Spell it how you say it

Which is most likely why Lily Violet (6) spells 'actually' as 'achely'.

Emissions Trading Legislation

It doesn't matter which side of the climate change debate you're on, the current legislation being debated in Parliament is a complete waste of time:

... few in Parliament are excited about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill (2009) and its related 11 bills. The legislation is arcane. It is compromised. It will cost voters money. Compared with Rudd's rhetoric during the 2007 election, it is a cop-out. For those who are convinced that human activity is responsible for a dramatic shift in global climate, such as Garrett, the Labor Left and the Greens, this bill is a pointless exercise in bureaucratic churn. For those who are convinced that human activity is not necessarily responsible for a dramatic shift in global climate, such as half the Opposition, this bill is a pointless exercise in bureaucratic churn.

They are both right. This bill is a pointless exercise in bureaucratic churn. It is all about having a policy in place before the world climate convention in Copenhagen in December. The collateral benefit for Labor is that Malcolm Turnbull inherited an opposition that is anything but a coalition on this issue.

It was a listless debate because everything that matters will be decided overseas, by the US, the European Union, China and India. Australia's contribution, good and bad, represents about 1 per cent of the global phenomenon.

-Paul Sheehan in today's SMH.

George Orwell gives six of the best

George's six words on writing well

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Rule six breaks rule two, wouldn't you say?

Still, the whole article is good. Tony Payne originally showed it to me.

Turn your computer off

Then unplug it, plug it in again, and turn it on.

Looks like good advice from this article, "Do computers get tired?"

Studio

Ah Studio! We'll meet again.

It won't be gaslight in the lane,

But just as gentle, only brighter.

And Jack on Aslan's back.

We'll sing His glory

Around those two: One Love-truth.

Old world will give one final 'crack!'

Our hearts could not be lighter.

Dom Julian, O.S.B.

Sylvia!

Ah! Sylvia...



Saint Saens, Violin Concerto No.3, 1st movement

(facebook friends click "View original post")

Riverdance

I never really tire of watching the finale...

Anti-Islam

The headline in the SMH screams Christian leaders plan anti-Islam conference".

I'm immediately worried. Has a Christian cleric declared a fatwa? Let's see.

From the article:

Mr Nile invited the leader of the Catch the Fire ministries, Pastor Danny Nalliah, to address the National Conference for all Concerned Christians on November 21 on the theme "Australia's Future and Global Jihad", an event Mr Nile said was about "strengthening Australia's Christian heritage".

Class assignment: rewrite this article on the basis of the information you have here, and give it your own headline.

Mine?

"Christian leaders plan conference".

Words of Matilda

First heard Tom Waits sing this live in Sydney 1979.

Wasted and wounded, it ain't what the moon did
I've got what I paid for now
see ya tomorrow, hey Frank, can I borrow
a couple of bucks from you, to go
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you'll go waltzing
Matilda with me


I'm an innocent victim of a blinded alley
and I'm tired of all these soldiers here
no one speaks English, and everything's broken
and my Stacys are soaking wet
to go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you'll go waltzing Matilda with me


now the dogs are barking
and the taxi cab's parking
a lot they can do for me
I begged you to stab me
you tore my shirt open
and I'm down on my knees tonight
Old Bushmill's I staggered, you buried the dagger in
your silhouette window light to go
waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you'll go waltzing
Matilda with me


now I lost my Saint Christopher now that I've kissed her and the one-armed bandit knows, and the maverick Chinamen, and the cold-blooded signs
and the girls down by the strip-tease shows go
waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you'll go waltzing Matilda with me


no, I don't want your sympathy, the fugitives say that the streets aren't for dreaming now
manslaughter dragnets and the ghosts that sell memories
they want a piece of the action anyhow go
waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you'll go waltzing Matilda with me


and you can ask any sailor, and the keys from the jailor
and the old men in wheelchairs know
that Matilda's the defendant, she killed about a hundred
and she follows wherever you may go
waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you'll go waltzing
Matilda with me


and it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
and a wound that will never heal
no prima donna, the perfume is on
an old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey
and goodnight to the street sweepers
the night watchman flame keepers
and goodnight to Matilda too

Tom Waits Waltzes Matilda

Time for some late melancholy



Tom Waits.

Ruby's dogs

In what seems quite a striking coincidence, Ruby sketched these doggies while visiting the dentist.

Would you like to receive an e-mail prayer letter?

