Archive for the 'Culture' Category
Another happy customer of the Federal government.
This is an actual letter sent to the then DFAT Minster, The Hon Alexander Downer and the then Immigration, The Hon Minister Amanda Vanstone. The Government tried in desperation to censure the author, but got nowhere because every legal person who read it nearly wet themselves laughing!
Dear Mr. Minister,
I’m in the process of renewing my passport, and still cannot believe this. How is it that K-Mart has my address and telephone number, and knows that I bought a Television Set and Golf Clubs from them back in 1997, and yet, the Federal Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date. For Christ sakes, do you guys do this by hand? My birth date you have in my Medicare information, and it is on all the income tax forms I’ve filed for the past 40 years. It is on my driver’s license, on the last eight passports I’ve ever had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I’ve had to fill out before being allowed off the planes over the last 30 years, and all those insufferable census forms that I’ve filled out every 5 years since 1966. Also would somebody please take note, once and for all, that my mother’s name is Audrey, my Father’s name is Jack, and I’d be absolutely fucking astounded if that ever changed between now and when I drop dead!!!…
SHIT!
I apologize, Mr. Minister. But I’m really pissed off this morning. Between you an’ me, I’ve had enough of all this bullshit! You send the application to my house, then you ask me for my fucking address!! What the hell is going on with your mob? Have you got a gang of mindless Neanderthal arseholes workin’ there! And another thing, look at my damn picture. Do I look like Bin Laden? I can’t even grow a beard for God’s sakes. I just want to go to New Zealand and see my new granddaughter. (Yes, my son interbred with a Kiwi girl). And would someone please tell me, why would you give a shit whether I plan on visiting a farm in the next 15 days? If I ever got the urge to do something weird to a sheep or a horse, believe you me, I’d sure as hell not want to tell anyone! Well, I have to go now, ’cause I have to go to the other end of the city, and get another fucking copy of my birth certificate, and to part with another $80 for the privilege of accessing MY OWN INFORMATION! Would it be so complicated to have all the services in the same spot, to assist in the issuance of a new passport on the same day?? Nooooo.. That’d be too fucking easy and makes far too much sense. You would much prefer to have us running all over the place like chickens with our fucking heads cut off, and then having to find some high society wanker to confirm that it’s really me in the goddamn photo! You know the photo.the one where we’re not allowed to smile?! …you fucking morons
Signed – An Irate Australian Citizen.
P.S Remember what I said above about the picture, and getting someone in high-society to confirm that it’s me? Well, my family has been in this country since before 1850! In 1856, one of my forefathers took up arms with Peter Lalor. (You do remember the Eureka Stockade!!) I have also served in both the CMF and regular Army something over 30 years (I went to Vietnam in 1967), and still have high security clearances. I’m also a personal friend of the president of the RSL.. And Lt General Peter Cosgrove sends me a Christmas card each year.
However, your rules require that I have to get someone ‘important’ to verify who I am; You know.. Someone like my doctor; WHO WAS BORN AND RAISED IN FUCKING PAKISTAN!!!……a country where they either assassinate or hang their ex-Prime Ministers, and are suspended from the commonwealth for not having the ‘right sort of government.’ You are all Fucking idiots.
February 12 2009 | Culture and Humour | 1 Comment »
Just To Provide A Context.
The Southern states are burning
The Northern states are in flood
The country is at war
We are in the worst economic crisis since the great depression
February 09 2009 | Culture | No Comments »
Watch Out For The Puns, They Bite.
I figure I would amuse myself with these for a while just to annoy those of you Anglo Saxon European types whose source of truth lore and history is the book of tales from the middle east.
Missed that one eh? Lets put it another way. How is it that someone of European origins can recite the religious rules and names of the leaders of the Semitic tribes going back thousands of years, but you probably have never heard of the Gothic migrations, have no memory of your own cultures oral history, and haven’t a clue what the images below are….
Anyway while you ponder that, the first image is of the Pictish Hilton of Cadboll Stone . This stone has christian motifs on the side facing outward over a coast, while the landward facing side has images that were interpreted as being secular. What is interesting is that to a heathen like me it’s glaringly obvious that the side the christian scholars think is secular isn’t. It’s a visual pun, a play on words, a story hidden in plain sight.
