I’ve decided to confuse the hell out of the Google search process by posting the top search terms that have been bringing people here recently. This should bring even more people here for no apparent reason.

Schwarzenegger saw some nice houses when he passed  Bodiam Castle on his way to Stonehenge. He was wearing the blacklisted  chip 666, taking medicine and watching Charlie Brooker on the Wire.

See we believe in giving the public what they want.   We aim to please.

(Hint to people that came here before as a result of one of these searches. There are indeed posts with these words in.  Use our own search engine to find them….)

Disturbing news story that qualifies for today’s new “You couldn’t make this stuff up and I don’t mean that in a good way” award. No prizes.

This week there have been more than enough horrors, such as the Burmese cyclone, that numb your responses with the numbers of dead and injured. As well as the more chilling and incomprehensible stories like the Austrian who kept his daughter locked in cellar for a quarter century and a German couple whose grown children found they had three dead babies in their freezer.

This latest mad “heart of darkness” tale brings in religion as well.

The BBC report says:

A Czech woman charged with deceiving a children’s home into thinking she was a 13-year-old girl has been found not guilty by a court in the city of Brno.
The court said Barbora Skrlova, who along with five others is believed to belong to a secretive cult, meant no ill-will towards the children’s home.
But Ms Skrlova, aged 33, was immediately re-arrested to face more serious charges of child abuse.
Ms Skrlova went on the run after the child abuse case erupted.
She re-appeared months later in Norway, where she posed as a 13-year-old boy.

Blimey. Hypnotised like a hen on a chalk line, I must find out more.

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I’ve looked at the development of this story in Czech.
25/05/07 A boy was taken into care after mind-numbingly horrific levels of abuse. So was his 13-year-old “sister” who the mother was trying to adopt. But she turned out to be a 34-year-old woman. (Well, the Czech paper says 34. Ages seem very fluid in this story. )

14/01/07 Woman posing as child may have fallen victim to strange sect

The mysterious case of the Czech woman charged with identity fraud after posing as a 12-year old girl in the Czech Republic and a 13-year old boy in Norway has shocked and baffled the nation. Czech investigators are slowly piecing together the picture of her life and there are serious indications that she was a victim of a sect whose members made a profit from child-abuse films.
Barbora Škrlová as a 13-year old boy,
The strange case first surfaced when Barbora Škrlová was found living with a woman who tortured her two young boys. Škrlová, then living in the family under the guise of their 12-year-old sister Anička, was put in a children’s home where she duped social workers into believing they were dealing with a stricken, abused child. Anička fled the home and disappeared for many months surfacing unexpectedly in Norway last week where she had been living and attending school under the guise of a 13-year-old boy.
Is this strange figure - at the centre of a frightening child-abuse case - a criminal or a victim? Teachers and social workers who knew her in the Czech Republic and Norway say she appeared withdrawn, unbalanced and may herself have a history of abuse. Marie Vodičková head of the Czech Fund for Children in Need says it seems that she was most likely abused as a child and then turned into an obedient puppet by a sect which may have made a profit from making and selling child-abuse films. There is at least one direct piece of evidence to support this theory – the torture of one of her alleged brothers was documented day and night by a professional camera system. Both boys showed signs of abuse – cigarette burns in their genital regions and numerous welts and bruises. The children said they had been tortured by several members and “friends” of the family.

She appeared “unbalanced”? Oh the beauty of understatement.

Škrlová’s teacher in Norway says she decided to contact the Norwegian police after the alleged 13-year-old boy painted a picture showing seven children all bruised and bleeding and each with a number.

Her biological father

“who is believed to be the head of this strange sect once led a religious group called The Ants which splintered off from the Holy Grail Movement centred in Europe. Czech experts on religious sects say that whatever is going on in this terrifying community, it is unchartered territory because there is no known sect in Europe involved in child identity fraud. What is particularly worrisome is that this strange case came to light by pure accident when a neighbour of one of the abused boys got a glimpse of him bound and naked in a closet – on his own baby monitoring device.