As many of you blog-readers know I am working with the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students at the Cumberland Campus of Sydney Uni (better known to the students as 'Cumbo!'), with a group known as the Evangelical Christian Union.

So anyway.

Would you like to receive the Cumbo prayer letter by e-mail (if you aren't already)? Shoot me an e-mail at ggordonc AT optusnet.com.au

It's taken longer than I wanted to get all of this sorted out, so thank you to people who have been keen to get the prayer letter but haven't yet, and thanks especially to those who have already been praying and supporting the work in other ways.

Cause and effect

Got to be careful:

Statisticians also caution that strong correlations of data do not necessarily prove a cause-and-effect link.

For example, in the late 1940s, before there was a polio vaccine, public health experts in America noted that polio cases increased in step with the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks, according to David Alan Grier, a historian and statistician at George Washington University. Eliminating such treats was even recommended as part of an anti-polio diet. It turned out that polio outbreaks were most common in the hot months of summer, when people naturally ate more ice cream, showing only an association, Mr. Grier said.

-From this New York Times article by Steve Lohr on how statisticians are the Next Big Thing.

If you really think 'x' is important, you'll...

spend more time on it?

Wouldn't really have thought so.

Take your brain (please! take it!):

Like your brain, the R&D department is part of a complex system that does a lot of important stuff. You can argue that the R&D department is the most important part of a company, not least because it couldn't survive long without it. I think the same thing about my brain--but I'd still be just as dead without my liver. You certainly can't prove anything about my effectiveness as a journalist by pointing out that it weighs less than my bones.

So how big should a "brain" be? Hard to say. But let's look at some companies that are generally recognized as pretty innovative, and their R&D as a percentage of revenue:

Apple: three cents out of every dollar

Google: ten cents out of every dollar

Intel: fifteen cents out of every dollar

Genzyme (innovative biotech startup!): sixteen cents of every dollar

US Government: three cents out of every dollar

The article's here, with links that back up those figures. By Megan McArdle.

Divorce dance

Well. The original wedding dance with Jill and Kevin is very sweet, granted.

But the follow-up is hilarious.



It is to laugh.

Graham Cole on atonement

Graham Cole lectured me in theology at Moore College, years ago.

He's written a book on Atonement, and you can find an interview with Graham on Justin Taylor's Theologica blogspot here.

If it's anything like Graham's book on the Holy Spirit, He Who gives Life (read it recently in prep for our Mid Year Conference), it will be well worth a read.

Says Graham:

Penal substitution provides a good example. It seems to me that following the biblical plotline, the first note struck is the Christus Victor one (i.e., the defeat of evil) in the protevangelium (first gospel) set out in Genesis 3:15. But how is the evil one defeated? The grounds of accusation need to be removed that stand against us, and the fear of death that is the devil’s tool needs to be addressed as well. The cross of Christ disarms the evil one by removing the grounds of accusation against us (Col 2). Christ died in our place (1 Peter 2)), experienced the righteous divine wrath that we deserve (Rom 5) and so, if we are in Christ, there is no condemnation (Rom 8). Because we stand clothed in Christ’s righteousness we will not face the divine judgment of the great white throne for our sins (Rev 20). Our names are in the Lamb’s book of life. The fear of death, which lies in judgment, is thereby addressed (Heb 2). Evangelicals in my view need to do more justice to the Christus Victor theme and in so doing find that penal substitution is integral or central to it.

Triffic!

Albrechtsen on a human rights act

Not a good idea to move power away from the legislature toward the (unelected) judiciary:

Let’s be clear. We are not talking about a campus campaign to save the whales. The introduction of a human rights act will alter the carefully calibrated balance of power in Australia between the legislature and the judiciary. And that single fact requires a detailed consideration of the consequences, not a T-shirt revolution.

The list of vaguely described rights in a charter will necessarily require judges to determine important social policy questions that we have traditionally entrusted to politicians to decide on our behalf, politicians who can be voted out of office if we disagree with them.

On matters of rights, where reasonable people can disagree, a handful of judges will decide the outcome. By any measure, that is a shift of power to judges away from the people.

From The Australian.

Is the internet a threat to general knowledge?

Well, was writing?

What has changed in the past generation is that the internet has come along, and the question stands: is it a threat to general knowledge? When I put that to John Lloyd, creator of “QI”, the subversive BBC quiz show presented by Stephen Fry, he gave a very QI answer, referring me to the story of the Egyptian god Thoth. I looked it up, and it was told by Plato. It goes like this: Thoth has invented writing and proudly offers it as a gift to the king of Egypt, declaring it “an elixir of memory and wisdom”. But the king is horrified, and tells him: “This invention will induce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written…rather than, from within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind. So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you are equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth.”

