This is curenty a relatively bold thing to say.

As tempus is want to fugit it is likely this post will lose both its impact and meaning very quickly.

Japan has suffered its biggest earthquake ever. It triggered a huge Tsunami that wrecked even more damage, death and destruction.
Currently over 10,000 are dead and further 10,000 are missing.
It is a horrible tragedy.

And on top of this there has been an accident at a nuclear facility north of Tokyo that has pumped radioactive Iodine into the environment.

So why on earth would I still be going to Japan on vacation?

1) Bloody mindedness

Let me be honest. I am intolerably bloody minded about most things.
When I have decided on something it is very difficult to get me to change my mind.

I planned my vacation last year and booked it after renewing my passport in February.
This is something that I had set my mind on and nothing was going to stand in my way.
[Even my new boss!]

When the quake and tsunami hit, it did give me pause for thought, I am human after all, and my vacation plans actually fell from my mind.
My initial concern was more for the people who were suffering than any vacation plans.
When asked about my vacation I said simply, “I will see how things go”.
I then said, “I am bloody well going, as long as my flights are not cancelled or the British government tells me it is totally stupid.” [more on this later]
I now say, “I am going, but as I had planned, I am going to Kansai within 2 days of my arrival, which is about the distance Paris is from Amsterdam, and far away from the area affected by privations.” [I really said this... my bloody mindedness had fully returned]

2) The press are idiots!

I have, through watching the coverage of the disaster, determined that humanity is ultimately doomed.
Not because of the frightening and horrific power of nature that was in effect, but because the press has showed such ridiculous stupidity and inanity that I cannot believe mankind will actually survive to the next millennia.

The coverage at first was exactly as you would expect.
Wide angle shots of the tsunami wiping entire communities off the map.
Awed presenters looking aghast at video feeds.
Then came the parade of pundits. And this is where the stupidity started.
“Could this happen here?” was uttered by more than one of these morons.
Always trying to come up with a local angle for a disaster happening to real people half the world away.

Then the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor facility started having issues due to loss of coolant.
This is when the media idiocy reached critical mass.
Suddenly Ann Coulter was an expert in the medical affects radiological isotopes, a nightclub in Shibuya was one of Japan’s “dangerous” nuclear reactors, and the word “Chernobyl” was bandied by the media, left-leaning, right-leaning and centre.

Then there were food shortages and power cuts in Tokyo.
I will not even get started with how the press has handled this.

And so whatever the press tells me I rightfully, and disdainfully, ignore.
Instead I am trusting certain blogs such as;
Tokyo Times
Danny Choo
Japan Probe,
blogs written by expats actually in Japan rather than clueless talking-heads in studios in New York or London.

And all the time the idiot media were saying “background radiation in Tokyo has doubled” did not change the fact that it is still less than in Denver.

3) Governments always try and save face

As mentioned earlier, my second instinct was to only abandon my vacation if the British government told me to.
They then told people to not go to the Tokyo region.

However, this had nothing to do with the disaster itself. It had to do with 2 things.
The first is that the British government did not want to inconvenience travellers as public transport and power supplies were unreliable.
The second is that France had offered flights to its citizens out of the country and the FCO were being asked why they were not doing the same. [About 1/4 of French expats fled.]

They did it because the French did it. And the USA also soon followed suit.

4) I am not in Tokyo for long

I had already planned my vacation before the quake and tsunami.
And the big draw was not Tokyo, even though I love it to bits, as I have visited multiple times before, but Osaka, which I have not yet visited.
My plan was, and still is, to arrive in Tokyo, stay 2 nights to acclimate to the time-zone, and then go to Osaka.
I had booked my hotel in Shibuya, but was still in the process of choosing the one in Osaka.
My plan was to stay in Osaka as a base and travel around the Kansai region, perhaps stay in Kobe, then stop off in Kyoto for a night or two before returning to Tokyo for the last week before flying out.

Based on how Tokyo is already returning to some form of normalcy I more than expect it to be fine for the first week of May.

5) What is appropriate?

This is the only thing that concerned me.
“Is it appropriate to go on vacation to Japan right now?”

This is a tough one as there is no arbiter of appropriateness.
Who decides when it is still too soon and when it becomes appropriate to vacation in Japan?
Can you give me their email?

Points to consider;

• I am not in Tokyo long
• Things are not as bad in Tokyo as the press says
• I am not going there because of the disaster
• I planned this vacation prior to the disaster
• The Japanese economy needs to rebuild itself
• I love Japan

I have decided that for me it is appropriate to still go to Japan on a pre-planned vacation a scant six weeks after the disaster.
To me this is not too soon.
Others may disagree, but that is their personal opinion.
[I would probably have a different mindset if I was meant to fly out today..]

6) Can I help out?

Let me be honest again, it did pass my mind that I could help out. But this is nothing but senseless egoism.
I can’t speak Japanese to any level other than tourist.
I am not in the medical profession.
I am not in the construction profession.
I am not affiliated with any aid agency.

The only thing I can do, other than donate here, is contribute my tourist yen.

Conclusion

I have had different reactions from friends and family about my decision to still go.

From, “You would find a way to go regardless” to “I do not think it is appropriate for you to go there on vacation at this time.”.

