Making some demands on your time recently, aren't I? Still, I expect you made time for this one by skipping the long one about spiders.

Following on the late lamented Tony Wilson, Hilly Kristal has also died. He ran CBGB's in New York. Looks like it's a risky time to be an old punk impresario. If I was Malcolm McClaren's daycare nurse, I'd be checking his pulse regularly. Thanks to Mrs Tilton for the heads up. Incidentally, did you know Wilson was a Man Utd fan? It seems wrong somehow.

Still, there's plenty of other stuff to cheer us up. Here, for instance, is a rocket-powered prosthetic arm. Now there's something you really would give your right arm for.

While you're trawling through the blogs, do watch out for fake posts with links to hidden viruses. Apparently some blogs have been invaded by malicious posters, and other blogs have been created entirely for the purpose. So be warned, those cheap CD links aren't really from me. You'll never catch me offering you anything cheap. The more complex the Internet gets, the more it looks and feels like an ecosystem. For every niche, there's a predator. Some people are still trying to make it a better place though.

Here, meanwhile, may be the world's first war crime.

And an apology to the good people of NASA. Apparently their astronauts didn't fly drunk, as previously implied. Assuming we can believe anything they say, of course.

Tomorrow, the 31 day regime begins.

Here is a fascinating piece about social spiders. They live together in colonies, where they make huge great fuckoff webs the size of houses. They normally go for mosquitos, but just recently they've been taking chunks out of the individualist theory of natural selection. Here's how.

Life evolves through natural selection, as you all know (frankly, if you're not with me so far you're probably going to run out of steam before the end). Anyone who's anyone understands this, but there has long been a debate as to whether this selection works at the level of the group or the individual. It's been generally agreed for a while that it works at the level of the individual.

The argument most commonly used to justify this position is that of sex ratios. Take seals, for instance. If only ten percent of seals were male, they could still get all the females pregnant, and there'd be lots more baby seals than there actually are.

In fact, fifty percent of seals are male. The males fight, the winners get lots of females pregnant and the losers either die of their wounds or loaf about not having sex. This is clearly inefficient (and I should know), so you might expect natural selection to 'choose' the ninety-ten solution instead. It doesn't, for a very good reason.

Each baby seal has one mother and one father. If you're a male in a ninety-ten species, you have an expected average number of offpsring nine times that of a female. Therefore, a genetic mutation which makes a lady seal more likely to give birth to males would expect to succeed, and be copied down the generations, so a ninety-ten ratio could never be stable. The only stable ratio is fifty-fifty, and that's what you get, even though it's less efficient from the point of view of the whole species.

Ninety percent of social spiders In Ecuador are female. This has seriously screwed up the theory, but they think they have an explanation.

Individualist selection depends on genetic variation within the population. In social spiders, there is almost no variation at all, each spider being virtually a clone of the others, so there's nothing for individual selection to work on. For this reason, group selection wins out, as ninety-ten colonies outbreed fifty-fifty ones, and replace them.

There's an obvious problem here, which is mutation. Any mutation towards making boy spiders would be almost bound to conquer the colony in which it arose. However, it might be that such colonies would fare less well than their ninety-ten rivals, and would die off.

It's going to be an interesting debate to follow. Yes it is. There's a more in-depth discussion here, and I've written other spider related stuff here and here. Yes, I'm scratching a bit as well.

Incidentally, here is Bug Girl's website. Me and Bug Girl both think you could all stand to be a bit more interested in bugs. They should stop eating the Internet though.

You may remember I had a debate with some Christians recently. I described it in this post.

Well, they deleted it. Can you imagine? To lose an argument, then to hide it afterwards. The cowards. It's like kicking over the chessboard when you get checkmated.

Fortunately, I'd already saved it on my hard disk. I've put it here. Ha!

Go read it, and decide for yourself who won. If you ask me, there's a clue in the question "Who deleted it?"

Yes, it's that time of year again, or in this case that time of year for the first time ever. Remember this moment, because you only hear about International Rock Flipping Day for the first time once.

It's explained here by Via Negativa, rock flipping impresario. The day of all days is September 2. All you have to do is flip rocks and photograph the life revealed. Rather charmingly, he emphasises the need to replace the rock to protect the critters, unless you're planning to eat them. Clearly a boy after my own heart.

There's also a Flickr group to post your results on. I suppose you could call it a rock group. Or a rock pool. Or you could just shut up. If I was, say, a B-list Flickr celebrity with a pack of adoring followers who'd recently moved to a small town in Somerset, I might well be tempted to have a go. Bristol City ticket holders with two sons who recently celebrated a milestone birthday are another promising sub-group of potential entrants, as are people called xoorx.

Flip on, dudes.

Yes, that's what Pro Blogger promises. Are you some weak-kneed, sappy blog? Do the other blogs kick sand in your face? Take their 31 day challenge, for a confident, muscular blog, the kind that gets the girl.

