The following ad for VWs in Britain is wonderful:

It first caught my eye because is uses the music from the soundtrack to the George Clooney version of Solaris (as distint from the Soviet Tarkovsky version Solyaris). Cliff Martinez’s music (listen to the first track and the last) is beautiful and moving, particularly appropriate for an ad about night driving. While I first ignored it, the reading by Richard Burton of Dylan Thomas is also amazing:

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.”

&tBrowsing around the interweb, I came across the site “christian apologetics”, which provides arguments to non-beleivers. I find the term apologetics a bit unusual, but Wikipedia describes christian apologetics as coming ;…from the Greek word apologia, which means in defense of; therefore a person involved in Christian or Bible Apologetics is a defender of Christianity”.

An example of some of the reasoning given on the site is the section on responses to unbelievers. See for example the responses to :I can’t believe in a God who would send people to Hell:        

1.        Hell was originally created for Satan and his angels. In the future it will contain those who join Satan in rejecting God. If you reject God’s provision for the forgiveness of your sins, then you will join the Devil who rejected God from the beginning. Is that what you want?        

2.        Could you believe in a God who would become a human, suffer at the hands of humans, and be killed by them, all so that His death could be the payment for their sins? That is extremely loving. God is saving people who deserve to go to Hell – and we all deserve that. Remember that the same God that sends people to Hell also died for them. If they reject what God has provided, then what is God left to do? He would have to judge them.        

3.        Whether you believe in something or not does not change the fact of its existence. Jesus spoke often of Hell (Matt. 25:41-46; Mark 9:47-48; Luke 16:19-31), and warned us so we would not go there. Would you say Jesus didn’t know what He was talking about?        

4.        Are you implying that it is unjust for God to send people to hell? If so, then you accuse God of injustice. Sin is wrong and it must be punished. What would you have God do to those who oppose Him and do evil? Do you want Him to ignore that which is wrong? Do you want Him to turn His head and not be holy and righteous?

In essence the response is to someone who says “I don’t want to worship a god who is so bad that he would send people to an incredible torture (hell) for not meeting a set of rules of his devising”. And what are the proposed responses? to paraphrase:

1. Hell was created for bad people, if you are judged a bad person, you will go there as well. This is just restating the proposition that has been rejected in the first place, maybe with the addition of personalising it to the specific doubter. Hardly a convincing argument to repeat that which has just been rejected.

2. This one is multipart. The loving god (jesus) sacrificed lots so he could save you from going to hell. This kind of misses the point that it was the very same god who created hell in the first place. Essentially the argument in response to sending some people to hell is that he doesn’t send others. This is fairly obvious from the initial proposition, and doesn’t really offer any refutation. Then, remember that the same god that sends people to hell also died for them. This is not the most compelling argument: he is doing something bad to you, but something bad happened to him, so its OK. And while this is a pretty poor argument, it is even worse, since he is not actually dead. According to the scriptures, he rose from the dead and is sitting pretty in heaven, something I assume those committed to hell don’t get. If they reject what God has provided, then what is God left to do? He would have to judge them. If people reject being saved from going to hell, he will send them to hell. Gee, that will bring them around.

3. This is the most compelling argument, which comes down to well too bad he did it, do you want to burn in hell? But of course, assumably the doubter had considered this: it is the whole point behind their rejection of such a god.

4. This brings some whole new concepts into the argument, and duplicitously confounds some arguments. See “…oppose Him and do evil” and “turn his head and not be holy and righteous”. So suddenly everyone who rejects his concept of hell is now lumped in the group “evil”, and sending people to hell is righteous. But no argument is actually put forward to support why you are evil and why god is righteous. So someone who has rejected this cruel god is unlikely to turn around and support him because of the introduction of the unjustified labels “evil” and “righteous”. To top it off, the argument states that the unbelievers views accuse god of injustice and should be punished. So if you say “I don”t want to worship a god who is so bad that he would send people to hell” the response is that such a position is you are evil and you should go to hell.

I wouldn’t call any of these arguments at all persuasive. Now I know why it it seems appropriate to call it apologetics.

I have often wondered why we have Melbourne’s inner city crammed with single fronted homes on exceedingly long and narrow blocks. Someone recently offered the explanation that the local government rates and/or land tax were levied on the frontage of the property. This makes sense, current land taxes are based on the undeveloped value of the property, it is not unlikely that prior to this, a more simple system was used, and block frontage would be easily measurable. The consequence of this is that the blocks developed to be thin and exceedingly long, with long thin houses and equally long and thin back yards.