However, I will finish with a transcript of a genuine conversation I had with a friend of mine, Greg, a DJ, who is a pretty together guy.

Greg comes over and sits next to me while another DJ has a set
Greg: Are you still going to Japan?
Me: Yeah. The radiation risk is over-hyped and things are not as bad in Tokyo as they say.
Greg: No way! [With a look of shock]
Me: What? [Frowns] [I am fully expecting a "you will glow in the dark comment"]
Greg: Dude! You will miss Queens day!

This is true. This is the first time that I have missed it in 13 years.

Only 1 in 2 got the tenor of the apology right.

The first was apology was from Groupon‘s CEO Andrew Mason.

As a serious Japanophile I watched with dismay as Groupon failed to deliver on promises by overselling offers on Oeschi bento, effectively ruining many peoples new year celebrations.

Then I read today that Groupon’s CEO had made a personal video apology for his companies fuck-up and he promised not to make the same mistakes again. [Video below]

He comes across as very genuine and honestly embarrassed by the whole incident.
You can really connect with him.

The second apology was a joint email from the Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon and KLM CEO Peter Hartman.

At the end of last year unprecedented snowfall caused widespread transport chaos in Western Europe.
It left many people stranded and struggling to get home.

In such a situation airlines, including AirFrance/KLM, could not keep up and seriously fucked-up many peoples lives and holidays.

But read text of the apology below;

Dear Mr GRANEY,

Pierre-Henri Gourgeon
CEO of AIR FRANCE KLM

It does not sound genuine at all.

I emphasized the bit that is apologizing for the fuck-up.
I did this in case you missed it.
It makes up a tiny portion of the email, most of the email is explaining the situation that travellers found themselves in, which I am sure they were well aware of, and the rest is nothing but self-aggrandizing hagiographic prose.

Saying “we will further work on limiting the effects of such situations in the future” does not tell me WHAT they are actually planning to do to ensure that.
It sounds too much like they are dismissing the whole thing.

This brings me to the advice that I think CEOs should follow when their company has just fucked-up royally;

1. Apologize in person: A video explaining the situation is a wonderful way to show you do not live in a platinum mansion drinking unicorn tears out of diamond goblet and actually do understand the travails of the “little people” [AKA. Customers] .
2. Explain what you did wrong: Explaining the circumstances is not enough. Explain what you did wrong, not what happened. People already know what happened.
3. Describe the specific steps you will take to ensure it will not happen again: Just saying “we will never do this again” is not enough. You have to describe a plan of action to ensure this does not happen again in future.

It is so disappointing that the CEOs of a major established airline can get a heartfelt apology so totally wrong but a CEO of a start-up who is half their age can get it so totally right.

Below are 5 simple tips to help you stay a little safer online;

1: Keep a different and hard to guess password for each site

This might seem like a burden, but passwords are the gateway that criminals use to get your personal information.
You would not leave your door open at night if you lived in a high-crime neighbourhood.
In fact you would fit a very secure steel door to protect yourself.
Do the same on the web.

I use a simple, and memorable, formula for secure passwords that is similar to the following;

(6 character random alpha numeric sequence) + site identifier + (4 character random alpha numeric sequence)

The two random character sequences are the same for all passwords, and the site identifier is unique and of variable length.

I used a tool to generate the two random character sequences. But you can make your own up.
An example for the first one would be; A[4i5Z

The site identifier is something you can personally use to remember the site;
For instance, for the site "remember the milk", you might use; milky
It is a simple mental name for the site.
If you hate microsoft, for instance, you could use fascist as the site identifier for your MSN account.

The suffix 4 characters are there to just make the password even longer more random
An example would be; g#d0

This would make the example password for remember the milk;
A[4i5Zmilkyg#d0
And for MSN;
A[4i5Zfascistg#d0

Once you have learnt the random segments of the password all you need to do is remember the site identifier for each site.

Downside: If a single password is compromised you are relatively safe, but if 2 passwords are compromised you will need to change ALL of your passwords unless your site identifiers are totally unique to you. And they won't be. The only positive of this is that you would only need to relearn the random bits. You can keep the site identifier.

2: Give an answer to a different question for the account recovery questions or create your own absurdist question

An awful lot of services give you the ability to recover your account should it be hijacked or blocked by getting you to answer some personally identifying question like; What is your mothers maiden name?

This is a two edged sword. If you have already been compromised such a question is simple. And thanks to all our data being on-line nowadays it could be a simple search of a government records site for a nominal fee to find such basic information.

If the site only allows for set questions like the above, then give an answer to a different question in the answer field and make sure you make this consistent across sites.
What is your mothers maiden name? : Lasagne (What is your favourite food?)
What was your junior highschool teachers name? : A980 TFK (What was the license plate of your parents car growing up?)

If the site provides an "ask your own" identifying question then this is your time to shine a light on your inner python and create something completely absurd.
Pi is to yellow as Einstein is to? : banana ( remember the yellow part...)

A CSR will think you are totally mad, but it will prove completely that you are who you claim.

3: Secure your WiFi and use a secure password

WiFi routers are the common currency of home web access.
The older WEP standard is totally compromised and criminals can easily access all your data should your WiFi router still use it.
The newer WPA and WPA2 standards are far more secure and you should use either of these as the only way to connect to your router.
The extra benefit of WPA is that you can use a secure password, like the ones explained above, rather than a short hexadecimal sequence.
Do a Google search for your router make/supplier to find out how to configure it for WPA.