He's clearly of the opinion that you don't get a readership by being too fussy about capitals and punctuation, and I suspect he may be right. I'm assuming he's better with blogs than he is with grammar, and I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to try not to be sardonic about the whole thing, but I may fail.

I write this stuff in character, you know. I'm not as snide in person. It's nice of him to offer the advice, and it's not like I've had to pay for it.

He's run it through August, but I shall be doing it in September. Annoyingly, there's only 30 days in September, so I'll be finishing on October 1st.

And as a little treat to get you in the mood for all things bloggish, what's the connection between the mite harvestman and plate tectonics?

Zooillogix tells you here. You can also read the original piece in the Science Times, but you have to register, and as we all know that's an insuperable barrier to the attention deficit specialists who use the Internet. Yes I'm talking about you. Hey, over here! You can eat that later. Read this, you might learn something interesting. No, you will learn something interesting.

You can make them drink, you just have to hold their heads under long enough.

The mite harvestman is a species of arachnid (spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites), which is found all over the world, but only in small areas. Because it doesn't spread geographically of its own accord, it's only global because of continental drift.

Look at the map of today's world on the blog. See the dots for the pettalidae species. They're in South America, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand. What a large dispersal for a species which habitually never makes it far on its own.

Now compare it with Gondwana on the map of Pangea (drawn decades ago, I should emphasise). See how close together the dots are. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it? Now tell me you can read my fucking palm. Go on, I dare you.

More about spiders and evolution here and here.

My progress in the 31 day challenge, meanwhile, is summarised here.

From the BBC website, here (link still down - Ed).

The World Organization for Human Rights says Yahoo's sharing of information with the Chinese government has led to the arrests of writers and dissidents.

One journalist cited in the case was tracked down and jailed for 10 years for subversion after Yahoo passed on his e-mail and IP address to officials.

Right, from now on, we should be very clear. None of us, whatever we do on the Internet, should ever pay Yahoo any money.

Oh yeah. As you were.

Yes, that's how it feels down at Ashton Gate at the moment. Last Tuesday it was England under-21s, on Saturday we beat Scunthorpe in the league and next Wednesday the Carling Cup brings us Manchester City, complete with Geovanni, Sven Goran Eriksson and Pol Pot. Oh no, sorry, that's Thaksin Shinawatra, club owner and the shining symbol of football's other bright new dawn, currently breaking over Maine Road.

Just in case you'vve been idly wondering where he got the money to buy them, the full story is here and here. In 2006 he was Prime Minister of Thailand, and owner of 49% of the Shin Corporation, a TV and telecommunications business. At the time, it was illegal for any Thai telecommunications company to be more than 25% foreign owned. His new Thai Telecommunications Act increased that percentage to - yes, you've seen what's coming - 49%. On January 23, the day it came into force, he sold his entire stake to Temasek Holdings, which remarkably was exactly the percentage he was now allowed to sell. He got just under $2 billion (on which, incidentally, he was required to pay no tax at all). Meanwhile, it has emerged that all Temasek's shares belong to the government of Singapore. It's as if Rupert Murdoch and Tony Blair had merged into one body, even more than in reality, and sold Sky and the BBC to Denmark.

Even more seriously, he stands accused of the deliberate murder of 84 protestors demanding regional autonomy in the south. This is a largely Muslim, ethnically Malay area, with its own independence movement.

You might think this kind of murderous, thieving behaviour would ingratiate him with Thaliand's ruling class, but actually he's a bit nouveau riche for them, and they decided they wanted shot of him. In August last year, a car bomb was intercepted on its way into the palace, loaded with enough explosive to create a blast radius of one kilometre. The driver was the personal chauffeur of the head of Internal Security, one Pallop Pinmanee. When quizzed about this by an understandably curious media, Pinmanee said that "If had wanted to do it, I would have done it more subtly. In my career, I have led death squads. If I had wanted to kill him, the Prime Minister would not have escaped." If only our own dear security services were as diligent.

He clearly wasn't acting alone, though. After all, we already know there's more than Pinmanee involved. It's a pun, you see. No, that's sarcasm. Don't provoke me, I'm still working on something truly awful based on the Pallop Pinmanesian war. All your exasperation is just enabling my behaviour.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was a coup while he was out of the country, leaving him with lots of money and nothing to do in the daytime. As you do when you find yourself in that situation, he bought Man City, squeezing past the draconian FA regulations which don't allow anyone to run a football club if they've stolen over two billion pounds, or had more than a hundred people shot. And now he's coming to Ashton Gate. I hope security are paying attention. Take my advice, if anyone turns up in Thai Army uniform, search their car.

