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Yep, another gap of a couple of weeks between updates. But am I going to apologise for having a social life? No, I’m not…

Sunday 28th July

Ukrainian generals arrested: after the crash of an Su-27 fighter into the crowd at a Ukrainian air show yesterday, President Kuchma sacked General Strelnikov, head of the air force, and General Oniszhenko, commander of the air force division organising the show. Now both men have been arrested, as have two other officers involved in planning the air show, and charged with “negligent attitude to the military service that led to heavy consequences” — that is, being sloppy about ensuring the safety of the crowd.

The end of the world as we know it? an asteroid is on a course which may bring it to a collision with Earth on February 1st, 2019. Will this actually happen? Can it be deflected? Will we actually do anything about it if it is on a collision course?

But now the good news: well-known liar Jeffrey Archer failed in his attempt to appeal his convictions for perjury and perverting the course of justice. In a masterpiece of understatement, Lord Justice Rose said, “The fundamental question is whether a total sentence of four years for his criminality can be regarded as manifestly excessive. In our judgment, it cannot.” It took only two minutes for the judges to reject his application to be allowed to appeal.

Creationists read New Scientist shock! The magazine’s regular Feedback column — “strange but true tales from the world of science” — highlighted the enlightened way in which a creationist website deals with the emails they receive:

SURPRISE, surprise. Here’s how the open-minded and enquiring creationists at users.bigpond.com/rdoolan/FAQ.html deal with the questions they receive: “We are happy to get emails asking questions…We classify emails that need a response into four categories: from four-star replies to one-star replies. Four-star replies are usually to creationists who agree with our position: they get answered first. One-star replies are to rude evolutionists and sceptics. They usually go to the bottom of the pile and we answer them when and if we have time.”

Well, that’s an interesting policy. Very shortly after the appearance of the item in New Scientist, however, there was a little change in the FAQ:

We are happy to get emails asking questions, but receive more than we can answer with our limited volunteer staff and time. To overcome this, we usually ignore rude, antagonistic emails, and give preference to those genuinely seeking information. The rule is: write nicely to us and we will reply nicely to you; swear and abuse us, or show that you have contempt for God and His position, and you will probably get no reply.

Presumably this is thought to sound more reasonable, but it seems to me that “we usually ignore … antagonistic emails” and “show that you have contempt for God and his position, and you will probably get no reply” say exactly the same thing as “One-star replies are to rude evolutionists and sceptics. They usually go to the bottom of the pile and we answer them when and if we have time.”

Today, there’s an addition to the FAQ item in question discussing the New Scientist item — without, incidentally, noting that there has been a change or providing the New Scientist’s URL. This addendum says:

New Scientist kindly sent a lot of new visitors to our website in late July when it criticized our FAQ page.… It took exception to the fact that we said we get more emails than we have time to reply to, so we answer supporters’ emails first and put rude and abusive emails from skeptics at the bottom of the pile. Apparently we are not supposed to do this. (We wonder whether their own mail policy is to give priority to answering rude and antagonistic diatribes against them and to deal last with supportive readers who genuinely want information from them.)

Note that the original FAQ entry did not, anywhere, say that “we get more emails than we have time to reply to” — but the amended entry which appeared within the past day or two does. This playing fast-and-loose with the facts is fairly typical of creationists’ arguments, but they usually get away because most people don’t know enough about biology and palaeontology to spot it. Also note that the original item clearly states that people who agree with them get faster replies than people who don’t, rude or not; it is also unclear whether the “one-star replies” (i.e. probably no reply at all) refers to rude evolutionists and rude skeptics, or to rude evolutionists and any skeptics. The amended FAQ entry seems to suggest the latter, as surely creationists must consider “skeptics” — which in this context must surely include those who understand and accept the Theory of Evolution — to be people who have contempt for their god and his position? Surely, too, any email from someone advocating actual science and pointing out the holes in the arguments on the website would be classed as “antagonistic” and would be ignored? The impression I get from both these FAQs is that there is no distinction between abusive diatribes (no one sensible would expect these to get any attention) and straightforward disagreement with their position.

