Climate change — beyond John, Tim, Miranda — and even Al…

… and yet not Left as some might conceive it.

I am still processing a heap of new stuff that is coming my way, but not from the Americans. All I can confidently say is that it is worth looking into. There are names here that in my ignorance I had never even heard of, and yet at least one of these is a name that John Howard must surely have heard of — and what a gloriously British name it is! Sir Crispin Tickell. “Coldstream Guards, diplomat, Ambassador to Mexico and the United Nations during the 1991 Gulf War. Sir Crispin was warden of Green College, Oxford between 1990 and 1997, when he made George Monbiot a fellow. Tickell wrote Margaret Thatcher’s speech on global climate change…”

Hubris

Overbearing pride or presumption. John Howard’s favourite word of late, as in: Don’t you come in here [Kevin Rudd] with your puffed-up hubris and start lecturing this side of the House.

Pardon me while I pick myself up off the floor!

A Google search for John Howard hubris brings up 401,000 results, with tag lines like:

• If John Howard has this in mind for 2006, he’s not showing it - yet. But hubris? Gloating? That’s been there in spades from his front and back benches…
• FOR a man who eschews hubris, John Howard was drowning in it yesterday. First, there was ill-disguised arrogance when asked about Government’s ads…
• Howard’s hubris may contain the seeds of his demise (The Age, September 4, 2003)…
• The hubris of Howard will eventually trip our government up…
• One of the most grating lines that John Howard has wheeled out ad nauseam over the … believe the Rodent is “losing touch” and showing signs of “hubris”. …
• But John Howard, barely concealing his routine triumphal hubris, has bent over backwards to assure Australians that he has “no desire to extend Commonwealth …
• Now the treasurer confirmed that, in fact, John Howard (then a failed former leader), … the prime minister had accused his deputy of hubris and arrogance. …
• Hubris has gone to John Howard’s head, or in other words, he has “lost the plot”. He thinks he is such a good politician that he can sell refrigerators to …
• One of the secrets of John Howard’s political success is that he made a close study of … the final phase of the Keating era saw similar acts of hubris. …

You get the drift.

Evidence against evolution?

Perhaps Ken Ham is on to something, perhaps inadvertently his museum and indeed he himself do represent powerful arguments against evolution…

And has evolution produced THIS?

Moscow love-in 27 May 2007

Certainly “progress” is uneven, isn’t it? But whoever said (after 1918 anyway) that evolution was progressive? Or purposive in any but a blind way?

Ken Ham — God’s gift to atheism

Elohim said
We will make a groundling (Adam) in our image, after our likeness
Let them govern the fish of the sea the fowl of the skies, the cattle, all the earth every creeper that creeps on the earth
Elohim created the groundling in his image created it in the image of Elohim male and female created them
Elohim blessed them
Elohim said to them
Be fruitful, increase, fill the earth, subject it
Govern the fish of the sea, the fowl of the skies every beast that creeps on the earth
Elohim said,
Here I give you all plants seeding seed upon the face of all the earth and every tree with tree-fruit in it seeding seed
It shall be for you for eating
And for every beast of the earth for every fowl of the skies for all that creeps on the earth with living soul in it all green of plants for eating
It was so
Elohim saw all he had made
Here! it was very good
It was evening, it was morning
The sixth day (Gen. 1:26-31).

When foreign aid isn’t really aid…

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald begins a series of reports that merit close study, beginning with Phantom aid never leaves our shores.

National Reconciliation Week 27 May - 3 June 2007

This year is very significant being the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum and the 10th anniversary of Bringing Them Home — that is a great entry on Adrian Phoon’s blog. See also my Indigenous Australians page and a posts search here under the word indigenous. Much soul-searching has been going on this week.

Click that banner. Unfortunately most Australians watch one of the so-called news programs on commercial TV instead at 6pm. Not to worry; you may see what you are missing by visiting the Message Stick site.

You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard.

Thus does Leviticus put all hairdressers out of business: Chapter 19 Verse 27. And of course there is much worse in there, as Richard Dawkins is currently pointing out on TV, but also as Bishop John Shelby Spong has equally pointed out in The Sins of Scripture; but it is, as I said here last week, a mixed bag, Leviticus. Perhaps we, with our capitalist society, our current workplace laws, and our treatment of asylum seekers, might do worse than take note of other verses in the same chapter.

9: “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field to its very border, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest.
10: And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.
11: “You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another…
13: “You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning.
14: You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.
15: “You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.
16: You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand forth against the life of your neighbor: I am the LORD…
32: “You shall rise up before the hoary head, and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.
33: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.
34: The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.
35: “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quantity.
36: You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

So I am a shameless cherry-picker, not only from the Bible but from other philosophies and traditions as well. Rather like a Quaker or a Buddhist, I see the Spirit of God anywhere and everywhere, but nowhere exclusively, whatever fundamentalists may like to believe. Or I could be more pretentious and say I am postmodern, a spiritual flaneur. Nothing wrong with that either; I refuse to be bullied into the certainties of others, even those of Dawkins.

Not many more Lord Malcolm reports

Sirdan, who flies out to South Africa Wednesday week, and I had lunch at The Porter House and then went to see Lord Malcolm. We didn’t stay; he is cyanosed and could not talk to us. “Hanging on by a thread,” the nurse said.

