Equality for all, except...

Tonight I caught the end of a party political broadcast by the Scottish Christian Party (next week across the UK there are local elections and in Scotland there are also elections for the Scottish Parliament.) Now the SCP seem to be an angry bunch, but I wasn't quite prepared for the comment that their leader, the Rev. George Hargreaves, said at the very end of the broadcast. Now one of the SCPs main bugbears seems to be the Equality Law that is soon to be introduced across the UK, with their particular attention being on the fact that it means you can't discriminate against someone due to their sexual orientation. Being Christian's you might think "how can they be against something that says everyone is equal?", because isn't that how God views people. Well they don't quite see it that way. The law is in fact an affront to all Christians and is in fact discriminatory against them! Yeah, right! Now I come to what the Rev. George said. He compared the introduction of the anti-discrimination law to the Nazi's introducing a law banning the preparation of Kosher food. And then went on to make the statement that pretty much suggested that, as the Nazi's followed up this law with the Holocaust, the UK Equality law would lead to a similar fate for Scottish Christians! Comparing a piece of anti-discrimination policy to events that led to the Holocaust is really fucked up. Not that I was ever considering "placing my cross by their cross" (their slogan for how you should vote), but these guys will most definitely not be getting my vote!

Tell me WHY I don't like airports...

The reason is that they are the work of Satan himself. They are hellish places when you just have to spend the merest of timespans in them, but when you have to spend entire days, or more, of you precious life in them they become all the more unbearable and maddening. This rant is courtesy of a rather large amount of icey weather in the North East of America, and the general astounding lack of preparedness by the staff of Continental Airlines (as may have been picked up from my last post - BTW I'm now approaching 36 hours of sleep deprivation). The reason these things have effected me is that I had to leave the gorgeousness of the Moriond meeting in La Thuile to attend the rather less attractive prospect of the LSC (my collaboration) meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So let me take you back two days...

A slightly hungover me leaves the Moriond to travel the much trod road to Geneva. This all goes well (apart from having a large - yet reclaimable - amount of money extracted from my wallet by a greedy coachman). After about 40 mins semi-random wandering I find my hostelry, where I will rest before my early flight the next morning. I partake in victuals at a local eatery, dispatch myself to a pubbe to quaff ale and watch borish sporting endeavours, and then drink with a local comely wench - sorry Helen ;) - forgive my olde worlde tone in the last sentences for I have mostly been reading a lot of Quicksilver in the last day, which is set, for a large part, in 17^th Century England.

This flight was directly from Geneva to Newark Airport, for which I arose at the ungodly hour 5.30 am (cue the start of my sleep deprivation). The flight was as pleasant as any long hall trip can be, but the pilot said there might be some light snow in New York. No-one's too worried as there was no word of delays. We get to Newark and it's fairly snow laden all around, with snowplows whizzing around the tarmac a breakneck speed to clear the snowy slush, but the planes seem to be moving ok. Little did we realise that this movement was a rouse. The planes are leaving gates and new ones are arriving, but barely any are actually taking off. Various people are sitting on their planes on the runways for several hours before being recalled. This seems an obvious point for the local airport staff to start preparing people for the fact that their flights are rather unlikely to take off, and maybe diverting some of the incoming flights to more hospitable airports. However this isn't what happens. They just keep putting back and back the departure times of all the aircraft, with more and more people arriving all the time. When the staff do eventually bow to the inevitable there are thousands of people with cancelled connections all wanting the same thing and with very few points of call to get it. The connections desks develop huge queues, which move at a snails pace and snake around with many hours waiting time. No-one really knows if any flights will be able to take of the next day either, so people just have to hope that a connection can be found. Continental, who were the only people I dealt with, as they control pretty all Terminal C of Newark, where I had landed, gave out a phone number to ring to get a connecting flight, but this was inundated by half the North East of America, so became practically useless - which I found out after many failed attempts at getting through, including a brain sapping, 2 hour 10 min stint, which almost LEFt mE InnSAyNE! I hadn't done the clever thing if just brazening out one of the check in queues from the start (which would have been at least a six hour wait), but had assumed things the numbers of people would dwindle as the night progressed - the only dwindling of people was from the check in staff though, slowing progress even further. This meant that, after a few aborted attempts to sleep in variuos parts of the terminal building, I had to try to rejoin a queue in the morning check in, which would start at 4am we were assured. At 4.40am the check in staff finally arrived. This time I stuck out the line (to use an Americanism), before being told that I wouldn't be able to get a flight to my destination until Monday. The attendant I had spoken to didn't seem to have tried particularly hard to find alternative routes, but I accepted things (in most situations a couple of free days in New York would have been great, but my mood was rather strained at this point) and said to just book me the earliest flight back to Glasgow - I just wanted to go home and sleep - but again this wouldn't be until Monday evening. I walked off to collect my baggage, which had spent the night all comfy in the hold of its plane, feeling distinctly emotionally drained. There was so much stress and high tension in the air from the mass of pissed off and tired people that it just got into you.

