Here in the UK we are suffering from an excess of interfering busy-bodies who have pet theories about how the world should be run. All for our own good, of course, we cannot be trusted to be in charge of our own lives. No, rather we should all behave as these unelected control-freaks think we should and be damned grateful that they are saving us from ourselves. Most of these unspeakable swine work for fake charities that are really funded by the government to lobby the government on the subject of their weird ideas and distorted world views in the hope that it will result in a change of policy in line with the meddlers’ latest whim. These people are always publishing reports or appearing in the mass media in the hope that if they keep banging on and on they will eventually be taken seriously and so justify all that money that has been thrown at them by the government.

I’ll give you some recent examples. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is the perfect example of a bunch of self-satisfied pen-pushers who will take any opportunity to get themselves in the press. Some of their lunacy was reported on the BBC News website today. After the Christmas day bomber, Mr Abdulmutallab, hid explosive materials on his body and tried to blow up an aircraft heading to the USA there has been the usual knee-jerk, ‘something must be done’ reaction from the government who have committed to installing body scanners at UK airports. “That doesn’t sound so bad?” you might well be thinking.

The EHRC realised they could get themselves in the press and show that they have some point to their petty, whining existence by criticising these scanners. Apparently the devices risk breaching an individual's right to privacy under the Human Rights Act. Does that sound convincing? It sounds like a load of tosh to me. They go on to suggest that body scanners could generate illegal images of children and images of celebrities that could be leaked online. The BBC News website helpfully provides a picture of the type generated by these scanners. I’ve reproduced it to the right of this paragraph. These are characterised by the EHRC as ‘naked’ images which are are likely to have a negative impact on privacy, especially in relation to certain groups such as disabled people, the elderly, children and the transgendered community.

It is clear from the body scanner picture that they do not generate pictures of people looking as if they are naked. They are a fuzzy blur, with no real fine details about the target’s body visible. You’d have to be pretty desperate to find the opaque images from these scanners in any way a breach of someone’s privacy, they are just not detailed enough to tell much about a person’s body.

Moreover, even if body scanners produced a more defined image of someone’s body under their clothes, it still would not mean that the scans would be child porn as the EHRC suggests. Nakedness does not equate with pornography and body scanners do not automatically upload the images they scan to Flickr.

Finally, why should body scanners, with their fuzzy, indistinct images, be a particular worry for disabled people, the elderly or the transgendered community? It is just totally vacuous to suggest such groups would have any more difficulty with being scanned than anyone else. These kind of statements, which try to bring victim status to particular groups by saying they would be unfairly treated, are just a feeble attempt by the pressure group involved to make the whatever they are raving about seem a more serious, iniquitous problem and so justify the idea that ‘something must be done’. There are legitimate reasons why body scanners might not be a great idea, for example security experts have claimed that body scanners would only have a 50% chance of spotting the bomb carried by Mr Abdulmutallab, but the extremely vague possibility that a body scan may reveal that someone in a dress might have the suggestion of a penis being in their pants is not one of them.

There are more of these fake charities spewing out countless reports about how only their pet theories can improve the world and everyone else just cannot be trusted with anything important. A few days ago I discovered an excellent blog devoted to debunking the ravings on Don Shenker, chief executive of the government-funded pseudo-charity Alcohol Concern. Quite why the government should be funding this nutcase organisation is beyond me, but then the Labour government under the odious Gordon Brown is only too happy to let his ‘big government’ and the unelected special interest groups nanny us all.

The desire of the government to interfere with our drinking habits has been much on my mind of late. The recent report from the Health Select Committee (HSC) into alcohol consumption was woven from half-truths, manipulated data and unfounded assertions. These people clearly want to dictate how much we can drink, where we can drink it and how much it will cost. Most people have a perfectly healthy relationship with alcohol, I know I do, and yet all of us are being demonised by these jumped up farts who think they know better than us even if they have to publish reports which are a tissue of mendacity and duplicity to show they know best. I dropped by a good beer blog earlier and the author of the site has written a number of articles which debunk most of the claims in the HSC report. He demonstrates that alcohol adverts do not encourage under-age drinking, that cutting overall consumption of alcohol does not necessarily result in a drop in alcohol misuse, that alcohol is getting more expensive rather than cheaper as the neo-prohibitionists claim and much more. All of these blog posts of his are well worth reading; if you know how the bastards are trying to mislead you it is easier to stand up for them.

