[blogfocus saturday] some stalwarts, some new

A rose between two thorns or are they also roses?

1 Is this piece by Andrew Alison, arch-conservative, amazing or is it amazing? And who can gainsay Andrew on this?

I have never been a fan of John Prescott, but I must give credit, where credit is due. He used a PowerPoint presentation to tell us of his visit to our partner school in Sierra Leone and gave a good and witty speech. The pupils told us of their experiences visiting different countries; did an international rap song, as well as a Chinese dance. They were great, and Mr Prescott really praised them. So good on him for that.

2 If Nu-Labour think they've got away with something there, Bel puts paid to that with this piece on Broony:

Gordon Brown’s misery deepens. On Wednesday, he was prancing around with a sharp knife, pretending to be a taxcutter. The ploy backfired, and he ended up slitting his own throat instead. Almost everybody saw through his illusory tax cut, and by his own actions, he has now freed the timid Conservative Party to start talking about tax cuts. Today brings even worse news for him. A Yougov poll for the Daily Telegraph conducted after the Budget gives the Conservatives an eight-point lead.

3 Let it never be said that this blog doesn't run the views of the opposition, in this case, the NSS, brought to us bythe accommodating Matt Murrell:

For me, the only type of secularism worth supporting is that which is synonymous with freedom of religion - the idea that the government has no right to interfere with the freedom of religious organisations, except where those organisations interfere with the freedom of the individual. The NSS has done a lot of good in this direction, campaigning against compulsory worship in schools and against the EU declaring itself a Christian organisation.

Nine more bloggers here.

[saturday quiz] know your ants

Two famous ants. Now to the quiz:

1 Among the Native American religions the Hopi mythology claims that the first animal was:
a] the ant
b] the woolly mammoth
c] Genghis Khan

2 The Japanese word ari is represented by an ideograph formed of the character for insect combined with the character signifying moral rectitude. It refers to:
a] the grasshopper
b] the ant
c] the greater spotted purwill

3 Muslims in general avoid killing a particular creature, due to it being mentioned in religious texts. Which creature?
a] Christians
b] the ant
c] the ant's nearest cousin

4 Boric acid and borax are excellent for killing off which creature?
a] Genghis Khan
b] Christians
c] the ant

5 Pavement, Pharaoh, Argentine and Carpenter are all names for which creature?
a] the pig
b] the lesser crested purwill
c] the ant

6 The Santander people like to toast alive and eat which unfortunate denizen of nature?
a] Genghis Khan
b] the greater steppe yak
c] the ant

7 Charles Thomas Bingham noted that in parts of India, and throughout Burma and Siam, a paste of a green creature (Oecophylla smaragdina) is served as a condiment with curry. Which creature?
a] the sikh
b] the hindu
c] the ant

8 If you unscramble the "nat" and the "tan", you get which two words?
a] the ant
b] the horse latitudes
c] Genghis Khan

9 Which animal lives in a hot climate?
a] the polar bear
b] the yeti
c] the ant

10 Sol the King said, in Proverbs 6:6: "Go to ___ thou sluggard." [Fill in the gap]
a] the yeti
b] the ant
c] Genghis Khan

11 It has been estimated that brain of ___ may have the same processing power as a Macintosh II computer. [Fill in the gap]
a] Tony Blair
b] the ant
c] George Bush

12 The introduction of a writing system based on the Uighur script was NOT due to one of these? Which one?
a] Temüjin
b] Genghis Khan
c] the ant

Answers to questions 1 to 12:

the ant

Further reading and confirmation of some of these answers here and here and here and here. Bonus question for those kind enough to indulge me thus far:

Which Mongol leader of the early 1200s will be forever associated with the ant?
a] Tony Blair
b] the red crested purwill
c] Genghis Khan

[I know the answer but I'm not going to tell you.]

[bullying] confessions of a cad

Ian Ogilvy, the School Bully

The trouble with bullying is defining it. Some cases are as clear as day. Workplace bullying is well known, school bullying is rife, I've seen girls bullying girls something awful and head teachers can bully staff. Army bullying has been seen by most undertaking officer training, particularly for subaltern rank. Sometimes it's less clearcut and comes down to perceptions.

I once had someone try it on with me while I was working for HM Customs. This 'gentleman', who had just been promoted above me, decided to reorganize my work station which I had 'just so'. It had taken a year of negotiation with my supervising officer and the Inspector to get the standing orders rewritten and so I wasn't going to put up with that.

When I explained to the 'worthy gentleman' his error of judgement and the consequences of ever coming within two metres of my desk again, he went beserk and 'belittled me' with every swearword he could dream up, stood over me physically, [I'm not a tall man], then officially complained about my 'uncooperativeness'.

