the new USSR

a belated message to my reader

2005-11-25T13:41:00.000+11:00

It’s farewell to this blog, for no good reason. I’ve been working on a new blog for some time, so please visit daily, illustrated.

bringing God to book: the evidence mounts

2005-09-30T22:02:00.000+10:30

I’m diverting myself again with ye old testament, using Testament as my starting point but ranging through many different versions – I’ve come across a concordance thingy which allows you to compare chapter and verse in 26 different versions. For example, were the ‘tumours’ that God visited upon the peoples of Ashdod (1Samuel 5:6) really hemorrhoids? Not surprisingly the skeptic’s annotated bible (truly a godsend) has great fun with this, especially with the five golden images of hemorrhoids God then demands to be made, as a ‘trespass offering’, whatever that is. The King James Bible uses the word ‘emerods’ where Testament and most modern versions has ‘tumours’. Interestingly, a later version of the King James, called The New King James Version, also uses ‘tumours’ and has a footnote about it referring to the bubonic plague. I was tempted to accept that maybe ‘tumours’ was more historically accurate (apart from the bit about God bringing them about), but then came upon another even more recent version of the King James, called the Twenty-first century King James Version (that should be it for the next century then), which boldly uses ‘hemorrhoids’. Bible study’s a fraught business, but it can be fun.

A rather more serious discrepancy occurs at 1 Samuel 6:19, where the skeptics understandably make much of the terrible slaughter and the pathetic pretext. Here’s the KJV:

And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter

My Testament reduces this number (50,070) to 70, without comment of course, and you can see here that, of eight versions, only two claim that seventy men were killed, while another goes for ‘seventy men – fifty chief men’, trying to argue presumably for fifty ‘thousand-men’ being chief men – probably on very shaky ground. The other five versions go with the vastly bigger number, sometimes with some ambiguity, separating the fifty thousand and the seventy as though that were somehow significant. But really, it looks bad for God. Not that murdering 70 is less heinous than murdering 50,070, and in any case the charge list is horrendously long quite apart from this crime. We’ve definitely got him on the big ones, ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity. What astonishes me is that he has chosen to write his memoirs, detailing in chapter and verse the whole gamut of his crimes. A testament to the complete arrogance of the fellow. Personally though, I believe he has grossly exaggerated his involvement, in order to big-note himself and to scare his enemies. Like most alpha types he suffers from delusions of grandeur.
He’s been lying low for a while but he can’t evade capture forever. I hope they don’t make it a show trial, he really doesn’t deserve the publicity. The last thing you’d want to do is make a martyr of him.

Surprise surprise, someone's arrived here way before me.

lost in Albany

2005-09-23T13:59:00.000+10:30

And of course it’s not just in books or in illness that you find heart-stopping pain. This is the sort of pain I most dread. As I get older, I suffer it less, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

don't forget the rack

2005-09-23T11:44:00.000+10:30

I’m not aware that Ellis wrote anything other than this 1958 novel, which naturally reminded me of that other book dealing with a tubercular young man seeking treatment in the Alps, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Since reading that book more than twenty years ago, I’ve probably become less idealistic, less hungry for knowledge, and certainly more bronchitic, though Ellis’ depiction makes my phlegmy gobbets feel quite benign.
Unlike Mann’s largely relaxed depiction of dilettantism, The Rack is much more about speculums than speculation (sorry, I had to get that line in), and is harrowing in its unrelenting realism about, not only this particular illness, but the often fatal conjunctions of character, constitution and treatment, not to mention the psychological foibles of examining physicians.
Interestingly, the writer I was most reminded of was Dostoyevski. The intensity of much of Dostoyevski’s writings, and of his on-the-brink characters, has often been attributed to illness – specifically epilepsy. In The Rack we find a similar feverish energy, the energy of youthful fervour trapped in an exhausted and debilitated body. Add to this the brain stimulus of morphine and other drugs of treatment, and you have the formula for the sort of impotent anarchy that marks the novel. We meet an array of irrational characters – nursing staff and doctors as well as fellow-convalescents – and we observe the central character – Paul Davenant, an English student - being subjected to a most bewildering array of contradictory diagnoses and treatments, yet Ellis manages to handle the twists and turns in Davenant’s health and hopes with wry humour. Not surprisingly, the question of suicide, dealt with so heavily and intellectually by Camus a generation earlier, is often foregrounded here, in a very different way. In the end, though, Davenant keeps on keeping on, in spite of the apparent loss of the love of his life  - the unkindest cut of all, though treated with Stendhalian understatement.
The lines at the end of the book will stay with me, and are worth quoting in full:

Why did he feel such an intensification of grief? ‘Nothing is altered’, he repeated, half aloud. He covered his eyes with his hand. ‘Stretch me no more on this rough world.’ The phrase came irresistibly to his mind. Where had he read it? He picked up Haydon’s Journal and turned to the entry which the latter had made just before killing himself:

‘22nd. God forgive me. Amen.
Finis of
B. R. Haydon
“Stretch me no more on this rough world” – Lear

Something was grotesquely wrong. He opened his Shakespeare.

     “…O, let him pass! He hates him
       That would upon the rack of this tough world
       Stretch him out longer.’

‘The rack’, he murmured. ‘Haydon forgot the rack.’ And his mind still exercised by the strangeness of the omission, he stared across at the half-open window.

funny thing about passion

2005-09-20T08:44:00.000+10:30

A couple of nights ago we watched Ken Russell’s film, Crimes of Passion on DVD. It came out in 1984. Like all Russell’s films, it’s high-energy, anarchic at times, silly, shallow, funny and sometimes startling. It’s all about sex, with Kathleen Turner playing China Blue, a bewigged smart-mouthed prostitute who by day is a workaholic sportswear designer. Considering the content, the film’s rating – M, for low-level violence – is way off-beam. It contains quite a lot of nudity, and one scene, in which China Blue has a wild ride with a truncheon-wielding policeman client, would definitely push it up to an R in my generally libertarian judgement. Of course, with Russell, nothing is ever taken too seriously, which is presumably why he’s gotten away with it.
Insofar as there’s a plot, it’s about a private-detective-security guy caught in a loveless marriage who’s asked to tail Joanna Crane, that’s Kathleen Turner’s workaholic sportswear designer, because her boss suspects she’s secretly selling out his designs. Naturally he uncovers her undercover job and they get under the covers. The sex is fantastic and whammo, it’s Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Antony and Cleo.
Meanwhile China’s being stalked by a sex-obsessed godbotherer, played either by Norman bates or Anthony Perkins, who resorts to mayhem here and there and is finally run through by a silver vibrator. All in all, a lot of frenzy and sordidité, some funny if creaky lines, a few distracting videoclip-type visuals, and a musical score that got under my skin, because I was sure I recognised a classical refrain, though Rick Wakeman was the only name in the credits. We never find out why Joanna becomes China, nor for that matter why she becomes Joanna. There’s a touch of pathos in the failed husband-wife relationship, though it’s hard to feel too much sympathy with frigidity so blankly presented. There’s probably an affirmation-of-life attitude to sex operating here, but to channel it into the old all-or-nothing, virgin-whore dichotomy looks to me like a failure of imagination. It’s not a film that’ll stay with me, character-wise, I suspect.

remember Scott Parkin?

2005-09-16T11:18:00.000+10:30

Media attention to the pathological posturings of Mark Latham has inevitably pushed a few more serious issues aside, and what could be more serious to our national identity than the deportation of peace activist Scott Parkin? Barista has some pungent commentary here, and well done Natasha for pursuing the issue vigorously in the senate, but of course the wall of national security is easy to put up and excellent for hiding behind. The claim is that the opposition, on being briefed, went along with the decision. So just who was the opposition in this instance. Was it Mister Big, or the shadow cabinet, or every card-carrying ALP member? Hey, I’m in the opposition, and I’ve never voted labor in my life.

Did this opposition also accept that Parkin be billed $20,000? More importantly, what allegations could they have sensibly made against him? That a person who has built his reputation on non-violent methods of protest was suddenly planning something violent? Rubbish. That he was planning to reveal some secrets of Haliburton that would compromise national security (i.e. national commercial interests)? Now there’s a political minefield. Hard not to head in that direction though. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if ASIO was pressured by ‘outside forces’, and considering Beazley’s consistent pro-American positioning, I’m afraid I wouldn’t trust his judgment any more than I’d trust ASIO’s.

Meanwhile, the lie that the public needn’t be informed about the details of this case must be exposed. The onus should be on the government to prove rather than assure that this extraordinary deportation isn’t political.

bye bye feudalism? - some Tibetan enlightenment

2005-09-07T21:43:00.000+10:30

Thanks to Sarah for sending me this info on the history of Tibet, apropos of nothing at all. I was never a big fan of the Dalai Lama; not that I had anything against him, he seemed harmless enough, and his message sounded positive, if a little vague and ineffectual. I suppose what has most irritated me is the sort of people he often attracts, the ‘enlightenment-chasers’, though he has, as this article indicates, stressed the material needs of his people over and above the spiritual – even advocating Marxism, much to the chagrin of his CIA backers no doubt.

priorities

2005-09-07T13:48:00.000+10:30

I think my blog will have to take a back seat for some time. I intend to write copiously about this harrowing case, and I realize I can’t do that in a public place for the time being. My lawyer has also advised me not to speak about it, so I’ll go along for the time being.

guess who bears the brunt of America's tsunami?

2005-09-03T11:19:00.000+10:30

Randomly clicking through Blogger’s blogs, I note they’re mostly American, and a fair percentage of them proclaim praise of the lord as their primary purpose. Still, I came across some fine original material, with naturally much about Katrina. Lots of anger about the local and federal authorities’ lack of response and support for those (the vast majority of them black) trapped in New Orleans and elsewhere. Lots of directives were issued, but those who couldn’t afford to follow these directives got short shrift – and the federal authorities, according to this finely enraged site, have been stinting on providing money for levees to protect New Orleans for years. It’s occasions like these, sadly, that really expose that country’s great divide.

hope springs eternal

2005-09-02T11:32:00.000+10:30

le printemps arrive enfin, et il faut cultiver notre jardin

a few brief notes...

2005-08-30T01:37:00.000+10:30

Murray Bramwell in The Adelaide Review writes that Albee subtitled his goat play ‘notes towards a definition of tragedy’, or something like, and concludes from this, rightly I think, that he didn’t mean the bestiality to be taken literally, that he was primarily exploring the unspeakable notion of betrayal, especially the kind of betrayal that’s utterly unexpected and under-cutting.

Rightly, and yet… He certainly meant to play on the idea of real bestiality, to throw us as witnesses into a ‘how could you possibly do that, and to your wife?’ sort of quandary, so that we wonder what the ultimate crime is, the bestiality or the betrayal, and we feel uneasy about our responses and sympathies.

It’s sheeting down, the moths whirl and beat above my head, and I’m still not permitted to post a comment to Barista’s blog – having just read his monster post about the monstrous Joe Korp

pandas marsupials and monotremes

2005-08-29T00:45:00.000+10:30

One of the most fun activities of the week, apart from gardening with Courtney, was teaching English to, or facilitating the English usage of, a trio of elderly Chinese. In fact there were five students in all, the other two being thirty-something Japanese women, and I had a problem trying to maintain the same level of engagement for all of them. Both the Japanese women could come out with whole sentences and engage with me at quite a high level, while the Chinese could rarely string two words together. There were infectiously enthusiastic though, and when taught a new word would repeat it endlessly like a bunch of Courtneys, nodding sagely all the while.
Our conversation began with naming the things around us, and distinguishing types of containers – cups, mugs, jars, jugs, bottles, packets and boxes. This was all very exciting, but somehow we got onto animals. Remarkable how much interesting info can be pumped through the semi-permeable language barrier. Pandas are China’s main claim to fame wildlife-wise, and the wisest of the Chinese fraternity told me their numbers are increasing at last, and that the only pandas outside China are a pair in America, a goodwill gift, and recently, a child was born to this pair, the first panda born in captivity, or perhaps it was born in China, and perhaps it wasn’t the first born in captivity, anyway one was born, recently…
Then another of the Chinese mentioned Taiwan, and oh yes that was right, the Chinese government had recently sent a panda pair to Taiwan, or perhaps they hadn’t sent it yet…
Later, I asked one of the Japanese women about the native wildlife in her country, whether there were any bears for example, and she said they only had a couple of pandas, but they were from China…
We talked about the bamboo eaten by pandas, and the gum leaves eaten by koalas, but later that day, or the next, one of my fellow volunteer staffers assured me that pandas are really carnivores, that it’s all guff about the bamboo, oh yes maybe they eat bamboo but they prefer fresh red meat, it’s all propaganda to make the pandas seem cuddly and sweet but she isn’t taken in, she thinks they’re hideous beasts, she loathes them…
We talked about koalas and their lives of ennui, and kangaroos, and stout wobbly wombats, and crocodiles and emus. The wise Chinese man told us haltingly and with gestures that Africa’s ostriches were bigger than our emus, and differently plumed, and that emu eggs were quite blue, unlike those of ostriches. He was clearly delighted at this blueness.
I spoke about the platypus, of whose existence they were all aware. The wise Chinese man told us they had webbed feet as well as a duck’s bill, and that they dug out nesting areas in river-banks where they lay eggs, for they were one of the few mammals on earth who lay eggs. Yes, I said, marsupials are egg-laying mammals found only in Australia. I was trying to re-assert myself as teacher and all-round expert, but then it occurred to me that kangaroos didn’t lay eggs, or maybe they did, and I became confused. I tried to cloak it by talking about the pouch, marsupials had pouches in which they reared their young, protected while they suckled the breast, because when born they were very small at least I knew the baby kangaroo was. Later the fellow volunteer staffer told me she wasn’t too sure about the marsupial thing, but there were certain monotremes who laid eggs and they were a sub-class of marsupial but don’t quote her.
So because I like to be factual, and to learn while writing, let me be clear that there are only three species of monotreme, namely the platypus, and two types of echidna. Monotreme means one-holed and is a reference to the cloaca. They also happen to be the only egg-laying mammal, so that’s probably an easier way to remember them. They’re the most primitive of mammals.
Monotremes and marsupials are described as non-eutherian. They’re phylogenetically isolated from other mammals. Eutherian mammals have a placenta, though I’ve read that marsupials do have a simple placenta, but their young are extremely artricial (as opposed to precocial), that’s to say they’re undeveloped, tiny, and in need of lots of TLC.
For next week, I’ll have to come up with another engaging subject, or maybe the wise Chinese man will.

overcoming crap

2005-08-27T11:40:00.000+10:30

One CRAP acronym, Alan Saunders has just informed me on the radio, is Computer Rage, Anxiety and Phobia, and I certainly suffer from that. So I should be happy that blogger (RTM) has combined with Microsoft to create a blogger for Word package, since I always write everything on Word beforehand. But of course nothing goes to plan, and I suffered the usual computer rage anxiety and phobia when my last post, sent straight from Word via the new blogger toolbar, came out in a CRAP font, too small to be comfortably readable. Let’s see how this one goes, but first I’ll increase the font size in Word…

terror trail

2005-08-27T10:15:00.000+10:30

In the shadow of swords: on the trail of terrorism from Afghanistan to Australia. Sally Neighbour, 2004, HarperCollins.
This book agitates as well as educating. We’re left with some awkward questions – how could JI have gone undetected for so long? How do we get the Indonesians to take the threat seriously? Why does the extreme interpretation of jihad appeal to such a diversity of Moslems (even if they’re few in number)? Is there something integral to Islam that we should worry about? What about the effect of our foreign policy, and more importantly that of our big beefy ally, on the rhetoric and actions of our enemies? Can we find a way to be placatory without being weak? We could certainly do a helluva lot better than we’re doing now.
Neighbour here tells a tale of individuals, all with different interpretations of and varying commitments to jihad. She humanises them far more than they’re prepared to humanise us, it seems. Even the three notorious brothers, Muklas, Amrozi and Ali Imron, emerge as distinctive personae, conforming to well-known patterns of sibling development, with Muklas, the eldest, as the responsible leader-figure, hardline all the way, followed by Amrozi, irresponsible and unsettled, before finally ‘growing up’ into a full-blown terrorist, with all the zeal of the recent convert, and Ali Imron, the baby of the family, struggling for the recognition and respect of his brothers, always with a me-too air, and stricken by conscience way too late. Then we have the softly spoken and outwardly gentle Abu Bakar Bashir, as ignorant of Western ways and values as the old Ayatollah Khomeini, and as thoughtlessly destructive. And for me probably the most intriguing/disturbing individual described here is the still-at-large Azahari Husin, a roguish former Norwood High School and Adelaide Uni student, who went on to become a high-flying academic in maths and statistics. He’s likely responsible for designing the Bali bomb, as well as the Marriott Hotel bomb.
A vastly diverse bunch, they all have in common a contempt for what they conceive to be Western values, and a macho delight in making big bangs. Coming soon to a cinema (or stadium or terminal, etc etc) near you.

on sharing one's fantasies

2005-08-26T23:34:00.000+10:30

As the secretary of the Urbane Society for Skeptical Romantics I need to remind myself from time to time of my romantic delusions - that's to say I don't have any trouble maintaining the delusions but I rarely give them any space here.

So, after a reasonably rare spot of TV viewing, I hereby declare the new love of my life, one Keeley Hawes, of Spooks (though I found the show, or this episode at least, a little less than convincing). I hereby admit to gasping with (romantic) disbelief at her magnificent intellect. She replaces Sarah Blasko (discovered circuitously via Larvatus Prodeo of all sites) for this week only.

strolling and lolling

2005-08-26T20:29:00.000+10:30

Spending much of the day blog-browsing, reading Online Opinion articles, discovering New Matilda and generally strolling and lolling about in cyberland.
Made one fairly pedestrian comment on another of Peter Sellick's tedious but no doubt heartfelt pro-Christian articles, shook my head (mostly) at pieces by John Stone and Patrick Goodenough, and nodded at Tim Dunlop's defence of free speech. Always amazes me how vicious things get so quickly when Israeli issues are raised. Wouldn't you think people would agree that this is a vexed historical matter with a myriad of perspectives? Or maybe they do, and acknowledge the fact before launching into each other. Anyway, this guy Loewenstein seems to raise a lot of hackles.

doing community service

2005-08-12T14:00:00.000+10:30

I sit down at my computer after a couple of days of genuine bona fide community activity. Yesterday – well I can barely recall what I did yesterday. Hopefully it’ll come back to me as I write. The evening was spent devoted to housing co-op treasury work, costing our situation under the new funding agreement. Tedious stuff to describe, but there really is something engrossing in figures – there must be, considering the hours I spend poring over them. Of course there must also be some self-satisfaction in knowing I’m doing useful work for the co-op, cementing myself in as an indispensable office-bearer, a credit to the team. At the same time, I’m perhaps not the team player I should be, I like doing my work in isolation, I like knowing I’m about the only one in the co-op with the willingness to perform accounting tasks I myself would once have baulked at, perhaps for fear of turning into a blinking bespectacled drone.

And now I recall what else I did yesterday. In the morning I drove off to the Adelaide South West Community Centre for my first stint at assisting in English conversation classes. The inaugural class was held the week before, unbeknownst to me. Lita, the organiser of the classes, had expected me to turn up, though she hadn’t directly informed me. The others at the centre assured me this wasn’t a concern, for Lita tended to get into a flap about most things. Besides, there was only the one student, and, according to the others, Lita had become so possessive of her that I mightn’t even have been welcome once the class had gotten underway.

I was getting the impression that Lita might be a difficult woman to work with. I’d met her, and found her affable enough, and almost embarrassingly deferential to my supposed expertise as an ESL teacher, but there was a kind of doggedness and preciosity about everything that made her company a little draining after a while.
I arrived at the community centre about half an hour before the class was due to begin, and I was soon treated to a diverting altercation between Yvonne, one of the centre’s more impressive operators - and an acquaintance of Sarah’s and mine through the co-op sector - and Lita. It seems that Lita had, the previous week, become so absorbed with the language difficulties of her only student, a fairly newly-arrived Korean woman called Clara (surely not her real name), that she’d brusquely turned away another woman, a Filipina who’d approached them following Yvonne’s suggestion, for she was in attendance for the purpose of minding any children of students who might need it, and was at a loose end.

Not surprisingly, Lita had no adequate response to Yvonne’s criticism of her behaviour. She emphasised Clara’s need for intensive assistance, and tried to explain the nature of her problems. ‘You’re missing the point, Lita,’ Yvonne interrupted impatiently. ‘Is it a conversation class or isn’t it? That’s what it’s advertised as. The poor woman was so embarrassed, and I was embarrassed at having put her in that position. What’s more, I then had to entertain the blessed woman myself, when I had a load of work of my own to do.’

Lita seemed contrite enough at this, but I sensed, like Yvonne, that this would be an ongoing problem. We started the class, with only the one woman, Clara, and I think my presence helped to make the interactions more conversational and less intensive. At times Clara seemed to forget the language technicalities, being too engrossed in the content of the communications. Is this a good thing? Well, it’s meant to be a conversation class after all. I think the best thing is to mix it up, because these people do want to improve their English language kills, so you need to bring their attention back to language structures from time to time. The problem with immersion methods often is that it’s more about effective enough communication than absolutely correct language. The main difficulty is fossilisation in the interlanguage. Always loved that term, but it’s not just pretentious claptrap, it’s a reasonably accurate description of what happens.

To illustrate, it’s perhaps best to go on with my recounting of the class. At 11.30am, only half an hour before the 90 minute class was due to wind up, another student arrived, a Japanese woman named Kyoai, together with two kids. Unfortunately the crèche volunteer, this time a man and a native English speaker, had by this time gone away, so she had to struggle between minding a six-month baby and a three-year-old and participating in our class. She was late because it had been raining and she was travelling by foot, only living a couple of blocks away. She explained that she needed English practice because her husband, an Australian, never corrected her, because he always understood what she was trying to say. Their conversation was in any case minimal, he came home, turned on the TV, that was it. No sense of tragedy in her voice about this, she just laughed it off, but with embarrassment.

So it was with some mortification that I heard Lita say to her, after focusing most of her attention on Clara, that really, her English was quite good, that in fact she had no real need of these classes and should instead go to the lunchtime learning sessions or something like that. Lunchtime learning was not targeted at NESB people at all. No doubt Kyoai would benefit from such sessions, but it was just not true that she had no need of this type of class. She knew that she needed correcting, that she was in danger of fossilisation, and to be given such a non-welcome from Lita must have been demoralising. I protested mildly, and made more of an effort to include her, but considering Lita’s comments, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t come back. And so I’m going to have to bite the bullet and take Lita aside about this. If we’re to have informal conversation classes, she has to accept that abilities will be mixed, from the newly arrived elderly to youngish adults who’ve been here for a dozen years but know they are still making mistakes. And she must be welcoming to any NESB person who wants to join the group.

Kyoia’s concern, I’m sure, is that, with her minimal opportunities for English communication, she feels increasingly trapped by her lack of confidence with the language, increasingly reduced to minimal conversations involving an inflexible English language use, cut off from the possibility of richness and diversity of communication that a greater command of English might give her.

Fossilisation in the interlanguage occurs when the rewards for improving your target language structuring and pronunciation are insufficient to make the effort required worthwhile. Listen to any NESB person who hasn’t been exposed to English before adulthood and you’re likely to find some fossilisation, that’s to say, some stubborn remnants of native language usage transferred to the target language. With people of Chinese background it’s often found in the inappropriate application of plurals, for example. The term ‘interlanguage’ refers to this mixing of native language structures with target language vocabulary.

Actually this matter of rewards and effort is a major factor in all learning, not just language learning. How many of us really understand the deceptively simple equation e=mc2 ? I could devote the next several years to understanding the maths and physics behind it, its implications, etc, but the effort required, at my age, to master whole areas of mathematics hitherto unknown to me, to put myself as far as possible into the mind of an Einstein and so forth, would bear little fruit whether in terms of kudos from my friends or contributions to the field of scientific theory. There might, on the other hand, be some reward in going into the matter just a little bit more than the average lay person, since most people are easily dazzled by science and you might get to impress some Sarah Blasko fantasy figure at parties.

In Kyoia’s case, she might feel that making the extra effort to avoid fossilisation isn’t being appreciated by her husband, or by the shopkeepers and other professionals she might have dealings with from time to time, and she’s still young and wants extra stimulation. The last thing she wants to hear is that her English is ‘excellent’ and has no need of improvement, or even that it’s adequate for her purposes.