The suggestion that the website is offering “information” is amusing; it’s full of the same distortions and downright falsehoods as every other creationist website or text I’ve ever seen. One thing which is new, to me at any rate, is the coining of a new term, “creationology.” Clearly this is an attempt to give an air of academic credibility to creationism — -ism suggests (and correctly) a position held dogmatically, -ology a field of academic enquiry.

An example of the falsehoods? Oh, well, let’s see...

On a page headed Is there any good evidence for creation? this statement is made:

Sometimes evolutionists ask creationists: "Can you produce clear-cut evidence that definitely suggests creation?" … I venture to suggest that a good sign of creation would be the appearance of something without antecedents. The fossil record reveals something that is disturbing to the evolutionary theory. It shows that complex animals appear rather suddenly in the early strata.

Unfortunately, fossilisation happens only to a very small proportion of animals which die; it is also a process which preserves the hard parts of animals. These facts mean that complex animals will appear very suddenly in the fossil record because their ancestors without hard parts haven’t been fossilised. The suggestion that the sudden appearance of complex animals as fossils is unexpected and a problem for evolutionary theory is either a disingenuous falsehood or an indication that the author doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.

I could go on, but I won’t. Anyone with any real understanding of biology will be able to pick lots of holes in the fallacious arguments presented against evolution. Anyone who has no real knowledge of biology might be well advised to visit the Talk.Origins FAQ or seek out good books on the subject, such as Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker or Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

The real problem with all this rubbish is that it is presented as though it were science; it isn’t. Science is about looking at the Universe we live and figuring out how it works on the basis of the evidence. Creationism — even when masquerading as “creationology” or “creation science” (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) — is about making the evidence fit a belief system. Look at as many creationist sites or books as you like and you will not find much effort expended on presenting evidence (and no, Bible quotations are not scientific evidence) supporting the creationists’ beliefs, most of their energy is spent on attacking evolution. The fairly arrogant assumption underlying this is that if they could prove evolution had not happened then the only alternative explanation is the biblical creation myth. What about the story of Ginnungagap, Ymir the ice giant and the great cow Audumla? Or Raven beating his wings to make the world and the waters?

Something else you will look long and hard for and fail to find is an honest confrontation of the problems with the creationists’ beliefs. There is a very obvious one which anyone thinking honestly about the subject has to confront, but to a Christian the question itself is ruled out from the start. I’ll spend a bit of time on this because it so clearly demonstrates how creationist “science” is driven by religious dogma, not evidence.

To start with, here is a lengthy quote from an article found in a Glaswegian Pagan magazine. The subject under discussion is a book by scientist (not, though, a biologist) and creationist E.H. Andrews.

Andrews assumes … that the methods appropriate to physics are a paradigm for all branches of science. Given such an assumption, he could decide nothing else than evolution is ‘unscientific.’

Being a scientist, he presents himself as someone who weighs the evidence and reaches his conclusions on the basis of that evidence, but it is painfully obvious that it is his religious beliefs which determine how he deals with all the evidence and every argument.

Given his conservative theological views and his decision that evolution is ‘unscientific’ he is not going to have much time for ‘theistic evolution’, the notion that evolution did happen, but directed by Yahweh. He is open about the fact he dislikes the idea for leaving the spiritual dimension as merely “icing on the cake:”

There is a basic philosophical principle derived from Occam’s Razor that forbids any explanation of a phenomenon that is more complicated than it needs to be. If evolutionary theory is adequate to explain the observed phenomena, namely the physical universe, why do you need to introduce concepts such as “the spiritual” or God?

Why indeed? But, on the very next page, when he is discussing the beginning of the universe itself:

You will see that sooner or later you reach a full stop. Now you may say, “All right, we admit to having no explanation of ultimate origins, but there is no particular advantage in adding one more step and saying God created the energy or the matter, because then you ask ‘Where did God come from?’ and you are no closer to an answer.”

Absolutely — in fact, you might say it leaves the spiritual dimension as no more than icing on the cake. Occam’s Razor time? Well, no, because this time it would go against Andrews’ beliefs:

Let us accept for the moment that the idea of God may not help you at that point, but it does not hinder you either!

So much for rejecting any explanation that is more complicated than it needs to be.