-Brian Cathcart, Intelligent Life magazine, Summer, 2009

How to forgive others

A superb post on the Sola Panel from Jennie Baddeley, who hasn't blogged on for ages.

Her post is called The Nuts and Bolts of Forgiveness.

One of those useful things was the realization that my forgiveness is not of the same quality as God's forgiveness. God's free and extravagant forgiveness of our sins in Christ is the basis of our forgiveness of each other. We don't forgive because we are nice people or because pain doesn't bother us; we forgive because Jesus died on a cross for our wickedness and we needed God's forgiveness so desperately.

It's one of those uncommon posts that is worth rereading several times. Thanks, Jennie.

Rudd opposes gay marriage

There'll be a disproportionate amount of noise about this, but the Ruddmeister is right when he says:

As well as his private instructions, Mr Rudd issued a stern public message yesterday before the factional meetings.

He emphasised that Labor’s policy opposed gay marriage. The party considered marriage a union between man and a woman.

That's right, and not something that would be changed by reconsideration.

Dentist as tiger

This picture (by our middlest daughter, Ruby age 8) has been on the cupboard in the kitchen for about a month now:


Below it she added the caption "Dentists don't always do people, they sometimes do animals."

That's about all she had to say about it.

Harry Seidler

Polly in the SMH letters:

My father, Harry Seidler, was not a student at the Bauhaus – the institution closed when he was 10 (‘‘Distinguished already, as the last Seidler design’’, July 25-26). Nor was his architectural training in Europe, as Brian Zulaikha of the Australian Institute of Architects says. He studied with the emigre Bauhaus teachers Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard and Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in the 1940s.

Polly Seidler, Darlinghurst

When discrimination laws become discriminatory

Peter Costello writes:

What happens when equal rights between men and women are so widely accepted mainstream Australia hardly thinks about it? Surely it is time to acknowledge that anti-discrimination statutes have done their job?

Not according to the Victorian Government. It harbours the view that discrimination has got sophisticated – so hard to find under current law – that we must widen the law to catch more of it.

Its Attorney-General has his sights set on men-only clubs (apparently it is OK to have female-only clubs and it is OK for men-only rules at gay venues). The Government has also put religion on notice it will come under closer scrutiny.

The whole article is here in today's SMH.

Nigerian Taliban strikes

RADICAL Islamists yesterday torched a police headquarters, a church and a Customs office in northern Nigeria, as the death toll in weekend religious clashes climbed to 150.

A BBC reporter counted 100 bodies, mostly of the Taliban-styled militants, near the police headquarters in Maiduguri, Borno state, where hundreds are fleeing their homes.

Nigerian police chief Ogbonna Onovo said earlier that five of his officers and 65 of the militants had been killed in the neighbouring states of Bauchi and Yobe.

The Australian.

Please pray for our Nigerian friends.

You've got to hide your love away

And now a number from the finest rock group of this age, or indeed of any age (as my friend Andy would say)



Here I stand head in hand
Turn my face to the wall
If she's gone I can't go on
Feelin' two-foot small

Everywhere people stare
Each and every day
I can see them laugh at me
And I hear them say

Hey you've got to hide your love away
Hey you've got to hide your love away

How can I even try
I can never win
Hearing them, seeing them
In the state I'm in

How could she say to me
Love will find a way
Gather round all you clowns
Let me hear you say

Hey you've got to hide your love away
Hey you've got to hide your love away

-The Beatles

Persecuted Christians in Islamic countries

Here's a good question. Why do the majority of American Christians remain so oblivious to the increasingly bitter fate of their fellow Christians in the Islamic world? These ancient communities -- many descended from the very earliest followers of Jesus himself -- are under growing siege.

True, and true of us too. Huffington Post, with thanks to Dan Phillips at Biblical Christianity.

Two more homeopathic lagers please

It is to laugh.



Thanks Lucy and some others.

Another!

beautiful...Sydney midwinter day.

Took the girls to the park. Ruby rode, Lily scooted, I read.

1939: George Orwell's diaries

1. Gov.t advising all householders to lay in supply of non-perishable food. Leaflet on the subject to be issued shortly.

Add George Orwell to your RSS feed. A slow burn.

Crime in the countryside

Honour is due to Mr P. Kirsop for this quote:

"The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside"

"Adventure of the Copper Beeches" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes