Complete and Utter Zebu

IS GOOGLE CENSORING ITSELF WHEN IT COMES TO ISLAM?

On January 5th, thenextweb.com noticed some odd behaviour with Google when you type in search suggestions for various religions. Type in “Christianity is”, for instance, and Google autofills with a few ideas for things it thinks you might be hunting for. “Christianity is a lie”, for instance, or “bullshit”, “false”, “almost dead”, “not a religion”, “a cult”, “wrong”, “sexist” or “dead”.

Similar things happen when you type in “Judaism is”, “Hindusim is”, “Buddhism is” and “Catholicism is”. Try it yourself and see.

But something very different happens when you type in “Islam is”. Nothing. there are no suggestions, of any sort.

Google claims this has nothing to do with cowardice or censorship but is simply a bug. Given that it is now eight days since the oddity was noticed, it must be a very serious bug indeed. Only the most deluded conspiracy theorist could possibly think that Google’s sudden announcement that it might end its much-criticised censorship practices in China could have anything to do with diverting attention away from this embarrassing “bug”.

RELATED POST
Google’s disgraceful Chinese censorship in picture form

OTHER ZEBU NEWS
• Lingfield racecourse has abandoned its “all-weather” meeeting because of…the weather. Åccording to The Racing Post, they claim the track is raceable but that there are safety concerns with local snow-covered roads. [Thanks to Mark]

• Which? reports that hire car companies are bamboozling and misleading customers. Avis and Enterprise give no details of terms and conditions on their website, while Europcaar, Enterprise and Hertz stipulate in their small print that if the car is stolen and you can’t produce the key, you can be held liable for the whole value of the vehicle.

• It isn’t only the UK that has problems with fake students. In China, entry standards to universities are higher for the Chinese than they are for foreigners, so there’s a growing demand for fake passports from African, South American and Southeast Asian countries. The Global Times says: “A typical student imposter cannot speak the native language of his purported motherland and can’t tell you the name of the nation’s capital. His family is Chinese.” To be fair, that probably also applies to some genuine British students too, given the latest report on UK education standards.

• The Daily Telegraph reports that MPs who claimed expenses they weren’t entitled to are striking deals, with the whole thing kept secret if they repay the money. If anything illustrates the “one law for them, another for the rest of us”, it is this scandalous arrangement offered by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Labour MP Janet Anderson, for instance, was offered such a deal after double-claiming £6,000 in “petty cash”. So much for the transparency promised by the party leaders.

THE SWINE FLU “PANDEMIC” TURNS OUT TO BE NOTHING OF THE SORT

“All of humanity is under threat”, said World Heath Organisation director-general Dr. Margaret Chan in April 2009 as the WHO, reacting to H1N1 virus – swine flu – raised its alert level from phase 4 to phase 5. The UK Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson said that “Phase five indicates that WHO considers a global pandemic to be imminent.”

Flash forward to January 2010. Wolfgang Wodang, head of health at the Council of Europe, says that the H1N1 virus was “a mild flu and a false pandemic…It’s just a normal kind of flu. It does not cause a tenth of deaths caused by the classic seasonal flu.” Instead of the forecast 65,000 deaths in Britain, 360 have died.

Wodang blames the drugs companies, believing they orchestrated a “campaign of panic” to pressurise the WHO into declaring a pandemic so that stockpiles of vaccine would be ordered and claiming that some people in the WHO are too closely associated with the pharmaceutical industry.

“The great campaign of panic we have seen provided a golden opportunity for representatives from labs who knew they would hit the jackpot in the case of a pandemic being declared.”

Are drugs companies solely to blame? What about those politicians desperate to be seen to be doing something, even if it turns out to be utterly pointless? What about the newspapers, which love a good scare story? What about the scientific “experts”, who too rarely claim poo-poo such things as being mere storms in teacups.

A parliamentary question in September 2009 put the cost of tackling swine flu at £1 billion. That much has now been spent on vaccines which appear to be largely useless. According to Wodang, the “vaccines were developed too quickly. Some ingredients were insufficiently tested.”

It’s not as if this has not happened many times before. Remember SARS? Remember bird flu?

According to Dr. Shiv Chopra, a former senior scientific adviser to Health Canada: “No flu vaccine has ever worked. Swine flu, we don’t even know there is such a thing. It’s a misnomer. Avian [bird] flu, these are all made-up things. The whole thing is a hoax. It has been for the last 10 years.”