The story looks like a variation on “The Tail Of the Dragon” motif you will see more of below, but the positioning of the stone probably also tells a story. Imagine that you have just commissioned an expensive work of art. Which side would you want facing the most viewers. The landward side or the side facing over the sea?
Before the christians imposed middle eastern interpretations on everything, the pagan artists commonly used visual puns. Perhaps to hide something, but more likely the artists were simply showing off how clever they are. There is status associated with a clever image. They would take an image and hide it inside another image so that you could see two things at once. Commonly faces it seems. You look at a design and suddenly see face staring out at you.
To my eye the secret is in the helmet that isn’t a helmet that if you look twice looks like a face, and if you look again could be a “T”. It’s a clever play on images. If you described it in words you would say it is an image with a warhammer “T” at the top and intertwined beasts around the border. These guys didn’t actually have the letter “T” by the way so I tend to think warhammer, ie Thor’s hammer.
Where this gets interesting is the images of Nordic stones below where you will see in content the same thing.
The interpretation the christians have of the border design in the above is of birds in brambles or thorns. The trouble is these birds have four legs and wings, so they probably aren’t birds at all. In fact they seem to be intertwined variations on pictish beasts.
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February 01 2009 | Culture | No Comments »
The Dangerous Free Ride
This one is a return to my philosophical posts and builds, or reiterates upon some concepts I discussed in Paradoxes Of Civilization. Like many of my posts it isn’t particularly politically correct, but then reality isn’t either. And like most of my philosophical posts, it is a long one.
Some Definitions
The concept of civilization leverage is the concept of civilization “A” obtaining a survival advantage or leverage from the existence of civilization “B”.
In terms of definitions, when I use the word “Civilized” I am referring to a society within which the principal of “Justice” once again according to my definition holds.
To review; the principal of Justice is essentially a “Do No Harm” philosophy. As stated it means a legal system within which the guiding principal is to “Avoid damage and remediate damage when it occurs.”
An important note here is that this is not some touchy feely new age Buddhist principal. It is a real hard cold economic reality that relates to the costs associated with a society incurring damage as related to another society within which less harm occurs.
That by the way does not mean that such “touchy feely” principles are wrong by the way. It is interesting that post enlightenment Western humanism combined with “Natural” or “Common” law has converged on the “Do No Harm” of the Hippocratic oath and “Do No Harm” philosophies that would normally be considered “Eastern”.
And like Eastern philosophies it is also an easy principal to get wrong as we in the nanny state have discovered. The relentless drive to “do no harm” trampling over the equally important concept of “Liberty” without which such philosophies would never exist.
With the definition of “Justice” we are able to see that the concept of being civilized is a relative term in which the damage incurred and caused by one group of people can be compared to another, allowing us to state that group “A” is more or less civilized than group “B”. It does not take much thought to notice that according to common usage more civilized places and peoples tend to have better justice systems.
One of the key benefits of civilization is that from the definition it means that less damage occurs within a group of relatively more civilized people than without. This means that there is a greater build up of economic resources and infrastructure with the more civilized than the less. In simple terms the more civilized spend less of their resources repairing damage and have a greater ability to invest in their own development.
Once you have your mind around this I think it is relatively easy to see that the build up of knowledge and infrastructure depends upon the level of civilization of a people which in turn creates problems driven by the build up of technology that the people need to respond to, further refining their civilization.
An Aside Into Arms
A further definition we need here is the concept of a “Force Multiplier”. For this I need to digress a little into that of Arms a little.
The term is not mine, but the definition I use is. It originally came up via consideration of how to compare two soldiers or two militaries mathematically. In simple terms you compare a naked unarmed mans capability when pitted against an equal equipped with some item under measurement. For example a single man equipped with a pair of boots has a force multiplier of 
compared to the same man without boots. being measured by the number of people without boots the guy with boots could defeat. A knife would be a greater multiplier, a gun more so. Training, comms and infrastructure grant even more multipliers eventually allowing a militaries capability to be expressed as
To the unenlightened this simply means to sum over all the men 
the capabilities of each man with respect to the mans ability with the multiplier 
in terms of a single troopers ability 
. Setting this to unity yields.
Force multipliers can be less than unity to become force divisors. For example carrying a gun with no ammo, bad morale, the habit of shooting your own men, bad leadership.
While I am on this digression this whole thing will end up looking like one of those sums of products things you played with at school
(
(
))
where you can group together various terms and pull out common factors enabling you to determine which of an enemies multipliers are shared across everything, which are local and hence what you should target to result in the greatest damage to their capability.