Each router will have an administrator password to allow you to configure it.
Only you should know this password, even if you give the WPA password to family and mates who come around.
The first thing you should do when you get a new router is immediately create a secure password for the administrator.
Do a Google search for your router make/supplier to find out how to set the administrator password.

4: ABANDON Internet Explorer and NEVER install a Toolbar Plugin/Extension

There are 2 good reasons for not using IE;

1. Internet Explorer has tons of security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by criminals to grab all your passwords and credit card numbers.
2. Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of people and so criminals focus all of their efforts on creating viruses and trojans for it and finding said vulnrabilities.

I currently recommend Google Chrome as the browser to install and use on a day to day basis.
It has an update in the background feature that makes sure you get the security patches as soon as they are developed. Which is better than Microsoft's policy of only bundling every month and then "asking" if you want to have these security patches installed. [Plus, Chrome only asks you to restart Chrome and NEVER asks you to restart windows!]

Browser Toolbar plugins seem like a major convenience.
Everyone has one, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and even your Web provider will give you a Toolbar to make your browsing experience simpler.
But with great simplicity comes great vulnrability.
These Toolbars have access to; everything you type in your browser (including passwords and credit card numbers), the addresses of all the sites you visit, and the times that you visit them.
Google recently had to issue an urgent update to their Toolbar to fix a major vulnerability.
If Google cannot make a secure Toolbar plugin, then what chance does anyone else have?
Never install a Toolbar plugin!

Luckily, most of these Toolbar plugins only offer options that a browser bookmarklet can achieve in your normal bookmarks toolbar.
Go to the website of the Toolbar provider and search for bookmarklet or take a look at marklets.com to find them.
Even though these can also be compromised, they will only run when you click them.

5: Run a virus scanner daily

If you are using windows this should be mandatory.
A virus scanner will check to see that you have not inadvertently installed a virus or trojan onto your machine.
I recommend AVG Free as it is both free and very good. The premium edition does lots of other good stuff, but the free version does the most important task of identifying and removing viruses and trojans.

I used to suggest running a virus scanner weekly, but as more and more people are online nowadays, and for much longer durations, I recommend to perform it daily and first thing in the morning as you get your coffee.

Finally: Trust no one

Always remember that even though you personally might be relatively secure other people you know will not be.
Do not share with anyone online anything that you may want to keep from your parents (… or your government).
Pictures of quasi-legal naked and drunken escapades may be fun to share amongst participants, but you have no guarantee that all of your friends have secure passwords and then your will find these pictures all over 4chan and SA.

There are further ways to stay even safer on-line, but these 5 (+1) simple tips are a good starting point.

• The cables are top-secret and have been obtained illegally by WikiLeaks
• WikiLeaks is not a newspaper and so cannot be protected by the first amendment rules protecting a free press
• The cables do not reveal anything new and are thus not in the public interest
• The cables expose people working with the US intelligence service to retributions

However, these arguments are somewhat flawed. And are even contradictory.
The exposure of top-secret information already has legal precedence with the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Although not as decisive a decision as some are claiming today, it did set legal precedent for some protections for the press publishing carefully redacted top-secret information if it was deemed in the public interest.

And this is what WikiLeaks is doing. It is redacting information, such as names and addresses, of informants and others who work closely with USG intelligence services whose safety might be jeopardized by their exposure.

This is the main reason only 600 or so of the cache of 250,000 cables for #cablegate have currently been released.
It is taking the secretive and anonymous editors who work for WikiLeaks a awful lot of time and effort to identify and redact such information.

Of course if you read/watch CNN or FOX you would not even be aware of the redactions that the WikiLeaks staff are actually making to protect those most at risk.

The next question is whether or not it is in the public interest for WikiLeaks to release these diplomatic cables.
The claim by the USG that it is otherwise is pima facie attempt to nullify the first amendment rights that they claim WikiLeaks does not even have. [Which begs the question why they would do such a thing]
The question is answered with a strong yes and a quote about the aforementioned Pentagon Papers;

“demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance”.

This is the basis of public interest.
In a democracy it is utmost public interest if public officials, elected or administrative, are purposely deceiving the public and Congress.
The extensive revelations so far confirm that public officials are systematically lying to the public and congress.

And the final argument against a constitutional protection is that WikiLeaks is not a newspaper and their editors are not journalists working for a newspaper.
Of course this is true.
WikiLeaks is not a newspaper and their editing staff are not journalists working for a newspaper.
But you can consider WikiLeaks a news agency with a focus on leaked information.

Similar in nature to Associated Press and Reuters, WikiLeaks has publication partnerships with mainstream newspapers that publish it’s edited journalistic content.
If WikiLeaks is categorically not protected by the first amendments provisions for a free press, then by extension you could easily argue that neither are the large News Agencies and wire services.
Which would essentially repudiate the constitutional protection of a free press.

I was firmly on the fence with regards the cablegate disclosures.
But the disproportionate and draconian overreaction of the USG, more akin to the actions of China or North Korea against political dissidents, knocked me off the fence and onto WikiLeaks side of the argument. The USG is losing hearts-and-minds on this by their very actions.

