Upgrade to unfeigned piety for only £1

While I'm determinedly trying to ignore what passes for political rhetoric these days, hard-core rhetoric junkies can always get their fix from the always-excellent-value Mary Beard, who has some passing thoughts on the rhetoric of 18th Century memorial inscriptions and 21st Century pub menus. Highly recommended.

Turn on, tune out, drop in

New blogging resolution. It's time to stop mocking disingenuous politicians for merely saying something that's obviously unhinged (e.g. Theresa May's factually-challenged Easter egg rant or Michael Howard's recent burble about how we could totally beat Spain in a war). While it's fun to take the piss, it's also a distraction from what the buggers are actually doing.

I've come to the conclusion that these people are deliberately saying mad things in order to stop other people talking about what's really going on. It's like Trump's 3am tweets. I used to believe that these were only incoherent brain farts. These days, I think that they work on two levels. On the simplest level they're still just meaningless nonsense, but tactically, they're also ways to hog the news agenda and squeeze out any reality-based discusssion of what's happening.

While you're busy telling everybody how stupid the president is for wasting his time on some celebrity Twitter-feud, you're also not thinking about the more important fact that he's actually knocking down Dodd-Frank, that big, beautiful wall protecting America and the world from another multi-trillion dollar financial meltdown, an issue that should have been top of the news agenda from the moment he even hinted that he was thinking of doing anything so insanely reckless.

To understand what these people are really doing, it helps to tune out from what they're saying.

Pick your own facts

When I had occasion to ask her whether or not it was a fact that giraffes are taller than ants, she replied that it was not a fact, but rather an article of religious faith in our culture.

Postmodern philosopher, Laurie Calhoun, explaining to philosopher, David Detmer, how to deconstruct biology. Then the right adopted the left's worst ever idea, and the freedom to pick your own facts stopped being funny...

Image partly mashed up from here

"I spit on your grave (more tea, vicar?)"

"Theresa May wades into 'Easter egg hunt' row despite apparently thin grasp of story

Intervention appears to ignore fact the word 'Easter' still appears on promotional material for the event and on the National Trust's website"

Interesting to see that Prime Minister Mayhem isn't confining herself to the European Union when it comes to stirring up a national sense of fact-free grievance. The word is that she's been radicalised by home-grown religious extremists. Some of the extremists' language has been quite disturbing:

The Church of England sparked the row, with Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu accusing Cadbury of "spitting on the grave" of its religious founder, Quaker John Cadbury, by removing references to Christianity's most sacred festival from the spring event.

Steady on, Your Grace! Maybe Elmer Fudd Amber Rudd should  have a word with YouTube and get them to take down this sort of hard-core Anglican material.

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Update

It's hard to believe that this could get any more stupid but, apparently, it can. There's one detail that the archbishop and the vicar's daughter seem to have overlooked. As one self-described "godless liberal" has pointed out, "Quakers don’t actually celebrate Easter."  And he's not wrong - at least according to this, from the "What do Quakers believe?" section of the Berkhamsted Quakers' website:

Holy Days
Quakers do not celebrate Christian festivals such as Easter and Christmas.

But please don't let that stop you lecturing the rest of us about the need for "religious literacy", Anglicans...

Against Marmite fundamentalism

As for those on the fence about the taste? Well, there’s not really a fence. “I have, to date,” says Watkins, “only met one person who has claimed to be ambivalent about the taste of Marmite, and I don’t believe them.”

I've never knowingly met this Watkins, so I can probably confirm that there are at least 100% more people with no strong feelings about Marmite than he imagines, and that at least 50% of the total known population of self-declared Marmite agnostics isn't lying.

I suspect that I'm only one of many people who think the stuff's OK occasionally, but nothing to get that excited about. I further suspect that the claimed extent this binary love/hate thing is advertising hype but, frankly, I'm too indifferent to such claims to spend any time verifying my suspicions.

None of us have unlimited time and attention, so if you're going to get worked up about something, get worked up about something that really matters. Like incorrect apostrophe placement, for example.

Birds of a feather splat together

...behavioural differences suggest that individual birds that are not killed in traffic should have larger brains for their body size. We analysed the link between being killed by traffic and relative brain mass in 3521 birds belonging to 251 species brought to a taxidermist. Birds that were killed in traffic indeed had relatively smaller brains, while there was no similar difference for liver mass, heart mass or lung mass. These findings suggest that birds learn the behaviour of car drivers, and that they use their brains to adjust behaviour in an attempt to avoid mortality caused by rapidly and predictably moving objects. 

Which is presumably why the panicky, feather-brained pheasant seems to be in almost as much danger of ending up as roadkill as it is of being blasted out of the sky by some feather-brained toff with a shotgun. The altogether smarter crow, on the other hand, will view your approaching vehicle with bored contempt, then grudgingly hop out of the way at the very last, precisely-timed, moment before returning to resume its rudely-interrupted meal of carrion (pheasant, if it's lucky).

Nutters finally vindicated

You'd probably​ dismiss this as the usual load of old tosh...

"Apocalypse NOW: End of the world upon us and 2017 will be our FINAL YEAR, say Christians" shrieked the Express

Being slightly calmer and more level-headed, I was having none of this nonsense, until...

"Unfortunately, Earth has stopped."

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine (now that Earth has rebooted).