The Hicks debacle

2005-08-08T02:11:00.000+10:30

The other day I woke up to the drone of Gerard Henderson on Radio National. I disagree with him on most things, but that morning he was being excessively disagreeable. At least Fran Kelly wasn’t prepared to let him get away with it, but even so I couldn’t bear to listen after a while, and I switched off. It was about the David Hicks case. Henderson was trying to argue that, regardless of the issues around the legality or fairness of his trial, and regardless of the fact that he has been incarcerated without charge for three and a half years or more, nobody, on either side of Australian politics, was denying that he was guilty, and guilty of serious offences. He then went on to state that Hicks had had training in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that this training was ‘extensive’, a term he made much of. Now considering that it is Hicks’ accusers that claim his training to be ‘extensive’ (and it is solely on their evaluation that Henderson is relying), and that those accusers have an enormous vested interest in finding guilty at least someone out of the hundreds they’ve had incarcerated without charge for years, it comes as no surprise that they make this claim. What this term signals to us is not anything factual about Hicks, I’d contend, but the determination of the military tribunal to make Hicks one of those few (and there are only four left, including Hicks) whose ‘guilt’ will somehow make the long incarceration of the other hundreds justifiable.

The central issue in the Hicks situation, as we all know, or should know, is whether or not Hicks will receive a fair trial. Henderson is more than fudging the issue, he’s proclaiming Hicks’ guilt (of what I’m not sure – presumably of having worked with or trained with organisations or groups which were subsequently dubbed terrorist), on the basis of evidence obtained from the very source the impartiality of which is so heavily under question. It’s another unacceptable example of trial by media.

When pressured about the fairness of the trial process, Henderson seemed to consider the fact that the Americans are ‘at war’ to be sufficient reason for any irregularities in Hicks’ treatment thus far, but this is patently absurd. Many serious doubts about the fairness of these military commissions have been raised by persons far more qualified to judge of the matter than Henderson, including former prosecutors John Carr and Robert Preston (two of the three prosecutors who have resigned due to serious reservations about the commissions’ fairness), Australia’s former war crimes prosecutor Greg James, and the head of Australia's military bar, Captain Paul Willee QC. The Weekend Australian here gives a sobering account of their misgivings, though I think the article’s a bit rough on Hicks himself. Not that I have too much sympathy with Hicks’ jihadist sympathies, but the authors seem also to have fallen for the American line about his ‘extensive’ training. Who really knows what training, if any, Hicks has had? Certainly Gerard Henderson doesn’t, and neither do the Weekend Oz writers. Everyone's relying on the same dubious sources.

battle weary

2005-08-05T11:56:00.000+10:30

A good day yesterday in that my Centrelink fears were largely assuaged. A rollercoaster of emotions before my 3pm Centrelink appointment. Trying to fill out the horrendous Job Diary, I decided the task – it appeared that I had to fill out details for twelve jobs a fortnight, over six fortnights, as well as several weeks of mutual obligation stuff – was beyond me. I would go to my appointment, tell them I preferred to give up benefits rather than be harassed and humiliated in this way, and walk out with dignity intact and wallet empty. I would accept JS’ one-day-a-week job offer, for a measly $72, (which would probably mean not going ahead with assisting in English conversation classes, which would’ve been fun but unremunerative) and try to hustle other work, tutoring in ESL, gardening, cleaning, anything…

I was in two minds about even turning up for the 3pm interview, but I’d filled out my previous fortnight’s dole form, and I should hand it in for one last payment at least. I tried passing the form through at the front counter, but then it was suggested I should hold onto it and hand it over to the interviewer. So there was no easy escape. So I stood waiting to be called, too agitated in fact to sit down, rehearsing the words I would say, the precise nature and direction of my righteous indignation. I would insist that my ire was directed at the heartlessness of government, not at Centrelink staff. I imagined a staffer trying half-heartedly to defend the government’s line, to insist that there was a certain obligation, considering that I was paid… I would cut them off, saying that I was to be paid no longer, that the mutual obligation, such as it was, had come to an end, so any lecturing would be inappropriate…

I was called and the staffer kindly showed me to her desk at the very back of the private offices area. I recognised her as the person who had dealt with my case a few months previously. That interview had been difficult because I was in poor health, and I remembered her sympathy. I told her I hoped this interview would be short and sweet, and launched into my objections to and frustrations with this mutual obligation palaver. She immediately assured me that I’d got the stuff about the job diary all wrong, I had merely to copy into it the same info that I put on my form, and since I had already, at the previous interview, proved my credentials in terms of community work, that, too wouldn’t be a problem. She rang someone in policy for confirmation of various processes, told me I could ditch the old job diary and start again. Unfortunately something of the sort had to be filled out, though she made it as easy as possible, agreeing that it was overly humiliating ‘especially for someone of your age’. She made this point of my age a couple of times, and I wasn’t too sure about that. I felt I was perhaps being treated as a well-meaning old soak who shouldn’t be put to too much stress, rather than being recognised as a doughty veteran of many a Centrelink and DSS campaign. I should get a medal, I reckon. Anyway, I was very grateful for her assurances, and I left the place feeling much lightened.

on acknowledging terrorism

2005-08-04T19:33:00.000+10:30

Walking down King William Street yesterday, I noticed a bus stop poster proclaiming the merits of dobbing in a suspected terrorist. This is something new in my experience, though we've not suffered anything yet on the Oz mainland. It really is a vexed question, whether we play up or play down the terrorist threat. Halfway through reading Sally Neighbour's book In the shadow of swords, I'm still not certain of the line to take. Do these guys feed on testosterone-driven heroics? Of course it's not that simple, but clearly too it's about a simplistic outlook. It's about having found the answer, which is what makes these 'revolutionaries' similar to Western 'Marxists' of yore (and not always of yore) in many respects. It takes us back even to the anabaptists and beyond. There are similarities, too, to various cults that have cropped up since time immemorial. Absolutism, which will always be with us, always have its adherents. Reading about the gradual conversion of bright sparks like Azahari, you realise how unpredictably attractive these all-or-nothing modes of thought, religiously cultured, seem to be. I'm not sure if they're more attractive, or more prevalent, than they've ever been, but with the greater availability of bomb materials, guns and other murderous stuff, they're able to make more of an impact. And surely the coverage they're getting is helping to swell the ranks. I'm still trying to ignore it all, to reflect on more mundane and innocent stuff.

Trollope's The Warden

2005-07-31T04:40:00.000+10:30

I’ve been reading aloud to Sarah again, and today we finished a novel, my first Trollope novel (that’s Anthony), called The Warden; his first successful novel, and the first in the Barchester series. It’s a very tightly controlled novel, which treats of a number of themes and one central moral dilemma. The central character, Septimus Harding, Warden of Barchester hospital, finds his living under a cloud when it’s revealed that what was originally a small bequest from the will of John Hiram in the fifteenth century, which covered both the pay of the Warden and the expenses of a dozen retired wool-carders, has since become a tidy sum for the Wardenship, but not for the dozen retirees (no longer wool-carders in the nineteenth century). In other words, through either the carelessness or the manipulation of the Church of England, which has overseen the bequest through the centuries, the Wardenship has become a pleasant sinecure, and the working class carders and their successors have had their portion kept to the barest minimum.

Around this dilemma, Trollope invents and has great fun with some archetypal characters: the kindly, doddering bishop; the zealous reformer; the conservative and self-important archdeacon; the man of the press as judge, jury and executioner; and in the middle of it, the kindly and scrupulous Warden himself. In general, quite satisfying fare, but both Sarah and I had qualms about the way it ended, especially for the dozen indigents on whose behalf the zealous reformer (John Bold) and the man of the press (Tom Towers) took up the cudgels. Clearly these were worn-out, illiterate working-class worthies, but Trollope treats them more as grotesques than as fully human characters, and seems rather to mock their ‘illusions’ regarding the bequest out of which they seem to have been genuinely cheated. In the end the Warden resigns his tainted position, and the Church, avoiding controversy, appoints no successor. The twelve good men and true gradually die off and are no longer replaced as they had been in the past, and the whole place falls into desuetude. The kindly bishop is thus shown, though not explicitly by Trollope, to be kindly only to his friend the warden, but not at all to the deserving poor of the hospital. Their abandonment is a disgrace undealt with, though no doubt this sort of thing really happened. Trollope is really much more concerned with his middle-class protagonists; doctors, lawyers, ecclesiasts, newspapermen and the like. There are only two prominent women in the novel, both daughters of the Warden. Eleanor, the more or less simpering maiden and dutiful daughter, and Mrs Grantley the haughtily respectable wife of the archdeacon. And to be fair, even Eleanor is rendered bearable by Trollope’s mild but unrelenting satire.

Still, there’s always this silly hope that the writer’s critique will bite deeper, biting right to the heart of his age and class. In the end, it’s what Trollope presents but doesn’t himself fully notice that attracts our utmost attention, I feel. Most notably, the nineteenth century class system, and the failure to recognise even the potential for equality for all. The undemocratic nature of the age, if you will.

trees and the fruit thereof

2005-07-31T00:31:00.000+10:30

Today I planted an almond tree (Prunus amygdalus?), after weeding and preparing the ground, at Sarah’s, not far from my fence. Later, watching Gardening Australia, we were bemused and amused at the experts exchanging botanical names. I’m often looking up Latin names for my garden species and promptly forgetting them.

The prunus amygdalus is commonly called the bitter almond, in English. I think. Actually there’s some confusion, in me at least, but a clarification, as well as a lot of useful almond tree info, is offered at this Californian site, It seems that the almond is now known botanically as Prunus dulcis.

We’ll be doing some more planting tomorrow – our co-op has bought a swag of fruit trees for its members, including a ruby grapefruit and a quince for me. Today though I also put two trees in my front garden. Two Albizia julibrissin, also known as Mimosa, or Silktree. Sarah has one growing in her courtyard, a beautiful specimen. She saw them growing in a courtyard café in the city and wanted to have one. It grew so well and quickly in her little courtyard that she became concerned that the neighbour would complain about leaves in the gutter, so last winter I pruned it back heavily with the intention of uprooting it and replanting it out the back. When it came to the point, though, it was too boxed in to be removed. So now it has sprung back up to its former glory, and from the prunings, which I tossed into the back yard, four or five little mimosas have been born. We could end up with a forest of them. From China originally, they’re very popular street trees around the world.

By the way, Sarah insisted they were from cuttings, and from the look of a neatly sawed root she showed me, she’s probably right, but they self-seed muchly too apparently. Just been reading a Californian gardening forum, in which most of the forumees, middle-class yank wankers, have nothing good to say about the messy prolific Mimosa, obsessed as they are with order and control, which unfortunately seems to be a principal reason folks get into gardening.

buck off

2005-07-30T19:12:00.000+10:30

Apparently Amanda Vanstone has a new sign on her desk - the buck passes here.

one day in winter

2005-07-27T23:54:00.000+10:30

A cold and wet wintriness has returned. Yesterday was a busy day, spent at the community centre, taking bookings and sorting out ongoing computer problems. Also attended the centre’s first staff meeting, and even contributed in a relaxed sort of way. Years of housing co-op meetings have stood me in good stead. It’s a pleasant work space, a pity I’m just a volunteer. I’ve been admonished, though, for using such language. Volunteers are much respected here in the council.

After work, I attended a twenty-fifth birthday dinner for Fiona, at Catherine’s house. Sarah, her three daughters, her five grandchildren, Rachel’s husband Dave, Fiona’s boyfriend Peter and myself made up the company. Even with all the kids running around it seemed a subdued occasion.

I was subdued sure enough, except when Dave brought up the court case. People want to see this kid brought to justice, brought to heel. Dave’s glad to hear I have a lawyer for free, they can cost $200 an hour he points out. Imagine if some kid tells an outrageous lie that threatens to destroy not only your earning capacity but your reputation and your very life, and you have no option but to hire someone at such cost, just to try and maintain a normal, struggling life.

I have fantasies of a letter to the lad’s mum, the most responsible party, delivering her a serve about her lying son, and especially about his reason for lying, his desperation for a mother’s love, but it doesn’t take long to realise that she too is likely a victim, that her troubled relationship with her son goes back darkly to her past and so forth. No winners, but I’m losing badly, the boy’s not winning and will eventually lose his mum surely, the police have lost least and that’s most infuriating. I suppose I should contact lawyer George.

I’ve written occasionally of Courtney, but I must again register my amazement at her speedy incorporation of new language, the expansion of concepts, the way she builds narrative, with less and less repetition as vocabulary and understanding burgeon. She speaks often now of her best friend Michael, a fantastical being with whom she shares lip gloss and her pretty pink car rattling through the city full of people dangerous and monstrous. She builds on the story to keep receiving the reward of glitter-eyed fascination, the beginning of the poetry of invention. And the face puckers and pouts, nods and tilts, the hands flap and fly, the eyes bulge and blink, and you try not to look too entranced, and sometimes you’re wearied, for after all she flags, she’s human, oh she’s very human, she wants to dominate your every second, and you’re glad to escape, the extraordinary scary force of a three-year-old. Exceptional? Aren’t they all?

Mostly I just watched. Fiona seemed straighter than usual, and all lovey-dovey with her beau. She’s a sad dependent type. And I suppose I’m a sad independent type. Sarah suspects she’s pregnant again. Just as long as poor Sarah doesn’t get further lumbered.

that damn report again

2005-07-20T20:35:00.000+10:30

I’ve returned to the Police Apprehension Report, with a renewed outrage. It wells up from time to time, unexpectedly. I note that the date of the alleged offence is given, in the first paragraph, entitled ‘BREIF (sic) OVERVIEW’ as September 24, whereas in the following section, ‘VICTIM’S VERSION’, and on the front page, where the ‘offence details’ are stated, the date is September 23. A schoolboy howler, as George Galloway would put it, that will doubtless be punished by my lawyer.

Something else about this report has niggled at me, though, and I’ve just become clear about it.

On the front page, in a box headed ‘Offence details’, two offences are presented. In the first, the relevant words are ‘... had sexual intercourse with [name of alleged victim] a person of the age of 15 years’. This is the ‘unlawful sexual intercourse’ charge. In the second, the relevant words are ‘…had sexual intercourse with [name again] without his consent. This, clearly, is the rape charge. At the end of each charge comes the words ‘This is a major indictable offence’.

The sentence which ends the section in the report entitled ‘POLICE VERSION’ is this: ‘Accused arrested to ensure appearance and due to the serious nature of the offence.’

Now, I’m in a particularly strong position to know that no offence of any kind took place on September 23 or 24 or any other day between myself and the plaintiff. So I take particular offence at this emphasis on the word ‘offence’, put forward as fact. Shouldn’t it be ‘alleged offence’ or ‘allegation’? The use of the words “Offence details” on the front page suggests that this is standard practice, and who knows how long it has been so. Decades perhaps. Centuries. No excuse, however. If it is standard practice, it is wrong standard practice. It must be objected to. Leaving the wording as it is is prejudicial, in the strictest sense of the word. It has more than a whiff of quod erat demonstrandum.

Oh and one more thing: that last line which read that the accused was ‘apprehended… due to the serious nature of the offence’ makes it seem that the police were perfectly justified in their action. However, if ‘offence’ here is changed to ‘allegation’, as it should be, then we see clearly the problem, for it’s plainly absurd to arrest people just because the allegation is a serious one, regardless of evidence. If the police seriously followed such a procedure, rewarding every false allegation, the justice system would quickly collapse under the weight of police incompetence.

a terrorist haven?

2005-07-16T19:42:00.000+10:30

The other day I accidentally clicked on instapundit, which somehow has wormed its way onto one of my toolbars. There I was directed to a Daniel Pipes piece arguing that weak, wishy-washy liberal Britain is, according to 'counter-terrorism specialists', a hub of Islamic extremist jihadists, encouraged by Britain's pro-multicultural laws, whereas France is a European centre for counter-terrorist activities, where fewer rights are accorded to terrorism suspects than just about anywhere else in the world. He argues, naturally, that these differences have much to do with France's defence of its heritage, by comparison with the Brits' disinterest in theirs. All a bit tendentious, but where you stand on these matters depends on whether you've ever been, or know someone who's been, subjected to the heavy-handed treatment of security agencies let loose on the community. I just think it's more about getting smarter about the people who perpetrate these atrocities, not nastier. But then, as a wishy washy liberal, I would think that, wouldn't I?

my day taken care of

2005-07-12T23:54:00.000+10:30

Today was one of those rare days, almost a nine-to-five workday, driving into the city, trouble with parking, greeting colleagues, professionally smiling for much of the day, managing to be of real use from time to time, rushing out to the Central Market for a lunch on the run, demonstrating computer expertise to the boss, making suggestions, learning about systems, becoming more integrated into the team. Warmed at the end of this working day (the coldest Adelaide day in near twenty years) by thoughts of a job well done, even if unfortunately all unpaid.

I’m volunteering one day a week at the new Adelaide South West Community Centre, staffing the reception desk mainly. Today was a special day though, the day of its official launch. The official launcher, our Lord Mayor, Micky Harbison, actually spoke to me at one point, having mistaken me for a mover and shaker. ‘You’re on the committee, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘Committee…? No I’m just a ring-in, just volunteering…’ I began, but that was enough for him, he quickly disappeared back into the crowd. At least Janie Lomax-Smith looked comfortable when confronted with a volunteer. She asked if I lived locally, and when I said I used to, but no longer, she urged me to come back to live in the city. Presumably these people think it’s just a matter of putting your hand up for a bit of plum city real estate. She seemed nice enough though.

So, after all this heady stuff, I finally arrived home to more bills and a call from JS telling me that he’d changed his mind about hiring me for stock-taking. Quel désastre, that’s a thousand dollars not coming my way, because of his whim, and I’m looking financial ruin in the face, mainly because of that little liar, but really it’s myself to blame for not having a more secure income stream set up, at my age. But hey I’m meeting a few interesting people, I have a roof over my head and sometimes I’m in reasonable health. I’m sure something good will turn up soon.

the age of the patriarchs

2005-07-11T22:31:00.000+10:30

Chapter 2 of Testament deals with some troubling events in Genesis, most of them involving Jacob and his family. First, and throughout the narrative, there’s Jacob’s unsatisfactory relationship with his elder twin, Esau. Then there’s the story of his polygamy, first marrying Laban’s eldest daughter Leah (though he seems to have been tricked into it), and finally marrying his love, the younger daughter Rachel, while still retaining Leah. Another mysterious one is his trickery with Laban’s sheep – hard to work out what, physically, is going on there. Finally there’s the awful story of the rape of Dinah, and the retribution it engenders (which reads like one of those horror stories about honour and killing we still hear about out of Afghanistan or certain African countries).

According to the story, the rivalry of Jacob and Esau was fore-ordained (Genesis 25:23), and it prefigures the rivalry between the Israelites (Jacob’s descendants) and the Edomites (from Esau). In reading of the relationship, I tend to forget that and observe only Jacob’s wiliness and dishonesty in his dealings with his well-meaning but apparently dull-witted brother. As one commentator has noted, Jacob’s fore-ordained success – ‘the elder will serve the younger’ – should render his devious tricks unnecessary. I suppose, though, that these tricks might also be fore-ordained to achieve the desired result. It’s also noteworthy that Jacob’s mum, Rebecca, favoured Jacob over Esau (whereas Isaac favoured Esau), abetted him in his trickery, and helped to spirit him off to the land of Laban, her brother, to avoid Esau’ wrath. There seems to be lots of standard family drama and tension here. There’s an amusing sceptical analysis of the family values that crop up in Jacob’s life here.

Jacob’s polygamy is also a highly diverting source of contention among godbotherers, from those who claim god’s total disapproval of arrangements, to those who want to use it to argue polygamy’s okay. There’s also the question of whether he had two wives or four. As to the weird stuff about the poles and the streaked sheep (or goats, or cattle) (Gen 30: 37-39), the SAB comments:

Jacob displays his (and God's) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats.

A believer’s commentary goes like this:

Jacob followed an ancient superstition (Genesis 30:37-39), which by Jacob's own admission, only "worked" because of God's direct intervention (Genesis 31:9).

A much funnier commentary, though, begins with this:

A close analysis of the passage results in scientific accuracy as well as an indication of god's sovereignty in all matters.

It goes on for several pages of pseudo-scientific analysis re Mendelian genetics and tries to argue that Jacob was really onto something with his streaked rods in water troughs:

Exactly what it is that determines the actual characteristics a particular individual [or animal] may have, out of all the potential characteristics that are theoretically available in the gene pool, is not yet known in any significant degree. It may be that Jacob had learned certain things about these animals which modern biologists have not yet even approached.

All of this from half a dozen lines in the Bible. Such is the Will to Believe, and such is the great human gift of rationalisation.

For the sordid events around the rape of Dinah, Genesis 34, you just have to look around you. I’m told that Calabrian brothers ‘look after’ their sisters in much the same way today – they’re only less violent because they can’t get away with it.

touching on consciousness

2005-07-11T00:30:00.000+10:30

David Chalmers gave a lively talk today at the Festival of Ideas, on puzzles of consciousness. I was expecting more of a challenge to materialist explanations though. Instead I found that, though Chalmers insisted on the first-person privileged access to consciousness as unique and somehow irreducible to third-person description, he was keen to establish, as part of a ‘science of consciousness’ a formalisation of the experience of conscious states. He tried to present this in a non-reductive way as some kind of generalised formalisation, a kind of field which captures while not capturing the uniqueness of individual conscious experience, but I didn’t myself find that approach too promising, at least as presented. Too hazy and metaphorical at this stage.

biblical matters

2005-07-10T17:55:00.000+10:30

Spent all of yesterday at the Festival of Ideas, with a break halfway through to view a beautiful exhibition, Belonging, (can’t recall the name of the artist), in a building within the grounds of the botanical gardens near the tropical house.

In the Festival tent I bought a book, Testament, which had nothing to do with the forums I attended (Ross Adler, Julian Disney, Kathy Laster and Deirdre Macken on philanthropy; John Murray on epidemiology, Africa and fiction writing; John Quiggin, Deirdre Macken, Peter Botsman and Feisel Abdul Rauf on affluenza). It’s a condensed version, apparently, of the Revised English Bible, a highly regarded version first published in 1989.

As a proselytising atheist I’ve always been more at odds with Christianity than with other religions, purely because of the weight of its presence in my culture.

I’ve always felt, though, that I needed to have some understanding of the basic texts of Judeo-Christianity, to argue any case more thoroughly. Of course I’ve also been reluctant – why waste my time reading this text when I might get so much more, say, out of David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind, or the brain books of Susan Greenfield, or any number of texts, political or scientific or historical or fictional? I can’t answer that except to say that I’m drawn to it at the moment, and who knows if it’s only a whim?

Now I’ve just read the first chapter of Testament, ‘Creation and Fall’, which includes the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, and the tower of Babel, and already I’ve struck trouble aplenty. Some of it is old stuff to me, eg what was the point of putting a mark on Cain, ‘so that anyone happening to meet him should not kill him’, when the only other humans on Earth were his mum and dad? (To which there appears to be an answer – Adam and Eve soon had another son, Seth, to replace Abel, and he in turn, somehow, had a son Enosh. Possibly daughters weren’t worth the mention. Anyway, Adam lived 930 years altogether and had other kids [Genesis 5:4-5]).

More interesting for me are these lines:

The Lord God made coverings from skins for the man and his wife and clothed them. But he said, ‘The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out takes fruit from the tree of life also, and eats it and lives forever?’

Leaving aside the small issue of eternal life here, why does God say ‘one of us’? This use of the plural is also to be found in Sarah’s NIV (New International Version, first published in the seventies), which includes copious study notes, but no mention is made of this intriguing hint of polytheism, surprise surprise.

The King James version (Genesis 3:22) also employs this plural. Some scholars neatly suggest that the Trinity is being referred to. Others whip up a host of angels.

There’s another, more powerful hint of polytheism, though, at the beginning of the Noah story, in Testament (and presumably also in the Revised English Bible (REB):

The human race began to increase and to spread over the earth and daughters were born to them. the sons of the gods saw how beautiful these daughters were, so they took for themselves such women as they chose.

Now, this use of the plural, gods, may not be so easily explained away as the trinity etc. And of course there’s also the question of who might be referred to as their sons. The NIV (Genesis 6:2) simply uses ‘sons of God’, as does the KJV. Of course there’s plenty of exegesis of Genesis 6:2-4 to be found, and it gets weirder – in Testament it continues thus:

But the lord said, my spirit will not remain in a human being for ever; because he is mortal flesh, he will live only for a hundred and twenty years.’ In those days as well as later, when the sons of the gods had intercourse with the daughters of mortals and children were born to them, the Nephilim were on the earth; they were the heroes of old, people of renown.

The term ‘Nephilim’ is apparently translated as ‘giants’ in KJV. But note the second plural in Testament. Again the singular is used in KJV and NIV.

The godbotherers clearly find this passage as perplexing as I do. To take a typical comment from one of their sites:

Many have been confused about the identity of these "sons of God". This section of Scripture has puzzled and perplexed a great number of scholars and Bible students for centuries. Some immediately assume the "sons of God" must be fallen angels, but we have already discovered that the Bible teaches that this can't be talking about angels since they don't even have sex with each other, which means that they certainly don't have sexual intercourse with human beings either! It is true that the book of Job uses the phrase "sons of God" in connection with angels, but that is the only book in the whole Bible where this can be found. It's dangerous to build a belief on just one portion of the Bible; You need to compare Scripture with Scripture in order to get the whole meaning and idea of a certain teaching or principle.

