Zapiro puppet program pleases
I watched the Zapiro “Z-News” puppet program last night. It was roughly produced, some of the voices fell short and the puppetry was rudimentary. But it is a pilot, and there is nothing that proper funding won’t fix.
There are some really funny bits: Thabo singing “I Will Survive” on Idols (“…I will survive, I will survive, … and so on and stuff like that,..”) , Zacob Zuma also on Idols doing a double-header (as it were) singing both “De la Rey” (with shower-head affixed) and “Umshini wam”. The segment with Manto Tshabala performing an operation with beetroot, lemon and garlic is hilarious.
The voices for both Thabo and Jacob are excellent. Helen Zille’s is poor. But generally I enjoyed it and found its good bits far outweighed the poor. Watch it, it’s fun.
This of course follows the cancellation of the show by the SABC on the on the grounds that “South African viewers are not ready for it”. The SABC then went on to cancel a documentary on political satire in South Africa, not once but twice. Luckily, the documentary fell into the hands of the Mail & Guardian, and you can watch it here.
South Africa suffers from a extreme dearth of political satire. It also suffers from a stifling political correctness that causes any criticism of the ANC to attract vicious denunciation. Critics are regularly dubbed counter-revolutionaries, colonialists, cultural imperialists and, the favourite, racists. And given the apartheid history of the country, the racist tag is something that most “white” people want to avoid.
This political correctness is self-reinforcing: the more political criticism and satire is suppressed, the more intolerant the general ANC defender becomes. To the point where it appears that no TV channel will carry political satire. This is very dangerous to the future of democracy in South Africa.
The rise of the comedian in political commentary in the US, has resulted in the majority of young people getting most of their political news and analysis from channels such as Comedy Central. Jon Steward is now a major political force, overshadowing political analysis in the traditional media.
Young people in South Africa need to see that it’s okay to laugh at and criticise their leaders. Only by exposing them to popular political satire will this stultifying political correctness be broken down.
Catholic Church downplays child abuse
As was expected, the Catholic Church is largely in denial about the revelations contained in the Ryan Report of widespread child abuse perpetrated in Irish Catholic institutions, over a period of many decades. The Ryan Report itself is under attack for providing a smokescreen for the Catholic church.
The Irish government has bent over backwards to shield the Church. In this video Michael O Brien, a victim of this abuse, lays into minister Noel Dempsy who signed a deal limiting the Church’s liability.
The South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference really tackled the issue head-on. They lead with a highly gripping story of Abbot Francois Pfanner’s centenary. Yeah, whatever. They did have the energy to comment on Angels and Demons, though.
The Archbishop of Westminster, the new Catholic leader in England and Wales, used his installation ceremony to attack atheists, but of course said nothing about child abuse.
At least we have one senior cleric condemning the outrages listed in the Report. Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has criticised the Irish Catholic orders for concealing the abuse, and called for much more money to come from these orders to compensate the victims – 90% of which are being paid by the Irish taxpayer, thanks to slime-balls like Noel Demsey.
True to form, the orders refuse to do so. These human puss-bags, probably too busy piously fingering their rosaries made by child slave labour, have a better idea:
Sensing the rapidly growing public mood of anger, senior members of the clergy
have been urging the religious orders to do more. Those appeals appeared to
have fallen on deaf ears last night, when the congregations issued a
statement saying that while they “accepted the gravity” of the Ryan report
they would not do what Cardinal Brady and others have urged.A statement from the orders said: “Rather than reopening the terms of the
agreement reached with Government in 2002, we reiterate our commitment to
working with those who suffered enormously while in our care. We must find
the best and most appropriate ways of directly assisting them.”
That’s right – they want to find the “most appropriate ways” to assist their victims. Aren’t they exactly the right people to judge what is best for their countless victims. Of course, it would not include compensating their victims for the lifelong suffering they’ve endured. As Mary Raferty says, “At the rate they are going, not even the pope himself could separate them from their cash.”
But the most depraved, disgustingly immoral and arrogant response came from Bill Donohue, president of the US-based Catholic League.
