More On WordPress

I admit it, it’s taken me longer to get used to WordPress than I first thought. I still haven’t got round to replicating my blogroll or doing the resource stuff! But don’t delink me yet, it will come!

I went with Lyc0s’s installation of WordPress, which should automatically update you when a new version is ready but I’m stuck with 2.1.x and the latest version is 2.2.x. I discovered this because I have been struggling with widgets since transferring and only just realised I could download the ‘Widgets’ extension itself for backwards compatibility with blogs older than 2.2.x.

This makes it a lot easier than doing the hard coding (you will have noticed the effects of my manual widgetizing if you came by at the wrong time). Fortunately I have also discovered this slick admin extension that allows me to put up a maintenance page for the site- no more splattered code for you guys.

In other Meta, it looks like my controversial subject matter has finally paid off and my ship has come in. I recieved an email from someone at DIMACC with a proposal to buy advertising space on the blog. Before anyone starts, I’ve never been against blog advertising, after all I pay to host this website and I’ve been wanting to find some way to subsidize it for a while.

Neither do I feel like I’ve sold out, I used Adsense when I first started, but it just didn’t pay.
I’ve been asked to place 5 individual advertisements for some older posts, hopefully, if they do well then perhaps I’ll get more. The great thing is they are textual, there’s no links that would cause me to feel pharisaic and, most importantly I have been offered a decent upfront fee!

EXCLUSIVE! NEWSFLASH! REVEALED! St. Paul Must Have Been An Atheist! I Have PROOF!

The CHURCH does NOT want you to know this but I have in my possession a book containing letters published by St. Paul aka Saul of Tarsus, the very apostle who wrote most of the New Testament and helped to found the lie that is Christianity. Here is an excerpt:

Offender Mentality

Previously on Abandon All Fear, I’ve written many articles on (usually middle-class) victim mentality:

Mind The Gap
Justice or Mercy?
Response to ‘Following the Israeli-Lebanon Crisis’
The Created Image: God’s First Command
An Immigration Problem Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Comparing Christian Value Systems
Blogwars
Thick as Legal Thieves
Big Brothers Charter
Are you Aiding Criminal Activity?
Real Cost of Immigration?
Right-Minded Individuals
How to be a Victim
The Process Driven Life
We’re All Terrorist Suspects Now
The Water in North London
They Know Not What They Do

I’ve always considered the fact that a victim can also be a perpetrator, and how much the MSM and bloggers miss this fact. I have also been accused here occasionally, of attacking victims and hypocrisy. This is odd since I’ve mostly tried to present offenders as either victims themselves or point out (moral) offences committed by self-proclaimed victims. Furthermore, I am a born-again Christian, something I’ve made no attempt to hide. Where the law of victim and offender is concerned I subscribe to the words of Jesus before the rights of the individual:

But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”

Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” – Luke ca. 130AD

Hardly hypocritical when you consider I am acting within the remit of my faith and understanding of theology.

What caught my eye back in June was an article from Reuters which basically says out loud what I’ve mostly been hinting at since the inception of this blog:

“Almost two-thirds of Britons regularly commit petty crimes, according to a report, challenging the notion that the country is made up of a law-abiding, respectable majority.

A survey by researchers at Keele University found that 61 percent of people they questioned had committed one of a variety of crimes…

…”Although the middle classes are engaging in this type of behaviour, they are also eager to blame when they find themselves victims of such behaviour,” said the report, published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College, London.

“Consumers are sheep and wolves — easy prey and preying on others. Offending and victimisation are as closely and intricately linked at the core of society as at its margins.” – Most Britons Admit to Petty Crimes

Considering record numbers of Britons are leaving the UK (apparently because of foreigners, but not fellow ‘law-abiding citizens’), given the information above, shouldn’t countries like Spain be worried of the criminal classes that are invading their lands?

Perhaps if we spent as much time on our own offences, as we do on singling out immigrants, young people or ex-cons that have paid their debt to society, we would actually find the UK a peaceful and decent place to live in. Just like the rest of Western Europe.

Technorati Tags: victimisation, offender, crime, britain

Terminators 3: Ethics of the Machines

Read: Terminators, Terminators 2: War of the Machines

Recently a new robot has been developed called the iCAT which has been programmed with a “set of logical rules for emotions”. The idea behind this is to aid interactions and help in reduce computational workload when faced with decision making.

I studied both Artificial Intelligence and Computer Ethics whilst I was at university. That doesn’t make me an expert on either subject, and AI has advanced in leaps and bounds since I studied it, but it does mean I know how AI works. AI has and will continue to accomplish many great things and make our lives easier (however the global economic and ethical impact has not been discussed enough).