I love the way Andrews completely sidesteps the question of the creation of God, but it is a question which is legitimate — unless you are a Christian. I once heard a Christian minister talking on the subject of God the Creator actually state that one cannot ask this question about God because God is eternal — he has always existed and will always exist. This is not an answer likely to satisfy anyone who does not share his particular religious beliefs. If a god created the Universe, then that god’s existence has to be explained. Looking back at the FAQ which kicked off this item, we see the same evasion of this point:

Both the Bible and Christian theology teach that the Creator is God and that God is everlasting. He was not created. If you think this is odd, then think about this: If someone created God then that someone would be the real Creator and God would not. So your question would then be, who created that someone? If someone else created that someone then that someone else would be the Creator and the someone would not. See the problem? You will always find that the Creator will be one step further back than the answer to your question. And the original one is called God.

Well, if that doesn’t satisfy you…

That quotation shows very clearly the reason why the creationist position isn’t science: the “evidence” of the Bible is what matters, not the findings of science. This is not simply an accusation made by their opponents, as you can see from this:

The Bible also speaks of the world as presently being in a fallen condition resulting from the influence of sin. This should make us cautious about any final conclusions from science. Furthermore, what does one do when nature and Scripture are seemingly in conflict? The usual response is to reinterpret the Bible to fit the latest finds of science. This approach robs the Bible of its authority. Scientist E.H. Andrews writes of those who put the Bible and nature on an equal par:

You notice that the book of nature and the Word of God are both ‘Divine Records’. They are put on a par, on an equal level, so that one is not to be preferred or advanced beyond the other. This surely is a denial of the evangelical doctrine of Scripture and the teaching of Romans 1 concerning the inability of fallen man to comprehend the ‘book of nature’…

There is something worrying about a scientist (which, I repeat, Andrews is, and as far as I can see a respected one in his field) stating that if the findings of science conflict with the findings of the Bible, then the latter should be “preferred.”

The truly worrying thing about the creationists is the political clout they have in the USA. In Britain and the rest of Europe, this is a settled question and the creationists are generally regarded as an eccentric fringe; the English even have Darwin on their money! Yet in the USA education boards have tried to remove evolution from the curriculum or insist that religion, in the form of creationism, gets taught in science classes. When American public service television broadcast a series on evolution, Idaho Public Television accompanied it with a programme called The Young Age of the Earth, a creationist programme provided by a Republican senator.

Responses to the falsehoods, evasions, and distortions of the creationists are very common on the Net — there are a lot of very scientifically literate people online. Sometimes someone asks what the point is of arguing with the creationists? After all, you are never going to persaude them. That is probably true — but it isn’t the point. The point is to demonstrate the fallacious nature of their case to the intelligent but scientifically uneducated who may not see the flaws without help. The point is to try to make the facts available to people subjected to religious propaganda by their teachers and political leaders. The point is to try to shine a little light in the dark.

I meant to leave the whole creationist stuff alone after that, but I stumbled across this on the same site as that FAQ. I’ll simply note here that this example demonstrates a classic creationist technique — namely, quoting terms used in one context and then taking examples of their use in other contexts and pretending the meanings attached to the words is identical in all cases; in the first quotation they make, only the creationists seem to be unaware that the author is clearly referring to a supernatural creator — and let the flaws in the argument speak for themselves.

Scientists sometimes imply, or say outright, that creation science and intelligent design are unscientific because they do not use naturalistic explanations. One evolutionist wrote: “Thus any statement concerning the existence, nonexistence, or nature of a creator or creators is not science by definition and has no place in scientific discussion or in science classrooms”.

But they are mistaken. They are trying to redefine science to fit their view that naturalistic evolution is science and creation is non-science because creation invokes a creator.…

Walter ReMine shows the fallacy of the “science is naturalism” school of thought in his book The Biotic Message: Evolution versus message theory. He says that if the existence, nonexistence, or nature of a creator or creators is not science by definition and has no place in scientific discussion or in science classrooms, then scientists would not have deduced the existence of the creator of the Piltdown man hoax. ReMine says: “This example shows how science can discriminate between an intelligent designer and naturalistic causes. It also shows that science can go further and deduce a designer’s character traits and motives. Science does this based on the pattern of the data.”…

Another area in which science deals with the existence of a creator is in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The SETI project has had backing over the years from such prominent evolutionists as the late Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Francis Crick, David Raup, and Edward O. Wilson. It seeks evidence of life elsewhere in our galaxy. Using radiotelescopes, scientists hope to find and recognize signals from intelligent beings outside earth. So they cannot really accept the view quoted above that “any statement concerning the existence, nonexistence, or nature of a creator or creators” of these signals “is not science by definition and has no place in scientific discussion or in science classrooms”.

