Just Thinking

It is the 2007 World Rugby Cup. The team play has occurred and then the quarterfinals. The semifinals are about to take place.

My home country of New Zealand is in deep shock and mourning as a result of the All Blacks being beaten by France in the quarterfinals by 20-18. The NZ coach Graham Henry resigned the next day. The inquiry (or is it inquisition) is about to start. But before that I want to look at the record of the All Blacks over the last few years and look at the issue of whether the best team is really expected to win. I am sure that people think that the best team is the one that won, but that isn't really true. Not winning does not mean that you have failed. In a game of rugby, one funny bounce of the ball can mean 7 points difference on the score board. There are usually a number of such events in a game. Anyway, first the facts:

1. Over the last 3 years New Zealand has indisputably been the best team and the IRB ranked them as number one team. They have a better than 50% result against every other team they have played.

2. My own analysis is based on all International Rugby Board games between countries from 16th April 2005 and 1st September 2007 determines a points ranking for each team so that if you want the expected winning margin then you take the difference between the points for the two teams. For example, from the table if NZ plays Australia the expected margin is the difference between NZs 79 and Australia's 70 or 9 points in NZ's favour. In that period NZ met Australia 5 times and the average margin was 8 points to Australia, so you can see that it works OK. Of course one of those games was a win to Australia and 4 to NZ.

New Zealand 79
Australia 70
South Africa 65
Ireland 61
France 57
Argentina 54
Italy 50
England 50
Scotland 48
Samoa 46
Wales 46
Fiji 34
Canada 27
Tonga 25
Japan 13
Romania 8
United States 3
...
India -124

2. Rugby balls are not round. This means that when a team kicks up and attackers and defenders are chasing the ball over the try line to dive on it there is every chance that someone gets a lucky bounce (unlucky for the other team). There are many other chance events in a game of rugby, such as a referee not blowing the whistle for a forward pass (we will leave that particular matter rest there, simply mentioning that such a thing did happen in the game between France and NZ and it did in fact decide the game). Anyway, for all these reasons the expected result is not really expected, but rather we expect some result in the general vicinity of that margin. A statistician will say that there is scatter with standard deviation of about 16 points about the expected result. A result will be outside one standard deviation about one third of the time. It will be outside two standard deviations about 5% of the time.

3. If a team such as NZ meets a team such as Australia and the difference between them is expected to be just 9 points with a standard deviation, then a statistician can tell you that there is about a 30% chance that Australia will win. In the previous 5 games that would mean we would have expected 1.5 games to go to Australia and 1 did so that is no big surprise. If NZ plays France then there is just a 10% chance of an upset and if they play South Africa, then a 20% chance.

4. Having reached the quarter-finals of the 2007 IRB World Cup of Rugby, it looked like New Zealand would be needing to beat France, Australia and South Africa to be the cup winners. With the chances of winning based on pre-cup match results that meant that New Zealand had pretty much an exact 50% chance of winning the cup. So there is a full 50% chance that the best team will not win. In past cups where the dominance of NZ was not so great the chances of them winning was generally more like 30% to 40%. So over 6 world cups we would have expected NZ to win 2 or 3 of them but they have only won one. They would very likely have won another if almost the whole team hadn't been suffering from food poisoning in South Africa.

5. It is worth noting that although NZ was expected to beat France by 22 points on average, in their previous encounter they beat them 61-10 or by 51 points. That was 29 more points than expected and the quarter final result was 24 points less than expected. That is the nature of sports results.

6. Graham Henry has been a really great coach for the All Blacks. His policy of rotating players has not been proved wrong by one loss for the team. It is sensible to look at the entire record to assess the value of his coaching and his method. It stands up as second to none. It is a tough result that NZ exited the cup so early and Graham took it on the chin like the man that he is. He has resigned and no doubt the public of NZ will want him gone and a new coach. There are others that are certainly capable, but if the NZ Rugby Union were sensible, they would look at his methods and keep as many as they can.

7. In the 7 world cups up to and including this one, New Zealand have scored the most points and the most tries in all but one of them. This shows that they have clearly been the best team pretty consistently. If anyone can name the year and the team that took that honour off them in one cup then they are good to have in your side in a rugby trivia contest. It totally surprised me.

8. If you really wanted the best team to have the best chance of winning, then you wouldn't have pool play followed by a knockout. Rather you would have section play with maybe three divisions of 6 to 8 teams and a round robin system in each section. There were 20 teams in the cup, so that would make 3 sections of about 7 teams each. That would mean 6 games played against teams of similar strength, no more games than the present tournament, just missing out the mismatches and getting to the meaningful games more quickly. The bottom two teams could be demoted each year and top one promoted with one extra place decided on best results between tournaments or something like that.

I live in New Zealand, so these comments are related to our conditions, but much of the western world is similar I think.

Government is always making new laws. The very seldom scrap old ones. So we have more and more laws all the time. And yet we find that when it comes to the police enforcing them, there are many that they now just do not bother about. This is not about bashing the police, as they have limited funds and have to set the priorities. Unfortunately that same lack of funds, pressure to balance the books along with the combination of police and traffic departments some years ago has all come together to make one of the top priorities handing out speeding tickets. I suspect that it is also a little more attractive to catch people doing no harm to anyone and get some quick income because most of these people do not carry guns or attack the police. It must be less attractive to chase after armed gangs who produce drugs and ruin many people's lives.

It occurs to me that government needs to be more responsible. They need to either fully fund the police to deal effectively with the laws as they stand or to get rid of some of the crimes off the books.

An example of a crime that the police do not wish to deal with, is vandalism. A few years ago our brick wall between our house and a shared driveway was attacked and knocked down in ten places along its length. It was obviously a deliberate act of vandalism. I had a suspicion about who did it because there had been some discussion with our neighbours about relaying the concrete driveway and we had not all agreed. One of the neighbours had even stated that they didn't like that wall. When I asked all the neighbours if they had seen anything, that neighbour replied that maybe the wind had done it. I told all this to the police who did not wish to even record the crime. It annoys them because they actually tell you they are not going to investigate it and so why have it on the books as an unsolved crime? The answer is that it shows that there are many unsolved crimes and hopefully leads to thinking about that. Of course many people are not like me and would just go away and not have the particulars written down. Perhaps they would decide to throw a brick through the neigbour's window some night. It might all end in someone burning the other's house down and someone's head getting split open. Then the police will come.

I think that the best way to stop crime or neighbourhood disputes is right at the start. You don't allow a certain amount of it and then when it gets really serious take some action. Or, if you decide that neighbourhood relationships are not police business the government should change the law. Define exactly what degree of damage you can do to the neighbour's place before the police should be called in. If $300 is OK then say so and we don't need to report that we can just do $400 back and see how that goes. But burning a house down would not be OK. Not unless it was a really small one.

If the government made a contract with the police to enforce the laws, they would have to provide adequate funding. If they don't then they are being hypocrites. They have to either supply more funds or less laws until a reasonable balance is met. We are not near that at present.

The same should be done with health services. Decide which problems the state will deal with and then do those and nothing more. Get rid of stupid waiting lists. They serve no purpose but to tell people that the government does not care about them. Well tell them directly to their faces, not by passing the buck. Say you can have a $100,000 heart-lung transplant because you smoked too much but not a $1,000 varicose vein surgery because too many people want them. Or whatever the rules are, but make them fair and known to all, and then actually do what you say.

Until the last couple of generations it has not always been possible for those that are not religious to speak openly and honestly about their beliefs if they valued their wellbeing, health and even life. Even in much of the world today that situation remains, especially in some Moslem countries and some Christian dominated regions in the USA. Being an Atheist is often considered lower than a thief or even sex offender.

So the idea that Atheists should come "out" and declare themselves has recently been promoted, and an organization has been started for people who do not have belief in anything supernatural, although they do not have to be Atheists. The difference between being an Atheist and not believing in the supernatural may not be obvious to some. The new organization is called the Brights and they exist to try and counterbalance the pressures of religion in society so that people without religious beliefs are not disadvantaged. Religious groups, like other groups, do try to influence governments and education authorities and even companies. Where these influences might disadvantage non-religious people the pressures should be resisted.

The organization has so far mainly gained members in Europe, North America and Oceania, but it is to be hoped that their example will gradually change the climate of religious tolerance so that in other places people may have less fear about exposing their beliefs.

To quote the bright's main page:

What is a bright?

* A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
* A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
* The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

There is also a forum for discussion of issues.

A campaign for Atheists to come Out has also been started. I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing, but do see that Atheists have often felt the need to hide, and that some sort of security from numbers allows that to be overcome. There is the danger of becoming just like that which is being rejected, and it is wise to guard against that.

Richard Dawkins has been a major spokesperson for Atheist views which has no doubt been influenced by his seeing the silliness of the religious pretense about evolution. First creationism and now intelligent design propaganda have been attempts to stop evolution being taught in schools, mainly in America, but now based on USA funding this has been taken into the UK and other countries.

Richard Dawkins is an intelligent man and his ideas on how evolution works have been clearly presented and shown that genes rather than individuals are the units of evolution. While appreciating fully and sharing his concerns, it does seem to me that he needs to be careful in his campaign. I already see propaganda that has originated with him that asks questions about whether certain things are rational. Some of those things are not at all irrational, although they may be mistaken. There is a difference, and a man like Dawkins should be careful to keep his statements correctly expressed if his objective is to stamp out irrationality and superstition. Otherwise, Richard Dawkins, good luck.

It began when Australian PM Howard passed a special racist law to deal with problems of drunkenness and sexual offenses in Aborigine settlements. New Zealand Maori MP Hone Harawira called him a racist bastard.

"John Howard is a racist bastard imposing racist policies on a people who are not in a position to fight back," Mr Harawira said on Maori TV's Native Affairs programme last night.

He compared Mr Howard's move in the Northern Territory, with its mineral wealth, to United States President George Bush's invasion of Iraq, allegedly to control oil. A similar move in New Zealand would be met with violence from the Maori community.

"If they tried this up north, we'd be out with guns. It wouldn't happen."

He told Australian press agency AAP he stood by his comments: "If I was an Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory I would feel like absolute shit right now.

Mr Howard declined to comment.

There is no doubt that NZ's MMP electoral system has made Parliament more colourful. Harawira has shown staunch support for the Australian Aborigines who really are treated poorly in their own country. His next step was when he was on a trip with other MPs to Australia and he went walkabout much to the discust of MPs of other parties. He turned up at some Aborigine communities because he wanted to see for himself how bad the situation was without media distortion. Parliament's speaker's decision as reported in the New Zealand Herald:

Maori Party MP Hone Harawira has been ordered to pay back half of the cost of his taxpayer-funded airfare to Australia after he went walkabout while on an official parliamentary visit.

Speaker Margaret Wilson told MPs that Mr Harawira's "private visit" to the Northern Territory to see aboriginal communities had come halfway into a select committee visit to Melbourne.

MPs had an obligation to complete their work for which they received public funding, she said.

