Jesus’ parables invite us to take up residence for a while in their imaginative world, and see things from a different point of view. But the parable in today’s gospel reading is at first glance a fairly unpleasant affair. It asks us to imagine ourselves as slaves. Slaves who are tempted to laziness and who risk a beating if they’re found shirking their tasks. It doesn’t sit comfortably. It’s a jarring metaphor, but I think appropriately so – because the whole thrust of the Gospel reading, and of the Hebrews passage, is to shake us out of our complacency, to literally take us out of our comfort zone. I’m going to return to the parable later, but for now let’s wind back to the start of the passage: (more…)
Tim Jones has a good if difficult post up today, responding to the idea that we should boycott BP in protest at that big oil spill(ing). He suggests we boycott all the oil companies – Shell for messing up Nigeria, Exxon Mobil for funding climate denial and Chevron (Caltex) for polluting here and there (and he could add funding the Burmese regime).
Their suggestions for reducing your own emissions:
fly less/take local holidays
turn down thermostats, insulate house (they obviously don’t rent our house)
swap in compact fluorescent for incandescent bulbs
walk and bus instead of driving
eat in-season fruit & veges and have one no-meat/no-dairy day a week
buy less, buy second hand, buy durable/repairable
don’t buy packaging-heavy stuff, recycle, compost
don’t waste food
or water (shower rather than bath), careful about lawn/garden watering, fill your washing machine up
feel happier (smugger?) because “It’s Dec 2010… you’re healthier for walking & cycling, you’ve made new friends from swapping stuff & car-pooling, you’ve saved a big chunk of cash… and you know that you’re part of the global e ffort to prevent castastrophic climate change…”
From Herman Daly & John Cobb’s excellent book For the Common Good (1989):
Power criticises the “economic base” models that treat production for export as the “base” or driving force of economic development, and production for the local market as derivative and dependent on export production. … The real economic base of a community is not exports, but rather, “consists of all those things that make it an attractive place to live, work, or to do business. That means the economic base includes the quality of the natural environment, the richness of local culture, the security and stability of the community, the quality of the public services and the public works infrastructure, and the quality of the workforce. None of these things are produced by the commercial economy or produced for export.”
The quote within the quote is from Thomas Power’s The Economic Pursuit of Quality (1988). It’s relevant to the mining question, to the idea of ‘catching up with Australia’, to the Greens’ beyond-GDP approach, and to the Transition movement.
Below are some currently operating mines (mostly coal, with one gold). I’d love to add any others you know of.
Stockton coal mine
Not sure I’ve got this right — is that whole area a mine? South of here there is a large area which might be the old Denniston mine.
Luke & Esther gave me a voucher for a gliding trip for my 30th birthday. I used it yesterday, at Gliding Wairarapa, which is at Papawai, a little east of Greytown. It was a good time. CFI Vern told me that it was in fact the ultimate thrill, and that I was to tell all my friends about it. Because CFI stands for Chief Flying Instructor I thought I ought to follow his instructions. It was a friendly, low key, very New Zild operation. (more…)
The assumption she challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God.
What is the zeitgeist? What is it here in NZ? What are the best bits, the flames you would like to see fanned? Like in the 60s it was maybe folk music – that was the thing to be into, the good bleeding edge.
There are lots of waxeyes hanging around our feijoa tree. The tree is in flower, so I wonder — are they drinking the nectar and helping pollinate it? There is a family of bumblebees who live in a brick wall at our place, but I don’t recall seeing them hanging around the feijoa. Can birds assist pollination?
The flowers of the feijoa (Feijoa sellowiana) look a lot like pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) flowers, though the leaves are quite different. Are they related?
In a non-evolutionary framework, is there any such concept as species being related to one another?
10:10 is a campaign to get individuals, businesses and organisations to commit to reducing their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. It was started in the UK by the excellent director of The Age of Stupid, Franny Armstrong. Chris Laidlaw interviewed 10:10 manager Daniel Vockins a couple of Saturdays ago (download it here). 10:10 has had quite a bit of success in Britain, with about 50,000 committed so far, including celebrity-types, MPs and sports teams. Vockins said if 1,010 New Zealanders sign up on the 10:10 global website they’ll launch it here by Christmas. I have signed up, and I think you should to. If you sign up you’ll receive pointers on achieving the cuts. Although individual consumption choices dictate only a small percentage of total emissions (see graph below – as Alex Steffen says “the parts of our lives that actually fall within our direct control are the tips of systemic icebergs”), the campaign has the potential to build a movement that would show politicians and industry (who can actually make the necessary reductions), as well as the public itself, that there is widespread support for real change. There’s lots more guff about 10:10 on the Guardian website if you’re interested.
… which is on December 17 (every year – though this one is particularly special as I’m turning 30), I would like vegetable seedlings, a baby bike seat for my bike (like this), a helmet for Elke, a beard trimmer and some books from my Amazon wishlist (wow, dig the potential erudition in that list).
Today I’m going to concentrate on the Gospel reading. It’s difficult material on more than one level. There is a lot of strange stuff about the sun and moon going dark, the stars falling out of the sky, and the Son of Man coming in the clouds – what, if anything, does this have to do with us, sophisticated city-dwellers, university students and graduates in the 21st century? (more…)
The antibiotics didn’t work, but I have seen a humpback whale, two bottlenose dolphins, four dugite snakes (venomous but shy), some bluetounge and other lizards, hundreds of quokkas, pelicans, more than two ibises and many other birds besides.
We’re off to Perth for a holiday from Thursday. My workmate leant me Dirt Music for the trip. I got up at 5.20. I have been cutting my hair. It looks about 6/10. I’ve had some toothaches. The antibiotic I’m on for an abscess above a tooth is responsible (via use by vets) for wiping out India’s vultures, wikipedia tells me. Land comes in huge tracts. Vegetation comes in vast swathes. Eliza found a large mirror in good condition in a skip.
