An imaginary conversations between a US citizen and a Cuban citizen:

American citizen (AC): Cuba is an despotic country that locks up dissidents.

Cuban citizen (CC): Yes but it does not lock up very many.

AC: it still has over 200 dissidents imprisoned in Cuba.

CC: Well yes, but America has over 270 detainees locked up in Guantanamo Bay.

AC: Yes but they are unlawful combatants, maybe even terrorists.

CC: What about the rest of the prison system, America has 2.5m people incarcerated, one per hundred adults.

AC: Yes but they are criminals.

CC: So we have 270 dissidents locked up, but you have one in every hundred adults locked up, either you unfairly lock them up, or your capitalist system has generated a massive underclass of criminals. It is bad either way.

From this I am not attempting to draw a complete moral equivalence between the US and Cuba. However I am trying to demonstrate that the moral stance of an individual can be, and usually is, influenced by the culture in which it occurs.

If you remember the statue “Crouching Boy” that was the Australia entry in the 2001 Venice Biennale, you might like this look at this site covering other works of his.

I do like Germany, although I often find it hard to figure out exactly what it is I like. But when I see a factory like this one I understand.

Some elements of the Right in the US have been distressed by the neutral point of view of Wikipedia that they have created a new wiki: Conservapedia.

in the description of Conservapedia it is described as

Conservapedia is a clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth. We do not allow liberal bias to deceive and distort here. Founded initially in November 2006 as a way to educate advanced, college-bound homeschoolers…The starting point for increasing your knowledge, your faith and the well-being of you and those around you is to understand concepts better…No other encyclopedic resource on the internet is free of corruption by liberal untruths.

In How Conservapedia Differs from Wikipedia, they identify some of the key differences:

We do not attempt to be neutral to all points of view. We are neutral to the facts. If a group is a terrorist group, then we use the label “terrorist” but Wikipedia will use the “neutral” term “militant”.
We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts. Wikipedia editors who are far more liberal than the American public frequently censor factual information. Conservapedia does not censor any facts that comport with the basic rules.

This makes for a sometime bizarre website that can at times be hilarious as their entire view of the world is shifted rightward. There are lots of pages to see this, for example the page on Evolution, which manages to have pictures of not only Charles Darwin, but also Lysenko, Stalin and Hitler.

To give an example of Conservapedia I thought it might be worth having a look at the Barack Obama page to see what they say.

The first problem is in the first paragraph:

In 2007, Obama was the most liberal Senator.

This was certainly the conclusion of one magazine, there of course have been counter arguments to this claim, but to Conservapedia, because it fits their ideological view it is now a fact. In contrast Wikipedia reports this “fact” thus:

the National Journal ranked him as the “most liberal” senator based on an assessment of selected votes during 2007.

IT goes downhill from there:

Obama has declared himself to be a Christian, yet he never replaced his Arabic name with a non-Arabic one as many do casting doubt on his politically self-serving claim.

The implication here is that anyone who does not Anglicise their name is suspect in conservapedia’s view.

Obama downplays his Islamic background by claiming that his Kenyan Muslim father was a “confirmed atheist” before Obama was born, but in fact less than 1% of Kenyans are atheists, agnostics or non-religious.

This is an attempt to make Obama’s claim suspect, but of course there are 32.5m Kenyans, so there are 325,000 atheists in Kenya, it is not so unlikely his father was one of those.

Obama wore an American flag lapel pin after 9/11, but later stopped wearing it without adequate explanation.

We are now descending into quite clear distortions of the truth, for Obama did provide an explanation for not wearing a lapel pin:

You know, the truth is that right after 9/11 I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest, instead I’m gonna’ try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.

It is only Conservapedia which has somehow classified this an not “adequate”. Certainly, this type of editorialising is not within the rules of Wikipedia, which is why it is biased against conservative “facts”.

And of course the article goes on in a similar vein. In many ways it is funny, but also quite disturbing.

This ad was shown on the Gruen Transfer last week, as an ad that won the 2007 best ad competition.

It is a good ad, well, maybe not a good ad (given that is about selling product and I have no idea how successful it was at that), but it is a good short film, and I was trying to think why that is.

There is the obvious connect between the ape and it animal spirit and the drum (the drummer in The Muppets wasn’t called Animal for nothing), but I think it is more than that. It is the sense of purposeful and meditative concentration on the ape’s face, the singular focus on the task and the obvious, primal, satisfaction that the ape achieve. I think we would all pay a lot of money for that sense of satisfaction.

The ABC’s new political television show The Hollowmen is not a bad show, but there are some unrealistic parts to it. For example this scene from last weeks episode, do you see the problem?

The public servants are using a Mac.

there is no way stingy government departments would fork out the money for a Mac. They would give you some dodgy Windows computer, because “that’s the policy”.

On a related issue, this was in the credits, it was the “thanks to section”:

Angkor Wat?

This is the ad being run by the current government on climate change, on televisions across Australia.

Political campaigning was something that the ALP complained about quite a bit before the election (see here and here).

Apparently ALP policy on the use of advertising in elections was to have independent scrutiny of advertising campaigns:

In 2007, Kevin Rudd made an election promise that campaigns over $250,000 would be scrutinised by the Auditor-General.

So now we have the policy in place. And what is the policy? From the department of Finance and Deregulation the policy [link to pdf] is:

A. all members of the public have equal rights to access comprehensive information about government policies, programs and services which affect their entitlements, rights and obligations;
B. governments may legitimately use public funds for information programs or education campaigns to explain government policies, programs or services and to inform members of the public of their obligations, rights and entitlements; and
C. government campaigns shall not be conducted for party political purposes.