At least we can be hopeful about the football. We won convincingly on Saturday, with two great goals from our new ace striker Lee Trundle. He's a cut above what we're used to, frankly, and just to emphasise our glamorous new status he's got his very own wag. It's the very well known Liz McClarnon, of Atomic Kitten. Walcott one week, Sven the next, pop stars, war criminals - it's just what we've always dreamt of.

It was my first time back at Ashton Gate last night, but not for City. Instead, England were playing an Under 21 friendly against Romania.

There were a few names you might recognise. Matt Derbyshire of Blackburn and Gabriel Agbonlahor of Villa were playing, but all our eyes were on young Theo Walcott.

I went with my mate Dave and his wife and son. We weren't in our usual seats, but were higher up in the same block. I spent the first five minutes wondering why all the players were so short before it dawned on me they were just further away. Apparently they're sending me to another parish on an island just off the coast of Donegal.

There were several obvious differences from a City game. There were more people than usual, and a lot more women. Half the fans didn't know how to find their seats. I've just re-read that, and no I'm not implying a connection. The clueless people around us were all male. The hoardings were advertising national products rather than local garages, and the scoreboard didn't work.

Now I've mentioned the scoreboard you're probably imagining some high definition LCD technical wonder, but that's just the posh clubs. Ours looks like the digital display on your radio alarm clock, but last night it couldn't even have managed the time. It flashed briefly into life in the second half, conveying the information that Englan0 were drawing d-d with Roman#, but then relapsed into the message kkkkkkk. Every instance of k was the correct spelling of the letter k, but the information content was low, and in the end they switched it off.

Walcott though was operating within acceptable parameters. Research has shown that the T Rex would have been able to outrun a footballer, but he'd never have got the ball off Walcott short of eating his head. The standard of play generally was light years beyond anything we're used to seeing.

England went ahead early through Derbyshire, but Rumania equalised after 36 minutes. They got a questionable free kick, which bounced back off the post and in off the keeper. England dominated the game, but couldn't find the winner.

Which really didn't matter. Because nothing depended on the result, it was only the entertainment level that mattered. It was a rare insight into the world of non-partisan football, and I had a great time. Thanks Dave for sorting out tickets and reminding me it was on. The senior moments flow thick and fast these days.

I've got nothing of my own today, so I'm just going to list some of the ball-crunchingly clever things scientists have been doing.

First up, computer geeks. You may remember they recently solved draughts. Now they've done the same for the Rubik's cube. Another one bites the dust. And they've made tiny, tiny wind engines to cool the computers down while they're fulfilling our every dream. And batteries made of paper. I bet they could make soundcards out of trifle if they set their hearts on it.

It's probably in recognition of the brilliance of computers that so much shopping is going online. July was a record month. Apparently the weather may have been a factor. I bet Amazon had to charter a yacht.

Social responsibility? Oh, I suppose so. Here's the latest research on Atlantic currents. It's all very relevant to saving the world and everything, but where's the pizazz?

I've saved the best till last though. They're going to make artificial life in three to ten years, they say. At the moment, they're working on the membrane. Then they're going to drop some nucleotides in like kittens in a bag, and let them fight it out. At the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, they're going to make eight new base molecules to add to the existing four. That makes twelve, which is three times as clever.

Humans are so cool. The first time life happened was quite soon after the Earth cooled in geological time, but it still took millions of years. On that scale, we've gone from priest to geek in a heartbeat.

Excuse me, I think I'm about to come.

That's better. Now, what's left. Oh yes.

I always do the title last.

I went down the pub with Sean the other night, and we had a political debate, in which it emerged that he was Still An Anarchist. Thinking about it on the bus journey home, I felt more envious than anything, being unable to muster the cojones for such a claim these days. Also, I just can't find the tone of voice. On the rare occasions I hear myself slipping back into it, my better angels come and tap me on the shoulder, and whisper "how do you actually know that?"

They're not real angels, obviously. Mind is made out of meat, as previously discussed. I had once hoped that such expressions would become usable, in the same way as we can quote the Iliad without having to worry about the poor Trojans, but I'm reluctantly reconciled to the idea that it won't happen in my lifetime.

Anyway, since my anarcho-apostasy the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism have spent the entire week taunting me. Yes, me personally. You're all just the backdrop. First, they set about manipulating Wikipedia. This has turned out to be something of an own goal for them, as Wikipedia track the IP address of editors, and have released details of transgressors.

So, Exxon edited the page on the Exxon Valdez to make it sound like local wildlife suffered no long-term damage. The Turkish treasury deleted material about the Armenian genocide. All kinds of creationist nutters have edited pages about Darwin and evolution. Someone from the South African Government changed the article on AIDS in South Africa to read "'I think that was all bullshit, thats why i deleted it. Thank you motherfucker!" That's the trouble with Wikipedia, you can't guarantee accurate capitalisation.