I’m more interested though in the use of the plural here. Unfortunately even the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (SAB) doesn’t mention the possibility of a plural here, though of course it makes hay over the contradictions about the one and the many sons. The New American Bible (NAB) writes ‘the sons of heaven, with the footnote – ‘literally the sons of the gods or the sons of God, i.e. the celestial beings of mythology’.

Some light is shed here by a Biblical scholar, Trevor Major, who has this footnote:

The expression “sons of God” is taken from bene-ha’elohim, while “daughters of men” is derived from benoth ha’adham. While few would argue with the common rendering of the latter phrase, some would say that the former should read “sons of the gods” or “lesser gods.” Although a reference to a plurality of gods or god-like characters may be inferred, the word ‘elohim in the Old Testament most often refers to the One God of the Israelites, and hence the former usage cannot be used to affirm the pagan definition as the only option.

Major has in fact written a whole thesis on this passage of genesis, but from the perspective of a confirmed godbotherer out to refute those nasty liberal scholars who’re trying to undermine the Truth of the Good Book by claiming pagan and other influences and intrusions. He charmingly points out that ‘It would not occur to these writers that perhaps the Bible’s rendering is based on the original event and is accurate because of the guidance of the Holy Spirit’. He sure does have a point there! And of course he’s only complaining about liberal believers, not out and out secularists like me.

three little reviews

2005-07-07T10:57:00.000+10:30

I’ve read a couple of good books – Love in Idleness by Charlotte Mendelson and Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban, and seen some interesting movies – What the bleep do we know?, My summer of love, and, on TV, The warrior and the princess.

The first three, briefly:

Love in idleness – quality writing, taut and bright, even if the world described struck me as stiflingly middle-class, and the young narrator as overly desperate to milk every ounce of meaning from stray glances and offhand remarks. She was an appealing character though, finely mixing astuteness and insight with innocence and vulnerability. And lots of good humour.
The book’s theme, if that matters, is family relations, sibling rivalries, desire and morality, all revolving around the narrator’s intrigued and timorous relationship with Stella, her mother’s younger sister, an apparently hard-hearted hedonist. She emerges well, though, and in spite of the sting in the tail, which sends her back into family intrigue, you just know she’s going to survive, and thrive.

Passage to Juneau – a real treasure, and I’ll certainly be looking out for more of Raban’s writings. A fellow loner, Raban uses this trip through the inside passage from Seattle to Juneau to reflect on history (the fat, fuming Captain Vancouver’s earlier voyage of discovery along the same route), romanticism (the Sublime and Beautiful nature of wild nature, as defined by Edmund Burke, and oceanwise as painted by Turner), the transformations of native culture, the shapes and colours of water and weather, the illusions and elusiveness of love, the patterns of family, and the consolations of literature. A book full of heart and spirit and stalwart individualism – a great read and a great companion.

What the bleep do we know? - behind all the talking head blahblah this was a simple feel-good, take-control-of-your-own-life movie. It was a mixture of documentary and narrative, the narrative following the day of a grumpy, harassed photographer, played by Marlee Matlin, whose narrow view of herself and her life is widened by strange ‘cosmic occurrences’ supposedly based on or inspired by the weirdness of quantum mechanics and molecular biology. This could all be easily dismissed as new age religion posing as science, and on some level I’ve done just that, but its religiosity has something of an appeal for me – rather surprisingly. It’s not really a religious sense at all, but a sense of the multi-dimensionality of the self, which you may or may not want to describe as spirituality. Yes I think more an inspirational film than a religious one, and the self-actualising message surely doesn’t deserve to be too harshly criticised.

recovery

2005-07-03T21:35:00.000+10:30

I’ve taken my third roxithromycin tablet today, after a visit to the doctor back on Friday. They’re a one-a-day tablet, I think a broad spectrum antibiotic, and boy have they proved effective. There’s only five in the whole course, though I could buy a repeat dose just to make sure.

I’ve only ever paid two visits to my new regular doctor, five minutes’ walk away. She reminded me that my previous, first visit was in July last year, with the same complaint.

In the last day or two, particularly today, my energy has returned almost to normal. I have lots of catching up to do. Mid-week I was languishing on the sofa, drifting in and out of consciousness, exhausted by mid-afternoon after hours of hawking and heavy breathing. Only the other day I’d drifted off, and woke in a sudden fright at a minatory female voice. Sarah was standing in the middle of the living room. ‘You really shouldn’t leave your front door open like that, I could be anybody coming in, bopping you on the head and making off with all your worldlies.’

‘That reminds me, I need to make the point for the court case that we both live in an open house, with you coming in and out at all hours without knocking. Remember, he says I did it here during the day.’

‘Ah yes, that’s a point,’ she responded sympathetically.

I’m trying to avoid talking to her about the case – I’m sure she’s sick of my obsession with it. In fact I probably need to give it a rest myself. I do feel myself calming down as my strength is returning. I may even yet come to the point of addressing my slow slide into poverty since the boy brought my foster-caring career to a crashing halt. Currently I’m in trouble with Centrelink, because a little while after I was arrested and probably after I fell ill too I missed an appointment with my employment agency. Nobody’s been in touch with me since, but no doubt the wheels are grinding inexorably on.

I’m certainly being a very good boy in terms of voluntary work, however. Quite apart from my work for La Luna, which is quite considerable really, and which would itself be enough to satisfy the mutual obligation watchdogs, I’ve joined a team at the Adelaide South West Community Centre, and I’ve promised to do reception work there on Tuesday, all day. Impossibly, though, I’ve booked myself to do an orientation session on the same day at Red Cross House, as a volunteer IT assistant consultant. At my interview there a couple of weeks ago I was surprised to hear that about eighty percent of the people working in that building are volunteers. They all looked pleasantly middle-class and well-to-do (but then again so do I). Can it be that they’re all on the dole, comme moi?

those nice police people

2005-06-28T10:48:00.000+10:30

I haven’t given much of an account of my interview after my arrest – after all, it’s all on video and audio, so I won’t try to best the technology. I should say though, that after all that was switched off, I was DNA-tested, finger-printed, shot in the mug and searched all around the inside of my pants by a plain-clothes man (the same who had questioned me) wearing a very threatening pair of rubber gloves.
Although all this was humiliating of itself, there was no nastiness directed toward me, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were coming round to the idea that they might’ve made a mistake. Hard to read the minds of the more important players. The lesser figures were just struggling to get the procedures right, and to figure out the technology. They had a geewizz fingerprinting machine that was giving a policewoman the gyp. I had to try and help her, which meant that she had to acknowledge me as a human being.
Of course I’d just been charged with rape, and it’s true, I suppose, that these people are often faced with the nastier side of humanity, but at the same time it seems to me that police culture seems to encourage a hostile or at least disdainful treatment of the general public, and this has always raised my hackles. For example when, some days after all these humiliations, I brought in a letter for the investigating officers, the letter mentioned on June 12 (the dates are wrong of course), I was forced to wait for ages at the front counter. Nobody was at the counter but I could see a couple of people sitting around in the open space office behind the silver striped glass. They were chatting desultorily, and could clearly see me through the glass. Finally, a dishevelled, middle-aged woman shuffled around to my side of the glass and asked me what I wanted in a distinctly gruff tone. I gave her the envelope, hand-addressed to constable Welsh and asked for a receipt, so that I could be sure that it had reached its destination. This business of the receipt I’d only just thought of, and the woman instantly took umbrage. We don’t give receipts, she said surlily. I tried to explain that it was a major case and I wanted to be sure… We’ve never given receipts, she repeated. I’ll put it in his pigeon-hole, but we don’t give receipts. My name is Barb. He’ll get the letter.
So I accepted that, having no alternative (and maybe I was being a bit cheeky), but during the time I’d been waiting I’d read a poster behind the counter, a poster that was presumably deliberately posted there to catch the eye of the public. It criticised the government for their meanness with regard to the pay and conditions of police. It was a public servants’ union poster, which finished with some such remark as ‘the nurses deserved their pay increase – so do we’. This strongly reminded the public that the police were public servants. Servants of the public. And the public – that’s me. Now considering all the modern talk about productivity and performance-based salaries, the question of whether an organisation that treats its wage-payers and customers with such surly disdain deserves better pay really begs to be asked.

nine songs

2005-06-26T14:37:00.000+10:30

I’ve decided it’s not such a good idea to read a heap of reviews before I write my own, so I’ll avoid that, though I might do some research on directors and such.
Michael Winterbottom is apparently gaining something of a rep as an enfant terrible of current Brit cinema. I’ve never seen a film of his before. I recall that Butterfly Kiss (1995) caused a bit of a sensation a while back, and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) sounds familiar. My guess, from Nine Songs, is that he’s one of those directors who invites big loyalties, scathing detractions with a great gulf between.
Interestingly, he also directed Jude (1996), based on the Hardy novel which had such a powerful effect on my callow youth.
I had no idea what to expect from Nine Songs, a short film at about 69 minutes (though it really dragged at times). The nine songs of the title were performed live by various contemporary British bands (and the film composer Michael Nyman) at concerts attended by the young couple whose story is the focus of the film. Apart from Nyman and the Dandy Warhols I’ve never heard of any of the bands – and mostly the songs had a sameness to me (assisted by the blurred acoustic that was a deliberate part of the feel of the film) which made these moments the most tedious in the film. Having said that, I don’t blame the film-maker, I blame myself. It reminds me of why I gave up going to rock concerts twenty-five years ago (though I still enjoy seeing live bands at pubs). I was too much of a wet blanket, too egotistically resistant to the group mentality, the requirement – almost the raison d’être of the rock concert – to lose yourself in the moment and the atmosphere.
So these rock concert scenes only served to remind me of my alienation from that vibe, though I could well understand intellectually their purpose in the film, which was to help chart one of those intensely felt, young and physical relationships, full of instants of vitality, of pleasure and searing clarity and nakedness and trust and a oneness that, momentarily, seems eternal.
I’m sure that many would identify with this type of relationship. I’ve never experienced it myself, but I’ve witnessed it, though of course not quite in the detail in which we’re permitted to witness this.
I’m talking about a relationship between a perhaps unprepossessing yet surprisingly stimulating young man and a beautiful young woman who’s taking advantage of the situation and preparing, right from the beginning, to move on, knowing, or feeling, that she has the looks and the smarts to land someone else, completely different and equally interesting.
And having witnessed such a scenario, I’ve in the past tried to write about it as if I’ve experienced it myself, being abandoned after an intensely sexual, revelatory experience and feeling you have to take it in your stride because that’s what’s expected of you though it’s the last thing you want to do. Of course maybe this isn’t what it’s about at all, but my feeling is that it’s a modest, personal sort of film about abandonment, for a while, to the physical, a while that goes deliciously on and on and yet in the end is only fleeting.
When I first saw this couple (Matt and Lisa, played by Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley), between the sheets in their cramped but adequate-for-the-purpose bedroom, I was immediately reminded of Godard’s A bout de souffle, especially considering that O’Brien rather resembled a young Jean-Paul Belmondo. I’m not sure if there was an influence there, but Godard’s couple seemed like rank outsiders, in a vaguely exalted way, whereas Winterbottom’s lovers seemed a more everyday pairing, outsiders but tediously so, too commonplace in their outsiderdom to generate much romanticism from their status. Typical young concert-goers. This would’ve created an overly melancholy effect if we didn’t get hints of another life. Lisa is an American student, doing a course in England (presumably London) while Matt (whose story this essentially is) appears to be a scientist of some kind. The lovemaking and the concert-going are occasionally leavened by scenes of the Antarctic ice, with Matt’s voice-over, reflecting on ice-olation (sorry) and such, but also suggesting that there’s life after sex.
An intriguing film in a minor key, if a little voyeuristic for those of us with an inadequate sex life. I was amused that of the half-dozen viewers at this screening, there were two elderly Chinese-looking couples who probably, like me, wandered in with little idea of what they’d be seeing. I hope they enjoyed it.

poor foster carers

2005-06-26T14:21:00.000+10:30

It has often occurred to me – and the police’s line of questioning simply confirms this – that foster caring, especially caring for troubled wards of the state, is the sort of job that few sensible people would take up. Thus it’s left to the mad, bad and dangerous to know, at least that might be the perception. And no doubt there are foster carers just like that.
Many have said to me ‘it’s not a job I’d do’, and they’ve mixed a sort of admiring, praising talk with just a smidgeon of puzzlement.
I took on the job, partly because I was confident I’d never find myself in the position I now find myself in, but also because I’m a poor dilettante who wanted to remove the stain of unemployability. I could continue my dilettante existence under just a little less pressure. But I find that as always, it’s the poor and the vulnerable, the easy-to-target, who do in fact get targeted. They do the work that nobody else wants to do, and they get punished for it. It seems almost harshly Darwinian.

illness inter alia

2005-06-26T12:30:00.000+10:30

We entertained last night, Sarah and I. We had a cocktail party – obviously planned before my arrest. I was to be barman. I didn’t last the night, because my coughing cold has returned with a vengeance. I mixed everyone a round of cocktails then had to more or less retire. I’d taken two mersyndols and some heavy-duty cough suppressant, to little avail. Illness is very introverting, it’s hard to focus on government reshuffles or Beazley’s performance in opposition when you’re exploding into convulsions every few minutes, and god knows it doesn’t take much of an excuse for me to make the inward turn.

some vital discrepancies

2005-06-24T01:39:00.000+10:30

During our videotaped interview I was asked if the date September 23 (2004) meant anything to me. I said no. Apparently this was the day I did the alleged deed. I said that I wasn’t sure, but it might’ve been that we (the boy, Sarah’s grandson Michael, and myself) were at Victor Harbour at that time. They then said that, according to the boy, the rape had occurred after the Victor Harbour trip. I then had the great satisfaction of being able to say that I returned with the boy and Michael on a Friday morning or early afternoon, that he was picked up by his mum later that day for his usual weekend stay, and that I have never seen him since.

Since returning from the arrest I’ve of course consulted my journal – what a huge advantage it is for me that I’m a compulsive writer! – and I’m able to date the Victor Harbour trip precisely. It took place from Monday September 27 to Friday October 1. However, the exact dating isn’t so important – it’s amazing and rather unlikely that the boy could come up with a precise date. What’s important is his claim that the rape took place after the Victor trip. If he insists on this, his whole case will collapse. On the other hand, he won’t be in a position to insist on this, since, I presume, he won’t himself be called for questioning by a court, being too young. Presumably then the prosecuting lawyers will argue that, though he may be confused about dates and the sequence of events, he’s quite clear about the act itself. And then it’s back to being my word against his – a most unsatisfactory way of ‘getting off’.

why the porky?

2005-06-23T10:05:00.000+10:30

This was a question the police asked of me during our videotaped and audiotaped interview. The question, asked by a plainclothes man who shared the interviewing with a constable, was put thus: ‘Can you tell me why xxxxxx would want to tell such a lie against you?’ My response was lame. I said that I’d often wondered about it and discussed it with friends, without of course knowing the precise nature of the accusation hanging over my head for so long. All I could come up with was that he was attention-seeking. The plainclothes man said that he’d questioned the boy and felt that he was embarrassed and reluctant about recounting the details of my alleged rape of him (supposed to have occurred in the toilet), so he didn’t see it as attention-seeking. He also said (and the implication was that this made his testimony more convincing) that the boy spoke warmly and positively about me, for the most part (!!). He then asked if I thought this accusation was out of character for the boy. After some reflection, I said that, though the boy was a bit of a bullshit artist (and I gave examples of his bullshit), this enormous porky did seem out of character, yes. This was probably impolitic of me, but there you go. So when he asked me to speculate further on the boy’s motives, I could only say that I was no expert in child psychology.
But during my sleepless night after returning from the police station, and after debriefing with Sarah, this absolutely key question kept recurring. I think I’ve worked out the answer.
The key to the boy’s accusation lies in his troubled, dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Some years ago, this woman put the boy into state care, citing his difficult behaviours and her own emotional and health problems. Previously she’d sent him off to live with her ex-husband, the boy’s father, in Coober Pedy. This had proved disastrous – a huge flair-up had occurred between the boy and his father’s new wife, and the boy had been sent packing back to the mother.
So there he was under the guardianship of the minister, having been rejected by both father and mother, and obviously very damaged by the experience. By the time he was in my care, he was staying with his mother on weekends, and the aim was to gradually effect a complete handover to maternal care. Many of the professionals involved had their doubts about the benefits of such a reconciliation to the boy, because of his mother’s hot-and-cold, love-hate treatment of him, but it was clear he was devoted to his mum.
Given this background, my theory is that the inevitable has begun to happen. After six months or so back together, cracks are appearing again in the mother-son relationship. There might even be hints being dropped about sending the boy back into state care. So, enormously fearful of being rejected and abandoned yet again, the boy hits upon telling a story so awful that it will win forever his mother’s sympathy, her assurances that she’ll never abandon him again. ‘Mum, when you send me out into that nasty world of foster-caring, you don’t know what danger you’re sending me into. I get raped, mum.’
As for my role, he’s just using me as the instrument. It’s nothing personal. And it would be easy to target me in this way, especially as he’s gotten away with a false accusation against me before. He claimed that I punched him on the back of the head while we were together in Victor Harbour, an outrageous claim, but clearly a minor one in comparison to rape. Also, this earlier claim was an exaggeration of a real flare-up, so it had greater plausibility. He got what he wanted out of that accusation – resettlement with his mother. This time, what he wants is to stay with his mother, in a working-class culture he feels comfortable with. Above all, he wants, desperately, not to be abandoned again. So he’s gambling everything on this story, and it’s unlikely he’s going to give it up. He knows, or he feels sure, that if he admits he’s lying, his mother will react badly and want to have no more to do with him, so he’s locked himself in.

now here’s some news

2005-06-22T05:06:00.000+10:30

For anyone out there wondering why I’ve not been posting much lately, I must tell you I’ve often wondered myself, but I think it’s best explained by a restlessness and distractedness I’ve felt ever since, two months ago, I was informed of a mysterious, but very serious, accusation against me, the exact nature of which I sometimes felt everybody but myself was aware.
Well, the mystery of it has been resolved in the past few hours, at last. Upon visiting by request the Port Adelaide police station at 7pm last night, I was arrested and charged with rape and unlawful sexual intercourse. I’ve been released on $1500 bail on my own surety and am to make my first appearance in court on July 6.
I’ve been advised, by the police and by Sarah, to obtain a lawyer/solicitor. Sarah has spoken of Legal Aid. However, I well recall being way less than satisfied by the Legal Aid lawyer who represented me in a minor matter several years ago. The trouble with Legal Aid people, it seems to me, is that they’re overworked and underpaid, they spend the absolute minimum time with you beforehand, they tend to be pessimistic and conservative about outcomes (probably because they realise a better outcome requires more input, and they haven’t time for that) and they encourage you to follow the line of least resistance (‘if you plead guilty you’ll be sure to get off with a suspended sentence, and there’ll be less stressful court time for you…’).
Not that I think any lawyer with an ounce of intelligence or integrity would ask me to plead guilty on this one, but I suspect that they’d still go for a simple result - ‘let’s not get bogged down in the details, it’s your word against his, so it won’t be beyond reasonable doubt, ergo they can’t convict.’ This would be a poor relation indeed to being completely exonerated, and I want nothing less than that. Of course, I can’t afford a proper lawyer.
The way I see it, the only way I can be completely exonerated is if the fourteen-year-old plaintiff is brought, without coercion or pressure, that’s to say of his own free will, to admit that he’s told a ginormous porky, and that he’s sorry for all the pain he’s caused. Now, the likelihood of him doing that is perhaps less than zero, but that’s really what I must aim for, nothing less. This is the greatest crisis of my life, obviously, and it requires an appropriately sterling response.

in the meantime

2005-06-07T20:41:00.000+10:30

The Corby case has brought to light another, reversed. On the radio this morning I heard of a Japanese tourist charged with drug smuggling in Oz, found guilty, and finally shipped back to Japan, where she’s been freed and has been trying ever since to clear her name. Apparently it’s big news over there and two books have been written about the case, which, guess what, involves baggage handlers, innocence ‘traduced’, claims of racist bias, etc etc. Never heard of the case before – who’s reporting it here?

The ACTU seems to be quite happy with the latest, and apparently the last, negotiated rise in the basic minimum wage ($17), decided upon by the Industrial Relations Commission. From now on, it seems, minimum wages will be regulated by a ‘Fair Pay Commission’, which the ACTU considers will be a purely political institution of Orwellian hypocrisy. David Murray of the Democrats rightly, I think, argues that such a commission will seek to ensure that the minimum wage never rises again across the board as it has done in the past.

I’ve been following the Eugene McGee Royal Commission with half an ear, and of course it’s been a pleasure. Michael Jacobs of the Adelaide Review has been excellent in his coverage. It really does seem that McGee’s reputation as a heavyweight has clouded the pursuit of truth and justice in this case, at least from the police perspective. And now the famous expert evidence is being roundly questioned, and some basic issues, somehow overlooked in the actual trial, are being scrutinised. Some lawyers have suggested that the Rann government is seeking to undermine the jury system, but of course juries can only adjudge the evidence before them. The problem here seems more to be the adversarial system. Wouldn’t it be great if lawyers were paid to use their analytical skills to arrive at the truth?

One of the more interesting developments on the domestic political front is the fact that DIMIA is under siege. The scandals just keep on coming. A possible cover-up re Cornelia Rau’s identity as an Oz citizen. No help being offered to discarded Oz citizen, the soi-disant Vivian Solon, in her return to Oz and rehabilitation, suggestions and allegations that this is just the tip of the iceberg, etc etc. It all points to a pervasive atmosphere of intolerance and insensitivity. Margo Kingston is scathing about it. The question to be asked is, how did it all go wrong, and who’s responsible? I’d like to blame Ruddock, but that could quite possibly be prejudice on my part. I don’t have the inner knowledge, really, to point to anyone in particular.

Margo ends a bit purplishly (with rose tints):

The poet Shelley wrote that life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity. There was a radiance about Australia’s immigration policies at one time. DIMIA is not radiant now; it’s whitewashed. It’s time it was given the many colours of life through the examination of conscience and the revelation of truth.

To translate: let’s have a full and frank public enquiry.

other priorities

2005-06-07T18:44:00.000+10:30

Haven’t been writing much on the blog, and probably won’t be so much in future, as I’ve started a new ‘fiction’ cum memoir which I’m quite excited about. I’ll post some of it from time to time – in fact here’s my first attempt at a beginning.

the pursuit of happiness

1. the boys
1975 was, of course, a memorable year in Australian politics. For much of the year, the Whitlam government was storm-tossed. It was putting on a brave face, but the triumphalism was gone, as was no doubt much of the reforming zeal and energy. From the kind of corporate perspective that no true believer would deign to adopt, federal Labor (still Labour then) was apparently on the nose.

As a spasmodically keen follower of the political landscape, I was taking in the scandals and headlines with a growing bemusement, and a natural cynicism about what I was reading and who was writing it, especially in Adelaide’s conservative press. However, I had plenty to distract me. In July of that year I passed my nineteenth birthday with scant celebration or notice in a well-appointed home on sweeping grounds in Norwood, an inner suburb of Adelaide. The home was run by a Christian Organisation called Prisoner’s Aid. My cohabitants included half a dozen teenagers, of whom I was the eldest; a young married couple who lived in the west wing of the moderately palatial residence, a section forbidden to the juvenile delinquents; and three other live-in social workers – Christians all of course.

Briefly, I’d landed up at this place after a misadventure some two hundred miles north of Adelaide, which saw me pass seven days for ‘insufficient means of support’ in a sleepy and semi-abandoned old prison, now a half-hearted museum, in the sleepy old wheat and sheep town of Gladstone. Upon my release, I was given a train ticket back to Adelaide, where I was to be met by a representative from Prisoner’s Aid. I gave them the slip however, and slept a few nights rough. I recall a long night in a shelter by a lawn bowling green, with the rain lashing down, and another evening, perhaps the same one, in which I was taken in by a middle-aged Greek man who spoke proudly, though not overbearingly so, of the many properties he owned in the neighbourhood of his house. He’d simply fallen in step with me on the street – I’d been tramping all day. I was wary of course of his offer of a bed for the night – the classic case of the kind stranger offering sweets – but he looked respectable, and I felt cunning. I would take advantage of his kindness and brush aside any other agenda. In jail all I’d done all day was talk with the other prisoners, all much more serious offenders than myself, and I’d heard hair-raising stories – without raising a hair. Those seven days had given me a wily, if borrowed, self-confidence.