If government officials are systematically lying to the populace, and these leaks prove it, then it fundamentally undermines the very machinery of democracy that the secrecy is alleging to protect.

The quote in the image above could easily have come from Assange, but it didn’t;

“Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light”
- George Washington

Especially if, like me, you believe you have little conscious choice in what you believe.
[That entire sentence, and most of this discussion, is a nightmare of circular language!]

I got to the question via PZ Myers blog post linking to the Grauniad article by Harriet Baber.

Like PZ Myers I find her lazy fall-back on the discredited and hackneyed Pascals Wager a little lame.
Her whole article boils down to single statement; “I am a christian because I want to be a christian”, which is pretty lame too.

Pascals Wager in my opinion primarily fails because it tries to reduce the potential answers to the question “Should I believe in god?” to only two options.
“Believe in a christian god” and “Do not believe in a christian god”.

This places the huge body of personal faith that has existed over human history, from belief in the fields of Aaru to the Summerland, in the “do not believe in a christian god” column.

This is plainly absurd.

It assigns greater credibility to the claims of afterlife in christian dogma than it does the claims of afterlife familiar to the likes of Herodotus.
A credibility it does not deserve.
They both, after all, have the same level of “evidence” to support their conflicting claims.

Taking into account all the other gods and personal faith beliefs of humanity since the dawn of recorded history makes Pascals Wager totally unusable as a determiner of faith to anyone who is not intellectually dishonest.
The Wager remains;
“Should I believe in god?”
But the options now become;
“Believe in a christian god… but no other gods”
“Believe in a babylonian god… but no other gods”
“Believe in a norse god… but no other gods”
“Believe in a zoroastrian god… but no other gods”
… etc.
and finally;
“Do not believe in any of the above gods”.

I naturally selected the last option as it is the most logical.

I solidified my atheist position wholly because I spent far too much time trying really hard to understand religion.

In my 20s I voraciously read any and all religious works that I could get my hands on.
The Quaran, various versions of the christian bible, the bhagavad gita, the pali discourses, the doa te jing, the confucian analects, various new-age mystical stuff, the, list, goes, on, trying hard to find any level of understanding of religious faith.
[Religious friends and relatives find my bookshelf confusing. God is not great sandwiched between the Quaran and the bible!]

When someone asks me; “Why are you an atheist?”, after all my usual sarcasm, cynicism and avoidant behaviour, comes a far more genuine answer of; “I just don’t get it!”

And I really don’t.

I look at religions and their claims and see nothing that substantively differentiates between xenu, jesus, mohammed, or jack.

They all make fantastical claims, that are all required to be taken on faith, and any evidence to support any of their claims is extremely shaky at best.

And yet people continue to place such personal faith in these “ideas”, that I cannot for the life of me understand, that they are willing to torture, kill, be tortured and die for them. [Can you see why I just don't get religious faith with this sentence?]

There are, of course, some things that I would fight and die for.

But these are tangible things like “personal survival” and “loved ones” and not for just “ideas”, albeit evidence based ones, like Natural Selection.
[This is the reason there are atheists in foxholes!]

And so I get to the big question; “Do I choose to be an atheist?”

No.

I do not feel that there is any conscious choice involved in my atheist position.
I do not feel that there is any conscious choice involved Harriet Baber’s religious position.

I think you either believe something or you don’t.

People can change their beliefs over time, but again I do not believe a change in theological position from believer to atheist is a conscious choice.

I personally feel that my atheism is more likely due to natural inquisitive behaviour and the experiences and education that followed from that.
But this is just, like, my opinion, man.

From when I was a toddler, trying to take apart the family television with a screwdriver, to the current day, I have a natural inquisitiveness that I feel probably predisposes me to rational thought and especially to skepticism.
I am not very happy with the answer “that is just how it is”, I want to know why and how.
This was, I feel, the reason for my concerted, but futile, attempts in my 20s to understand religious faith.
I wanted to understand the “why” and “how” of religious faith.
[Why are intelligent people religious? How can intelligent religious people justify this? etc.]

Religious faith seems to be secured by not being interested in finding out truth.
Being un-inquisitive, especially to the “why” and “how” questions of religious faith, seems to be the cement for religious faith.

Harriet Baber even states that she is not at all interested in “workaday truths”, she is content with her level of ignorance of “workaday truth”s, but I immediately looked on wikipedia for an article on the cat flea because she piqued my interest in them.
[And I have no cats and dislike insects!]

“Workaday truths” are very interesting to me even if they have no relation to my everyday life.
From the humble cat flea to space toilets, many subjects fill me with an inquisitiveness that is hard to sate. [Thankyou intarwubs!]

Of course, there are many religious people who are inquisitive, and I note that nothing about the human condition is exact or absolute, it is just that I have noticed the more inquisitive a person appears to be the more likely they are to be a skeptic, and by extension more likely to be an atheist.
[I also note that this could easily be a "confirmation bias". I am not immune to normal human failings. I do not have any data on the Inquisitive behaviour and its relation to religious faith, or some such. It might be an interesting study.]

I will most probably continue to have the preternatural urge to google anything I hear about which I know nothing.

And I will most probably continue to be an atheist while religious faith is the antithesis of reason.