FORECASTERS AIM FOR CONSISTENCY. BUT THE MET OFFICE’S CONSISTENCY IS IN GETTING ITS PREDICTIONS WRONG

Forecasting is an inexact science, no matter what the field. It’s said, for instance, that economists have successfully predicted 14 of the last five recessions. Yet Britain’s Met Office has achieved an extraordinary consistency in its long-range forecasts – by getting them wrong every time.

It has been wrong in its predictions for the past three summers and the past three winters. You may recall that in April 2009, the Met Office forecast a “barbecue summer” for Britain. If there was a summer day suitable for unearthing the barbie, I must have missed it. Tthen, in October, they prophesied a mild winter. Perhaps nobody should have been too surprised that we were soon plunged into the coldest winter for 20 years.

This is despite the Met Office costing the public purse getting on for £200m a year, installing a new £30m supercomputer the size of two football pitches in 2009 and giving its directors pay rises of a third, with the Chief Executive now getting more than the Prime Minister. Its record has probably cost British industry and tourism millions and it makes one wonder how accurate are its predications on climate change, a field in which it is incredibly influential.

Despite the Met Office’s supercomputer, I’m more inclined in future to pay attention to Harry Kershaw. Harry, an amateur weather forecaster from Sale, predicted in late December that we were heading for one of the harshest winters in years. Maybe it was simply a lucky guess. Lucky or not, Harry’s is still a better record than the bloated, massively-funded, climate change-obsessed Met Office. How appropriate that the speed of the Met Office’s new computer, one of the 20 most powerful in the world, is “one petaflop”.

NOT ENOUGH “FRIENDS” ON FACEBOOK OR TWITTER? WHY NOT BUY SOME MORE?

One of the Oxford University Press’s words of 2009 was “defriend”, coined to explain somebody jettisoning a Facebook “friend”. For many people, however, that’s the opposite of what they want. Feeling lonely and without enough friends on Twitter or Facebook, more and more people are resorting to buying blocks of fake pals.

Usocial is an Australian net marketing company which offers Facebook and Twitter packages. They are targeted at companies. As the Facebook page explains, “Since the inception of Facebook, people have been feverishly trying to get as many friends or fans as they can in order to market their product or services to.”

However, according to Usocial’s chief executive Leon Hill, business from individuals boomed during the holiday period. “Social networking sites can be cruel if you’re unloved. They show exactly how popular you are.” He went on:

“People are buying pals so they have more mates to chat to, rather than sitting alone on their PCs.” – Leon Hill, Usocial

Facebook’s lawyers are reportedly trying to shut the service down. Indeed, at the time of writing, buying Facebook “friends” rather than “fans” has been suspended on Usocial’s website. But Twitter “friends” can still be bought at a mere $87 per 1,000, with as many as 100,000 offered at a discount price of $3,479.

The idea of paying to make yourself look more popular seems rather sad. However, despite The Sun and The Daily Telegraph carrying the story, it may of course be untrue or wildly exaggerated. As we’ve seen often before, it may simply be a PR puff that has been taken as gospel. Will anyone out there stick their hand up and confess that they’ve actually paid for online friends? And wouldn’t going into any pub and yelling out “The drinks are on me” be a better way of going about it?

ARCHAEOLOGISTS CLAIM TO FIND SWISS WATCH IN TOMB UNTOUCHED FOR 400 YEARS

Picture the scene. A Ming Dynasty tomb in Guangxi in southern China, undisturbed since between 1368 and 1644. A pair of archaeologists are working in utterly virgin territory, alone other than for a pair of documentary-makers.

The People’s Daily reported what happened next. According to Jiang Yanyu, the ex-head of the Guangxi Museum: “When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with a metallic sound. We picked up the object and found it was a ring. After removing the covering soil and examining it further, we were shocked to see it was a watch.”

The watch was engraved “Swiss” on the reverse and was stopped at 10:06. The archaeologists were so perplexed that they have asked Beijing experts for help. What sort of help? Archaeological or psychiatric?

The story was picked up by a surprising number of papers and not just The Daily Mail looking for another in its beloved vein of “Hitler found the Lost Ark of the Covenant”. That paper kindly explained to its more historically-challenged readers that, “watches were not around not around at the time of the Ming Dynasty and Switzerland did not even exist as a country”, attributing such insightful detail to “an expert”.

The Chinese were, of course, scientific wizards who invented many wonderful things while those in the West were still painting themselves blue and erecting giant stone dominoes with roofs on. So it seems perfectly reasonable that they should invent replica watches before the sluggards in Europe had got round to making the first timepiece. Or could it simply be that the tomb was not quite as sacrosanct as the archaeologists thought?