So the Greek gentleman cooked me a simple meal and offered me something alcoholic, which I accepted. He’d been amused to learn that I was of drinking age, as I was small and slightly built, and would easily have passed for a sixteen-year-old. I remember that his home seemed very Spartan for a man of such property. He showed me the bed I was to sleep in, a single bed in a small, unadorned room, and assured me that the sheets were clean and that there were extra blankets if necessary.

We sat together on his sofa, chatting haltingly. He asked questions about my background and I gave polite but evasive answers. He refilled my glass. He was watching me very closely and I thought I understood the look in his eye. He told me that I was a very pleasant young man, not like so many young people these days who were selfish and loud and ungrateful, with no respect. He said it was sad that such a nice boy as myself should find himself so alone in the world, with not even a roof over my head. And he with a bed to spare, just waiting there, night after night, with nobody using it…

I liked the man, or at least I didn’t feel afraid of him, though I felt a little uncomfortable, that there was something unspoken in the air. Doubtless the alcohol emboldened me, and I said, Sorry to interrupt, but I was just wondering, are you homosexual? I don’t mind at all, but I’m not myself, you see, or not much, I mean, I just wanted to make it clear…

He reacted rather badly. He drew himself up. He wondered how I could think such a thing. He stood up and strode out of the room. He came back and looked down upon me. He wondered how I could possibly say such a thing, think such a thing. Such a shocking, shocking thing. Again I tried to explain that it wasn’t shocking, it was simply… But No, no, it was too much, I would have to leave. No, he couldn’t have someone who thought such a thing of him… No, I had to leave.
He stood on the porch and watched me go. I presume it wasn’t snowing, but I do recall wishing he would go inside so I could curl up on his porch like the little matchmaker. In fact though I felt quite light-headed, just a little miffed at having made a silly move, like a novice chess-player. It hardly occurred to me to wonder what kind of a night he’d spent after he’d turfed me out.

I had a Prisoner’s Aid card in my pocket, so I finally got in touch and was welcomed into their fold. My first memory of the place was of them saying Grace at the enormous dinner table. A terrible shock to my pagan heart, and possibly the first time I’d experienced such a thing outside of American movies. A couple of the delinquents glanced about and sniggered silently. I soon found the right pose, of open-eyed contemplative condescension, which I maintained on such occasions throughout my stay.

I was assigned a bottom bunk bed in a room of, I think, three bunks, and maybe five boys sharing. I remember being much distracted by the beauty of the boy in the bottom bunk across from me, his name was Murray and he was only fifteen, the youngest of our tribe.

bloggers do it better

2005-06-03T22:41:00.000+10:30

By far the best review I’ve read of Downfall, by the way, is by blogcritic Alan Dale here. It’s bloody long, but its exhaustive summary of the film’s strengths and weaknesses is superb.

Downfall

2005-06-01T23:09:00.000+10:30

Haven't been going to the movies so much in recent years, and would like to turn that around, so I'm making it every Tuesday.

It’s started with a bang, a real heavy-weight. The German film Downfall certainly has plenty of ready-made drama about it, and threading so many stories through the last crumbling and exploding days of the Third Reich must have been something of a logistical nightmare, but the director Oliver Hirschbiegel has wisely chosen to leaven the general cruelty and stupidity of Hitler and his cronies with the odd hero (in particular a Doctor Ernst-Gűnter Schenck), and a handful of naïfs (such as Traudl Junge, Hitler’s young secretary, and Peter, a boy soldier) caught up in the insane fervour.

I always like to start with criticising the critics, and while they’ve been overwhelmingly favourable, you get the odd carper who writes something like ‘okay it’s accurate enough, but it offers no new insights’, or ‘yeah it’s fine on how things happened, but not so hot on why’. Also, it seems that some critics feel the film isn’t sufficiently hard on Hitler, or that it’s somehow not ‘momentous’ enough.

So why not use another critic against them. The generally reliable Roger Ebert responds:

I do not feel the film provides "a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did," because I feel no film can, and no response would be sufficient. All we can learn from a film like this is that millions of people can be led, and millions more killed, by madness leashed to racism and the barbaric instincts of tribalism.

And this brings me to another point. A couple of critics have pointed out that Germans have rarely portrayed Hitler on screen, implying that they haven’t been able to come to terms with their Nazi past. I suspect quite different reasons. To ‘portray’ Hitler is inevitably to fictionalise him to some extent. There is plenty of real footage of the man and the events, and the reality is what they’ve needed to confront. It’s notable that Hirschbiegel has insisted that every element of Downfall is based on fact. Clearly this is an important matter for the German director, and for a German audience, a point lost on some American critics. For example, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly [EW probably shouldn’t be allowed to review such a movie] writes:

The moment of Hitler's greatest vulnerability — his double suicide with Eva Braun — occurs off camera. What did he say just before he pulled the trigger? Missing from Downfall is a vision of this ultimate murderer's relationship to death.

Of course Hitler’s last words are unknown, so Hirschbiegel would’ve had to invent them. Yeah, no probs, wanker.

But getting away from the critics - sorry I’ve read no German ones, not knowing the language – the film was as absorbingly ghastly as one might expect, and certainly the most chilling scene, the one that lingers longest in the mind, was the murder by Frau Goebbels of her picture-perfect kids, because she didn’t want them growing up in a non-Nazified world. It’s this readiness to sacrifice even one’s own children to an ideal (any ideal, let alone such a puerile and putrid one as Nazism) that scares and sickens most effectively.

The main perspective we’re given of these last claustrophobic days is that of Traudl Junge. She might be criticised for being ‘too naïve to be true’ (or to engage our sympathy), and irritatingly star-struck before Hitler, though we also see the scales starting to fall from her eyes as old Uncle Adolf (played unforgettably by Bruno Ganz) spits out his venom upon the Jews. Her naivety and passivity are, I think, meant to be symptomatic of a large proportion of the German population – and we find such types everywhere, though hopefully in lesser proportions as we’re increasingly educated to back our own judgments and to distrust authority – who were overly awed by those who spoke in certitudes, crystallised vague fears and hatreds, promised the earth, and promulgated that ever-enticing myth (now promulgated in Israel itself, as well as in the USA), of the Chosen People.

At times sprawling and untidy, because sacrificing neatness and tightness to the reality principle, the film has left me with some memorable characters above all – Traudl and Peter, the bizarrely untouched Eva Braun, the noble yet questionable Schenck, the career soldier Weidling, the fanatical Goebbels and his wife – but with all the ‘based on reality’ emphasis, I’m left wondering at how true they are. Hitler dominates and so his portrayal ends up being most questionable of all. In the end we’ll never know, and for my part I’m left with a kind of self-annoyance at how unfathomably fascinating and compelling such unworthies are. It’s a bit like staring into an abyss – get away from there, you’ll hurt yourself.

the perils of foster caring, part 3

2005-05-31T15:37:00.000+10:30

However, nothing like that came close to happening, until the last week he spent in my care. That was a trip to Victor Harbour, of infamous memory.

This six-day trip, entirely paid for by myself I might add in injured tones, was initially intended for a group of adults as well as the boy and Sarah’s fourteen-year-old grandson Michael. The cottage was booked, I’d made the promise to the boy and to Michael, but our friends John and Deborah had to pull out due to work commitments, and then Sarah also pulled out due to a crisis involving her two-year-old granddaughter Courtney (now in her permanent care, with my assistance).

I heard the alarm bells. Six days alone with Michael (himself quite a handful) and this sometimes hyper-active, often impulsively transgressive kid, wasn’t my idea of a holiday. I tried to arrange for Sarah to come down for at least a couple of the days, but it was all too difficult.

Mostly it went well. I blew up at the boy once early on, when I caught him trying to set fire to Michael’s hair from behind, but even he seemed to accept that my anger was justified. By the last day or two, though, my nerves were getting pretty frayed.

The night before we returned, I took them for a meal at the Victor hotel. Afterwards we strolled along the bridge to Granite Island. The two of them had brought, or so I thought, bottles of soft drink with them. Halfway across the bridge the boy threw, or pretended to throw, his empty bottle into the drink, crowing something like ‘I’ll just get rid of this.’ I grabbed at him, and told him fiercely that that was unacceptable behaviour. ‘Ow’, he said, ‘Hey, I was only kidding, I didn’t have anything in my hand, you know I would never do a thing like that.’

Later, when he told police I’d punched him on the back of the head, he admitted that he had thrown the bottle. Perhaps this is irrelevant, except insofar as it illustrates his shaky relationship with the truth. In any case, I apologised immediately, and I thought that was the end of that. Later during that same walk, though, I had another go at him for slagging in public, which he often did. He’d argued with me – or at least he’d produced a defence of sorts. Slagging was cool. I probably went on too long with the lecture, and he looked very put upon. Later, a friend suggested I might’ve used a different reasoning, pushed the point home in a more light-hearted way: ‘Hey, you don’t think spitting’s disgusting, fine, so why not go further? How about shitting in public? Next time you feel the twinge, how about dropping your daks [is that word recognised by teens today?] and pooing on the pavement? I know it doesn’t sound too cool but you could start a new trend…’

The fact remained that I became a little overbearing, and it was during this walk along the Granite Island causeway that he started to harp on how keen he was to get back home to Mum for the weekend.

I blew up at him again when we were packing to leave. I was trying to get the pair to vacuum the lounge, where they’d made a great mess dragging in logs and twigs to start evening fires, but finally I gave up and did it myself. Then I asked the boy to empty the vacuum cleaner. He did so, dumping its contents on the stoop. I gave him such a blast for this that tears came into his eyes. This really was my mistake – he was just a wet clueless kid, who’d never emptied a vacuum cleaner before. It didn’t come ‘naturally’ to him to see that dumping something outside his own immediate area was just going to cause headaches for others. After all, whole national governments had trouble recognising this. So I tried to make light of it, and we drove home without incident, though the boy often spoke, with a growing excitement, of the prospect of seeing his Mum. And I did feel a trace of jealousy, in a general way about fatherhood, not at all about not being father to this particularly draining kid.

I knew I’d made mistakes. My own impulse control had proved problematic. I’d reacted without due thought. Still, I’d recovered quickly, apologised when necessary, and tried to get back on amicable terms as soon as possible. On the whole, I felt that no great damage had been done.

Not long after our return, the boy was picked up as usual by his mother for the weekend. In front of her, he’d put his arm around me and assured me it had been a great fun trip. I never saw him again.

The boy was late returning on the Sunday evening, so I rang his Mum. She told me he wouldn’t be coming back, and that I should check my answering machine. She was clearly very emotional. I asked what this was about, and she said something about my having attacked and hit the boy. I assured her - and I was quite calm, if bewildered - that I had done no such thing. She didn’t wish to discuss the matter and again referred me to the answering machine. There I found a message from a police officer, telling me that certain allegations had been made, though not of any serious nature. I rang the number, and the officer explained that the boy had made a couple of minor claims about me. First, that I’d clapped him round the ears on the bridge, and second that I might have done ‘something sexual’, though this seemed to be a simple misunderstanding. The officer was, I must say, very sympathetic to my situation, and confided that the boy’s story was ‘pretty incoherent and contradictory’. ‘Does he want to go and live with his Mum, does he?’ he asked shrewdly.

The ‘sexual’ claim referred to an incident I’d put out of my mind immediately after it occurred. The three of us were trying to negotiate a maze in an adventure playground on the outskirts of Victor Harbour. The boy, impatient and bamboozled by the labyrinth, opted to take a short cut out of it by climbing one of the tall, thin timber fences. I’d worked out the maze enough to know that mounting that particular fence would not move him forward one iota, beside the fact that it wasn’t in the spirit of the game and might damage the barrier. I called him down, but he wouldn’t listen, so instead of trying to grapple with him, I tugged playfully at his trousers. It worked, though he looked askance at me, and it just crossed my mind that I’d made another mistake, this time one of ‘over-familiarity’. However, I soon put it out of mind, perhaps for profound psychological reasons.

This was the possible sexual advance the boy was accusing me of. Feeling a little dizzy at the enormity of it, I hadn’t the presence of mind to point out that this had taken place in the middle of the day, during the school holidays, before a flock of passing parents and their kids. I mumbled something about it being totally innocent, and found to my relief that the officer seemed already to have come to that conclusion. He preferred to focus on the bridge incident. I told him that young Michael was my witness to the incident, and gave him Michael’s number. ‘I’m not sure if we’ll talk to him at this stage,’ the officer said. ‘We realise that you were punishing him for throwing a bottle into the water, and we don’t see that your action lies beyond the bounds of normal chastisement,’ he said. ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t hit him.’

Later, the policeman rang again to tell me that Michael had confirmed the boy’s story that I’d hit him. On reflection I realised that this wasn’t so surprising – the bridge was very dark, Michael had walked on ahead, and the boy had shouted ‘Ow’ when I rounded on him. Once again I denied the claim. ‘Okay,’ the officer said affably, ‘we’ll record that you deny the claim, and it won’t be taken any further, I mean it’s reasonable chastisement as far as I’m concerned, but we have to issue a warning, and that’ll be the end of it, the boy’s mother’s happy with that. I’m sorry about all this, I can see the lad would’ve been quite a handful.’

I wasn’t too happy to let it go at that, but I didn’t want to stand too much on my dignity in what must’ve seemed to the police such a trivial matter. And so the boy remained in the care of his mother, but the Anglicare team expressed their full confidence in me, assigning another lad to my care almost immediately. I myself felt badly shaken, but I’d learned a number of valuable lessons. I wasn’t about to let this setback spell the end of my foster-caring career.

So another six months rolled by. I looked after another lad briefly until another carer could be found for him (the boy was based in the south and didn’t want to be disentangled from his network there), and then in December my ‘current’ boy moved in, and was whisked away at the end of April when this new accusation was made. I’ve found out indirectly that my accuser is this same boy who’s given me such trouble before. It’s a more serious accusation than the last one, it seems, and this time I can’t even guess what it’s about. The placement was monitored on a weekly basis, and no complaints ever arose. Is this an elaboration of the previous accusations, or is it something entirely new? Did the boy’s mother make the accusation? Did she make it to CYFS or did she go directly to the police, as she did last time? Is it right that I should remain completely in the dark for getting on for five weeks now? Is there any redress for those who are subjected to false accusations? I’ve written to the police complaints authority, to try to get things resolved more quickly. There’s not much more I can do, but wait for the next instalment…

the perils of foster caring, part 2

2005-05-27T13:26:00.000+10:30

The boy in question had been, at fourteen, the youngest of the boys in my care, and also the most demanding. The program I was part of usually handled kids closer to adulthood, the idea being to protect and encourage them in their transition to wholly independent living, but of course with the demand pressures and the crisis in supply of foster carers it was almost inevitable that the rules would be set aside in the name of urgency.

This boy was only the second to come into my care, and I was very much learning on the job. I’d completed a tricky twelve-month stint in charge of a gay lad with whom I’d found it difficult to connect. My approach was decidedly hands-off and undisciplined, and during our period of cohabitation he changed from a neat, polite, punctual, heavily routinised adolescent to a metal-adorned bottle blond with a wise-cracking habit, a clutch of pretty female fag-hag hangers-on (in fact they were all sweet kids), a small galaxy of older male hoverers, and an uncanny ability to wheedle more money out of me than I knew was good for him (or for me). His school life had gone largely by the bye, and he was in fact kicked out just after the placement ended, a few months before his eighteenth birthday. He still rings me from time to time, but only to borrow money.

The people at Anglicare assured me, after the cagily ultra-positive manner of social workers everywhere, that this placement had been a success, but I remained unconvinced. It was inevitable, I suppose, that I’d give the kid plenty of space, because I like to be given space myself. It’s a question though, whether taking so much space to myself has done me more harm than good. In any case, the Anglicare approach was to set up some clear guidelines to start with – house rules, or ‘norms’, division of labour, consequences attendant upon failing to keep up with what were fairly unintimidating standards. Once they’d fitted in with this, cut them some slack. This was what I’d been advised as a trainee teacher too, but I’d never been able to put it into practice.

In any case my match-up with my first foster-kid coincided with one of those regular occurrences in social worker workplaces, a staff upheaval in which a number of workers decided at more or less the same time, no doubt influenced by each others’ demoralisation, that they’d had enough, they were burnt out and needed something new, like domestic engineering or cycling round Australia or opening a clothes shop. My charge and I were left unsupervised, and by the time my current liaison person was appointed to us, the unhealthy pattern of our relationship was set. It was, basically, another illustration of this dictum by William Hazlitt (via Alan Bennett):

Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.

None of this really prepared me for the next lad. His age and level of development meant that I couldn’t adopt the same slightly distant approach. He was needy and dependent, always around. And noisy with it. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he’d repeat stock phrases in funny voices – a sort of adolescent echolalia. He’d take things of mine - books with lascivious-sounding titles, or screwdrivers or clock-radios or mobile phones, and secrete them in his room. He’d steal into my bedroom when I wasn’t around, and download porn from the internet. He even did this on Sarah’s computer next door, when she was in the next room. He was regularly suspended from school for various pieces of cheekiness, nothing serious (hardly anything to warrant suspension in fact, but they do things differently these days).

Yet with all that, I coped quite well. We struck up an easy, bantering relationship. And there was the added boon of his going to bed at eight-thirty sharp every night. On weekends he stayed with his mother.

He was in my care for about five months all up, between May and October last year. We had regularly weekly meetings with Anglicare, and monthly review meetings involving the department (CYFS), and no serious issues were brought up. When asked how happy he was with the placement, the boy invariably gave it a score of ten out of ten (though I never set much store by this – he knew how to give the right answers).

Of course I knew I had to be careful. He was constantly pushing at, and past, the boundaries. Take smoking - he knew he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house, and made many solemn assurances that he would never do such a thing, never be so disrespectful (I suffer from chronic bronchitis, as he knew), but I continually found cigarette traces in the toilet or his bedroom (I rarely entered his bedroom, but when I did so after he’d been cleared out, I found dozens of butts in a bottom drawer by his bed). I often ignored this, but sometimes confronted him or reported him. The matter of his smoking in the bedroom, or his bed, was of course a serious OH&S issue, especially given that he’d been a regular fire-starter in earlier days. The smoking problem was compounded by the fact that his mother let him smoke at her house – one of the many differences between us that probably led to my undoing.

These constant transgressions, the petty pilfering, the noise and babble, the stream of bullshit (he often told a story of some burglar who broke into his mother’s house, and he’d attacked the burglar and chased him off – though in one version of the story he’d broken both the burglar’s legs), these sometimes got to me. I felt like strangling him (but I didn’t do it, honest). The difficulty is that when a kid persists in behaving badly, you’re forced to ‘intervene’, and this can be used against you if you’re not careful. For example, I was driving him to school, and he was being more than usually noisy. He’d taken my steering-wheel-lock and was machine-gunning schoolkids and their loving parents on both sides of the street. I might’ve felt some sympathy, but this wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and he’d been doing it for some time in spite of my too-light-hearted requests for him to stop. Finally I reached over, grabbed the thing off him and flung it on the back seat. He’d flinched and, for an instant, held on to it more tightly, so that there was a tiny moment of grappling. Now, what if this had lasted longer and if, in trying to wrestle the heavy bar of metal from him, I’d inadvertently struck him a blow on the scone?

the perils of foster caring, part one

2005-05-25T01:49:00.000+10:30

Just today I heard on the radio that scads of revelations are about to come out regarding sexual abuse within the foster-care system. It’s the sort of stuff we foster-carers always dread, and often hear.

So I’m going to write a bit about my recent experience as a foster-carer, though I’ll avoid mentioning personal names of course. It might bring home to some the perils of foster-caring, and the vulnerable position they find themselves in.

Right now I’m playing a waiting game, the only game available. A little over three weeks ago, the seventeen-year-old boy in my care, the fourth boy I’ve acted as carer for, was whisked away for a ‘respite’ weekend, by CYFS, a department under the Minister for Families and Communities, which has responsibility or guardianship of kids who for one reason or another have been placed into the care of the state. This struck me as a little unusual but I didn’t think too much of it, and I was going out for drinks with some friends only half an hour later when I got a call on my mobile from a woman from Anglicare, the agency with which I’ve worked as a ‘Special Youth Carer’ as part of the SYC program for the past two years.

She told me that the young person had been taken out of my hands and wouldn’t be returning, and that a serious accusation had been made against me, but she couldn’t tell me anything more. She gave me the phone number of a person in the 'Special Investigations Unit', who was handling the case, but she assured me that, at this stage, he wouldn’t be able to tell me anything more than she could.

This was a Friday afternoon, and it was a hell of a way to spoil my weekend.
It was the second time I’d been ‘in trouble’, and my initial reaction was much the same each time. A state of mild shock, confusion. Loss of appetite, inertia. A snail buried deep in its shell.

About twenty minutes after this call I received another, from the Anglicare youth worker who’d been my liaison person for most of my time as a carer. She asked how I was, but I sensed a distance, a wariness. ‘I suppose you know what this is about,’ she said. I told her I hadn’t the slightest idea. I spoke tersely, wary myself. I didn’t particularly like it that everyone seemed to know more about what I was accused of than myself, and that they’d probably formed their own conclusions. She apologised, just as her boss had, for not being able to tell me more. I could barely respond.

More than a week went by, during which my liaison person contacted me a few times, to reassure me, to tell me to hang in there. I began to imagine that maybe she thought I was innocent after all. One day I received a call from the CYFS social worker who had charge of the boy who’d been whisked out of my care. He asked if he could come around to pick up some of the boy’s things. He, too, apologised that he wasn’t able to discuss any details of the case with me.

He arrived in the company of the boy, much to my surprise. I didn’t know what to say to him – especially as I didn’t know whether it was he or someone else who’d laid this complaint. Also, I noticed, or felt, that the CYFS worker was taking up a position between us, as if shielding the boy from any inappropriate questions I might ask.

So I went into the front garden and proceeded with the laying of my front path. The boy and the worker finally came out with his TV and a couple of bags.
‘So, what’re you taking?’ I said, trying to sound breezy.
‘Everything,’ the boy said with an easy grin.
‘Well, not everything,’ the worker assured. Unsuccessfully. The boy’s attitude convinced me that it was he who’d made a complaint against me. I felt as if I’d been stabbed.

Then later I wasn’t so sure. We’d always gotten on fine, he was very settled, he was doing well at school, CYFS and Anglicare were pleased with his progress, though he was a difficult kid, young for his age (like most of the kids in care, I’d noticed), very stolid and uncommunicative. Banter kept the relationship bobbling along.

Others I talked to also felt that it was unlikely to be the boy. And it was true that his apparent happiness at leaving my care could just as easily be interpreted as going cheerily with the flow, making the most of whatever was being imposed on him.

My Anglicare liaison person rang to tell me there’d been a meeting about the situation. ‘I’m not allowed to tell you anything directly about the case, and I have to say, I think the way you’ve been treated is really really unfair, but I am allowed to say this: don’t assume that the accusation has anything to do with this current placement.’

These words were a godsend. A few further remarks and some questions from me made me realise what she’d been hinting at in previous phone conversations, that this accusation had come from the same source as the previous one, even though the boy in question had been out of my care for several months.

grrrrr

2005-05-20T01:51:00.000+10:30

Again the Force is against me. This time it was at Barista that I tried to post a comment, on the Galloway performance, but my comment was ‘denied for questionable content’. This was an instantaneous thing, so clearly I’d failed to pass some automatic filter. Perusing my comment, the only problem I could find with it, in my humble opinion, was my use of the word ‘arse’, an anodyne enough word. I changed it to ‘backside’ and tried again, but got the same message. Then, at the very bottom (i.e. arse or backside), I noticed this weird and possibly explanatory message, doubtless from the god I don’t believe in:

Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at plugins/Blacklist/lib/Blacklist/App.pm line 44.

I’m sure this means that I’ve been blacklisted by every reputable blogsite. Anyway, I’ll post my comment huffily here.

Those of us who lapped up gorgeous George's performance the other day haven't necessarily gone over to his side - but I trust that DJ has more evidence against him than the US Senate seems to.
Apart from anything else, the speech might provoke bloggers - like myself - to get off their backsides (or on their backsides) and find out more about the oil-for-food scandal that Galloway has tried to make the real issue (as well as the war and its victims).
I mean he's surely right in arguing that these investigations are massively hypocritical in the context of the US's deceitful warmongering and the profiteering that has gone with it.
Sadly and predictably, the American media, in many ways as compliant as the media in a dictatorship, have given little space to Galloway's delicious riposte.

gorgeous George

2005-05-18T23:53:00.000+10:30

Just been doing a bit of research on gorgeous George Galloway, who I’d only vaguely heard of before. There’s actually a Wikipedia piece on him. He was born in Dundee, just like me (bet you never thought Luigi was a Scot), and has had a chequered career as a leftist Labourite, before being dumped by the party for making overly virulent statements against the Blairights. He was always a firebrand speaker, but often under suspicion for his financial affairs – no serious misbehaviour has been uncovered though.
Not sure that I entirely agree with all his views – try this one for size:

"I am on the anti-imperialist left." The Stalinist left? "I wouldn't define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; that would be making a rod for your own back. If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe."