The Islamic Center of San Francisco edited the page on the Protocols of Zion, to imply that they were genuine. Dell deleted a reference to their staff being trained to discourage users from using non-Windows operating systems. The "School of the Americas", where the CIA train Latin Americans to run torture and death squads, has removed text saying exactly that.

The CIA themselves have made loads of edits - my favourite is the one where some bored operative marooned deep in Langley changed Pope Benedict to Pope Fonzie, complete with a picture of the Fonz doing the thing with the thumbs. Not to be outdone, someone from the American Civil LIberties Union edited another entry on the Pope to suggest that abusing children was actually one of his official duties. On a similar theme, the Qwest Communications Corporation used Wikipedia's biography of George Bush Senior to claim that "George is the only man in known history to have successfully given birth through his ass." Who could they be thinking of?

Never mind the war criminals, though, Microsoft have also been at it. They edited a page about themselves, and signed off with "Some freakin LINUX anti-MIicrosoft hacks will remove this factual information. All they know is FUD and nothing else." Oh dear, someone's touched a nerve.

While some fuckers are busy defacing the people's Internets with their lies, others are blocking off entire sections of it. Nutty Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar gets quite a lot of criticism from people on Wordpress blogs, and he's talked the courts there into blocking all Wordpress blogs across the whole of Turkey. Such censorship is hardly surprising in a country where "slandering the Turkish nation" is a criminal offence, but they are at least supposed to be secular censors.

It's all too much. I let Them off, and They're taking advantage. That's it, I'm redeclaring war on Them. Not Turkey. The bigger Them. Ruining the physical world is one thing, but assaults on the Internet are quite literally hitting me where I live. What's worse, there's the implied threat to television. What's next? Extraordinary rendition for Stephen Fry? A surgical strike on Countdown? It's time to make a stand.

The title of this post is my new slogan for interesting times. It's my equivalent of Basta! I'm hoping it might catch on.

Yesterday was the biggest day of the new Premiership season so far, with all the top teams out there. The live games are on Setanta, but Match of the Day still get the highlights.

It was too big a day to give to Adrian Chiles, they must have thought, so Lineker and Hansen got it. I prefer Chiles myself, he seems more human, but the football made up for it.

Highlight of the day was the Manchester derby. For that section of my audience who doesn't follow these things, Manchester City are now managed by Sven Goran Eriksson. He's been busy in the summer, and brought in lots of new talent. After six years with England he doesn't seem to have felt the need to chase after any of our boy wonders, preferring to go to Switzerland and Bulgaria. And Brazil, for which he can hardly be blamed.

City also have a new owner, one Thaksin Shinawatra, who as I explain here has just been indicted in his native Thailand on corruption charges. He was Prime Minister there from 2001 to 2006, and was described by Human Rights Watch, the American Amnesty International, as "a human rights abuser of the worst kind". I'm sure he'll fit right in at the Chairman's Ball.

Somehow, though, you still feel it's United that have turned to the dark side, and Alex Ferguson certainly has Darth Vader's skin complexion. They certainly had all the big guns yesterday, and it's a mystery how they failed to score. It was City who finally felt the force, as new boy Geovanni cruised through the United defensive screen to send a perfect volley right up their exhaust pipe.

It was looking like the same script at Anfield, after Torres put Liverpool ahead. Unfortunately the man in black works for the Dark Lord, and Darth Stiles gave Chelsea a penalty for no good reason. Galactic justice is swift, and he's been made to hand in his light sabre, and suspended from refereeing Premiership games.

Mourinho used his Match of the Day interview to explain that he wasn't going to criticise other managers this year. I might well be quoting him on that by January. He didn't criticise the referee either, but did say his job had been made harder by the behaviour of certain players from "a different culture". I can only assume that must have been the English ones. I'm always impressed by their ability to adapt, personally. Lampard even scored a penalty, which is about as un-English as you can get.

But as we all know, the only City that really matters is Bristol. Unfortunately I missed the only home game so far, but I'll be there for Scunthorpe on Saturday. We've managed two draws, but we need to start winning before the hard games start. We're also getting Man City in the League Cup, so we'll get to see Sven in the flesh.

Well, whatever colour patches go when they stop being purple, that's the colour mine have been. I've not been entirely idle though. I've been arguing with some Christians. They call themselves the Righteous Response Squad. They seem to regard themselves as some kind of riposte to the Rational Response Squad. It reminded me of Dennis Healey's description of what it was like to be attacked by Geoffrey Howe. I forget his exact words, but it was something to do with being savaged by dead sheep.

I wish they'd chosen a different name. Now both organisations have the same acronym. They could perfectly easily have called themselves the Irrational Response Squad. After all, everyone in America loves the IRS.

They came to our attention when they posted a video on YouTube attacking the Richard Dawkins site. It got picked up there, and many of us went to visit. I don't think they were quite prepared, because they locked us all out, and wouldn't let us back in until we'd signed up to their new guidelines about blasphemy.

