Tits and cocks at the RSPB

The RSPB’s website runs censoring software: You’re not allowed to say cocks, but tits are alright, apparently.

On a similar note, the BBC’s running the story that Great tits cope well with warming.

(via Liberal England)

War on Civil Liberties Suffers Setback

The government’s War on Civil Liberties suffered a setback today, as five men who had been convicted of the thoughtcrime offence of reading extremist literature were freed by the Court of Appeal:

The convictions of five young Muslim men jailed over extremist literature have been quashed by the Appeal Court.

Freeing the men, the Lord Chief Justice said there was no proof of terrorist intent. The lawyer for one said they had been jailed for a “thought crime”. A jury convicted the students in 2007 after hearing the men, of Bradford and Ilford, east London, became obsessed with jihadi websites and literature.

Hugo Swire MP is an incompetent shit

Hugo Swire, MP for East Devon, thinks the government should mandate Internet filtering for children:

Internet service providers should offer a two-tier system, with users able to pick content suitable for adults or children, a Tory MP has said.

Hugo Swire said the “default” setting would be for children, with a password or PIN needed for unfiltered material. A Whitehall department should create a blacklist of unsuitable sites, he said.

Most UK households have an Internet connection. Many of these households have children in them. You’d think that if there was significant demand for something like this, the market would provide such a service. (Hey, I thought the Tories believed in markets?) Alternately, if no-one is providing this, and many people want it, surely that’s an opportunity for Mr Swire to make some money — he could set up an ISP to satisfy all this unfulfilled demand.

Update on Sayed Pervez Kambaksh

(see here for backstory)

According to the Independent, Pervez isn’t going to be executed after all:

The condemned student journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh will not face execution, a senior government official in Afghanistan indicated yesterday. A ministerial aide, Najib Manalai, insisted: “I am not worried for his life. I’m sure Afghanistan’s justice system will find the best way to avoid this sentence.”

It was the clearest indication yet that the 23-year-old will have his death penalty revoked amid mounting international pressure on the Afghan authorities.

Mr Kambaksh was condemned to die by an Islamic court for insulting Islam. He was found guilty under sharia law after he distributed articles from the internet on women’s rights at Balkh university in northern Afghanistan, an act he claims was aimed at provoking debate. His family say he was not allowed a defence lawyer and the trial was in secret.

Of course, just because he’s not going to be executed, doesn’t mean he’s going to be freed.

(via Harry’s Place)

Afghan human rights

A man in Afghanistan is sentenced to death:

A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country’s rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years after “liberation” and under the democratic rule of the West’s ally Hamid Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

Kambaksh should be immediately freed, and the judge who passed this sentence sacked — or better still, put to death himself. But if, on the other hand, this sentence is carried out, then Britain needs to seriously look at what we are doing in Afghanistan: why should British troops risk their lives for such a barbaric government? If the people of Afghanistan want to live in the dark ages, I suppose that is their choice, but Britain should not spend blood and money helping them.

If you want to help save the life of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the Independent has a petition, and there is also a facebook group.

(via Slashdot)

Forking Wikipedia

As I mentioned in another article, I’m doing an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.

I’m not the only one who’s recently had this idea. Glyn Moody recently wrote:

I wonder whether it might be time to start thinking about forking Wikipedia. The original claim of being “an encyclopedia anyone can edit” has become less all-inclusive – not so much in terms of who may write, but rather as far as what they can write about. This involves the issue of “notability”:

Within Wikipedia, notability is an inclusion criterion based on encyclopedic suitability of a topic. The topic of an article should be notable, or “worthy of notice”. This concept is distinct from “fame”, “importance”, or “popularity”, although these may positively correlate with notability. A subject is presumed to be sufficiently notable if it meets the general notability guideline below, or if it meets an accepted subject specific standard listed in the table to the right.

That is, Wikipedia is no longer interested in accepting entries about any old thing, but requires them to be “notable” in the above sense. Now, that’s all very well if you aspire to be a dead serious kind of encyclopedia along the lines of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but given that Wikipedia offered the hope of something more than just an online version of that dead tree monument to dead knowledge, I’m not so sure this attempt at increasing the respectability of Wikipedia is right.