Well, OK, not quite leaving the creationist web site yet. Apart from the subject matter and the way it is handled, the design sucks. I’m not talking aesthetically here, although it does look like it has been designed by a not particularly gifted 10 year old girl. When I’m surfing the Web, I make use of one of the best features of Mozilla: tabbed browsing. Sometimes I use CTRL along with the main mouse button to open a link in a new tab, sometimes I use the mouse’s menu button to get the contextual menu to do it. Hitting the mouse button to do that results in this:

I’m not going to bang on about why this sucks. I don’t have to, I’ve already explained why it’s a bad idea to throw up alerts with JavaScript, as well as a stupid one. And, as always, the site with the paranoia about theft of its graphics has bugger all you would want to steal. As well as the irritating alerts, part of the site uses one of those crappy JavaScript “pull-out” menus and the structure of the site is somewhat confusing (because it is an amalgam of two sites). Plus, take a look at this screenshot of the FAQ page:

Now, for your information, the display settings I am using include a screen resolution of 1280×960. The browser isn’t open to the full width of the screen, but it is open to the full available height. That is well over 900 pixels — and none of the page’s actual content is visible! The three giant FAQs aren’t images — for which we should be grateful — but a bit of swank with CSS. So they’ve heard of CSS; they haven’t, apparently, heard that specifying font size in points is not a good idea. And what on Earth is that photograph of the blonde doing there?

The question of how America relates to Europe and how we relate to it has been a hot one since the September 11th terrorist strikes. There was a furore over the BBC’s Question Time broadcast on September 13th (see also comments on the September 20th programme) leading to an apology by Greg Dyke. The problem was that many in the studio audience had the temerity to be critical of America’s foreign policy and to see that policy as an important contributory factor in producing anti-American terrorism. It is probably not surprising that Americans found this hard to take — true or not, two days after the fall of the World Trade Center would be too soon to think about it dispassionately.

I do recall that a week or so after the attacks a friend asked me something like: “Do you think America deserved the attacks?” This was because he had heard a number of people in the media apparently saying just that. My response at the time I still think was right: it depends on what you mean by “deserve.” If you mean deserve in a moral sense, i.e. that in some way Americans are so bad, so evil that it was simply justice that they suffered such a grievous blow (pretty much in fact what Foolwell said a couple of days after the attacks) — well, if you mean that, then no, clearly not. No nation deserves to have thousands of its citizens slaughtered like that.

On the other hand, a lot of people who seemed to be saying that America “deserved” it were not talking morally, they were making a very simple point (if not always phrasing it sensitively): that the resentments which have led to there being people prepared to kill themselves in order to kill Americans as well arise, if only partially, from the foreign and trading policies of the USA during the past fifty years. If America is going to have a policy of toppling governments it does not like, shoring up vile and oppressive dictatorships when it suits the USA, backing up Israel no matter what the Israelis do to the Palestinians, then this has consequences — one of which is that a lot of people will not see the influence of the USA as exactly beneficent. Actions have consequences, but the problem is that very few Americans (I can’t think of any holding political office just now) are prepared to accept that their foreign policies have consequences, or that other nations have (or can have) interests which don’t fit with the USA’s interests; for too many in America the USA are the guys in the white hats, and the rest of the world should be able to see that.

An example of this is described in the New Statesman where Scott Lucas and Barbara Sussex talk about Joe Klein, supposedly over here to publicise The Natural. But, they say, that is not all that he is doing.

Nope, Joe has a higher calling: he is the “liberal” who’s gonna save us from our identity crisis. Down deep, we love America, we need America — and he is going to remind us of it.

