Tetherd Cow Ahead

Being as I am an atheist, one of the things that peeves me about religion is the idea held by many that without it we’d somehow be completely incapable of navigating the complex moral issues of human existence. Religions would like everyone to believe that they have the answers to all the big moral problems, and claim to have the final word on how we should live our lives. Of course, in the Christian religion, the Mac Daddy of religious moral imprimatur is, without question, the Ten Commandments.

Today on The Cow I thought we might scrutinize the Big 10 and their heritage. Anyone with a Sunday Schooled childhood will know that the story of the Ten Commandments is outlined in Exodus, so it is here that we open our Bibles in order to find out the real nitty gritty behind what Moses brought down with him from Mt Sinai on those big stone tablets. I suggest that it might go a little differently from what most people might think…

To set the scene: The Israelites are fleeing from Egypt under the guidance of Moses. They have been travelling for three months ((To the very day! as the Bible gleefully exclaims, as if to make a point of its superb timekeeping abilities. This is something that is noticeably absent about, oh, EVERYWHERE else…)) when they arrive at Mount Sinai. After laborious admonishments from God that he should come alone, Moses heads on up the mountain to take receipt of the Ten Commandments that we all know and love:

1. You shall have no other Gods before me.

2. You shall not worship idols. (This is pretty much just a variation on #1) ((In the King James version, which is not neatified like some of the more modern renderings of the Bible, God makes no bones about issuing a threat along with this: “… for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”. God is jealous? How sad to believe that an all-knowing being is unable to rise above the petty human foible of jealousy!))

3. You shall not take My Name in vain. (So’s this)

4. You shall keep the Sabbath day holy. (And this is just a sub-clause of 2&3, by any sensible reckoning)

5. You shall honour your mother and father.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

10. You shall not covet they neighbour’s house/wife/manservant/maidservant/ox/donkey/XBox etc. (God is nothing if not circumlocutious. He could have simply said “You shall not covet anything that your neighbour owns”. Maybe he feels he has to spell it out for the really stupid – after all, they must number a fair percentage of his followers)

OK. So that about wraps it up and we can trundle off down the mountain with our slab of stone, and our moral certitude intact, right? ((I just want to bring up something here: how is it, with 2000+ years of guidance from God in their pockets, Christians still transgress the above rules in numbers equal to, or perhaps even greater than, the rest of the population. Are we to think that without these guidelines these people would be even worse? Or is it just that religion provides a convenient excuse for not taking any personal responsibility?)) Oh no, not on your nellie. Now that God’s got the soapbox there’s just a few teensy other things he wants to add…

11. You shall set your Hebrew servant free after six years. Except if he doesn’t want to go, in which case his ear will be pierced with an awl. (It is pretty obvious already that the end of #10 was always going to be a good place for an edit, isn’t it?)

12. You shall not let your daughter go free if you have previously sold her as a servant. Conditions apply. (I’m abbreviating for the sake of sanity. Pretty much all these further Commandments are long-winded and full of caveats)

13. Anyone who strikes someone else shall be put to death. Unless it’s an accident, in which case I/God will decide on a place to send him. (God persists in talking in both the first and third person throughout Exodus. It is really quite irritating. I suppose it’s something to do with him being a Holy Trinity and all that, but you’d think that an omnipotent being would have a better grasp of grammar and language structure).

14. Anyone who attacks his father or mother should be put to death. (No exceptions for accidents here, evidently)

15. Anyone who kidnaps someone and sells them should be put to death.

16. Anyone who curses his father or mother should be put to death. (This is certainly a little stronger than #5: “Honour your mother and father”)

17. If men quarrel and one hits the other with a stone or with his fist and he does not die but is confined to bed, the one who struck the blow will not be held responsible if the other gets up and walks around outside with his staff; however, he must pay the injured man for the loss of his time and see that he is completely healed. (Geez – it’s starting to sound like the minutes of the annual general meeting of a bowling club)

18. If someone beats their slave and they die they should be punished. But if the slave gets up after a day or two, that’s OK, no worries.

19. If fighting men injure a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely, then they have to pay up whatever her husband thinks fair. (Many of these latter commandments smack of rules made by a committee – “But Jehosaphat what if a bearded man goes into the temple and kicks a priest in the balls? Surely we need to cover that?”)