“What you need to learn is that being creative is not enough in this business. You have to become technical. Creative people are born creative – you’re lucky. Technical people however can never be creative. It’s something they’ll never get. You can’t buy it, find it, study it – you’re born with it. Too many creative people don’t want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? They become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that.
If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.”
- Robert Rodriguez (emphasis mine)

This quote was sent around work at precisely the wrong time.
The Tech team had been working for 16 hour days, and in some cases 30 hour days, for a total of three weeks without a break, scrambling hard to meet hard deadlines.
The entire tech team almost walked out.
[By this time we were too exhausted to move ]

This quote shows some very sloppy and arrogant thinking.
And from the director of Spy Kids no less.
[A little ad hominem to spice up my rant ]

It highlights common misperceptions about the craft of technologists.

Unfortunately the creativity involved in technology is obfuscated by it’s very nature!
Only a person who understands PERL can appreciate the creativity and beauty of a well written PERL script.
Only a person who understands software architecture can appreciate the creativity involved in an appropriately and effectively used design pattern.

Lack of knowledge and comprehension becomes a barrier to even seeing any of the creativity involved in technology, and thus people dismiss all acts of technologists as being intrinsically uncreative.
They liken technologists to unskilled blue-collar workers operating a stamping press.

Not being capable of seeing the creativity involved does not mean that it does not exist.

The blanket statement of “Technical people can never be creative” is just offensive nonsense.

The best technologists are intrinsically creative.
They are creators.
They create.
[They create damn good technology!]

The conflation of ability with knowledge espoused by the quote is another common fallacious bagatelle.
The idea that if it can be contained by a book that it is intrinsically learnable by all.

Although it is true that you can gain a good rudimentary understanding of a specific technology from books, to become really proficient and creative in its use is something that takes experience and skill and ability.

Being able to play chords on a guitar does not mean that you are able to compose a symphony.

As such my reply-all to the email was as follows;

“What you need to learn is that being technical is not enough in this business. You have to become creative. Technical people are born intelligent – you’re lucky. Creative people however can never be intelligent. It’s something they’ll never be. You can’t buy it, find it, study it – you’re born with it. Too many technical people don’t want to learn how to be creative, so what happens? They become dependent on creative people. Become creative, you can learn that.
If you’re technical and creative, you’re unstoppable.” (emphasis mine)

Full of it’s own arrogance and absurd assumptions I hope that it exposes the offensive arrogant BS in the original.

The only part of the quote that is not utter biased ignorant crap, the only part the colleague should have included, and also something that I truly subscribe to, is;
“If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.”

In his piece in Newsweek, calling for the Pope to be brought to justice for his complicity in the paedophile scandal he had this to say;

The so-called Vatican City, a political nonentity covering about 0.17 square miles of Rome, was created by Benito Mussolini in 1929 as part of his sweetheart deal between fascism and the papacy. It is the last survival of the political architecture of the Axis powers.

This is, of course, an ad hominem attack against the legitimacy of the Papal State.

Hitchens should really know better than to use the failed rhetorical device of the Christian vox populi against itself.
Unless he is using it in a veiled attempt at irony, it has no real purpose in his piece.

The legitimacy of the Papal state is not determined by it’s close historical association with Fascism any more than the legitimacy of the atheist viewpoint should be influenced by Communists historical promotion of atheism.
They are concepts that are independent of each other and whose legitimacy should be evaluated independently.

The Papal State is not recognised as a state by international accord, as Hitchens himself points out;

… it is exempt from the annual State Department Human Rights Report precisely because it is not considered a state. (It maintains only observer status at the United Nations.)

This is a a far more convincing argument that the statehood of the Vatican has little international legal weight behind it than it’s historical association with Fascism.
He could also have pointed out other members of the UN with Observer Status, like the IOC, which, although also an ad hominem attack, has far more relevance to the pieces argumentative thrust on the current international legitimacy of the Vatican’s Statehood than the ad hominem he chose to use.

So how should we go about stating the case for bringing the Pope to justice?

The problem that Hitchens, Dawkins and others of their ilk (including me) have with convincing Christians of Papal culpability is one caused by a problem to do with human perception.
More specifically cognitive bias.

Christians immediately see an attack of the Pope, the Church hierarchy, or even a pedophiliac priest, all Christians, as an attack upon themselves.
And so they rush blindly to their defence.
[And the fact Hitchens, Dawkins, and myself, are all atheists probably does not help matters either!]

This is not something unique to Christians. It is a normal human failing that everyone, including atheists, succumbs to.

The best way to present anything that will induce such a cognitive bias to a group is to reframe or re-contextualise the issue at hand. That is, take it outside of the groups natural reaction and see how they react. For instance;

The CEO of a popular major US corporation was found to have aided and abetted paedophiles within his orgnaisation while serving as the companies COO. Although he himself was not involved in the actual abuse, he moved paedophiles from division to division, and country to country, bribing, threatening and humiliating victims, all in an eventually futile attempt to cover up the abuse.
When the abuse, and his complicity, was discovered, national governments and judiciaries decided not to prosecute him because it would upset the shareholders of the corporation.

Once the issue has been placed in a secular context it is quite clear that the CEO has acted with total opprobrium.

Any calls for leniency should quite naturally evapourate to anyone with even a shred of intellectual honesty.