It would be handy to see the video footage. For some mysterious reason it has yet to emerge. [Thanks to Beowyn for the tipoff]

RELATED POSTS:
Do the media check press releases? Not on this evidence
Google’s disgraceful China censorship in picture form

MAIN BLOG

A pair of American high school students working on a project using DNA analysis inadvertently uncovered a startling degree of outright fraud involving expensively-priced food items.

New York City high school pupils Matt Cost and Brenda Tan carried out a science project to see what sort of everyday items carried decipherable DNA. With the assistance of The Rockefeller University and the American Museum of Natural History, they tested 217 specimens using the high-tech but relatively routine method of “DNA barcoding”. They found, for instance, Ostrich DNA in a feather from a duster and horse DNA in manure collected in Central Park.

What surprised them, though, was how many food products were not what they claimed to be. “We found 16% of food items were mislabeled. For example, a specialty cheese labeled as being made from ’sheep’s milk’ was made from ordinary cow’s milk, and a delicacy labeled ‘dried shark’ was Nile perch, an inexpensive freshwater fish from Africa. ‘Venison’ dog treats turned out to be beef. Fish were the most commonly mislabeled items.”

“Most cases appeared to involve substitution of a less expensive or less desirable item, suggesting the possibility of deliberate mislabeling for economic gain.” – Matt Cost & Brenda Tan

They also found Caribbean red snapper that came from Southeast Asia, dried smelt (no, we have no idea either) that was actually unrelated Japanese anchovy and “Sturgeon caviar” that turned out to Mississippi paddlefish.

The students quite rightly pointed out that it wasn’t only that such items were misleading, but that mislabelling could be dangerous, given that some “individuals have allergies or dietary restrictions regarding certain foods.”

The case brings to mind New Zealand schoolgirls Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo who discovered, also through a school science experiment, that ready-made Ribena sold in New Zealand and Australia contained almost no vitamin C. This, despite the claim that it contained seven milligrams per 100 millilitres. After being ignored by manufacturers GlaxoSmithKlein, the NZ Commerce Commission watchdog took up the case and, in 2007, the company was fined £80,000.

RELATED POSTS:
The wine label that breaks the law by telling the truth

The cheddar cheese from Latvia
“Spankingly fresh” sushi, brought in frozen from Chile

Zebu Organization of the Year
What else could it be but the House of Commons, the high reputation of which has been brought low by the Expenses’ Scandal? It’s as if our 646 MPs lined up their feet and took aim at them with shotguns. What is most disgraceful is not the claims that have been made, but the strenuous attempt made by the House of Commons collectively to prevent the public ever finding out the truth. In a story that seems almost forgotten now, they bullied Elizabeth Filkin out of her job while, more recently, the head of the senior pay body admitted that he’d been warned off investigating expenses.

What’s more, while many MPs caught with their hands in our pockets have claimed to have acted within the rules, there are other, more serious rules about the behaviour of MPs and bringing the House into disrepute that one could argue most of them have broken. And now some of them have the chutzpah to claim that the Bill of Rights gives them Parliamentary privilege.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the whole affair is that there have been no riots or public unrest of almost any kind. Surely the very least they deserve is the receipt of some overripe fruit.

Zebu in the Media
Much as we may love Google for the good things it has brought us (and the months of our life it has stolen from us in pointless but enjoyable searches), its craven attitude towards China makes even Sinophile John Prescott look shy. This is best encapsulated in the blood-chillingly different Google search results “Tiananmen Square Protest“, depending on whether you’re within China or outside it.

Zebu Farmer of the Year
What good is a politician who can’t lie? Hillary Clinton seems to have trouble distinguishing reality and fantasy, even when it concerns herself. As well as the famous Bosnian incident, when the “sniper fire” that kept her pinned down was utterly illusory, there have been many other fantasy Hillary incidents. Most recently, she addressed the Northern Ireland Assembly and, once again, reinvented the past.

Shocking Zebu
For those concerned about the intrusion of cctv into our daily lives, the screen grab of a live feed from one of Transport for London’s traffic cameras was something of an eye-opener, given that the camera was pointing into somebody’s bedroom. Our complaint to the Mayor of London has, so far, gone unanswered.

Dictionary of Deceit
“Fresh”, as defined by Pret a Manger, applied to frozen sushi imported from Chile. In fact, it wasn’t just described as “fresh”, but as “spankingly fresh”. That isn’t, perhaps, “fresh” as most of us might think of it.