I don’t think it’s right either. I am fed up with deletionists destroying articles I’ve created or worked on. I worry that Wikipedians are being put off from writing or editing articles by the prospect that their work will be consigned to the dustbin by deletionists (I know this has happened to me and I bet I’m not the only one).

Why shouldn’t every film, every TV programme episode, every small-circulation magazine, every pokemon character, etc have an article about it, if people want to write those articles? People who aren’t interested in these subjects won’t read them, and people who are interested will find them useful.

In an ideal world the deletionists would delete themselves, or at least go found their own encyclopedia. But they don’t want to do that, instead they want to actively disrupt the project of delivering all the world’s knowledge to all the world’s people.

So I’m creating an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.

Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing

Slashdot is reporting that 13 Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing. Yay!

Royal sex blackmail scandal

I’m not going to name the member of the British royal family who Ian Strachan and Sean McGuigan are charged with attempting to blackmail regarding allegations of gay sex and drug use. Frankly, there’s no point since the person’s name is all over the Internet — including on Wikipedia — and anyone curious enough to spend 5 minutes with Google can easily find it. Why the British authorities are still attempting to keep this secret is beyond me — all they are achieving is making themselves look stupid.

However I will quote this gem from Anorak:

Says Mr Davies of the alleged video featuring an apparent bout of gay oral sex: “It is a con trick that exploded in their faces.”

The Society of Homeopaths attempts to censor the truth

Homeopathy, as everyone sensible knows, is a form of fraudulent quackery masquerading as a treatment of the sick.

Website The Quackometer wrote a piece on the Society of Homeopaths earlier this year, which the SoH objected to and did an Usmanov by issuing a takedown notice against the offending article.

Anyway, here’s the article the SoH objected to in full, from mediawatchwatch:

The Society of Homeopaths (SoH) are a shambles and a bad joke. It is now over a year since Sense about Science, Simon Singh and the BBC Newsnight programme exposed how it is common practice for high street homeopaths to tell customers that their magic pills can prevent malaria. The Society of Homeopaths have done diddly-squat to stamp out this dangerous practice apart from issue a few ambiguously weasel- worded press statements. The SoH has a code of practice, but my feeling is that this is just a smokescreen and is widely flouted and that the Society do not care about this. If this is true, then the code of practice is nothing more than a thin veneer used to give authority and credibility to its deluded members. It does nothing more than fool the public into thinking they are dealing with a regulated professional.

As a quick test, I picked a random homeopath with a web site from the SoH register to see if they flouted a couple of important rules:

48 Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority. No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.

72 To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease.

The homeopath I picked on is called Julia Wilson and runs a practice from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. What I found rather shocked and angered me.

Straight away, we find that Julia M Wilson LCHE, RSHom specialises in asthma and works at a clinic that says,

Many illnesses and disease can be successfully treated using homeopathy, including arthritis, asthma, digestive disorders, emotional and behavioural difficulties, headaches, infertility, skin and sleep problems.

Well, there are a number of named diseases there to start off. She also gives a leaflet that advertises her asthma clinic. The advertising leaflet says,

Conventional medicine is at a loss when it comes to understanding the origin of allergies. … The best that medical research can do is try to keep the symptoms under control. Homeopathy is different, it seeks to address the triggers for asthma and eczema. It is a safe, drug free approach that helps alleviate the flaring of skin and tightening of lungs…

Now, despite the usual homeopathic contradiction of claiming to treat causes not symptoms and then in the next breath saying it can alleviate symptoms, the advert is clearly in breach of the above rule 47 on advertising as it implicitly claims superiority over real medicine and names a disease.

Asthma is estimatedto be responsible for 1,500 deaths and 74,000 emergency hospital admissions in the UK each year. It is not a trivial illness that sugar pills ought to be anywhere near. The Cochrane Review says the following about the evidence for asthma and homeopathy,

The review of trials found that the type of homeopathy varied between the studies, that the study designs used in the trials were varied and that no strong evidence existed that usual forms of homeopathy for asthma are effective.