"As Mr Harawira participated in less than half of the committee's business I consider it appropriate that he refund half of the airfare that has been paid out of public funds," Ms Wilson said.

Ms Wilson's ruling today sparked a number of exchanges between MPs with Mr Harawira's co-leader Pita Sharples having a go at his MP's critics over incidents in the past.

This included National MP Richard Worth going for a camel ride, when he was on an official trip and also the travels of MPs in the parliamentary rugby team.

"Has the same due diligence applied (to them)?" Mr Sharples asked.

Pita Sharples once again shows how astute he is in finding previous situations where the shoe is on the other foot. He has also spoken out about the problem of violence being perpetuated by Maori families, and gave a severe telling off to a Maori family who did not help the police with their inquiries when young twins will beaten and later died.

In the past I have visited Hone Harawira's web site and always found it interesting and thought provoking. He is a man of action and he sometimes hitch hikes from Auckland to his home in the North. He says that this is good for developing humility because he sometimes gets an ear-bashing on the way. I don't see any statement yet by him on this issue, but look forward to what he has to say.

While it is fair to ask him to attend a conference that the taxpayers have sent him to, and he does not deny that and seems quite willing to pay half the air fare, he is quite right that the issues involved for Australian Aborigines are very serious. All the problems that NZ Maori have, and they are considerable with many recent terrible cases of young children been brutally beaten to death, are many times greater in Australia.

Hone, may your efforts be successful in keeping these issues in the public eye so that they are addressed in a meaningful way, both in New Zealand and Australia.

This is not the sort of pie you can eat, but rather the ratio of the distance around the sort of pie that you can eat compared to the distance across it. The history of the accuracy to which the value of pi has been determined is quite interesting and that is what this article is about.

When I was at school we were often told to use the approximation for pi of 22/7 which is 3.142857 ... although this is a bit of a rough value being wrong in the 3rd decimal place, a better fraction being 355/113 = 3.14159 292... but the nice thing about this very accurate fraction is when it is expressed as a division of 113)355 because it can easily be remembered from the 113355.

I have always liked that fraction of 355/113 ever since I came across it as a young man. I have even seen an explanation for this one in the bible, which is much better than the pi equals three that is also claimed to be there.

These can be compared to the true value being something like this:

pi=3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 ...

Historically pi had to first be determined by making a circle and rolling it and comparing to the diameter by measurement and early values around the world tended to be between 3 1/8 and 3 1/6 and centered around 3 1/7 which is quite close to the true value. In other words the accuracy was only a little better than 1% although careful measurement can reasonably easily achieve at least one more decimal place than that.

This graph shows several thousand years of the history of the accuracy of pi determinations and there are two main phases although they are not quite distinct. The first phase was of actual measurement and shows only a little improvement over a long period.

The second phase is based on finding ways to calculate pi based on various geometric constructions and using trigonometry to determine the value. Usually this means dividing the circle into many small identical triangles that are thin slithers and adding the circumference up as the many sided figure approximates a circle more accurately as the number of sides increases.

The accuracy of Pi as determined by measurement or calculated by humans.

The second phase of calculation really got going from around 1400 onwards when Madhava in India calculated pi to 11 decimal places. However before that, in about 480, Zu Chongzhi (or Tsu Ch'ung Chi) had found the fraction 355/113 which is accurate to 7 decimal places.

Eventually some formula for pi were discovered based on trigonometric expansions and these were easier to go to more places, but still required a lot of long calculations when done by hand. Remarkably people did hand calculations of pi to more and more digits, reaching 626 digits by Ferguson by 1946. One poor chap, Shanks, did 707 places back in 1874 but made a mistake after the 527th digit.

However from 1947 onwards computers took over from humans as the pace-setters of pi, starting with 710 places in that year and going ahead in leaps and bound to 1,240,000,000,000 places in 2005. This is pretty remarkable as disk technology today will only hold the answer on the very largest single disk drives manufactured. You need something more for the working. Note that this diagram expands the time axis and compacts the accuracy axis, so the rate of improvement is very much faster.

The accuracy of Pi as calculated by computers.

The rate of improvement in the value of pi was very slow by measurement, perhaps doubling the accuracy (by which I mean halving the percentage error) every 500 years roughly. But with formula based calculation by humans the improvement became some 7 times faster, doubling the accuracy about every 72 years as shown by the trend line in the first graph. But computer calculation meant a doubling in accuracy every 1.8 years as shown by the trend line in the second graph, a further 40 fold improvement in the rate of progress.

For comparison, the record for remembering pi is shown on the second graph. For a while human memory was gaining on computer calculation, but when computer calculation interest in pi calculation was rekindled in the 1980s, people got left in the dust. There is no chance that ever again people will be able to learn all the places of pi that computers can calculate. In fact, if a long lived person spent their whole waking life reciting pi they could only get to about 10^9 decimal places which is only 0.1% of the present determination ... but by then, at the present rate of improvement, the value of pi would be known to 10^28 digits, so they would be far further behind than when they started.

References used in preparation of this article:
* Wikipedia article about pi
* Wikipedia article about approximations to pi
* Chronology of pi determinations
* Zu Chongzhi who determined pi in 480

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."
- Mohandas Gandhi

In todays world it is easy to say that the problems are so great that as individuals we cannot affect them. That is exactly the cause of problems - that no-one stands against seemingly overwhelming forces. Just which snowflake in an avalanche can be held responsible? Another view ...

…We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

- Howard Zinn

I have taken the above quote from NonviolenceUnited.org who always capitalise the "Non" but never the "violence". This is an organisation aiming to get people to think and act in new ways that help reduce violence of all types in the world right now, not waiting for the next election, not waiting for someone else to act, but each of us choosing to do what we can do now. The site is full of inspiration thoughts and quotes and advice on how to live with these ideas in your heart at all times.

We nearly all think of Gandhi as a great man, but how many of us follow his advice? There is much evil in the world today, with especially the large and powerful nations having governments controlled by very corrupt people, and this situation can easily lead people to despair. But that is exactly what those leaders and manipulators want us to do. We can instead decide that we will be millions or billions of people simply not co-operating with their schemes of invasion, enslavement and greed.

"We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways... The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

- Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is the author of "The God of Small Things" for which she received the 1997 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She gave a 44 minute speech Come September as the Lannan foundation lecture for September 2002. She is Indian and talks particularly about the situation in India and Pakistan as well as the World. She speaks of living outside of patriotism, something that I have long felt is necessary to solving international conflicts. "My country right or wrong" is always wrong. Roy is an inspirational speaker and I recommend this video. Some brief excerpts ...

"flags are pieces of coloured cloth that people use, first to shrink-wrap people's brains, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead"

"grief ... the death of dreaming ... the (absolute) unfairness of the world"

In 1989 Bush Snr said that Saddam Hussein was committing genocide on the Kurds. He sent him $500,000,000 in subsidies that year, and $1,000,000,000 the following year. After the first gulf war he implemented sanctions that caused the death of 500,000 children.

Wikipedia on Arundhati Roy.

"Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.

Literally speaking, ahimsa means non-violence towards life but it has much higher meaning. It means that you may not offend anybody; you may not harbor uncharitable thought, even in connection with those whom you consider your enemies. To one who follows this doctrine, there are no enemies. A man who believes in the efficacy of this doctrine finds in the ultimate stage, when he is about to reach the goal, the whole world at his feet. If you express your love—ahimsa—in such a manner that it impresses itself indelibly upon your so-called enemy, he must return that love.

This doctrine tells us that we may guard the honor of those under our charge by delivering our own lives into the hands of the man who would commit the sacrilege. And that requires far greater courage than delivering of blows.

Ahimsa or non-injury, of course, implies non-killing. But, non-injury is not merely non-killing. In its comprehensive meaning, ahimsa or non-injury means entire abstinence from causing any pain or harm to another living being, either by thought, word, or deed. Non-injury requires a harmless mind, mouth, and hand."

- Mohandas Gandhi

Ahimsa is actually a central tenet of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, but is also present in the West through the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors which includes the statement "I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone" and often summarised as "first do no harm". It is present also in Christ's advice to "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemy". It is the foundation of a peaceful and moral life regardless of one's religion.

I recommend NonviolenceUnited.org as a useful resource for those who would embark on a path of trying to make this world a better place to live.

In this article the question is asked Is the United States Killing 10,000 Iraqis Every Month? Or Is It More?

A state-of-the-art research study published in October 12, 2006 issue of The Lancet (the most prestigious British medical journal) concluded that -- as of a year ago -- 600,000 Iraqis had died violently due to the war in Iraq. That is, the Iraqi death rate for the first 39 months of the war was just about 15,000 per month.

That wasn't the worst of it, because the death rate was increasing precipitously, and during the first half of 2006 the monthly rate was approximately 30,000 per month, a rate that no doubt has increased further during the ferocious fighting associated with the current American surge.

Remember that is up to October 2005 and almost two more years of increased violence has passed since then.

It is difficult to imagine this amount of bloodshed. If you take all your family, all your friends and work mates, you might come to several hundred people. That would amount to the morning of one day of killing. Can you imagine the horror of that? Can you imagine repeating that again in the afternoon, again in the evening and again in the night? What about every day of every week, year after year.

And why is this being done? Quite simply because the likes of Bush and Cheney have been telling lies for money. And they got Blair to go along with them. The scale of their lies is so great that many people cannot believe that people would stoop that low, so they pretend that it isn't happening. These men have been paid billions of dollars to tell lies to profit other evil men who wish to sell weapons of mass destruction and to steal and / or control oil. What they have accused others of in their lies, they have actually done.

The following pictures represent the typical result of just one typical hour of USA activities in Iraq. And look at what America's young people are turning into! Gloating at the death and suffering that they cause. They will make model citizens when they come home won't they?

For more pictures like this go here and here and here.

I know that this is hard to look at. Imagine how much harder it is to live with or die with. Whoever in the USA does not act now to impeach Bush and Cheney is equally responsible. American's elected them. They were known to be liars and criminals at the last election. Their list of crimes grows daily and they show contempt for the law in many ways.

Both the USA and UK must make certain that they look for better morals from their leaders in future. The Democrat party is no better than the Republicans. Their leaders do not set out to impeach Bush and Cheney for only one reason. That reason is not that they wouldn't be successful. It is that they do not want new leaders now, as they think they can easily win the next election if they do not act.

Go to the title link to see the original page.

It is stated that already 100,000 people have signed this petition.

Ten Reasons to Impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney
I ask Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney for the following reasons:

1. Violating the United Nations Charter by launching an illegal "War of Aggression" against Iraq without cause, using fraud to sell the war to Congress and the public, misusing government funds to begin bombing without Congressional authorization, and subjecting our military personnel to unnecessary harm, debilitating injuries, and deaths.

2. Violating U.S. and international law by authorizing the torture of thousands of captives, resulting in dozens of deaths, and keeping prisoners hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

3. Violating the Constitution by arbitrarily detaining Americans, legal residents, and non-Americans, without due process, without charge, and without access to counsel.