The Hijacking of Atheism by the Intellectual Elite

When I was at school and college, I was used to atheism being an all encompassing default belief system, and atheists were like this (caution: these videos may shock and offend.):

Now, unlike some militant atheists who consider ALL people of faith to be suicide bombers (which I shall be referring to as Yellows Law in an upcoming post), I am not stupid enough to consider all atheists to be mindless, Godless thugs.

However, I think it should be important for elitists such as Dawkins, Hitchens or Harris to bear in mind next time they point fingers.

New Feature: RSS Clearout

I’m starting a new monthly blog category today, entitled RSS Clear Out, for want of a better name. Like most people now I get all my news and blog digest via rss feeds into my Google Reader, which gives you the option of starring (saving) an item. The problem is I have amassed a huge back catalogue of starred items, things I wanted to read more of, commented on, or wanted to blog about, but have had no time to do so.

So from now on around about the end of each month I’m going to try to do a ‘clear out’ for the previous month with links to all items I’ve starred and possibly a brief sentence or two. Hopefully the impact is that you know what items caught my interest and if I thought a fellow blogger had something profoundly important to say (or something completely ludicrous either way).

Without further ado, here’s May and most of June (that’s currently how far it goes back):

Losing my Religion?

What A Wheenie features a video of comedian Bill Hicks ripping into the Bible. Not hilariously funny and aimed at the rhetorical right, Hicks manages to take some infantile assumptions and turn them into jokes, fair play.

A woman amazingly survives internal decapitation, I can’t remember what I thought to this at the time but it just goes to show how amazing the human body really is.

The Naked Pastor provided a 2-part post, My Vision is to have no Vision, which is counter to the popular mandate for churches to seek a vision.

Matt G is a blogger who I have a lot of respect for. I met Matt for a pint in central London a while ago and he’s really into philosophy. Here’s a post from Matt explaining what naturalism can’t do, related to a debate that took place on Yellow’s blog (more on that later).

Have Dawkins and Hitchens really got Christians quaking in their boots or converting to atheism? judge for yourself when you read what Southern Baptists make of their books.

An educational establishment demonstrates why UK has the highest levels of teen pregnancy in Europe. Rings are banned but condoms will be available so what we’re saying is under-age sex is okay, but promoting abstinence is going too far.

Meanwhile Gavin Ayling posted a YouTube video of Sam Harris preaching at a Brights convention. There’s a lot I wanted to say about this, most of it is inflammatory, elitist and logical fallacy, but Gavin already took a bit of heat in his comments from some anonymous cowards.

Dinosaurs

The theory of transmutation gets another ass-kicking as The National Geographic provides us with evidence that dinosaurs do walk at least swim amongst us. To me this hints that not only were dinosaurs at least capable of living in the same environment as us, it may even be possible that many dinosaurs co-existed with humans at some point during history (we just thought they were extinct when we couldn’t find them). But forget all about intelligent design, creationism and young earth for a second, is the earth actually hollow? Scientific theories abound!

BoingBoing feature a picture of Jesus cuddling a baby dinosaur. I think it was created as mockery of the new Creation Museum, however a BB reader sent in an image of dinosaur carvings from the Angkor area in Cambodia, as little as one thousand years ago. Restorers playing a practical joke or further evidence?

Stephen E Jones posts his comments on scientific articles that pose problems for the current theories of Evolution on his blog CreationEvolutionDesign. He goes on to explain why a new fossil complicates the picture of feathered evolution.

Copywrong

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing wrote an article for information week: How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM are Beating Up the American Economy in which he gives a rundown on the origins of the copyright wars and it’s effect on global trade policies that has backfired on America. A worthwhile read. At least email is still protected by the 4th Amendment.

Open Source Consortium continues to question the BBC’s strategy in relation to it’s new iPlayer product.

Meanwhile The Antagonist blogged on the new economic of community: filesharing, “The cat is out of the bag. The horse has bolted. The banks have burst.” He also has some numerology spin and an interesting conversation with a policeman during the muslim cartoon demos.

Politically Incorrect

Onto politics and Phil Taylor gave his take on the journalistic standards of The Londoner.

LWTC247 gives an analysis of reports of an explosion in WTC7 before the towers collapsed on 9/11. Having watched a couple of documentaries myself, I’m not beyond believing it was an insider job, in fact I’m almost convinced. Also a very good article on apostasy.

Bystander reminds us, over the prison overcrowding issue, that he told us so.

