I may need to retract an earlier statement where I proposed that “we shove the whole complacent Irish population into containers and ship them to Afghanistan where they can join their Taliban brothers in the stone age.”

It seems Ireland is not populated entirely by brainwashed religious nutcases, as evidenced by Atheist Ireland. To start the new year in proper fashion they’ve published a series of 25 blasphemous quotes on their website in an effort to provoke a lawsuit over Ireland’s newly adopted and utterly backwards blasphemy law.

These blasphemous quotes are not the rantings of random bloggers (such as yours truly) but come from a fairly respectable bunch of folks: Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, and even some quotes from the prophet Muhammed, Jesus Christ, and the Pope.

Each of these quotes can be interpreted as being blasphemous towards one religion or another. It demonstrates the utter stupidity of this law against blasphemy. I hope Atheist Ireland gets their trial - whether they win or lose, it will definitely serve to demonstrate the stone age thinking currently prevailing in Irish government circles.

Recently, as part of the Intelligence Squared debates, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry took on an archbishop and a conservative politician in a debate on the question: “Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?”

The whole debate can be viewed on the IQ2 website, but if you can’t spare the full 50 minutes I at least wanted to share Stephen Fry’s passionate speech:

The answer to the debate’s central question is, as you may have gathered, a resounding no.

Let’s take stock:

• Copenhagen, despite the moderately positive statements from politicians, has failed.
• Climate change denialists are increasingly polluting the airwaves with their anti-scientific rhetoric.
• Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise exponentially faster than ever before in the history of our planet.
• We don’t have a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

We see it coming, we know the repercussions, and we’re not doing enough. Most of us aren’t doing anything at all.

The universe doesn’t care about disinformation. It doesn’t care about political rhetoric. It doesn’t care about who can shout the loudest on national TV and sell his point of view to the masses.

Our planet is an exceedingly rare gem, providing an exquisitely fragile environment precariously balanced to provide us with the conditions in which we can survive. The rest of this unimaginably vast universe is extremely hostile to human life. We can’t live anywhere else but here on this planet.

Let me repeat that so you really get it: There is nowhere else for us to live except right here, on this earth.

And we have tipped the balance. Our planet is changing from a world hospitable to human life to one that is increasingly unable to support human life.

We are failing the Great Filter.

In May 2009 Ireland was shocked to its core by the Ryan report that revealed systemic and pervasive child abuse in Catholic-run boys’ schools since 1936.

Since then no effort has been spared to find suitable scapegoats. This frenzy of accusation and incrimination has resulted in the Murphy report published last month, which states that the leaders of the Irish church deliberately covered up reports of abuse of young boys by priests.

And now an apologetic Vatican has announced that, in an act of penance, it will ‘significantly reorganise‘ the Irish Catholic church. There might even be some resignations.

Let me clarify this for you in plain, uncensored language:

Adult men have beaten, assaulted and raped hundreds of young boys over many decades, and this fact has been deliberately covered up by other adult men. The appropriate penance is deemed to be ’significant reorganisation’.

I don’t expect ’significant reorganisation’. At the very least, as an absolute bare minimum, I expect to see excommunication, followed by swift criminal prosecution, culminating in severe prison sentencing!

I expect heads to roll. I expect the guilty to be publicly named and shamed and thrown in jail for the remainder of their natural lives. I expect enormous sums of compensation money to be paid to the victims. I expect every party even vaguely complicit in the cover-up to be punished as severely as possible under the law.

But instead we get ’significant reorganisation’? Are you fucking kidding me?!

If Ireland as a nation has its collective head so far up the Catholic church’s anal orifice that it accepts apologies, reorganisations and token resignations as sufficient penance for these unspeakably horrific acts, the Irish people have truly lost their way.

A country that deals with these heinous crimes in such an inexcusably lame and cowardly way doesn’t deserve to be called civilised.

I propose that we shove the whole complacent Irish population into containers and ship them to Afghanistan where they can join their Taliban brothers in the stone age. Then we can repopulate the island with truly civilised people and can continue to enjoy its natural beauty, without having to deal with these toothless, spineless cowards.