In the above you can see that knocking out 
and 
would have broader impact than 
unless of course is greater than .
In other words would you get bigger bang for your buck damaging transport, air power, or destroying ball bearing plants. It explains why training, logistics and infrastructure are important because they amplify the ability of just a bunch of men with guns.
If you want to play with that even further you will find that the whole thing breaks down into a graph where an army is broken down into divisions, brigades, platoons etc at each level of which the same force multipliers hold. You eventually end up with the capability of an army being the sum of the capabilities of all divisions which in turn is the sum of the brigades capabilities etc. Some multipliers come out at army level, some such as specialized training and morale down at squad level. This though is a whole different topic, but does enable army “A” to be pitted mathematically against Army “B” on paper.
You can see why engineering is pretty well mandatory in this day and age.
Back to the Topic
The reason for the importance of this digression is consideration not of the military, but of civilians. Lets go back to our definition of Justice and Civilization, but this time we will look at the damage a population group will cause. The rhetorical question is what happens when you provide force multipliers to a less civilized people?
For example the thug who likes to bully his neighbors with a stick has with the gift of an AK47 the ability to terrorize a whole district. The force multipliers increase the amount of damage the less civilized can cause. Once again going back to the definition this reduces the civilization level of those people as a consequence of the increase in damage.
And here is the problem. How did our uncivilized thug get the force multiplier of the AK47 without having to go through the social and moral development that allowed the development of the technology that produced the weapon in the first place.
The answer of course is he obtained leverage from some other more civilized population group.
The Gun Debate
It is also probably the crux behind the US gun debate that assumes falsely that because some people can safely own and bear weapons that all people can own and bear weapons without an increase in damage. It makes the assumption that all people are as civilized as each other and despite the cries of the bleeding heart “We are all created equal crowd” this simply is not true.
With this concept as background we have a far more concerning issue. What happens when a population’s ability to survive is enhanced because of the development of a neighboring peoples social, moral and technological capability.
As a basic example lets say the social moral and technological development of population “A” results in medicines, guns, transport etc being given to people “B” who increase in numbers. But the problems of people “B” that inhibited their ability to develop those same items in the first place are still with them. So now instead of 100,000 warlike uncivilized tribal people you have 1,000,000 warlike uncivilized tribal people armed with AK47′s.
As an interesting thought 1,000,000 illegal AK47′s are made each year and there are about 75,000,000 AK47′s available worldwide. Self correcting problem perhaps?
Charity An Issue
Western charity I am afraid is not good. Less civilized people can not just be handed the end result of social, moral and technological development without harming them. They need to find their own way, their own solutions to their own problems and tread their own path. They have to develop socially and morally in line with their technological development.
A concept people have a really hard time understanding is that if we in the West had left Africa alone disease would mean that today their population would be smaller, but that the available resources for schooling education and medicine per head of population would have been higher and today they would have been better educated, healthier and all in all better off. One wonders if we had kept our noses out of other peoples business whether the relationship between the West and Africa would be far more equitable today.
No I don’t like images of starving African babies. But I also shudder at the concept of millions of starving Africans in a century. For this one the concept I use is what I term the “Hours of Misery” simply put integrate the total number of hours of misery in a population over time using strategy “A” and compare it to strategy “B”. I don’t know about you, but to me a million starving people is a far greater problem than half a million.
So dear bleeding heart liberal I suggest you demonstrate that your politically correct feel good policy will not result in a much larger population of miserable people. From my view if you increase the total misery within a population then it is you who are being cruel, not I.
I don’t want to just hear the rhetoric either. Show me the math.
Was eradicating smallpox the right thing to do. Before you condemn me on this, you need to understand from your own history that the increase in resources per head of population following the Black Death was one of the key factors that jump started Western Enlightenment. All of a sudden the value of people increased, they could break from serfdom and sell their labor for more elsewhere. There were sufficient spare resources to fuel the scientific and cultural developments of the time and the churches power was significantly diminished.
Nuclear Concerns
The concept of civilization leverage is the crux behind Western concerns of nuclear weapons in the hands of nations who themselves did not go through the social, moral and technological advances of the enlightenment. The risk of nuclear weapons and advanced military capabilities in the hands of essentially tribal peoples correctly scares the West.