(I have to drop any pretence of having read this in the original language. It’s all from the English version)

According to the July 2007 Independent

The Grail Movement follows the teachings of Oskar Ernst Bernhardt, a German also known as Abd-ru-shin, who from 1923-38 wrote the Grail Message, which depicts man as a being whose spirit can return to its source in heaven by performing good deeds on Earth. It claims to have at least 10,000 followers worldwide, including several hundred in Britain.
“We broke with the people involved in this 11 years ago, after they added to the Grail Message with their own imaginings and fantasies,” said Artur Zaplukal, spokesman of the Grail Movement in the Czech Republic, where it has about 1,500 followers. “I sent them a letter telling them they were no longer part of the Grail Movement.”

So these weird people are a a break-away movement considered too eccentric even by an apparently off-the-wall cult.

Just when you think you can understand a bit of this, the Independent threw in a few more odd facts, such as the fact that Barbora - of indeterminate age and gender and apparently parentage - is the second cult member to have masqueraded as “Anna” the “girl” that the woman who tortured her own sons wanted to adopt.

Arrgh. My head hurts…… How many dangerously more insane cults are there?

Francis of Assisi. Hmm, what does Wikipedia say about him? “…Francis was inspired to devote himself to a life of poverty…..” He founded the Franciscan order which is pretty well synonymous with the concept of monastic poverty, in the face of the incredible wealth amassed by the other medieval monastic orders.

So, it’s a mite odd to find that, according to the Times

Armed guards brought in to protect Assisi church from beggars

Armed security guards have been brought in for the first time to protect visitors to the Franciscan church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Assisi from “beggars, tramps and gypsies” who “disturb the peace of a place of prayer”…..
Claudio Ricci, mayor of Assisi and a member of Forza Italia, the party led by Silvio Berlusconi, said the friars’ decision to employ guards was in line with a new local ordinance cracking down on illegal immigrants, many of them Roma gypsies….

After all, those irritating poor people might be benefitting from the charitable impulses of the faithful, before they’ve unburdened themselves of worldly wealth in the church’s collection boxes. Leaving that much less to give to the Church. Even when the church in question is supposedly founded on concern for the poor.

(Some of which donated wealth is clearly going to be spent on paying armed security guards to drive away the irritatingly poor….. It’s almost pleasingly circular)

New Franciscan rule: Give to the wealthy.

And here’s a further story, which may seem slightly reminiscent of the above news item to anyone familiar with the history of the British Labour Party.

The Times Rich List shows that:

The richest 1,000 people in Britain have seen their wealth quadruple under Labour, according to The Sunday Times Rich List published today. Even under Gordon Brown’s brief premiership their fortunes have soared by 15%, just as the financial squeeze and faltering house prices have hit ordinary people.

Or, perhaps more pertinently for “ordinary people,” rising costs for food, utilities and local taxes. At the same time, the tax system has been changed to take more income tax from the lowest-paid, while everyone else pays less. (The government has promised rebellious Labour MPs that it will put this tax thing right but not yet explained how it’s going to work)

A new candidate for the Beatitudes: Blessed are the rich for they shall always get more.

From our “Words Fail in the 21st Century” Department:

The Malaysian Foreign Ministry has proposed that women travelling abroad will have to have letters from their fathers, husbands or employers permitting them to leave the country.

This story is headed:Proposal to protect ‘fly alone’ women: Have letter will travel
How strange that fly-alone is in quotes but protect isn’t.

What exactly are flying-alone Malaysian women to be protected from?

In a move to stop Malaysian women being duped into carrying drugs for international syndicates, the Foreign Ministry has proposed that all women travelling out of the country alone be required to have a letter from parents or employers.