For many years now Richard Dawkins has been working like a demon, you might say, to discredit all belief in God. He has now said that he wants to have the Pope arrested when he comes to Britain for later this year for covering up “crimes against humanity”.

Why not start an attack piece with some old-school ad hominem.
Dawkins most definitely has been working very hard to promote the atheist viewpoint in books such as The God Delusion, but he has been working hard to promote evolutionary biology, his professional discipline, with equal vigour in such works as The Greatest Show On Earth.

Most atheists I know are great people, sticking to the truth as they see it. Most also remain open to new possibilities and acknowledge that they are not entirely omniscient, and are respectful to those who think differently to themselves.

Dawkins, however, often seems to have only contempt for the majority of human kind who, unlike him, do believe in the spiritual. His selective campaigning about political issues makes me wonder: is he really an objective seeker of truth, or is he someone who just hates and wants to undermine Judaeo-Christian principles?

This is totally ludicrous. I suggest that Fitzgerald read, or re-read, The God Delusion.
Dawkin’s is exceedingly clear that he does not exclude the possibility of, although he determines it to be extremely remote, the existence of a god. This puts him firmly in the camp of atheists who “remain open to new possibilities and acknowledge that they are not entirely omniscient”.
And as for his selective campaigning; Dawkins has campaigned vigourously against the war in Iraq, been very active for the Great Ape Project and advocates replacing the British monarchy with an elected President.
Hardly the one-dimensional caricature trying to “undermine Judaeo-Christian principles” that Fitzgerald portrays.
And the way Fitzgerald starts with the whole “some of my best friends are atheists, but…” argument is repellent.

Dawkins has many times tried to say that Einstein was not spiritual in the way most people understand it. Yet Einstein said this:

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”

Here is perhaps the most important scientist of all time, with an incredibly profound mind, but with the humility to acknowledge how feeble and frail the human mind really is. Our universe is far from explained and the more our scientific knowledge increases, the more mysterious our reality seems to be. It is untrue to say that the settled explanation of our universe is that it is a meaningless accident that functions solely on mechanistic principles.

Einstein also said; “Teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up the source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests” and “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
The second of which is quoted quite a lot by Dawkins, and it seems to support his assertion that Einstein was a scientific materialist, with a certain kind of almost spiritualist wonderment in the nature of the universe.

Richard Dawkins has become a sort of Messiah for some atheists. He is an evolutionary biologist. I’m not sure why he feels that expertise in such an arcane field gives him authority to pronounce on spiritual questions. But, if biologists hold the keys to heaven, people may wish to consider the thoughts of Nobel Prize winning microbiologist Werner Arber, or eminent geneticist, Francis S. Collins, who led the Human Genome Project. Both are believers in God, and both find evidence for the divine in science itself. The debate about the reality of the spiritual is fascinating and is of profound importance to human kind, but Dawkins increasingly only brings to it noise and hatred.

Hardly a messiah.
Some of the weakest chapters in The God Delusion, some of which should have been excised by a judicious editor, are on the philosophical and theological positions for atheism. Dawkins is, after all, an evolutionary biologist, and should have left those sections to others more qualified.
Atheists regularly fisk each other. P.Z. Myers, for instance, is noted for attacking the FFRF, an organisation whose objectives he vigourously supports.
Arguing against Dawkins as an authority but then, in the very same paragraph, arguing for Arber and Collins, beggars belief.
Dawkins himself has been very keen to separate out his personal convictions as an atheist from those as an evolutionary biologist and educator.

It is unfortunate that others, like Fitzgerald, continue to conflate his two strong positions.

Dawkins is right to be angry about the awful cover up of child abuse in the Catholic Church, but he seems to have a tendency himself to be very selective in the issues he shouts about, and those he remains silent about. In that sense, he can be seen to hush up the many horrendous crimes committed by atheist ideologues in the 20th century.

Many earlier atheistic ideologies despised Jewish and Christian thinking, and were often obsessed by natural selection. The Nazi ideology, for example, was inspired in part by philosophers like Nietzsche who proclaimed that “God is dead” and that Christian morality was a “slave morality”, not befitting an “uebermench”. Atheistic communism, as manifested in the Soviet Union, hated religion, “the opium of the masses” and it brought about the murder of millions more in Gulags and purges.

Wow. The old chestnut of Redutio ad Hitlerum.
Two facts that Fitzgerald needs to become aware of;

• Nazi party banned Darwin
• Nazi party was founded on “Positive Christianity”

Hitler was most likely a non-Denominational Christian, based upon his book, published prior to his ascendence, and his speeches and policies.

His open verbal attacks against various established denominations are no more surprising than the acrimony of many of the sectarian schisms within Christianity itself.
“After Satan there is no greater rascal than the Pope.” – Martin Luther.

As recently as 1979, the Cambodian genocide killed 1.7 million people. These were murdered by communist atheists. War crimes tribunals are now being set up in Phnomh Penh. The Tibetan people continue to be persecuted by an atheistic tyranny. It is perfectly reasonable to be critical of the many bad things done in the name of religion, but I don’t see Dawkins loudly decrying the actions of atheists in Cambodia or Tibet. Why? Because his preference appears to be to emphasise religiously motivated barbarism over the many wrongs prompted by some atheistic ideologies.