Few things get me riled up as much as deliberate ignorance about science. Every time I hear someone promoting homeopathy, talk favorably about energy healing, or spew forth some other pseudo-scientific nonsense, I try (and often fail) to control the urge to set them right.

Ask my girlfriend. If I had to give her a penny for every time she asks me to stop yelling at the TV because of some mind-numbingly ignorant piece of ‘news’ (I’m looking at you, BBC Breakfast), she’d own substantially more than just my heart.

The reason I get so enraged at such displays of wilful ignorance is because it’s so terribly easy to check if any given scientific ‘fact’ is true. All you need is an open mind and a web browser.

But people as a whole are lazy, enjoy being ignorant, and suffer from a phenomenon known as confirmation bias that makes them focus on the few scraps of information confirming their pre-conceived notions, while ignoring the mountains of evidence that contradict their point of view.

We can’t fix this by showering people with real, verified facts coming from genuine, evidence-based science.

We can only fix this by teaching people to think rationally, clearly, and with an awareness of their own biases and limitations.

The book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is a goldmine for sceptics. It effectively demolishes homeopathy, deconstructs nutritionists, and delivers staggering blows to the media’s horrendously flawed reporting of science news.

But it does all this almost carelessly, as an added benefit, in the course of its real goal: educating the reader in spotting the fallacies in medical science as it’s reported in the news, in advertisements, and on TV.

The real goal of the book is to teach people to think for themselves, to not allow themselves to be manipulated, and to base their decisions about medicine on valid scientific evidence.

Bad Science is a very important book. It’s so important that I think everyone should read it. Unfortunately I don’t have the resources to buy six billion copies, so I can’t send this book to everyone. But I can buy this book for the readers of this blog, as few as there are.

I’m going to give away ten copies of Bad Science. The first ten commenters on this post will get a free copy of Bad Science, paid for entirely by me.

All I ask you to do is when you receive the book to read it, and then lend it out to someone who you think will benefit from reading it. Spread the word.

Control internet search: Check.
Control internet advertising: Check.
Control email: Check.
Control office: Check.
Control desktop: …

Check.

Today’s biggest non-news story is that the Pirate Bay, that terrorist beacon of all things evil on the internet (if you believe the copyright lobby), has shut down its torrent trackers.

This may at first glance seem like a devastating blow to filesharers across the world. But only if you totally lack a proper understanding of how the BitTorrent protocol works.

Neglecting the fact that ever since the whole Pirate Bay mess started literally thousands of new torrent sites have popped up to fill the gaps, BitTorrent users don’t actually need torrent trackers any more. BitTorrent has evolved to include trackerless technologies such as DHT, PEX, and Magnet Links, so the loss of a tracker (even the world’s largest, as the Pirate Bay’s was) won’t actually harm filesharing.

On the contrary - the more the copyright lobby fights against filesharing, the more sophisticated it will become, until filesharing is based on such advanced technologies that stopping it would mean shutting down the entire internet.

Which may actually be what the copyright lobby wants. They do after all still seem to live in the pre-WWW 1980’s where they reigned supreme over all types of content and media, locking artists into inescapable contracts and charging ridiculous amounts of money to consumers for music and films.

But times have changed. Technology has liberated consumers and artists alike, and the big media conglomerates seem unable or unwilling to adapt. So I say fuck ‘em. Adapt or die, and the copyright lobby has obviously chosen the latter option.

You’ve probably heard of the so-called ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch‘, a giant floating debris field in the Pacific ocean believed to be twice the size of Texas. Apparently vast oceanic currents circle this patch and cause all sort of plastic garbage to gather and float there, as a testament to excessive human waste.

Now I’m as eager as the next cynical bastard to denounce humanity’s treatment of the planet, but has anyone ever seen this great garbage patch? It should be pretty hard to miss, being twice the size of Texas and all. We sure don’t seem to have a problem spotting Texas on a map.

Yet there are no pictures or videos of any kind of the garbage patch anywhere to be found. No visual evidence at all.