I was thinking about the idea of ‘being true to myself’. I will grant for the sake of this exploration that my self is accessible to me and can give me useful guidance. But there are still forces acting on my self that are at more or less beyond my control or even awareness. These include my upbringing, physiology, class, and perhaps especially the ideas-environment my society (mediated by e.g. friends, church, the internet, ads, books, tv) provides me. My self is at least partly formed by these things, and perhaps is the sum of all these influences. So if I consult it, I’m not necessarily hearing from a more authentic or reliable guide than e.g. 3 News. (more…)
You can make Google Gears work with Firefox 3.5.2 by adding browsing to about:config and changing extensions.checkCompatibility to false (or adding it if it doesn’t already exist). Presumably Google will release a new version of Gears soon. I missed my offline Gmail. More info here
From Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I recommend:
It was an ancient custom in the funerals, as well as in the triumphs, of the Romans, that the voice of praise should be corrected by that of satire and ridicule; and, that in the midst of the splendid pageants, which displayed the glory of the living or of the dead, their imperfections should not be concealed from the eyes of the world. This custom was practised in the funeral of Julian [the Apostate]. (more…)
Despite the Returning Officer Robert Peden’s words “Voting in the referendum is easy”, I am conflicted about how and whether to vote. Smacking is not necessarily abuse, and the current law is bad law. But New Zealand’s problem with violence against children is shameful, and the law is likely to have a good effect: gradually changing the culture so that physical abuse becomes less acceptable. So I don’t want to see the bad law overturned, and therefore I don’t want to vote No. But Jesus’ command to tell the truth (e.g. Matthew 5:37) means I ought not to vote Yes either.
In correlation with our sense of impossibility we tend to think of “apocalyptic” promises as pointing “off the map” of human experience, off the scale of time, in that they announce an end to history….Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom was unacceptable to most of his listeners not because they thought it could not happen but because they feared it might, and that it would bring down judgment on them.
John Howard Yoder’s book The Original Revolution arrived in the mail a few days ago, care of (the apparently a bit neglected & imho foolishly volunteer-staffed) goodbooks. Treat. Here’s a cracker quote from chapter 2, The Political Axioms of the Sermon on the Mount:
As the parallel statements in verse 45 and in Luke 6 make clear, we are asked to “resemble God” just at this one point: not in His omnipotence or His eternity or His impeccability, but simply in the undiscriminating or unconditional character of His love. This is not a fruit of long growth and maturation; it is not inconceivable or impossible. We can do it tomorrow if we believe. We can stop loving only the lovable, lending only to the reliable, giving only to the grateful, as soon as we grasp and are grasped by the unconditionality of the benevolence of God.
First impressions report: Great meeting. Enthusiastic participation from heaps of speakers. There was a disconnect between the audience who appeared to overwhelmingly support a 40% emissions cut by 2020 (a la signon), and Nick Smith, who in response to a useful question from D (why can’t we have some shorter-term goals, say 2% per year?), said it will be hard enough to stop NZ emissions from further rising, let alone achieving the required substantial cuts. Smith wanted us to truthfully present to people what 40% would mean for our society. It’s not a tweak; it’s a shake-up. What’s needed now, I think, is some visioning (ick — for want of a better word): some sketching out of pathways to a low-carbon future. What do agriculture, transport and electricity generation look like in a 40%-reduced-CO2e NZ? Also needed is of course leadership at all levels, from John Key down. On the way home Eliza talked about Key’s needing to give some World War II-esq speeches — this is a massive challenge, we will need to pull together, sacrifice our comforts for a noble cause, etc. I admit that is hard to imagine. Here is what was on John Key’s mind this past week (the weather, sporting events, a feel-good trip around the Pacific):
Money is a system of magical talismans that are used ritualistically. A lot of things around money are ritualistic — signing a cheque is a ritual. What makes that slip of paper powerful? You have to use a ritual to make it powerful. Rituals in any society are what a society uses to perpetuate its stories. The story of the people, and many subsidiary stories. And these stories are what assign roles to people, and focus human activity.
After some weeks of to-tooing around the other gospels for Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity and Te Pouhere Sundays, today we are back to the Gospel of Mark – back to the ‘ordinary Sundays’. Such a funny Church phrase. We’re in ‘ordinary time’; it’s ordinary Sunday #12, if I’m not mistaken. Be that as it may, today’s readings are about the extraordinary, about disrupted time. (more…)
Firstly, I would like to appreciate your Social Responsibility. And I thank you for bringing this to our notice. We respect you valuable feedback and would definitely take it to the concerned department.
I once again thank you for being a valuable and an honest customer with HP.
Please provide the exact problem description and any other information that can help HP assist you:
Nothing wrong with the laptop – I’m very happy with it in fact, and I’ve bought HP laptops on behalf of friends & family members as well. I came across this report last week, though, which is concerning me: ‘High Tech Misery in China: The Dehumanization of Young Workers Producing Our Computer Keyboards‘. It alleges that some keyboards used in HP (among many other companies) computers have been produced by people working in very poor conditions for very low pay. Is the report accurate? Am I supporting awful injustice by buying HP computers?
The first is that for the last three or four weeks there has been a notice in the parish newsletter asking people to contribute meals, which would be frozen and distributed as needed to old, sick and or pregnant people. The second is that the freezer is now full.
This mulled wine recipe worked well for me. I used two bottles of $8 Timara Cabernet Merlot, lemons rather than oranges, and a bit more sugar than the recipe calls for. The cinnamon quills are pretty expensive – about $6 worth – but apparently reusable.
This Al Jazeera item on anti-Indian racism trouble in Melbourne lists Australia’s top three export earners: coal, iron ore, and international students. Who knew?
Interviewer: Being a Christian in the army… Doesn’t Jesus tell us to turn the other cheek? How do you match those two things up?
Jim Wallace: It’s a question I’m asked often, you know, and I personally have no problem with it. One, because I actually became a Christian in my first year in the army, and certainly as Christians we believe you stay where God calls you, where he’s called you to himself, unless he calls you out of that. And he didn’t call me out of it for 32 years, very clearly. But the other thing was, I had a friend of mine, actually, who was a Christian, and became a Christian about the same time I did, in Duntroon. (more…)
Reckless love of neighbour. We (church) have forgotten who we are. Contrast society. cf Amish & the shooting. Embezzlement – the sin of the contemporary church. Alternative to insurance: communities of redistribution. Bear each others burdens. Not ‘how can we accumulate more?’ but ‘how can we live off less?’. Reconciliation must start in our homes. Whole-heartedness. Creation care. Personalism. Living on US$150/month. All having just part-time jobs so that there’s time for non-economic work.
Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren.
Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author’s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community. We have been this way before.
I’m a bad egg for starting to read reviews before finishing the book. Perhaps Wolfy will be vindicated when Alpha goes live… perhaps.
US Soldiers Accused of Proselytizing in Afghanistan
Al Jazeera has revealed US soldiers are being encouraged to spread the message of their Christian faith among Afghanistan’s predominantly Muslim population. Soldiers have been filmed with Bibles printed in Afghanistan’s main Pashto and Dari languages. In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley: “The special forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians: we hunt people for Jesus. We do. We hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into kingdom. Right? That’s what we do. That’s our business.”
The mass of the fossil fuels consumed by “the average British person” is about 16 kg per day (4 kg of coal, 4 kg of oil, and 8 kg of gas). That means that every single day, an amount of fossil fuels with the same weight as 28 pints of milk is extracted from a hole in the ground, transported, processed, and burned somewhere on your behalf. The average Brit’s fossil fuel habit creates 11 tons per year of waste carbon dioxide; that’s 30 kg per day. In the previous chapter we raised the idea of capturing waste carbon dioxide, compressing it into solid or liquid form, and transporting it somewhere for disposal. Imagine that one person was responsible for capturing and dealing with all their own carbon dioxide waste. 30 kg per day of carbon dioxide is a substantial rucksack-full every day – the same weight as 53 pints of milk!
In contrast, the amount of natural uranium required to provide the same amount of energy as 16 kg of fossil fuels, in a standard fission reactor,
is 2 grams; and the resulting waste weighs one quarter of a gram. (This 2g of uranium is not as small as one millionth of 16 kg per day, by the way, because today’s reactors burn up less than 1% of the uranium.) To deliver 2 grams of uranium per day, the miners at the uranium mine would have to deal with perhaps 200 g of ore per day.
So the material streams flowing into and out of nuclear reactors are small, relative to fossil-fuel streams. “Small is beautiful,” but the fact that
the nuclear waste stream is small doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem; it’s just a “beautifully small” problem.
I’m reading Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. I’m about one-fifth the way through this 1200-page tome. He has studied cellular automata and found that complexity can be generated by very simple rules — complexity that appears to ‘come from nowhere’. It feel consonant with Simon Conway Morris talking at the Faraday Institute about convergence in evolution. Convergence is evolution finding similar solutions to design problems in disparate organisms. Sonar in bats and dolphins, for instance, evolved independently (there is no common ancestor with sonar), but their implementations share many features. SCM says that that shouldn’t really be surprising – for any given design problem there may be only so many solutions. There are only a few different ways two-legged creatures could possibly walk, for instance. So he thinks that if you were to ‘rerun the tape’ of evolution, you’d get similar creatures emerging. One interesting implication of convergence is that it suggests there is a sort of structure built into the universe. To someone like me who grew up with six-day creationism, but has let it fall away, that is helpful — that structure, combined with the mysterious fecundity of the universe (its propensity to complexity, life, intelligence, self-awareness) hint at, suggest, or allude to a God ‘behind’ everything-that-is.
We’ve established that the UK’s present lifestyle can’t be sustained on the UK’s own renewables (except with the industrialization of country-sized areas of land and sea). So, what are our options, if we wish to get off fossil fuels and live sustainably? We can balance the energy budget either by reducing demand, or by increasing supply, or, of course, by doing both.
Have no illusions. To achieve our goal of getting off fossil fuels, these reductions in demand and increases in supply must be big. Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand and in supply. (more…)
The vertical coordinate shows the energy consumed in kWh per net ton-km, (that is, the energy per t-km of freight moved, not including the weight of the vehicle).
He’s trying to get people to think (and talk) rationally, rather than emotionally, about energy consumption & production. He gives lots of useful rules of thumb for figuring out the possible contribution of various forms of energy generation. He’s fighting against the ‘every little bit counts’ mentality that is careful about turning off cellphone chargers but has nothing to say about (say) urban form. He’s trying to provide the mental tools for people to get a handle on their own consumption, the bigger context (in the UK at least), and confidence to decide between conflicting and confusing claims like these: “The UK has the best wind resources in Europe” (Sustainable Development Commission). “Wind farms will devastate the countryside pointlessly” (James Lovelock).
One kilowatt-hour per day is roughly the power you could get from one human servant. The number of kilowatt-hours per day you use is thus the effective number of servants you have working for you.
If the Australian government simply shared its $6 billion car industry bailout among the affected car workers, these workers could pay off their mortgages or perhaps start small businesses. At least that way the money wouldn’t be wasted. As things stand, the government’s $6 billion is simply paying the bills for a few multinational corporations, while doing nothing to solve the underlying problems.
Last Sunday, after the evening service, Substance, I gave everyone who came a short questionnaire with three questions to answer: 1. Do you think Jesus physically rose from the dead? 2. Why do you think that? 3. What does the resurrection mean? The Substance service is made up of mostly university students and recent graduates. Their answers are flicking through on the slideshow here, between the artworks. I found the responses very interesting, perhaps you will too. Most interesting perhaps is the diversity in the responses to the question of what the resurrection means. (more…)
Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible ‘expert’ advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
It will raise the level of scientific things that the average person can do. People will find that the world is more predictable than they might have expected. Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram|Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.
Slide [13] To keep evil at bay, Americans require money. In an economic collapse, there is usually hyperinflation, which wipes out savings. There is also rampant unemployment, which wipes out incomes. The result is a population that is largely penniless. In the Soviet Union, very little could be obtained for money. It was treated as tokens rather than as wealth, and was shared among friends. Many things – housing and transportation among them – were either free or almost free.
Social network[ing sites] don’t grow because they provide utility to their users: they grow because they keep pushing the social stimulus button. And any utility they provide is incidental to that function.