All this can’t be loosened from a post-11 September context. For Klein, like so many Americans, the attack and its aftermath have set up an expectation and fear that remain irreconcilable. The expectation is that Brits, America’s cultural blood brothers, will follow Tony Blair’s shining example and rally round the US flag whatever may come in the war against terror. The fear is that many here don’t seem to have read the script, and keep whining about US disregard for human rights, US unilateralism, the US war on the environment, US “culture” and US support for states such as Israel.

So kind-hearted Joe gets angry.…

The article notes the longstanding reservations Americans have had about Europe, the underlying reason behind it, and the implicit threat:

At the Hay Festival this year, Klein took the podium with Christopher Hitchens. Initially the crowd was quite pleasant to Klein, saving their scepticism for Hitchens; however, when Joe waxed lyrical about the “benign power” of the United States … Klein’s efforts for Anglo-American harmony were booed.

Klein’s approach, like much of US foreign policy, founders on a fundamental contradiction. His America is “exceptional” in its values and objectives — but for us to tag along, it also has to be “universal”, and its ideology must be our ideology.

And if we protest that Europe or Britain or any one of us deserves a “Third Way”, that alternative must be restricted. “Containment” is no longer for the Soviets; it is for us.

American foreign policy and trading policy regularly gets discussed on the Net, of course. There’s a “natural law” of the Net, Godwin’s Law, which says that the longer any Usenet discussion continues it is increasingly likely that a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler will be made; I’d like to suggest another rule: in any prolonged Net discussion where there is criticism of American policy, it becomes extremely probable that someone (some American, that is) will state that “the rest of the world would like to be Americans.” This notion that all of us out here are simply gagging for the chance to cross the Atlantic (or the Pacific) to enter the promised land is very bizarre even to those of us who have American friends and who see much to admire in the aspirations upon which the USA is founded. Did I say bizarre? It’s utter bollocks.

I could go on at length in a serious vein about the increasing totalitarian tendencies of the US political system, the deep corruption of the political system, the democratic deficiencies of the political system, the cost of health care, the litigation-happy culture, the widespread disdain for any form of intellectual activity or achievement, the parochialism which means that television stations show “world news” reports which never refer to any incident occurring outside the USA, the death penalty, the ready availability of guns which is particularly worrying in a country with numerous extreme right-wing groups, and a legal system in which judges and prosecutors have an eye on electoral prospects; but I won’t. I’ll simply point to Mark Thomas’s article which approaches the notion that we all envy the Americans with his typical corrosive humour:

A few weeks ago, I appeared on a Newsnight debate with William Shawcross, ex-Ho Chi Min cheerleader and now right-wing man of tweed; and Tom Reid, the European correspondent for the Washington Post. They argued that anti-Americanism is the product of our jealousy of the US. Jealous of what, exactly? Jealous of a political leader who at times can barely string a sentence together? Of course not, we have John Prescott, for a start. But do we secretly harbour a desire to have a deputy leader who is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and sued for his time as chief executive and chairman of the Halliburton Company? Do we long for a political system where hoards of MPs are financed by a corporation that goes belly up after being lied about by its auditors and sucked dry by its directors?

If we are jealous of the American way of life, then the anti-American majority in Britain actually craves the highest obesity rate in the world. They want to own handguns and run major sporting events called the World Series without inviting any other country to take part. Our deepest desire must be to see people in Britain paying for private health insurance.

Every so often someone — usually a journalist — lifts up their head and curses weblogs and the whole practice of blogging. This time around it’s Brendan O’Neill, who has been blogging for all of two months. What does he find wrong with blogs?

I am shocked by the Blogosphere’s often poor quality of writing and its celebration of pithy opinion over considered judgement.

The irony is that while many talk up blogging as a challenge to mainstream journalism, in terms of slipping standards and the elevation of personal opinon and gossip over fact and truth, bloggers have a lot more in common with modern journalists than they think.

Of course this post comes with a rider - namely that there are many weblogs I read and respect.... But much of the blogging world is taken up by unreadable second-rate writing and petty prejudice masquerading as journalistic opinion.

The Blogosphere is in serious need of a sub-editor. In fact, if we take George Orwell’s advice to writers as our starting point - ‘If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out’ - then most of the Blogosphere could be sub-edited out of existence....

