[olympics] time to return to first principles

Time for this blog to put in its tuppence worth. Paula Radcliffe said:

A peaceful protest on the sidelines - fine.

Sorry, Paula - that isn't going to do it. Mutering "acceptably" in the corner like a Church of England Archbishop about Jesus is not going to convert or convince anyone. If it's going to be a protest, it has to be loud and outrageous.

But don't try to stop the torch, because the torch is about more than the Beijing Olympics. It's about the Olympic spirit and the importance of the Olympics in teaching youth, and teaching the world, what sport can do - how sport can bring people together, how it can overcome suffering, how it has overcome even wars in the past.

Trouble is - this is also true. The torch is the wrong thing, the one thing, in fact, which should never have been targetted. Gutless Brown and cronies should have gauged public mood or at least acceded to it, as revealed in polling organization results.

While these can be wildly inaccurate, mass feeling in a community shows through any polling system. If the China games are clearly anathema to most, then boycott them and hand in the keys to 2012 as well.

London 1908

That the games are now a farce is sad but true. To continue them in this fashion is a drug riddled parody. Better to drop the whole thing and start over in the fashion of the early games, as a largely impromptu affair using existing facilities.

Though they had their problems even then.

[thought for the day] tuesday evening

“I remember when I was a girl, one of my – well - my young men - picked up a handful of gravel, and the girl who was with me said at once that he was treasuring it because my feet had trodden on it.

Such a pretty idea, I thought.

Though it turned out afterwards that be was taking a course in geology at a technical school. But I liked the idea anyway - and also stealing a girl's handkerchief and treasuring it - all those sort of things.”

[Agatha Christie, from “The Seven Dials Mystery”, 1929]

[personal things] memories reside in these

Update: check Bunny's offerings here and Nunyaa's here. Cherie's here. Welshcakes' here.

As more come in, this will be updated.

People are more important than things and feelings between people are the most important of all but the danger is that when the people are gone, only the things remain.

This is nostalgia and I'm not a nostalgic person.

And yet the things about me each carry a memory. For example, in the collage at the end of this post, the little bird in a garden is all that's left of perhaps the most important girl in my life. She's still here but not the same person.

One either loved or loathed Roy Orbison but in the track Bono penned for him below: "She's a Mystery to Me", there are many personal things, many images, many memories, glad and sad.

Looking at the woman's visage, it's not surprising to me the memories were mostly sad and yet piquant at the same time.

Will you make a collage of your most important things and post it on your site? Will you include your favourite musical track? I'd like the pragmatic, the gruff, the unnostalgic to post these things as well - to give us an insight into who you are.

Collage of some of my personal things

[meme] from anastasiarta

THE THINGS I’M PASSIONATE ABOUT:

* tuhan [G-d]
* kebenaran [truth]
* kemerdekaan [liberty]
* satu orang wanita [one woman]
* sangat lucu [fun]


THE THINGS I SAY OFTEN:

* Dengan semua rasa hormat hak [with all due respect] ... when I'm about to disagree
* Apakah anda nyaman [are you comfortable]?
* Teh atau kopi [tea or coffee]?
* Mendesah [sigh]
* Uh-huh ... when I don't believe what you say


THE BOOKS I’VE READ RECENTLY:

* Obsession ... proofreading [mengoreksi]
* Lemmings ... proofreading [mengoreksi]


THE THINGS TO DO BEFORE I DIE:

* Taubat [atonement]
* Menolong seseorang [help someone]
* Menari dengan baik [dance well]
* Temukan cinta [find love]


THE SONGS I COULD LISTEN TO OVER AND OVER AGAIN:

Ada sebegitu banyak:

* Deep South [Layo & Bushwacka]
* Temptation [New Order]
* You've got something [JJ Cale]
* Turn, turn, turn [The Byrds]
* Mystery girl [Roy Orbison]


THE THINGS I'VE LEARNED IN THE LAST AND THIS YEAR:

* Anda harus memberi sesuatu untuk mendapat sesuatu [you must give something to get something]]
* Sebegitu banyak orang tidak jujur dengan anda, khususnya dengan perasaan [so many people are not honest with you, especially with feelings
* Lebih baik untuk sudah mencintai dan hilang daripada tak pernah untuk sudah mencintai di semua [better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all]
* Be patient, nourish obscurity and persist until you've nailed them.
* Tidak lupa untuk tertawa [don't forget to laugh].