20. If someone knocks out a servant’s tooth or eye, the servant is to be set free. (This Commandment coupled with #18 can best be summarized thus: If you have a servant, make sure any wounds you inflict upon him can – in the grand manner of modern prison retaliation – come under the explanation “He slipped in the shower”)

21. If a bull gores a man to death….

OH GOD ((Yes, I mean YOU WITH THE BEARD)) THIS IS SO FUCKING TEDIOUS. It just goes on and on and on and on like this for a good part of Exodus – for a total of 56 Commandments by my counting. ((Give or take. It’s hard to know which are Commandments and which are just sub-clauses and asides)) I won’t assault you with the rest of them, even though Moses had to stand there and listen to God drone on about what to do if your bull gores someone else’s bull and what to do if your goat gets into someone’s vineyard and the finer points of disputes involving arson. You know Moses lived to be really old, right? He aged about a hundred years on that mountain listening to God yakking.

It is, for the most part, totally irrelevant dreck, unless you happen to be a pre-technological Middle-Eastern goat herder. And even then, it’s hard to see the purpose of many of the abstruse and often contradictory instructions. Here’s just a few more highlights:

32. Do not allow a sorceress to live. (She’s a witch – burn her!) ((Actually, this is not that funny – it was readings of these verses that allowed the Christian Church, throughout history, to kill so many innocent women on the flimsiest of pretexts))

33. Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death. (…and you fuck one goat…)

38. Do not blaspheme God or curse the ruler of your people. (Repetition, much? There are at least four variations of “And don’t call Me any bad names!” among this particular batch of Commandments. If there’s one thing that reading the Bible constantly impresses upon me, it is how utterly petty and childlike God sounds whenever he is supposed to be speaking in his own voice. In fact, for an omnipotent being he seems almost neurotically obsessed with trivia)

47. Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt. (But don’t worry about having Hebrew slaves. They don’t count as aliens and slavery doesn’t count as oppression) ((You want hypocrisy? The Bible is teeming with it!))

And finally ending with:

56. Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. (This last seems to be not so much a moral injunction as a cooking tip. God has plainly run out of ideas by now. One gets the sense that maybe His initial notion was to have 100 Commandments but that he realised somewhere around #50 that this was a tad ambitious. So he battled on for a half dozen more and then just threw in the towel.) ((Don’t get it into your head that he stopped talking, though. He goes on for many more chapters about how to make a whole lot of knick knacks for His tabernacle, including the Ark of the Covenant, the Table of the Covenant and the Lampstand of the Covenant. And not just with general descriptions either – God has some really specific design ideas when it comes to His temple furniture. He’s the epitome of every designer’s nightmare client.))

Anyway, God eventually senses that Moses is nodding off, and He’s a little worried that the people at the bottom of the mountain might be using the idle time to, oh, smelt down their jewellery and turn it into a Golden Calf or something equally as stupid, so he uses his Super Laser Vision ((It doesn’t say that in the Bible – I just made it up. But you have to admit that this was the most colourful image in the whole story I’ve told here today, right?)) to etch the aforementioned 56+ Commandments onto a couple of stone tablets and send Moses on his way.

So, just to clarify the situation at this point: Moses arrives back at the Israelite camp with two chunks of stone bearing the Words of GOD – the supreme omnipotent Creator of All Things – and what does he do? What does he do with the moral guidelines that are to set all humankind on the path to a correct and sinless future?

Exodus 32

15: And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.

16: And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.

…

19: And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

That’s right folks – he smashes them into bits! In a fit of pique (due principally to his followers getting overly enthusiastic during his fairly lengthy absence) he petulantly renders the Words of God into marble chips in an act that has inspired literary editors ever since.

You really have to ask how seriously Moses was taking any of this, and question God’s choice of representatives on Earth. I mean, think about it. If you were a boss and you were sending an employee to do something really important and they fucked it up because they had anger management issues, what would you do?

Then some time passes. God sends down a plague on the Israelites, appears naked in front of Moses (although He only agrees to show Moses ‘His back parts’) ((He agrees to do this for a most unusual reason: “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.” Wha? He’s fucking OMNIPOTENT! He knows EVERYBODY by name!)) and visits Moses’s tent disguised as a pillar of cloud. Eventually He commands Moses to come back up Mount Sinai with a newly-chiselled pair of stone tablets so that He might refresh them with a second set of Commandments. Here’s a weird thing – God does not seem for a moment pissed at Moses for his careless handling of the first version. Elsewhere, God smites people mightily for infractions that seem a LOT less egregious.