And all of this brings us back to the Paradox of Civilization where the civilized find it distressing to see the damage incurred by the uncivilized, but any attempts to short cut the process results in even more damage to the uncivilized, which itself is not a civilized thing to do.
The argument that it is not fair that one people have access to something and another people don’t resonates. You have to ask yourself why don’t they. Why can’t they farm. Why can’t they learn to rotate crops, why do they tolerate barbarism, why do they deny their daughters schooling, why do they resort to superstition.
Demographic changes, a longer term worry.
Another thing that worries me is migration patterns. Human populations are not constant entities. A common thought in the West is to look at the ruins of ancient civilizations and wonder how the people living there now ever built those monuments.
The answer is they didn’t. People move from one place to another. One people will build infrastructure and another people will migrate in. A fairly obvious trend is that people tend to migrate towards more civilized places and away from less civilized ones. The unsavory question is whether the decline and fall of civilization is related to changing demographics.
What was the population mix at the time of Romes fall. What happened to Aquitaine? Why is Alexandria no longer the worlds center of knowledge? What happened to Constantinople? What happened to the “spark” of civilization.
Of greater concern in the modern era what happens when over time you find that people move into an area containing the military infrastructure of a more civilized people.
Constantinople conquered Rome and used Roman roads to impose themselves on Europe for a millenia. Today our courts and presidents are sworn in holding a book of the oral history of the Judean’s while our own lore and history has been long forgotten.
What about US and Russian nuclear capability? As different people move into these countries bringing different values and culture with them does that increase or decrease the risk of nuclear war?
The fastest growing population group in the US are Hispanics. It would be quite reasonable to expect that in the years to come US politics will be dominated by the Hispanic population and South American issues will have a far higher place in US policy. Does that increase the risk that the US military will find itself involved in Latin American conflict driven by the realities of politics. Will it become attractive for a US president to side with one party or nation in South America in order to win over the US based Latin vote.
Or to be more brutally honest would you trust the nuclear arsenal of the US in the hands of a Latin American presidente. Even if you are South American, would you honestly trust your own politicians with the arsenal of the United States?
While I am on my soap box, the internet has been an interesting example. When I first met it, the primary users were academics. Hacking was a challenge, but not malicious. Then it spread. As it came into contact with a broader population base the range of crime and malicious activity exploded. The less civilized think this is great, whereas once they could have made life miserable for their town or local area, the internet provided them with leverage and the ability to damage anyone anywhere on the planet.
Just a thought.
Sic Em Rex.
February 01 2009 | Culture and Philosophy | 1 Comment »
T’is the Season for Feasting, Family and Old Jack Frost.
For thousands of years at this time of year, from long before Constantine’s Eastern Roman Empire defeated the Western Roman Empire and imposed the history, lore and religion of the Judeans upon Europe , we have been coming together as families, piling our tables with the last of the fresh and the first of the preserves and celebrating the season and another year ended. As the Northern Winter solstice approaches we put up snow covered pine tree’s, decorate our homes with images of sleigh’s and reindeer and prepare for a visit from an old man from the North.
It is interesting that we have forgotten who we are, who we were and why we do this.
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December 15 2008 | Culture | No Comments »
Ask The Chinese
Well after the black tone of my previous, here is one to lift some peoples spirits a little. Did you know that luck was not random?
From a Western view Luck is the roll of a dice, the flip of a coin, a random distribution. For the Chinese it seems luck is a thing that can be changed. The craziest thing is that it appears they are correct.
Consider you have a circle of friends and go out gambling. What is the probability that one of your friends has a win and you get a free drink? If that occurred you would consider your self lucky correct? Obviously the answer depends on how many you went drinking with.
It seems that the probability of a lucky event occurring around you is proportional to the number of people in your social circle. As a simple demo. What is the probability of one person flipping a coin and it landing heads? A 1/2 of course. Well the probability of one of two people landing heads is actually 1 minus the probability of both throwing tails which for the non mathematical all adds up to 1 – 1/2 x 1/2 = 3/4. So the probability of you getting a free drink was 50% with one friend, but 75% with two.
Now consider that you are fussy with your relationships, and tend towards people who are successful and away from those that bring bad luck with them.
If you focus on “Good Luck” relationships and move away from “Bad Luck” relationships, then you are able to a certain extent to increase the probability of a lucky or fortuitous event happening in your social circle. Some of which may flow towards you. We have the buzz word “networking”, but I think our Eastern friends take this to a whole new level.
