forgot to look at the most obvious thing. So we oldies can watch movies or play games on our mobile phones. Are we bovvered? Many of us who have been rounded out by leading full and interesting lives can think of a hundred better things to do than watch a movie on a three inch by two inch screen.

I cannot take pictures or record video clips with my mobile phone. Is my brain going or is the case simply that my excellent digital camera and state of the art camcorder perform those tasks far better than the phone ever could. So I cannot do those things simply because I am never likely to want to.

Similarly neither I nor my wife ever learned to set the VCR to record a week in advance. Are we sliding into dementia or are we simply not the type of people to get withdrawal symptoms if we miss an episode of a favourite program. They will be repeated in a few months anyway.

It is not a question of neurological degeneration because everybody is different in that respect, it is a question of how interested we are. QED. And that is how to do the science, just think things through and a lot of time, effort and expence can be saved.

The second story has slightly more sinister connotations. Scientists (again – its never philosophers or artists or historians causing trouble) at the University of Kentucky, Louisville – now keep in mind this is in Kentucky, think fried chicken, bluegrass and red necks – claim to have found a link between eye colour and intelligence.

Blue eyed people, amazingly, are found to be more intelligent, ambitious and focused. Brown eyed people can run faster.

Nobody thought to mention in the context of this study that brown eyed people tend to have darker skin and curlier hair than blue eyed people.

My entirely unscientific observations on this issue, made throughout a long career in management consultancy is that if you tell people they are intelligent, thoughtful and capable of more than they have ever given themselves credit for, they tend to aim higher and as a result grow in confidence and status. This approach works regardless of eye colour.

So let’s throw this one back at the boy scientists who have been trying to give me a hard time (and actually themselves being on the receiving end of a harder time.) What is it exactly that us alleged non scientists don’t understand? That ageism and racism are OK so long as they are backed up by properly conducted scientific studies?

I’ll bear that in mind when advising young friends on whether they should follow me into a science related career. (Clue: proper scientists tend not to refer to themselves as “scientists” but by the specific discipline. I am (was) a systems analyst, later an Information Technology Consultant. 

Who Needs HDTV
Have you noticed how the electronics industry is pushing necessity of owning a High Definition Television set at us. Anyone who does not own a HDTV by 2010 will indentify themselves as anti – social, hopelessly off message, a misanthrope and curmudgeon and very probably an anarchist, Al Qaeda sympathiser and very probably a smoker and trainee alcoholic.In other words the HDTV refuseniks will be downgraded to second class citizens. The reason for this of course is that in spite of the bletherings of government and big business about saving the planet, the global economic model is built on the assumption that the world’s economy will indefinitely grow at two and a half percent or better. For that to happen we must all be persuaded that we are somehow letting down the human race if we are watching a TV or driving a car that is over five years old. We must throw out perfectly serviceable appliances, furniture, clothes and electronics because they are no longer either fashionable or “state of the art.” If consumerism was a religion (and I often think it is to many people,) the stuff we throw away would count as sacrifices at the altar of Mammon.The HDTV push is a particularly fine example of the shoddy way we are treated by the world’s most powerful industry, Public Relations.The great advantage of High Definition screens, we are told, is that we see things in absolute reality. “Watch a football match and you will be able to see individual blades of grass on the pitch, watch a wildlife programme and you will see every hair on an animal’s hide,” the sales pitch goes.But hold on. Even at the front of the stands in a stadium do you see every blade of grass? If a family pet is sitting six feet away from you do you see every hair of its coat. And more importantly do you want to. A short while ago I heard a radio presenter who is a self confessed technology nerd waxing lyrical about his new forty – six inch High Definition television.