New Zealand is under pressure to donate some of our SAS special forces to the US military ‘surge’ in Afghanistan. … New Zealand currently has about 200 troops doing reconstruction work in Bamiyan province, an Afghan backwater far from the fighting raging elsewhere in the country. If the SAS is to offered up to the Americans, [Murray] McCully should spell out what the goal of their deployment would be. We would deserve an explanation. After all, raising the stakes and the visibility of our military contribution to Obama’s war in Afghanistan would make New Zealand a more likely target for terrorism. That risk should be balanced against clear, achievable goals. Would we be there for the limited military purpose of eliminating any threat still posed to the outside world by al Qaeda? Or would our goal in Afghanistan be seen as a domestic one, to help turn that country into a viable, self sustaining democracy?
The first page of my (gmail) inbox shows the most recent twenty-five unarchived emails. This usually means email received up to three to six days ago. So if you haven’t received a reply from me for over a week, you might want to gently re-email. Actually that sounds like a counter-productive strategy — maybe post a letter. Or put a sticky note on a bottle of wine. Yes, that would work. Hmm… I’m 29. This is going to be chronic by the time I’m e.g. 35.
A new round of little tax cuts came into force today. If you feel so moved, it would be great if you’d do something interesting with the extra cash and write about it on giveitup.org.nz.
Money is toxic. It’s obvious. Jesus, Gandhi and the GFC. Your new job is to try and get by with less and less of it. Grow more, swap more, walk more, make more, borrow more, give more. Try and convince your kids to support you in your retirement (what other choice do you have?). Wes Jackson says that high energy destroys information. Money keeps you from loving your neighbours and from receiving their love. Your salary is your exposure. Give it up!
As mentioned recently, I bought and planted a few rocket seedlings. I planted them in the same planter box that last year’s crop were in, and the seem to be doing well. Imagine my mingled surprise, delight and mild chagrin to find that last year’s crop has self-seeded (as my mum actually mentioned it might), and circa 100 tiny rocket plants have germinated among the handful of larger seedlings. So now I have rocket plants to spare if anyone would like any.
You will be thrilled to learn that this blog now supports OpenID. All going well, soon it will support RPX too, so that you’d be able to use your Google, Facebook, etc. account to log in here.
I received a new old Compaq 6715b laptop via TradeMe today. It has a problem which I haven’t yet solved: the mouse cursor freezes. Sometimes when the computer first starts both the trackpad and USB-connected optical mouse work fine, then after a short time either or both will respond jerkily, and then stop moving altogether. Even after the cursor has stopped moving, the trackpad buttons still work. I’ve updated the video driver (ATI Radeon Mobility x1250) and uninstalled mouse drivers from Device Manager, but to no avail. Suggestions welcome.
Global Recession; An opportunity to create a more sustainable and desirable future
13 March 2009
Robert Costanza
Jeanette Fitzsimons:
[lots of claps]
300 respondees on a Friday night – pretty good.
[Very warm feeling]
Bob Costanza:
My and Jeanette’s ideas are very close. The idea of using the current crisis to move green is getting some mainstream currency. Don’t want to get back on the same track we were on. Opportunity to rethink entire agenda. Anthropocene now, not Holocene. Human activities changing major global cycles. Full world. When our economic ideas were being formed, natural capital was abundant, built capital was scarce. ‘The folly of growth’ NewScientist. Oil peak. Net energy production even worse curve than gross. Oil reserves concentrated in unstable parts of the world. Climate disruption – rather than ‘climate change’, or ‘global warming’. (more…)
Fun question from Sue Bradford to the Minister of Housing: “Does he see any opportunity to simultaneously deal with the job losses in the housing construction sector and assist the nearly 10,000 people on the Housing New Zealand waiting list?”
Paul Graham: “The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid-seventies. … When Microsoft and Apple were founded.”
Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both.
CLARE CURRAN to the Minister of Commerce: Does he intend to respond to public concerns expressed about the implementation of section 92A of the Copyright Act, which comes into force next week; if so, what will be his response?
South African dock workers are refusing to unload Israeli ships. Israeli Foreign Ministry says “If these people think that by refusing to unload a ship they are advancing peace in any way they should go back to school, since they clearly have no understanding of the situation in the Middle East.”
I love HP, but their subsidiary EDS provides the Israeli Ministry of Defence with a ‘biometric access control system’ which vets Palestinians crossing into Israel to work. The system matches data from smart cards the workers carry to the shape of their hands and heads. More here. Creepy evil oppressive shits! This I found out from the relevant page at Who Profits?, a database of firms involved in the Gaza occupation maintained by an Israeli organisation, The Coalition of Women for Peace.
Perhaps this will be of interest. Since May last year I’ve been keeping a history file, which I add to when I learn some new historical factoid. Of course it is an eternal work in progress. I suppose that most of the value in it is in manipulating it and adding new items, rather than just reading it. Here it is.
I recommend Doubt (the movie, not necessarily the state of mind). Philip Seymour Hoffman and Merryl Streep. You think you’ve seen sufficient movies about possibly paedophile priests, but you really haven’t.
If you find copying large numbers of files in Windows frustrating (because a 5GB copy will stop on a single file error, and you won’t know exactly how far you got; because you can’t queue up a batch of files to copy sequentially rather than ‘simultaneously’; because you can’t pause; or because you can’t overwrite only older files), I recommend TeraCopy. I’m even (gasp) thinking about shelling out for the Pro version.
Unless you are my mother or mother-in-law, the best way to find out what is happening with the baby is to follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/mhjb That will save me having to send n-1 text messages. You may wish to pass on that link to interested older people.
If the straights were not “prone to hostility” before that experience, they might well be so after it, because they’ve got a new host of excellent reasons. The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata. It’s like somebody burned their church. (more…)
We’re moving house this weekend. I’m looking forward to Aro Valley, but I think I’ll miss this house. It’s always warm, our room is very sunny, it has a high stud, nice bricks and an airy feeling. But our new house has a deck, a garden and a compost bin. Lots of kind people have volunteered to help us shift, and we’ve got commercial movers coming for heavy stuff too. I hope once we’ve moved in that we’ll have a chance to chillax a bit for a few weeks, because when the baby comes I imagine things will get hectic for a while. I’m waiting to find out if I’ve been successful getting a three or four month-long design contract. It will be great if I do get it, because it will be lucrative work that is unlikely to require much brain power – both very baby-friendly attributes. When baby busyness settles down I’d like to get more involved with the Aro Transition Towns group. Transition Towns being exactly the most hopeful thing I’ve come across this year.