Reuters is reporting that “Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children,” yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. Four types of abuse are noted: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. Physical abuse includes “being kicked”; neglect includes “inadequate heating”; and emotional abuse includes “lack of attachment and affection.” Not nice, to be sure, but hardly draconian, especially given the time line: fully 82 percent of the incidents took place before 1970. As the New York Times noted, “many of them [are] now more than 70 years old.” And quite frankly, corporal punishment was not exactly unknown in many homes during these times, and this is doubly true when dealing with miscreants.
Regarding sexual abuse, “kissing,” and “non-contact including voyeurism” (e.g., what it labels as “inappropriate sexual talk”) make the grade as constituting sexual abuse. Moreover, one-third of the cases involved “inappropriate fondling and contact.” None of this is defensible, but none of it qualifies as rape. Rape, on the other hand, constituted 12 percent of the cases. As for the charge that “Irish Priests” were responsible, some of the abuse was carried out by lay persons, much of it was done by Brothers, and about 12 percent of the abusers were priests (most of whom were not rapists).
The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower. They think about rape.
This revolting creep thinks there’s nothing wrong with a bit of rape, beating and emotional isolation, particularly since many of the children were “miscreants”. Yes, they got (slightly less than) what they deserved. Could anyone in the Catholic laity read this depraved defence and then still send their children into the care of these utterly morally bankrupt and corrupt church officials?
I repeat, Shut them down!
Pat Condell re-emerges
Pat Condell has been away for a while, tending his garden and soaking up some sunshine. Well, these gentle activities have done nothing to douse the fire in his belly. Here’s his latest video:
I wish the man would stop sugar-coating his views.
The ANC doth protest too much
The vilification of Helen, as noted in a previous post, continues unabated. It has been seen the most outrageous, filthy, misogynistic and defamatory bile being spewed out by the attack dogs of the ANC and its allies. As she herself points out:
It did so in brutal fashion this week on a facebook site that listed Deputy Home Affairs Minister, Malusi Gigaba, and ANCYL spokesman, Floyd Shivambu, as administrators. The postings on this site exposed such depths of bigotry and misogyny, that it is almost understandable why gender activists avoid the real issues. The consequences of doing so can be devastating.In public, we often hear the ANC reciting its mantra of a “non-racial, non-sexist society”. The warped set of hateful patriarchal attitudes displayed on this site, perhaps reveals more of the truth.
Led by their secretary general who declared Helen an enemy, and abetted by their glorious leader’s silence, these vile louts have seemingly been given free reign to spew their defamatory hate speech. The administrators of the crude and juvenile Facebook group, “ZILLE IS STILL A VENOMOUS WHITE RACIST ADULTERER” is none other than Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba. (The other is our Humpty Dumpty, linguist genius Floyd Shivambu.)
This group has now been removed, but you get the idea. What the ANC has demonstrated is that they are deeply racist, misogynistic and ….. scared.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the ANC are dead scared of auntie Helen and the DA. They dare not let them succeed, since it will show the ANC for what it is: a corrupt bunch of do-nothings who live to keep their snouts in the public trough at the direct expense of the poor deluded people who voted for them. In other words, they are terrified that the DA will run a clean administration and deliver services to ANC supporters. Then maybe – just maybe – the voting fodder in thrall of the ANC will start acting in their own interests.
So expect this war to be intensified. Don’t think these threats to make the Western Cape ungovernable are idle. These ANC attack dogs are fear biters.
Shut them down!
Imagine a secular charity organisation, say Rotary International, running a large network of orphanages and schools and it is found that widespread abuse and exploitation was being perpetrated on the boys and girls under its care. That this routinely included regular, vicious beatings, rape and other sexual abuse by the care-givers, deprivation in appalling conditions and slave labour. Imagine that when any complaints against people in the organisation were made, the hierarchy closed ranks and the complainants were punished and sidelined and the abuser was left to continue his cruelty without censure. Imagine that.
What do you think would happen to such an organisation? Do you think governments would commit young offenders to its care? Do you think parents would ignore all the ugly rumours and send their misbehaving children to these institutions?
No, this is what would happen: the organisation, and all its orphanages, schools and other institutions would be CLOSED DOWN and its members rounded up in public disgrace and sentence to long periods of imprisonment. That is what would happen.
