Monday, December 24, 2012

The Cult of Christmas


I know exactly how many hours it is until Christmas.

I know this not because I am particularly good at figuring things out. Its not because I have any Rain Man tendencies towards time or dates of significance.
I don’t sit there and go ‘3….2….1. Its Christmas! Hurrah’ (resets clock in head) ‘Right everybody its (pause, eyes flickering)….. its 144 hours till New Year! Come on everybody lets count!’

Contrary to what my job title states I’m also not really that good with numbers and time is a concept I sometimes have issues with.

No, the reason I know exactly how many hours it is until Christmas because I see it every day on Facebook, Google or any other number of electronic places I drop into during the day. When I log on its there, normally accompanied by a large man in a red suit grinning manically.

It‘s as if suddenly someone has woken up this year, created an app and the whole world has gone countdown mad.

Last week before the non-event which was the supposed end of the world there were more Christmas countdowns than ‘we’re all going to die a fiery death’ ones. Even knowing we were not going to vapourise on Friday I would have thought someone would have leveraged this new, state of the art, technology to count it down for us.
But no. Not one. Now prioritisation isn’t my strong point but……

The whole woo-ha around Christmas does baffle me. I have pointed out my religious viewpoint a number of times in this blog so you wont be surprised that the impending anniversary of the birth of a major player in Christendom doesn’t really float my boat much. I therefore find it somewhat odd to see grown adults excitedly clapping their hands like Priscilla Queen of the Desert as the big day approaches on their Facebook countdown app thingy.

Given its such an alien concept to me and in keeping with my other blogs I have tried to understand why this is. What is it which drives people to act like yuletide lunatics with no concept of self esteem or fiscal responsibility during the month of December.

Without wanting to bore you and as this is a short blog I will dispense with my usual heavy technical analysis to prove to you my study wasn’t soiled with any form of bias. Suffice it to say it was lengthy, I used large complex mathematical models, a big computer and a laser.

Now complete I can say that my findings astonished even me. I have proven, statistically & mathematically proven that is, that I am not wrong. Even on the ‘Harold Camping’ scale, the measure of mental-ness regarded by most of the worlds leading scientists as the only true measure, the results are off the chart.

A short extract of my findings which I have summarised into ‘Facts’ for easy simple digestion:

Fact 1. A significant segment of the population turn into cheesy grinning, boozy red faced idiots in the week(s) before Christmas.

Fact 2. The same segment also seem to forget the rules governing what is considered acceptable social behaviour as offices close for the period.  
Fact 3. The vast majority of us shop like a piggy squealing, Iowa bomb shelter dwelling, patriot just before the government start closing in.

Fact 4. ‘It’s a wonderful life’ was actually a sober study into the effects of mixing different hallucinogenic drugs.

The conclusions of this study are as frightening as they are undeniable and I can only conclude that we are brainwashed by this creepy cult called Christmas. Why else would we act in such a way in the middle of Winter. This blog is therefore a call to arms. Please see it as a shining beacon of sanity amongst all the dribbling lunacy.

Reject Christmas. 
Reject the bondage of Christmas cake, brussel sprouts, eating, drinking and spending far too much. Reject Ant & Dec’s Christmas special, reject Bambi, James Bond, the Great Escape and reruns of Morecambe and Wise.  And yes, sorry but you have to reject Jimmy Stewart too.

Then and only then will we all be truly free and sane. Probably.

Either that or I’m just a boring c*&t with too much time on my hands.

P.s. Merry Christmas in 8hrs, 9mins!

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Living & Growing


I will start this blog off with an admission: I’m not gay.

I’m also not Christian. I’m not Muslim nor am I a scientologist. I’m not black. I’m not Asian.

I’m a heterosexual, Anglo Saxon, atheist, white male. To compound this damning description I also work in finance and have voted Tory ever since I was legally able to.

Essentially I am about as far away from the urban street as its possible to be, well perhaps Boris Johnson is a bit further away but its safe to say I won’t be appearing as an extra on The Wire anytime soon. Unless it’s to get mugged that is.

It doesn’t really matter though, I don’t care and I’m sure 50 Cent and his chums don’t care much either.

I remember when I first learned the real truth about human reproduction.  I was about 9 or 10 years old. It was the summer holidays and I was idly walking back from the park with a friend kicking an old plastic football between us.

‘Fuck off! No way! Who told you that?’ I shouted after he had just, out of the blue, told me about it using terms like ‘Your dad put it there, they did this and then you appeared’

‘Its true’ he said nodding solemnly

I thought about this for a while, trying to exorcise the image from my brain.

‘That means your mum and dad must have done the same then?’ I grinned, throwing it back at him.

‘Nope' he said 'not them, just your mum and dad' then he ran off laughing and waving for me to pass him the ball.

I didn’t believe him at the time but within two years the horrible truth had been broken to me through the medium of pencil and chalk drawings in school. Living and Growing is a TV series I will never forget, for all the wrong reasons. Two years later it was a topic which had taken over my mind almost entirely. My forearms bulked out. Childhood was nearly over.