[T]he Blogosphere must have standards it if expects to be taken seriously.

Not one to hold back, he gives five guidelines to would-be bloggers:

1. Think before you blog — even if it’s just for 10 minutes. As The Economist says: ‘clarity of writing follows clarity of thought.’ Take a short walk, sit back and relax, or drink a cup of coffee — but get your thoughts in order before committing them to the web.
2. Be brief — the best posts are short ones that get straight to the point. We don’t need long rambling introductory paragraphs before finding out what you think on a subject. A good writer thinks as carefully about what he should leave out as he does about what he should put in.
3. Be accurate — get your facts straight (many bloggers don’t), and keep your posts free from spelling or grammatical errors. You are more likely to be taken seriously if you are accurate. And if you’re a British blogger, do not use American spellings just to please American audiences....
4. Don’t be too clever — remember, opinions are everywhere. There is nothing big or clever about having them. Besides, you should avoid writing in a pompous, told-you-so style even if you do have some new, original and profound insight. It is more likely to annoy readers than convince them.
5. Finally, be pacy — write in a style that pulls your readers along with you, rather than leaving them behind feeling bored. Get rid of all unnecessary cumbersome plodding over-long boring words (like all of those for a start), and write in the language of ‘everyday speech’...

What is amusing about this list is that O’Neill’s own blog seems to regularly break at least two of these rules (I’ll let you figure out which ones). Unsurprisingly this post has drawn a lot of flack from other bloggers. One, an American, thought O’Neill was caught out in an error through using the phrase “hard graft” — apparently graft as a word meaning hard physical work is not known across the Atlantic; I hadn’t realised that. O’Neill put him right on that, obviously. But Dr. Weevil made another point. In his article, O’Neill quoted Clint Eastwood — or at least claimed to be quoting Clint Eastwood:

The Blogosphere is built on opinion. But what is so great about having an opinion? As Clint Eastwood once said, ‘Opinions are like arseholes — everybody’s got one’. And like arseholes, we don’t need to see (or indeed hear) them every minute of the day.

Doesn’t sound quite right, does it? As Dr. Weevil pointed out, “Eastwood surely said ‘ass-hole’ not ‘arse-hole’.” O’Neill defends his deliberate misquote like so:

The two things Weevil picks me up on are ‘wrong’ only from the point of view of Americans. He challenges my Clint Eastwood quotation, pointing out that ‘Eastwood surely said “ass-hole” not “arse-hole”’. True, Eastwood did say ‘asshole’, but I changed it to proper English.

In English, an ass is a hoofed mammal of the genus Equus, with a smaller build and longer ears than a horse. Arse, by contrast, is British slang for the ‘fleshy part of the human body that you sit on’. I assume that Eastwood was referring to the latter, so I changed the spelling to capture his true meaning in proper English.

Well, to quote means to repeat someone else’s words; altering the words, for whatever reason, is not quotation but paraphrasing. So much for “Be accurate” — that’s a third one of his own rules he has broken. If he really could not bear the thought of Eastwood’s “ass” without parading his contempt for the language the Americans speak, O’Neill did have the option of inserting “[sic]” while leaving the quotation a true repetition of Eastwood’s actual words. To “correct” Eastwood’s words in what is represented as being a quotation of them is the action of a prig. Or possibly of a near-homophone of that word.

Of course, as regards his main point, O’neill is right: most blogs are neither very interesting nor well-written. Neither are most books, or most newspapers or magazines — why he should expect blogs to have a uniform standard of excellence puzzles me. He says the “blogosphere” needs a subeditor — that may sound fine as an ex cathedra pronouncement but a moment’s thought shows it to be a ludicrous notion revealing a deep misunderstanding of how the Internet works. OK, OK, he was speaking metaphorically (I hope), but the point about the Net is that there is no central control: people can get online and express their views and beliefs. Perhaps they may do so in less-than-perfect English — hardly surprising given the complete mess the education system has made of teaching English over recent decades (and that’s just talking about the UK) — but that does not necessarily mean that their views are not worth hearing. As O’Neill himself demonstrates, a good command of English does not automatically produce an interesting or informative blog.