And of course, now that God has Moses’s attention again, he can’t resist in adding a few things. He also rehashes numerous edicts that we’ve heard before, and concludes once more with the perplexing:

Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.

In fact, given its repetition almost word-for-word, and its obvious status as the last thing He wanted to impress upon Moses, one has to believe that this Commandment was as at least as important to God as ‘Thou Shall Not Murder’ (which is only mentioned once, and is contradicted at least a dozen times with ‘except-in-the-case-of’ clauses), and ‘Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery’. All things considered, it’s surprising that it doesn’t appear in the #2 slot after the monotonously reiterated ‘Thou Shall Not Take My Name In Vain’ ((The Commandment ‘to not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk’ was probably meaningful to the Israelites and most likely an instruction not to follow Canaanite practices. This is just one of many illustrations that the texts of the Bible were written for their time, not for all time. It seems obvious to anyone with a rational thought process that if you can drop one Commandment because it doesn’t make sense in a modern idiom, then the relevance of all the others is quite reasonably called into question))

A few things should now be clear: The choice of ‘ten’ commandments as some kind of rule set for humans to follow is more or less arbitrary. Nowhere does God actually say – ‘Really, it’s only the first ten that count’. Indeed, the moral value of those ten, as Christopher Hitchens eloquently puts it, is particularly questionable in the first four, which have no bearing on morality at all, but are simply exhortations to accept irrationality as a bedrock of a worldview before going on to anything else.

God, as represented in Exodus, is a spiteful, small-minded and confused being. His thought processes appear meandering and obtuse. He contradicts Himself repeatedly, and repeats Himself infuriatingly. He plays silly games with Moses on numerous occasions, where it seems a less-petty deity would have just directly communicated His wishes. He dresses up as pillars of cloud and burning bushes and delivers terrible dialogue – being on the whole reminiscent of a bit player in a cheap pantomime.

And worst of all, His ‘commandments’ when distilled down to the really useful bits, are nothing more than good common sense. Something that any atheist could have come up with.

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Thanks to Cissy Strutt who pointed out the Christopher Hitchens article in Vanity Fair where I got the idea for this post.

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The capacity for stupid people to part with huge amounts of cash on schemes concocted by morally bankrupt swindlers never ceases to amaze me. It’s as if there’s a reservoir of schmucks out there who are just busting to empty their bank accounts into the pockets of criminals. Here on The Cow this is very familiar territory. Over the years we’ve seen the duplicitous Shoo!TAG™ scammers bilking all and sundry with their nutso pest repellent scheme; the smarmy Steorn with their ‘free energy’ shell game (a scam that’s centuries old in one form or another); the Space Diamond fraudsters who promise untold wealth via implausible interstellar retrieval schemes. And the list goes on.

Sometimes I like to play this game in my head where I make up the weirdest scheme I can imagine and speculate on whether people would pay money for it. For instance, I’ll look out my window and see something like, oh, let’s see – bird shit – and then make it the centre of some daft scam. I’ll imagine, for instance, that there’s some place that offers to rub bird shit on your face for money. Maybe I’ll even elaborate on it a bit to make it even more implausible – maybe it’s not just bird shit they’re offering to smoosh all over your dial but, oh, let’s see something really off the wall… I’ve got it! Nightingale shit!

Hahahaha! No-one would believe that in a BILLION years. No-one on the PLANET is dumb enough to fork out for that.

Hahhahahahahahaha!

WRONG!

T-shirt available now in Cow Threads!

Acowlytes! I stand before you a stunned and humbled man. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but on visiting the Steorn website this morning I was presented with incontrovertible proof that their Orbo engine is about to revolutionize the world! Never before have I seen evidence of an extraordinary claim laid out so compellingly, or been swayed by a concept so utterly mind-blowing!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Hands up who believed me for even a second?

Nope. No hands there.

The images above are from Steorn’s much hyped video ‘Proving Overunity’, today posted on their site for all to see. The audience in the bottom snap is watching in awe disbelief as Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy trots out exactly the same old guff that has already been up on the Steorn site for ages. This is the sum total of the PROOF that Steorn promised the world, that their machine would be shown creating more energy than it consumes.

