An odd comment

Ronald Dworkin has a short comment piece in The Guardian in which he sets high standards for "genuine" democracy:

In a new book I argue that the conditions of genuine democracy are far from met in the US, the UK and other mature self-styled democracies. These conditions can easily be set out in very abstract terms. Government must respect human rights, it must respect religious freedom and other forms of freedom of conscience, it must distribute its wealth so as to give everyone a fair stake in its economy and, above all, it must conduct its elections and other political procedures argumentatively so that each citizen is treated as someone worth convincing not just outvoting.

In the comments that follow, I found this one, which starts off as if it is written by a normal intelligent person, but then suddenly ends with such aggression that it made me laugh in surprise:

I live in America.
I know I live in a democracy. I serve on my local town's water board, and on a county hospital board. Two of my friends are county supervisors. We argue our cases before our voters, the state, and the federal government. We've failed in some things but been successful at others and got funding to improve our hospital, our water system, our infrastructure. We've made a difference.
I discuss religion, politics, and economics on forums and blogs like this one before an audience of millions. My voice is heard. I get a fair hearing.
Because of this I know Ronald Dworkin is a sub-human, lying moron not fit to write advertising for toilet paper. He belongs in a sewage treatment plant where he can be converted to useful fertilizer.

You have to remember to take your pills before commenting, you know.

Fun in the diplomatic life

An ambassador is caught out having just a bit too much fun in the Embassy:

Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear.

Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.

I just hope our likely future ambassador Amanda Vanstone doesn't get any ideas...

Slowing down the universe

It is possible that the current accelerating expansion of the universe will slow down and stop. There's a recent arxiv paper about it here, in which it seems to be argued that a natural process may lead to deceleration.

On the other hand, Frank Tipler believes that expanding intelligence in the universe will cause its slowing and eventual collapse. (But with the happy ending of the Omega Point, which is the equivalent of eternal heaven.) I like the idea; it's good to know there is useful work to be done until the end of time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Frank Tipler is writing a book in which he maintains that the most important miracles of Christianity can be explained by the same mechanism to be used to stop the universe expanding. Here's a sample of his ideas:

It is this mechanism of baryon annihilation via electroweak tunnelling that could have been used to accomplish ALL of the miracles described in the Gospels, in particular the Resurrection. I point out in my book [1] that Jesus' resurrection body, as described in the Gospels, has all the essential properties of the computer emulation resurrection bodies we all will have in the far future. The property most difficult to duplicate at the lowest level of implementation is the sudden dematerialization (vanishing from the appearance of His disciples) and re-materialization (suddenly appearing inside a locked room). De-materialization can be accomplished by electroweak quantum tunneling, which violates baryon number and lepton number conservation. The key reaction would be proton plus electron goes to neutrino plus antineutrino. This would convert all the matter in Jesus' body into neutrinos, which interact so weakly with matter that a person in a room with Jesus would see only Jesus appear to vanish. (If the matter of a human body were converted into photons rather than neutrinos, this would be equivalent to the detonation of a 1,000-megaton H-bomb, assuming Jesus weighed 178 pounds ([27], p. 2). The people of Judea would notice this, though the disciples would not, since they would be vaporized.) Materialization apparently out of nothing could be carried out by reversing the process . The Resurrection is then merely an example of first de-materialization of Jesus' dead body, followed by the materialization of a living body. The Resurrection, in other words, is a profoundly different process than the mere resuscitation of a corpse.

I must admit that I have not even read all of that article. It is very long, and deals with the Virgin Birth, Turin Shroud and even original sin. All are explained in a quasi scientific way (to the satisfaction of Tipler's mind, anyway.)

I don't think he is mad; he's a physicist/cosmologist who seems to have done good work for many years. However, I reckon his views are going to be taken as so eccentric and on the fringe that his book might not even be reviewed by the science community.

There is more I want to say about miracles, but don't have time today.