Bizarre Zebu
We’re often told there are 4.2 million cctv cameras in the UK. How they arrived at that number, eight years ago, is mind-bogglingly bizarre.

Funny Zebu
Some Zebu can only be admired. That’s the case with the double entendre (or sometimes single entendre) racehorse names which owners try to sneak past the authorities. Occasionally they succeed and it’s hard not to smile when you see the video of one of these, Hoof Hearted, romping home to pride of place in the winners’ enclosure.

A ROUND-UP OF THE MOST GLARING, RIDICULOUS AND EGREGIOUS LIES, DECEPTION AND BULLSHIT OF 2009

Zebu Organisations
Royal Mail clearly deserve to be singled out for their “Sorry You Were Out” cards, pushed through letterboxes, whether people are out or not. Initially, facing an imminent strike, Royal Mail’s less-than-stellar management maintained that this hardly ever happened and said that any postman guilty of such a practice would be sacked. Then a survey for Consumer Focus found that 55% of people claimed they had experienced it at least once in the past year alone. Arrange these words into a sentence: Mail pissup couldn’t in a arrange brewery Royal a management.

Zebu Regulations
According to a study by Open Europe, 100 EU regulations will cost Britain £184 billion between 2010 and 2020, more than the UK’s record budget deficit.

Zebu in the Media
An Australian show called Hungry Beast wanted to see how carefully news organisations checked stories before running them. Given the eagerness with which they ran a story about the gullibility ranking of various Australian cities, the answer was “not at all”.
DO THE MEDIA CHECK PRESS RELEASES?

Zebu Farmer of the Year (nomination)
Home Secretary Alan Johnson sacked senior drugs adviser Professor David Nutt, maintaining that it was because the professor spoke out against government policy.
WHY DID ALAN JOHNSON SACK PROFESSOR NUTT?

Most Shocking Zebu
The fatal flaw in ID cards is one that should chill our marrow, given that the government has still not given up on them and that the same problem applies to biometric passports which are raplidly becoming ubiquitous.
THE FATAL FLAW IN ID CARDS.

Dictionary of Deceit
When even our language lies to us.
WORLD SERIES

Bizarre Zebu
How coin tosses can easily be fixed, even by complete beginners.
TOSS YOU FOR IT

Funny Zebu
The singing toy mouse whose rendition of Jingle Bells sounded to some more like “paedophile, paedophile”. Judge for yourself by listening to or downloading the mp3.
THE SINGING PAEDOPHILE MOUSE

RELATED POSTS:
Zebu review of the year – part 1

Zebu review of the year – part 2

A ROUND-UP OF THE MOST GLARING, RIDICULOUS AND EGREGIOUS LIES, DECEPTION AND BULLSHIT OF 2009

Zebu Organisations
British Telecom make the list, primarily for telling the villagers of Hambledon in Oxfordshire that it was impossible to provide them with broadband. That might not have been so difficult to live with, had they not then discovered that BT made an exception in the case of one solitary resident.
NOT SO BROAD BAND

Zebu Regulations
EU regulations on food are incredibly tough, except in one area – “filth”. Amazingly, it does not cover extraneous matter like insect fragments and animal hair. According to the American Agricultural Law Association, “it isactually illegal for anybody to prohibit, restrict or impede foods on the grounds that they contain bits of insect, animal hair or other extraneous matter.”
WHY OUR FOOD MIGHT BE FILTHIER THAN WE THINK

Zebu in the Media
JFK, while still a senator, sunbathing, while around him naked women frolicked. It a “photo that could have changed history” trumpeted TMC.com. It was also a fake.
JFK NAKED PHOTO IS A HOAX

Zebu Farmer of the Year (nomination)
Politicans telling us lies? Nothing new there, perhaps. But to keep repeating the same lie, despite being told by the Office for National Statistics that it is wrong and that she “may undermine public trust in official statistics”, sets Harriet Harman apart from the herd.
IS HARRIET HARMAN A LIAR – OR JUST PLAIN STUPID?

Most Shocking Zebu Story
Why on earth would the BBC invent a story about a heart-rending famine in Africa?
THE FAMINE THAT NEVER WAS

Dictionary of Deceit
When even our language lies to us.
RINSE AND REPEAT

Bizarre Zebu
How can calorie-free water help you slim by having stuff added to it?
DIET WATER

Funny Zebu
The glorious case of the Identity Minister who forgot her own identity

ZEBU REVIEW OF THE YEAR – PART ONE