Number Plate

I saw this number plate on a car today:

4XX1XY

See if you can work it out. I’ll put the answer in the comments below.

Electing Judges: “unthinkable nonsense”

The Sensible Sentencing Trust is to campaign for judges to be elected rather than appointed, an idea the attorney-general has called “unthinkable nonsense”.

Trust spokesman Garth McVicar said the policy had been raised during the trust’s annual conference in Taupo yesterday.

“We need to make judges more accountable, and the only way that can be achieved is to move towards a system where judges are elected,” McVicar said.

But Attorney-General Chris Finlayson said, “The prospect of electing judges is unthinkable nonsense.”

He said the United States experience showed that such a move would open the door to corruption of the judiciary.

Andrew Ladley, adjunct professor at Victoria University, said the entire justice system would suffer a “revolt of the senses” and cease to function if the policy was adopted.

Even lawyer Stephen Franks, who attended the conference, wasn’t keen: “I wouldn’t favour it myself.”

When God Tells You to Hate

By Deepak Chopra in the Washington Post

The rise of incivility in this country is a symptom of mass psychopathology. Groups of people see other groups of people behaving badly, and this gives them permission to behave badly themselves. The same thing happens in families. If one child is allowed to throw a tantrum, refuse to pick up his toys, or talk back, the other children watch and imitate. Which doesn’t mean that everyone in the family automatically loses control. The key is that boundaries have been crossed, and once that happens, it’s hard to go back again. (This accounts in part for why abused children grow up to abuse their own children. They were raised not to recognize the boundary that protects a child from physical or emotional mistreatment.)

The abuse delivered by right-wing Christians is such an old story that we are long past irony. The Rev. Rick Warren has a record for trying to smooth the waters, but he also flirts with intolerance — toward gay marriage, for instance — and since his rationale is that a “loving” God shares the same prejudices, what’s to stop others with worse tempers from following the same logic? When your God hates, you have permission to hate.

Since Jehovah is an expert hater in the Old Testament, urging his people to countless wars, the greatest attempt to recross that boundary comes in the New Testament, where Jesus preaches love and peace. His success, shall we say, has been limited. Christian violence is as old as the persecution of heretics, which began immediately after Constantine’s conversion in 313 A.D. The impulse toward aggression, which is present in everyone, found a way to turn even the Prince of Peace into a hater.

If the story is old and universal, then the rise of incivility in our time displays behavior that cannot be eradicated. At best it is controlled. Sane, civil people have always been the gatekeepers of mature behavior and the teachers of morality. Sometimes their efforts go terribly astray, and the worst in human nature is allowed to have its way (these are the times described by Yeats as when “the center cannot hold”). President Obama’s behavior comes from the center, and I don’t mean just politically. He’s a sane, civil adult who knows where his center is. We see our own maturity mirrored in him, but for a long time his predecessor was willful, petulant, arbitrary, and unchecked in his mistakes — all the marks of serious immaturity, which is especially dangerous in a leader. It breeds not only incivility but wars.

At the same time, reactionary politics is rooted in incivility, having found its first success in the 1970s and 1980s by welcoming bigots, haters, the religious right, and the psychologically damaged to enter the arena of power brokers. The ultra-right fringe had long been excluded, and rightly so, from the central core of either party, being tolerated because a democracy must learn to tolerate the intolerant. Now the intolerant were told that their anger and repression were good things. President Nixon had shown the way with his Southern strategy, a code name for racism, intolerance of hippies, and hatred of the anti-Vietnam movement.

The tactic didn’t backfire, which struck a blow to any hope of civility in public discourse afterwards, and once a smooth talker like Ronald Reagan appeared, a shameful policy like allowing AIDS patients to die because, ultimately, they deserved it for their ungodly behavior, could be instituted. The result was that the right-wing base became used to promoting social injustice as a good thing. Fortunately, the outrageousness of Reagan’s AIDS indifference led to strong, vocal opposition. Sane, civil adults do keep watch over misbehavior; they have done so during the entire reactionary shift in American politics.

What closed the circle of incivility is that the vociferous intolerance that continues to spew from the religious right and cultural conservatives set a tone that tempted their opponents to scream back. The hectoring left is much smaller than the hectoring right, which has thousands of radio stations at its beck and call, but it feels just as justified. What will stop this vicious circle of name-calling and invective? Not the arrival of a civil President. We already see stories about fringe preachers asking God for Obama’s death.

To heal the ills of mass psychology, a shift in consciousness is needed. The problem exists at the level of human aggression. The solution exists at the level of human ideals. There are many ways to remind us of our ideals — through families, churches, the political pulpit, and by example in public behavior. When more people realize that peace is better than war for everyone, the war of words will begin to end. It’s happened before in America’s history of inflammatory politics. The sane and civil among us will try to make it happen again.

St Kentigern School

My primary school, St Kentigern School, is celebrating it 50th anniversary. My parents went to an open-day and saw this photo on display. I’m the fourth from the right in the blue shirt with the red shoulders. Circa 1981.

Strange Clouds

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

They are called Morning Glory clouds and, says NASA, no-one is quite sure what causes them.

