Looking Out To Sea

Some of you might remember a TV broadcast from a couple years ago called The Great Global Warming Swindle. The central thesis, that cosmic rays are the central cause of global warming, has been long disproved. (To make the film-makers’ case more appealing they, uh, “omitted” the last 30 years of data.) Two of the interviewees filed official complaints with Ofcom because their views were misrepresented and their scientific findings distorted in order to show the opposite effect. The producer has previous record on this point and it’s a wonder anyone wants to work with him at all.

I bring all this up to mention that I saw the Ofcom summary by accident the other day:

However, whilst Ofcom is required by the 2003 Act to set standards to ensure that news programmes are reported with “due accuracy” there is no such requirement for other types of programming, including factual programmes of this type.

You heard it here first — factual programmes do not have to be factual.

It seems documentaries, or programmes which look like documentaries, do not have to hew to anything we might call reality. Graphs, figures and statistics can be pulled out of the producer’s… hat and this wouldn’t matter.

The remainder of the ruling makes for some quite depressing reading. You can get away with whatever you want if you introduce your detractors as “the orthodoxy”, mention that they represent a “distortion of a whole area of science” and that they are conspiring to “invok[e] the threat of climatic disaster, to hinder vital industrial progress in the developing world”. Because despite all that you are letting the opposing view have a say. The excuses can stretch even further if your programme is viewed as being “polemical”, as if unsubstantiated nonsense is its own rightness.

Totally unrelated to the above, the same document also contains other rulings, the last of which quite amused me. It was regarding a complaint against subscription-only SportXXXGirls, in which the female presenters “perform[ed] explicit sexual acts” and “invited viewers to contact them for ‘adult chat’ via a premium rate text service”. The complaint was that the “live chat” was a repeat from the week before, which wasn’t obvious (unless you’d seen the previous screening, I guess…). I can only imagine how often they get complaints like this — I don’t know how many people consider complaining about subscription porn channels — but the result was that “Ofcom viewed the recordings supplied and noted that the material shown on the 10 February 2008 was a repeat of that shown on 3 February 2008”. What a strange job…

After what seems like a hundred years, Durham County Council have decided to release the “results” of their fish-oil “trial”. What they have released are not results, because what they did was not a trial.

In short, they

1. Gave fish oil to as many kids as would take the pills.
2. Got laughed at by everyone.
3. Took the huff, said it was never going to be a real trial. Took their ball home too.
4. Refused to answer any questions. Even refused Freedom of Information Act requests. The whole thing became Super Top Secret.
5. Decided they would release the results after all.
6. Didn’t have a control group.
7. Compared the GCSE results of some of the few compliant subjects (~600 out of 3000 starters) with another group of kids chosen after the fact, on the grounds they were quite similar. Really.
8. Ignored another 200-odd compliant subjects because they presumably couldn’t match them against anyone. Science, it works bitches!

Ben Goldacre has the full press release on this sorry affair.

I was going to just tag this one on my Delicious feed but decided it merited a bit more publicity. The Times on Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts said:

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

I honestly don’t care who you get to arbitrate on the argument you have with the next-door neighbour about his apple tree blocking out your sunlight blah-blah-blah. But since when has domestic violence counted as a civil matter?

Has this been the case with other arbitration systems and I didn’t notice? The story is typically light on relevant details, comparisons and caveats — or even a comment by someone who might know the law. “News media: Like information, but less informative.”

Tip of the panama.

If you’ve not heard about the Jewel of Medina story, read the story about “the next Satanic Verses”. My favourite quote was the university professor claiming:

You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.

Well, I’m pretty sure you can. If you can film The Passion of the Christ it should be possible to do anything. But even if you can’t, we’ll just wait for them to film Song of Songs instead, right? No need to turn it into pornography at all.

Via Calum’s Tumblr blog — Frank Zappa on CNN’s Crossfire in 1986:

Includes hilarious “argumentum ad hitlerum” by John Lofton, sitting to the left of Zappa. Zombie Hitler lives!

And here’s George Carlin on those 7 dirty words:

Well, I was going to write about last night’s trip to the cinema, but this caught my eye and I couldn’t resist pointing it out. You might have heard of Poe’s Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

It strictly applies to fundamentalism but is more generally considered to mean “you can’t come up with a parody so absurd that someone won’t believe it, or that someone already doesn’t”. It’s the more general sense that seems relevant here.

Despite endless evidence that it is both ineffective and dangerous, abstinence seems to be the predominant topic of sex education in the US. But how does one actually teach that? Uh, well, like this:

Men sexually are like microwaves and women sexually are like crockpots… a woman is stimulated more by touch and romantic words. She is far more attracted by a man’s personality while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is physically attracted.

Microwaves are turned on by sight? Crockpots are attracted to your personality?! I call Poe’s Law! This can’t possibly be real!

Unfortunately, it is, it really is.

(Hat tip.)

Apparently the cartoon on the front of The New Yorker depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Islamic terrorists burning the Stars and Stripes in the Oval Office isn’t good satire because

satire needs to be completely over-the-top, and this isn’t.

Just roll that one around inside your head for a while.

As one commenter on the Guardian blog says:

In any country there are sophisticated people capable of seeing through several layers of irony and there are those whose humour and comprehension is limited to custard-pie-in-the-face.

…and then there are those who claim sophistication but would censure others for fear of the reaction.

This must be what it feels like to fall into a bottomless pit of inanity, also known as a parliamentary discussion about “alternative” medicine. I think the defining point of the discussion is this short note by Oliver Heald (Cons):

My hon. Friend must not forget aromatherapists. The Aromatherapy Organisations Council has done a great deal of work to move towards regulation of the profession, and would be interested to hear the Minister’s remarks on that.

And so on with other contradictory approaches to health. The important thing is not whether these approaches are effective or worth the money — but whether there is a council of idiots to represent it. In short, whether they are vocal enough.

Is there a meaningful difference between

• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it will give them autism
• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it promotes promiscuous sex

And having asked that, what do you think about compulsory vaccination? I haven’t thought about it yet and I’m ready for bed. Comments please!

This is just a rainbow of hilarious (yeah, I went that far):

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.

To think that there are genuinely straight Lesbians out there, and lesbian Lesbians too. Or is that Lesbian lesbians?

Either way, maybe this is the kind of thing the EU protected name committees should get involved in. You can’t have proper champagne unless it’s made in the Champagne region — and you can’t have proper lesbians unless they come from Lesbos! Ha, next I’m envisioning someone taking a pornographer to court for fraudulently labelled goods…

Still, the ambiguity must do wonders for their tourism. But finding websites for local companies must be a real pain.