Perhaps it is because in case of both Cambodia and China these barbarisms were not “done in the name of” atheism. They were done in the name of communism.
Conflating communism with atheism, as Hitler also did by-the-way, is yet another familiar logically fallacious bagatelle that the religious try to bring out as a convenient stick with which to beat atheism.
As Dawkins is a supporter of the dis-establishment of Monarchy and Religion in the UK, to be replaced by a secular, elected head-of-state in a system similar to the USA, you can hardly call him a communist.

Many now see Dawkins as something of a narrow-minded fundamentalist himself, increasingly redolent of a man with no sense of smell going around shrieking to everyone that their sense of smell is a delusion.

Perhaps Dawkins imagines that by promoting his grim personal philosophy as the ultimate truth, and by viciously attacking ancient moral systems upon which Western Civilization is founded, he will bring about some sort of atheist utopia. He seeks to magnify wrongs done by religions, and to breeze over the immense horrors brought about by some atheist belief systems. Yet we have seen what atheist utopias can look like.

Atheism is not new: the ancient Greeks knew it well, and in the 1600s Bacon said “a little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism, But depth in philosophy bringeth men’s mind about to religion.” What is new about atheism’s current incarnation is its increasing virulence and disrespect for other ways of thinking.

By now I am getting quite tired of refuting, line-by-line, every poorly constructed ad hominem fallacy. But ever onward.
After reading Dawkins’ works on evolutionary biology, or even The God Delusion and other pro-atheist works, I would hardly call his personal philosophy “grim”.
If anything it is quite inspiring, liberating and motivating.
Has Fitzgerald even read Dawkins?

The fact that Fitzgerald has to quotemine 17^th Century philosopher is quite telling.

Why not pick a noted philosopher from the 20th century?
Perhaps because most of them were atheists?

Yet some say this New Atheism is endangered; not necessarily philosophically, but demographically. This seems to be especially true in Europe, which is a far more secular place than the United States.

Ed West of the Daily Telegraph in the UK, recently noted that: “Across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives far outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that modern liberal secularism is endangered. That, anyway, is the thesis of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a fascinating new book by Eric Kaufmann… It may well be one of the most significant books of our era.

“It used to be taken for granted that, just as liberal democracy meant the end of history, so it also meant the end of religion. Once people became rich, educated and sexually liberated, they left irrational beliefs and other such nonsense behind. Christianity declined steadily from the mid-19th century but it wasn’t until the 1960s that European societies were able to fully abandon the emotional baggage of their civilisation’s infancy, and especially its repressive attitude to sex.

“But if what Kaufmann is saying is true – and the demographic data suggests it is – then the contraceptive Pill was not so much secular Europe’s liberation as its cyanide tablet… New Atheists comfort themselves with the idea that religious people will continue to drift their way, like rustics to the city, but the figures do not bear this out….

“It’s happened before: Kaufmann believes that Christianity’s rise from 40 followers to 6 million within three centuries had less to do with conversions that with higher birth rates, since the Christians rejected such pagan practises as polygamy and infanticide.

“Today we view the ancient world’s attitude to infanticide as barbaric and incomprehensible, but perhaps future generations will look at our attitudes to abortion in the same way – that’s not because pro-lifers would have won the argument, simply that (in addition to the effect of the Pill) abortion is killing the atheists of tomorrow.”

Is atheism being de-selected by natural selection? The more militant New Atheists appear to have a lot in common with the more fanatical religious fundamentalists, in that both are marinated in fear and hate, posses an iron certainty that they alone are right, and seek only to mock and deride those who think differently to themselves. These people create a lot of noise, and do not contribute meaningfully to a most fascinating debate about our universe and our place in it.

Is this a new class of logical fallacy? Argument from Demography? or is it just a rephrasing of yet another old chestnut?
I do find it sad that Fitzgerald does not seem to realise that the so-called new atheists ARE contributing meaningfully to a most fascinating debate about our universe and place in it.
If they were not then what is the point of his article?

The picture painted by Eric Kaufmann of future society divided clamorously between fundamentalist atheists and dogmatically religious groups is not pretty. Perhaps all sides ought to ponder Hamlet’s phrase, “there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies.” For as soon as we begin to think that we have all the answers, we are wrong, and curiosity and wonder dry up.

Something I actually agree with, finally, although only partially.
I find the idea of fundamentalist religion, which is on the rise globally, disturbing in the extreme.
And it is being facilitated, in part, by the sappy kind of liberal, free-pass, religiosity that Fitzgerald promotes in his very post.
We need, as a society, to be steadfast against it.
Something that, currently, only the new atheists seem to have the balls, or lack of humility, to do.

Yet secularisation has brought society the ability to expose the hidden actvties of religious authorities. A theocracy is as bad a place as a secular dictatorship. Both science and our shared wisdom is of profound importance to all of us. Atheists, believers, agnostics all have a huge amount to contribute to building a better society. Some of the most moral people I know are atheists, and some of the least moral are fervent believers. Neither side has a monopoly on truth or on virtue. But it is in a spirit of co-operative discourse that truth is best served, and sadly nowadays Dawkins appears to bring only discord, thereby making the truth ever more distant.