Why did I sign, you may be wondering. It's because I wanted to meet their challenge. It said "Do you have bible contradictions? Do you think you can prove the bible false?" I assumed they were referring to the famous Bible, the one with a capital B, in which case I felt that I did, and I could. Also, I knew I could always blow off secular steam in here if I needed to.

I won, obviously. One guy posted something so fatuous their admins deleted it. And my witty demolition of it, rather annoyingly. They seem to have left my other witty demolitions in for now, though, presumably because they know they'd just look stupid if they cancelled the challenge after losing it (I saved the page just in case). To think that my sacreligious words are stinking up the webserver of the Lord, and there's nothing they can do about it.

To be honest, I wasn't sure if it justified the time and energy. In the end I decided it would count as charity work, doing outreach among the benighted. Also, I can use the text elsewhere if I choose. Once you've written something, it stays written.

By all means go here, and witness the triumph of the referential over the merely reverential, of systematic parsing over the flabby exegesis of the noisomely quotidian. You have to register, though, so I don't expect most of you will think it worth your travail.

Yes of course I do it on purpose. It's mainly for the thrill of being insufferable, but also partly to get you to go to Wiktionary. It's a sister project to Wikipedia, and given that you're on the Internet already it really wouldn't hurt to extend your vocabulary. Remember, every new word is a chance to annoy somebody somewhere.

And for the record, I wouldn't ordinarily be quite this unkind even to Christians. This lot, though, are the kind of Christians who have issues with evolution and gay people, which as far as I'm concerned makes them fair game. Also, Pastor Geoff annoyed me by calling the whole argument foolish after they'd issued the challenge in the first place. If you can't stand the heat you should fuck off back to Hull, frankly.

STOP PRESS: Read the latest developments here.

Werner Heisenberg is driving down the motorway when he gets pulled over by the traffic police. "Do you know how fast you were going?" they ask him. "No", says Heisenberg, "but I do know exactly where I am".

Isn't that just the best quantum physics joke ever? It came from The Canon, by Natalie Angier, a "whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science".

On the Internet, most of the best jokes come in the form of comics. Here, for instance, is Sinfest. And on a cruder note, Explosm. Be warned though, if you don't like it when I say cunt, this one may not be for you. And you may have heard of Jesus and Mo. Yes, Mo is short for Mohammed. They live in a flat, they watch TV, they go down the pub and argue about religion with the barmaid. This is definitely for you.

My favourite, though, is xkcd. It does help to know a little Maths at times, but it just demolishes the idea that anyone who likes science or rational thought is bound to be prosaic or unimaginative.

We all love the Internet, some of us not wisely but too well. Take me for instance. I could write the book on dysfunctional relationships with cyberspace. It would be called Geeks Who Love Too Much. Now matter how much it hurts me, I hang on in there, kidding myself that if I loved it just a little bit more I could change it.

And here's the delusion I'm pinning my hopes on. It's called micropayments, and this is how it would work for bloggers.

The world's high readership bloggers, individual providers of quality content, would set up a co-operative. I'm clearly not talking about me here. You might have been deceived by the phrase 'quality content', but if you look closely you'll see it also says 'high readership'.

Anyone who wants to read any post from any registered site has to pay let's say 0.1p for each one, charged as follows. First, they pay in a tenner, say. Every time they click on a link for a post on one of the blogs in the system, they get charged 0.1p off their balance. After they've read, or at least downloaded, 10,000 posts, another £10 is automatically deducted from their bank account, or PayPal, or whatever.

You only have to register once for the whole thing, rather than once for each site. The first time you access data from any site under the new system, the software asks you whether you want to confirm the payment each time, or simply charge each page view on that site automatically.

The central computer holding this data, as well as having an account for each reader, also has an account for each blogger. Every time a blogger earns say £25, that money gets paid into their bank account at the end of the month in which they pass the £25 threshold. For the small number of bloggers making more than that every month, it becomes a second salary. For the Huffington Posts of this world, with let's say an average hundred thousand readers of each post (a total guess), they make £30,000 a month if they post ten pieces a day.

The central organisation pays four or five geeks a reasonable wage to keep it all working. If enough content providers all over the world are involved, then their wages are only a few percent of income - possibly even paid for by the interest on the time lag between readers paying and contributors being paid.

Suppose you look at 25 posts a day, far more than most people. Your £10 would last for just over a year. Suppose you have an average readership of 10,000. You would make £10 a post.

Everyone who has their own domain already just keeps it. If people are with regular blog companies, they might need somewhere else. Perhaps the central organisation could run a blog site itself, for a percentage.

If people have advertising on their site, they keep the revenue this generates. The same applies to any other revenue sources - T-shirt sales, and suchlike.