4. Violating the Geneva Conventions by targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, and using illegal weapons, including white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new type of napalm.

5. Violating U.S. law and the Constitution through widespread wiretapping of the phone calls and emails of Americans without a warrant.

6. Violating the Constitution by using "signing statements" to defy hundreds of laws passed by Congress.

7. Violating U.S. and state law by obstructing honest elections in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006.

8. Violating U.S. law by using paid propaganda and disinformation, selectively and misleadingly leaking classified information, and exposing the identity of a covert CIA operative working on sensitive WMD proliferation for political retribution.

9. Subverting the Constitution and abusing Presidential power by asserting a "Unitary Executive Theory" giving unlimited powers to the President, by obstructing efforts by Congress and the Courts to review and restrict Presidential actions, and by promoting and signing legislation negating the Bill of Rights and the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

10. Gross negligence in failing to assist New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina, in ignoring urgent warnings of an Al Qaeda attack prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and in increasing air pollution causing global warming.

The above are all well documented and proven statements. Any one is sufficient grounds for impeachment. The Libby pardon has to be taken by Americans as the final sign that Bush treats them and the law with contempt.

The sooner that the USA gets this job done, the sooner they stop their country looking foolish in the world and have a chance to repair some of the damage that has been done.

Known as the Golden Rule, many Christians will know this as a Christian saying: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". It is also a saying of Buddhism, Hinduism (or Brahmanism), Taoism, Confucianism, Islam, Paganism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and others. For details of this claim, see these articles on the golden rule and the ethic of reciprocity (wikipedia). See also Peace be with you.

Recently my post Religious Belief and Social Problems received some discussion and it also resulted in me having long discussions with Atheists and Theists outside of this blog. In reply to one remark in the blog I stated:

... Better to understand that "as you give, so shall you receive" and "do unto others as you would have done unto you". These are practical guides to living. However these beliefs do not require a belief in God, the bible, prayer or attending church to work.

I have added the bold here, because I want to emphasize that atheists can equally well as theists believe in the golden rule. However when they do so, they believe in it for its own sake, not as a means of getting a reward in the hereafter. That is not to say that all religious people do that, but many think that way. Belief in the principle for its own sake is more pure and leads to healthier actions. Lip service is worse than useless.

One thing that I especially wanted to raise in this article is the awareness that I have had from a number of atheists that have been brought up in religious families. A large number of these people exist, and they are really tortured by the experience. If your response to that remark was that they deserve it, then you are not a Christian, for that is not Christ's teaching. This is the typical scenario for a person in a religious family that becomes an Atheist:

1. Have doubts about the existence of God or the Bible's divine inspiration. Keep it to themselves for a while.

2. Mention the doubts. Get told that they will go to hell if they don't believe. This keeps them pretty quiet for a while but probably makes them think even less of God as he is then seen as the ultimate bully.

3. Keep quiet about it for a long time and live a double life, pretending to believe. There must be huge numbers of such people who fill out the census with "Baptist" or "Catholic" or whatever but secretly do not believe.

4. Develop guilt and repress thoughts. This is unhealthy for a person to live this way.

5. Once they become independent from their parents they may meet others that think like them and gain courage. They then move in different circles avoiding the "bible-bashers".

6. Tell their families about it which leads to storms and accusations that "you will go to hell" but "I will pray for you". They are unable to be themselves around their families. That is unhealthy, as everyone needs love and acceptance from their families.

7. Either stop associating with their families or keep living a double life and trying to avoid the family. This benefits no-one.

Now, here is a question directed at Christians or other theists. How can you reconcile this type of behaviour towards your children with the golden rule? Admittedly it is not as bad now as the inquisition. But if you knew the torment that you put your children through and the lasting damage, and the way you drive them away from your religion, you would not do this. Christ's message is clear. Love everyone and judge them not. It is not your decision whether they go to hell or not, but if you think it is then you create hell right now in this life for you and your children.

I see so much Satanic music and videos come out of America. The energy for these things is fed by the denial of the believers. They create the atmosphere in which those that started with doubts learn to hate instead.

It amazes me that in the developed world, Americans preach more religion and go to church more than most other countries, and at the same time they have more guns, commit more murders, attack and invade far more other countries than anyone else, and often in the name of God. This is the utmost hypocrisy. If there are any people who really believe in Christianity in America, they should certainly not support such people as George W. Bush because all his behaviour is so much against all Christ's teaching. And yet so many of the religious in America do vote for Bush. I cannot understand this at all. They have all entirely failed to get the message. Turn the other cheek. Do not tell lies. Do not kill. Love your enemy. Do not covet your neighbours oil wells.

I have been told by an American Theist that all Atheists are Satanists. You cannot be a Satanist unless you believe in God and hate him. By definition an Atheist cannot be a Satanist. He also says that the roots of Atheism are in Marxism. Excuse me, but Atheism existed for many centuries before Marxism was ever thought of. Is it compulsory to think crooked and to abuse people if you are religious? You will note that I am criticising many religious people in America, but I am not abusing them. I am telling them, please think about what you do. If you are really a Christian, then follow Christ's commandments. That means you should:

a. Let you children speak their minds and kindly explain your beliefs to them. Allow them to reach their own conclusions. They will love you for that.

b. Do not vote for Presidents that you know have attacked other countries or suspect that they might.

c. Do not send troops to other countries. Speak out against this.

d. Cut down on your oil usage by getting a car that uses half as much gas so that your country can stop invading other places.

e. Read up on the news and find out the lies that your leaders are telling you. Bush, Cheney and Libby are criminals.

f. Teach your children to understand people from other countries and treat them with respect.

g. Love everyone including Atheists.

If you do all these things, then I will believe that you are a Christian and I will hold you in the highest respect for practicing what you preach.

In recent years customer loyalty schemes have been all the rage. They range from having a stamp put on a card when you buy another book or greeting card at the stationers to a pre-paid card that give special prices when you buy pizza or movie tickets, from special petrol price vouchers when you buy groceries to fly buys on everything that you purchase. They are retailers attempts to get you to keep using their stores. This article examines whether these schemes can possibly benefit anyone.

One way that I like to look at things is to see what would happen if everyone did the same thing. After all, if the scheme is a good one, everyone will copy it. So the end result of these customer loyalty schemes is now clearly visible.

You now have to keep loads of bits of paper and cards with you all the time, waste time at shops and checkouts getting stuff filled in and stamped, get really annoyed when you finally get enough stamps on your book club card only to find that the original purchase date is too long ago and the offer has expired, and you pay for all the paper work in the prices --- and collectively the retailers are doing more work, employing marketing idiots (yes, you know who you are) to do nothing useful and collectively not getting 1 cent more income between them. They must have to put up their prices to pay for all their extra costs. We are paying more to have our time wasted. If they didn't do this they could have a price advantage which is what people really want.

People are not spending more. All the businesses are getting the same total income. They are all spending more money doing this stuff. They are wasting money on running the schemes. They are wasting time while their employees do the paperwork. They are paying for extra materials that all end up in rubbish dumps. They are annoying their customers. It is madness if you even think about it for a few minutes.

Please, why don't they all agree to call it off. If they don't we need to all agree to never shop at a place that offers these schemes. Prices must be able to be kept lower if no silly schemes are run. Let us never shop at such places.

My conclusion is that we live in an age ruled by marketing hype, and full of people that cannot think straight. These things are not worthy the time spent on them. They benefit no-one. They waste everyone's time. People knock on your door and phone you incessantly with special offers that are useless to those selling them and those buying them. They employ people in jobs that should not exist. Let them get a proper job doing something useful.

A related scheme is the people that telephone and tell you that you have won something, when really they are trying to get you enrolled in some pathetic scheme. My conversations with them go like this.

Me: Hello

Them : Congratulations, you have won a package worth $170 ...

Me: No thanks.

Them: ... but I haven't told you all the benefits of ...

Me: No thanks. I don't need it.

Them: ... its free and you get all this wonderful ...

Me: No thanks. I don't want it.

Them: let me tell you about ...

Me: No thanks. Good-bye.

How can any self respecting person spend hours on the phone each day annoying people with promises of free things, when they know that they are lying? It must cause serious stress to do this. Even worse, the people that dream up this stuff! They should all have to spend 3 months ringing each other and answering calls day and night until they surrender and promise never to pester anyone or tell a lie for the rest of their life.

Many non-religious people have experienced religious people claiming that they are therefore less moral and related arguments. Of course this is not true, but this belief is common amoung the religious, that morality comes from religion.

Now some actual research has been done, looking at how prevalent various religious behaviours are in different countries and comparing this to various moral behaviours and healthiness of living. The results are bound to be a big shock to those that think that healthy and moral behaviour come from religion - quite the opposite is true. Consider these two lists - the first concerns itself with being religious and the commonly associated disbelief in evolution. The second is concerned with behaviours which most would agree are immoral and / or unhealthy.

Absolute belief in God
Attend religious services at least several times per month
Take the bible literally
Pray at least several times per week
Not being an agnostic or athiest
Disbelieve in evolution

High homicide rate
High rate of 15-24 year old suicides
High rate of under 5 year old mortality
Lower life expectancy
Higher rate of gonorrhea infection - adults and teens
Higher rate of syphilis infection - adults and teens
Higher rate of 15-19 year old abortions
Higher rate of 15-17 year old pregnancies

It turns out that countries that are higher in the first category items are also generally higher in the second category items. The two go together. It cannot be stated that religion causes immorality, as it might be that immorality causes religion, or something else causes both. But they do go together.

The full details of this report are available at website of the Journal of Religion and Society.

I would interpret these results in this way. If you look to God, prayer and religion to solve your problems, then when nothing happens you are lost. If you look to yourself to solve your problems, then you take responsibility for all your own behaviour. The latter is a much more healthy approach as it develops useful patterns of behaviour whereas the former develops dependency on something that is imaginary and then disappointment and upset is inevitable.

See also the follow up article Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

I cannot see any other way of putting this, and I am not one to mince my words. Anyone that thinks genetic engineering is in any way good for people is very ill-informed, insane or evil. There are no other possibilities.

In many tests of genetically modified food sources it has been found that animals eating them get damage to their immune systems. This is not at all surprising to anyone who even slightly understands how life works, because immunity can only be expected to exist for things that exist naturally in the environment. This problem alone is sufficient reason to abandon all GE food sources. There is no point in having food 10% cheaper if it seriously damages your health.

Of course there is the issue of whether genetically engineered food is actually more productive as is often claimed by people producing it. It is common practice for those doing scientific research for businesses to selectively report the facts to make the case for the business and if they do not do so they will not get repeat work. This means that such reports are as useless as drug company tests of their products which have been shown over a long period to not be independent reports that should be relied on.