See, uppity women who dare to get on planes by yourselves. It’s to protect your feeble little minds from being fooled…

“I have submitted this proposal to the Cabinet and both the Foreign and Home Ministries feel this is necessary. Many of these women (who travel alone) leave the country on the pretext of work or attending courses and seminars.
“With this declaration, we will know for sure where and for what she is travelling overseas,” said Rais.
The New Sunday Times has learnt that 119 Malaysians, 90 per cent of whom are women, have been imprisoned in various parts of the world for drug-related offences

Wait a minute - so Malaysian women are pretending to travel to work or courses. I am actually pleased that despite the way the issue is phrased, it seems to be Malaysian women themselves who are actually doing the duping. And the Malaysian government that feels itself duped?

119 Malaysians imprisoned around the world, a hundred-odd of them women. Does that number seem huge enough to justify taking away the rights of all Malaysian women?

Surely, this means there have also been about a dozen Malaysian men imprisoned in other countries. In the interests of justice, I think they deserve the same protection. I think a note from their mothers, wives or bosses would go some small way to keep these fragile easily-fooled creatures from international harm, don’t you?

A recent link on Pharyngula took me to a site that would be a perfect home for the Terry Pratchett character “Visit-The-Ungodly-With- Explanatory-Pamphlets.”

Despite the evidence of the senses, Chick.com seems not to be a spoof site, but some of these “tracts” defy belief. I’ll gloss over the bizarre claims in the adult tracts - such as the Pope having invented Islam.

Look, instead, at the comics aimed at children. The new “classic” one Phayngula linked to is about evolution. “Evolution” is by definition racist, in this bizarre interpretation, serving to make a blond-haired blue-eyed selfish child think he can be god…. Rejects friend’s message about Jesus. Godless evolution-influenced child dies and gets sent to eternal damnation.

Death is a pretty huge theme in the tracts aimed at children. Here’s a sample The Little Princess

Story line: dying girl goes trick-or-treating on Halloween, dressed as a princess - it’s her dying wish. Meets couple who pray for her. Whole family gets converted. She dies. But that’s well worth it because she goes to heaven and her family become “Christians”….

I am forced to refer to Oscar Wilde’s remark about the death of a Dickens character:

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

But, then, I’m not a child subject to a style of brainwashing that owes so much to the manipulative powers of Victorian melodrama. And I am a bit disturbed by the juxtaposition of a smiling child holding out flowers and the explicit death threat.

You might think that this sort of thing (Catholic plots, eternal damnation, Armaggedon fears) appeals to only a tiny subset of the population - the truly mentally-challenged, So, the number of unfortunates who are subject to it might be counted in Westboro Baptist numbers.

Not so, according to its claims. The website claims that Chick has sold 700 million tracts worldwide. Let me momentarily assume this isn’t bearing false witness (because it’s on the Internet which is - like television - not allowed to lie.) That suggests at least seven hundred people have bought a Bumper Million Pack of the things. And that’s an issue for global deforestation in itself.

A whole list of “tracts” is here. I was going to count how many of these contained death threats or rants against other religions. But that would be more or less all of them. Here’s a few quotes from the blurbs:

They thought he was dead, but he woke up screaming, “I’ve got to get saved! I saw hell! I never want to see it again!” Dramatic!

Suicide…The subject is common among teens today. But when Lance decides it is the only way out of his troubles, he discovers that hell is not the party place described in popular songs

Here is a description of the horrible times the Bible says are coming in the future. There is no one to turn to for help but Jesus. He is the only hope.

When this Catholic dies, he learns that his church couldn’t save him

Bob was mean and didn’t need God, until he nearly died in jail.

Time was running out for Ashley. Drugs would soon kill her. But a praying grandmother made the difference.

This soldier learns that it’s not what you know that gets you into heaven. It’s WHO you know… Jesus

A young man goofs when he is talked out of receiving Jesus as Saviour. Adapted for Black audiences.

Danny is dying of cancer. The man in the bed next to him tries to win him to Jesus. A compelling story with a happy ending.

When the collapsing roof dumped him into the flames, Fred thought he had seen hell. But the real hell is much worse.