Now I don't blame (most of) the check in staff for the situation, or the weather for that matter. What I blame is just piss poor management and planning. Snow and cold weather aren't exactly uncommon phenomena in the northerly parts of America. Indeed it's pretty much expected during the winter, so these situations must occur at least yearly. However there seemed to be no contingency for it at all, with people having a very poor idea of what should have been done and when. The fact that planes weren't going to be flying should, and could, have been spotted earlier. This would have allowed people to arrange their connecting flights as they arrived, which would have been in a more orderly manner with a far smaller flow of people to deal with. Flights that could have been diverted, should have been, so that so many people wouldn't have been stuck in the one place. The phone system should have been more helpful, and at least given an updated message of how long it would be for a call to be answered. I just don't know whether any of this will be done, and it's certainly taken the sheen off what before was one of my least hated airports.

However my luck did change. When attempting to arrange for Continental to at least put me up in a hotel for the next couple nights I came across a rather more competent and professional set of check staff, the very people who I should have gone to in the first place. In their room, which was tucked away at the far end of the main terminal, past the luggage carousels, the atmosphere was a lot calmer. This eased me and when I got to the desk I asked whether a more concerted attempt could be made to get me to Baton Rouge. After a short while it was found that this was indeed possible, and all that had to happen was that I went via Memphis, rather than the original route via Houston. So now after about 26 hours in Newark I'm nearing my flight time. I've still not slept, so no doubt soon my normal sleep deprived experience or audio hallucination's is just around the corner, but hopefully I'm actually on my way somewhere. In fact at this point I don't care where, I just want to be moving and get out of this BLOODY AIRPORT!!!

A little to the right

Read this recent post from Cosmic Variance. It's about a new rival to wikipedia, called conservapedia, that doesn't hold too much hat with all the woolly liberal views that wikipedia expounds. By God, they aim to set things right and they'll do it by ridding entries of the scourge of liberal non-American spelling (see conservapedia commandment number 5) - non-American spelling leads to homosexuality, rape, and cruelty to cats, or something like that! Some of the entries detailed in Sean's CV post and comments sections are obvious piss takes and have been removed, however the posts on Atheism, Einstein and "Anything Goes" are still as stated - I think they might be serious! I know that wikipedia can sometimes have some dubious statements and citations for articles (which you're free to correct), but how's about this for a "true and verifiable" (commandment numero uno) statement:

"Since atheists have no God, as a philosophical framework atheism simply provides no logical basis for any moral standard. They live their lives according to the rule that "anything goes". In recent years, this has led to a large rise in crime[1], drug use,pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy,[2] pedophilia[3] and bestiality."

Particularly amusing/disturbing is that the citation [1] is to a website called www.creationtheory.org.

Express yourself

Tony Blair's an arse! The Queen's a crack ho! Christianity smells! God's a bastard!

Now I like the fact that I can say and write these things, even if they're insulting to people. I like the fact that I can write them as my honest opinion, or as a joke. I like the fact that I can criticise people or institutions that I don't agree with. However, I might think differently if I was in Eygpt, as a blogger who expressed his opinion has just been sent to prison for four years. His crime was "for contempt of religion, insulting the president and spreading false information.", or basically speaking out against an establishment he felt was deserving of some criticism. This type of state censorship/punishment isn't limited to Eygpt (see the UK religious hatred laws for example), but I hope that it wont spread too far and too wide. There's a huge amount that has already been written about freedom of speech and civil liberties, but I just thought I'd bring up this case as a recent example of where things can lead. You can see more about the Egyptian blogger Kareem here.