It’s been a full year. I got married. We got pregnant. I helped make some books, booklets and book covers, magazines, flyers, and posters; delivered some sermons; went to Melbourne to see Steenhofs and Sigur Rós; helped start giveitup.org.nz; procrastinated less than last year; stayed in Central Otago for the first time; remained convinced about pacifism, environmentalism and some sort of Christian socialism; went to weekly workers’ prayers about as often as not; rode two horses and got some of my teeth repaired. I enjoyed Midlake, Gillian Welch, Sigur Rós, Bon Iver and Nina Nistasia (i.e. not much new). But enough about you.
We live in an apartment and don’t have our own back yard. We have been putting a lot of organic waste into the ($1.85 each) council rubbish bags. Peelings, coffee grounds, teabags, old flowers, that sort of thing. That’s been grating on me, so now I’ve got a bucket and arranged to empty it every few days into the compost bin of a friend who lives down the road. It took a while to find a suitable bucket. Neither Mitre 10 nor The Warehouse sold plastic buckets with tight-fitting lids. I ended up getting one that used to have yoghurt in it from a cafe that another friend works at. They usually throw them out and gave it to me for free.
From the National & Act confidence and supply agreement:
National agrees to a review by a special select committee of Parliament of the current Emissions Trading Scheme legislation and any amendments or alternatives to it, including carbon taxes, in the light of current economic circumstances and steps now being undertaken by similar nations.
National further agrees to pass forthwith an amendment to the ETS legislation delaying its implementation, repealing the thermal generation ban and making any other necessary interim adjustments until the select committee review is completed.
There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
… I doubt that history will assess the Clark-Cullen Labour governments as dismissively as their critics do now. Labour’s real achievements – net government debt reduced from 20 billion to two billion before the current crisis; unemployment down to levels many people didn’t think possible; a huge drop in the number of welfare beneficiaries, especially per capita; real wage growth; GDP growth that outstripped the OECD for years; a historic turnaround of trends in poverty; the repair of a public sector that was in dire straits by the end of the 90s; a serious attempt to address our savings problem via KiwiSaver and the Superannuation Fund; and a degree of stability that we now all take for granted – outweigh any counterfactual.
In 20 years’ time, those achievements will be regarded as prodigious and defining of an era. The fact that Helen Clark signed a painting for charity, or that her car once went really fast with a police escort on an open road; or the absurd mythology constructed around the departure of an under-performing police commissioner; none of these will be thought of as anything important.
Two more, this time from Voice for Life, who care about abortion; and Value Your Vote, who care about prostitution, civil unions, marriage, abortion, euthanasia, definition of ‘family’, Easter trading, smacking, the drinking age, and the EFA.
New column added, this time from Vote for the Environment. Issues important to them include climate change, water quality, ocean management and conservation. If you know of any other folks ranking parties, please send them in; I’d love to include them.
The top 20 arms-producing companies (excluding China) for 2006, with total after-tax company profit in US dollars: Boeing (USA) $2.2b, Lockheed Martin (USA) $2.5b, BAE Systems (UK) $1.2b, Northrop Grummane (USA) $1.5b, Raytheon (USA) $1.3b, General Dynamics (USA) $1.9b, EADS (W. Eur.) $124m
BAE Systems Inc. (USA & UK) ?, L-3 Communications (USA) $526m, Finmeccanica (Italy) $1.3b, Thales (France) $487m, United Technologies (USA) $3.7b, Halliburtong (USA) $2.3b, KBR (Halliburton) (USA) $168m, Computer Sciences Corp. (USA) ?, SAICh (USA) $391m, Honeywell (USA) $2.1b, MBDA (W. Eur.) ?, Rolls-Royce (UK) $1.8b, SAFRAN (France) $222m. Other well-known companies that are further down the list include General Electric, Saab, Goodrich, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Samsung, NEC. This list doesn’t include suppliers of oil, electricity, office computers or uniforms. Lots more here, if you’re interested [120KB PDF, via Jolyon at Justice.net.nz].
As we discover ourselves to be a much poorer nation, one of my correspondents put it: “the bogus risk-swapping economy must be replaced by a net value-added economy.” That means actually making things, growing things, and rebuilding things, and that can only begin to happen if we do not stupidly sucker ourselves into a war with other nations who are liable to be extremely ticked off at us for destroying the global economy, but also competing with us for a dwindling supply of resources that are not equitably distributed around the world.
… (more…)
Yesterday I did a couple of hours of garden work, for the first time in years. It was at Castle Semeloff, and it was very good fun. Shane and I dug a garden. I sawed planks for low walls around it. While digging I accidentally killed one or two enormous worms, thick as my index finger. I think they were native worms. They were milky white, with faint tigerish markings. White fluid came out of them when they died, and they had a sort of smaller worm inside them that looked like an umbilical cord. We covered the garden in soil from their old compost bin. It is amazing how coffee grounds and old veges and fish heads turn into nice brown soil in just a couple of years.
O happy day, the first of the party rankings is in! Last time around was fun. This ranking (best to worst) is from SAFE and comes via Frogblog. I do not know what SAFE stands for, but they are ‘the voice for all animals’.
I sat on the roof for a while (about here), having gotten a little bored of staring at my computer. There were pigeons flitting about from rooftop to rooftop, and it made me want to know the city like a pigeon knows the city. I wonder if a small transmitting camera could be attached to one. Someone has made a faux-pigeon cam, but it is stuck to the ground. I want to see the crooks and nannies you can only get to from above.
How many hectares per person of publicly-owned land are there in Aotearoa?
How many people are involved in the NGO/non-profit sector in New Zealand? (James K knows.) If they were somehow organised into a big meta-organisation, could they agree on anything (such as a set of government or business policy demands)?
Maxim Institute on Give It Up
… and in the Herald, and on Radio NZ news [streaming audio; I start around 13 minutes in. "Matthew Bartlett says he hopes that discussions over tax cuts won't dominate the election" – ha! brilliant]
I’ve tweaked wellingtoncalendar.co.nz (or by RSS feed). Previously I was displaying a month at a time, but now there are too many things each day to show more than a week at a time. One day I should promote this properly, because it seems like a useful thing to have all these cheap + hopeful Wellington happenings listed in one place. I am always impressed at how much lovely stuff is bubbling along around here. Good work team. If you’d like to be able to add your own events, send me a note.
newsreader or e-reader + facebook’s “we’re related” app could tell you if you knew the kids of the people mentioned in the news or in biographies. Just saying.