Similar models could be created for pictures, for music, for video, comic strips, whatever you want. The system could cope with variable charges for short or long posts, or for posts with multimedia features. Rather than charging by the post, you could perhaps charge by the word.

It's strange. It's such a brilliant idea, and yet you all hate it. These are the objections you've raised in conversation, which incidentally are all rubbish, and the brilliant refutations you've dismissed out of hand.

It won't work because in the digital age everything can be copied at the click of a button, so people will go and look and look at the free version. The digital generation have no qualms about breaking copyright, which is becoming unenforceable.

To copy takes time and energy. For an 80p iTunes download this is worth it, but to save 0.1p? Where's the motivation? For each individual reader, the time and energy you'd need to invest in stealing content would show a poor return if you're only paying a tenner every year or two anyway. I reckon in my entire career I've made maybe 1000 blog posts. By my scheme, to have read all of them would have cost a quid. Why not just pay it?

Also, the real comments stream would be at the original site, so if you wanted to take part in discussions, that's where you'd have to go.

There isn't enough money involved to make it worth the bloggers' time.

But if I had 10,000 readers, I'd have made £10,000. And if I haven't got 10,000 readers, I'm not really a proper professional anyway.

If I had 1,000 readers, I'd have made £1000. This isn't much, but it pays for your broadband, and it's some small return for your time and energy.

I haven't got a thousand readers, but like I said, this isn't about me. No it isn't.

People mostly click away from sites that ask them to sign up.

Yes, but you'd only need to sign up once, with the micropayments company. Once you were registered with them, each individual site would just ask you to confirm that you were happy to pay for posts once. To put it bluntly, if all the decent sites were micropayment sites, people would have to register.

People would ignore charging sites, and only go to the free ones.

Pornography sites make money, despite the existence of free pornography. Bookshops make money despite the existence of libraries. Obviously going to a library twice is a lot less convenient than going to a bookshop once, but it's equally true that the cost of a book is a lot more than 0.1p.

This is the worst writing you've ever done

You've clearly never seen one of my job applications. In any case, it's not a refutation of the argument.

Why don't you just fuck off, and stop badgering us with your stupid ideas?

Well go and get another bus then.

When I think about the economics of the Internet, I'm struck by the way it could cut right through the whole corporate baggage train, and eliminate the need for factories to print papers and magazines in, presses to make CDs or DVDs, trucks and trains to move it all about, shops to sell them in - the whole caboodle. Gone would be the acres of pine forest replacing deciduous woodland. There would be less ugly new shops defacing our town centres, and less need for juggernauts to haul products to them. Our choice of journalist, and for that matter our choice of film-maker, author or musician, could come directly to us, wherever we are, at a fraction of the cost we currently pay.

But having eliminated virtually all the costs except for the time and energy of the journalist or creative artist, we've yet to provide a decent mechanism to pay for the comparatively small sums of money involved, which means that the creatives are forced back into the arms of big business. I'm thinking about solutions to that. Any comments?

Look below for a celebration of the noble amateur, but the big corporations have also been amusing us. The British Broadcasting Corporation in particular, with their fine news from the worlds of science and technology. Shadow lamps to connect friends, they announce, for instance. You just have to look don't you? Meanwhile, some bright technospark is automating digital imaging. And coffee protects female memory. Don't argue, is my advice.

Elsewhere, Lucy's going to America. She's been waiting 3.5 million years, and finally she's got a visa. She'll be in Texas, presumably so she can stare reproachfully at most of the citizens.

The grown-ups have been busy as well, cataloguing galaxies. Go here, and help. There's like a million or something to do, and computers can't do it (yet). There's a short tutorial, a test, then they let you loose on the universe. I got 80%, I did. It's a shame for the millions of stars I've put in the wrong box, but that's science for you.

I've been reading The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen. His argument goes something like this.

With the arrival of Web 2.0 applications, blogs, file sharing, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc, the amateur is now exalted over the professional. Because trained journalists, authors, TV channels, film makers and so on are struggling to get a look in, accuracy, good writing, production quality and so on are taking a nose dive, and being replaced by the smugly amateur, who make their very ineptness into a vocation. This is the worst thing ever, and threatens to drag civilisation back to a new dark age, where blank-eyed youths eviscerate each other for the twice-chewed bones of the last cow, and the living envy the dead.

I exaggerate, but not by much. I'm only halfway through it, but so far I'm beginning to think there must be some kind of parallel Internet where everything is tawdry and humdrum without exception. Meanwhile, Garry Bushell and Michael Winner lament the passing of the golden age of print in rhyming couplets, and Richard and Judy discuss phenonenology with Wendy Richards and a talking dog.

It's all just crying out for some kind of riposte. I'm not going to do a proper one until I've finished the book, so for now I'm just going to celebrate the Internet, and all the good things that are on it. Here are some of my personal highlights, gleaned from the serried ranks of the noble amateurs.