So when a religious organisation, say the Catholic Church, does exactly that, should there be any difference in how this outrage is handled by the authorities? Well the Irish authorities certainly do. The many complaints over the years, the large number of unexplained suicides, the bitter, broken people ending up on the fringe of society – all these the Irish authorities shrunk away from in their obsequious deference to the Catholic Church.
Even the damages that have been awarded to some of the victims will largely be paid by Irish taxpayers. The Church is always accommodated. Names of known offenders – evil rapists and serial abusers – will not be revealed in another deal with this organisation that has brought so much misery to so many helpless victims in its captivity and “care”. The Church is always accommodated.
As we all know, this systematic child abuse by Catholic priests has been reported from all around the world. And wherever complaints have been made the Catholic leadership has protected the perpetrators and more often than not punished the victims. A story from South Africa illustrates this perfectly.
John McCann was molested by his Catholic priest at a church Christmas party. He happened to be the nephew of the Archbishop of Cape Town, Cardinal Owen McCann. This neither deterred the priestly paedophile rapist nor gave John McCann a chance at justice. Instead the Catholic instinct of of protecting the Church before anything else – including one’s own family or even simple things like evil being done by its agents – kicked in. This man of God, so lauded by his congregation and his country – Nelson Mandela called him “one of South Africa’s great sons” and “a man of great ability and wisdom” – this man turned his own family into victims for daring to murmur a complaint against a nasty child rapist:
My devoutly Catholic mother stood up to my uncle, both over what happened to me and my younger brother, who was severely beaten by a drunk teacher at De La Salle. She was shunned for it: the cardinal declined to visit her when she was terminally ill, despite being nearby in Pretoria on Bishops’ Conference business. My sister, who is older than I, witnessed a heated discussion between them some years later.
My parents met him at the bishop’s house in Johannesburg to discuss her intention to withdraw her sons from Catholic schools. She recalls my mother saying words to the effect of: “I am sick of my children being assaulted and abused by the church.” He threatened her with excommunication.
He was elevated to the College of Cardinals by Pope Paul VI, so this was a threat from a prince of the church. She, in turn, threatened to go to the press and he backed down.
If there is any sanity left in this world, the cry must go out” “SHUT THEM DOWN!”
Moral compass left spinning
In a report in The Times, South Africa’s cabinet ministers are asking for guidance to find clarity on the ethics of receiving gifts.
“Cabinet raised the issue… Maybe we need to look at the ethics handbook to make sure there is proper guidance,” he said. “Ministers will always be given gifts and as the new cabinet we should discuss how these things are handled.”
This follows the astounding case where the new Minister of Transport, S’bu Ndebele was given lavish gifts, including a top of the range Mercedes Benz worth over R1.1 million, by contractors to the Transport department. The sheer chutzpah of publicly handing over this bribe is astounding enough and is only surpassed by the astounding stupidity of accepting it. Ndebele then went on to defend this utterly indefensible action.
S’bu Ndebele accepting his car
Faced with a public outcry, he chose to seek guidance from that paragon of virtue, Jacob Zuma, who lives under a cloud of 783 unanswered corruption charges. Predictably, JZ told him: “Of course you should accept it, old boy. Why ever not. I mean, if your friends are feeling generous, why spoil their fun? Just jot it down in the gifts book, and you’re good to go.” Or something like that. Zacob would have to say that, wouldn’t he? His defence for receiving the bribes paid by his friends is that they were just gifts and loans. Not that he ever entered them into the gifts register, though.
What cretin would accept “gifts” like that? Has the man no moral compass at all? Didn’t something at the back of his mind send out even the slightest alarm? Even the most acute sociopath would at least intellectually recognise the gross error in accepting these blatant bribes. But not our friend, S’bu. What hubris does he possess? It took an irate public (who he would be inclined to ignore) and political allies (who he can’t ignore) to force S’bu to hand the “gifts” back.
But now the public and the press are full of praise for this genius! They are congratulating him and treating him like a hero! He has clearly, unequivocally demonstrated that he possesses no integrity, has the ethics of a sewer rat and has the feeling of entitlement only bred from extreme hubris. And this is the man that is now being thanked. In any sane country he would be thankful he wasn’t chucked out of government by the ear or facing corruption charges.