It’s also worth noting that O’Neill’s skills with HTML are a little wanting. I am guessing he is one of these guys who thinks that he needs to protect his “code” in case anyone steals it. That’s the only reason I can come up for this very bizarre HTML:

<html>
<head>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>

Wait a minute — I’ll stop it there because I bet you don’t want to scroll down through 1,725 instances of <br>, do you? Yep, that’s what I said: one thousand seven hundred and twenty-five uses of an element which should not be used in the document head in the first place. What does he think it’s going to do? Doesn’t he realise that you can insert white space into the HTML markup? It didn’t cause me any actual problems, either in getting to the markup which was intended to do something (hasn’t he heard of scroll bars?) or in terms of crashing the browser — although there are some browsers I wouldn’t like to hit with dodgy markup like this. (I didn’t excise the <!DOCTYPE> tag, by the way — he hasn’t bothered with one.)

In case you are wondering why I was looking at his markup, I wanted to see why his page looked like this:

I’m guessing he didn’t expect or want most of his text to be on the orange background rather than the pale yellow. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that in Internet Explorer the pale yellow background extends all the way down behind the main content and the sidebars. I went to the source markup to confirm my suspicion of what the cock-up was behind the appearance of the page; I’m not going to go into it right now, though, because I think this deserves a mention in a web design article.

I’ve commented before on the moneygrubbing sleazoids who run the music industry, in the USA particularly. As a person who listens to music I am firmly of the opinion that something like Napster could only help to sell music. It was a way to listen to new stuff you would never — and probably could never afford to — pay money to try out. It gave new bands, and for that matter older artistes who had slipped from fashion, exposure that was otherwise unavailable. The American music industry killed Napster claiming it was ruining the music industry and costing us, the mugs who actually shell out £15 for a CD, money. Some credulous MPs and some airhead reporters bought the line in its entirety; I don’t know anyone else who did.

Here’s an article by Janis Ian — I’m sure I’ve heard something of hers from way back, but I have no idea what it was (American female singers aren’t really something I’m into in a big way) — who is basically saying the same thing, with the difference that she knows what she is talking about from the musician’s perspective.

The premise of all this ballyhoo is that the industry (and its artists) are being harmed by free downloading.

Nonsense. Let’s take it from my personal experience. My site (www.janisian.com) gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who’d downloaded Society’s Child or At Seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they’d found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But… that translates into $2700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn’t include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.

Or take author Mercedes Lackey, who occupies entire shelves in stores and libraries. As she said herself: “For the past ten years, my three “Arrows” books, which were published about 15 years ago, have been generating a nice, steady royalty check per pay-period each. A reasonable amount, for fifteen-year-old books. However... I just got the first half of my DAW royalties...And suddenly, out of nowhere, each Arrows book has paid me three times the normal amount! (Actually a bit more than that). And the only change during that pay-period was that I had Eric put the first of my books on the Free Library. There’s an increase in all of the books on that statement, actually, and what it looks like is what I’d expect to happen if a steady line of people who’d never read my stuff encountered it on the Free Library, a certain percentage of them liked it, and started to work through my backlist beginning with the earliest books published. The really interesting thing is, of course, that these aren’t Baen books, they’re DAW—-another publisher—-so it’s ‘name loyalty’ rather than ‘brand loyalty.’

“I’ll tell you what, I’m sold. Free works.”

I don’t know about you, but as an artist with an in-print record catalogue that dates back to 1965, I’d be thrilled to see sales on my old catalogue rise.

Lackey says “It’s what I’d expect to happen if a steady line of people who’d never read my stuff encountered it for free…they started to work through my backlist.” I’ve found that to be true over and over again. Every time we make a few songs available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot.