I compiled a dossier on him over the next fortnight - when he turned up to work, when he actually began work, which girls he was using HM's time chatting up and so on. It reached the Inspector's desk at the end of the month and naturally got no further but it did get 'my friend' off my back. Trouble was, I didn't let up and arranged 'little accidents' for him and when I'd get to work, I'd go over to 'supervise' his own station for him, making little comments on the state of his desk and so on. I was hauled over the coals for that.

So who was the bully?

I posit that there is blogosphere bullying too. Some big bloggers will only give the time of day to sites who link to them and then refuse to link back. Some august circles of blogfriends consistently won't quote you but will then run a post by one of them on that topic and immediately link. Some consider that the Blogpower issue and the Great Blogwars some weeks later were getting close to bullying.


While the bullying question is vexed, I've always liked Eleanor Roosevelt's comment and try to remember it as some sort of mantra:

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.


Girls are not always sugar and spice.

[cool blogschemes] things stumbled into

I'm in eight schemes:

1] Blogpower - the most human one of all. Join us and other members will come round to your place, visit and comment. This is a real community, medium-tech, where everyone knows everyone else. It has no political view, no common thread except that sense of helping one another.

2] MyBlogLog - I really like this one and would love to see Blogpowerers in it too because many of our regular reads are there. Some may see it as rivalling Blogpower or at least preventing members from joining Blogpower. I can't comment on that but it's nice to see those faces appear and know that a human being is reading your site.

3] BlogLinker.com - I got into this through an American site and the idea is that if you link, this person automatically links back to you.

4] Right Links Banner Exchange - The brainchild of Euroserf, this links right wing and Eurosceptic bloggers to each other and was the first scheme I was in. Very useful for finding people of a similar political bent.

5] Eurosceptic Bloggers - Another of Euroserf's ideas, the name says it all. I need to spend a lot more time here but their latest is always e-mailed to me.

6] RSS - I don't understand it at all but I'm told that somehow I got into it. I suspect either Tom Paine or Thunderdragon put me in and thanks for that. I don't know what it's meant to do but it seems cool enough if the Dragon is in it.

7] Blogrolling.com - Not so much a scheme as a wonderful way of organizing one's blogroll, once you've entered all your links in a really easy to understand manner, you can change them round, add info, revise and do anything you want - it automatically appears in your sidebar.

8] Voluntary Code Free Zone - A scheme started by Disillusioned and Bored, to resist the attempt by the authorities to impose a code of practice on the blogosphere.

I've also now redone my Blogrolls, changed the format and the way I link, added 6 and deleted 1. After much soul searching, I felt the only fair way was to roll according to frequency of interaction but none of these lists are immutable. My cunning plan is to revise the lists every Sunday.

[friday quiz] are you a true scientist

With all the recent references in this blog to scientists, here's a chance to prove you are one. How many of these do you know?

1] How many noble gases are there?
2] Which planet has an orbital period of 687 days?
3] What is inflamed if you suffer from Nephritis?
4] Aquaculture is a term for what?
5] What kind of animal is a basilisk?
6] What is Borborygmus?
7] Evaporation is changing from a liquid to gas and gas to a liquid is called condensation. What is changing from a solid to a gas called?
8] If 8 bits make a byte, what do 4 bits constitute?
9] What did Einstein get the Nobel prize for?
10] Name anything that happened in Britain on September 3rd, 1752.

Answers are here.

[debate] only undertaken from entrenched positions

When did I last lift someone's entire post [almost] and repost it? I must do so here because it says what I wanted to myself. It's by Chris Dillow:

What puzzles me about so many people is not what they believe, but the sheer vehemence with which they do so. I suspect there are at least four biases that cause such fanaticism.

1. Over-rating intellect and learning. Most politically active people are more intelligent or better educated than average. And a common error amongst intelligent educated people is to exaggerate the importance of intelligence and learning. They forget (or never knew) Hayek's insight, that knowledge is inherently dispersed, and unattainable by any single mind.

2. Ego involvement. Political views define who we are, so a challenge to them is a challenge to our identity.

3. Groupthink. For most of us, there's a huge correlation between our political opinions and those of our friends. Hardly anyone echoes Robert Nozicks' view: "I do not welcome the fact that most people I know and respect disagree with me" (quoted in this great book). This means we become over-confident in our opinions, bolstered by the fact that so many good people agree with us.

4. Incentives. One problem with vulgar democracy is that incentives favour cheap talk. If we overstate our case, government is more likely to listen to us than if we state our case to the extent warranted by the evidence. Hence the importance of "community leaders."

These biases - there may be others - mean that people with centrist views can be irrational too. They also mean we shouldn't expect political debate to be fruitful or even enlightening. Still, we can try, can't we?

I wonder how many of Chris's readers would nod at the sentiment but of course, know deep down that it didn't apply to them? For myself, I plead guilty. Also, in my situation, the debate over climate change has shown the above to have substance and not just from my side.