No one ever stopped. Except the Highway Patrol arriving promptly fifteen minutes late, radioing the report of an explicable billboard fire to a casually scornful dispatcher at headquarters, then ejecting self from vehicle, extinguisher in gloved hand, to ply the flames for a while with little limp gushes of liquid sodium hydrochloride (“wetter than water” because it adheres better, like soapsuds) to the pyre. Futile if gallant efforts. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating. All-cleansing fire, all-purifying flame, before which the asbestos-hearted plutonic pyromaniac can only genuflect and pray.
We have a nice big room available for rent in our lovely apartment on Cuba Street. It’s $160 per week. It will be available from the end of next week. If you can think of anyone who might like to live with Eliza and I (and a small baby from January), please ask them to contact me. Thanks 1 million.
My church is fun. I talked to some people there. One person I talked to is currently reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Genesis concurrently. Another is a probation officer who cares about restorative justice. Someone else spends their time studying Southern Baptists. D and I have kicked around the idea of having a series of brown bag sessions. The idea would be for parishioners who’re working on interesting things, or reading interesting things, to give short presentations followed by general discussion. This would be a. interesting, b. improve community connections and c. counter the fractured nature of our lives.
I recall Walsh and Keesmaat said you can learn more about a person’s ‘worldview’ by poring through their rubbish than by perusing the books on their shelves. But either way: 30cm of floss. Lemon husk. Old takeaway container (#5 plastic). Old takeaway container (#2 – recycled). Broken wine glass and paper wrapping. Paper bag that a muffin came in. Tea bag. Pear core. Toothpick. A4 x4 (recycled). Carrot ends. Beer bottle (recycled). Library receipt (recycled).
Four pages of A4, stapled (Schlabach article on Yoder). Lemon husk. Banana peel. Pear core. Mandarin peels. Sandwich wrapping. Broccoli end. Sushi packages (7pcs, mostly plastic). Wine bottle (recycled). Courier envelope (recyclable (type 4) but not in Wellington). Used tea bags. Dead leaves from potplants.
It was a good day today. In the morning I continued to learn to edit. The book I’m working on is quite hard going and full of academia-speak. At lunchtime I went out with a happy little crew and a mini-DV camera. We recorded a couple of dozen vox pops, asking people what they’d do if they were given $60 a week to make the world a better place. I think we got a lot of good footage. This is for giveitup.org.nz, which ought to be live by the start of September. In the evening, Eliza and Isis and I went to Drinking Liberally to hear Trevor Mallard speak. He made a good impression on us (at least on Eliza and I — Isis wasn’t paying a lot of attention). He was down to earth. He wasn’t always on message. He wants to do what’s right for New Zealand workers. He thought the carbon tax would have been a better solution than the ETS, but that politically its moment had passed. My mabo: he is a good person to have in parliament.
Finally I have a lady hero: Amy Goodman. She hosts Democracy Now! (which if I ever get off my bum I’ll try and get syndicated on HumanFM), and spoke at Google with her brother David [YT vid – watch, mark and inwardly digest] in April this year.
From 42collective: you can now recycle number 5 plastics (like yoghurt containers). Wash them, remove the labels and take them to Common Sense Organics, Wellington. Cyclops (the yoghurt-making outfit) will take them to Auckland to be recycled.
Interesting questions from recently-returned missionaries to Tanzania at church tonight: 1. What are things that encourage you about the church in NZ? 2. What are the challenges? 3. How can you contribute to meeting the challenges?
1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.
4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
Wendell Berry said, “We’re members of each other, everything, all of us. And the difference is not in who is and who ain’t, but who knows it and who don’t.”
I recommend John Pilger’s documentary The War on Democracy. It’s about the adventures of the US in Latin America. The basic idea is that the US has done whatever it feels it needs to do to further its ‘national interests’, including supporting coups of democratically-elected leaders. Pilger is a little simplistic, too easily concluding that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (Chavez, Castro), but he’s still mostly spot on.
The depressing thing is that even though National have said absolutely nothing of interest in the election campaign to date (please correct me if I am wrong), they are still likely to be running the show by the end of the year.
Christian faith is inescapably rooted in biblical tradition. But the Bible isn’t a series of knock-down propositions. It is a set of living, dynamic, troubling, inspiring and disturbing accounts of the ways of God among wayward people across the centuries. For Christians its interpretative core is the Gospels. They are, by their nature, diverse rather than singular. They speak of a God of unutterable grace who, in Jesus, turns upside-down every expectation of the conventionally religious. In Christ nothing we thought we knew about God, the world or ourselves remains untransformed. But, (more…)
I admit it, TVNZ7 makes me want to watch TV. I am watching the Kingmaker debate at the moment. It’s got a stupid structure — following the results of some bullshit poll or other — but I still feel like I’m getting a good feeling for what the minor parties stand for. Rodney Hyde is more thoughtful than I expected, but in the end doesn’t really have much of interest to say. Peter Dunne is trim milk. Pita Sharples makes me interested in the Maori party’s consultation process. Mr Anderton is completely worth keeping in parliament. Jeanette Fitzsimons is really thoroughly great.
I’m so glad we’ve got MMP. It’s good for politics (in the sense of public deliberation about public goods).
Translation of the title page of The Starry Messenger that appears in Edward Tufte’s (best) book (of all time), Envisioning Information:
Unfolding great and surpassingly wondrous sights, and offering everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the phenomena observed by Galileo Galilei, a Gentleman of Florence, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Padua, with the aid of a telescope, lately invented by him, on the surface of the moon, an innumerable number of fixed stars, the Milky Way, and Nebulous Stars, and above all in four planets swiftly revolving around the planet Jupiter and at different distances and periods, and known to no one before this day, the author recently discovered them and decided to call them The Medicean Stars. Venice. Published by Thomas Baglionus. 1610. With permission and approval of superiors.