The problem with all of these hideous gits clamouring for their own ideas to be adopted as government policy is that, even if their most extreme ideas are not implemented, the propagation of the view that there are problems and ‘something must be done’ will result in legislation creep. Bit by bit our freedom will be eroded until it will be impossible to do anything without the government’s express permission. The suggestion floated recently that adults should have ‘entitlement cards’ that have to be produced when buying alcohol and act as ration books to control the amount we purchase shows that this is the aim of some of these nutcases. They want to control us, and unless we stand up for ourselves and our rights the filthy swine will get their way.

The Daily Telegraph has an interesting article concerning a twelfth century poem that has just been translated into modern English. The poem itself is piece of propaganda composed by English intellectuals of the time to whip up anti-French feeling. Seems we English have not got on with the French for some time; the poem characterises the French as lazy, arrogant cowards. The stanza I particularly like is:

People remind them often enough about
This source of shame, but they may as well not have bothered;
For they take neither offence or account,
As they know no shame.

Naturally, I love French culture and the French people, even if sometimes they can be a bit… well… French.

I’m reading an excellent history book at the moment: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England. It is quite an unusual take on the history book genre in that it aims to explain what life was like for all the social strata of people living in the fourteenth century and how we, as modern people, would respond to life during that period. It covers everything from food to recreational activities, from the structure of towns to the effects of the great plague. It provides a lot of detail on aspects of life that most history books just would not contain. An example of this is the section on medieval humour, and I shall reproduce a medieval joke here:

Two merchants are having a chat and one of them says, “I’ve been married four times now, and each time my wife has hung herself from the oak tree in my garden.”

The second merchant replies, “Can I have a cutting from this noble tree?”

So you can tell medieval humour was not terribly sophisticated. The book is filled with fascinating details like this, and reading it gives a real sense of how the people and life was so different back then. Another example is the staggering misogyny in medieval England, no modern English woman would allow themselves to be treated as the distinctly inferior people that women were in the fourteenth century.

If you enjoy history and want a compelling and engaging book to read I can highly recommend this.

The nutcase theist Pat Robertson blamed his particular god for the earthquake in Haiti; apparently his flavour of god was angry with the Haitians for rejecting Jesus. Obvious bollocks, of course. If he really wanted to be taken seriously he should have gone with the currently fashionable idea that we get punished with natural disasters because we are evil, consumerist, free-market swine who fail to treat the world with the delicate touch it needs. This is also manifest bollocks. Whenever there is a natural disaster, or even something as minor as the recent cold weather in the UK, the environmentalist nutcases all get terribly worked up about how they are warnings from nature that our shameful ways will lead to the end of civilisation at best and the total annihilation of the world at worst. They get a cheap thrill lecturing us that they know best whilst the rest of us cannot be trusted to live on the planet like responsible people (ie. living in yurts made from cow dung and only eating grass clippings. Sorry, organic grass clippings).

Some appalling examples of this hat-stand thinking* can be found in this excellent article on Spiked.

*A good example that is shows how misanthropic the environmental extremists can be are the Australian bush fires of 2009, which killed 173 people and destroyed 2,000 homes; they were started by arsonists and so are not really linked to any bogus environmental problems. However, these fires  were characterised by Jonathon Porritt, a green who has advised both the UK government and the royal family, as being linked to Australia’s pursuit of ‘unbridled affluence, California-style’. So Australians burned for their sins; how dare they to try to generate wealth! He went on to say that the problem with the Australian bushfires is that they clearly weren’t ‘bad enough’, because Aussies straight away went back to pursuing their ‘dreams of unbridled affluence’. Too many people spout petty, vindictive, sanctimonious drivel like this.

You have to fiddle with your device’s registry to do this, so if you are a bit nervous about that you may want to stop reading now.

In a registry editor (I use Resco File Explorer’s registry editor plug-in) go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shell\TaskBar and change both values to 1. This will make the battery icon always visible. You’ll need to restart your device for the registry change to take effect.

Unfortunately, the battery icon in Windows Mobile 6.5 is ugly and uninformative, so I suggest you install a better one. The best battery icon I’ve seen comes from the Misfortune Taskbar, but the complete installation of that does not work on WM6.5. However, if you go here you can get just the battery icon and it does work. As the instructions there say, install SDKcerts.cab (there is a link to it on that page) then download and install the Ahen 6a taskbar. Restart your device and you’ll have a much better looking and useful battery icon.

I’ve been vaguely following the stories about non-Muslims in Malaysia using the word ‘Allah’; here is the latest piece. This started when a Catholic newspaper there used the word Allah to refer to their Christian version of God. This has resulted in some of the Muslims majority in Malaysia getting a bit excited and throwing petrol bombs at Christian churches, schools and the like. The Muslims claim that Christians are using the word Allah to try and convert Muslims to Christianity; the logic behind that being so opaque and risible that it must be one of the crappest excuses for violence the world has ever seen.