It also probably explains the seating at Chinese restaurants compared to Western restaurants. The Chinese have large gatherings, big tables, with many friends. We Westerners sit at a table of four most likely, and that quite often is two too many.
I would hazard a guess that the Chinese are luckier than us Westerners. Or at least when something good happens around them, they make sure some of it flows their way.
Where the Chinese have problems is that they try to bias the probability of luck flowing towards them by setting up debts of obligation before the luck occurs. They have this thing “Guan Xi” which we in the West would call corruption. But that is a different story.
Gong Xi Fa Cai perhaps.
(which translates as a wish that you be prosperous, and in context makes perfect sense)
December 10 2008 | Culture and Philosophy | No Comments »
Barbarians At The Gate
Background: What Is Civilization
Before delving into this I need to bring out the abstract concept of “civilization” as it is a term that is often used but seems to lack adequate definition. For now in the absence of the more formal definition of Justice and its relation to Civilization that I will write about at a later time, assume that the concept of being civilized is a relative term that enables you to compare two peoples in such a way that you can compare the damage that you are at risk of sustaining if you lived amongst them.
As such you can say that “such and such a people are civilized”, or “that was a civilized place”. When you say this, you are in fact saying that when you are amongst those peoples, or in that place that the threat to your own security is less. Conversely when you are amongst uncivilized people, or in an uncivilized place you are exposed to risks that you probably would not desire.
Whether these threats be the obvious threat of violence and warfare, the threat of disease and starvation or the more subtle threats of government incompetence and corruption it is easy to see what a civilization is, by comparing it to what it is not.
Note here I am not necessarily talking about nations or cultures, I could be talking about suburbs in the city you live in. Interestingly I find that public amenities are an interesting measure of how civilized a place and the local people are. Clean and maintained or broken doors, flooded stalls and graffiti everywhere?
The key advantage about civilized versus uncivilized to my mind is that in regions of civilization there is less damage which in practical terms means infrastructure builds up rather than torn apart. The build up of infrastructure then provides survival advantages to the people that built it. Quite simply the civilized spend less of their resources repairing damage and are able to spend more on their own development.
Consider again the public amenities and the costs of cleaning graffiti. Could that money be spent on schools or public parks?
With the concept be being “Civilized” behind us, a good way to define a “Civilization” seems to be that a Civilization is a collection of people with more or less the same standards of Civilized behavior, who all contribute in one way or another to the collection itself. In simple terms a “Principal of Fair Exchange” holds. Note the key word contribute here as this is important.
Keep in mind that the concept of being “Civilized” is a relative rather than absolute term, you may think you are “Civilized”, others perhaps do not.
This by the way does not include the concept of “civilized” as used by the the chardonnay liberals who will call the people they visited on their latest overseas jaunt “civilized” because the people are “nice” and smile lots, while the tourist is reliant upon the medical, legal, military, educational and social support infrastructure of their home country. Nice place to visit, but wouldn’t want to live there? Think about why.
With these concepts in mind what are the Paradoxes of Civilization?
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November 25 2008 | Culture and Philosophy | No Comments »
World War 2 – What Was That?
I kid you not. I was in a cab yesterday on the way to work and as is common in this day and age talk turned to the economy. As could be predicted when asked what I thought was happening I got on my “baby boomers are just getting old” soap box.
The wierd thing was that this guy didn’t know what baby boomers were. OK so his English was not good, so I thought perhaps in his culture they use a different word. Nope still not understand. You know “soldiers all come home at the same time? happy to see the wife”. Nope no comprehension.
The problem when I got to the bottom of it amazed me
It turned out that the guy – in his thirties I would guess – had never heard of World War 2. He understood the “happy to see wife” bit alright, just had no idea why so many men came home at once. Now I was sure that India was involved in WW2 and on checking surely enough there are about thirty Victoria Cross recipients listed – which is a lot, Australians earned about 20 – so it could not be a case of the world seen from Anglo eyes and me being at fault assuming things are important that other nations consider irrelevant.
How can that be? How can someone not know what World War 2 was. Particularly in this ANZAC infatuated country with War memorials in every town square?
Perhaps from an Indian view partition and independence are more relevant. He probably could have talked all day on that if I had asked.
Just don’t know, wierd in fact.
November 21 2008 | Culture | No Comments »