And now we know he is not alone. His cabinet colleagues are all at sea, and don’t have the faintest idea on the ethics of public office. This is what you get when you elect as your leader a deeply flawed man, who has legally been found to be in a corrupt relationship with a convicted fraudster, and though the bullying tactics of his supporters got the corruption charges against him dropped. Who in his circle would not feel that he was entitled to pocket a lavish “gift” from adoring suppliers?
Another Zuma tactic – get rid of your persecutors – has resulted in the demise of the one body that could investigate and root out this sort of corruption, the Scorpions. The crooks in government will now feel that they can plunder the public purse with impunity.
It is now left to the press and the public to step up the scrutiny on it’s elected officials. We are alone and unprotected. It is not the time to thank corrupt officials for handing back their ill-gotten gains when found out. It is up to the press and the public to stop that moral compass spinning wildly.
Ida, media sensation
News of the discovery of a 47 million year old primate fossil has just been released. The skeleton, nicknamed Ida, has been classified Darwinius masillae. It was a female animal which lived during the Eocene epoch. It was discovered in Messel, Germany as long ago as 1983. It was privately sold off in two parts which were later acquired for the University of Oslo Natural History Museum. A team of scientists have been examining it for the past two years.
Ida is a lemur-like creature but differs from a lemur in many respects, in particular, the absence of a toilet claw and a toothcomb. Darwinius masillae is part of a larger group of primates, Adapoidea, not simply a lemur. The scientific paper is available and can be found here.
This is clearly an extremely interesting and important find. But the media reports – television, radio and press – are running sensational reports about this being the “missing link” and that it provides “proof” of our – human – evolution from the animal kingdom. The hype is that Ida is our direct ancestor, even that Ida show human characteristics. Here’s but one example:
Evidence in the talus bone links Ida to us. The bone has the same shape as in humans today. Only the human talus is obviously bigger.
This is obvious nonsense. Having the “same shape” is so non-specific as to be meaningless. And as for “Missing link”: this is an archaic phrase now adopted by creationists to cast doubt on the fact of evolution. The tactic is to demand that scientists produce every single morphological change – the full evolutionary record – which is impossible. And of course when any fossil of a new transitional creature is found, another gap, or missing link, is added.
At first glance, this media onslaught with pretty much the same (wrong) message is puzzling. But dig a bit deeper and you will find a well-coordinated public relations effort to promote an upcoming documentary and a new book titled The Link. The press release from the University of Olso has a huge heading: “The Link”. They have a website named, you guessed it, The Link, where they describe what they’re doing:
The scientific publication of Ida has been carefully timed so that the film, book and website can be launched at the same time. The scientists see this as a new way of presenting science for the 21st century, where a major scientific find becomes available to everyone, wherever they are in the world at the same time. Ida connects to us all, and we can all share in understanding her.
This “link” they’re talking about is the one directly to humans. A member of the team, Dr Jens Franzen takes this to unbelievable lengths, describing Ida as “like the Eighth Wonder of the World”, because of the extraordinary completeness of the skeleton. He can’t contain himself:
It was information “palaeontologists can normally only dream of”, he said.In addition, Ida bears “a close resemblance to ourselves” he said, with
nails instead of claws, a grasping hand and an opposable thumb – like
humans and some other primates. But he said some aspects of the teeth
indicate she is not a direct ancestor – more of an “aunt” than a
“grandmother”.
Others are more circumspect. Dr Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and author of The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey, said he was “awestruck” by the publicity machine surrounding the new fossil.
He argued that it could damage the popularisation of science if the creature was not all that it was hyped up to be.
Dr Beard has not yet seen scientific details of the find but said that it would be very nice to have a beautiful new fossil from the Eocene and that Ida would be “a welcome new addition” to the world of early primates.
But he added: “I would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans.”
Quite. I’m all for popularising science, but this is not the way to do it. It doesn’t always have to be about us. There is enough beauty and wonder to revel in this find. It doesn’t have to be turned into a proto-human media sensation.