Where have all the white towels gone...

Today I discovered that, after months of threatening, the University of Glasgow gym (aka the Stevie) has removed their service of having small white towels freely available for exercisers. These towels come in useful for wiping your sweaty brow after a hard work out, and also wiping your sweaty imprint off the exercise machine you've just used. Unfortunately many people abused this service, and instead of returning the towels to the given receptacles for laundering at the end of their session, they would selfishly steal the towel. This even lead to an attempted towel amnesty by the gym, but I don't think it wasn't hugely successful, hence the disappearance of the towel service completely. Now we're left with the far lesspleasant scratchy paper towels to do the job of the old soft and fluffy cotton towel - maybe I'll just bring in my own flannel!

United

Today marked the 300th anniversary of the Scottish parliament voting for the Union between the Scottish and English parliaments. This has of course been greeted by debate (sure to continue up to this year's Scottish parliamentary elections) over the place of the union and whether the United Kingdom should break up with an independent Scotland (and indeed and independent England - in a lot of these debates Wales and Northern Ireland get a bit forgotten about, but then they are only small). There are three main areas where these debates tend to focus, and they are used to argue, by various parties (not only meaning political parties), both for and against independence: the political arguments e.g. self determination in all areas of government including taxation and defense, the West Lothian question; the economic arguments e.g. other small independent European nations have vibrant economies, businesses thrive with close links to the economic powerhouse of London; and the cultural arguments e.g. we diminish/enhance our identities through the union. I've just given a few examples of some of the areas which arise from the independence question and there are many more. Each of them is very complex with no simple answer or conclusion, so I'm just going to give a bit of opinion as to why I favour keeping the union rather than delving into any one particular argument.

I'm English and have lived in Scotland for over four years now, so I have some knowledge of what it's like to live in both countries. Before moving here I liked the idea of the union, just because I thought it was a nice notion, although I didn't have any real idea of the strength of the Scottish national identity or of the differences throughout Britain. On moving to Scotland I've enjoyed the fact that there is a distinct cultural identity here, however I've never felt like a foreigner (ok, except during the football!). I don't know if it's just the shared language that makes it this way, and maybe I'd feel the same in, say, France if I spoke French, or them English. Then again, I do feel like a foreigner in America, where they speak English. I think the main reason that I feel like I'm at home in Scotland is that the union's been around so long that the links and commonalities between the nations are actually rather ingrained, and comfortable. Sure there are difference and it's nice to celebrate these things, and to show them to others, but on another level there are (again in my opinion) far more similarities. So my main reason for the retaining of the union is still that I like the way it feels. I like the fact that England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland are part of something bigger and that because of it they do have so many links and things in common. I suppose I'm arguing here that there is (in my experience) some sort of common British identity, which a lot of people don't like the idea of or get defensive about - maybe this is because they think it somehow dilutes or takes away from their narrower national (or regional) identity, or maybe it's just that they like being in a slightly more exclusive club, or maybe it's that they don't like the idea of a label or national identity at all, but I don't really know. I have to say that one aspect of the independence debate that I hate (and which thankfully you don't often hear) is one of racism, whereby the Scots, Welsh, Cornish are Celts and racially different that the Anglo Saxons and therefore are fundamentally different and should have independent (and maybe they're suggesting racially pure!) countries.

Anyway, these are the opinions of someone who's from England, or more specifically the South-East (London), so it would be interesting to hear other peoples views. Maybe you see the commonalities that I say run deep are actually the superficial things, whereas the differences are far more numerous and ingrained. Let's not get to divisive now though ;)

Back to the general starting point of this opinion piece:- The main thing I think that would be seen if independence were to happen is that a mixture of the pro and anti-independence predictions would be born out, with some benefits being seen as well as some loses (for both England and Scotland), plus some outcomes that no one expected - I know that's not a very insightful thing to say as it's pretty much stating the bloody obvious, but politicians tend to paint things as either one option or the other.