An odd way of looking at things, to say the least.

I must say that all the biggest catastrophes of my life (apart maybe from the one I'm going through now) have involved women. So much for my political credentials. Omnia vanitas est.

I note that some of Galloway’s speech, most notably the point scored against Donald Rumsfeld, was recycled from another speech given in late 2003 and very favourably reported on by Aljazeera – ‘a historic speech, which could change the face of British politics forever..’. Not bloody likely. But then again, baby steps…

oh joy, oh delight

2005-05-18T22:52:00.000+10:30

Undoubtedly the highlight of tonight’s SBS news was the speech (unfortunately, didn’t quite catch the beginning of it) given by George Galloway before a US senate hearing, investigating the claim, trumped up as far as Galloway is concerned, that he profited from Iraqi oil deals.
Well I’ve now listened to the lot of it here, and the initial part of it, the speech part, was quite delicious. You just want it to go on and on, with rambunctious, evidence-based strike after strike. I’m sure if I was up there, I would’ve lost it and descended into invective, but Galloway remained on theme and maintained the rage and contempt with dignity.
Theatrical, perhaps, but heartfelt surely, and if it causes more scrutiny, by more, previously indifferent, bloggers and such, of the oil-for-food scandal, well worth the effort. And hey don’t we all just love someone sticking it up this administration.

my odyssey

2005-05-14T22:33:00.000+10:30

Well yesterday I finished reading Ulysses. I’ve started it many times, and read extracts many times. This time I followed through, buying a new very handsome Bodley Head hardback last June, on the centennial Bloomsday in fact. So it’s taken me near a year.
Impressions? It’s been a long time since, as a vaguely ambitious twenty-year-old, I read Dubliners and thought, no doubt pretentiously, of Elizabeth as my version of Dublin, a place where as a teenager I’d tried desperately to fit in, perpetrating my share of petty crime, fringing youth gangs, wondering if they were sniggering at me, knowing sometimes that they were.
I’d get my revenge through writing, I hoped, but was I up to it? Apparently not. A portrait of the artist as a young man was inspiring too [I recall reading out the hell and brimstone speech from it to my housemate, an art student, at a table dramatically lit by tapers, our electricity having been cut off], if not so obviously usable to me. Being bespectacled and skinny in those days, I suffered Joycean delusions, strolling down the then deserted Norwood Parade of a Sunday, ashplant in hand, until some hairy lout backed me into a laneway and ruffled my feathers for offering a passing glance to his none-too-attractive girlfriend. I began to wonder if it was really Elizabeth that had been my problem.
Where was I? Ulysses, yes would’ve made a start on it in them days, and on days in afteryears, but I was having my doubts, and anyway life’s the thing, places faces and finding my own way, artist as someyoungthingelse, and I read philosophy because of a friend, to keep up the end of conversation, and halfarsed obsessionalism took over, but kept on trying to make stories of my adventures, adventures of my story…
So over the year I’ve read the whole thing, though mostly absently, after a keen commencement, a busy performance of noting and researching. Lost interest, lost faith. The only things that kept my dander up towards the end (plenty in Molly’s monologue of course) were the sexual moments and innuendos. I found myself watching for them like the leery patron who paid for Anaïs Nin’s erotica. I couldn’t keep track of the cast of minor Dubliners, couldn’t be bothered trying to figure out the Latin phrases, the Spanish, the Italian, the musical allusions, the streetscape, the dream from the reality. In the Molly monologue, all unpunctuated, I couldn’t even be bothered most of the time working out where one thought or memory ended and the next supervened. Still I read the book, 1078 pages in the Bodley Head edition, and when I announced the fact at last night’s reading group meeting, I was applauded roundly. Hollow man, head-piece full of straw.

shitty technical matters

2005-05-14T15:17:00.000+10:30

Brought to my attention recently that my comments facility wasn’t working, probably hasn’t been switched on for my months, good excuse anyway for why I’ve received no comments in that time. All fixed now.
On similar, been trying to post a budget comment to troppo armadillo, but keep getting this message:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /mt-comments.cgi on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.ubersportingpundit.com Port 80

Of course, I blame myself. To make matters worse I tried to rescue the comment, which was quite lengthy, to put here, but somehow managed to wipe it completely.

Beazley’s budget broadside

2005-05-13T13:38:00.000+10:30

Seems I’m always way too late in weighing in, but Beazley’s stirring budget response has received quite a few plaudits from our good blogger friends. Still educating myself on economic matters, but Beazley claims that the nation’s current wave of wealth owes more to a minerals boom than to any Conservative Party policies, and that the government is squandering the opportunities this bounty opens up. Their tax cuts indeed are damaging the nation, being targeted more towards those with less need of them, thus further opening the rich-poor divide and promoting the politics of envy [well, he didn’t say that, that’s my spin].

The speech, after initially focussing on the tax cuts and tax thresholds and how Labor would’ve set them and balanced them, looks at various areas of reform that have been neglected by the incumbents, such as addressing the skills shortage and targeting infrastructure development. To me he sounds convincing on this, especially when pointing out that it has been Labor governments who have put ideology aside and addressed real and much-needed reforms in the eighties and nineties, such as market deregulation, compulsory superannuation, the movement away from protectionism and so forth. The Tories have long had a policy of non-interference if not downright neglect. A matter of ideology breezily aligned to sheer slackness. And surely it’s true that this is a populist budget [Beazley insinuates that it’s a ‘get Costello elected PM’ budget] which evades all the hard decisions, hurts the impotent few on welfare benefits, neglects crucial areas such as education and training [particularly apprenticeships], child-care and labour market reform [to make real part-time work available for those being pushed onto the dole].

Our foreign debt is astronomical, complains Beazley. Presumably this is about a poor import-export ratio, though it’s not clear what Labour plans to do to redress this, if anything. Still, it’s an eloquent response, even inspirational in places, as it adumbrates a few positive policies, as well as firmly imprinting on our minds the difference between the two sides of government, against those who like to claim there isn’t any.

Tim Dunlop does as good a brief summary of the budget as anyone:

Ten years of populist conservative government and this is what it boils down to: tax cuts for the highest paid, no real investment in the future, and a Treasurer more concerned about shoring up his leadership ambitions than delivering necessary reforms.

the DPP’s upset, and that’s just the beginning

2005-05-12T11:38:00.000+10:30

The new Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Pallaras, only two weeks into his job, has inevitably warned politicians off his turf, describing the kind of pressure he’s experienced in this brief time as extraordinary and unprecedented. Now, many of us are wary of Rann’s law and order push, especially as being in jail’s no picnic and has little or no rehabilitating effect, but the McGee hit-run case has really created a lot of anger and cynicism here (to judge by remarks overheard at a wizards dinner last Friday).

Eugene McGee, 50, an Adelaide lawyer, struck and killed cyclist Ian Humphrey while driving a four-wheel drive vehicle along the Gawler to Kapunda Road in the Barossa Valley in November 2003. McGee pleaded guilty to driving without due care, a rather minor charge under the circumstances, and received a light penalty (a $3100 fine and 12 months’ suspension of his licence). The cynicism comes in because McGee is a high-profile lawyer and former police prosecutor who has apparently participated in the processing of many cases similar to the case against himself, and the cynics claim that he used this knowledge to get himself off with a much lighter punishment than anyone else would have reasonably expected to receive.

Legal experts have criticised Rann, for example in this article:

But criminal defence lawyer, Simon Slade, says it is not the Premier's place to intervene in the judicial process.

"It seems that this is just a reaction to one high-profile case," he said.

"The danger of course with that is that we end up with a government that changes every law just because there's a jury verdict that it doesn't like."

Mr Slade says the inquiry has been announced because an appeal probably would not have been successful.

"Given my experience in this area the sentence couldn't be described as manifestly inadequate compared to other sentences for other cases," he said.

"People need to be very careful not to compare this to cases where people have been found guilty of death by dangerous driving."

However, I think Slade has been carried away by technicalities. The issue here is whether McGee should have been found guilty of that charge, whether all the evidence was presented, whether McGee himself obscured evidence (of his level of intoxication), aided and abetted by the police and lawyers.

McGee told the trial that he’d been drinking wine at a lunch hours before the accident, but didn’t consider himself intoxicated. When he turned himself in, some six and a half hours after the accident, he wasn’t breath-tested or blood-tested for alcohol. The cynics argue that he didn’t turn himself in precisely because he wanted to avoid being breath-tested. They also argue that, as an ex-policeman, he was the beneficiary of cronyism. Witnesses, who for some reason I’ve yet to discover didn’t testify at the trial by jury, claim to have seen McGee driving erratically just before the accident.

The lightness of the penalty, coupled with the social prominence of the accused, has caused consternation amongst the public (I note that cyclist groups are particularly incensed), and a royal commission has been called, to investigate the police handling of the case. McGee was acquitted of dangerous driving but found guilty of the lesser crime of driving without due care. He pleaded guilty to two other charges, failing to stop at the scene of an accident, and failing to render assistance. The maximum penalty, presumably for all these charges together, was one year’s gaol. The Rann government has now introduced legislation to parliament that would increase the maximum penalty to 10 years jail for causing death by dangerous driving. Presumably this is the dangerous driving charge of which McGee was acquitted in any case, so that wouldn’t have made too much difference. Personally I don’t like this increase in gaol penalties approach, the prison system is iniquitous and pernicious and should be avoided if at all possible, to me the obvious answer to dangerous driving and the like is stiffer penalties with regard to licences. It seems to me, on the basis of what I know so far, that McGee should have lost his licence for a far longer period, perhaps for life.

I also think that in the matter of fines, the impact of the crime should be considered, the effect upon the family of the victim, even the effect upon society as a whole – for example, the effect upon cyclists generally and the level of safety they feel. A kind of compensatory effect for overall damage done. I don’t know who receives these fines – do they simply go into the state’s coffers? Surely the money, paltry though it is, should go to the victim’s family. It would be great to live in a society where this sort of thing was de rigueur, driven by the public. It certainly follows the line of any worthwhile ethics in my view, that a person who can well afford to pay should do so for the benefit of his victim’s family. As it stands, lawyers will undoubtedly see far more of McGee’s money than the family of Ian Humphrey will, and surely that is morally wrong.

After being made aware that McGee could not be retried, the Rann government has called this royal commission, perhaps to be seen to be doing something, though also no doubt out of a real sense of outrage. However, the commission cannot result in a retrial. McGee has largely gotten away with it. Or has he? I think of the more celebrated OJ trial. He was found not guilty, though few people were taken in, and he has largely been a pariah since the trial. The general public generally gets it right in these matters, unless this is wishful thinking on my part. McGee of course is no O J Simpson – I imagine him, perhaps wrongly, as one of those swaggering, slightly arrogant police detective types. Overly careless, overly clever. I hope he’s genuinely humbled by this experience. Maybe he might consider giving up his licence voluntarily.

honest J?

2005-05-06T00:50:00.000+10:30

The following half-hearted effort’s already out of date – I started writing it before crashing and burning.

Always worth remembering that the term ‘honest John’ was first applied to our PM ironically by the union movement. I’ve always felt Howard was the most cleverly sneaky in his dishonesty of any politician I’ve observed. As Mungo McCallum wrote, he’s a consummate politician who lives and breathes political double-speak and knows no other world, has no other real interests. So, not surprising that he wants to hold onto the top job for some time yet.
The recent remarks he made in Greece are interesting for a number of reasons. They seem to me to reveal most baldly the methods he’s been applying for years, because both the arrogance and the gaucherie of this delivery goes beyond, I think, what we’ve usually come to expect from him. I note, though, that he’s already taking up the usual damage-control performance of man of integrity and innocence besmirched by the media, wilfully misunderstood but not prepared to put the blame on anyone else, for he understands how these things can happen and he has the utmost respect for the media etc etc. One of his formulaic protests – formulaic but unanswerable – is ‘that wasn’t my intention’. Note also that he’s using the media arguments against him to back himself up – ‘it defies belief that I would use an interview with two journalists in Athens to make a major statement about the future of the liberal party…[the party I owe so much loyalty to, etc etc]…’ Sometimes, it’s almost convincing. Of course there are two schools of thought about the honest J idea. Some consider that he gets elected because he really does come across as embattled but honest to many people. Others believe he gets elected in spite of people’s doubts about his honesty, because everything’s chugging along quite nicely thanks very much. For me in the end though it doesn’t matter what others think of him, I have to come up with my own view.
With the help of others.
A few bloggers are now saying Costello’s skewered, and that apparently this was the point of the exercise. To indicate to Costello that there’s no Kiribili agreement, no promise of a smooth transition, indeed no endorsed successor. Some of the same bloggers are also saying that the most conservative prime minister in our history has no desire to see his work undone by a damp liberal like Costello. How do these bloggers know this, and how can they squeeze such meaning out of a few words spoken in Athens? I’m all admiration.

crisis chatter

2005-05-05T12:37:00.000+10:30

The last few days have put such stress on me that I find blogging and journal-writing (I generally keep a daily journal, which I’ve been doing for near twenty-five years, first on paper, and then on a personal computer since the mid-nineties, and I only post some of my journal entries to my blog) even more of a questionable activity than usual.

The stress I’m feeling is due to my having been accused of something as a foster-carer. I don’t know what, or by whom, but apparently I’m under investigation. The effect has been to undermine my motivation to do anything.

Lack of motivation, and faithlessness, have been important themes throughout my stop-start writing life. I think a lot of people get much of their motivation and energy from the effect of their actions upon others. Actually being able to witness an impact and an influence. Also, success is a great motivator. When I had a novel published in 1997, it was very energising. The novel wasn’t actually published until 13 months after I’d signed a contract with the publisher, so by the time of publication I had almost finished a second book, which the same publisher was expressing some interest in. I was starting to think hopefully about a career as a writer, and ideas were buzzing about in my brain.

The first novel was a commercial failure, as well as receiving a couple of surprisingly hostile crits. Not easy for a self-absorbed thin-skinned egotist like me to take. The publisher held on to the MS of the second novel for ages without giving me a firm answer, and naturally my hopes began to fade. I was also very uncertain myself about the quality of my writing and whether I was a ‘fiction’ writer at all, bearing in mind that I’d done far more in the way of journal writing than fiction.

However, I knew that there was no real market for my journal writing. Much of it was trivial and self-indulgent, though just occasionally I would confound my low opinion of myself by hitting my straps and expressing what I thought was a genuine insight in what I thought was genuinely original language.

What to do, though, with these moments of quality?

Well, now I’ve discovered blogging, though still I’m unsure what to do with it. To write about my own life and opinions was easiest, but I also have to admit that from an external perspective my life isn’t much chop, and my opinions, on political issues for example, are hardly as informed as would be those with high and vast connections, and the historical perspectives gained from being constantly in the field. I’m a mere dilettante, who would be heavily reliant on other bloggers and journos for info. There would be little opportunity to make an original contribution.

Thinking about things like this made me hesitant and lost. I was better when I simply wrote, without thinking too much. Sure, nobody was reading my work, and I would love to get a discussion going, but most who view my blogs are too busy with their own, and those blogs that get a lot of commentary tend to be well-established and probably better informed than I am. Still, this shouldn’t stop me from pressing on, writing, commenting elsewhere, and trying gradually to learn about the technical side to make myself more accessible. So that’s what I’m doing, and oscillating between enthusiasm and despair, until something like this happens, this accusation, which makes me look up and realise that I’m in a precarious and vulnerable position financially and in other ways, that I’m middle-aged, loveless, childless, overly reclusive, and faced with a very uncertain future. Is it really wise to just keep on like this? I have no answer.

issues in science 4

2005-05-03T11:20:00.000+10:30

Recent satellite observations have been used to detect ground level emissions of methane, the greenhouse gas, and there has been a surprise in the level of methane being produced by tropical rainforests – possibly through termites. This is the first time ground-level concentrations, near the source of the emissions, have been able to be measured in this way, so that speculation on causes can be more solidly based.

Interesting developments are occurring in the fields of computing, robotics and parallel processing with the application of electroactive and other gels. It seems chemistry is becoming as vital if not more vital than physics to the future of AI. Much of this is still at the stage of ‘huge potential’, but BZ-based chemistry is at the heart of the new activity. The BZ reaction involved cascading effects which can be organised to form circuits. As one expert points out, BZ chemistry is one of the best models for what goes on inside our heads. It’s moving closer to a biological model. The Blob apparently wasn’t sci-fi at all.

Some contradictory research is being published currently about the risks attached to cannabis use, along with contradictory interpretations of findings. The major point of controversy is whether cannabis use might lead to schizophrenia in young people. The results still seem inconclusive, and there are arguments about whether laws should be changed or warnings issued. The author of a recent survey that has given pause to the UK govt suggests laws to keep the drug out of the hands of teens, and to outlaw extra strong varieties. Others say the minority at risk is very tiny and new laws aren’t required.

From New Scientist March 26

not too happy

2005-05-01T12:05:00.000+10:30

Been knocked sideways somewhat by a bit of a crisis re my foster-caring. Going to bed early, seeking the womb. Am starting to poke my head out again, looking at other blogs and the world. At least I'm losing weight, having no appetite. I think I need to abandon foster-caring, for health's sake. A terrible shame as it's a hugely undermanned area (man's the word), with carers trickling away over time. An article in the Messenger from July last year described 'a system wrecked by neglect', in which the number of carers of wards of the state has dropped from 900 in 1997 to between 300 and 400 at the time of the article. Under-resourced, under-protected, the usual story.
Anyway, this is the second time I've been put under a cloud in seven months, and I've had enough. Now I've got to think of making an honest living.

issues in science 3

2005-04-29T12:29:00.000+10:30

GM foods are meeting the same sort of resistance here as in Europe, with the name Monsanto often treated as synonymous with the devil, so that company’s plans to release a new GM low-fat soybean is expected to meet with much resistance. Oil from these beans doesn’t form trans-fatty acids or saturated fats thought ti increase the risk of heart disease. Strangely the reduced linolenic acid, key to the low-fat effect, wasn’t achieved through genetic modification but through conventional breeding. The GM component is for pest resistance. So, critics are asking, why bring this product out in a GM form only?

With many beginning to believe that the days of broad-spectrum antibiotic solutions to diseases are numbered, serum therapy, much improved since its heyday early in the twentieth century, is making a comeback. Serum therapy, which often involved large dosages with serious side effects, was sidelined by the rapid advance of antibiotics in the forties and fifties, but with the breakthrough in producing monoclonal antibodies (the mass production of one particular antibody) in the seventies, and their use in cancer treatments, antibody treatment is on the increase, though it is still comparatively costly.

Recently in the US, the first full skeleton of a Neanderthal was reconstructed. Neanderthals died out nearly 30,000 years ago. The skeleton was reconstructed from casts taken from a number of sites around the world, most notably La Ferrassie in France. The skeleton reveals a larger-than human chest capacity and pelvis, and less of a waist. Meanwhile the oldest fossilised primate protein ever sequenced, taken from a Neanderthal, has been found to be identical to its human equivalent.

From New Scientist, March 19

AIDS in Africa - scratching the surface

2005-04-29T11:49:00.000+10:30

The various comments that I and others have been making over at Online Opinion, in response to an essay criticising the Catholic church’s pronouncements against condoms, have generated some heat from the opposition, but there’s one issue they’ve raised that’s worth investigating more fully, and that is the claim that those countries which have practised abstinence according to the Catholic church’s dictates have been far more successful in reducing AIDS than those which have emphasised condom use. Here are some of the claims in the critics’ own words:

Before condemning the catholic position on contraception, how about checking the AIDS facts with the catholic countries in Africa. the countries with the lowest AIDS rates are the ones that use the ABC method advocating abstinence before marriage and faithfulness after.
These countries have high percentage of catholics and low rates of AIDS. The highest AIDS countries are the ones with low catholic numbers and high condom use (condoms aren't 100 per cent effective).
I am not a catholic (or christian of any denomination) and happily use condoms but for people who are and live in Africa - abstinence and monogamy are obviously the safest option.
the usual suspect

Atheists grossly overestimate the importance of the popes utterances in the Lives of most practicing Catholics.
I must be a bit simpleminded but why the hell would a African rooting around give a brass razoo about what the pope thinks about contraception. The man/woman who has premarital sex, commits adultery, has multiple sexual partners is not suddenly going to say I have broken most of the Catholic sexual commandments but I will keep the one about not putting a rubber on. Its this type of thinking that gives atheists a bad name. Sharpen up.
slumlord

And Luigi, have a look at the individual countries in Africa.
Not all African nations are largely Catholic.
The countries which have advocated abstinence (like Uganda) have cut their AIDs rate by up to 500 per cent, while those where there are millions of condoms distributed have seen their rates increase.
I think the Catholic Church has done some pretty horrible things in the past but they have also done good.
Abstinence before marriage and faithfulness in it is the most effective way to reduce AIDS in those countries and it has worked. ABC even promotes the use of condoms as a last resort but many people are willing to abstain. Muslim leaders are also heavily promoting abstinence because they say condom use only promotes promiscuity and they are not 100 per cent safe.
There is an article in last December's Lancet medical journal showing the benefits of the ABC approach - I hope it is a prestigious enough publication for you to not immediately dismiss.
the usual suspect

I’m probably coming across as a pompous wanker. I don’t want to imply that all the Catholics working on the ground in Africa are meddlesome fools, though if they’re of the clergy they’d have to toe the line and condemn the use of ‘murderous’ condoms. Nor do I wish to deny the claim that promoting abstinence is very effective. I’m sure that when AIDS was rife among homosexuals in the West, the immediate response would have been a general reduction in sexual activity, and especially in sex with multiple partners, and it makes sense to encourage this as a short term measure in Africa. I’m all for saving lives first and foremost. There’s a difficulty though when those who would preach abstinence as a good in itself, for religious reasons, are able to point to the efficacy of their religious stand. It really does muddy the waters, and can lead to claims that God is punishing promiscuity, homosexuality, etc, and that their view is the correct one and should be imposed on all.
The situation in Uganda has it seems been widely touted as a success story, though there are a few complicating factors. According to this site, the government claims a reduction in the prevalence of AIDS from above 30% in the early nineties to 4.3% in 2001. The UN has said that only 4.1% had the virus at the end of 2003. However, these figures have been disputed of late. A non-governmental organisation released a study last year which found that the prevalence was more like 17%. This study has in turn been disputed, though many observers believe that the government’s figures are inaccurate. However, there’s no doubt that the prevalence rate is decreasing, against the trend elsewhere in Africa. The ABC method (Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom) is a three-pronged attack which is yielding positive results. Most experts on the ground agree that it’s the Be faithful message, spruiked by the nation’s President in tours of the country, that is biting hardest.
Apparently, Uganda has received huge financial support from the Bush administration, funds channelled through faith-based organisations. My concern is that, with this assistance, such Bush-backed organisations will be keen to spread certain moral and religious views along with medical assistance and advice. AIDS is a medical health problem and only secondarily a moral problem. Of course the immorality comes in when someone knowingly exposes others to risks. If on the other hand people are infecting others unknowingly, the responsibility falls on those whose duty it should be to inform the population fully of those risks. It’s about providing full information about preventive measures (and the ABC approach sounds fine to me, as long as it saves lives), the best possible treatment, and if necessary, the enacting of laws to punish those who deliberately put others at risk.
The OLO article, though, deals with the culpability of the Catholic hierarchy and the new pope in being willing to sacrifice lives by thundering against the use of 'abortifacient' condoms and the 'holocaust' they're responsible for.
The philosopher A C Grayling puts Ratzinger's moral equivalence into perspective:

.. the prospect of alleviating suffering is too intrinsically good to be sacrificed to the mistaken view that a cluster of cells... is the moral equivalent of a baby in a crib. The argument that the two are equivalent because the former could in the right circumstances become the latter fails on the grounds that this makes any arbitrarily chosen pair of a single sperm (say in a testicle in Toronto) and ovum (say in a pelvis in Prague) morally equivalent to a baby, for they too in the right circumstances could become one.
Of course, a line has to be drawn. But to draw it at the moment a zygote is formed rather than at the point where a fetus becomes independently viable – from where something really can be ‘become a baby’ – is to ignore the fact that nature itself is profligate with the zygote, the morula, the blastocyst, the embryo, the fetus, voiding itself of any it is not satisfied with, in numbers unimaginable to the moral sentimentalist for whom the mere existence of life rather than its value – its quantity, not quality – is what matters most.