And so on, ad nauseam..

New Whydontyou blog awards are due today. Blast. I even promised an improved cup award thing… (And I realise I didn’t even get round to adding any more about the blogs that got squeezed to the end of the original post.) But you contenders haven’t lived up to your side of the bargain. Admit it. No plain brown envelopes full of cash have arrived here to sway the judging panel. Remember. You get what you pay for.

Well, the original Top Ten list stilll pretty much stands, for start, except that Nullifidian’s latest blog entries read:

Couldn’t write to: /home/####/####/nullifidian.net/wp-content/cache/wp-cache-###(randomnumbers)###.html

(I’ve replaced the subdirectories and strings with # signs)

Maybe I’m too hard to please but this just doesn’t live up to the quality of his old content.

Here’s a few more award-winners anyway. (Feel free to thank God and your manager and anyone else who made this award possible.) With some hurriedly-put-together award modding.

Funny:
Apathy sketchpad new coins Apathy sketchpad is funny, anyway, but something about this post and the one about the email scammers put the blog in the top rank.

I hesitate to mention Alun’s Archaeoastronomy again, as he’s already in the Top Ten, for fear of this blog turning into a simpering Archaeoastronomy fan club - like this, for example - and it’s really a serious blog, but this is the favourite April 1 post ever.. )

News Biscuit can be entertaining. This is typical of its style.

The Register is often great although you have to be too interested in tech for your sanity to really enjoy it. MY favourite bits are often the comments and the ongoing ROTM (Rise of the Machines strand) which is based on the premise that machines are about to wreak havoc on their fleshly masters. It reports on killbot research and Eye of Sauron anti-immigrant tech and so on. For example.

NASA to unleash ‘mind meld’ intelligent machines
All members of the neoLuddite Resistance Army are hereby ordered to go to Defcon “Armageddon”* and prepare to battle a new breed of mind-melding intelligent machines and systems under development by NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Machine-to-Machine Intelligence Corporation (M2Mi).

Serious:
Grumpy Lion is always amazingly good. Not to mention very generous in his allotment of comment space for mini-blog-skirmishes over nothing ….

Psycho Atheist This blog somehow coincidentally picks up on the exact same stories as PsychoAtheist at the same time. And says pretty much the same things about them.

An Apostate’s Chapel is always measured and wise. I am ashamed to admit that I’ve never listened to the podcast created by the Chaplain and the Exterminator PhillyChief and others. That’s not going to stop me recommending it as a Good Thing.

(It’s not that I don’t want to. I just don’t listen to podcasts. My PC speakers are for listening to (what the Register would characterise as freetard) music. Or they aren’t switched on. That sounds so lame that I suppose I’ll listen to it now….)

There were several blogs I meant to add but these are the only ones that made it through the “Remembering the URL of a good post” filter. Happy May Day.

It was a scenario that would have seemed like overkill in an Eastern European border post at the height of the Cold War. At least a dozen uniformed British Transport Police with dogs and backup vehicles in the average-sized mainline trainstation of an insignificant UK provincial city, at tea-time on a Sunday evening.

Doing stop and searches, apparently based on the hunches of the afore-mentioned sniffer dogs. Which apparently were experts in the fine old canine arts of sniffing out “drugs” or people who “look a bit Brazilian Muslim.”

I listened to one father challenging a Transport policewoman about the fact that his teenage son’s details - name, address, date of birth, etc - had been collected to go in a database. …. Despite a search of all the lad’s pockets, socks and so on, not having turned up an aspirin, a knife, a gun or a handy pocket-sized stick of semtex.

The father pointed out that any other time the lad is stopped, the information that pops up will record him as the subject of a drugs/weapons/terror search. Thus setting him off on a path that leads to an identification as somehow having warranted this suspicion.

The policewoman said words to the effect that it was just tough. That’s just the way things are. And no, there was nothing he could do about it. The database entry stands. All the details collected from such stops go into the database of information on - well - close to everybody that they can get information from .