Anyway, it turned out to be not as bad as I thought it would when my friend told me about it that summer’s day in the late 1970s.

My three kids will find out one day, one already has. The other two have some time yet but eventually they will too. They might turn out similar to me, who knows. Two are half Asian so they already have a significant headstart in the street credibility stakes long before that even matters to them.

The good thing is regardless of their ethnicity, their sexual preferences or their career choices there will generally be no bias one way or another towards them. In general, and I am of course generalising here, the world is a pretty unbiased place to live. Rio Ferdinand might argue differently but we are certainly some way away from the world as it existed say, 200 years ago. Pockets of resistance exist in amongst some segments of the population and there is the odd country still believing themselves to be ethnically superior to another but these are rare.

Religion is different though.

Science is right, of course it is, 2000 years of scientific study and clinical evidence cant be wrong, can it? With such an overwhelming volume of work, postulating, hypothesising, proving and disproving how could it be anything but the truth? Well it cant be but it is certainly not the whole truth. It is still someway away from explaining the whole truth. Which leaves me in the difficult situation of there being some scientifically accepted scientific concepts I personally find impossible to understand no matter how tight I screw up my eyes; infinity, higgs bosun, warp speed to name just three.

So what is wrong with having a get out of jail card called faith in your back pocket? If you don’t understand it simply say it was gods will and move on. An omnipresent escape clause as John Loftus would describe it. But think about it, having an escape clause, omnipresent or otherwise has to be preferable to trying to figure out how the Starship Enterprise doesn’t bump into planets during warp speed. At least I think it is.

Christian bashing seems to be in vogue. There are multiple websites, facebook pages all with the intention of throwing unanswerable questions at creaky old men in robes safe in the knowledge they have no valid repost.

Its too easy. These sites seem to be awash with smug atheists actively seeking a fight then sniggering or arguing about creation and in the process trying to persuade some poor soul that his or hers belief system is flawed.

Are these the modern day equivalent of missionaries traipsing around Africa trying to convert the heathens?

Probably not.

To me it feels less of a conversion process and more of a bullying/self promoting ‘I am right and I want to hear you admit defeat’ type of process.

Either way its not very pleasant, in the same way it wouldn’t be acceptable to have the scientific community going out of its way to prove that man-love isn’t correct. ‘Its not supposed to go in there you know?’ is a pretty valid argument but I’ve never heard Stephen Hawkins say so and does it really matter? 

Not really.

Anyway religion isn’t all that bad. The vast majority – 99.9% - of people with faith practice it without any negative consequence on the rest of us so what’s the problem?

If you have to throw anyone to the lions why not focus on the 0.1%. The door knocking Jehovah witnesses, scientologists, Islamic terrorists and anyone who carries out violence in the name of religion. Leave the rest alone to whatever it is they believe.

Just a suggestion though, it might be an idea to keep your thoughts on the existence of god to yourself if you happen to find yourself in the middle of Helmand province.

Who knows at some future point the bearded chaps at CERN might discover the god particle and reveal to the world it was actually made by the big man himself. They could prove that Mary did conceive immaculately and not how my friend described it and they might prove that god exists and is a hazy man with a white beard.

What will you say then? Bullying atheists? Huh? 

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Morally Taxing


Robots come in all shapes and sizes.  
From small shiny bins with a round, swivelly, antenna loaded, heads right through to large muscular and heavily accented Austrians. They have been imagined in every conceivable way. Sexy ones, ugly ones and ones which look like large buildings with spindly legs. Robots which go bleep, bloop in such a way you want to cuddle them and robots which are as murderous as they come. Male, female, dogs, cats, horses, knives, forks. Regardless of their shape or their intentions to you, me, mankind or a woman called Sarah Connor they all have one thing in common.

They are not real. They are all made up. They don’t actually, properly, in the real world, really exist.

Hard to believe I know but trust me on this one. They don’t.

The depressing reality is real world robots which do actually exist are rubbish and are a million miles away from what I would consider a proper robot. The oxford dictionary defines a robot as a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer. Real world robots barely scrape into this definition. 

Basically they come in two forms, they can either mow your lawn or hoover your carpet. Or both and that is it. Oh and they resemble a crap brown plastic plate on castors to boot. They can’t kill you, you can’t have sex with one, or at least I would strongly advise against it, they can’t break the code of a locked down force field/tractor beam and are bloody useless when it comes to telling jokes.

Why is this?

One of the core principles of physics is the universality of computation. Now I don’t profess to know much about physics, or anything much for that matter however even my simple brain understands this principle. Basically it states that if it is possible within the laws of physics then it is possible, given enough time & memory for a computer to replicate it in very fine detail. This law was postulated in the 19th Century and was proved in the 1980s.

One of the implications of this is if the human body can do it then it is possible to build a computer to replicate it. Fact.

Why then, if it is proved to be possible, can’t we do it?

Let’s just assume for the sake of argument we can build one and assuming we can devise cogs and motors sensitive enough to move with appropriate fluidity would that be enough? Probably not.