Pretty much what anyone with a brain would have expected, no? She also lists a few assertions the RIAA make:

1. “Analysts report that just one of the many peer-to-peer systems in operation is responsible for over 1.8 billion unauthorized downloads per month.” (Hilary B. Rosen letter to the Honorable Rick Boucher, Congressman, February 28, 2002)
2. “Sales of blank CD-R discs have…grown nearly 2 ½ times in the last two years…if just half the blank discs sold in 2001 were used to copy music, the number of burned CDs worldwide is about the same as the number of CDs sold at retail.” (Hilary B. Rosen letter to the Honorable Rick Boucher, Congressman, February 28, 2002)
3. “Music sales are already suffering from the impact…in the United States, sales decreased by more than 10% in 2001.” (Hilary B. Rosen letter to the Honorable Rick Boucher, Congressman, February 28, 2002)
4. “In a recent survey of music consumers, 23%…said they are not buying more music because they are downloading or copying their music for free.” (Hilary B. Rosen letter to the Honorable Rick Boucher, Congressman, February 28, 2002)

Hilary Rosen, by the way, is the head of the RIAA. Here are Janis Ian’s responses to these statements:

1. Who’s to say that any of those people would have bought the CD’s if the songs weren’t available for free? I can’t find a single study on this, one where a reputable surveyor such as Gallup actually asks people that question. I think no one’s run one because everyone is afraid of the truth — most of the downloads are people who want to try an artist out. And if a percentage of that 1.8 billion is because people are downloading a current hit by Britney or In Sync, who’s to say it really hurt their sales? Soft statistics are easily manipulated. How many of those people went out and bought an album that had been over-played at radio for months, just because they downloaded a portion of it?
2. Sales of blank CDs have grown? You bet. I bought a new Vaio in December, and now back up all my files onto CD. I go through 7-15 CD’s a week that way, or about 500 a year. Most new PC’s come with XP, which makes backing up to CD painless; how many people are doing what I’m doing? Additionally, when I buy a new CD, I make a copy for my car, a copy for upstairs, and a copy for my partner. That’s three blank discs per CD. So I alone account for around 750 blank CDs yearly.
3. I’m sure the sales decrease had nothing to do with the economy’s decrease, or a steady downward spiral in the music industry, or the garbage being pushed by record companies. Aren’t you? There were 32,000 new titles released in this country in 2001, and that’s not including re-issues, DIY’s , or smaller labels that don’t report to SoundScan. A conservative estimate would place the number of “newly available” CD’s per year at 100,000. That’s an awful lot of releases for an industry that’s being destroyed. And to make matters worse, we hear music everywhere, whether we want to or not; stores, amusement parks, highway rest stops. The original concept of Muzak (to be played in elevators so quietly that its soothing effect would be subliminal) has run amok. Why buy records when you can learn the entire Top 40 just by going shopping for groceries?
4. Which music consumers? College kids who can’t afford to buy 10 new CDs a month, but want to hear their favorite groups? When I bought my nephews a new Backstreet Boys CD, I asked why they hadn’t downloaded it instead. They patiently explained to their senile aunt that the download wouldn’t give them the cool artwork, and more important, the video they could see only on the CD.

But what should really open your eyes, if you haven’t already got them open, to the scummy nature of the music business is her description of how the artists’ contracts work and how little remuneration they get. America, by the way, unlike countries in the civilised world, does not pay live performance royalties to songwriters. I didn’t know that, and I’m staggered. Why I should be staggered, though, I don’t know. It isn’t as if I ever thought the recording industry was run by decent people. Go read the article.

Fundamentalists are not noted for their ecumenical tendencies, but here’s a report from the Washington Post on the way American fundamentalist Christian groups are allying themselves with Islamic governments to block expansion of rights for women, children and homosexuals.

The new alliance, which coalesced during the past year, has received a major boost from the Bush administration, which appointed antiabortion activists to key positions on U.S. delegations to U.N. conferences on global economic and social policy.

But it has been largely galvanized by conservative Christians who have set aside their doctrinal differences, cemented ties with the Vatican and cultivated fresh links with a powerful bloc of more than 50 moderate and hard-line Islamic governments, including Sudan, Libya, Iraq and Iran.

“We look at them as allies, not necessarily as friends,” said Austin Ruse, founder and president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a New York-based organization that promotes conservative values at U.N. social conferences. “We have realized that without countries like Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right in a U.N. document.”

The alliance of conservative Islamic states and Christian organizations has placed the Bush administration in the awkward position of siding with some of its most reviled adversaries — including Iraq and Iran — in a cultural skirmish against its closest European allies, which broadly support expanding sexual and political rights.

There are mirror sites and there are mirror sites. Google now has a real mirror site.