This shot was taken by photographer Mick Petroff from a plane near the Gulf of Carpentaria and posted online by NASA.

A Morning Glory cloud can roll for 1000 kilometres at altitudes up to two kilometres high.

These, over Burketown in Queensland happen every spring, says NASA.

The picture above reminds me of this:

Huge flying craft of some sort produced wakes in a cloud layer in this image captured by a NASA environmental satellite.

(Washington, D.C.) In a startling image collected by a NASA environmental satellite over two years ago, evidence of huge objects flying through the atmosphere can been seen in the wakes they produced in a low cloud layer.

The image shows evidence of several unidentified objects of varying sizes, all flying in formation, at a very low altitude over the Indian Ocean. The area is too remote to be covered by radar.

ecoEnquirer asked famed image analysis expert William B. Davis his opinion of the image. “This is truly amazing”, said Mr. Davis, between long drags on his trademark cigarette. “I’ve drawn these black lines (see image, above) where I think the UFO’s are located, based upon the cloud wakes they produced. It looks like several smaller craft and one large lead craft are all escorting a huge Mother ship of some sort. The Mother ship looks to be at least several miles in diameter.”

Based upon the wakes produced in the clouds, Mr. Davis said the flying objects were travelling at a very great speed — about 4,000 to 6,000 miles per hour. Their great size is sure to challenge generally accepted size ranges for UFOs, which are usually approximately the size of human-piloted aircraft.

“Spaceships of this size would be difficult to hide from humans, which is likely the reason why they are flying in such a remote region”, explained Davis. “Kind of reminds you of that movie, ‘Independence Day’, doesn’t it?”

Stephen’s Stag Party

My brother Stephen:

Inglorious Basterds

I really enjoyed this movie. Reviewed below:

We had a sneak preview of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, last week at the Museum. The screening was introduced by Harvey Weinstein, and Tarantino hosted a Q&A after the film joined by Melanie Laurent, the female lead.

I will confess that I was nervous about this screening given the nature of our audience and the distinct possibility that some might have come to see the film thinking it was a serious movie about a serious history. Well, it’s not. I had seen the movie several weeks ago in a mid-town screening room. It is, in parts, stunningly violent, and it departs from historical fact in both intended and unintended ways.

By now, most people are aware of its premise: a rag-tag group of Jewish soldiers are dropped into occupied France to kill — and scalp — Nazis in dramatically violent ways. The denouement involves the kind of revenge that some people dream about: A movie theater filled with Nazi leaders and the German High Command that is…. well, I won’t spoil it.

Now, we were careful to warn everyone about the explicit violence and the fantasy nature of the film, but nevertheless, as I scanned the faces of the audience as they arrived at the Museum, I was concerned.

My worries were misplaced. With one or two exceptions, the audience remained throughout the screening, and the general reaction to the film was overwhelmingly positive. I think Inglourious Basterds has every prospect of becoming a sensational success. It is brilliantly acted, with sharp and intelligent dialogue, and is chock full of subtle –and not so subtle– film allusions. I also think that it will attract its share of criticism from those who will claim that it trivializes the Holocaust, champions revenge at the expense of morality, and devalues historical truth.

Harvey Weinstein anticipated such criticism in his introduction to the screening by saying the first words of the film are, “Once upon a time,” emphasizing its fable-like character. And Quentin Tarantino responded to one critic during the Q&A by saying, “It’s a war movie, dude.” For my part, I am perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief — and perhaps some of my better judgment — in the face of such a thoroughly entertaining and well-made movie.

Word of the Day: Bacchanalia

Bacchanalia 

1. a festival in honor of Bacchus. Compare Dionysia.
2. a drunken feast; orgy

Why I Am a Conservative on Health Care Reform by Dr Andrew Weil

I hold that nothing could be more wild, unconstrained, and downright liberal than the path medicine has taken in just the last 20 years — an unprecedented bacchanalia of excess and contempt for traditional American values.

The GOP’s Misplaced Rage

by Bruce Bartlett

Leading conservative economist Bruce Bartlett writes that the Obama-hating town-hall mobs have it wrong—the person they should be angry with left the White House seven months ago.

Where is the evidence that everything would be better if Republicans were in charge? Does anyone believe the economy would be growing faster or that unemployment would be lower today if John McCain had won the election? I know of no economist who holds that view. The economy is like an ocean liner that turns only very slowly. The gross domestic product and the level of employment would be pretty much the same today under any conceivable set of policies enacted since Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect.

In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit this year of $1.2 trillion before Obama took office, with no estimate for actions he might take. To a large extent, the CBO’s estimate simply represented the $482 billion deficit projected by the Bush administration in last summer’s budget review, plus the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which George W. Bush rammed through Congress in September over strenuous conservative objections. Thus the vast bulk of this year’s currently estimated $1.8 trillion deficit was determined by Bush’s policies, not Obama’s.

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

Continued here.

District 9

I went and saw this movie today. I didn’t know anything about it beforehand, except for the trailer which didn’t give much away.

THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME!

Go and see it. It is not what you expect.

See this movie.