From New Scientist, April 9, p17.

words

2005-04-29T11:38:00.000+10:30

A lot of new words to catch up on, like these for example:
I had no sooner unfurled the genoa… (Jonathan Raban); in full, genoa jib – a large jib or foresail used esp in racing yachts (COD).
… a madrona clinging by its toes to a ridge (ibid); also madrono, an evergreen tree, Arbatus menziesii, of western N America, with white flowers, red berries, and glossy leaves (COD).
…charabancs, narrow gauge railways, and pleasure steamers (James Joyce); an early form of motor coach (COD).

weighty matters 11

2005-04-28T14:14:00.000+10:30

That’s an eleven, not a two. I haven’t posted all my journal entries regarding my obstacle race to fitness for fear of losing my voluminous readership ho ho. Today in a public lav I caught sight of my overhang and vowed yet again to fight the good fight. I haven’t jogged for three days, and my daily pedo readings are wildly oscillant – I hope that’s a neologism – but generally lower than they should be. I have fantasies of trekking the whole of the Heysen trail, but they remain just that. My weight is 77.4, stable over the past three days, but fractionally above my average over the past eight days of measurement (77.15). I’ve been chided for measuring myself daily, as there are too many fluctuations over a twenty-four hour period that can’t be sheeted home directly to food intake or exercise, but I need to take these measures for motivational purposes. I might also, for similar reasons, post about this more frequently, though minimally at the same time – eg weight, amount of exercise done, amount and type of food ingested. A line or two.

Maher Arar encore

2005-04-28T13:40:00.000+10:30

I’ve just read a detailed account of the Maher Arar story, with a heavy heart and a huge sense of outrage. I know this is not the only case of this kind (well, in a sense it is, but it’s not the only case of an innocent being tortured by or at the behest of the USA in recent times), but its awfulness, and the ease with which this young man’s life was completely trashed, make it an object lesson for anyone concerned about civil liberties during the soi-disant war on terror.
The story’s in the Canadian news at present, with an inquiry there being headed up by Justice Dennis O’Connor. The inquiry resumes public hearings on May 9. In fact the inquiry was called back in January 2004, though it didn’t begin until June. Arar also launched a lawsuit against the US government in January 2004. Interestingly but unsurprisingly the US administration has already refused to co-operate with the Canadian inquiry, no doubt claiming that ‘classified information’ is involved. Having read a number of online articles, I’ve gathered that the Mounties, the RCMP, were murkily involved in events leading to Arar’s ‘apprehension’ and deportation to Syria, a country Arar left in his youth, and a country he was loath to return to, as his family had fallen foul of the government there. Of course now everybody with any responsibility, at least on the Canadian side of the border, is ducking for cover. When documents are released, huge portions of them are blacked out, again with the usual excuse.
There was never any evidence produced against Arar, except that he knew someone who knew someone who was suspected of being a terrorist. He was accused of training in Afghanistan or at least of visiting the country, but this has been denied, and again there's no evidence. He was released through popular pressure, a campaign in which his wife Monia Mazigh was heavily involved. During his imprisonment, she stood unsuccessfully as an MP in Canada.
Apart from the obvious civil liberties issues this case raises, there’s the major question of accountability. Will there ever be any consequences for the powers whose decisions have devastated so many innocent people like Arar? If ‘honest mistakes’ are made, they should be corrected immediately, and those who are responsible for trying to cover them up should also be brought to justice, as they are knowingly destroying lives in the process.

Barista probe

2005-04-24T20:14:00.000+10:30

The Barista blog really intrigues me. Who writes it? One guy – I presume it’s a guy? How does he find the time? A man of leisure, taking an early retirement? I mean, there are posts every day, or more than once a day, many of them of inordinate length, all well-written, grammatically correct, effortlessly researched, and above all constantly thought-provoking. He has about 500 time more links than myself. I mean, this guy gives me the fucking shits….

that old issue again

2005-04-24T19:37:00.000+10:30

A comment to the saint in a straight-jacket who writes about a school counsellor in the US who created a stink by altering a school pledge speech from ‘our nation under God to ‘our nation under your belief system’:

Trying to work out what I would say if I was thrust into counsellor Lucero's position. As an unbeliever, and a proselytising atheist, I would never be able to say 'under God'. Never never never. As a kid, being forced to repeat some chant with God in it (or some cliché about our Wonderful Nation for that matter) would leave me fuming with resentment for days. So I would never want to subject anyone else to that sort of stuff - even if there was only one mini-me out there among a thousand.
If there was no way of getting round it though, I'd just drop the 'under God' phrase and hope the kids didn't notice, whereas 'under your belief system' is so clunky, and it seems, so deliberately designed to draw attention to itself, that it could hardly fail to do just that. And I wouldn't delete the offending (to me) phrase because I wanted to be more inclusive, but for the far more selfish reason that if I said it I wou
ldn't be able to look myself in the mirror afterwards.

issues in science 2

2005-04-24T11:37:00.000+10:30

Cosmology and space-time mysteria are at the pointy end of science with all that mathematical-physics stuff, but they’re also fuelled by the weirdest speculations. Dark energy, vacuum decay, supersymmetry, the collapsar model, branes – it sometimes seems to a lay person that anything goes. Now a controversial new conceptualisation of the universe as full of bubbles has made its appearance. I’m not going to make any serious attempt to explain this, but it has to do with how gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows might be explained. There are competing theories, and competitors are awaiting the results from NASA’s new Swift gamma-ray observatory over the next couple of years. It’s expected to clear up much in the currently hazy field of gamma-ray burst research.

The concept of altruism has always been slippery as well as fraught. Many just assume that what seems like altruism is really self-interested behaviour cleverly disguised. Yet the evidence, from analysis of the prisoner’s dilemma game among others, increasingly supports the claim that in some circumstances we really do behave in an altruistic way. Given higher order complexities, it’s always arguable whether this flies in the face of evolutionary theory, but adaptive or not it’s something charitable organisations are already looking to take advantage of (adaptive things that they are).

Computed tomography screening is apparently enjoying something of a vogue among wealthy members of the ‘worried well’ set. However, many medicos are claiming that CT scans could quite possibly do more harm than good. These scans involve powerful x-ray beams which are fed through a computer to produce richly detailed cross-sectional images of a patient’s body. The process has been heavily and controversially advertised. There is a small danger from radiation from multiple full-body scans, but the main concern is that unnecessary scans will pick up ‘problems’ not previously known about, with costly follow-up, the tying up of resources and so forth.

soulsearching stuff

2005-04-21T10:51:00.000+10:30

Today I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation on religion and Catholicism with a Polish Catholic friend, who, when I mentioned that the human soul’s existence was hypothetical to say the least, brought up the story of a little weight loss just after death, the soul’s flight from the body. I tried not to chortle, but I pointed out – having a go in passing at the appalling Christian belief that only humans have souls – that this would be more convincing if it could be proved that a similar or corresponding weight loss didn’t occur among dumb soulless animals. She was insistent that no such thing happened among our beasty brethren, so….
The 21grams legend is dealt with effectively by Karl Kruszelnicki here. To summarise, the idea grew from experiments done in 1907 by a Dr MacDougall, given much publicity by the NY Times.
They were drawn from six subjects, an absurdly small sample. Of these, two had to be excluded because of ‘technical difficulties’, one had a weight loss of only about ten grams (subsequently regained), and two suffered an initial weight loss followed by a second a few minutes later. Only one of the six showed a sudden, non-reversible weight loss of around twenty-one grams. Hardly scientific proof. Dr Karl points out some of the difficulties of any experiment of this kind:
Even today, with all of our sophisticated technology, it is still sometimes very difficult to determine the precise moment of death. And which death did he mean - cellular death, brain death, physical death, heart death, legal death, etc? How could Dr. Duncan MacDougall be so precise back in 1907? And anyhow, how accurate and precise were his scales back in 1907?
This is probably enough for me, but it won’t convince the true believers. After all, they might argue that different people’s souls have different weights (this would even be more logical than assuming all souls weigh the same), and regardless of the exact point of death, if it could be proved that, in the hour, say, after physical death is confirmed, humans weigh measurably less, and non-human animals don’t, the soulsearchers might be on to something.
Meanwhile I should direct you to this urban legends page for a more detailed account of MacDougall’s experiments and their flawed nature.
My guess though is that with the number of variables you’d have to account for, it’d be impossible to get accurate readings to put this one to bed once and for all. I haven’t found anything on recent experiments to prove or disprove the theory of weighty souls. Nobody seems to take the idea seriously enough to test it.

picked some olives

2005-04-19T00:50:00.001+10:30

I do feel much better today, a little more determined for the time being. For the first time in several days I didn’t weigh myself, and I actually did some barbell work and sit ups, and intend to go latenightstrolling after these few words. Want to discard some things in my life to improve my focus. Much of the day was spent among friends at Peterhead, near Port Adelaide, harvesting olives from their large tree, some seven bucketfuls, and at least that again left on the tree, not yet ripe. Brought a bucketful home to have another go at curing. The last lot, two seasons ago, were semi-successful only. I left them hanging about too long before starting up the process. They tasted bland, and were too mushy. The colour wasn’t too appealing either, they looked like the fresh droppings of some mutant bunny.
It was a glorious day for bashing trees and bibbing sauvignon blanc. I took a H2 blocker before setting out, as my acid levels have been bothersome again. There was desultory talk of the fall of the USA and the rise of China, as well as much advice and wonder about troubled and troublesome teenage children. It amuses me the way I can talk about these things as if I’m a father.
Occasionally too the subject of elderly parents came up. Curmudgeonly lonely old salts. My mother wasn’t mentioned, but she was thought of, only a few days ago she was asked after, and how long has it been, two years? More? How could this be allowed to happen? Don’t leave it too late, I’m sorry to bring such a subject up but don’t leave it too late. I’ve thought of writing to her, I said. You could, you should, that’s your preferred mode of communication…
I know she doesn’t trust me, but I have to act as if that doesn’t matter.

vale Saul Bellow

2005-04-19T00:41:00.000+10:30

Got this fun thing from a v literate yank blog.
“I’ll tell you a story,” says Bellow. “A wise man is asked the difference between ignorance and indifference. He answers, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’”

something about carnivals

2005-04-11T16:18:00.000+10:30

I saw ‘Carnival of Souls’, but perhaps not all of it, as a child, and its creepy atmosphere lodged itself in my memory for the term of me natural.
A real one-off, this film, and one of the things that’s most impressive about it, apart from a really fine performance from the totally convincing lead (Candace Hilligloss), is its low-key, no-nonsense way of transforming the screen into an all-enclosing and somehow profoundly unnerving otherworld. The plot’s simple enough – a young woman emerges from a river, sole survivor of a bridge accident, and we follow her as she moves from her home town, immediately after the accident, to another town to take up the position of church organist. She has a series of experiences, is revealed as an intriguing loner, who is haunted by visions, and drawn to an abandoned fairground outside of town. She also has periods or bouts in which nobody is aware of her existence. Finally we find that she didn’t survive the accident at all.
There’s no real coherence to this, but it doesn’t matter, the plot’s not the thing, it’s kind of existential, but above all it’s about atmosphere and mood. There’s an intensity of focus on one person, her own perspective sometimes offset by those of others looking in on her - the doctor who wants to help her, the priest who puzzles over her lack of spirit (irony of ironies), the drunkard neighbour who wants to fuck her - and the mood is beautifully enhanced or created by the music of that most other-worldly instrument, the organ, as well as by some subtle cinematography, and of course the fairground setting, used quite sparingly but obviously to great effect as it’s that image which has (mildly) haunted me since the first viewing.

can't live on bread alone

2005-04-11T10:32:00.000+10:30

This morning I weighed myself for the first time in a while, and I’m 77.6 kilos and rising. I’m not getting the discipline together re eating more fruit and less bread. Bought a big pack of dried fruit and nuts, and what with muesli too I’m sure getting enough fibre, but I just scoff the stuff between meals, which mainly consist of bread.

issues in science 1

2005-04-11T10:30:00.000+10:30

Here’s the first in a perhaps endless series of snippety bits on what’s hot in science, mainly from New Scientist. First I’ll cover the March mags.

A special report on the science of the teenager was useful to me as a carer of same. An interesting fact; humans take twice as long to reach maturity as our nearest primate relatives. This growth, though, is not spread evenly through our pre-adult lives. After birth, the growth is fast, but it decelerates to the age of three, after which it is gradual and slow up until adolescence (a vaguely defined point, as the onset of puberty varies enormously, age-wise, between individuals). Over the approximately three years of adolescence, there’s an average 15% overall growth, and this spurt is apparently unique to humans.
There’s a lot of debate about why this is, and no clear answers, but one of the ways to understand some of the weirdities of adolescence is to note the continual development of the brain through this period. The prefrontal cortex, involved in high-level executive processes, undergoes rapid pre-pubertal development followed by a dramatic slowing. Teenagers are no doubt trying to cope with the contradictory impulses this leads to as they try to protect links to childhood while investigating new ways of thinking. Apparently the best way to cope with this is to listen to Eminem, Limp Biskit and Fifty Cent over and over again, while experimenting with ring tones. Other brain areas affected include the pineal gland (hormones), the corpus callosum (left-right linkages, language), the cerebellum (balance) and the right ventral striatum (risks and rewards).

Other features included a scathing review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, a novel about global warming and environmentalism which comes down heavily on the sceptics’ side. Recent letters, though, have been in turn scathing about the review, so there’s no avoiding the hard work of fact-checking.

Also a new rechargeable battery has been developed in Nevada. It can be recharged in just six minutes, lasts ten times as long as current versions, and, in bursts, can be three times more powerful. Can’t see much use for it myself.

some currents

2005-04-10T15:00:00.000+10:30

Now that it’s all sadly over, I must say I didn’t much follow the Schiavo case, except to note that the religious right in the US were falling over each other to express indignation and outrage because some poor woman who’d been on life support for fifteen years, in a state of enormously reduced capacity, from which she could never recover, was going to have the plug pulled on her. I didn’t share their moral outrage, and though I recognised that central to the case was the uncertainty about what in fact would have been the wishes of this woman had she the ability to express them, one of my first thoughts on it was – who’s paying for fifteen years of life support to a person in this hopeless state? In how many nations would there be the kind of technology and money around for this to ever be an issue? And with the technology growing ever more sophisticated, and the sanctity-of-life attitude growing ever more prevalent (or at least ever more strident), why not keep everyone alive for as long as possible? I mean, does anyone have to die? Consider after all that nobody really dies of old age, we die because some part of us stops functioning, and that part could be fixed, and isn’t it incumbent on us to do everything in our power to prolong life, and who’s to say that a 125 year-old woman with an artificial heart and kidneys, bionic hips and silicon tits has such a reduced quality of life as to be a candidate for euthanasia? I’m no murderer.

Anyway, Larvatus Prodeo has a view on the case which reads like what I would think if I thought about it more – and researched it more. An excellent place to start.

The pope’s death – I must say the huge numbers and the outpourings have unnerved my anti-catholic self. I’ve no doubt that he was a great bloke, with many endearing qualities, and far more generous to his friends and his enemies than I’ve ever been, as well as something of an intellectual heavyweight in his way, but I can’t really think of anything positive to say about Catholicism. So I’ll say nothing more.

A couple of important visits to Oz. I think this is more than symbolic, and I sense in particular a new era of much improved relations with Indonesia. The future of that particular relationship has never looked better in my lifetime, and it’s happened in such a low-key way, really. The Bali bombing, and the tsunami and this more recent quake, have been the main events to bring us together, clouds and silver linings and all.

A new President, a Kurd no less, has emerged in Iraq, but don’t get too excited, it’s the Prime Minister who’ll have the real power, and there’s still no sign of who that’s going to be and meanwhile the nation’s still in a mess. Quiggin has a thought-provoking piece on whether it was all worth it, with the usual array of comments, of which Andrew Bartlett’s is particularly sensible. No sense squabbling over past decisions, the issue is how do we improve things from here?

a gun, a car, a blonde, a problem

2005-04-09T12:52:00.000+10:30

Speaking of private dicks, I mean of the investigative kind, I found another character fantasising about being one in A gun, a car, a blonde, a film of a few years ago that I picked up on DVD at Market Bazaar. Jim Metzler plays Richard Spraggins, a wheelchair-bound victim of spinal cancer, formerly active, athletic and successful, now reduced to being preyed on by a shiftless and ditzy younger sister (Kay Lenz), who’s ostensibly his ‘primary caregiver’, as Garfield would say. However, since Richard was in his former life an effortlessly wealthy businessman, he has others, staff and/or friends, to help him out, including a black and probably gay personal assistant, a housekeeper probably from south of the border, and a new age old mate (John Ritter). Richard slips into despair fuelled by alcohol, much to the concern of his supporters, and starts developing a fantasy around a sexy new neighbour (Andrea Thompson). In the film noir fantasy world he becomes P I Richard Stone, the neighbour becomes his client, and his various other associates play police or underworld figures. They include Billy Bob Thornton, who in the ‘real world’ plays Syd, the sister’s slumming boyfriend.
Of course, Stone is as capable and confident as Spraggins now isn’t, and the dull Syd is transformed into a larger than life villain, and there are some fine wisecracks and amusing references from one world to the other, and I suppose it affirms the positive power of fantasy as release, but it was all spoiled for me by some typically yank middle-class attitudes. We’re asked to believe that Spraggins, whose multi-tiered, open plan home is tastefully decorated in low-key culture vulture style, was in his pre-cancerian existence the owner-manager of a tyre factory turning a handsome profit (Richard always had a golden touch, claims his sis, which of course is meant to indicate her ‘view’ that it’s all just a matter of good and bad luck). Further, this effortless and unlikely capitalist writes a will which hands the factory over to its workers. A bit communistic, says his lawyer. A bit vague and unconvincing, say I. The equation of capitalism with deserved wealth and generosity of spirit is hard to ignore, especially when you look at the nasty sister, self-absorbed and parasitic – ah, sigh, the poor will always be with us. The struggling Syd is also painted as a loser, and a user. The good guys are the housekeeper (illegal immigrant – oppressed minority) and his friend/personal assistant (black, possibly gay – doubly oppressed minority). It’s a kind of complacent apologetic, reinforcing the assumption that the poor largely deserve their place and must be put up with stoically or avoided. You might want to help them in an abstract way (the factory workers), but best to keep them off-stage. Oppressed minorities are okay as long as they’re not looked into too closely, or as long as they’re quasi middle-class themselves. God knows a lot of poor and struggling people are bad news in one’s personal life, bitter experience teaches that, but they’re never entirely the authors of their own misfortune or of their own unfortunate characters, it’s way more complex than that. This isn’t remotely touched on in the film – and why is Richard such a vastly different character from his sister anyway? We never find out, indeed the question is never posed.
So, by a kind of omission, a lot of yank claptrap about winners and losers and being self-made is inferred, and it lingers unpleasantly on the palate.

a reckoning in a small room

2005-04-07T21:43:00.000+10:30

It’s always been a fave daydream of mine, of waking up and finding myself in a small room with one other person, and no escape. A smaller and more claustrophobic version of the Big Brother house. Of course in my younger days that other would be some woman I had the hots for, who would only notice me if there was nobody else to notice, but it would also quite often be someone I was in dispute with, someone I wanted to have it out with to the bitter end. Who would be the strongest, intellectually, emotionally and all the rest?
Today it’s George Pell, arch-conservative archbishop in the cult of Catholicism here in Oz. He’s been getting TV time lately, not surprisingly, and George Negus today said to him – ‘You know John Paul 11 was such a charismatic, larger-than-life figure, don’t you think the Catholic Church might need to take the path of reform in order to maintain its popularity now that he’s gone?’
Pell’s response was something like, ‘Oh no, because the Church will never be able to abandon the gospels…’
I switched off then, being insufficiently interested in Pell’s idea of the gospels or of revealed truth or whatever, and having no confidence that Negus would be able to put him on the spot, but Pell’s smug response bothered me, and the idea of being locked in a room with the wanker began to exert its appeal.
Moi: You believe that any reforming of the church will entail abandoning the gospels?
Georgie: There’s a chance of that, yes. The church is built upon the gospel of our lord, and that’s a strong foundation indeed. That foundation must be kept intact at all costs. We’re not about to water down holy writ in a bid for converts.
Moi: I understand, but the difficulty I have is that I hear theologists and religious thinkers of all persuasions, from the most conservative to the most liberal, all claiming that their view of their church (whether catholic or lutheran or whatever) is backed up to the hilt by scripture, by the gospels. Now, I’m no bible scholar, but since these debates have been going on in the various churches for centuries, it seems reasonable to assume that the gospels are open to a wide range of interpretations, no?
Georgie: No that isn’t so, the gospels are quite clear on virtually all issues of moral significance…
Moi: Yes, that’s what they all say, but it seems to me that these clear and well lit paths to virtue and salvation are leading many of the faithful in quite opposed directions. Are you saying that your interpretation of the gospel is right and everyone else is wrong?
Georgie: What I’m saying is that the church’s understanding of the gospels – and I say understanding rather than interpretation, which is a loose word – the catholic church’s understanding of the gospels is pretty well spot on. If I didn’t think that I wouldn’t be a catholic, much less an archbishop.
Moi: So you must presumably think that the other christian denominations are wrong in their interpretation of, or understanding of, scripture?
Georgie: Well, not necessarily, but I can’t speak for other denominations. I can only speak for the catholic church.
Moi: The true church?
Georgie: My church.
Moi: And why is the catholic church your church? Did you choose it rationally out of all the available denominations, out of all the various religions indeed, or was it a matter of the peculiar circumstances and influences in your life?
Georgie: I’ve been a lifelong catholic.
Moi: You were educated in catholic schools, weren’t you?
Georgie: I was
Moi: So you never got much chance to think differently. It was quite literally a cloistered upbringing…
Georgie: No it wasn’t cloistered at all, I was given a very good all-round classical education, not just a religious education, and I’m very grateful for that. I wouldn’t have gotten where I am today without that start in life.
And so on. It’s bit hard putting words into the mouth of a real person, especially one whose views you so strongly disagree with. You want to expose him, but you want to be true to the character, and he’s capable enough of putting his own words in his mouth. So I suppose I should leave him be. Still, I wonder, what would happen in that small room, with him no longer shored up by institutional power, just an ordinary guy whose views are no more sacred than anyone else’s. I’d just love to have a go.

John Paul 11: another RWDB?

2005-04-06T22:18:00.000+10:30

We’ve all been inundated with information and opinion on the late pope over the past few days, almost all of it tending towards hagiography. The greatest pope in centuries, bestriding the world like a colossus, single-handedly bringing down the Berlin wall and the whole of European communism, repairing relations with Judaism and other religions, an inspiration to the poor and downtrodden everywhere, the great stabiliser of the catholic faith in degenerating times, a man of enormous personal courage, magnetism, complexity, simplicity, indefatigability, indomitability, humility, compassion, humanity, warmth and love.
I have to admit that this great tide of positivity did have an eroding effect for a while on my usual timid and beleaguered independence of judgement, and I clung gratefully to the scraps of criticism here and there re his uncompromising attitude towards homosexuality, women, abortion, religious radicalism. I noted with relief too that the adulators tripped over themselves badly in following their approving comments on J P’s insistence that the Church should not be meddling with politics in Latin America and elsewhere, with more approving comments regarding his decidedly political stand against the communists of Europe. However, this morning’s ‘Religion Report’ on Radio National has helped to crystallise my more critical position as well as bringing a lot of new evidence to bear.
The program aired an interview with Peter Hebblethwaite, a renowned Vatican watcher and historian, just before his death back in 1994, who presented another side to John Paul 11, an authoritarian conservative side as displayed in his encyclical letter of 1993, Veritatis Splendor (which basically, through the philosophical and ‘spiritual’ waffle, preaches obedience, presumably to the Church, which has the ‘burden’ of ‘recalling always and to everyone the demands of morality’, morality meaning of course Church doctrine). Hebblethwaite pointed out the biased nature of J P’s political interventions, undermining supposedly ‘left-wing’ dictatorships as in Poland, but refusing to countenance uprisings against right-wing dictators as in Nicaragua, not so much because he had sympathy for such dictators but because the Marxist rhetoric of some of the rebels in Latin America was beyond the pale for him. His hatred and fear of godless Marxism over-rode his concern for the downtrodden. Perhaps this can be forgiven, considering his personal history and his dogmatic faith, but another commentator, William Johnston, is even more critical, particularly in his analysis of J P’s dictatorial methods of enforcing obedience, which, he claims, were methods taken from the very oppressors J P struggled against throughout so much of his life. Publicly humiliating key dissenters so as to frighten others into submission, stacking the inner circle with dutiful yes men, increasing the use of loyalty tests, narrowing his vision of the righteous life more and more as he grew older, J P, in Johnston’s view, became increasingly the kind of controlling and intrusive bureaucratic presence that blighted the lives of Eastern Europeans for decades. And this conservative throttling of the Church will continue for some time yet, due to J P’s painstaking weeding out of liberal elements within the Vatican. Of course, I personally don’t give a flying fuck about the political machinations or indeed the underlying dogmas of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, but it exerts an undue influence over millions of poor people, and I’d hate to see their lives blighted by the pontificating pronouncements of a bunch of misogynistic male superannuated cross-dressers in their archetypical ivory tower.
Congrats anyway to Radio National for sailing courageously against the wind, even before the old fella’s been laid to rest.

if the hat fits

2005-04-06T10:46:00.000+10:30

I spent much of the 1970s trying not to buy a lava lamp – coloured chaos in a bottle. A prisoner of my insecure good taste, I feared the snobbish derision of friends if one were suddenly to appear in my sitting room. The lamps became fixtures in English pubs, and I consoled myself by perching on a bar stool and furtively communing with those iridescent, endlessly mutating lemon-yellow, green and puce globules as they rolled tumescently behind glass. ‘Obscene’ was the usual adjective, but I found them beautiful; an addiction I kept under my hat.
Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau

Written in the old familiar spirit of timid and beleaguered independence.

blue notes on physique

2005-04-04T20:41:00.000+10:30

Late afternoon early evening, I'm sorry I allowed myself to conk out, I should push through the barrier of tiredness, with something lightly physical, even a walk, I know when I'm in those states I'm no good for reading or mental work, but at least I managed many of the tasks I set for myself today - paid the fine, deposited the money order, obtained the bank signatory papers, collected the computer, sat in on an Anglicare meeting. Still a few things to do, and I'll do them. Yet still I feel in crisis. Bushwalked yesterday at Morialta, which was all to the good, but did it, as with everything, alone. Comparing myself with other physical specimens, wow look at that one, he must work out regularly, god I’m glad I don’t have a gut like that one, or do I? No no of course not, but my arms are so weak... A woman walks in front of me carrying a writhing toddler at her hip, and I know how hot n heavy that is, and my arms are soft as butter.

favourite jobs of all time - today, at least

2005-04-02T13:58:00.000+10:30

Here are my top five favourite jobs in no particular order.