Yes, say the environmental pundits, that’s because it’s all floating just beneath the surface! Clever, eh?

But hey, fish float beneath the surface too, but we’re not lacking any photographic evidence of their existence, are we? If this garbage patch really is so huge and so full of plastic debris, why aren’t there hundreds of Cousteau-type marine explorers coming back with rolls of underwater film shot full of pictures and images?

Because, *drum-roll*…. the garbage patch doesn’t actually exist. At least, not as we imagine it. Apparently the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is an area with “elevated concentrations of microscopic plastic particles” too small to see with the naked eye. So this is really the Great Invisible Pacific Garbage Patch.

Not quite so dramatic, is it? Invisible microscopic pieces of plastic don’t make good Greenpeace protest banners or background shots for CNN headline news.

The moral of this story? Don’t believe everything you’re told. Whether it’s right-wing propaganda excremented by Faux News or left-wing treehugger nonsense, submit it to a healthy dose of skeptical enquiry before you start repeating it.

Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, but no one is entitled to an uninformed opinion.

SEOmoz.org, a site I follow religiously for professional purposes, has published a blog post called ‘24 Hours Without Privacy‘. It describes one young man’s daily activities, and the sheer amount of surveillance and data recording that is taking place behind the scenes.

The total lack of privacy as detailed in this blog post is reminiscent of the Will Smith film “Enemy of the State“, only this time it’s not fiction. This is how we live today. An excerpt:

“Later, after finishing a long day at work, he stops by his local grocery store to pick up a six pack of beer. He goes straight to the back of the store and brings the drink back to the register. Despite his facial hair, the clerk requests to see his ID. He complies and pulls it out of his wallet. The young man keys in his phone number in absence of his grocery store loyalty card so that he can save $0.50. The cash register prints out a receipt and the cashier shoves it in a plastic bag along with the purchase. The man thanks the grocer and continues on his way home.

As soon as he stepped into the grocery store he was picked up by one of about 20 video cameras that continually record shoppers. As he approached the checkout stand he started a three tiered identification process that rivals that of getting a Passport.

The first method was via government ID and was paradoxically the least useful to the grocery store. The cashier ignored his picture and instead focused on typing his birthdate into the register computer as speedily as possible.“

Privacy is an illusion. There is very little about you that isn’t known and stored somewhere, permanently, and accessible to parties who most certainly do not have your best interests in mind.

The BBC, that hallowed UK institution of broadcasting, seems to be the target of an ever- growing storm of criticism. This is nothing new of course - if you’re not pissing someone off, you’re not doing it right.

However, much of the new recent criticism seems aimed not at the quality of BBC’s broadcasts, but at their cost. “It’s too expensive”, critics proclaim, “we deserve to know where our taxpayer money goes!”. They’re right, to an extent. Citizens have a right to know where their tax dollars, or in this case pounds, are being spent.

However, I find the BBC a bit of an odd choice of targets. Surely there are more obvious areas where public scrutiny should focus? The BBC, after all, makes great quality television that is critically acclaimed around the globe.

From Top Gear (the best car show on earth, no contest) to Dr Who (the longest running sci-fi series of all time), from The Office to Mock the Week, from Horizon to Panorama, the BBC makes some of the best television available to us today.

So why aim such venomous barbs of criticism at an organisation that provides us with high-quality television & radio programmes without any commercial breaks, and gives us superior news reporting with minimal bias, all for a budget that is earned back easily through international programme licencing and DVD sales?

It all becomes painfully clear when you look at the origins of this criticism - conservative news sources that compete with the BBC on various different fronts.

Many of these conservative critics are owned by News Corp, Ruport Murdoch’s global propaganda machine aimed at eliminating critical thinking and promoting conservative political agendas.

And we all know that the news reported by the BBC is liberally biased. After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias and it is up to the conservative news agencies to counter this by polluting the airwaves with their distinct brand of brain-destroying garbage.

I for one sincerely hope the BBC remains immune to this criticism and keeps doing what it does best - make good programmes. Three cheers for the BBC!