We saw Black Watch. It was not shite. There was nice singing and dancing and jumping around lots of clever and beautiful stage tricks and loud noises and bright lights. But “the structure was muddled and unsatisfying” (EA) and the point of the play is in my view a weak and one: the Black Watch used to fight in good wars but now they’re hired bullies. There was some reflection on what it does to soldiers to have killed people, but no hint that we should all give up the whole shooting match.
from second episode of the best documentary in the world, The Century of the Self:
My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. The problem is not to undo suffering, or to wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to ‘cure’ ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call ‘happiness’. There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him – of defining him, rather than letting him go. It’s part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.
My goal in The Caveman Mystique is to encourage the average non-academic person to question the authority of science, particularly the “scientific” claims of evolutionary psychologists talking about human behavior and sexual desire and especially such claims discussed in the popular press. We must understand that those claims are loaded with values and are far from neutral and objective.
Trust me I’ve been doing it for ages. Economy is going well. Achievements: Kiwisaver, Working for Families, big investments in education, health, policing, infrastructure. Sustainability! Sustainability! Things have to be built to last. In economics, environment, society and culture. We want to kick the carbon habit. Those who denied climate change look silly now (don’t vote National). NZ has to work to maintain clean green image, position ourselves for overseas ethical consumers. Balance is needed (don’t vote Green). The current social ills are due to Ruth Richardson’s 1991 Budget, and we’re working on fixing them. We’ve done lots for business, education (from early childhood up). We want to keep under-18s in school or training. We have no hidden agendas, we’re experienced, we’re stable, we work for the whole community, not just a part.
Sorry it’s a bit longer – but then, she had more to say.
NZers used to be rich. We’re slipping way behind. Labour’s fault. Groceries, gas, and houses are getting expensive. Australians have better wages and tax cuts. Carbon emissions are going up. The underclass continues to grow. National will be tough. Many youth are in trouble. Many on welfare, many idle, many violent. We’ll make sure they’re all in training or work. We’ll give the Youth Court more power, and fund ‘fresh start programmes’. National is positive & pragmatic. We face facts. We have high expectations. We’ll move on from the tired debates of the past. NZers deserve better.
[There is] a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.
Wendell Berry said:
I think that human dignity … depends on not knowing everything. I think that you and I have a measure of dignity and are granted a measure of dignity because just anybody cannot presume to understand us entirely, and that dignity, that mystery, seems to me to be infinitely worth protecting.
Thanks for coming to the engagement party. We had a ten out of ten time.
When talent emerges it is a sin not to cup your hands around it and help it on. That’s about all I think one learns from the study of history, or the decline of cultures: somebody needed to help somebody a little more.
Stanley Hauerwas quoted his friend Enda McDonagh as saying “I am neither a pacifist nor a just war theorist, but a disciple of Jesus.” This is good because it is less abstract than the two alternatives, it stops one separating ‘convictions’ from practice, and it helps one think in terms of attempts and process rather than achievements, engendering humility.
Robert Pirsig, in Lila: “Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear.”
Wes Jackson, speaking at Duke Divinity School, in conversation with Wendell Berry, quoting Ben W Smith: “We need wilderness as the standard against which to judge our agricultural practices.”
From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals (via Kim Stanley Robinperson):
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
I have ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice, the law of suffering. The Rishis who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence were greater geniuses than Newton, greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms they realized their uselessness and taught a weary world that salvation lay not through violence but through nonviolence… The religion of non-violence is not meant merely for the Rishis and saints. It is meant for the common people as well. Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law – to the strength of the spirit… I want India to practice non-violence being conscious of her strength and power…
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
I ought to be writing or at least researching for a sermon I have to deliver in three days. Instead I’m reading an excellent new interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. A quotelet:
… the word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social justice.
…the gospel [is not] that war is sin. That also is true, but alone it would not be the gospel. The gospel is that the war is over. Not merely that you ought to love your enemy. Not merely that if you have a ‘born again experience’, some of your hateful feelings will go away and you maybe can love. Not merely that if you deal with your enemies lovingly enough, some of them will become friendly. All of that is true, but it is not the gospel. The gospel is that everyone being loved by God must be my beloved too, even if they consider me their enemy, even if their interests clash with mine.
I read in the DomPost today that Transmission Gully is supposed to cost $955m. If my calculations (based on the NLTP) are correct, that’s about eight times more than the entire government spending on public transport planned for Wellington next year. Which is stupid. We could write to Fran Wilde about it.
From a review of The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey:
For the last generation, we’ve been admonished to lock “utopia” in the attic of historical nightmares and dwell within the cheerfully commercial boundaries of the capitalist imagination. It’s been busy and entertaining and, until recently, it’s been safe. The poor were forgotten or chastised, the critics were stifled or bribed, and the billions in the slums of globalization’s wake were silenced with promises and missiles. But as Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums with grim and austere eloquence, “the gods of chaos are on their side.”
Said Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America:
There is no philosopher of so great parts in the world, but that he believes a million of things on the faith of other people, and supposes a great many more truths than he demonstrates. … It is true, that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but its a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.
I went to a presentation on Simply Good Food, a community-supported agriculture scheme. I was impressed by their food, methods and philosophy. I wasn’t impressed that their membership fee is $500. That would be fine if I was buying into a co-op with that money, and getting a share of ownership in the operation, but that’s not how they roll. My $500 would help them cover the risk of starting a new venture, and only buy me the right to buy organic produce directly from SGF. So I hope some other group comes along and imitates their production and delivery scheme, but in a co-op structure.
When National has stopped making political hay from the bill – no earlier than the next election, I guess – and when Labour has stopped settling old scores, they might both like to return the debate over election funding to its fundamental aims. At the same time they should find a significant role for the people who actually own the electoral system, rather than use the power of incumbency to tilt the electoral landscape their way every three years.