Technorati Tags: evolution, science
Hate it when this happens
You know what it’s like. You go off to have a pee carrying your pet fish in your hand and – vrooom! The beast wiggles itself into your penis, up your urethra. Damned quick, these fish. And cunning too.
The latest victim appears to be a 14-year old Indian boy who seems bedevilled with bad luck. Not to mention a fish in his penis, which turned out to be a “small member of the Betta genus, measured 2cm long and 1.5cm wide”.
The patient was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period. According to the boy, the fish slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium at home.Professor Vezhaventhan and Professor Jeyaraman, who treated the boy and later wrote a paper on the case, explained: “While he was cleaning the fish tank in his house, he was holding a fish in his hand and went to the toilet for passing urine. When he was passing urine, the fish slipped from his hand and entered his urethra and then he developed all these symptoms.”
Now I don’t know about 14-year old Indian boys but.. 1.5cm wide? Ouch! Really awwww! And the procedure to remove the fish doesn’t sound any less eina:
After detecting the fish in the boy’s bladder, Vezhaventhan and
Jeyaraman used a technique known as cystourethroscopy to insert a
special set of forceps down the patient’s penis. Unfortunately, the
fish was just too slippery to grip, so they resorted to using a rigid
ureteroscope with a tool attached that is normally used for removing
bladder stones.
It seems the boy didn’t just take it in his stride:
He was later admitted into counseling to help him overcome any trauma.
I’ve made a firm resolution today: inconvenient as it may be, I will no longer carry my pet fish when urinating. In fact, to be on the safe side, I will eschew all fauna from my micturation.
Shuttle against the Sun
Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)
This amazing photo was taken of the space shuttle Atlantis during a “solar transit” – basically moving between the viewer on Earth and the Sun. It was taken on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida, before the Atlantis the crew had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope.
It was photographed by Thierry Legault using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.
For more on this photograph and others in the series, visit Solar Transit of Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Acupuncture doesn’t work
Newspapers are again showing their anti-science bias with their coverage of a new study which showed that, amongst other things, toothpicks were as effective as acupuncture needles in treating chronic back pain. All the media reports I have seen at least imply that acupuncture actually works. For instance, from The Times:
Using fake “toothpick” acupuncture to treat chronic back pain is as
effective as the real thing — and more effective than standard
treatments , a scientific study has found.
The press is notorious for lifting science stories from other news sources and then uncritically publishing them. But in this case the authors of the paper candy-coated their findings by actually not giving the conclusion the study clearly shows:
Although acupuncture was found effective for chronic low back pain,
tailoring needling sites to each patient and penetration of the skin.
appear to be unimportant in eliciting therapeutic benefits. These
findings raise questions about acupuncture’s purported mechanisms of
action. It remains unclear whether acupuncture or our simulated method
of acupuncture provide physiologically important stimulation or
represent placebo or nonspecific effects.
The study found that it doesn’t matter where you stick the needles or even if you stick needles in the skin, the results are the same. In other words, acupuncture doesn’t work. Neither does fake acupuncture. The well known placebo effect explains the palliative effects over those on the “standard treatment” only.
Note that those patients put on the acupuncture tests remained on the standard treatment. Acupuncture has a strong placebo effect because of the fussy process the “healer” goes through as well as the cultural authority it carries. Those patients on standard treatment only did not go through any of these procedures or its attendant cultural reinforcement. So it can’t really be regarded as a definitive control group. This is unfortunate since it leaves an opening for acupuncture apologists to latch on to their imagined support for their brand of woo-woo.
So when the authors say: “It remains unclear whether acupuncture or our simulated method of acupuncture provide physiologically important stimulation or represent placebo or nonspecific effects”, they are wrong. It does not remain unclear. It means acupuncture doesn’t work. To be more specific:
- Real acupuncture is no better than fake acupuncture
- “Individualized” acupuncture is no better than traditionally prescribed acupuncture
- Any acupuncture-like procedure results in a positive – though subjective and temporary – outcome
The question is: why did the authors of this paper fudge the findings the way they did and open the way to a pseudo-science media frenzy? Perhaps I’ve answered my own question.
Update: Steven Novella has written an excellent post demolishing both acupuncture and the conclusions of this study.
Technorati Tags: pseudo-science, acupuncture
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