Since GE promoters have had genetically engineered products available for various food types that I as a vegetarian need to eat, such as chick peas, lentils and soy beans, new practices have been introduced. These include radiation treatment of seeds that come into New Zealand to make certain that they cannot be grown, that is that they are dead seeds. This is a very sorry state of affairs, as these seeds could previously be sprouted to make healthy meals. Now, they not only will not sprout, but when cooked they produce hard shriveled seeds which suddenly turn to slush without going through a normal soft cooked stage. No one in their right mind would choose to eat such seeds if they had a choice of healthy seeds.

The reason given for this practice is for biosecurity. Yet, I know of no case in the preceding decades when any biosecurity problem ever occurred with such products. However I have noticed that this practice was introduced when GE crops became available. The GE manufacturers want to supply dead seeds, because you have to pay their license fees if you want to plant seeds but not if you want to eat them. If you were able to grow seeds from their GE crops then you wouldn't need to pay them fees and they would go out of business.

It seems highly suspicious that non-GE crops suddenly need this same treatment as GE crops manufacturers want done to their crops. If it were not done, then non-GE crops would be cheaper (not needing the treatment), tastier, more nutritious and far more pleasant when cooked. No-one who tried both would ever choose the GE crops. That is why I suspect that the biosecurity issue is a lie cooked up to allow GE manufacturers to compete. That is a thoroughly evil action. To sacrifice people's health for profit on an inferior product and force those conditions on all consumers.

Many sensible scientists have spoken out about the lack of any good reason for using GE crops. It is not an overstatement to say that we play Russian Roulette with the present GE policies. In fact it is an understatement, because disaster is certain. This is madness.

GE manufacturers deliberately do not test for such things as damage to immune systems for GE crops. They only test for the presence of toxins which is just one of the many things that can go wrong. They know that toxins can be traced to their food but that immune system damage cannot, so they do not care about that. This is evil.

There is no requirement around the world generally for foods to be tested before being used by humans. Even when tests on animals are done they do not indicate safety for humans. In 1983 hundreds of people died from adulterated rape-seed oil which was not toxic to rats. Actually no-one knows what to test for anyway, because the effects of making entirely new organisms are not fully understood. The entire show is based on the assumption that the scientists know what they are doing when it has been quite reasonably compared to doing surgery with a shovel. This is deep ignorance. There are many dangers and the FDA have expressed some of them.

In New Zealand the Green Party makes info available on GE. It has been a source of conflict between the Green party and Labour who have governed for the last decade. One of Labour's most embarrassing stands has been over genetically modified corn. One can only hope that PM Helen Clark has learned from her mistakes in that area.

Before I can adequately deal with the question of why I am a vegetarian, I first need to express my views about how people generally have such practices and where they come from.

For the majority of people, their religion, eating habits, belief systems and many habits are developed while very young. They are not based on thinking about things but on what your parents did and perhaps other important people in your life such as teachers and friends. Of course we all like to think that our views are rational, sensible and ... well just plain right! But the truth is that they were installed in our little developing minds before we had (if we ever have) learned to think at all.

Funnily enough, it is these views and habits which have never been subject to any questioning or thinking that are defended with the utmost force if they are attacked. That is because they cannot be rationally defended as they were never rationally conceived. They are simply habits born of doing the same thing every day because, well, that was what we just did. Of course our parents did the same, and we end up having to blame poor old Adam and Eve again for all our faults.

Sometimes, when still young, we meet someone who does something differently and so have two examples to choose from in how we behave. We can try them out for size. This can shock the poor parents when children try out new words, new music or want a tattoo. The odd time children pick up a good habit from somewhere or see a fault in their parents through coming across a better example. Then the child may decide that they want to do something another way.

Each person has a different type of mind, and some are much more likely to look at things in a questioning way so that they want to consider whether there is a better way of doing things. Society generally doesn't approve of this, seeing such people as radicals, stirrers and malcontents. Only after a couple of generations when something has been accepted as a better way are these people seen as innovators.

As I mentioned, we all like to think of ourselves as not being herd animals, and in this regard I too am one of the herd.

When it came to eating habits I ate what my Mother served up (except for a few things that I didn't like) as did the rest of the family. My parents in turn got their eating habits from the previous generation. I had really only thought a little about eating meat until I had a holiday job at the meat works when I was at University. The job involved tying lamb carcass front legs to their necks with a string, so that they didn't stick out a long way. It was disconcerting at first because the bodies were still quite warm, but without heads, feet, skin or innards. After some days it became easy to do without thinking. It put me off the idea of killing animals but not enough to stop me actually eating meat. Perhaps if I had worked on the bobby calf line it would have been different, as even without skin, head or innards, they still twitched something awful. I think that might have done the job.

Sometimes in the next 30 years I thought about it, but never became a vegetarian. Then I did a 10-day Vipassana Meditation course and after that things began to change. At the course we were fed vegetarian food. We also agreed not to kill during the course, not even insects. But when we went home these conditions no longer applied.

I began to try vegetarian food most meals, although still had a slight hankering for bacon. Then one day we went to a local restaurant that served a chicken and macadamia nut salad with terayaki sauce, and I ordered it as I had always enjoyed it in the past. I enjoyed it again, until I had eaten about one third of the chicken, then I chewed one piece and no longer wanted to eat it any more. I took it out of my mouth and ate the rest of the meal apart from the meat. I was a vegetarian.

Ultimately it was not a rational act, although the rational mind likes to go along for the ride. The feeling that it is not good to kill other creatures is a part of it. How would you or I like to be eaten? How would we like to be killed? How would we like to be hooked up on a meat works line with no skin or guts and our head and hands and feet tossed into some big buckets?

I don't buy the argument that humans have souls and animals do not. I don't even know what people mean by a soul - it is just words to me. But whatever, when I look into an animal's eyes, I see that there is just as much someone at home as there is in a human's eyes. Our cat understands the words I say and whether I am being nice or nasty to her as well as any person, and reacts in a way that lets me know what she thinks about it.

"George, George, George and George" by cynnersf & "Buds" by ovisdallii

"Love" by robertmiller & "Dolfinarium-3366" by rvo

There are plenty of photos of animals on the Internet that move any person with any heart to say that the animals are expressing love or tenderness, anger or jealousy, hate or rage of frustration. Only a person who wants to eat meat without thinking about the truth of what they do would pretend otherwise.

"Baby Ringtail lemur" & Orangutans by supertigger

Nutritionally we do not need to eat meat. We do need protein in our diet, but can easily get enough from vegetables. Many studies have shown that this is not a problem. We do not need to eat meat to get protein, because if that were true, then cows would not be made of so much protein when they eat only grass. Some people argue that it is alright for cows because they have seven stomachs, but humans do not. Well, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are Chimpanzees and Gorillas. You couldn't call an adult gorilla a weedy looking vegetarian. But it is a vegetarian and obviously has very strong muscles. Chimpanzees are not strict vegetarians, eating small animals occasionally.

Meat eating in large quantities is a relatively modern thing. Although the rich probably ate more meat in the past, there were very few of them. Medical reports show that meat eating is not healthy for humans. It causes problems in the intestines, including increased incidence of cancer.

Many Christians think that the bible says that man was given the right to eat animals, but I think that they misinterpret the meaning of having dominion over animals. There is excellent evidence that Christ was a vegetarian. Most scholars agree that he was a member of a sect called the Essenes, and both Greek and Roman reports of the Essenes say that they were strict vegetarians, eating only raw food.

The Buddha also taught that people should not kill, neither other people nor animals. Although he was not a vegetarian by modern definition, he did instruct all his followers to never eat meat if they thought that an animal might have been killed to feed them. It was only acceptable to eat left overs where it was known that no deliberate killing was done to support their lives. This was a matter of not wasting food.

Generally speaking, vegetarians are not pushy people, but they often feel the pain that others choose to cause the killing of so many creatures to feed humans. Could you kill the creatures that you eat? How would you feel if you saw all the carcasses of all the creatures that you have eaten in your life in one big heap? What a burden of guilt we must share.

Several generations have passed since George Orwell wrote "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Animal Farm", but in real life we are nearer now to the situations described in those books than at any time since he wrote them. The person acting as the Minister of Truth is none other than George Walker Bush.

Busch sprechen

According to Dubbya, the USA is installing a "missile shield" in Eastern Europe. According to dictionaries, a shield is "a protection used to block attacks", "a device or part that serves as a protective cover or barrier". So one might expect that a missile shield would be something that can absorb missiles. But not in Busch sprechen, where it actually means missiles themselves. There appears to be a little bit of confusion between a weapon and a shield.

The one in his left hand is the shield Mr President. The other one is called a weapon. The left hand is the one holding the big shield shaped thingy. The right hand is the one swinging the big sword shaped thingy. Hope that is clear to you now Mr President.

As far back as 2001 the BBC reported "Bush to push for missile shield".

"United States President George W Bush is expected to outline his vision of a national missile defence (NMD) programme on Tuesday.

Following conversations with allies, he is likely to argue that the US cannot be bound by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that bans such systems."

Other countries have argued that this will lead to a new arms race, but Bush seems quite happy with that. Indeed that may be the very job that he is being paid large sums to do if one is to believe Michael Moore.

"We will deploy defences as soon as possible. Therefore, we believe that the ABM treaty will have to be replaced, eliminated or changed in a fundamental way," US defence official Lucas Fischer said last week. Of course the word defences actually means weapons of attack.

Busch sprechen

When BBC News reported that "Amnesty accuses US over 'torture'" stating that "In a 300-page annual report, the group accused the US government of damaging human rights with its attitude to torture and treatment of detainees" Busch sprechen "Bush says Amnesty report 'absurd'".

"I'm aware of the Amnesty International report and it's absurd, it's an absurd allegation," the president said during a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House. Mr Bush said that accusations against Americans were "fully investigated in a transparent way".

Yes Mr President, a very transparent way. We can all see right through them. Why Mr President is it absurd for your country to apply the same standards of rights to people from other countries that you ask for your citizens? Methinks that you do not know the meaning of absurd.

If you were a Russian Mr President, how would you feel if in your lifetime you had seen a war-mongering foreign power attack, occupy and threaten many countries around your borders? USA has forces on South Korea, it threatens North Korea with attacks on a monthly basis. USA has forces in Turkey, Kuwait and other countries in the region. USA has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, it threatens Iran and other neighbours with attack regularly. USA is now putting missiles in Eastern European states that were formerly part of the Soviet block. What would America';s reaction be if Russia were to do any of these things in USA's neighbours?

We do not have to speculate as we have experience of that. On one occasion Cuba was installing Russian missiles and the USA threatened to bomb them in retaliation leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do not forget that that this situation arose because of the USA attempt to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs Invasion and so Cuba had every justification in fearing the USA.

Busch sprechen

But George Bush states "We are a peaceful people", although that was in a speech where he was threatening to attack Iraq under a set of excuses that he knew at the time to be lies. Yes Mr President, your destruction of the language which we used to call English is now almost complete.