Dedicated to my friends Santi, Ajeng and Febra ... passed on, as usual, to the first twelve faces in MyBlogLog to the left here. [Please correct my Bahasa.]

[liverpool] capital of culture

Delighted to see that Wiki has an entry under "hubcap"

On Thursday, August 23, 2007, Deogolwulf took it into his head, under the title Some Sense of Culture, to post:

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense.

One of the major joys of many blogs is the comments section and so it is here:

dearieme said...

European Hubcapital of Culture?

Deogolwulf said...

Not bad, dearieme.

Sir James Robison said...

Not unlike Glasgow, would you say?

Deogolwulf said...

I've only been to Glasgow once. A few friends and I decided to go out somewhere in the Gorbals, and to that end we took a taxi, the driver of which, hearing our English accents, declared with some pleasure that we were going to die. We didn't.

Anonymous said...

Surely microbiological sense?

[economics 101] eazy peazy if explained simply

There is a logical problem with economics.

The Tim Worstalls, Chris Dillows, Cityunslickers, Karl Denningers and Sackersons who actually understand this guff are fond of either graphs, esoteric references or eco-speak [Sackers is at least partly understandable] and tend to mutter to each other in their communities.

But it must be obvious to even Blind Freddy and his dog [wait for the PCers on this one] that the average person, e.g. me, is so awestruck by this fractional reserve banking and so on that he hurriedly shuffles to one corner and lets the big boys get on with it.

Well this blog thinks it's time economics is explained in words of one syllable or less to non-afficianados and this humble blogger is going to start the ball rolling. Today I'd like to look at:

Fractional Reserve Banking

Before that, it's bona fides time. As a non-economist, one has to start somewhere, so Lew Rockwell seems pretty good to me, as he was at World Net Daily and this is Vox's hideout and I trust Vox [even in intergalactic mode].

Rockwell seems to be in awe of Murray N. Rothbard who in turn is in awe of the Austrian School:

Austrian economists reject statistical methods and artificially constructed experiments as tools applicable to economics, saying that while it is appropriate in the natural sciences where factors can be isolated in laboratory conditions, acting human beings are too complex for this treatment. Instead one should isolate the logical processes of human action ...

Now that seems like a damned good model as it eliminates all those pesky graphs and projections and seems pretty libertarian to boot.

So, on that basis, I'd like to quote Rothbard on FRB. This is a long article for a blog [though short by eco-standards and no more than a synopsis for them]. I put only a brief portion here and please follow the link for the full thing:

Let's see how the fractional reserve process works, in the absence of a central bank. I set up a Rothbard Bank, and invest $1,000 of cash (whether gold or government paper does not matter here).

Then I "lend out" $10,000 to someone, either for consumer spending or to invest in his business. How can I "lend out" far more than I have? Ahh, that's the magic of the "fraction" in the fractional reserve. I simply open up a checking account of $10,000 which I am happy to lend to Mr. Jones.

Why does Jones borrow from me? Well, for one thing, I can charge a lower rate of interest than savers would. I don't have to save up the money myself, but simply can counterfeit it out of thin air. (In the nineteenth century, I would have been able to issue bank notes, but the Federal Reserve now monopolizes note issues.)

Since demand deposits at the Rothbard Bank function as equivalent to cash, the nation's money supply has just, by magic, increased by $10,000. The inflationary, counterfeiting process is under way.

This is one small reason [another being the global sub-prime scandal] why this blog is so vehemently down on banks and cartels. Now if you are lost by this or you've simply lost interest, then it is my fault for not cranking it down to more understandable and bite-size terms.

I'll hopefully do better next time. I'm working on it.