Flickr seems an obvious starting point. These are zombizi's eyes. View as slideshow is the way to go with these. In a different vein (not that you want to be thinking about veins after zombizi's eyes), here's David Hockney. Oh no it isn't, it's jolou's liquids. Did someone say - professional quality? And while we're gatecrashing the big boys, here's xoorx winning the Tour de France.

Here are the pictures you get if you search Flickr for Hargeisa, in Somalia. They're not much, you might think, but some of my students come from there, and right now it's the nearest to home they can get. I really don't think the role played by the Internet in the lives of the displaced is celebrated enough.

Just to remind you all how much you owe to Wikipedia, here they are on the subject of Easton. You can link directly from here to other areas of Bristol, a list of Easton pubs and a discussion of the M32. Which is a pathetic motorway. All Wikipedia pages are made for the people by the people, and if anyone wants to besmirch its honour I hereby challenge them to a duel.

From the very earliest days of YouTube, here's Matt Harding. You've all seen this before, but the old ones are best, or at least the most pixellated. To illustrate the viral, mimetic nature of Web 2.0, here's one of his imitators.

And finally, here is Andrew Keen's blog. Like many completely wrong people, he writes very well. I went to his Wikipedia page to check him out, and it sent me straight there. Thanks, Wikipedia. I love you.

I'll do you a proper review of the book when I've finished it. It does make some telling points.

(WARNING: not many jokes)

There was one of these last week about the British left and its attitudes to Islam and the Iraq war. A minority on the left, for instance Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen, have been consistently pro-war. Johann Hari, who started in this group but has since switched sides, set things going with this review of Cohen's new book, to which Cohen responds at the above link. The Hitchens link is to his Wikipedia page, as he doesn't appear to have his own site. He's not really in this ding dong, but I list him because he's so often in the general discussion.

There then followed an unholy row, with Hari threatening to sue the blog Harry's Place for remarks which have now been removed, and which I can't find. I'm going to rise above all of that, in the absence of any opportunity not to, and concentrate on the issues, as we used to say in the Eighties. In passing, I can do what I promised to do a while back, and talk about why I take such a critical approach to Islam.

The essence of the pro-war left argument is that Iraq and Afghanistan were governed by fascist regimes, and that the left should be supporting democracies like the US against fascism, just as we did during the Second World War. Further, they highlight human rights abuses by Saddam, or the Taliban, and focus on traditional leftwing struggles for feminism and gay rights.

The counter argument most commonly offered by the antiwar left is that the main goal of US foreign policy is to secure resources, oil in particular, and not to spread democracy. They counter arguments about human rights, women's rights and gay rights by pointing out that the position of women, for instance, is now significantly worse in Iraq, where Islamists routinely beat women for their dress choices, and no better in Afghanistan. They go on to argue that because US policy is not aimed at establishing democracy and human rights, it is futile to identify with them as a means for achieving those goals.

The pro-war left deals with this argument in various ways. Often, they seem to just ignore it. When they do address it, they may argue that US neo-conservatives are indeed motivated by a political belief in democracy rather than by economic arguments, and have been since the later days of the Reagan regime. I have to say that I really don't find this compelling.

A slightly more sophisticated and real-world version of their argument might go like this. The US does indeed act from economic motives, and does seek to secure resources, but it is motivated at least as strongly by the need for markets and cheap labour. It seeks to stop people in places like Somalia and Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan killing each other, not because it cares about the well-being of their citizens but because it wants to sell them things, and get them to make things for Haliburton and the like, for lower wages than they have to pay in Detroit. Whilst this isn't in any way a noble vision, for Afghans or Kosovans it's a distinct improvement over the alternative.

There are obvious problems with this argument as well. Firstly, the US only supports democracy when it likes the results. In Venezuela, it tried to overturn the democratically elected Chavez government a couple of years ago and replace it with a conservative dictatorship. Venezuela is of course an oil-producing country. Secondly, if the world is hijacked by US economic policy, backed up by military might, then it is unrealistic to expect social justice to be an integral part of the program. The Americans were perfectly happy to work with the Saudis, for instance, and there might be more secular democrats in the Middle East if the CIA hadn't had so many of them shot. Neither should we believe they genuinely care about the rights of women or gay people. In Afghanistan, for instance, women's groups who were lauded in the early days of the occupation have been quietly dropped after media attention moved on.

The clinching argument here is US domestic policy. Of course the human rights position in the US is massively better than it was under Saddam or the Taliban, but the secular values we would naturally support fit uncomfortably with a President who refuses to endorse gay marriage, and prevents stem cell research for religious reasons.