"If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick," Cleese said over a year ago. The Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star came out with this in his audio diary on his website for his "My Life, Times and Current Medical Problems" tour, which he will take to Australia later in the year. Cleese heaped praise on other towns and cities where he performed, but introduced Palmerston North as the "suicide capital of New Zealand".

Palmerstom North didn't really want that label but recognised that Cleese was not to be taken too seriously. What began as the suggestion of a joke has now hit the news. From the NZ Herald:

"Cleese's name is gracing a compost heap at the local landfill.

City council waste and water manager Chris Pepper said no one was taking credit for the sign, which was quietly put up about a month ago.

Entertainer John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg), originally from Palmerston North, had suggested more than a year ago that the landfill be named the "John Cleese Memorial Tip".

Members of the council had a good old laugh at this, and then somewhere along the line the "Mt Cleese" sign was constructed."

According to Stuff:

" Some people have a statue made in their honour, others a street named after them, but the Palmerston North City Council has bestowed the honour of a commemorative compost heap on comedian John Cleese.

Cleese achieved infamy in Palmerston North last year when, after a performance at the Regent on Broadway, he said he hated the "town", calling it the "suicide capital of New Zealand".

Palmy-born entertainer John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg) was quick to defend the city, and suggested the local landfill be named the "John Cleese Memorial Tip" with the tagline: "All manner of crap happily recycled".

A few members of the council thought this was a good idea; and as new signage was being organised for the old Awapuni Landfill (now a waste minimisation centre), "Mt Cleese" was born."

Here is a list of the top 10 blog directories that I have listed my blogs in. You may find them useful for doing searches in, or for adding your own blog(s).

... under preparation ...

BlogRankings.com

Blog Directory

This is rather an unusual topic. I haven't found anyone putting this idea forward before. However it seems to me to be an inevitable result of truly understanding what things are. Of course nouns and things are the same thing. Well excluding all the other even weirder categories of nouns they are.

To put forward this idea with any clarity, it is first necessary to discover what things (the main class of nouns) are. Things are made of stuff that we call matter. We think of matter as substance that exists and then behave so that it can act as subjects or objects in sentences that have verbs. However I want to turn that idea on its head, or at least make it so that people can see another angle on all this.

If we know that a thing "exists", then it must already not be stable and constant. If it were stable and constant then we could not know of its "existence". We only know of existence through our senses: we see, feel, hear, taste or smell something. We can only sense something if it is putting out some sort of substance or vibration that our senses detect. So it isn't the "thing" that we detect at all, it is these other substances or vibrations that we hear or smell or see. Without these substances or vibrations issuing forth from our supposed "thing" we would be oblivious of its existence, indeed we would conclude that it didn't exist at all, or rather it would never enter our mind in any way to consider its existence.

So all that thinginess of things is actually a result of a flux of some sort: of light or sound waves, of matter in liquid or gaseous form that can be tasted or smelt, or of somehow occupying space in a pushy sort of way so that we can feel it. Now the more cunning of my readers are already getting their objection to this voiced with "but the light is only reflected" or "there is no flux from matter that we feel", so I will have to go into these if I am to have a chance of convincing you.

Of course there is some truth that light is reflected, but not that it is "only" reflected. Things have colours and these result from the selective reflection of the light that falls on them. Each different object absorbs some colours and reflects others in various proportions giving each its particular shade, brightness and purity of colour. In addition, all that absorbed part is also re-emitted at some other wavelength meaning that the object is also putting out a flux that is not reflected at all - this is an inevitable result of the partial reflection.

So when it comes to colour and our ability to detect shape and size by visual means, it is the objects interaction with fluxes of light and the like that we allow us to know of its existence. You have to agree that that word "interaction" is a verb and not a noun. The key to existence lies in the verb behaviour of nouns.

But of course I have yet to deal with the sense of touch which will be the last refuge of those that haven't fully accepted my argument so far. From our bodies point of view, touch is a rich sense, not just the mere presence of something. We detect all kinds of texture, roughness, coarseness, smoothness, softness, hardness, yielding or unyielding, warm and cold, and a host of special properties like fluffiness, furriness, spikiness, sharpness, and on and on. All of these properties result from interaction between the object and our nerves with which we feel. There has to be interaction or we cannot detect the properties. Again, the essence of existence is action, noun does not exist without verb.

So I feel that at least I have introduced you to a new idea. No doubt I will have to argue this with some people and I look forward to that. Please leave a comment here and I will let you have your say and answer you.

Before I go for now though, I want to take this a step further. To show that what I say is true at an even deeper level. I am talking fundamental physics and the laws of nature here. To do this is is necessary to ask the question "What are elementary particles?" and to look at it in a way that is different to particle physicists.

I suggest that the correct answer to this was first offered by William Clifford, a man of recognised brilliance in mathematics and philosophy. When Maxwell, himself a brilliant physicist, developed his famous equations for electromagnetism, Clifford realised that there must be solutions to those equations that are concentric spherical standing waves. He saw that those solutions must in fact be what we call matter. This at once solved the problem of what those standing waves of electromagnetism which must exist would appear like, and explained once and for all what matter was. Unfortunately this idea seems to have been forgotten and so it happened that people became confused about how matter could travel through a tensile medium, the luminiferous aether, and not have any resistance. This lead to all the problems of the Michelson-Morley experiment because people thought that matter was stuff rather than a process.

The next chance to get it right was when Louis de Broglie put forward his famous work on understanding matter as waves which lead to successful experiments and a nobel prize in physics. However he was not fully understood and spent the rest of his life trying to get physicists to understand that matter really was waves. Schroedinger also had this view, but they were both ignored and Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics prevailed and set physics back over 100 years.

A third chance happened when the famous physicists, Wheeler and Feynman, came to understand that an electron behaved as if there were both advanced and retarded waves happening around it. This did not mean that electrons were dim, but that they acted as if at all times there were waves converging on it and also as if waves were coming out of it. generally physicists found this idea incomprehensible because they didn't see how the universe could organise the incoming waves -- it would have to know where the electron was going to be in the future to make the waves converge there! Or even worse, they started talking about waves going backwards in time! Yikes!! Actually, no, that is not the case. the waves do not converge where the electron is, the electron is where the waves converge. The electron is nothing other than this convergence of waves.

Although the idea has never caught on to physicist as a whole, there have been the above mentioned incidents and some physicists such as Milo Wolff have persisted with the idea. Milo found me on the internet when I proposed this idea that he had already had.

So physicists went on believing six impossible things before breakfast, well maybe even twelve. All the weird stuff that supposedly exists in physics results from this failure to understand what an atomic particle is. It is nothing other than a standing wave of electromagnetism. That means that at all times there is an inwards flux of electromagnetism and after that flux passes through the central region there is an outwards flux. Together the two fluxes make the standing wave. Matter is made of particles and particles are a flux and nothing more. Matter is made of waves.

All matter is simply a flux, a process, a verb. All nouns are really verbs. However they are slow verbs in the sense that the flux is rather stable over time so that it has a thinginess sort of look to it. So there I rest my case that nouns are slow verbs.

Recently I have had some wonderful experiences with people on the Internet. I have been finding sites that answer my long pending questions, asking in forums and getting people that give me much more than I asked for and all of what I dreamed of. I decided that it would be good to have a place where I can list all the good people that I meet that have blogs:

¥åßßå's Blog Inner Visions with bimble, babble, art and code. This is a very well presented blog by someone who gave me fantastic advice in the b2evolution forums while using the subtitle "Blonde Bimbo". Haha! Very far from it. Inspirational poetry, art and photography.

wow factor is John's site. John helped me to make my first change to the standard b2evolution blog setup so that I could have a wider main section in my blog. Combined with ¥åßßå's help above, I have now solved the 3 things that I didn't like about how my blogg worked.

hackblog@wonderwinds is run by EdB who is also a kind person helping out in b2evolution forum.

tamiki.com is run by a young man that I met in SU (StumbleUpon). He is very prolific, has a wicked sense of humour and a delightful way of making fun of stupid things.

Blog Potato has original ideas on promoting blogs which involve doing reviews of other's blogs and exchanging links and other things.

Since writing my blog entry The Benefits of a Stable Population in Housing I have come across a number of other people saying many of the same things that I said. My blog also links to a PDF paper also called Benefits of a Stable Population in Housing (450 KB pdf file).

Dr Clydesdale, who lectures at Massey’s Department of Management and International Business in Auckland, is researching the economic effects of New Zealand’s immigration policies. The following is from him and Massey University:

"New Zealanders should be questioning the rationale for current immigration policy according to a Massey economist.

Immigration puts heat on housing market - Massey economist

An extra $3600 a year in your pocket, or more immigrants ?

The question is one New Zealanders should be considering because it sums up the relationship between rising mortgage interest rates and our current immigration policy, according to Massey economist Dr Greg Clydesdale.

The arrival of more wealthy immigrants is contributing to the increasingly inflated housing market, and attempts to control it led to the recent hike in interest rates from 7.25 percent to 7.5 percent, he says.

He estimates that anyone with an average $160,000 fixed mortgage would be $3600 a year better off if interest rates had remained steady. In January 2005, the interest rate was at 5.0 percent. Since then, the Reserve Bank has increased it ten times.

“Of course immigration is not the only force driving inflation, but we only need to get inflation down within a limited range to stop the interest rates increases.”"

That is an accurate statement as far as I am concerned.

NZ Pays High Price for Fame appeared in the Sunday Star Times on Sunday, 8 April 2007 and asks "Are immigrants the cause of skyrocketing house prices? Tim Hunter investigates the financial impact of New Zealand's global popularity." before concluding "If, as seems likely, immigration is fingered as a primary engine of house price inflation, prospective home buyers should take heart. The immigration effect will tail off and the relentless competition for housing should ease."

Well that is true, but I like to consider the deeper causes and try not to go through those phases periodically.

NZ is not the only country where this is being recognised. UK house prices pushed around by population movement gives good statistics and clear scientific evidence:

"The extra demand for housing that migration and immigration cause explain much of the regional difference in house price performance around the country, according to our latest research.

Propertyfinder.com looked at regional population changes brought about by both internal and international migration and compared them to house price changes.

There is a 73% correlation between regional population growth and house price growth. Regions with the highest inward migration have seen the highest house price increases, while the least popular regions have seen house prices underperform. Exclude the North East, an exception to the trend, and the correlation is an astonishing 94%. Warren Bright, Chief Executive Officer of Propertyfinder.com said:

The overall level of house prices depends largely on the wider economy. However the relative strength of regional housing markets is very clearly due in large part to population movement. Whether it is people wanting to buy their own home to live in, or investors providing rental accommodation to newcomers, demand for housing in the most popular regions has caused prices to rise the fastest. While these population trends continue, our research suggests that the best performing regions which have been attracting the most migrants will continue to see house prices outperform over the medium term."

Dr Alan Bollard, Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand made a speech What's happening in the property sector? in Rotorua.

He showed the big surges in demand:

Figure 7. Estimated annual demand for dwellings from migrants
Number of dwellings (calculated as net migrants/average persons per dwelling)

and resulting activity:

Figure 6. Indicators of housing activity
Annual percent change

as well as a lot of other material.

