Funny the way things turn out...

It's been an odd feature of the last 20 years of politics here how Labor's view of itself as the "natural" party for better Australian foreign policy has gone all askew. On the face of it, one would think that they have a point: it sees itself as less subservient to the US, emphasizes independence of foreign policy development and the importance of regional engagement, and academic foreign policy experts all appear broadly to be aligned with such sentiments.

Yet, I don't think anyone seriously denies that Keating was about as far off the mark as he possibly could have been when he said Asia would not take a Howard government "seriously".

Now, we have the counter-intuitive situation of aPrime Minister with apparent superb credentials to impress the Chinese getting slapped around the face by said country.

Go on Kevin, we're waiting to be impressed with your resolution of this problem.

Long life in a pill?

If red wine's good, are resveratrol pills even better? - Los Angeles Times

Interesting article on how resveratrol (a potentially health promoting compound in red wine) is being sold to the public well before anyone knows if it works on humans, or at what dosage.

Impatience of this type is often unwise.

Baby power

How to ensure lost wallets are returned - Telegraph

A weekend in July

Some highlights:

* Saturday night ox tail stew. This is a dish for which a pressure cooker is indispensable. A better winter meal (served on mashed potatoes, with some green beans and couple of glasses of red) is hard to imagine.

* A visit to the Queensland Maritime Museum. It's been maybe 20 years since I had been there, and I was really impressed. Years ago, it was a bit of an amateur enthusiasts' jumble, but now the new-ish main exhibit hall is set out with high quality exhibits full of interesting detail. (Queensland Museum, go have a look.) The centrepiece of the museum remains, however, the HMAS Diamantina, a former Navy ship that saw some service in WWII, now sitting in a permanent dry dock originally built in the 1880's. The ship has been fitted out well (better than the last time I saw it), and all levels are open for people to wander around. Here's a photo (not the clearest, but still):



One of the exhibits in the main hall is an extract from an 1864 migrant ship on-board newspaper, written to entertain the passengers. Oddly, the then idea of entertainment included a serialisation of a real life shipwreck story. (This appearing after the introductory bit about how rough the weather has been lately, preventing the passengers from entertaining themselves "on the poop" as before.) There is also a birth on board recorded, indicating that migrants were made of sturdy stuff in those days. You can have a read of some of it if you click the image:


I think the story was that this was re-printed in Brisbane when the ship arrived: it did not appear in neat newsprint like this on board the ship.

There is a small admission price to this museum, but it is well worth it for half a day.

* Some extremely tender "wagyu" style rump steak on Sunday night. More red wine, this time the $1.99 a bottle cab sav from Dan Murphy's!. (Quite drinkable, but unremarkable. The steak was excellent, though.)

Embarrassing? Let me count the ways...

ADF man robbed of laptop by ladyboy | The Australian

THE Australian Defence Force is investigating a potential breach of national security after a naval officer in Bangkok was robbed of his Defence Department computer by a ladyboy he had brought back to his hotel room late at night.

Defence last night played down the security implications of the theft, saying the data in the laptop was of a low classification and it was password-protected.

The officer -- named in a Thai police report as Lieutenant Commander ....................., a qualified helicopter pilot who received the Order of Australia Medal in January -- was in Bangkok on official business and had gone out for the night to the city's Nana Plaza, an entertainment zone in the city full of go-go bars and where ladyboys also solicit in the streets.

An observation...

Has there ever been an uglier internet ad than the one for "The Gabriel Method". No, I'm not going to link to it, but you know, the weight loss whatever-it-is with the photo of the porker guy before (with shirt) and after (sans shirt)?

I've always found it deeply unappealing, yet it seems to be popping up more than ever. (I think it used to haunt conservative blogs in particular, but its reach now seems more widespread.)

Can someone design a Firefox tool that hides it from my sight?

Sure, like we need ones that are easier to lose

Buffalo jams 16GB in really tiny USB key

'ello?

Seems remarkably quiet, comment-wise, around here lately. I do my best to cover the best topics: sex, religion, politics, giant robots, but for nought...

UPDATE: blog re-designed somewhat. I'm quite pleased with the result. (But still some fiddling to be done to make it perfect.) Any novel Gadget/Widget suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE 2: that's odd. I just noticed that the upgrade to the "layouts" template made my links revert to a previous version, before I fixed them up a few weeks ago. I've got to go sort them out again (as well as insert headings.) Oh well...

Good news, kind of...

Low-end house prices 'to fall 10pc' | Property | News.com.au

The odd thing is, I guess for the first time buyer, government grants to encourage you to buy a house shouldn't really make much difference. I mean, while the grants are available, they artificially inflate the price, as everyone knows the government is funding a percentage of your buying power.

When the grants finish, the price should drop and the net cost to the first time buyer who has waited should be about the same.