Needless to say both myself and the folks above were comprehensively underwhelmed. We watched as Mr McCarthy, in finest waffling form, yakked on and on about the Orbo motor’s wondrous abilities as he poked periodically at gauges and meters. As in the other ‘explanatory’ videos on the Steorn site, he seems particularly hung up on making us aware that Orbo has no ‘back EMF’ – really, it does not matter one whit about such electrical engineering-speak if the machine is able to show a 200% increase in energy output as has been claimed. The tedious ‘technical’ talk is there to cover up the fact that what Steorn actually needs to demonstrate is mind-bogglingly simple. In fact, it is as simple as 1+1=2. I can outline it to you in a paragraph:

Imagine feeding the Orbo 1 watt of power. According to McCarthy, the miraculous technology behind Orbo can take that 1 watt and use it to generate 2 watts. Are you with me? Now, this is all that needs to be done to show a miracle: take the output of the Orbo and divert 1 watt of that power back into the Orbo’s input. Now the motor is powering itself and you have 1 spare watt ((Actually, if you believe Sean McCarthy, 1 watt is small potatoes – there is NO LIMIT to how much extra power you can get…)) of energy with which to do anything you damn well please. Let us, for example, hook up some LEDs to this extra power (a single LED typically uses way less than what we have at our disposal). What we now have is the Orbo motor, running itself and powering some lights with no other external source of power! THIS would be a truly astonishing and unequivocal verification of Steorn’s claims. No-one could argue with such a direct experiment. In his circumlocutious descriptions of the Orbo technology McCarthy himself has said that such a feat is feasible. ((“We’re recharging batteries and you will see… we’ll be lighting lights and all that kinda stuff later on…))

That’s all that has to be demonstrated. But really, they can’t show anything like that because it can’t be done. Instead, in the manner of every perpetual motion swindler throughout history, Mr McCarthy ((Actually, Maybe Sean McCarthy is a personified demonstration of overunity – he certainly seems to run perpetually on excess amounts of his own self-generated hot air.)) is obliged to obfuscate and complicate with abstruse methodology and meandering reasoning. ((You will have seen this behaviour in just about every snake-oil salesman we’ve had cause to examine here on The Cow. The ShooTAG! scammers do the very same thing))

So after all that, let’s see how Steorn is doing on the Tetherd Cow Ahead Interest-O-Meter…

Enough said. We won’t be mentioning Steorn again here on Tetherd Cow unless they do something a lot less monotonous.

Visiting Steorn is like stepping momentarily into another dimension – one with leprechauns and rainbows and pots of gold. As you will recall from yesterday, today was the day when their video showing final proof of their Orbo motor demonstrating overunity was to be posted for all the world to see.

Well, I wearily dragged myself over to their digs for what I expected to be another round of disappointment and I wasn’t disappointed. That is, I was not disappointed to see that they were happy to disappoint me again. Instead of the world-shattering demonstration that was promised, I was greeted with a new-look website, further exhortations to join up with the Steorn Knowledge Development Base (for a fee, surprise surprise), and the above announcement:

(The) Proving Overunity video will be published on Ist Feb.

It strikes me that we’re getting pretty close to April Fool’s Day.

Well, I don’t know about you guys in the North, but down here in Oz it was way too late to watch the Steorn cavalcade at the scheduled broadcast time, so I missed the actual moment that marked the re-writing of History As We Know It. Damn.

But as soon as I woke up, I tuned into The Guardian this morning to read about the massive shock and disbelief of scientists around the world as they came to the cruel realisation at just how wrong they’d been to dismiss Steorn as a bunch of conniving swindlers. Alas – not so much as a whisper about Steorn’s miraculaous achievement. There were just more boring stories about the iPad. So I jumped across to the Steorn website for the lowdown, and to watch the video of the ground-breaking demonstration to find that… they’re going to post it tomorrow.

Oh heck. I guess that the universe has waited this long for its physical laws to be broken that one more day won’t hurt. While I was at Steorn, I watched some other videos that they have, including a six part demonstration of absolutely fuck all. Mr Slippery himself, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy, was there with plenty of claims about how great their Orbo motor was, and the wonders it could accomplish:

“The electromagnetic components themselves return more energy and/or heat than is put into them!”

“It can achieve from 150 to 200% efficiency!”

“The faster you go, the more powerful the device is. In theory there is no limit to the energy it can produce.”

And as I watched the long-winded and banal technical demonstration (that was so full of misdirection and waffle that even my untrained engineering mind could spot it) I kept wondering “If the thing does what it says, why don’t they just show it powering a toaster or something?”