It is very strange that the Government seem to be saying that they don't think that migration is a major factor in housing price increases.

The following is an exact copy of a message that I posted in a flickr group called Renaissance Man (or Woman). The photos are all clickable to view larger versions and additional comments in flickr.

While I was intending to start a discussion on Fibonacci / Phi ratio in plants already, I decided to include intelligent design in the one topic as a result of Cryptia's remarks in this photo:

I made a couple of comments there, but want to expand here as it didn't seem right to do a great discourse in her photo comments. As well as the subject raised by Cryptia of the "clever" dispersal mechanism of the dandelion seeds, I would add the "clever" arrangement of them so as to fill the space around the seed head evenly.

I use the word "clever" as a loaded word, suggestive of design. Equally, it might be stated to be "effective", a word that would suggest that it worked well but not suggesting any motive in it being that way. These are two very different ways of looking at things, and people may be predisposed towards one or the other way of seeing the world. Before Darwin, only one of these ways was at all common.

Darwin's insight was to see that small variations did occur in species during his travels and to think about the consequences of this over huge periods of time. A new way of looking at things emerged, one in which design played no part, but which still got a result that was effective.

I fancy that I can possibly see fibonacci spirals in Cryptia's photo, but they are clearer in a pinecone...

... or a palm tree trunk ...

The nature of these spirals and how they increase in number while never being other than Fibonacci numbers is dealt with in this thread:

www.flickr.com/groups/emergence/discuss/72157600010225959/

But back to the arrangement itself. Mathematically it is true that if a tree branch grows leaves at some regular angle from the previous one (as seen looking down the stem) then there is one and only one angle that has a very special result, and that angle is 360 degrees times 0.618034.. (or phi) or the reverse of that. The special property is that every leaf is put in the largest remaining space (angle wise) which is clearly an advantage when we think about the "purpose" or "function" of a leaf which is to catch sunlight. So the fact that very many plants use this angle shows that nature has by design or accident found the best solution.

If a plant was able to make a consistent angle, then natural selection would eventually lead to the angle that most plants use.

See also Fibonacci Spirals.

The New Zealand Government are holding an Inquiry into housing affordability in New Zealand and invited submissions from the public and interested groups. The price of houses in NZ has risen spectacularly in the last 5 years and young families trying to buy their first house must feel that they are getting further from their goal.

I have made a submission to the NZ Government, making a few small alterations to a paper that I wrote a couple of months ago and then sending that. My paper is called Benefits of a Stable Population in Housing (450 KB pdf file) and looks at wider issues than those that the Government is looking at. There would be many additional benefits including assisting in sustainability which the Government has also stated as a major goal this year. This is to assist in achieving out objectives under the Kyoto Protocol, and also reflects the delicate balance in NZ Parliament after the Fields affair, and the possible dependence on the NZ Green Party.

From the paper:

"This paper suggests that existing economic wisdom, particularly with such measures as GDP, does not recognise the huge benefits to all people living in NZ of limiting the rate at which the population grows, even apart from fixing population limits. It is suggested that large net immigration flows since 2000 is mainly responsible for the huge house price increases in the same period.

The main benefit of limiting population growth rate is the large reduction in costs of providing adequate capital intensive resources including housing, business premises, schools, hospitals and distribution systems for services such as electricity, water and sewerage. To make the case for such benefits the following matters will be addressed:

1. The disproportionate extra costs of a growing population.
2. Statistical evidence of the detrimental costs of population growth.
3. The capital drain of people reaching adulthood.
4. Past population growth bursts as the cause of depressions.
5. The inappropriateness of measures such as real GDP per capita.
6. Is a stable population bad for business?
7. Relationship to other policy areas.
8. Suggestions for practically implementing the policy."

I make the claim that if NZ had a policy of limiting nett migration to 5,000 people per year for the last 5 years this would have assisted in the Government inflation objectives and also meant that house prices would now be 40% lower.

For more information on the Government inquiry and other reactions, please see the Scoop article Inquiry into housing affordability in New Zealand.

I just happened to accidentally see a little of a TV Documentary How Art Made the World. The part that I saw was investigating some findings regarding Aztec ideas about death and went like this ...

In the US some researchers were testing the effects of exposure to certain things on how people treated others who were similar or different to them. The subjects were either Democrats or Republicans and they had to dish up a helping of some very hot (and I gather unpleasant) spicy stuff for another person to eat.

In the initial test, the people were told who had to eat it and whether they were of the same or different political persuasion. This had no effect on the helping served, people treatd their opponents the same as their comrades.

However in the second test people were first put through a procedure that asked them about what happened to people at death. After that, people then served up twice as much nasty hot sauce to their political opponents. This apparently confirmed some Aztec ideas (I missed the earlier part).

The conclusion is that exposure to images or thoughts of death and their own mortality makes people much more likely to go along with seeing others as targets for unpleasantness.

It seems to me (and others have observed this also) that the news these days is filled with US propaganda on death and destruction and that 911 is kept alive as a reminder of death and mortality so that the US Government can continue a campaign of hatred and attack on other countries. It seems that they know about this or similar research and are practicing a campaign of hatemongering.

The manipulation of people's minds in this way should be deplored by all. Unfortunately the large majority are manipulated without any realisation of what is going on.

In the last couple of weeks I have been subject to "Idiotic and Annoying Spammers" on both my blogs. In the last 3 hours, 26 messages advertising illegal drug supplies and the like have been posted to my blog. They do not appear because I have to say "yes" or "no" to each messages to prevent spam. This has been going on for several weeks and I have succeeding in getting one web page account closed but not yet got the spammer kicked off his ISP. It is wasting many hours of my time and the idiots are getting no benefit.

If you have sent a message to my blogs in the last couple of weeks then it is not likely to be seen by me. I will post an unpate when this is all over and I can read my comments again without having to wade through hundreds of spam for each real comment.

....

This is now solved I hope. Advice to anyone that has b2evolution is to make sure that trackback is turned off on all blogs. It is a great big hole for people to send spam to your blog. One good thing though - the spam helped lift my blog up the google ratings :-)

From Amnesty International's "freedom letter":

"An International Arms Trade Treaty is closer to becoming a reality thanks to a historic vote in the UN General Assembly on 6 December 2006.

An overwhelming 153 governments supported a resolution proposing a treaty to prevent international arms transfers that fuel conflict, poverty and serious human rights violations. Only the USA voted against the proposal, and 24 governments abstained."

It is clear that the USA wants global conflict because those in control there are profiting from it. They are the world's largest supplier of weapons and do not want to lose that business. The world must find a way to control America if there is to be any reduction in global unrest. The UN, with its veto rights, is not capable of solving the problem, and too many nations are terrified to even speak about this because of US reprisals. Remember Nazi Germany and how people wished they had spoken and acted sooner.

Of course there are loads of pages on the internet about "Life the Universe and Everything" as imortalised by Douglas Adams, but this is the only one (other than some cheap copies) where you will find out what was the question?

Unfortunately this depends on you knowing what go is and a go board (also called goban). Go is an oriental game played on a board using black and white pieces called stones (actually shell for the white and slate for the balck ones).

Originally written by me before the 1988 New Zealand Go Congress and published in NZ Go Journal in October 1988. It is extremely funny to me that I wrote the article with the various answers and when I asked the people at the conference, the answers that I got were exactly the same ones as in the article. The last paragraph is an in joke for NZ go players:

How Many Squares on a Go Board?

Kami Kaze: How many squares are there on a go board? Go away and think about it and write your answer down before reading on!

20 kyu: 361 of course.
"Wrong" says Kami Kaze.

10 kyu: No silly, that's the number of vertices. There are 18x18 or 324 squares.
"Wrong" says Kami Kaze.

(A pause follows, but frantic calculations occur.)

1 dan: Aha, there are also squares 2x2 and 3x3 and so on, which means that the total is 18x18 + 17x17 and so on making a grand total of 2109!
crowd: Aaaahh very clever!
"But wrong" says Kami Kaze.

3 dan: You've forgotten that they aren't squares, they are rectangles. There are no squares on a go board!
crowd: That's a dirty trick.
"And still wrong" says Kami Kaze.

(Another pause, and many puzzled faces.)

crowd: Well how many squares are there on a go board then?

Kami Kaze It is perfectly true that the smaller areas are rectangles, and each of these is one twelth longer than it is wide. Therefore, if we take an area twelve rectangles long and thirteen wide, we have a large square, and this is the only size which works. There are (19-12 ) x (19-13) or 42 such squares. The answer is forty-two.

Douglas Adams We all knew the answer, it's the question that we didn't know. Thank you Kami Kaze, the whole question of the meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything is simply "How many squares are there on a go board?"

Marvin: I tried to tell them, but you know what humans are like, they have the attention span of a dead gnat. Here I am with a brain the size of a planet, and having worked out all the possible games of go, the meaning of life is to have two eyes except in seki when ......

crowd: Which restaurant shall we eat at tonight?

(The crowd departs leaving Marvin talking to himself.)

marvin: I can tell you what the strictly correct komi is if you really want to know? Oh never mind me, just carry on. I haven't got any feelings of course .....

In 1994 I came across a web site where you could make bets on various things ever happening and as a result wrote the following to the owner of the site:

"I enjoyed your little column on the odds of various events happening.

I am prepared to give 1000 to 1 odds against time travel.
My condition is simply that whoever wants to claim from me must turn
up tomorrow to claim the prize. They can do this by demonstrating
their time machine. No excuses accepted, as if they are running late
they can try again the next day."

No one turned up the next day to make a claim, so this is evidence that a time machine will never be invented, or that my offer got lost. So by posting it again, we know that google will store it for ever.

In his column "Welcome to Fascist America!", Gene Callahan writes the following. It expresses my own ideas very well. For some years I have considered that the USA today is following a path similar to Germany in the 1930s. This sums it up very well, especially the bit about a yellow star in the last quoted paragraph.

"My fellow Americans, it’s official now: We live in a fascist nation.

Now, the term "fascist" has been thrown around over the last fifty years in a loose way that has drained it of much of its meaning. If someone wanted to cut 5% off of a leftist professor's favourite welfare programme, the professor would call his opponent a "fascist." I’m not using the word like that. I mean honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned, 1930s style fascism, featuring such old fa~ourites as:

* Secret prisons – they’re back!
* Torture – we’re doing it.
* Spying on all citizens.
* Arrests and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
* Rampant militarism.
* Secret detention.
* Enforced disappearance.
* Denial and restriction of habeas corpus.
* Prolonged incommunicado detention.
* Unfair trial procedures.

(This list was compiled partially based on the work of Amnesty International, available here.)

An absolutely mind-numbing response to complaints that our traditional legal system is being torn apart is the question, "So, you want to protect the rights of terrorists?"