The drop in price should also encourage investment buyers, which may have the effect of reducing rent (slightly) for those who can't buy.

The only losers are those who buy with a grant and who then need to sell soon after the grants cease. (Oh, and the rest of us who have had their taxes spent on a grant which may not really have helped first home buyers at all.)

On thin ice

Arctic sea ice has thinned by more than 40% in five years, Nasa satellites show

Of note in Slate

There are two fairly amusing articles of note in Slate.

The first: about the Segway and its image problem. Apparently, guided city tours on them are now "ubiquitous", and "help fulfill one of the iron laws of tourism: Thou shalt do things one would never do at home (eat tripe, smoke a water pipe, listen to French pop)." I am curious to try them at least once.

The second: William Saletan has a go at finding a loophole in the Catholic Church's official negative position on masturbation. Was there ever a teaching that was less followed in the history of the church? A much more realistic Christian approach to the topic - at least in the context of teenagers - can be found at this site, which appears to be written by an Australian youth worker associated with the Assemblies of God. However, the number of photos of boys plastered through the site (even though it is just their faces) works against it: it gives the feeling that the author has just a little too much interest in boys, even though his advice is pretty reasonable (if you're Christian, at least.)

Do as the giant robot commands!

Gundam promotes Tokyo 2016’s Olympic bid
(Go to the link to see a photo of said giant robot in Tokyo)

Iraqi veteran fabulist

The story of the Marine who wasn't - Los Angeles Times

As it happens, I am pretty certain I currently have a client who is a big-time fabulist.

My suspicions are likely to be confirmed soon if promised large amounts of money (not for my benefit) do not arrive.

Miyazaki news of the day

Hayao Miyazaki, Anime’s Master, to Visit San Diego Comic-Con - NYTimes.com

(The article talks about him generally, and his lack of commercial success in the US.)

Big dill hits Big Apple?

It's usually Tim Blair's job to track all things "Hicks", but here we go.

The New Yorker ran an article noting that it finally appears confirmed (in a new book by his ex-wife) that Osama Bin Laden made a short trip with her to the United States in 1979. According to the wife, it seemed most Americans were nice enough towards them.

In the comments that follow, there is one by someone calling him (or her?) self "davidhicks1" who is from "downunder". I'll just put it here in full:

"I came to believe that Americans were gentle and nice." Well of course 'most' Americans are thus. The only 'problematic' ones are those that have been supporting the Racist State of Israel these many decades past. There is a feeling around -and some hope in the world these days- that these unfortunate policies may be about to be minimised( Stay on course President Obama!),and maybe even reversed. How many Americans could list the THREE 'demands' of Osama bin Laden post 9/11. I'll give you a clue from 'downunder.' One had the word PALESTINE in it!

To my ear, this does indeed sound like something the real David Hicks would say, but who knows. Certainly, it seems odd that the writer finds "most" Americans are nice, but then finds the (very large) proportion who support Israel "problematic". Are they overlapping sets, with some Americans being both nice and "problematic"?

Whoever the writer is, he (or she) should not plan on visiting the States any time soon.

Julia, Julia

Annabel Crabb today has a pretty witty column about how right wingers have become infatuated with Julia Gillard, in much the same Margaret Thatcher was seen to have sex appeal by her male opponents of a certain age.

Well, it may have something to do with the mysterious allure of her fleshy ears, since I can report again that barely a day goes past without a few people landing at this blog via a Google search of "Julia Gillard earlobes" or some variation thereof. (For those fans, Julia's sometimes coyly hiding lobes were on very open display last night in a 7.30 Report interview. Knock yourselves out.)

As for me, I think I have mentioned here before that my response to her softened when she showed a surprising graciousness on election night by declining Kerry O'Brien's offer to put the boot into John Howard for not making way for Peter Costello. (When asked whether this had been Howard's big mistake, she replied that, while such simple analysis would be easy to make, in reality all the Labor polling indicated that the Coalition would have done worse under Costello.)

Of course, her policies will still lead to rack and ruin in industrial relations, but she does seem a more genuine person than K Rudd by a few country miles.

The dubious god of Silence

Review: The Case for God by Karen Armstrong | Books | The Guardian

Here's a review of a new book by Karen Armstrong, in which she makes her response to the views of the modern militant atheists.

If the review is accurate, I have an immediate problem with her version of the history of religion (in much the same way many have had a problem with her history of Islam):

Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music....

This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world's best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail. This is Armstrong's principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory - in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern "militant" atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.