To some extent these are just platitudes, but they to provide a guidance for what should and should not be in a public advertising campaign, and for that they should be praised. The only problem is that under these guidelines all the Howard governments would also get through. In that sense the Climate Change ads by the current government are no different to the Howard government ads.

The thing that distinguished the Howard government ads was not so much the content, but rather the amount of them and the proximity to the election, and these guidelines do nothing to address that.

You don’t pay attention too much over the weekend, and a country gets invaded by Russia.

Over the last few days the simmering tensions in the break away Georgian region of South Ossetia broke into outright hot war.

The region has declared itself independent since 1993, although on the map it has been part of Georgia, although after the fall of the Soviet Union the newly created country of Georgia has never had the capability to do much about it.

Russia has claimed to support the people of South Ossetia, and has had peacekeeping troops in the province.

This changed when the Georgian military launched an offensive last Thursday. I suspect that they thought that they could pull it off without Russian intervention. This was certainly the opinion of Douglas Muir over at ‘A Fistful of Euros’ who argued:

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.
So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.

They seem to have underestimated the size and power of the Russian response, as Robert Farley reported over at ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ the Russians managed to move 650 armoured vehicles into South Ossetia, more than that possessed by the entire Georgian military. In addition CNN have been reporting Russian plans bombing the capital of Georgia.

Obviously things have not turned out well for Georgia, which was a one stage angling for membership of NATO. But the bigger message here is the willingness of Russia to go to war with its neighbours. This was not a police action, but a full scale invasion of another country. Russia is regaining its mojo after the fall of the Soviet Union, and I don’t think anything good can come of it.

The Bill is one of those shows that I never watch but always feel familiar with, based on watching it in my formative years as a teenager.

There are actors who have been on the show for twenty years. The character Tony Stamp is one.

But mixed in with the old timers are also new actors, a couple of cute young women amongst them.

The latest crop includes two women who provide an interesting contrast in beauty, between the tall, blonde, blue-eyed woman and the short, green-eyed, dark-haired woman. The classical arrogant woman and the geeky fiesty woman.

Its good they have their stereotypes figured out.

SBS played an old science fiction movie, Outland on TV last night. This is a kind of space western staring Sean Connery.

The interesting thing that struck me while watching the show was the way future technology was presented in the film. While there were aspects that were obviously ‘futuristic’, such as the location on the moon Io and the space suits, there were aspects that were not so futuristic but rather quite ‘of the time’ (1981).

One was the very seventies LED style displays:

Also of its time was the green screen computer display:

The computer paper was also an interesting addition. This type of paper would hardly be recognised by young kids today, the dot matrix and daisy wheel printers it was used with have all but disappeared.

There would appear to be a couple of reasons were using this technology in the film, the most obvious one being the very technological constraints of the show. The production of futuristic buildings and environments is relatively simple through modelling and filming effects, the more specific technology is more difficult to reproduce. What does a futuristic computer look like, and in any case how do you create one?

The other reason is more cultural. At the time, certain technology was considered ‘cutting edge’ and ‘modern’, for example personal computers and LED time displays. For a movie trying to show its futuristic setting, it is actually easier to use contemporary technology that is familiar to the audience than trying to invent a futuristic that may be unrecognisable as such to the audience.

This also explains the computer paper. Nothing says future technology in 1981 more than computer paper, even if thought about logically it is unlikely to be used a hundred years in the future.

The ABC’s Foreign Correspondent recently had an article about the McCain Campaign in the United States. One republican described the two candidates thus:

McCain in a centerist and Obama is from the far left.

It was seemed such a surprising thing to say, but was said in such a matter of fact way. It is probably a sincerely held belief and tells us so much about aspects of the US political belief system.

From an Australian perspective, Barack Obama is a moderate centerist. His policies are entirely moderate and sensible and certainly within the mainstream of the centre-left, and the centre-right in Australia.

This was evident when Barack did his recent world tour and he got on famously with such right-wing representatives as David Cameron in the UK and Nicolas Sarkozy in France.

There are real debates within the US on developing a national health care system, something that exists as a given in other developed countries.

The US ‘left’ with the likes of Barack Obama are in the mainstream of world politics, both of the centre-left and the centre-right. It would appear that on a global scale that the right in the US is on the far right of global politics. With a militarist approach of declaring a ‘war on terrorism’, invading multiple countries (and talk of invading another – Iran), ignoring the Geneva Convention with Guantanamo Bay, cutting social spending (‘reforming social security’), opposing gay rights, women’s right to choose, opposition to environmental protection, their policies would place them in the ‘loony right in other countries’.

So the Arizonian supporter of McCain had it wrong, he should have said ‘Obama is a centerist and McCain is from the far right’.

Note: Google and the Apple Dictionary tell me that the correct spelling is ‘centrist’, but I find that awkward, and will stick with ‘centerist’ which seems more sensible to me (the funny spelling seems to do with its origination from the French ‘centriste’, so not only did the French give us the political Right and Left, they gave us the Centre as well!

The Boston Globe has some of the best pictures of the new Large Hadron Collider that I have seen.

(The pictures are much larger than the one shown above).

The LHC, a massive instrument constructed collaboratively by Governments around the world to search for the most fundamental and elusive particles in physics, seems to me to represent all that is best in the world.

Note: Little known factoid gleaned from the Wikipedia page above: In the novel ‘Angels and Demons’ by Dan Brown the LHC is used as a weapon to fire at the Vatican. That facts confirms everything I ever thought about Dan Brown.