Indeed, in the Q&A afterwards a sensible gentleman asked just that. Here is the exchange verbatim (my thoughts highlighted), complete with Sean McCarthy’s squirming ((Some of his oleaginous tone does come through in the text, but to get the full effect you will, unfortunately, have to watch the clip)):

Bearded Gentleman: “So you say the reason that you don’t have a prototype that demonstrates load is that it’s cost prohibitive?”

Sean McCarthy:”No, I didn’t say that.” [Uh oh. Someone with some brains snuck into the demo. How did that happen?]

BG: “Well… why don’t you have one?”

SM (looking as if the guy has just spoken to him in Esperanto): “Sorry?” [Seems like a reasonable question to me you pillock]

BG: “Why don’t you have one then?”

SM: “Oh, wh… um.. wha? You mean showing load? We’re recharging batteries and you will see… we’ll be lighting lights and all that kinda stuff later on… [That’s ALL we want to see, dropkick.] but… you’re misunderstanding what we’re about. [You know, I think the Bearded Guy has a very good idea of what you’re about…] As a busi… we’re not, we’re not going to be next week selling generators down here just to charge your iPhone” [Who asked if you were?]

BG: “I think the problem though is that this isn’t really very convincing”

SM: “To whom?” [Oh, let’s see… to ANYONE you brainless halfwit!]

BG: “To the general public”

SM: “Um… we’re not… we’re interested in the development community. [OK, well show it to THEM then you simpleton]”

BG: “OK, but you’re broadcasting it on the internet”

“Absolutely (smug laugh)… we’re look… as I said… you understand our business model is engaging with the b… we’re not selling anything to Joe Public. Y… I mean, there’s no box of tricks we’re going to sell [Wow, they’re not even selling the box. Just the tricks.], we’re saying, we’re trying to sell this to the product development community and, if they understand the experiments, and they believe them [Yeah, now see, this is the crux of the problem Sean – NO-ONE BELIEVES THEM. Hence the reason we want to see your daft device actually doing what you claim it does!], um, that’s the next step for us to engage with the product development communities. [Waffles with syrup, anyone?]

(I’ll spare you anymore of the blow-by-blow – it’s exceptionally tedious – but if you think I’m exaggerating you can watch it to verify what comes next: Mr McCarthy goes on to say it’s cost prohibitive to build a demonstration Orbo motor, ((Um.. actually, what the FUCK, then, is the thing in the video clip that’s spinning around and around with all the measuring gadgets hooked up to it? My brain is exploding here Steorn! If you can’t build one, then the gadget you’re showing us is what, exactly? Why are we here again?)) comparing it to building just one hard disk drive ((I fail to see how the analogy is even remotely relevant – the reason people will put money into building millions of hard disk drives is because the science behind them works and is completely understood. If you’re claiming you can do miracles, then you have to produce a miracle, or at least very convincingly explain how your miracle works. Not just tell everybody how cool your miracle is.)) “… but even if I had a billion dollars, we still wouldn’t build one…”. Well, no, because even though you are a complete moron, you know it would be completely fucking stupid to waste a billion dollars on building something that doesn’t actually DO anything.)

So, examining the above exchange, we see Sean McCarthy first saying that the reason that Steorn can’t show us a working version of Orbo has nothing to do with it being cost prohibitive. Then he promises that ‘later’ they will be showing it ‘recharging batteries and lighting lights’. In the same sentence he negates himself and says that they won’t be making ‘a generator to charge things’, ((A small point here – the use of this example “We won’t be making a generator to charge your iPhone” – is a favourite trick of practitioners of woo: trivialize a critic’s good question by mocking them with a daft re-phrasing of it. The man simply asked why Steorn didn’t have a demonstration that would do what they claimed – ie, show overunity. This could be as simple as their Orbo motor, under its own power, lighting a simple LED. Since they say they have a working Orbo motor, which can deliver ‘up to 200% efficiency’, then this should be absolutely and utterly straightforward.)) and then, a few sentences later explains this as being ‘because it’s cost prohibitive’. Go back and plug Mr Bearded Guy’s original question in here, and see how long you can go around this loop before you fall off. ((Fractionally longer than the Orbo will remain in rotation without a power supply, is my guess))

Sean McCarthy has not been merely kissing the Blarney Stone, he’s been chewing off dirty big chunks. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s video.