That sentence in bold, if it reflects Armstrong's arguments, sounds hard to justify. I mean, you don't have to read much of the history of early Christianity to be struck by the seriousness of the intellectual battles over how Jesus was to be properly understood. Wikipedia gives a list of pre-reformation "controversial movements", and Paul Johnson in his enjoyable "History of Christianity" made the point that many of the early Christian theological controversies were beset with language difficulties: he writes that Greek lent itself to complexity in theological discussion, but finding equivalent words in Latin proved difficult:

The upshot was that it proved comparatively easy to devise a definition in the Latin West; much more difficult to produce one for the Greek East, and almost impossible to create a translatable formula which both East and West could accept in good faith.

My point is: intellectual understanding of itself has always been important in Christianity, not just since the 17 th century. Maybe she argues that to the average participant in Christianity, such debates had little practical impact. That might be plausible, but isn't the exact nature of (say) a 5th century congregation's personal understanding of their religion at least a little hard to judge that from this point in time?

According to the review, Armstrong thinks this:

So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the "apophatic" tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic. Words such as "God" have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word falls short of describing what it symbolises, and will always be inadequate, contradictory, metaphorical or allegorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression.

Well, this immersion in mystery is certainly what the likes of Peter Kennedy and his St Mary's in Exile crowd are now promoting.

The author of the review is skeptical, as am I.

This is a tricky area: from a Catholic perspective, mystical or meditative experience is certainly not dismissed as invalid; but I think it would be fair to say that the mystically inclined saints of the Church never doubted the concrete reality of the God that they believed the human mind was inadequate to perceive. The Cloud of Unknowing hid a mountain. The problem with the pop-mysticism of today, with all of it's "everything we can say about God is just a metaphor for the great mystery" approach is that it has converted God into a cloudbank with nothing solid in the centre at all.

Simon Blackburn says this at the end of his review of Armstrong:

Silence is just that. It is a kind of lowest common denominator of the human mind. The machine is idling. Which direction it then goes after a period of idling is a highly unpredictable matter. As David Hume put it, in human nature there is "some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent". So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance.

Sounds about right. How can anyone be sure that the meditative practice, or "song and dance" does have a significant effect on the ethical or moral behaviour of the participant in their dealings with others? If you want to address behaviour that is wrong, you need to be able to articulate why it is wrong, not just take the transgressor by the hand and share a quiet moment together. In fact, couldn't it be argued that indigenous cultures had plenty of time for ritual, yet some treated people (women, children and rivals) in pretty appalling ways. The abundance of ritual did not obviously make them more "moral" societies.

Blackburn makes the point that the "proof in the pudding is not my beatific smile but how I behave." For the religious at least, how you behave should surely be significantly influenced by your intellectual understanding of what your religion is about, not just your emotional experience of participating in ritual or worshipping mystery for the sake of mystery.

Bored? Sorry.

UPDATE: Jesus, Mo (& Moses) explain why Armstrong's approach is unappealing.

What art students do for fun

Dezeen - Tantalus Dinner by Ioli Sifakaki

Royal College of Art graduate Iola Kalliopi Sifakaki designed a dinner service cast from her own body and then invited a dozen of her male friends to feast from the tableware.

The dinner service, and the dining furniture Sifikaki designed, are based on the Greek myth of Tantalus, in which Tantalus boils his son Pelops and offers him up as food to the gods to appease them.

OK, but was there any particular need for the male friends to turn it into what looks like a food fight? It has way too much of Peter Greenaway art wankery about it, if you ask me.

Scrapping cap and trade

BBC NEWS | 'Time to ditch climate policies'

An international group of academics is urging world leaders to abandon their current policies on climate change.

The authors of How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course say the strategy based on overall emissions cuts has failed and will continue to fail....

LSE Mackinder programme director Gwyn Prins said the current system of attempting to cap carbon emissions then allow trading in emissions permits had led to emissions continuing to rise.

He said world proposals to expand carbon trading schemes and channel billions of dollars into clean energy technologies would not work.

"The world has been recarbonising, not decarbonising," Professor Prins said.

"The evidence is that the Kyoto Protocol and its underlying approach have had and are having no meaningful effect whatsoever.

Dot Earth has more about this. It appears that these particular critics think Japan can teach us a thing or two about worthwhile policy. They are quoted as follows:

....the last thing one would do is invent layers of regulatory bodies requiring international accord and transparency in arenas like energy policy, where countries traditionally go it alone. As Professor Prins put it in a statement, “Worthwhile policy builds upon what we know works and upon what is feasible rather than trying to deploy never-before implemented policies through complex institutions requiring a hitherto unprecedented and never achieved degree of global political alignment.”

Hear hear.

Sort of a win for Israel?

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Gaza conflict: Views on Hamas

OK, who knows how representative the views of three people in Gaza really are, but the the comments of 2 of them indicate that many don't exactly feel that Hamas did them a favour by provoking Israel's last attack. The first guy in particular:

"Hamas and the Jews both did this. Hamas don't have the power for war - so why did they launch rockets at Israel? Israel needed war here, but who gave Israel the key to come here? Hamas.