The air over there must be thick with hypocrisy. Is it really alright to say that one group of people cannot use a particular word, whilst it is fine for an arbitrarily different group to be able to say? Religious people think there is something special about their brand of lunacy which allows them to say what they like about whatever they like. Of course, people who don’t belong to their nutter cults (be they atheists or other flavours of religion) are not allowed to comment on anything, certainly not violate the ‘theologically-correct’ religious-person’s right to say whatever the fuck they like.

Some weirdos have the strange idea that people have a right not to be offended, especially when it comes to religious beliefs (see this utterly appalling article for a weaselling defence of this). This is of course complete toss (as this extremely good article points out). There is nothing special about religious beliefs that means they must automatically be protected and respected; respect always has to be earned. If someone offends you then that is your problem, not theirs; it is you who chose to be offended by them for whatever personal reasons you have and your reasons will never be universally held. If you do not like a newspaper using a particular word do not buy the bloody newspaper, it is quite easy. Free speech is the safeguard that protects all of our other rights. The right to say only the ‘right’ things is a sad, shallow idea not worth defending as there is clearly no objective list of acceptable things we can say and the objectionable things we cannot say.

Of course, some things people say do have to be taken a bit more seriously. If the Malaysian newspaper published an article saying that all Muslims were evil molesters of little children and it is every Christian’s duty to kill as many of them as possible then this would be incitement to commit violence and you can legitimately think such things should not be given uncritical coverage. When it is incitement it is not a case of offending people, it is a case of people having their lives threatened. I don’t think people should be in fear of their lives because the hard of thinking disagree with them. Extremists demonstrating in the streets carrying signs saying “Behead people who insult our religion” (whatever religion it is) are inciting violence and they should be watched carefully in case they go on to commit it.

Freedom of speech must be absolute. Once people start picking and choosing what can and cannot be said this list of proscribed words and ideas will only ever grow as more and more partisan and un-representative organisations start petitioning governments and courts to protect them from offence in their much-vaunted victim-status. This does not mean you cannot protest and demonstrate against outrageous peoples’ behaviour, but not by violence or seeking to restrict their rights.

"Let the idiots and bullies speak openly and they will be revealed for what they are!"

*I am happy to admit it is not just the religious people who do this. A few months back Nick Griffin, the odious leader of the odious British National Party, was invited to appear in a serious political discussion program on television. I was scandalised by the number of people who said he should not appear on television and not be allowed to expound the racist views of his party. Of course he should, he and his voters have a particular world-view and, even if we disagree with it, they are allowed to talk about it. By all means demonstrate against these views and try to propagate more civilised ideas, but you cannot gag or infringe someone’s civil liberties just because you do not like their ideas.

Christmas and New Year holidays are a great excuse to nosh on vast quantities of lovely food. Indeed, before Boxing day much was being cooked and consumed. Then, from somewhere, I picked up a vom-tastic stomach bug. This has spoiled my fun somewhat. I had to cook for a dinner party on the 27th and even though the food and wine was brilliant none could pass my lips. The guests enjoyed it, which I suppose was the important thing. I hope it wears off soon. Much as the weight-loss angle is good, feeling like hurling all of the time is a lot less good.

I played with something really clever today: called Swype it is a clever take on solving the problem of typing on a small screen. Rather than poke  around typing each character of a word individually, you drag your finger across the onscreen keys so your finger crosses each character. The software is clever enough to work out what word you have ‘Swyped’. This may sound a bit difficult and contrived, but I loved playing about with it, it is a fast and intelligent system for writing words quickly on a small screen. Perhaps it is not so surprising that this software is so neat as it was invented by the same chap who invented the T9 text entry system for mobiles. You can view videos of how it works on the Swype website.

Sadly, Swipe Inc currently only sell their software direct to mobile phone manufacturers, the Samsung Omnia II being the phone I tried it in. This means, alas, you cannot just download a copy, or even pay for one at the moment. Some people have extracted the installation file from an Omnia II and distributed it on dodgy sites, but you shouldn’t be searching for or downloading such dubious stuff. If you want this brilliant software for your touch screen phone I suggest you do as I am going to and email Swype saying you want them to sell their brilliant software direct.

I shaved off all of my body hair. Yes, I was that bored. My skin feels really soft but a bit stubbly. This is a problem with shaving body hair. If you shave too closely you may have baby smooth skin for a day or two, but you’ll get ingrown hairs and a general irritated rash. Shave less closely and you are a stubbly kid. The trick of shaving one’s own arse, we are told, is to squat over a mirror.

