Why is it that I sometimes see people write god as g-d? I know there is some thing about not writing god?s name, but g-d is a name as well – I mean assumably gods name wasn?t in english, so its some translation anyway, god is not some literal name handed down in an eveolpe from the heavens. God is just some english translation of some other name, so g-d is just as much a translation. It makes no sense at all.

This is a pretty good Jesus and Mo strip:

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2007/10/22/women/

Apparently last week there was a bit of Attack Ad to-and-fro-ing by the Kevin07 and Howard11+ campaigns.

One thing I particularly noticed was the computers used by the two. Kevin is using a Apple Cinema Display. John Howard is using, well it is not clear, some small Dell like object. He is also in the dark somewhere, while Kevin Rudd is well lit with natural light. It would appear Howard can?t do anything right at the moment.

On The Religion Report on 3 October (I am a bit behind on my podcasts) they covered the Burma uprising. their guest, an ex-budhist monk from the US (Alan Clements ) said:

I think they’ve obliterated the democracy movement as we’ve known it for the last 19 years. I received reports today perhaps like a lot of people in the world, who follow the BBC, ABC, CBS, so on and so forth, of 15 monasteries in Rangoon alone, according to US Embassy officials, had been ‘emptied’… So it sounds like the democracy movement was not only quelled and violently suppressed but it’s been obliterated at this point by this regime.

If this is true it is a sad day for Burma. I think it also highlights just how much protest/revolutionary movements are a necessary but not sufficient condition for regime change in oppressed countries. The ones who decide whether a regime is going to change are not the protesters themselves (although they are the catalyst). The ones who decide if the regime is going to change are the military – the one who control the use of violence.
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They are a fickle bunch, those members of the commetariat on The Insiders! For months now they have been commenting on how steadfast the poll numbers are. They have their four poll average that they report on every week, and they have remarked on how steady the numbers are, that nothing seems to be able to change them.

Now the election is on, the numbers are changing! And the Commissars of the commetariat have suddenly changed tune, now its all “those numbers were soft” and “people are really now having to focus on who they will vote for”.

I think they are as clueless as the rest of us!

I came across this image of the Nuremberg Rally while watching the new Ken Burns documentary of World War 2. It is a quite amazing site, all those people in a row. And I could not help thinking, with all those people, surely one of them has to go to the toilet, but where do they go?

On the news the other night, it was reported that the new Airbus airplane, the A380, a giant passenger airplane that can carry 800 passengers, flew into Melbourne to test out the facilities. From the photo below you can see how the airplane dwarfs those around it.

I read somewhere a few weeks ago about the Chinese attitude to the West being heavily influenced by their experience with the west over the last few centuries.

So I went and looked up the Opium Wars and it becomes reasonably clear how a suspect attitude to the West could develop. In the 19th century the United Kingdom imported a lot of goods from China (not the least China, in order to drink their tea in), but had few reciprocal items to trade. But rather than send straight gold to China for trade, they grew opium in India and shipped that to China with the result that there were a lot of opium addicted Chinese.

In order to deal with this problem, the Chinese proposed to ban the import of opium. The British did not agree to that and sent their gunboats and soldiers into China and defeated the Chinese military, made opium trade legal, forced Chinese to give trade privileges to Britain and to give Britain the area of Hong Kong.

In effect the British sailed up the Yangtze River and forced the Chinese at gunpoint to accept their heroin, anding over their autonomy and sovereignty. You can understand why that experience would make you very wary of handing over control over any of their industries to the West.