I find it strange that Fitzgerald seems, on the surface, to be in complete agreement with everything Dawkins has ever said on the nature of morality in society, but at the same time so totally ignorant of this fact.
Perhaps it is the very act of merely questioning if a Pope is above secular law, something that Martin Luther also did, that Fitzgerald has found so personally offensive that he cannot bring himself to accept that, in many instances, he and Dawkins are on the same page.
Fitzgerald does not have the balls to even address the disarmingly simple question Dawkins and Hichens have dared to raise.
Should the pope be considered above secular law?
Instead he uses the piece as a simple ad hominem attack on Dawkins.

I am sure he is sincere in believing his own preaching; but in reality he cannot and does not know the ultimate truth about the universe and the nature of mankind. And history shows that societies without a shared moral compass can be deeply destructive to human life, happiness and well-being. He claims the verdict is in, but the jury is out. The only clear truth is that his cold and premature verdict can bring human beings profound suffering and despair.

How moral does conspiring to hide the criminal acts of paedophiles sound to you?
I would personally rather live in a totally amoral atheistic world than one where the shared moral compass permits people who facilitate paedophiles to be immune from criminal prosecution.
But even in an amoral atheistic world there would still be a shared morality simply because humans are a naturally social species.
[Something on which Dawkins has spoken.]

Perhaps the most apposite warning for Dawkins comes from Einstein himself:

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”

Dawkins seems to feel that he has unravelled the mysteries of the universe. He is not the first to suffer from that delusion, and he will not be the last. As the ape-descended Dawkins struts around imagining that he knows the workings of every dimension of an infinitely complex universe from his tiny perch on this speck of a planet, the gods, in which he disbelieves, must be laughing big time.

Sigh.
Nothing, NOTHING, in anything that Dawkins, or any other new atheist for that matter, has ever written asserts that he “feels that he has unravelled the mysteries of the universe”.
If anything, Dawkins says clearly that the universe contains even more questions whenever science finds a single answer.
And that the pursuit of knowledge, using the rigours of the scientific method, is the path to true knowledge.
[Rather than some credulous, pseudoscientific, superstitious, mumbo-jumbo.]

Or, as I tend to say, “Science is about asking the right questions; Religion is about giving the wrong answers.”

I had a similar experience in January when I became snowbound at Manchester Airport in the UK and my flight was canceled.

But now, thanks to the bbc, I now know that KLM screwed me royally.

If a flight is delayed, there are strict European rules in place, which mean that the airline is obliged to supply meals and refreshments, along with accommodation if an overnight stay is required and you have a confirmed return booking.

Now, I had a confirmed return booking and KLM operatives refused to pay for a night in a Hotel.
They claimed, incorrectly it now seams, that they could not pay for my night in a hotel.

I can only assume that the reason they refused was the following;

However, if you are on the outward leg of a journey, this will not be given.

I am British and so maybe my British accent gave the staff the entirely incorrect assumption that I was on an outward leg.

I freaking live in Amsterdam. I am a freaking expat. I was returning home!

If any expat is reading this and is delayed don’t let it happen to you.
Demand your rights and get those arseholes to bloody well pay.

[For more information print this out in advance before flying.]

BTW, I have complained about being shafted.
Let us see how bad KLMs customer service really is.

This is an absurd and disingenuous straw man.

Let me concisely point out why;
The Flash VM is written and managed by Adobe, but he OS X JVM is written and managed by APPLE.

The problems that people experience with OS X JVM are entirely Apples own fault.
I cannot blame them for focusing their development on the proprietary Objective-C value chain rather than on the more generic Java, that is their business focus as a company.
But it is daft to say that the problems with the JVM on OS X are anyone’s fault OTHER than Apple’s.

The JVM as implemented by Apple needs to be passed a simple variable, apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar, and other such things, to get a more integrated OS X native look-and-feel.
Most Java developers cannot be bothered to branch their code.
Even if it is for a simple single property.
Also, why is this a simple property and not the default behavior of the OS X JVM?
Surely it makes much more sense to consistently use the UI idioms of the local OS as the default JVM behavior?
Apple are not even consistent with themselves on this extremely basic UI issue.
You have to explicitly say you want to use the native OS X menu, but the JVM by default uses the native OS X look and feel!

Some coders, thankfully, do go as far as to build and package Java based apps specifically for OS X and they actually look and perform well.

Another point to note is that Apple even have Java based products.
Which makes their overall lackadaisical support of Java quite confusing.

Apart from the fact the OS X JVM is maintained by Apple themselves, and the Flash VM is maintained by Adobe (well known for their atrocious resource hogging code), is the fact that Flash is only a browser plug-in that Adobe is trying to re-purpose into being much more.
Whereas the JVM is a run-time environment for an enterprise programming language.
[Warts and all!]

It is not even comparing like with like.

True, Java Applets are, thankfully, a thing of the horrendous past.

But that is entirely because the Java development community realized, perhaps a little too late to save Java’s image, that the average user did not want to download ridiculous large files that run in a proprietary in-browser container.

Something that Adobe and the Flash development community should grow up and finally realize.

Browser plug-ins, especially ridiculous resource hogging, poorly written, nonsense, should die.
And open standards should rule. [Which should be the topic for another post on the harm of Apple's closed ecosystem...]