The pro-war left seem somehow to shrug all this off. Hitchens in particular, a very moral man and insightful in many ways, often seems to be in deep denial about the Bush government. He says for instance that "George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he - and the US armed forces - have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled." I''ve got a pet name for subjective Christians. I call them Christians. Similarly, he makes much of the atheism of top aide Karl Rove, a friend of his, but seems less aware of the hundreds of Bush staffers who got their 'qualifications' at Christian-run universities where any biology taught is definitely of the old-fashioned kind. I am subjectively unaware of the objective contribution of any part of the Bush camp to any secular campaign I'd like to sign up to.

Whatever you may think of the pro-war left though, you have to credit them with enterainment value. Hitchens is a word-spinner of stellar worth. Oliver Kamm, from that camp, heads his blog with the quote "Smearing me in person" - David Irving. What with, I wonder? And do we really want to be thinking about this man smearing this one with anything?

And I find myself in more agreement with this section of the left on the subject of Muslim communities in the west. Here, we lefties undeniably have a blind spot. Because we remember the vicious racism of the Seventies and Eighties, when gangs of thugs roamed the streets 'Paki-bashing' (as still happens in many small towns), because we feel for Muslims who feel labelled with terrorist sympathies they don't have, we tend to want to minimise the dangers posed by their religion. When commentators say that Islam is a religion of peace, when they play up its role in preserving classical culture in the Middle Ages, we want to believe it's true.

I thought this way myself, but then I did something which made this comforting view permanently impossible for me. I read the Koran. The Koran says things like this (I cover this in more detail here)

“As for those who disbelieve in Our communications, We shall make them enter fire; so oft as their skins are thoroughly burned, We will change them for other skins, that they may taste the chastisement; surely Allah is Mighty, Wise” (Sura 4.56).

In other words, once the fires of hell have burnt your skin off, Allah gives you some fresh skin so the pain remains undimmed. Very wise, I’m sure. And you want us to be upset about some cartoons?

And don’t go imagining this is the exception. The word fire appears in the Koran 172 times in my translation. I did a random test of twenty instances, and in nineteen of them it was people that were burning.

It also contains verses that give husbands permission to beat their wives, that say gay people should be killed, that describe women as a form of agricultural produce – the list is endless.

Of course, you could do a similar exercise with the Bible, or with most of the world’s holy books. We’ve relegated ours to the sidelines, though. And the worrying thing isn’t that the texts exist, it’s that because they exist, people live them out. Women are beaten, novelists are persecuted, atheists live in fear of the midnight knock at the door. It’s intolerable.

The most worrying Islamic doctrine of all, though, is that of the death penalty for apostasy, which I've previously written about here. If you enter the Islamic faith, and then abandon it, it is the duty of all Muslims to kill you. This terrifying doctrine is based not on the Koran but on the Hadith, the collection of acts and sayings attributed to Mohammed. It has horrendous implications for Muslim communities in the west, who are under sentence of death if they dare to disagree with the religion that has been imposed on them.

And this is the core of my opposition to Islam. It is something which is imposed on the people who believe it. In childhood, they are systematically deprived of their ability to address it rationally by a combination of death threats and Koranic indoctrination, and they then deprive the next generation of their rights in turn. It passes down the generations like cystic fibrosis, and its worst victims are the carriers.

Crucially for this argument, Islam is an assault on the left’s core values. It is sexist, homophobic, dictatorial, and all-round unacceptable. Obviously people have the right to practice it, as they have the right to practice any religion or none, but we need to be constantly ready to defend women, gay people and other dissenters from those communities, and ensure that they have the same civil rights we take for granted.

It is also a battle we can win, and win cleanly. We don’t have to ally ourselves with Republicans, we aren’t tarnished by the association with the fight for oil, we aren’t about to create a power vacuum which can be filled by the militia. All we need is the will, and the clear sight.

The next time someone gets threatened with beheading for drawing some cartoons, every newspaper and news website should publish them the next day. All religions should be prevented from indoctrinating the next generation in ‘faith schools’. You might as well call them evidence-free schools.

School medical inspections should be used to make the genital mutilation of girls impossible. Circumcision of boys for non-medical reasons should be banned, to protect the civil rights of those children, and their right to choose their religion for themselves, when they grow up.

None of this applies to Islam alone, of course. No-one should get to indoctrinate their children in their own metaphysical beliefs, including atheists. And there is a strand within Islam, as with Christianity and Judaism, which emphasises experience over written text, and which sees their Holy Books as a tool rather than a set of prescriptions. But we should always be cautious about religious ‘moderates’ of any faith, and ask them the difficult questions. Do you think the voices in your head are real? Do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin? Did you have the end of your sons’ penis lopped off? In what sense then are you a moderate?

And just to be clear, getting back to Islam specifically, this is not the same subject as Iraq. People seem to line up on the same side in both arguments, but I see no need to. I’ve been told before that my emphasis on secularism in the UK, particularly in relation to Islam, amounts to siding with the new corporate world order. I don’t accept this.

Notice my emphasis on the civil rights of the people subjected to Islam. It can’t hurt