I think this demonstrates two interesting economic effects. First, government regulation can have a significant effect on the economy. This tax significantly impacted on the nature and design of housing. Second, it demonstrates the fallacy of composition. This fallacy is where one assumes that what is true for the individual is true also for the whole. The classic example of this is attending a football match. In order to see better a person stands up, this works for them, but if everyone stands up, then no one is better off, they may have well keep sitting. In the housing context, it might benefit an individual to narrow their frontage, but if everyone does it it would not have any effect, the government will still attempt to raise the same amount of revenue from the same amount of street frontage, assumable with a higher tax rate per foot.

Video blogging is starting to produce some interesting work. I have for a long time been a fan of Bloggingheads.tv, which now has a list of around fifty different journalists, wonks, academics and commentators who discuss policy and politics. See, for example, this “diavlog” between Robert Wright and Gershom Gorenberg on the recent battles between Hams and Fatah in the Gaza strip (Gershom is a Israeli journalist).

Another example of vlogs is Julian Sanchez, who has produced an interesting vlog on the republican television debates, here.

Watching Iron Chef the other night, the panel of judges included a member of the Japanese lower house.Given the fairly recent introduction of democracy to Japan, it is interesting that they adopted the two house (bicameral) system of parliamentary democracy. It is an interesting display of the reach of cultural institutions. The bicameral system of parliament is a essentially European invention (and particularly British), developed to accommodate the two great realms of power; the aristocracy and church in the upper house and the “new money”, merchant, industrialist, middle-class in the lower house. A structure specific to the cultural setting of the time. Despite this, that particular system of Parliament (and even the terms upper and lower house) have found their way to the institutions of Japan, a country half way round the world and of vastly different cultural development.

One of Australia’s tireless human rights campaigners, Dr Philip Nitschke, has recently written a book all about basic human rights and how to exercise them: The Peaceful Pill Handbook, which is a guide to suicide. Unfortunately the book was banned in Australia. Recently The Age reported that the book would be available over the internet.

“The outlawed euthanasia manual The Peaceful Pill Handbook will soon be available as a downloadable document from the internet via Google Books. The deal with Google Books was made in the US last week by the book’s author and euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke, who said the download version, illegal under Australian law, would cost about US$30 ($A37).” 

I can report now that The Peaceful Pill Handbook is now available from Amazon.com. It costs $US35, and while it is still illegal to import it into Australia, it will be nearly impossible for customs to pick it out (unlike the pallets of the book a local distributor would have to import).

Just another benefit of globalisation. It stops book banners.

With the debate over the Iraq Funding Bill in the US, it is becoming ever more clearer the distinction between the Republican and the Democratic positions on the war in Iraq. The democrats think it is lost, the republicans don’t.

You would have thought that this was a reasonably clear issue to sort out, you either win wars or you don’t, you are either advancing or you are not. Of course most wars we know about are in the past, and history has evaluated the wars and come down clearly on one side as the winner: when you are in the middle of one, things can look a whole lot murkier. We know that this war has been going on for a long time, a lot of people have died, but are we getting closer to a resolution?

You cannot start to evaluate whether you are winning a war without understanding your objectives for the war. With the Iraq war the purported objective of the war: to ensure that Saddam Hussein did not develop WMDs, was achieved fairly rapidly after the initial invasion. Obviously this is not now the objective of the war (and assumably was never really the objective of the war in the first place).

Now the objective seems to be about, well, a number of things. Certainly there are public statements about bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq. There is also the fight against “global terrorism”. And probably the most relevant objective, at least at the beginning of the war, was the neocon objective of destabilising the Middle East and providing a stable military base for further actions in the region.

On any of these objectives, it is difficult to say that the war is being won. Freedom and democracy are fragile things in Iraq, constantly rattled by suicide bombers and in serious threat of collapse if the US forces leave. The argument that fighting in Iraq was an important part of the ‘war on terrorism’ was only ever a rhetorical gesture. On the last objective, I think it is surprising how little the middle east has changed despite have a large US military presence for five years. If anything, it would seem that the war in Iraq has weakened the US ability to influence the middle east (the one thing they could do to really impact on the middle east – help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – has been ignored since the war began).

The other side of the equation that must be factored in is the cost, both human and financial. The war in iraq has cost of 3000 US dead and hundreds of thousand of Iraqi deaths, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure.

Even if the objectives above were being meet is this cost worthwhile? In this sense the democrats appear to see the war as lost, while the republicans seem to see some chance and/or benefit from success.

The republicans seem to be fighting a war that appear to be a long and costly one, a war that will kill thousand of americans and cost a trillion dollars, a war for the heart and soal of the middle east. (Although in this case, why did this seem to be stumbled into it?).

Phil Carter refers to an interesting article by a US military Officer who aregues that there has been a failure of civilian and military leadership in this war, and in particular, a failure of the generals to tell the civialian leadership and the public the true cost of the war, and the resources that really would have been required to win it.