1. Book reviewer for New Scientist (or any popular science mag)
Job description: I’d be employed as your average intelligent layperson (so I wouldn’t have to deal with anything too specialised or over-burdened with mathematical physics or statistics), I’d have half a dozen books to peruse per month, and I’d have to actually read them or get sacked.
Performance: I reckon I could do a good job if I was hired from tomorrow.

2. Porn star/male stripper/sex performer
Job description: I’d work freelance with the most beautiful and wanton women in the business, and I’d also work once a week in one of those male stripper troupes, with tipsy wild women of all sorts throwing themselves at us.
Performance: Okay I’d have to shed twenty years and a few kilos, stretch about 15cms, and start on a big fitness and muscular development routine, oh and I’d be squizzing hard at those PE emails… Sure it would only last for say five to ten years, then on to one of the other jobs…

3. Foreign correspondent
Job description: I’d be working for some cosmopolitan, pluralistic paper with a light editorial touch, I’d move continents every two years or so, and my brief would be to mix it with the people, relaying to my people how they respond to the big issues in their part of the world.
Performance: I’d have to brush up a bit on my social skills for making contacts, but my curiosity and my language skills would see me though.

4. Private detective
Job description: Having been bequeathed millions by a rich benefactor on the condition that I use it to run a detective agency, I would specialise in missing persons, unresolved homicides/suicides and the like. I’d have a wise-cracking blonde sidekick playing cat and mouse with me to a dizzyingly distracting degree, but I’d plough on in my usual stoic and understated way.
Performance: Covered already, but I’d have to brush up on my boofhead-biffing techniques. Also all that boy scout stuff on tying and untying knots.

5. Rambler
Job description: Something like blogging only being paid for it. I believe ‘The Rambler’ was the title of Samuel Johnson’s regular column in The Spectator, in which he reflected on anything that took his fancy. Other famous examples are of course Montaigne’s Essais, Rousseau’s Reveries of a solitary walker, and Orwell’s ‘As I please’ column in The Observer.
Performance: Of course if I was being paid I’d pay more attention to the readership and be less self-indulgent, I hope. Brighten and tighten the style, sustain the analysis a bit more.

fellow name of Maher Arar

2005-04-02T13:56:00.000+10:30

Just read, via Quiggin, the story of Maher Arar, a Canadian of middle eastern origin treated like a lump of shite by the US administration in 2002 and ready to claim restitution. A matter of kidnapping and rendition, a term for deportation for interrogation overseas. He was grabbed while changing planes in NY and flown to Syria. Bashings, incarceration in a grave, the usual stuff, and the Yanks doing everything they can to suppress the issue for security excuses. But, very good luck to him, Arar’s a smart and determined man, and that’s an absolute prerequisite for beating such a corrupt system, in which the treatment of suspected terrorists mirrors the brutal treatment of so many of the disadvantaged and abused who fall into the hands of the law, and who suffer and go down in proportion to their cluelessness and inability to fight that system. I don’t expect he’ll get the justice he deserves, but fuck I hope he manages to kick some ass, and for that he’ll need all the help he can get.

I don’t know why

2005-04-02T13:50:00.000+10:30

Not sure what’s going on with my brain, writing all this stuff, but it’s interesting I suppose to trace the mindworkings – first I read an article on Online Opinion written by a sceptic on the theme of science one day being able to explain religion, a theme guaranteed of course to get up the noses of the godbotherers, and while trawling through the voluminous comments (and adding two or three of my own) I come upon references to the supposed conversion of Anthony Flew, which I first read about in Philosophy Now. So (short sentences please) I do a spot of surfing to see what gives with Flew. I read his interview with Habermas. I visit some critical bulletin boards. This issue about evolution and the origin of life gets me hooked. I agree with the critics that it doesn’t seem much of a reason to overturn the thinking of a near lifelong atheist. I’m amazed for example that, though his principal reason for embracing deism is that he can’t see any explanation for life apart from a god, he’s not up at all on the latest work concerning life’s origins. Sounds chumpy to me. Back to short sentences. So, while waiting for Flew to provide a fuller formulation of his position (I’m not holding my breath), I’ve decided to check out the latest myself. Which explains my last post.

Meanwhile I await with dread the outcome of my job application. I hand over the co-op’s cheque book and requisition forms to the new assistant treasurer, explaining to him what needs to be done. I watch my colchicums coming spectacularly up in the front garden. I urge my charge to clean his teeth and all the rest. I jog around the oval in the evenings. I stare with true awe at the female form on the internet. I read a flurry of disconnected and occasionally incomprehensible science articles. I attend job search training with great reluctance, and afterwards wander around great fantasybarn shopping centres. I watch Jekyll and Hyde once more, and Russian Ark and A gun, a car, a blonde (which I find more or less fatally flawed by a typically American take on the rich and the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful).

abiogenesis: a goer?

2005-04-01T10:37:00.000+10:30

Abiogenesis was a term coined by T H Huxley in the nineteenth century. He wrote an essay, ‘Biogenesis and Abiogenesis’, first published 1870. In the essay he imagined himself on the planet eons ago, ‘a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter’. Of course we have no such witnesses, and so we can only speculate, and experiment, and search the universe for other life forms, or conditions supportive of life (as we know it, or maybe not as we know it). Creationists are generally convinced that the principle of abiogenesis is undiscoverable, that there is no other life, that it cannot be created by humans etc, but hey let’s leave those guys on the sidelines for a while (they really are scary). There’s a fair literature on the subject, e.g. The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada (excellent, apparently, as a general overview), and The Molecular Origins of Life: assembling pieces of the puzzle, by Andri Black (for the more technical, scientifically educated reader). Other writers on this subject include Christian De Duve, Thomas Gold, John Maynard Smith, Robert Shapiro and Lynn Margulis.
The abiogenesis idea (and that of exobiology – life elsewhere) received something of a boost from the experiments of Stanley Miller back in 1953. Sending an electric current through a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water, he was able, apparently, to ‘create’ organic compounds such as amino acids. There’s a very interesting 1996 interview with Miller here. I’ll summarise some of the data from that interview. The Earth is quite reliably dated as 4.55 billion years old. The earliest known life forms on Earth date back some 3.8 billion years. We don’t know what the pre-biotic Earth’s atmosphere was like precisely, but it is generally assumed, but that might be putting it too strongly, that the Earth had a reducing atmosphere, one that contained ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water. Such an atmosphere is found in all the outer planets of our solar system. Some speculate that some enabling molecular compound was introduced from outer space, on comets or meteors, though nobody has yet suggested what precisely this compound might be. There’s also a panspermia theory which we won’t dwell on here – it’s about life being everywhere, and having no beginning except in the sense that the universe had a beginning. Problems there, obviously. Whether life arrived here from elsewhere, or originated here, the origin problem is basically the same. It seems more likely though that life began on Earth, and independently elsewhere.
As to the spontaneous generation of life, Pasteur’s experiments in the mid-nineteenth century refuted the popular notion that life could sprout and teem from a bundle of lifeless rags. This did not necessarily refute the idea of abiogenesis, as some wish to argue, it merely shows that organisms do not spring from non-living material as a matter of course, all the time. The origin of life on Earth is a one-off, which is one of the reasons scientific investigators have such difficulties with it. Science is more often about discovering general principles to explain more or less common events.
The idea of the reducing atmosphere was first posited by the Russian scientist Oparin, who kicked off modern explorations of the origin of life in 1924. His first important idea was the heterotrophic hypothesis, the idea that the first organisms were heterotrophic, obtaining organic material from outside themselves. He also suggested that it is easier to form organisms where there is less biosynthesis (I don’t really understand what this means). His idea of the reducing atmosphere was independently arrived at by Harold Urey, under whom Stanley Miller conducted his famous experiments. Interestingly and importantly, a meteorite that landed near Murcheson in Australia some years later was found to contain many of the same amino acids in roughly the same proportions as developed in Miller’s work.
Reflections on the nature of the first replicated molecule led Miller, and others, to consider RNA and pre-RNA. We start getting into complicated chemistry here, in dealing with racemic mixtures, D and L amino acids, asymmetric carbon and peptide nucleic acid (PNA). Anyway, Miller speculates on the role of amino acids, the prebiotic conditions for life (drying lagoons and ocean borders are likely candidates, and temperature is v important) and the evidence from Mars. It’d be interesting to get an update on some of this stuff, as the field of abiogenesis has burgeoned in the ten years since this interview. More on that later.

further on Flew, inter alia

2005-03-30T01:46:00.000+10:30

I wrote a response, a bit of feedback, yesterday, to the article on Alister Mcgrath, and got this response from one of the moderators of the site, known as internet infidels, re types of atheism: There are other posts on this issue, but I supplied a number of definitions of "atheism" from respected authoritative sources just eight posts back. These definitions indicate that belief, or lack of it, is an important element in the accepted definitions of "atheism." That is one issue that is more or less settled, so far as I can see.
I’m not sure that I agree, for to say that ‘belief, or lack of it’ is an important element etc’, is like saying x or not x is important, which hardly gets us any further. The various dictionary definitions provided are mostly of the ‘belief that there is no god’ or strong atheist (or even polyatheist) type, and they include, interestingly, the Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and the Free Online Dictionary of Philosophy. So I’ll stick to my view that atheism implies a positive belief in the non-existence of a putative entity, or a set of putative entities.
And so to Flew’s claim that the teleological argument has become stronger. First, Flew is impressed with the difficulties involved in the origins of life. “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote to Philosophy Now last spring. He has a point, though his concern about Darwinism’s failure to account for it does seem misplaced. The theory of evolution by natural selection is designed to account for the origin of species, not of life. Something very different is required to account for that particular origin. But has Flew exaggerated the difficulty, and what of the current candidates? It does seem on the face of it, a positing of a god of the gaps. Extraordinarily, Flew has admitted that he hasn’t examined any of the material published on the science of life’s origin in the past decade or so (he’s eighty-one, but is that an excuse when you base your arguments, or your doubts, largely on this issue?)
By the way, apropos of almost nothing, here’s a great website providing 78 solid arguments for the existence of the Christian god.
More seriously, on another part of the same site there are some interesting reflections on abiogenesis (‘a hypothetical organic phenomenon by which living organisms are created from non-living matter’). This little article clarifies some of the conditions required for replicating forms to develop, and touches on the most complex self-replicators so far discovered/created, and the simplest life forms known (Mycoplasma genitalium has a genome of only 400 units).
An interesting quote from the article (grammatically corrected):
In order to explain all life as we see it today, all we need is one single molecule capable of replication and mutation. Once we have that, evolution will take over. This can be achieved in a molecule containing a sequence of only 32 amino acids. If we can order 100,000 coloured balls in 5 minutes, how long will it take to order just 32 molecules out of the billions of billions of atoms available over a period of billions of years? Remember that these molecules are attracted to each other and will readily bond together given appropriate conditions.
Put this way, it all sounds a bit more promising. So, before tackling teleology more broadly, I’ll focus next on abiogenesis.

more ramblings

2005-03-28T18:43:00.000+10:30

On Easter Sunday, trying to flee religion and holidays and other unmentionables I betook myself en voiture towards the hills with a vague plan to bush-walk, but I just drove windingly and listened to various items on the radio, film reviews, art discussions, discussions about the influence of Walter Benjamin, about the rising influence of the religious right in Oz politics, with half an eye out for places to stop the car and walk, I haven’t bush-walked for years and obviously wasn’t prepared, didn’t have any maps with me, or water, though I have a swag of bush-walking maps here, and galleons of bottled water. Then I realised I was running low on petrol and wound myself back to the city, finally back to the Market Bazaar where I picked up money owing, bought an old two-dollar book and took a large lunch alone at a window bench and read some pages of the book, Frank Kermode circa 1969 writing on Walter Benjamin writing on Kafka and Proust, Benjamin had this clever idea that the asthmatic ever-out-of breath Proust’s long-winded style was an antidote of sorts, an ideal space where one never had to stop to draw breath in one’s rambling reflections. Be that as it may, I stumbled back to the car feeling exhausted strangely, hot between the legs, bit of a bowel problem and a familiar touch of rash in the heat, just as well maybe I didn’t go walking but I need it, so home I came and some trouble with the foster-lad which I’ll pass over, and the poor wee tiny dog’s got a kinked back and’s in terrible pain, so a trip to the vet’s in the offing, early next week, and waiting for me was the atheism stuff, yes quite interesting, a whole bulletin board of expert and other commentary on Flew’s apparent conversion, is it really such a big deal, he’s eighty-one, getting soft in the head but hey we’re all living longer, hale and hearty and wits aplenty, and anyway Flew’s reasons for ‘converting’ seem a bit weak, invoking a god of the gaps because we can’t explain the origins of life and maybe the origins of the universe itself, pre the big bang, so roll out god to make these big things happen that we can’t explain then roll him back into his celestial closet, sorry not a he.

evolution again, etc

2005-03-27T16:17:00.000+10:30

I’ve been making a couple of comments at Online Opinion, in which every month there’s an article on religion. This month it was the sceptics’ turn, with a piece on the advance of science and the retreat of religion. It also dismisses, I think rightly, Stephen J Gould’s attempt to separate science and religion into mutually exclusive spheres. But boy what a commotion these issues cause. About ninety comments so far, way more than for any other article this month.
Out of the comments, some remarks about Anthony Flew’s apparent switch from atheism to ‘deism’, according to one commentator. I’ve yet to discover what the difference is between deism and theism, if any, but Flew says, in an interview with Gary Habermas that he has not been swayed by any versions of the cosmological argument, or the ontological argument, or any other argument but the teleological one. He claims that the argument for intelligent design has become much stronger in recent years. My next task, then, will be to examine these arguments.
Flew claims that new work in physics, around the big bang theory, has helped to turn his mind towards deism. He also feels that the theory of evolution increasingly suffers from serious flaws. He also seems to have problems with the failure to account for the origin of life itself within the theory of evolution or any other theory. Another commentator on the essay at Online Opinion, incidentally titled The Science of Religion, points out that self-replicating organisms are ‘irreducibly complex’. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it must be addressed.
This brief article by Edward Max responds well to some of the issues raised by creationists, but it doesn’t touch much on the origin of life issue, presumably because he considers it irrelevant. It does provide a clever challenge to present the evidence against evolution on the basis of its violation of the second law of thermodynamics, an argument or ploy often used by creationists, apparently. That’s to say, to present a detailed mathematical analysis of how evolution violates the second law. Apparently no ‘creation scientist’ has taken up this challenge, though many still make the claim regardless.
So much to do, I just drift or shift from one fascinating theme to another, moving along the thread of my own wonder. I’ve read today an article critiquing most negatively a book by Oxford theology professor Alister McGrath, and why not I say, for McGrath clearly blames atheism for way more than it could reasonably be blamed for thereby revealing much prejudice and ignorance, but along the way, and what most interested me about it all, was the question of whether atheists positively believe in no god or just negatively disbelieve in a god or gods, and the article claims that you just have to not believe to be an atheist, but some have distinguished two types of atheism, weak atheism or negative atheism which just doesn’t believe, and positive or strong atheism, which does believe in no god, or takes the positive position of denial. Now I personally believe you can’t be an atheist without taking up the strong or positive position. Babies don’t believe in god because the concept hasn’t been introduced to them, but it would seem absurd to call them atheists. And the same for dogs or cats for that matter, they’ll always be atheists if to be an atheist simply entails not believing in gods, but calling a dog or a cat an atheist is simply a category mistake, I think that’s what they call it. No, to be an atheist is to take up a positive position, to affirm a particular belief, that there are no gods in the universe. I agree that this doesn’t amount to a belief system, though it is a position, and I suppose for it to be coherent it has to fit with other beliefs (for example, atheists tend not to believe in the after-life, or spiritualism, or astrology, and these non-beliefs are not accidentally associated with atheism. Atheism is often, indeed surely almost always, associated with a non-supernatural or a materialist worldview). You can see how believers would tend to see a belief system there (though of course communism is no more a part of that system than is belief in capitalism or democracy or absolute monarchy).
Maybe though I’m getting weak atheism as a position all wrong, since some fairly astute thinkers claim to be weak atheists. This atheists’ website describes weak atheism as ‘simple scepticism’, so it’s not really like not having a position is it? And where does it sit with agnosticism? The same website offers two types of agnosticism, strict agnosticism and empirical agnosticism, the first based on the idea that we cannot ever know, the second claiming simply that we do not know. So where so I place myself? A strong atheist? Can I prove this negative? No, but I firmly believe that there are no gods. So how do I defend myself against the claim that this belief is based on faith and not on evidence? Wouldn’t it be easier to do a Bertie Russell and ‘retreat’, if that’s what it is, to strict agnosticism, saying that, whatever my firm conviction might be, I don’t believe that there’s any conclusive proof one way or another? Maybe if I was a better logician I’d do just that, but out of ignorance and maybe pig-headedness I want to assert the non-existence argument, citing as proof that naturalist explanations reduce substantially the likelihood of a god’s existence, except maybe as initial ball-roller, something very remote indeed. I do think though that a better understanding of the origin of life itself would deal a further blow to the theists, and that this might come from extra-terrestrial examples (Mars being an obvious candidate). That’ll be enough of this meandering stuff for now.

BWT, like the pickie?

2005-03-23T22:47:00.000+11:00

I’ve managed to download this picture of myself for the delectation of fans. Okay it was taken eighty-odd years ago but I did look rather raffishly paragonic in my youth, doncha reckon?

a laugh, kind of

2005-03-20T14:29:00.000+11:00

Have been living in the slough of despond lately (no love, no friends, no life) and suffering sleepless nights and I-don-wanna-face-the-day mornings, but something slightly bemusing roused me this morning. A nine am phone call from a woman whose politics I’ve not been able to work out suggested I listen to a radio this morning on child abuse ‘because I might be interested’, and also invited me to a talk to be given next month on the abuses of the media. I like going to these sorts of public lectures, she told me (and so do I but I have nobody to go with, to kick me into gear). Turns out the speaker will be David Flint. I was non-committal.
So what are her politics? The last series of radio talks she told me about was by Noam Chomsky. She’s Polish, a devout catholic, and I think she just takes a naïve interest in all these clever people…

foster-caring, a few general remarks

2005-03-19T23:23:00.000+11:00

Wanting to be careful these days to avoid specifics and naming names, a limit which might even stimulate me to improved writing. So, carefully, to foster caring, with teenagers who are new to me. It’s rather like teaching, though more informal. I recall many years ago hearing Simone de Beauvoir remarking that as a teacher she was only interested in the clever ones. Teachers are probably prohibited from saying that sort of thing these days. I sympathised with de Beauvoir but also felt uncomfortable – a sort of vicarious guilt that she/I might be happy to leave the flounderers floundering. Since then I’ve dabbled in teaching, or at least learning about teaching, and I’ve been impressed beyond measure at the sacrifices and the efforts made by some professionals to assist the flounderers (while also secretly feeling that they must lack something, whether in imagination or in intellect, to so allow themselves to keep company with those who will never make much of an impact on the sum total of human knowledge and achievement).
As a foster-carer I’ve been involved with kids some of whom have had a history of behavioural problems, problems in bonding with others, problems of trust, problems with the education system and learning generally. With the supported system I work in, I’m advised not under any circumstances to come down too heavily on my charges. My role, first and foremost, is to provide a roof, a relaxed bond, security. The social workers, the house support network, the department (CYFS), these are the people to apply the heavy hand when need arises. My role is to help out, to facilitate progress towards independent living.
This all sounds easy-peasy, but of course it isn’t always. For example, it’s very easy to forget just how wet behind the ears many teenagers can be. Some come to me without ever having been allowed in the kitchen, without ever having washed a dish or switched on a vacuum cleaner. They can’t necessarily be trusted to catch a bus to school. They’ll turn up their nose at all the exotic food you bring in and cook up, while a trip to KFC is better than sex for them.
For me the hardest thing is to not blow up at the egregious conservatism of the teenager. Was I like this at sixteen. In some areas maybe, but mostly not. Most parents, though they might suffer the enormous frustration of having their teen offspring repudiate all their efforts to educate or even simply advise them, at least see those teenagers emerge from these years of trial with all their old traits of determination, curiosity and venturesomeness surprisingly recast. The foster-carer is different, the gap might be wider but at the same time less concerning, since it’s more of a teacher-pupil relationship than a parent–child one. There’s generally nowhere near as much investment on the adult’s part. In some ways this causes other problems, as the carer might more easily become dismissive, even contemptuous of the youth’s inflexibility, dullness and apparent laziness. The carer has to be constantly aware that what he says to the youth will have far more significance than what the youth says to him. The imbalance is enormous. So it’s vital to be positive. Sarcasm has often been a failing of mine, I have to keep it within bantering limits. I’m also not in the habit of complimenting or praising people, ask my former wife. Considering that I’m cast in the role of inadvertent teacher in a one on one situation with a largely switched-off student, the urge to deliver praise or encouragement isn’t strong, so I have to constantly remind myself that the switched-off state is sometimes more apparent than real, that behind the veneer that tries to tell me everything I do is boring, there’s in fact a real hunger to know, to be guided, as well as to be appreciated and accepted. Get too pushy though about imposing your knowledge or values and you’ll quickly meet resistance. You have to let them unfold casually as part of the relationship. It requires some patience, some detachment, maybe some maturity. A lot of this is about leadership. These kids, perhaps more than most teens, are desperate for leadership in their lives, desperate too to mask the fact.

time for some html

2005-03-18T15:32:00.000+11:00

I think it’s time to bite the bullet and learn some computer code, it’s probably the only way to create a decent blog. The blogger help etc for my current blog isn’t helping much, I can’t even get a photo onto my profile, it keeps asking me for a url for my photo, but I don’t have any photos of myself online. Does a url have to be an internet address? I just don’t get it.
I doubt if learning about html will solve this specific problem, but obviously it’ll give me a bit of flexibility in terms of creating a unique blog, so away I go.
Have done two tutorials out of a seven-day tutorial thing, and have learned quite a lot, like that with any page you view online you can also view its source code, and from it, once you get the language, you should be able to work out how to set things up similarly. I’ll soon be looking at my blog template with a much more learned eye. However I’ve hit a snag in that the script editor or html editor which will allow me to convert text to html isn’t installed on my computer – I need a CD-Rom for it. Does this make sense even to me? Not really, but I’m making strides. Of course, this is all about text, but I do get a feeling that this is essential background to manipulating images too. Embarrassed at not having looked at this sooner.
Next day - I've just downloaded Evrsoft 1st Page 2000, which touts itself as better than Microsoft's built-in script editor (naturellement), because i can't wait for the person who's run off with our Office XP discs to come back. So we'll see how that goes...

my café’s au lait, fin d’histoire

2005-03-17T19:29:00.000+11:00

Always been a mite sensitive to animadversions on my fave indulgences, such as coffee-imbibing and dairy product-scoffing. Eg as a chronic bronchitic, I’ve been advised from time to time by chronic experts (not including doctors) that if I gave up the white stuff my phlegmy webs would soon dissolve away. Then the medical profession was swept up in findings that dairy’s role in phlegm production is more or less precisely zero, and this repeated to me by my local GP only a few months ago, to my great satisfaction. Now I’m told, by someone who loves discovering new diets, that, no, that’s all bullshit, dairy is the cuprit. Cow’s milk, they reckon, is a real worry, what with caseine and all. Caseine? Do I really want to know?
The same person has often been on at me about my coffee-drinking. All that coffee just can’t be good. Well, as far as I know, they’ve not been able to pin anything particularly nasty on this wonderdrug. What’s more, a recent New Scientist article reports that it may reduce the risk of liver cancer. Apparently a big study in Japan (ten years, 90,000 people) has found that regular coffee drinkers have half the rate of a common liver cancer than the rest, and the more coffee they drank, the lower the risk.
The general NS position on coffee/caffeine: ‘Despite their ubiquity, the long-term effects of coffee, tea and caffeine remain uncertain’, and that’s about as clean a bill of health as we’re ever likely to get.

best jekyll

2005-03-16T17:40:00.000+11:00

Charlotte Mendelson, a young British author, does have a way with amusingly gross descriptors, and her description of one character as looking ‘like an alcoholic baby, self-decorated with plughole hair’ provides a fine intro to John Barrymore’s portrayal of the fiendish alter ego of Doctor Henry Jekyll in a 1920 silent version of Jekyll and Hyde which I picked up on DVD a couple of months ago and promptly forgot about. Turns out it’s a real gem, the best film version I’ve seen by far.
When looking at these old movies, I tend to be impressed not so much by overall structure, or the script, or depth of character development or even acting prowess, but rather by particular images or scenes, and their visual impact. In fact I think you could almost trace the history of cinema as a very gradual shift away from this impact, as the visual language of cinema becomes more familiar to us. Or rather, the visual impacts are now quite different, the striving is different, rather less for symbolic impact…
No, actually I’m not so sure about this.
In any case, the theatrical roots of early cinema are particularly evident in this film, while the purely cinematic special effects are obviously pretty crude.
Moments I liked (some of which I have pickies for):
Barrymore as Jekyll for the first time quaffing off the potion that turns him into Hyde, and reacting as if there’s been a massive explosion inside his brainbox.
Good Jekyll treating the poor (and one young boy in particular) in ‘the human repair shop’.

handy
Nita Naldi’s absurdly perfunctory dance routine in the nightclub to which Jekyll is taken by his worldly future father-in-law, Sir George Carew.
The sheen of the Jekyll's top hat in the 'repair shop'.
Hyde’s ‘effeminate/sensual’ hands and his fascination with them.

very handy
Hyde’s hideous face as he approaches Millicent, his alter ego’s fiancée.

lovely lust
The murder of Sir George.