A thought process is also required and herein lies the problem. The human brain is an ugly, spongy, grey, waterlogged bag of tricks so complex it would require one the size of mars to actually figure out how one actually works. The human brain is probably the smartest object in the world, not every brain but certainly a good proportion of them. It is the only object which actually knows there even is an Earth or understands the concept of self and existence, life, death and morality. The brain understands this and understands that replicating one must be possible following the universality of computation but still we can’t even build something simple enough to help me put together an IKEA flat pack shelving unit.

I don’t get it but then I don’t get a lot of things so this shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone.

We could build a robot to do our tax returns though.

This would be simple. In fact we have, they just don’t look like robots but the principles are fairly straightforward. If you earn this you pay that, if you do this then this happens. Taxation like a lot of rules and laws are fairly black and white, to the extent even a robot brain would get it. They are of course bourn out of societal judgements on what’s fair and what’s equitable but the rules are fairly binary in their nature.

With such a clear cut set of rules, people will invariably have issues with them, its natural. The richer folks among us complain that they pay too much and the less well off complain that the rich don’t pay enough. That’s understandable but if you are a good citizen, corporate or private, follow the rules and pay the tax you should be ok, right?

Not necessarily.

The phrase, it might be legal but isn’t morally right has surfaced a few times in recent months in relation to taxation and a bit like robots its something which is baffling me. Does this mean the existing tax laws are not moral? What exactly is a moral tax?

David Cameron described Jimmy Carr as morally wrong for using the infamous K2 scheme where he ended up paying a lot less tax than he otherwise would had he just declared his income like a normal, morally robust, citizen. Starbucks UK have come under the moral microscope recently as well for paying no corporation tax on its UK businesses even though it achieved £398M worth of sales.

The headlines are damning; £398M sales! No tax! Starbucks are making a mocha-ry of the exchequer (I made that up btw). In this age of austerity I can almost feel the seething rage and hear the grinding of teeth as the Sun or Mail’s headlines are read out on building sites, in housing benefit offices and teachers well used rest rooms across the country.

Tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is smart. It’s a controversial statement I accept but if every person in the country could pay 1% less tax than they do at the moment legally do you think they wouldn’t?

If it is morally wrong to pay money into a K2 scheme in the channel islands or structure a company in such a way that it pays tax in Lichtenstein then the answer is very simple. Change the laws to make it tax avoidance and I can guarantee Starbucks, Jimmy Carr and every other so called ‘fat cat’ would stop doing it immediately. Its not difficult really.

Also following this logic if the legal schemes used by such people are morally wrong does this mean ISA’s or tax free pension scheme payments are also morally wrong? Are they not also legal mechanisms for individuals to reduce their overall tax liability?

The only way to make tax 100% morally equitable is to make everyone pay the same percentage. And by that I mean really everyone, whether you are a billionaire or a pauper you will pay the same % of your earnings. Another way to look at this, is it morally right to penalize someone more for working hard and being successful?

David Cameron making statements like he did are only there to pander to the restless natives reading the headlines. He knows there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. If he really felt that strongly about it he would task the Inland Revenue to jump all over it, close down the loophole and have them burn the participants at the stake.

Along with Klingons, warp speed and light sabers, R2D2 is not real and I can say with reasonable certainty he/she/it will never be real. I too am blessed with having one of those wonderfully amazing grey watery things sandwiched between my ears. And like most people I have my opinions and think these are correct. I do also recognise that I am probably not right, I have biases the same as everyone else and this is why just because I have an opinion it doesn’t make it right. It also probably means I shouldn’t be judging the moral rights and wrongs of a particular persons tax affairs.

Make the law then leave it to the lawn cutting, carpet hoovering robots and their bleep, bloop brains to police it free from bias.

Trust me, they will do a far better job than you or I ever will.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Free Sex. Free Money. Free Beer.


You want free sex?
You want free beer?
You want free money?

Having recently discovered the statistics function on my BlogSpot page this post is a test. It’s a test posting to prove or disprove my hypothesis that most people end up here by accident.

I know most of the people who read this regularly. I know the people who link up with me on the various social & professional networks end up here by being nosy but I think the bulk of traffic is accidental, random. This is not a pure guess, looking at the statistics function I can for example see which country you come from. I can see what operating system you use. I can see how you got here, I can see the search term you used to find this page and I can also see which posting you have read. 

After spending an extraordinary amount of time analysing these data I can conclude that there is a significant statistical correlation, for the sake of simplicity I will randomly call this r,  between the title of the post and the number of views it gets. Recently the bulk of traffic passing over this page comes from Google and the most popular search term which people find it through is Penoplasty.

Now I cannot think of a scenario whereby someone would type the words Mike Shanks and Penoplasty at the same time into Google and thus have to conclude its purely accidental.

Does this also mean the bulk of people reading my blog have small penises and probably can't type?

Regardless, to prove or disprove my theory I will upload this post and monitor the traffic. I am not sure what I will do with this information once I have it but I for one think it’s a very worthy exercise.

Its Saturday 8th September 2012, close to midnight and the current count on the blog is 2,474

Lets see.