Need proof that I’ve shaved? Here it is:

You can click for an enlargement and see the lack of body hair and the horrific state of my arms.

I think a nappy, shortalls and baby booties make for ideal apparel on a Thursday afternoon.

My writer chum tells me what I have written so far captures the terror of paranoid schizophrenia, but seems a bit hollow without more background information. I’m going to have to think about this as a lot of the memories are difficult, and a lot have been blasted out of my mind by electro-shock therapy. Ouch! Over the next few days I’ll try re-writing the first chapter and see what I think of it.

6000-odd words in and I have suffered a crisis of stylistic confidence in my book. My aim was to write short chapters which concentrated on one aspect of being insane. The chapters themselves would be composed of short paragraphs in order to capture the intense, frightening feeling of paranoid schizophrenia.

However, my life before I went mad was quite interesting, indeed my life when I was mad had many fascinating events in it. I wonder if I should have more back-story.

I have asked a friend who is a writer to have a look at it and see what he thinks. He is coming around for drinkies on Friday so we can discuss it then.

Last night I stayed up until 5am. This is because I decided start trying to write a book. I’ve decided to call it “Everyone wants me dead” and it details my experiences with paranoid schizophrenia. I wrote 1500 words last night and so far I am pleased how it is going. Despite the difficulty I feel remembering and exploring all the experiences of being very ill, writing it down is quite cathartic. I hope my text captures the terror and intensity of paranoid schizophrenia.

I updated the firmware in my TG01 so it now has Windows Mobile 6.5. I care little for most of the UI improvements as I use SPB Mobile Shell which provides the perfect smartphone UI. What has pleased me no end is that the update fixed a piece of TG01 flakiness: the reliability of bluetooth connections. I’ve read reports of this from other people. It would often take many attempts to re-connect a bluetooth device after disconnection and you could be fiddling about for a while getting it to recognise your headset again. This fix has resulted in me blogging on the TG01 when I am out and about using a fold-up bluetooth keyboard. That excellent boozer The Greenwich Union has free Wifi and I have been reporting on the beers live from the pub.

The other mobile thing that has tickled my fancy is the new beta version of Opera Mobile that is out, Opera Mobile 10. It is hilariously fast, in terms of downloading content and also panning and zooming about on pages. It is a very mature browsing platform and you do not feel limited by browsing on a phone.

If you are using a Windows Mobile phone that has a turn of speed to it (in terms of having OpenGL ES accelerated graphics) I’ve been playing two free 3D games which look just wonderful. Experiment 13 is a entertaining 3D puzzle game that has you warping gravity in order to save your avatar from the world he finds himself in. The Electopia demo doesn’t have the greatest control system in the world, but it is another looker of a 3D game. My long-time reader will know I like Xtrakt, a 3D shooty/racing kind of game. There is a lot of fun to be had with these new whizzy phones and mine certainly eats into the reading time.

Since I have been feeling better I haven’t felt like doing so much baby stuff. Sure, I still cuddle Butter the bear at night, and often wear nursery-printed clothes, but as far as putting nappies on and playing baby games goes I just haven’t fancied it.

Hmmm… I could put on a nappy now… I don’t have much writing to do today, so why not? Yeah, I’ll go for it.

Edit: Just to prove I am wearing a nappy (and a nursery-printed onesie) here is the evidence:

The cat seems quite interested in my nappy.

As I’ve mentioned, I generally use Opera Mobile 9.7 as the browser on my Toshiba TG01 Windows Phone. It is a really fast and transparently simple browser. The beta version of this that is on the Opera website does not work with the TG01, but if you go here you can download a more recent build that will work.

I like Opera Mobile so much I’ve been thinking for a while about trying the desktop version. Last night I downloaded and installed the 10.10 Beta and so far I am quite pleased with it. It supports ad blocking ‘out of the box’, has a spellchecker, will sync bookmarks across computers and comes with Opera Unite.

Opera Unite is a built-in file and web server in the browser. System administrators’ hair is probably curling at this point with horror about how insecure this is, but it seems quite handy to me. You can share your media files as well, which is quite nifty, so you can have your music collection anywhere you can connect to the internet.

So, do I have any general views on the best browser I’ve used? Much as I like Microsoft software, I only use IE8 in compatibility mode to connect to sites that code against the IE6 ‘standard’. I’ve been pretty happy with Firefox as a general browser, but as to whether Opera 10.10 is better I cannot yet say. I’ve set Opera to be my default browser and I’ll play with it for a few weeks.