Yawning Bread on the UNSW Singapore debacle

Recently the University of NSW announced it would be closing its Singapore campus. Au Waipang (Yawning Bread) is a Singaporean; his UNSW follows Warwick University out is worth reading.

…it is not what Singaporeans think of Singapore that counts, which is often the result of brainwashing by our own government, but what non-Singaporeans think of Singapore. It goes without saying that we’d be compared with the top, most liberal countries in the world, if the target market is already so mobile.

Quite often, what our highly conservative government thinks is an asset (”a safe place to raise families”) may be a liability. We tend to be victims of our own propaganda.

Consider this for example: students would rather study in Sydney, the city with the world’s largest and most flamboyant gay and lesbian mardi gras, than in straight-laced Singapore where homosexuality is banned, and censorship used to prevent young minds from being “infected”…

New book by Ouyang Yu

I am on Ouyang’s mailing list and have just had a notification that Bias: offensively Chinese/Australian, a collection of essays by Ouyang Yu, has just been released by Otherland Publishing (limited edition of 200 copies).

Some readers will be interested.

NOTE

Ouyang Yu has added: “postage now AUS$3.50 for Vic, 4.50 for NSW and 8.50 for overseas.” (13 June 2007)

Miranda asks a question or two on climate change

Yes, that banner is a link.

Why shouldn’t we be told humans produce a small fraction of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere each year, compared with volcanoes, bacteria, animals, rotting vegetation and the oceans?

That is in Miranda’s damp squib defence of “The Great Global Warming Swindle, a science-backed [sic] rebuttal of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.” I’ll let notoriously non-Marxist Christian Sir John Houghton, a top meteorologist and former Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, reply. You can download his PDF Global Warming, Climate Change and Sustainability: Challenge to Scientists, Policy-makers and Christians (3.9 mb).

5. Volcanic eruptions emit more carbon dioxide than fossil fuel burning – NOT TRUE. In fact, none of the large volcanic eruptions over the last 50 years feature in the detailed record of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Next question. Miranda?

Living near the Belvoir Theatre

…as I do has its interest, not that I can afford to patronise the theatre all that often, even on Seniors Rates, and technically I do not yet qualify for the special unwaged freebies they regularly offer. The next play there, however, is one I would dearly love to see: Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco. Today’s Sydney Morning Herald has a feature on director Neil Armfield and star Geoffrey Rush, both of whom may sometimes be spied upon from my kitchen window.

…”I believe this is Ionesco’s subtle tribute to Shakespeare,” Armfield says. “This is the kingly Shakespearean play you get to do that is not Shakespearean. It’s got all the echoes of that, but in a much more strident theatrical way.

“Maybe this is Geoffrey’s Lear.”

Is it? Is this why he has longed to do Ionesco’s strange, great play?

“It just smelt good, you know?” Rush says.

Lately there have been a number of lively but slightly scruffy teenagers sitting smoking on my very rough street flower bed, the one without flowers… I did wonder who they were, but a story not online in the Herald today makes it plain. I did after all hear someone come out of the Belvoir offices yesterday to call them in for “another rehearsal.” Oh, I thought to myself, they must look like that because they are dressed for some play or other. Turns out they are from Father Chris Riley’s Youth off the Streets (Surry Hills branch) and are indeed putting on a play. And that is my slightly perverse contribution to today’s “National Secularism Day”.

Teacher performance pay in action…

Yes, in Jeb Bush’s great state of Florida they are well down the yellow brick road that Julie commends to us here in Oz. Blogger Can’t Keep Quiet lives in Jeb Country.

If you live in the Orlando area you probably saw the article in the Orlando Sentinel about FCAT scores rising across the state. Schools got the scores yesterday and parents will be able to access the scores via the web tomorrow.

Yesterday at my school’s end of the year luncheon my principal came around long enough to tell that based on the results my soon to be former school should be an A. I wasn’t the only one that said “Gee, didn’t he say that last year?” Our grade based on last year’s FCAT results was a C…

She goes on to quote a newspaper story:

…Luis Barroso, a Deltona father of three, said the news added to his unease about FCAT and the use of those scores to grade schools, hold back students and dish out teacher bonuses.

He fears schools waste time focusing on standardized tests rather than helping students truly master academics.

“I think the FCAT is a little bit of an unfair barometer of how a child is doing,” Barroso said. “I think it’s tremendous pressure on third- and fourth-graders.”

Her conclusion? This parent has it about right…

Where are you taking us, Julie?

This may well be me…

A few years back SBHS had a bit of an archive exhibition; imagine my surprise when I looked at an exhibit on the school gym in the 1950s, looked again, and realised the person on the right may well be me! I put this up on Diary-X a while back; fortunately despite computer failures there and here I have saved certain incriminating files, so in response to Marcel’s ballet picture I offer the most reluctant gymnast of 1958-9.

He did hear the jazz

… and says it was good. I haven’t gone over to the hospice today as I have a bit of a cold. Nothing serious, but you don’t knowingly take colds to someone in Malcolm’s circumstances, not to mention others who are there. But he has at least made his 50th.