Um, no, I want to protect the rights of non-terrorists who might be falsely accused of terrorism! That was sort of, you know, the whole idea of our legal system. I’m sure there was some neo-con around in the 1700s saying to Jefferson or Madison, "So, you want to protect the rights of murderers and robbers?" but luckily they ignored him.

We’ve now gotten to the point where Nazi Germany was, say, in 1934. Remember, at that time, if you had told a typical German what his government would do over the next ten years, he would have looked at you as a madman. After all, his land had been civilized for over a thousand years. His was the nation of Albertus Magnus, Gutenberg, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Bach, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Heisenberg, Reimann, Mann, Lessing, Herder, Handel, Dürer, Leibniz, Gauss, Helmholtz – he could have gone on, but you get the point. His nation could not possibly descend into barbarism! If you tried to tell him he was living in a police state, he would have pointed out that his government had used its vast new powers very judiciously, and only against a few trouble-makers. So far.

It is interesting, in gauging the direction we are heading, to look at the proclamations of "respectable" opinion writers who support this administration. For instance, we have people at a "libertarian" think tank proclaiming that Moslems are not entitled to full civil rights in the US. (Perhaps we need to make them wear something special on their clothing like, say, a yellow star, so we know just who they are, hey?) But "conservatives" provide even more stunning examples of purely fascist reasoning. For example, conservative demagogue Ann Coulter has called for the editor of The NY Times to face the firing squad for his part in publicizing this administration's abuses of power. Let’s look at a recent column by Douglas MacKinnon at TownHall.com."

...

more at http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan160.html

It is worth mentioning here the fourth amendment of the US constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Boy is that ever gone with Bush's "Patriot Act".

I wrote this about 4 years ago before the US attacked Iraq. It takes an unbiased look at the US and Iraq to see who should really be the target of the world's concern.

Who is the Biggest Terrorist?

With the ever increasing rhetoric of Bush concerning axis of evil and the behaviour of Iraq it is interesting to compare the actual behaviour of Iraq and the USA to see who actually represents a greater danger to the world.

Has weapons of mass destruction?
Iraq maybe
USA yes more than any other country

Has nuclear weapons
Iraq probably not
USA yes more than any other country

Has used nuclear weapons on other countries
Iraq no
USA yes, the only country to have ever done so

Has attacked other countries in the last 10 years
Iraq no
USA yes, at least 5, see list below

Has attacked other countries in the last 30 years
Iraq yes, 3
USA yes, at least 15, see list below

Is threatening to attack other countries at present
Iraq no
USA yes, 3

If the USA was truly concerned with stopping terrorism they would have spoken out against the French terrorist act of bombing the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland. The fact that they refused to do so shows that USA is not against terrorism as such, only against people with different policies.

USA intends to drop 3000 bombs on Iraq in 1 day, more than the entire war in 1991, "to create Shock and Awe". Isn't that Terrorism Mr Bush?

Thank you New Zealand for being a sensible voice and not bowing to Bush.

George Bush Lies

Let us examine the truth of Bush’s statement on 18th March 2003 that “We are a peaceful people”. Here is a list of wars in the last 30 years with involvements initiated by USA in all but one case (bin Laden).

* Vietnam war (-1973)
* Cambodian War (-1975)
* Laotian War (-1975)
* Iranian Hostage Crisis (1979-1980)
* Lebanese Intervention (1982-1984)
* Grenada Invasion (1983)
* First Persian Gulf War (1980-1988) The U.S. gave logistical and intelligence information to Iraq in its war against Iran.
* Tanker War (1987-1988)
* Panama Invasion (1989)
* Second Persian Gulf War (1991)
* Conflict with Iraq (1991-)
* Somalia Intervention (1992-1993)
* Occupation of Haiti (1994?-)
* Bosnian War (1995)
* bin Laden's War (1998-) including Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan and Afghanistan.
* Kosovo War (1999)
*The War in Afghanistan (2001-)

Source of war info: The History Guy http://www.historyguy.com/War_list.html

Actually since writing this Bush has attacked several more countries. Isn't it time that the UN took some action against the US?

I first had this idea in 1996, and wrote it in the present form in 1998. I tried communicating it to several political commentators but got no interest. It explains serious weaknesses in MMP that are open to manipulation and offers an alternative VC.

Voter's Choice

This is a proposal for a modification to the voting system in New Zealand. It comes from our experiences of what is good and bad with the old FPP (First Past the Post) system and the MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) system chosen to replace it. No doubt everyone will have their own view about the relative advantages of each system. This is my view about the shortcomings of the past and present systems and a proposal for a new system that would overcome these shortcomings.

Over the last few elections, the political parties in New Zealand have gradually learned about how the system can operate in parliament by accepting that they may need different allies on different issues and that they may sometimes have to give up, at least for the time being, on certain issues.

A little has also been learned about how to manipulate MMP in certain situations. In part this is due to the 5% threshhold required for parties to get seats (unless they win an electoral seat). However in part it is due to not quite sensing that MMP can actually be highly manipulated by two parties working together, one as electoral candidates and one as list candidates. This will be expanded on further.

Disadvantages of FPP.

1. The biggest disadvantage of FPP was that it was unfair and did not reflect the wishes of the voters. It was possible and did actually happen that one party got less votes than another and yet still received more seats and became the government. Proportional representation is arguably a fair system and any system that does not properly give the correct proportion of MPs according to popular support is arguably not democratic.

2. FPP also made it very difficult for minor parties to get established and so did not represent a diversity of opinions. Supporters of minority opinions were effectively forced to make a choice between parties that did not include their first choice. MMP has addressed this problem, although with the 5% threshhold limit it also introduces the need for second guessing by voters as to whether a party will achieve this and so whether they need to win an electoral seat. The public collectively have been extremely accurate at achieving this, but have had to do some strange things to achieve the results which certainly have some distortions compared to an ideal system.

Disadvantages of MMP.

1. While MMP is intended to be a fairer system it turns out that it is possible for two or more parties to ask voters to support one candidate and a different party and so obtain a share of seats between them that is not in keeping with their actual popular support. Such a possibility was not recognised when MMP was being chosen and it clearly goes against the intended fairness of the system. In past elections this practise was used by National and United to gain a seat for United while still retaining National's full percentage share of seats. However it is actually possible for two connected parties to ask supporters to vote for one party with their party vote and the local candidate for the other party with their candidate vote. In this way they can get almost double their fair share of seats relative to other parties. Clearly such a practise was not intended and would be a miscarriage of justice. It is important that this possibility be eliminated.

2. It may also be argued that MMP is complex and that many people do not understand fully the significance of their two votes in spite of the fact that advertisements were shown that explained the consequences as well as possible. As elections have gone by the public have gradually become wiser in this regard and statements by the electoral officers and party leaders have lead people to understand that it is the party vote that really counts.

3. The lists are very important to determining who the elected MPs will be and yet most people do not have any say in who are on the lists. It is true that people could join parties and have some input into the lists, but a fact that most people are not motivated to do this.

Proposed Voter's Choice electoral system.

It is proposed that each voter have a single vote which they may give to any candidate of any party. If they do not like a candidate for the electorate they live in they would be allowed to vote for a candidate in another electorate. The votes of all parties would be added up and the number of seats that each party receives would be in strict proportion to the number of votes cast for their candidates in total. The actual seats would then be allocated to the candidates of each party that had the most votes of candidates from that party until the required number of seats were filled.

Advantages of VC.

1. A single vote only is made which keeps things simple so that people are in no doubt about where they are placing their support.

2. It does not allow for any possibility of several parties engineering extra seats by electoral accommodations as has been done in a minor way in the last three elections and which could be done in a much more extreme way.

3. The present and past systems assume that the area in which a person lives is the most important issue in allowing the choice of candidates except that race is also considered important for Maori. The Voter's Choice system allows each person to decide what is more important for them, be it having a local MP, someone of the same race, or someone representing a particular minority issue such as greens or christians. The present system allows occupations such as farmers to have good representation because they tend to be concentrated in rural electorates while retired or unemployed people or occupations other than farmers are generaly spread over many more electorates and so do not have the same clout. Under Voter's Choice these people can vote for a candidate that they consider sympathetic to their views rather than a local candidate if they prefer.

4. There is no need for special elecorates for Maori because even if registered in the general roll Maori could vote for a Maori candidate somewhere else if they wanted to. It would then become a non-issue to retain Maori seats - Maori could achieve an effective vote either on the the general or Maori roll without having to re-register. They simply need to vote for a candidate that they consider sympathetic to their cause in some other electorate if they have no local candidate that they like.

5. The voters would make the choice on which candidates from a party were elected rather than the less representative method of making up lists. This means that unpopular candidates cannot be repeatedly foisted on an electorate. Parties have a slight dislike for this idea, because they sometimes feel that they have important candidates who do not present well publicly. At present these can be put on the list or in a safe seat. In practice, they can still be given a safe seat because many or most voters will prefer a local candidate.

6. If a party had more than one faction then the voters would influence how many seats each faction has by their choice of which candidates they vote for. This means that major parties no longer need to fracture in order to allow a diversity of views to be accommodated and should allow greater stability of the major parties. Both National and Labour could have a spread of candidates with, for example, more or less Market economic policies, and the public could decide which factions were more highly represented. Although other aspects of this proposal (specifically the 5% threshhold removal) could be said to increase fracturing, this aspect would work very much to reduce fracturing of parties, making parties more fluid.

7. Voters are not faced with confusion about what to do if they like a party but do not like the local candidate, they simply vote for a candidate from another electorate for the party that they like.

8. All successful candidates would be electoral MPs and would in effect represent those voters that voted for them from other electorates as well as the local area.

9. The number of MPs could, if desired, be reduced to 99 in line with popular wishes and a larger number of electorates included satisfying the heavy electorate workload simultaneously. Alternatively, the number of MPs could be retained as a higher number than the number of electorates. This possibility would almost ensure that each elecorate had at least one sitting MP as at present.

Practical considerations.

When considering how each candidate would vote, this system allows a greater number of possibilities as any voter can vote for any candidate in any electorate. For practical purposes it seems that the best idea would be to have a voting paper with the local candidates on it and a space for "some other candidate". A numbered list of all candidates for all electorates could be shown on the wall, and anyone wishing to vote for some other candidate would simply record the number, name and party of the candidate from that list on to their voting form.

It is proposed that there be no "minimum party support" hurdle as in the 5% threshhold as required by MMP at present. The main reason is that it seems entirely unfair that a party getting 4.5% should get no seats while a party getting 5.5% should get 6 or 7 seats. This unfairness also spills over into voter uncertainty because they must try to guess whether a party will get over the 5% hurdle or not because if not their vote is wasted. Strictly speaking this condition is quite independent of the choice of voting system as it might equally well be changed in MMP or not changed in VC.

Years (well actually decades) ago I used to work doing statistical analysis, which included political party support surveys and such like. I found that the old political commentators method of doing two-party swing was not very good and came up with a better way that also worked for multiple parties. It actually had a similar form to chemical reactions because just as chemicals can convert between different forms such as H2O --> O- and OH+, people can convert from one party to another and the rate of conversion depends on how many people there are there that might convert.