Blimey, I didn’t even realise that British Transport Police had rights of random stop and search. Let alone rights to gather information on people’s names addresses and travel plans. Oh, yes, RIPA. D’oh. It’s probably only an oversight that they didn’t demand DNA.

I am so innocent. Who would have thought that a teenager buying a train ticket, with his parents, could probably be an international drug dealer or a suicide bomber? Well, better to be safe than sorry. Silly me.

A huge policeman came to physically back up the policewoman, in case the father might actually raise his voice, cuss or commit some other subversive act.

At this point, I could see a potential for nothing good to come of it for anyone who wasn’t in uniform, so I sidled off in a cowardly manner…….

(Yes, OK, that headline was just too bad a pun, even for this blog.) Bees are getting wiped out, in America and Europe. British bee-keepers lobbied Parliament on Wednesday. Beekeepers have asked for £8 million 5 year research programme. This is a pretty modest sum by government spending standards but the Environment Department (DEFRA) says it couldn’t possibly afford it.

American bees are apparently dropping like flies….. This is blamed on Colony Collapse Disorder, which is basically another way of saying that a whole colony dies and no one knows why. It has also happened in the European mainland, but not yet in the UK, according to DEFRA, although some British beekeepers think that they are experiencing it.

In case bees seem like an irrelevant luxury, especially if you don’t eat honey, the Independent pointed out that:

Without the presence of bees, much of agriculture would be impossible, and this is a sobering thought right now, as feeding the world is suddenly becoming more difficult because of rising demand and the transfer of much crop production into biofuels, especially in the US.

DEFRA’s response is to devise a strategy which involves setting up some sort of “Dad’s Army” for Bees - volunteers looking out for diseases- and - you may have guessed it, on current government form - setting up a database. (Is there a database administrator anywhere who could volunteer to explain to the UK government exactly what databases can and cannot do? )

It looks as if no one knows why bees are dying off, There are any number of possible explanations, some of which - blaming the use of mobile phones - strike me as ludicrous. (Although I have to admit that banning mobiles to save world food production would have two upsides.)

Finding out would seem to be a matter of some urgency, you would think. But apparently not worth £8 million, in contrast to the sums spent on other government projects, for instance:

…. the Identity and Passport Service has carried out nearly 90,000 interviews with first-time adult applicants at its new, multi-million pound network of centres.
The centres cost £50m to set up and £30m a year to run. (from the BBC)

So far 90,000 people have been interviewed and none have been knocked back. That’s £80 million spent on illiberal stupidity that has actually done nothing except make last year’s passport provision incredibly more costly. (Oh, and set up even more “joined-up government” databases, of course. )

Why is it always so easy to find government money for vanity projects or extending the apparatus of repression, but seemingly impossible to find any money to protect the environment?

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“It was a miracle I got out alive and I put it down to the power of prayer and God looking after me” (from the BBC)

said a 93-year-old former Pentecostal minister, who managed to reduce two Porsches and a Fiesta to landfill, while driving across the garage forecourt.

Hat tip to Alun for this link, with a shamefaced apology for not looking at my emails for days. Alun said:

Now was it a god, or was it lots of very tedious and difficult work by a lot of people working on safety that allowed that man to live?
On a more philosophical level, wouldn’t it be more helpful if god had whispered “Watch out mate, your about to crash into £60ks worth of Porsche!” *before* the accident or was it just that God wasn’t that eager to have the minister round to his place. If I had time I’d be tempted to set up a ‘Miraclewatch’ site.

There are obvious contradictions. If god has to be credited with the escape, then doesn’t he deserve any blame for putting the chap in danger in the first place? In fact, shouldn’t god take some stick for wasting a miracle on one specific careless driver when the world is awash with more deserving cases: the hungry, the sick, amputees?

It’s really eccentric of god to keep smiting some people and then letting them off at the last minute, to show off that he can, while continuing to smite other people - who pray even more earnestly - just for a cruel laugh.