OK, a blog update. Thank your lucky guitars. I’m in Leipzig, in the former GDR. It’s 20:41. I’m in the hostel closest to the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station. It’s the biggest train station in Europe. I came here from Weimar on an ICE, an Inter-city Express. They’re fast: as we were slowing coming into the station I noticed a speedo on the wall reading 133km/h. Weimar was all civilised squares holding the people in and the greenery out. I had a beer in a cafe in Marktplatz (Market Square) opposite a chemist that was 440 jahren alt. Later at Buchenwald concentration camp I saw a photo of Hitler addressing a mass gathering in the same square. Such a feeling of forboding on the bus trip out from Weimar, up through gentle autumn forests all yellow and orange and green. It’s an awful place, incomprehensible. You might say the doctrine of original sin means that all of us should acknowledge our unlimited capacity for evil, but most of us, even if we assent to it, tuck that thought away and out of sight. But that’s not possible in Weimar, where the last stop on bus route 6 will always be Buchenwald. The German friend I was staying with last week said that what he loves about Germans is that Germans don’t love Germany — apart from fringe loonies with shaved heads, there’s no nationalism here anymore. I’ve digressed, entschuldigung. I’m in my hostel. I’m trying to decide whether to ask my silent laptopping dorm-mates if any of them want to go for a beer, or whether I should just slip out into the night alone instead, and see what I can see. I’m here for five days. Is it going to be museums, tourist traps and aimless wandering, or is something going to come from out of the blue?
Wellington brethren & sistren, who are you going to vote for? Voting closes midday on Saturday October 13. I am quite clueless, too busy to research, and I need some guidance. Here are my thoughts so far: Kerry Prendegast is no good because she is in league with the devil (property developers), so is unlikely to work for the common good. I’m not sure in detail why she’s no good. Ray Ahipene-Mercer is good because he was endorsed by Sue Kedgley in a previous election. John McGrath is very no good because his advertisements are utterly vacuous, his brother doesn’t want his company Mojo associated with him, and he’s a property developer. Paul Bailey is good because Cam & James heard him talk and were impressed.
A Wendell Berry quote:
Charity is a theological virtue and is prompted, no doubt, by a theological emotion, but it is also a practical virtue because it must be practiced. The requirements of this complex charity cannot be fulfilled by smiling in abstract beneficence on our neighbors and on the scenery. It must come to acts, which must come from skills. Real charity calls for the study of agriculture, soil husbandry, engineering, architecture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, the making of monuments and pictures, songs and stories. It calls not just for skills but for the study and criticism of skills, because in all of them a choice must be made: they can be used either charitably or uncharitably.
If the weather is clement we will have a picnic this Sunday at noon in the Botanic Gardens, say in the Dell, a happy little fairtheewell, before I travel further than I have travelled. You are most welcome to join us.
The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and nervous. They steal them of their inalienable right of loafing and cheat them out of many a good, idle and beautiful afternoon.
Pope Benedict, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, said
The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history.
You may be interested to learn that another 900,000 km2 of ice melted since last time I mentioned it a month ago. For comparison, New Zealand is about 270,000 km2. The ice cover got down to 4.1 million km2, and seems to have reached its minimum for the season, and has broken the previous record minimum by 1.2 million km2.
Arctic ice extent at 16 Sept 2007 (left),
and the previous minimum – 21 Sept 2005 (right)
I haven’t forgotten about the boycott ANZ/National banks business. I’m waiting for the Greens to reply to me about whether the banks are still bad. Their campaign website is getting stale.
I lay out Pacific Ecologist magazine for the Pacific Institute of Resource Management. The next issue is due to be done in October. I’m probably not going to able to finish before going overseas. Do you know anyone with InDesign skills who might help us out? It’s not a volunteer job, but it will be at a discount rate.
Today I learnt that the United Nations Security Council (members: United States, Russia, Great Britain, France and China) supplied 86.7% of the world’s arms (guns not limbs) in 2004. I also learnt that between 1998 and 2001, the US, Great Britain and France earned more from selling arms than they gave in aid. I’m not sure what to do with these wonderful learnings. (Source: Richard F Grimmett, “CRS Report for Congress: Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1997–2004″, via Hope in Troubled Times by Bob Goudzwaard et al)
The natural or normal course of human growing up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one’s parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That is the old norm.
The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a return and reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. In the present economy, however, where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation.
Questions for evaluating those who govern or seek to govern
Are they in fact punishing evildoers?
Are they defending the poor and weak, or are they siding with the wealthy and powerful?
Are they acknowledging their limits as God’s instruments who are subject to God’s judgement, or are they claiming an authority that does not properly belong to them?
Questions we often do ask but for which there is no basis in the NT
Are these rulers promoting our economic self-interest?
Are they fostering our national security?
Are they living exemplary personal lives?
Questions we should ask ourselves
To what extent are our political leanings and commitments motivated by self-interest?
Are we living sacrificially for the sake of others?
Are we (the church) living as a visible alternative community? How is God’s kingdom being made manifest in us in such a way that the world can see that this is a community that is living in expectation of God’s coming order of justice peace and righteousness?
Hot tip: In Adobe Acrobat Pro 7, I was getting the error message “You do not have permission to write to this file” when enabling commenting in Acrobat Reader. The solution was to rename the original file, removing all punctuation.
Well, I didn’t write any letters yesterday, but I did visit ANZ Lambton Quay today, and I brought along a printout of the Greens’ petition. I said I was considering following the Greens’ advice and quitting ANZ unless they quit investment in evil logging companies. The receptionist didn’t appear at first to have heard about the issue, but when I explained further said “we’ve been told that ANZ don’t have anything to do with them”, but that she didn’t know anything more than that. I asked her if there was anyone around who did know and she went away for ten minutes but couldn’t find anyone. I’m not sure what she was doing for the ten minutes, but I’d like to think that this is at least now on the radar of a bunch of people down there. Someone is going to give me a ring “to answer any further queries you may have”. So that’s nice.
Jonathan Boston showed us this more or less terrifying image during his presentation on Saturday. The white area is the extent of sea ice over the Arctic as at Tuesday last week. The pink line shows where the ice usually is at at this time of year (or more accurately, the median extent for Augusts from 1979–2000):
A poster I designed, in collaboration with Kathy, Esha and Erin:
If you want to understand the Scripture, go find your worst enemy, and try and figure out what it would meant to forgive them. then you will be in a position to start reading the New Testament. You won’t get it from ‘the text’, you’ve got to be part of a community of forgiveness to even know what it would mean to understand this text as Scripture.