Arts and Media Madness

A group of social scientists cut through the media hysteria when it comes to online predators and present the facts.

Beau Bo D’Or is still having trouble with ZOO magazine using his images.

The BBC shot itself in the foot over bias and then later shot itself in the other foot over the misrepresentation of Jerusalem.

And apparently bad drivers are good for the economy, I’ll remember that next time I beep, however, living in Londonland as I am, beeping is an accolade from other drivers for good driving.

Josh, on his blog Silent Speaking, discussed the witch hunt for a liberal scapegoat over the Virginia Tech shootings.

Did you know there was a Cross and the Switchblade comic book? I’ve never read The Cross and The Switchblade, but I have read Run Baby Run, Nicky Cruz’s own telling of his gang life and subsequent conversion.

Bishop gives us a short bio of Christian Slater and the decline in the quality of his movies, on his blog, Renerd.

Remember the protest over the British knighting of yet another non-military foreigner, Harry Hutton reckoned it was insulting all right, but not to Muslims.

// End //

That’s about it for now, I’ll be posting the end of June-July later, then hopefully I’ll be ready for a more update August clear out at the beginning of September.

Quote Unquote: The BBC’s Upbeat Housing Market

BBC News, 21st August 2007:

“Persimmon, Britain’s largest housebuilder, has unveiled a jump in profits and says it expects the housing market to remain robust.

Pre-tax profits for the six months to 30 June rose 9.8% to £281.1m as it racked up sales worth £1.51bn.”

BBC News, 19th June 2006:

“Residents at one of Glasgow’s most upmarket developments have claimed that the former Sheriff Court conversion has been plagued by problems.

Homeowners have formed a residents’ association to resolve complaints about the building, which was converted by Persimmon Homes a year ago.

They claim to have suffered flooding several times and say they were left without heating or hot water in winter.”

BBC Watchdog Report: Permission Homes, 3rd February 2004:

“The nation?s biggest home builder also has the biggest house-building complaints file on the Watchdog database.

Persimmon build new homes and renovate old buildings. Watchdog has received over 450 complaints ranging from problems rectifying extensive snagging lists and poor customer service to subsidence and floods…”

I worked for house building company once. Without divulging the name (at this point in time), I can tell you there is a little known tactic in the industry. In order to build and sell the homes as soon as possible, certain corners are cut leaving them to catch up by offering a 2 year warranty/aftercare service. They then hire a handyman company to sit on the site and attend to all the faults the homeowners are destined to find. Listed as ‘defects’, these included flooding in the garden, loose fixtures and fittings (shower and kitchen), faulty sink taps and electrics, poor plastering and loose guttering amongst the most regular reported faults. Customers complaining even one day outside of warranty were denied any assistance.

This is standard practice in the industry, exceptions are rare. The golden rule is, don’t buy a new property, older properties have had most of their problems fixed and have stood the test of time.

And, of course, don’t trust a building company that announces pre-tax profits in the midst of a market downturn.

Technorati Tags: persimmon homes, new houses, building, bbc, housing market, defects, snagging, watchdog, profits

Absolutely Unforgiveable?

A while ago over on Dark Side of the Light, I blogged about the Blasphemically Challenged website, the latest attempt by a coordinated group of anti-theists to insult Christians. Now don’t get me wrong, as regular readers observe, I don’t mind a good poke at my faith and I find this website hilarious in the way that it takes itself too seriously (and sadly, many Christians did too).

Quote/Unquote: Home Buying

BBC Inside Out, 28th Feb 2005:

John Wrigglesworth, a Property Consultant, explains how the market is changing.

“The winners are those who’ve got property. Either they’ve got property or they’re buying it right now. The losers though are the people who are not in the position to buy property.”

…The message is clearly to get on the property ladder as soon as possible and keep climbing, any way you can.”

Interest Rate Feb 2005: 4.75%

The Guardian, 20th August 2007:

“Under-25s who have bought a home owe two-thirds more than tenants in the same age group, according to figures from the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. Homebuyers also accumulate several more lines of credit, said the CCCS.”

Interest Rate August 2007: 5.75%

Ken Livingstone Demonstrates Recycling

Ealing Councillor Phil Taylor provides some excellent images of The Londoner implementing a recycling scheme on their headlines. For those outside of Londonland, “The Londoner” is a monthly propaganda sheet newspaper delivered at cost to the tax-payer free to inform us of all the lies being spun wonderful things that the Mayor is doing for Londoners.

August Headline: Bus Fairs To Be Cut By 10%
September Headline: Bus Fares Down By 10% From The End Of September

Slow news month then, absolutely nothing happening. At all.