Metaphors on the march

In 2004, the SMH's Alan Ramsey went on and on about Latham being a Mack truck looming behind John Howard. (Handy list of links is at Tim Blair's.) Today, Phillip Adams writes:

There’s a hurricane called Kevin bearing down on John Howard.

I think there may be some law that silly metaphors doom a candidature, so conservatives can stop being quite so worried about those poll results now.

The Clinton character question

Captain's Quarters has a post about the latest evidence of Hillary Clinton's tendency to either confabulate or lie about her past. Some other examples were helpfully listed by Dick Morris in his Lateline interview here.

Such people make me uncomfortable in real life, as social politeness often prevents any correction to false recollections told to a group. Not every politician has to be personally likeable to achieve good things, but a repeated history of telling falsehoods about your past does reflect poorly on character, and on reliability of judgement in all aspects of your life.

On Kurdistan

I forget to mention last week that the always absorbing Foreign Correspondent on ABC had an interesting story on Kurdistan. You can watch it on streaming video via this page.

Rats know what they don't know

An interesting story at Science Daily about evidence for rats being capable of "metacognition".

Maybe this means rats can have failure dreams too?

Dreams of failure

Last night, I had one of those dreams of failure that I assume everyone has from time to time. It may be sitting down to an exam and realising that you know nothing about the topic whatsoever, or, in the case of my dream last night, trying to discuss a matter in dispute when it was clear my opponent knew everything about the topic, and I was totally unprepared. I have had missed deadline dreams too.

It occurred to me this morning that the consequences of failure of my job are no where near as spectacular as that in other, more dangerous professions. Does this mean that, for example, pilots dream of their plane taking a dive towards the ground because they forget to check the fuel before takeoff? Do surgeons dream of patients dying on the table in front of them for some really silly oversight? And, I wonder, do nuclear reactor operators dream of missing an obvious warning that leads to a meltdown.

Of course, it might just be that I am more insecure than other people, and such dreams are not as common as I expect. If that is true, just ignore this post. Otherwise, I would be curious to hear the nature of any other reader's failure dreams.

Make some comment, vast international readership!

An odd weekend

It seems a bit of an odd weekend when The Australian is getting pessimistic about John Howard, but on the Fairfax side it has a column criticising Labor's lack of policy decisiveness in The Age, and an SMH exclusive indicating that Rudd may be a bit too much into self-mythologising.

On the News Limited side, George Megalogenis warns that "Howard is in serious trouble", and draws comparisons to the 1969 election swing to Labor despite full employment at the time. (There's one big difference that comes to mind: conscription for an unpopular war.)

The Age column makes the point that Labor is still fuzzy on specifics in quite a few policy areas which it has had a long time to consider.

The SMH story on Rudd the Younger is here.

That's just not right...

For one of the most unusual clips from Japanese TV I have ever seen, have a look at this:



Found via Japundit, which also gives the explanation of what it's about.

Update: For an even more disturbing octopus related video, you can always view extremely fresh octopi bits being eaten here. (I found this posted at the brainiac site Cosmic Variance, OK?; I don't go out deliberately looking for grossness, you know.)

Death at the ABC

What is it about the supposedly religious themed Compass that makes it keep coming back to stories about euthanasia? Last Sunday, we had the story of a New Zealand woman who was looking after her dying mother at home, and killed her by morphine and putting a pillow over her face. She was not charged originally, but then she decided to press her luck by publishing a book about it. End result: 6 months in prison. Of course, international death hound Philip Nitschke was there offering his support, and the whole documentary was done in a way that was meant to elicit sympathy.

Only problem was, I didn't find the daughter very likeable at all. (Admittedly, she was put in a terrible situation, and the medical system didn't work as it should; but still, smothering relatives with pillows is something I think few people want to see encouraged.)

Then this Sunday coming, I see Compass is about a woman with a terminal illness giving a party before she heads off to Holland to hopefully [sic] be legally put down. Again, I am expecting nothing less than an emotional appeal for legalised euthanasia to be the main aim of the documentary.