Another thing that I did a little later was to make a 2D diagram of how the NZ parties fitted into a map showing which parties mainly competed with each other. Now I find that there is a web site called Political Compass (click the title to see this) that has a test that you can do that shows where you fall in a 2D diagram with the old left-right axis and another authoritarian-libertarian axis. The extremes of the axes can also be called communism----neo-liberalism and fascism----anarchism but that would probably upset people if they fall near the edges.

I did the test and you can see where I fall, about a quarter of the way between Gandhi and Friedman, or a third of the way between the Dalai Lama and Angela Merkel. Sounds about right to me.

Important suggestion - do the test before exploring the site.

I just noticed also that I fall about a sixth of the way between the Dalai Lama and George W Bush. This is ironic, because I share a birthday with both of them! I also share the Chinese sign of the Dalai Lama, so it is appropriate that I am nearer him (if you believe in that sort of things which I don't). I now see that I have been being unfair to Bush calling him a fascist, he is actually a neo-liberal fascist and I am an almost anarchist.

It is well established in the medical world that the overuse of antibiotics has been responsible for the development of superbugs. Anyone who understands evolution can work it out for themselves. The very few bugs that survive the antibiotic are a little more resistant to the antibiotics and as the process continues a superbug is developed. Even so, doctors continue to overuse antibiotics, writing prescriptions when there is not even any infection. D'oh!

There is another case where an equally silly action is being taken from an evolutionary point of view that does not appear to have been recognised. It is the culling (a polite word for killing) all birds in the vicinity when any one is detected with bird flu. This prevents the development of birds with resistance to the flu. Because the wild birds cannot be effectively culled they will eventually develop resistance, but birds kept by humans for food will not be able to develop resistance. This is a world wide action and it appears that no-one has considered the consequences. Bird flu will not go away because of this action.

I am reminded of King Canute.

Follow the link to "Five Easy Steps To Making Sense of a Senseless World" to read the full article. This is an intelligent and considered statement of important issues by "The Alerted Eye". The following is snippets only:

1) Climate change - Though this issue is often framed by the media as a scientific debate, I firmly believe that that is untrue. Meteorology is a complicated science, and it is sometimes impossible to reach positive conclusions. Rationally speaking, I think we’ve reached the point where there is at least enough statistical significance in the research to show that there is something going on that is at least worth stopping to think about. Can we not all agree on that much? ...

2) The Continuing Spread of Warfare - Despite a long list of political and/or ideological motivations for going to war, it ought to be maintained that violence in human civilzation has ultimately been an economic endeavour. The struggle for land and resources has persisted throughout much of history as the primary cause of aggression. Land and resources are, of course, entirely geographical factors. Western civilization only increased in size and complexity because of its geographical advantage (See “Guns Germs & Steel”). As the fissure between rich and poor nation-states becomes further wedged by the diminishing availability of vital resources and fluctuating accessibility to productive land, desperation will inevitably contribute to the ever increasing anti-western attitudes among those nations that are at an economic disadvantage. If they decide to express this anger using violence, we call it “terrorism.” ...

3) The American Administration - There are many people who like to blame the administration of the American Empire for all the conflict overseas. This is because America has engaged in a number of militaristic endeavours around the world since the end of the Cold War. The specific reasons for going to war have varied from region to region, and have also varied in success. But there is a common theme between all of them: America has consistently tried to depose autocratic or fascist governments in order to replace them with auspicious ‘business-friendly’ regimes. They call it “democratization.” ...

3) Consumerism - Something funny happens when you combine democracy with a free capitalist market. Over time, your vote becomes less important. More important… is what you buy. ...

(hey he really has 2 no.3 items)

4) The Irresponsible Media - The media does not help us to make sound decisions. Now heavily tied-in to the corporate world (through partnerships, buy-outs, mergers and other synergies), the institutionalized media’s agenda is primarily to perpetuate irresponsible consumption habits. This is done by skillfully using the cultural industries (music, movies, television etc.) as platforms for creating false needs among the population. Advertisers employ powerful methods of persuasion, often targeting younger generations who are vulnerable to various social and sexual pressures. By encoding products with different social meanings, the consumer system effectively weaves the act of consumption into the very tapestry of human courtship and everyday social engagement. The popular media is thus a very big part of the problem… much more than a mere “distraction.” The popular media is a continual reminder that “everything is alright” - the collective delusion of an entire civilization in denial. ...

5) Ourselves - I once read that our generation has a very unique responsibility. Ours is the first generation that has the power to end civilization, if we so choose. Ours is the first generation that must overcome human nature and, for the first time ever, choose to have less. We can hope that changes on our Earth will be gradual enough to allow for adaptation, but we can never be sure. It’s up to us. Ordinary people, naked as the day we were born.

All said and done, let me say that I am optimistic. I know there are people out there that think about these things all the time, and have already begun to prepare themselves mentally for the kinds of drastic social changes that our generation will face. Just exactly how it all goes down, I can’t guess. As I said before, I’m only looking at broad trends here, and I could very well be wrong about a number of things (comments are open if you want to fill me in on your opinions). All I know for sure is that “this” will not be a feasible way of life forever.

And where is there hope?

You know, I make a lot of entries in this blog praising the Internet. I really want to express how ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL I think it is. I don’t just think of it as a handy tool, I truly believe it could be the saving grace of human civilization. If you go back and read the problems that I’ve listed, the Internet has the potential to change many of them. It has the power to bring down empires, re-ignite discussion and re-create communities. It puts a great deal of power back into the hands of everyday people, and it is those same everyday people that will rise up and begin to make more informed and responsible decisions.

By virtue of me writing thus, and the fact that you chose to read it, proves that I’m on to something! Because it shows that we are at least thinking about it, and that we do care.

I sent this to the NZ Listener on 5th December 2005 but it was not published.

The Listener
Dear Editor

The Watergate plus 30 years programme on TV1 last night was extremely interesting and timely. It shows that US government can be filled with people that are quite prepared to make decisions that are total unlawful and to commit perjury about it afterwards. No-one took a moral position and stood up to President Nixon and said that these things must not be done.

Now, we see that President Bush is rather more cunning. He has passed secret legislation that does give him the almost unbridled power that Nixon had wrongly claimed to have. This legislation is the first and second so-called "Patriot Acts" that bypass most of the constitutional rights on freedom in the US and allow imprisonment indefinitely without charges, without trial, without appeal to courts and certainly without justice. All this in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting freedom.

It is some time since the torture and humiliation episodes embarrassed the US and UK. Investigations predictably did not find any higher authorities had any responsibility even though it was very clear that they did, and the little guys took the fall. Now we find that the White House is trying to stop a bill that bans torture and inhumane techniques of interrogation. Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney claim that the US does not use torture. Why then are they so strongly motivated to prevent this anti-torture bill including the CIA?

There is no doubt that torture is routinely practiced by the CIA, with the Independent newspaper reporting yesterday that "Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90."

If the US Government is what we depend on for the freedom and justice in the world then we are all in deep trouble.

Sincerely
Ray Tomes

I wrote this in September 1997:

Speed Bumps, Chicanes, Obstacle Courses and Sanity

Like inflammable, "speed bumps" are named for the exact opposite of what they are. They are a human invention that is supposed to make driving safer by making it more dangerous. If that is not perfectly clear, then perhaps a physical rather than intentional description will help.

Types of Obstacle courses employed by Road Engineers

A Speed Bump is a rise in the road that will cause the body of a vehicle travelling at (otherwise) normal velocity to first strike the bump and then launch into space and again make excessive contact with the road when landing.

Often they are accompanied by a narrowing of the road at the same point. This has the effect of either causing contact with the sides or, if the driver avoids them, finding that the vehicle is moving into the oncoming traffic stream just at a time when there is no traction to allow changing direction.

A Chicane is a restriction in a road that would otherwise be able to have traffic traveling both ways at the same time so that traffic from both directions must use the same narrow stretch.

There are a variety of different forms of chicanes, some requiring drivers to first go entirely onto the wrong side of the road to enter the narrow part. Sometimes there are multiple of these obstacles in rapid succession. They are a wonderful feature for those who have the desire to play chicken.

The Purpose of Obstacle Courses

The actual purpose of speed bumps and chicanes has never been established, but it seems to be an art form for road engineers with serious logic impediments. Little pieces of the purpose have been hinted at but it is like trying to do a Rubic's cube that some miserable person has removed, rotated and replaced one of the corners making it impossible.

Surveys reveal that most people think these things are made to slow people down, in which case one might have though they would be called "slow bumps".

When asked why people need to be slowed down most people say that drivers were travelling too fast here and they need to be slowed down to increase safety. Well that is a noble cause that few would want to disagree with.

The logic appears to go like this. Somebody has complained that people are going fast and they fear that someone will have an accident. People are going too fast and should slow down. When people go slower they have less accidents. When there are obstacles in the way people have to slow down. We will put some obstacles in the way and make them slow down. There is one giant mistake in the above logic.

Of course the mistake in the above logic is that going slower is only safer "if all other things are equal". If you drop bombs on people they might be forced to slow down but it definitely won't be safer. If people are forced to slow down to avoid obstacles then they will reduce speed enough to maintain an equal degree of safety, provided they know that the obstacle is there and are paying attention. If they are not aware of the obstacle then safety will go right out the window, and so might the passengers when they hit the bump at speed.

Actual examination of speed bumps however reveals that they are covered in tire skid marks and great big gouges made by sharp bits under the car coming into contact with the road surface. There are many skid marks going up the footpath. This is in marked contrast to normal patches of road where there are so very few gouges, skid marks and obvious trips up the footpath. It is abundantly clear that obstacle courses do not make things safer at all, but rather that they make things very considerably more dangerous.

When this is pointed out to people who claim that the purpose is safety they reply that it serves the people right for travelling too fast where there is a speed bump. Of course they are only going too fast because the obstacle is there. The speed would have been quite fine if the road had been undoctored. This is amply demonstrated by the lack of evidence of "incidents" elsewhere.

Sanity

Is there something wrong with the sanity of anyone that is unable to hold the idea in their head that you should have more accidents so that things will be safer?

Unpublished letter to NZ Listener written 19th December 2006:

Dear Editor

To me, your editorials by Pamela Stirling are one of the highlights of the Listener and I generally read them first. The latest one "Peace in the Pacific" is no exception apart from one thing. You state that "The number of people subsisting on $US2 a day has dropped from 39% of the world's population in the 1970s to 18%". Wouldn't it be nice if this was a real measure of reduction in misery, however the value of the US$ has declined so much that you would need to use $US10 a day now to be comparable with $US2 a day in the 1970s.

On that basis the equivalent figure for the present would be very much higher than 18% and there might in fact be no reduction at all from the 39% of the 1970s.

sincerely
Ray Tomes

NZ Listener article "peace in the pacific"