But, in this case, I think there’s an explanation for god’s behaviour. The driver was obviously doing god’s will by driving in mysterious ways.

God just hates Porsches.

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Greetings, any time travellers who’ve accidentally crash-landed in the present. If you’ve come from ten years ago, say, you really have my sympathy. You may find some things are a bit of shock. I bet this little story will come as a surprise, for a start, but this is just one of the subtle but wonderful improvements we’ve made to your superficially identical world.

Labour MP Austin Mitchell has tabled a Parliamentary motion in support of photographers’ rights.

As a time traveller, you may have idly wondered about the elongated metal rectangles and darkened globes that you see everywhere. They are not uninspired art pieces. These are cameras. CCTV cameras. They don’t need any “rights” because they already have them all. (They are theoretically under the control of some data protection law that says you can have any footage of you but Dom Joly showed, on television last week, that you have a 0 out of 35 chance of getting it.)

It turns out that it’s only the meat-based photographers who are short of rights. The humanoids with visble cameras, with lenses and lens caps and a carrying strap and a bag full of odds and ends. These humanoids are increasingly being challenged for taking pictures. Camerabots are free to take pictures of whatever they want. I think it’s guaranteed in Asimov’s Forth Law of Robotics or something.

The BBC page mentions a photographer who was stopped from taking a picture of a soap star switching on Christmas lights. (I will pointedly not wonder why anyone wants a picture of a Y-list celeb showing that they are capable of operating an On switch.)

The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera.
After explaining he didn’t need one, he was taken down a side-street for a formal “stop and search”, then asked to delete the photos and ordered not to take any more. (from the BBC)

A licence? To take pictures in public place? Where do we get these handy licences? I might need to pick one up when I get my next mp3-player operation licence and my permit to read on the bus.

Even Austin Mitchell has found that he’s been stopped from taking pictures:

Mr Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, was challenged twice, once by a lock-keeper while photographing a barge on the Leeds to Liverpool canal and once on the beach at Cleethorpes.
“There’s a general alarm about terrorism and about paedophiles, two heady cocktails, and police and PCSOs [police community support officers] and wardens and authorities generally seem to be worried about this.” (from the BBC)

The BBC shows a Metropolitan police poster that asks the public to be vigilant about people taking photographs. (I couldn’t find mention of it on their website.) Hmm, that will be people taking photographs in public in London. That was “London”:a popular (if sometimes inexplicably so) global tourist destination. Tourists: you know, the ones with the cameras.

And the shamelessnessness of constantly using the terrorist/paedophile-kneejerk-panic-effect to get us into line. Terrorists with any intelligence would take their pictures on a phone camera or a hidden camera. They wouldn’t walk round with a big obtrusively-lensed Nikon slung round their necks. And I suspect that there is nothing magic about photos for paedophiles, either. If they can see a kid in the street, they can see a kid in the street, whether or not they’ve taken their picture. Do kids magically become invisible to paedophiles when they aren’t in digital format?

*********Asides - related and random***************

1. In a charming irony, there is an incredibly expensive (£250 million, almost $500 million) and laughable plan to get all the Metropolitan police electronically tagged, like so many absconding juveniles. Who watches the watchers indeed? Well, you can watch them with a GPS but you’d better not take their pictures.

2. The Mr Smith story above reminds me of the orchestrated Daily Mail-style clamour for an extension of “stop and search” powers. This man was pulled out of a crowd and searched, apparently on the basis of being in possession of a photographic device with intent to use it.

It’s pretty obvious that Mr Smith didn’t look “a bit muslim” (unlike Jean Charles de Menezes) or the story might have been much worse. And just imagine what would have happened if he didn’t understand enough English to know that he was being “stopped and searched” so he’d just carried on taking pictures at will.

3. This blog gets many more hits when we don’t actually post. (That speaks volumes for the quality of the prose. Yes, I know.)

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