Barrymore is just fabulous in this dual role, elegant self-contained and magnetic as Jekyll, convincingly primal as the plughole-haired Hyde - his gait and movements clearly modelled on that of an ape. It really does show, as others have commented, that more is less, that a gifted actor’s performance can do so much more to encapsulate horror than an overblown budget of special effects.

I must say that trying to work out how to post pictures to this blog has shortened my life.

more on harassment

2005-03-15T14:06:00.000+11:00

It may be, though, that another approach might be tried. That is, that my email might be considered harassment simply because of the fact that it was sent.
Looking back at the history of my emails to this person over the past two years, i find i've sent twenty. I include only those sent exclusively to this person, rather than to a larger group of which this person was one. Nine of them sent in the last twelve months, eleven in the preceding twelve months.
Of the nine sent in the past year, four were sent in a perplexed and angry response to accusations made against me by this person in an email sent to me as well as to various other persons. Of the other five, one was the recent offending email, and another was a brief, tersely worded email raising concerns about things this person might be saying to third persons about me. Of the remaining three, two were very brief, one containing a joke, the other providing the address of a blog I liked. The only other email (the furthest back in time) contained, as an attachment, editorial comments about the first draught of a novel I’d written, in which this person was described, thinly disguised. The content of this email, as well as those of the previous year, indicate that my relationship with this person was rather more cordial then than now.
I should mention that, though this person asked me to remove their name from a mailing list which I used to send emails involving political reflections, reviews etc, in August 2003, no mention was made then that I should stop sending emails of any kind. In fact one of the reasons given for not wishing to receive such emails was that they didn’t want their names on a mailing list which might allow persons unknown to discover their email address. After August 2003 I continued to send very occasional emails to, and indeed to occasionally visit this person, who in any case I encountered socially on a regular basis. At no time did I receive any complaints about emails between August 2003 and October 2004, when I received a bitterly complaining and indeed threatening email about an SMS message I had sent more than a month before. The SMS message was indeed unfortunate and I apologised for it, but I was bewildered by what I considered an extraordinary level of response, in which accusations were made for the first time about harassment and unsolicited emails. I responded very strongly and very fulsomely to this in an email of October 13 2004.
However, I admit to being in error in one important respect over this last email (of March 5), because in that email of October 13, I wrote ‘let me swear that this will be absolutely the last email or SMS I ever address to you’.
Oops.
I confess to having forgotten this promise. I write a lot, probably far too much, so that it’s like conversation with me, and I assume that people won’t take exception to my conversation, or maybe that they’ll forgive me when they hear the fascinating things I have to say. My enthusiasm got the better of me, mea culpa. I hope it’s not a hanging offence.
That, I hope, is the end of this story.

on defamation, harassment, ethics and the internet

2005-03-15T11:54:00.000+11:00

The Concise Oxford defines defaming as attacking a person’s good reputation, or speaking ill of a person. I’m sure we’re all grateful that the law has a rather more narrow definition. Australian law distinguishes between criminal and civil defamation, but I’m only concerned here with the civil kind.
A civil defamation finding will incur monetary penalties only. Such a finding will of course depend on the definition of ‘defamatory matter’ (I’m here talking of ‘published’ or written material, in blogs, emails etc), and this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It should be noted though – and this is relevant to my case – that emails sent to someone, and to that person alone, cannot be found to be defamatory, since they don’t involve a third person, or a fourth, fifth or seventeenth, before whom that person’s reputation can be besmirched (lovely word that).
But enough of defamation and the law, there are other more purely ethical issues here, issues around what a person chooses to post on a blog, and how it affects others. The issue of airing the dirty linen of others in public. Hurt feelings and so on.
It has been brought to my attention that I’ve already published material on my blog that has caused offence to a person close to me. I apologise for this and am in the process of deleting this material from my blog, though ultimately it is up to me, as the author, to decide what to leave in and what to leave out. So if anybody else finds anything offensive in my blog, please leave a comment, and I will have a look at the material and decide accordingly.
May I just say in my defence that, as a person still in my first months of blogging, and as a person who has kept a regular journal for more than twenty-five years, I’m still adjusting to the new situation.
As a journal writer, I gradually became accustomed to the idea that nobody knew or particularly cared about my writing. In any case, nobody ever read it. This gave me a greater sense of freedom, though I always had some imagined, idealised readership in mind. With the transfer to blogging, I didn’t change my practice much, I didn’t really think through the implications of my writing actually being available, to friends, loved ones, as well as people with a bit of time on their hands in Iceland. This was reinforced by the fact that, in the first, well, many months of blogging, I had no evidence that anybody was reading it, since I haven’t really advertised it, and I haven’t worked out a way of getting it ‘out there’. A couple of months ago there was a flurry of comments on some posts I did re evolution and religion, and I think these people found my blog because I’d listed it on the ‘Adelaide Blog Directory’, now unfortunately defunct.
With that excitement came a gradual realisation that I must watch what I’m writing, and only in the past few months have I stopped simply transferring all journal entries to my blog. I shall be more careful in future and shall cull my archives of anything I deem to be offensive or an invasion of someone’s privacy. Having said that, I cannot of course be held responsible if someone claims to be traumatised by the mere mention of their name in my blog. Mere mentions won’t be deleted.
Since the beginning of this entry I’ve been informed that the person making complaints against me made no mention of defamation, so I may have been barking up the wrong tree. Apparently some mention was made of my blog, and I hope I’ve covered this issue already. Just to keep all bases covered though, I need to explore the area of harassment, sexual or otherwise, and the internet.
I think it’s fair to say that if one person accuses another of harassment, via email, text messages, phone calls, personal visits to home or work-place, or a combination of the above, some evidence must be cited. This is a tricky area to write about, for I don’t wish to go into personal details but I do wish to defend myself stoutly against any foreseeable claims.
Much of the material I’ve found on sexual harassment refers to workplaces or university campuses, which have developed their own policies, presumably in line with broader laws. I believe these laws are state-based.
Lawlink NSW presents a handy definition of how that state defines sexual harassment. It states that, in general, sexual harassment is ‘any form of sexually related behaviour that :
- you do not want
- offends, humiliates or intimidates you
- in the circumstances, a reasonable person should have expected would offend, humiliate, or intimidate you’
Let’s assume that the definition under SA law is the same. I’m also assuming that, for behaviour to be deemed sexual harassment, all of the criteria above have to be satisfied, not just one of them.
Now, I’m not sure if the person is accusing me of sexual harassment, but I do know that a recent email sent to this person, whom I’ve known for many years, has brought about a reaction, which, quite frankly, has surprised and shocked me. I think it is also fair to say that the extremity and severity of the reaction has affected my own health and well-being.
Problems with any foreseeable accusation.
First, I don’t think it’s necessarily clear that the sending of this email constitutes ‘sexually related behaviour’. Whether there is any real sexual content in the email would be a matter of perception, and I think opinion might be equally divided. Certainly there is no overt sexual content. There may be an attempt to argue that there was a sexual ‘mission’ behind the sending of the email, but given the wording of the email, and the current nature of the relations between the two parties, I don’t think that argument would get very far.
So it may be that just simple harassment should be charged. However, let’s assume for the moment that the sending of the email is established as a piece of ‘sexually related behaviour’. Then the three criteria would have to be met.
The first criterion, that the email was not wanted, is easily met. If the recipient says they don’t want the email, then that is that.
The second criterion is also pretty easy. The recipient must find that the email was offensive, humiliating or intimidatory. Again, if the recipient says that they were either offended, humiliated or intimidated by said email, it’s very hard to argue with a person’s feelings.
The third criterion, though, is the crucial one. Should I have expected, as a reasonable person, that this email would have offended or humiliated? (We may strike intimidation, I don’t think even the recipient would want to claim that it was intimidatory). Of course I expected to get a reaction, the email was sharpish in places, and was intended to be a robust rejoinder to a person whose remarks I occasionally find offensive. I also tried to lighten it at the end with a humorous touch, which appears to have been taken completely the wrong way. In any case, I’ve strongly defended elsewhere my sending of the email, and emphasised my complete astonishment at the reaction to it.
To conclude, I’m confident that any accusation of harassment, sexual or otherwise, based on this email would comprehensively fail on the third criterion.

a fair day, a red day, a green day, a rough old day, a new day

2005-03-13T00:47:00.000+11:00

and she arrived at last, nut brown maid
I called her, hard rocky crow call
but all I wanted was the smile again, and got that
and got more, a first rite, slow over her neck and arms
a warm, solemn touch

back to the ordinary day, dust and heat
brackish gum leaf, needles and ‘corns
a city’s green swirl, my dirty black mouth, my slouch
and home, just holding off the slime of a dazed passion
contrasting, what a contrast

refreshed, goodly, I returned
faint with faint hope, slightly shameful silly old grey hope
watched dumb as a friend, lover, friend
slipped an arm about her, slipped it off again like silk
the fair’s colour’s red but I’m green and green

better than being colourless, and the smile she gives me
it is all right just maybe

blogging and the law

2005-03-12T21:24:00.000+11:00

I’m currently in the middle of a storm around an email I recently sent out, and around posts to my blog which have been brought to the attention of my erstwhile. Much of the storm around this has to do with writing, publishing and ethical issues debated for centuries. As an observer to this debate, over more than thirty years, I’ve always sided with the author’s right to publish, whether in thinly disguised autobiography or in direct factual terms, material about his or her life, the people that he or she knows, and so on. Of course with this right comes the responsibility, either to be as factually accurate as humanly possible, or to make it clear that this is the author’s perspective. I’m certainly not absolutist about it. In fact this is a very murky and complex area, as any examination of the debate would show, and I’m not always sure that I’ve stayed on the right side of the line, but I’ve always been acutely aware of the issue.
The burgeoning of blogging highlights this old problem anew. Nowadays it’s the easiest thing in the world to start blogging, and there are plenty of blogs, for example, being published by juveniles. What does the law say about a fourteen-year-old-boy writing a hate blog about his mother? About a depressive writing positively and invitingly about suicide? About an ex-husband slagging off at his ex-wife?
The blog is different from the journal, which is often unearthed after its author’s passing, when the issues it deals with are no longer ‘hot’. It’s more immediate and therefore perhaps more potentially dangerous, but the dangers are diluted, it seems, by the fact that starting your own blog is as easy, almost, as raising your own voice. So one poisonous blog can be easily antidoted by another’s. Also most blogs have provision for commentary, making them sites of contestation, very po-mo. Of course the blog-owner finally oversees those comments, as is only fair, so that the truly unacceptable can be eliminated, but this also problematic, obviously.
You would expect, I think, because of the greater looseness of the blog in terms of its possible content and style, that the application of the law to limit it would also be looser. A greater subjectivity, a greater freedom of expression might be allowed. This is no doubt happening, though perhaps only because the general public is allowing it. That’s to say, there have probably been few cases as yet of bloggers being brought to book under defamation laws, because blogs are not yet seen as being as potentially damaging as the stuff made from dead trees.
After having just quickly glanced at Australian defamation laws, the first second and third words that come to mind are complexity, complexity and complexity. For a start, defamation laws vary with state and other jurisdictions – an obvious problem for a medium that transcends such jurisdictions.
It’s been suggested, in my case that, since there’s a person out there who’s apparently traumatised by the fact that I even mention that person’s name on my blog, my webhost could be pressured to ask me to remove all references to this person from my site. I can’t imagine, though, why webhosts would be susceptible to such pressure, unless they were jumpy due to previous defamation actions. In any case they would surely check out the site themselves first, and make some sort of independent assessment. They might also make some sort of effort, if they could, to check out the person doing the pressuring, to determine whether that person had the wherewithal to mount a defamation action, bearing in mind these chilling remarks from a website on defamation and the internet - ‘In practice, the laws are inaccessible to ordinary individuals who are defamed due to the exorbitant legal costs involved in bringing a defamation action’.
Unfortunately, this sentence itself, if true (and it surely is), tends to render the rest of my exploration merely academic. However, there are still some very important ethical issues involved, and I’ll have a look at them in my next post.

Centrelink and volunteering

2005-03-05T10:35:00.000+11:00

While battling with the tedious job search training rigmarole in the last week I sent an email to Centrelink regarding their policy on volunteering and paid work. I would much rather volunteer than go through the wringer of interviews for paid work of any kind. Centrelink (or the govt) clearly doesn’t like to subsidise volunteers, their agenda is to get people into paid work, but the government also likes to make noises occasionally about the importance of volunteers, so it’s always going to be a grey area. I’ve just received a response to my email in the form of a phone call from someone who told me that voluntary work can only be with an organisation registered with Centrelink as a volunteer organisation. I asked for examples and she mentioned the Sally Army ‘or something like that’. Does this mean that Centrelink discriminates between large, established organisations and smaller, fledgling ones such as the Campaign for Fair Trade? (assuming such an organisation exists – I know something like it does). Further, she claimed that ‘under mutual obligation’ people in the 40-49 year old bracket are ‘permitted’ to do 150 hours of volunteer work every six months, which is 11.5 hours per fortnight. However, I haven’t yet signed a mutual obligation agreement, though I have signed a preparing for work agreement. It’s all a bit confusing. The website under mutual obligation (which doesn’t ‘come into force’ until you’ve been on Newstart for 6 months – I’ve been on it for 4 or 5) puts it a bit differently. Mutual obligation actually requires you to do 150 hours (or more, depending on age and the type of activity undertaken) of ‘work for the dole’ (where volunteering comes in) or a training course, or part-time work or ‘some other activity’. I think it’s in connection with work for the dole that the organisation has to be registered with Centrelink. So what organisations are registered with Centrelink? I’m particularly interested in the fair trading org as well as Trees for Life – bit of bushwalking. Also would like to know if I can volunteer for work for the dole, before my time as twere. I’m sure I can, but I think that this stuff is all over and above the looking for full-time paid work, which they’ll still hassle you over, though probably not as much.

health and fitness, seriously

2005-03-04T11:00:00.000+11:00

Bought another pedo, having returned the other to my erstwhile, and yesterday was my first full day with it. Achieved the regulation 10000 plus, with the help of a briskish late evening walk, 35 minutes or so. I’m hoping to reach the stage where I can chuck the pedo out like a toddler’s dummy, and get into more serious fitness stuff. The gym beckons, and I could rejoin today. Was biffed yesterday evening at a dinner for the erstwhile’s son, at which one daughter made a casual remark about me in leotards. Another daughter was put off her dinner by the hideousness of the image. I’ll show em.
Brekky this morn, weeties with vanilla yoghurt, and two pieces of buttered toast – this butter must be my last.
There are so many things I can do, apart from gymming. Swimming, cycling, walking, the barbells (just done some), regular sit ups, the exercise machine (the climber), pilates (via my book) and the Carnegie fitness system, all easily available to me, so there’s no excuse. My future days will be filled with graphs and charts and measurements.

the fine art of bludging

2005-03-04T10:57:00.000+11:00

One i forgot to post from a week or so ago.
I’m an unemployable dole bludger. As such I’ve been sent by Centrelink to a Job Network provider, namely Ask Employment (a Catholic mob, to add insult to injury), where I’ve been told – I was interviewed two days ago – that I must do 100 hours, over four weeks, of job-search training. To get out of this I could give up on Centrelink benefits. This would of course reduce my circs but I’d still survive. I’m reluctant though because of a kind of vendetta I have with Centrelink. I incurred a huge debt with them eons ago, involving a court case and the whole shemozzle, a cool amount of $19000 (nout by comparison with what the ‘illegals’ are being forced to pay for their ‘accommodation’), because I claimed payment from one department rather than another while I was a student. Long story.
The difference between the two payments was negligible, and I wasn’t doing it out of greed, and I’m convinced that demanding all of the money back is an injustice, so I’m intent on collecting my entitlement for as long as possible (my foster-carer subsidy isn’t treated as income, so everything’s perfectly legal) so that the owings will continue to be deducted from their payments to me – in effect they’re paying themselves. I only have, according to my unreliable calcs, about $850 left to pay. So I’m prepared to go through the hoops, and it should be interesting to report on what those hoops are.
I’ve been given a swatch of papers by my Ask worker (a useful contact as she’s previously jobbed in housing and welfare, so I could actually pick up paid work through this stuff, as long as it’s not too much, for I don’t want to be severed from Centrelink for reasons above, and of course I just don’t have the time or the inclination for F/T work), including a couple of sheets titled ‘job search training confirmation of hours,’ in which I have to account for every tick-tock to show that I’m jumping through the correct hoops using the correct techniques. I’ve been asked to mark down time spent looking through the paper and on the net etc, which sounds easy to bullshit through, but they want me to attach the jobs I’ve looked up and applied for to the confirmation of hours sheets, so I may have to bite the bullet…

enduring love

2005-03-03T19:38:00.000+11:00

Visited the film festival at last, and it’ll be over in two days, and lots of gatherers and atmosphere, the artsy crowd I still hanker for, and women… but I was with my erstwhile, as always, mea culpa but that was fine, we were there because her daughter had tickets, or a booking, and we almost couldn’t get in because we weren’t Catherine, but we managed, though due to unexpected lifts across town and labyrinthine carparks we missed the first ten minutes or so.
Enduring Love’s a Brit film based on the Ian McEwan novel, which it follows quite closely (McEwan was executive producer). Looking for a review of the book (I mean my review), I find I didn’t write one, though I recorded that I read the book in January 1999, quite a while ago now. I do remember a few qualms about the book, reinforced by the film, or at least brought back to my consciousness by it.
The first part of the book was particularly memorable, the description of the ballooning accident, the moral dilemmas involved, the guilt, as well as the description of the body – McEwan, for all that he has ‘reformed’ clearly relishes the macabre aspects of such a death. The resultant bizarre connection between the narrator and a disturbed young man who falls in love with him was also a theme I was able to take in my stride, more or less. What I couldn’t quite accept or fathom was the narrator’s way of dealing with the stalker, and the lack of effective communication about the matter between himself and his nearest and dearest. In the film, the central character has an intensity and obsessiveness, after the initial, calmer, scenes, which makes him hard to warm to, but of course this is the point, and it’s a point that the medium of film can make more effectively than the novel. The incident with the balloon has triggered some self-questioning, has raised some serious doubts in him which have the effect of cutting him off from others, rendering him more vulnerable than ever just when the stalker makes his appearance, at first sharpening his sense of guilt and failure.
Obviously this is essentially the narrator’s story, the narrator’s journey. The actor, whose name I can’t recall, has been chosen, clearly, because of his physical resemblance to McEwan himself (though I suspect a more flatteringly muscular version), which is an effective touch. Yet I can’t help but feel that the lover/assailant, who’s so clearly not right in the head, is treated appallingly. Wouldn’t common sense guide you towards jollying him along (within limits) while immediately seeking professional assistance? I seem to remember that in the book the police were called in but that they were singularly ineffectual. In the film there’s a scene in which, after waking his girlfriend up in the middle of the night with the results of his internet research into the stalker’s peculiar mental condition, he notices that the stalker is waiting across the road from his house, in a child’s playground, in the dark, in the rain. I found this scene a little contrived, rather in a Hardyesque sense. The girlfriend, worn out by his intensity of late, is unwilling to take in his information, or to confirm the sighting of the stalker. Mighty bad luck, but surely the stalker would be there on other nights, surely there would’ve been a wealth of opportunities to point him out to her? Apparently not, and this failure of communication has enormous consequences. My erstwhile is unconvinced by my concerns, and thinks that without these accidents, these missed communications, there’d be no drama would there, no film? She’s more willing to recognise that the failure here is a failure in the central character, his preoccupation with his ‘manliness’, his worries about being overly theoretical. These have cut him off from simple communication, rendered him half-mad himself, caught in the space between action and contemplation, a la Hamlet. I’m not quite convinced though, I feel that the bloody dénouement to this particular tragedy could’ve been more easily averted. Mundane, true, but I suspect more authentic.
Having said all that, the intensely claustrophobic nature of the story is brilliantly rendered cinematically, with close-ups, up-from-under-shots, jumpy and sometimes swimming hand-held stuff – I don’t know the technical terms. The scene in which he rushes home to find his wife entertaining the nutter is a classic example of technical variety to create overlays of panic and urgency. The performances too are solid and nuanced in typically Brit fashion. Might reread the novel now, to focus further on detail. Seem to recall that in the novel he was a science writer, with the ballooning experience leading him to hanker after real scientific activity as opposed to mere reportage. In the film he’s a lecturer, apparently on love. It was left vague, but used as a counterpoint of course. Not entirely effectively, because love isn’t really the object under investigation here. Love and madness, yes perhaps but only superficially. The nature of the nutter’s madness/love is never really questioned or considered. In the end, you could argue, blood and guts, homosexual unpleasantness and cheap drama win out. That’d be a harsh conclusion, but what we have here isn’t quite satisfactory, to my mind.

fitness – big improvement already

2005-03-02T09:54:00.000+11:00

Without really trying I’ve improved my BMI, because this morning (March 1) I weighed myself in the proper fashion, post-ablute, pre-brekky, and came up with a figure of 74.7 kgs, big improve, bringing my BMI down to 25.8, still in the overweight range. I had a lapse though last night, and failed to go out walking or otherwise exercise. Could’ve brought things down further. I’ll try to refrain from weighing myself again till after three sleeps and three walks. Will also try measuring my height today once and for all. Still haven’t got a dressmakers’ tape. Need to monitor food intake too, but that’ll entail trying to extend my memory back twenty-four hours, a Herculean task.

some exercise data and such

2005-02-28T20:55:00.000+11:00

What I need to attack my weight/waist problem:
A better set of scales, but these’ll do (measure weight in the morning, after ablutions and before brekky).
A dressmakers’ tape-measure (waist to be measured at the level of the navel, neck below the larynx with tape sloping downward to the front)
I don’t know my height precisely, but it’s around five feet seven, that’s around 170.2 cms. We’ll say 170 cms. Given a weight of 76 kgs, my BMI is 26.3 kg/m2, which is in the overweight range for a person of normal musculature, that’s to say, it’s overweight unless your muscle/fat ratio, which of course is calculated differently, is very ‘good’ (a high proportion of muscle to fat), which mine certainly isn’t. They also have waist to height ratios, and body fat percentages (on this site I’m visiting), but I haven’t got the data to input into those yet. Must get my BMI figure down for starters.