This is not a surprise given that homeopathy is just a ritualised placebo. Hopefully, most parents attending this clinic will have the good sense to go to a real accident and emergency unit in the event of a severe attack and consult their GP about real management of the illness. I would hope that Julia does little harm here.

However, a little more research on her site reveals much more serious concerns. She says on her site that ’she worked in Kenya teaching homeopathy at a college in Nairobi and supporting graduates to set up their own clinics’. Now, we have seen what homeopaths do in Kenya before. It is not treating a little stress and the odd headache. Free from strong UK legislation, these missionary homeopaths make the boldest claims about the deadliest diseases.

A bit of web research shows where Julia was working (picture above). The Abha Light Foundation is a registered NGO in Kenya. It takes mobile homeopathy clinics through the slums of Nairobi and surrounding villages. Its stated aim is to,

introduce Homeopathy and natural medicines as a method of managing HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in Kenya.

I must admit, I had to pause for breath after reading that. The clinic sells its own homeopathic remedies for ‘treating’ various lethal diseases. Its MalariaX potion,

is a homeopathic preparation for prevention of malaria and treatment of malaria. Suitable for children. For prevention. Only 1 pill each week before entering, during and after leaving malaria risk areas. For treatment. Take 1 pill every 1-3 hours during a malaria attack.

This is nothing short of being totally outrageous. It is a murderous delusion. David Colquhoun has been writing about this wicked scam recently and it is well worth following his blog on the issue.

Let’s remind ourselves what one of the most senior and respected homeopaths in the UK, Dr Peter Fisher of the London Homeopathic Hospital, has to say on this matter.

there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won’t find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice.

Malaria is a huge killer in Kenya. It is the biggest killer of children under five. The problem is so huge that the reintroduction of DDT is considered as a proven way of reducing deaths. Magic sugar pills and water drops will do nothing. Many of the poorest in Kenya cannot afford real anti-malaria medicine, but offering them insane nonsense as a substitute will not help anyone.

Ironically, the WHO has issued a press release today on cheap ways of reducing child and adult mortality due to malaria. Their trials, conducted in Kenya, of using cheap mosquito nets soaked in insecticide have reduced child deaths by 44% over two years. It says that issuing these nets be the ‘immediate priority’ to governments with a malaria problem. No mention of homeopathy. These results were arrived at by careful trials and observation. Science. We now know that nets work. A lifesaving net costs $5. A bottle of useless homeopathic crap costs $4.50. Both are large amounts for a poor Kenyan, but is their life really worth the 50c saving?

I am sure we are going to hear the usual homeopath bleat that this is just a campaign by Big Pharma to discredit unpatentable homeopathic remedies. Are we to add to the conspiracy Big Net manufacturers too?

It amazes me that to add to all the list of ills and injustices that our rich nations impose on the poor of the world, we have to add the widespread export of our bourgeois and lethal healing fantasies. To make a strong point: if we can introduce laws that allow the arrest of sex tourists on their return to the UK, can we not charge people who travel to Africa to indulge their dangerous healing delusions?

At the very least, we could expect the Society of Homeopaths to try to stamp out this wicked practice? Could we?

Let’s all see how widely we can spread this article, shall we?

UPDATE: I was going to add a list of everyone who’s republished the article, but someone’s already done it. You might want to read the comments to that post; I liked this one especially:

I’m a bit stumped by this. Surely, shouldn’t the SoH folk, of all people, know that removing every detectable trace of the offending post from the blogosphere will just increase its effectiveness?

Website shut down for linking to illegal material

A website has been shut down for linking to unauthorised copies of copyrighted material. Note that no-one is claiming that the website in question, tv-links.co.uk, actually hosted anything illegal.

Now that the brave boys at Gloucestershire police have taken down this small-time operator, when are they going to go after Google which not only links to an enormous amount of illegal material, but hosts it on its YouTube subsidiary?