The thing about this is that it would seem palliative care specialists are usually against euthanasia and insistent that the right sort of care can mean a relatively "good" death for most people. (OK, there will be always be exceptions. Nothing's perfect.) Yet the views of such practical experts rarely seem to get an airing. To my surprise, and to his credit, Norman Swan's Health Report on Radio National recently did devote a show to one such doctor. The transcript is here. I am guessing, though, that the audience was not large.

In a way, I don't like talking about this topic because it feels too much like tempting fate. No one who speaks against euthanasia wants to be personally tested in their attitudes by watching a close relative slowly die, or having a painful terminal illness themselves. Still, the pro-euthanasia lobby seems to get a pretty much unfettered run when it comes to the print media and television documentaries, and that bugs me.

UPDATE: I started to watch last night's Compass program (the one about the woman holding a party before heading off to Holland.) Unfortunately, I didn't get far past the first five minutes, then woke up as the end credits rolled. (I should not lie down on the sofa past 10 pm.) From the introduction, it seemed that maybe the party process made her change her mind about euthanasia, but I am not sure. People who are all for it don't often seem to be the type to change their mind. If anyone saw it, perhaps you could enlighten me? The show's transcript is not up yet.

On a general point, Compass is generally a pretty dull show these days. Maybe there is a lack of good religious themed documentary being made by anyone, which is a pity.

Russian roulette

Yet more poisoning in Russia:

A physician well-known in Los Angeles' Russian community and her adult daughter were poisoned during a trip to Moscow last month, U.S. Embassy officials confirmed today, the latest in a string of Russian poisoning cases that have sparked international intrigue.

Officials said Marina Kovalevsky, 49, and her daughter Yana, 26, were poisoned with thallium, an odorless, colorless toxin originally suspected in the death of a former Russian spy in London last year.

I like this part of the report:

They had been staying at one of Moscow's fanciest hotels.

"I think it's an accident because I can't imagine anything else. It's really bizarre," said Tabarovskaya, a chiropractor who works in the same West Hollywood office as her cousin.

How on earth do you have an accidental thallium poisoning while you are staying at one of the "fanciest hotels" in Moscow? Are Council health inspectors there always having to tell hotel kitchen staff not to keep the shaker of dissident poison next to the salt and pepper?

Stuck on Iraq

Tigerhawk is sticking to his pro-Iraq war guns.

Of course, overnight there is news of more large scale killings of Shiite pilgrims. One thing that I still don't understand about the situation there is this: Shiites have the control of the government, and (presumably) are the great majority of the armed forces. They would not have a supply line problem if there was a full scale civil war of the type that it is said the Sunni's suicide bombers are trying to promote. But where do the Sunnis expect to get their weapons supply with which to fight a full blown war?

Also, so much of this killing is being done by suicide bombers targeting civilians. Would it be so hard for Muslim clerics to declare repeatedly the moral judgement that we in the West find easy: namely, that suicide bombing against civilians is a depraved and essentially cowardly act. (It is, after all, an entirely one sided form of combat. A suicidal attack against an armed target that might get you first if they see you coming is different; there is scope for acknowledging a type of bravery there. But blow yourself up in a civilian street? Just obscene murder.)

I know that some clerics have condemned repeatedly the violence generally; but what I am getting at here is specific condemnation of this particular tactic. I am not sure whether that has been done.

More on carbon offsets

More sceptical views on carbon offsets are in this TCS Daily article. A key paragraph:

If you want to fight carbon emissions, then join the Pigou Club and push for taxes on bad energy. If you want to fight carbon emissions at a personal level, then act as if there were a high tax on your use of energy from carbon-emitting sources, and reduce your use of that energy. If you are not really all that worried about carbon emissions, but you get pleasure from making empty, self-righteous gestures, then do what Al Gore does -- buy carbon offsets.

Double guessing the past

David Aaronovitch's column in The Times about the fantasies about what would have happened if Gore had been President is well worth reading.