Wikileaks

Concerning the latest Wikileaks, my blogging friend Poliphilo over on LiveJournal says it all really Eroticdreambattle - Wikileaks:

Thus far there's been nothing in the Wikileaks revelations that comes as a huge surprise. The Saudis hate the Iranians, the US State department spies on the UN, Russia is a kleptocracy, China mounts attacks on the Web, most of the aid that enters Afghanistan goes straight into Swiss bank accounts, Netanyahu is slippery, Merkel is dull, Sarkozy a blowhard, Karzai weak and paranoid, Prince Andrew obnoxious . These aren't secrets that are being disclosed. At most they confirm our best guesses. As someone on a Guardian thread put it, 'Diplomats say in private what Joe Public thinks!'

And, as someone commented there, "...but during National Brotherhood Week"

Or The Merry Minuet.

In the dark: book notes

In The Dark by Mark Billingham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A run-of-the-mill crime novel.

A pregnant London police officer is on maternity leave, and her boyfriend, also a police officer, is doing things that have little relation to his everyday duties. I found the first hundred pages, which set the scene, rather dull, and at several points contemplated abanding the book. But then the story picks up and becomes more interesting as one gets involved with the remaining characters. To say uch more would give away too much of the plot.





View all my reviews

Thanks but no thanks

I thought I'd visit a blog of a blogger who visited my blog.

Found his blog had closed, and was redirected to another site.

First hoop.

Got this message:

You are accessing

roezer.com

This website is participating in a project to stop the spread of viruses and malware online. Often, people do not realize their computers are infected.

Your computer or network (196.25.255.246) is showing signs of infected behavior. You are being alerted so you can take action.

To resolve the problem:

• Make sure your anti-virus, anti-malware, or computer security is up-to-date.

• Run a full scan of your computer and remove any viruses, worms, trojans, or other infections found.

• If your computer or network stops showing signs of infected behavior, this alert will no longer trigger.

Warning: JavaScript is not enabled in your browser!

In order to request temporary access to roezer.com, you must have JavaScript enabled in your browser!

Too many hoops, so I gave up.

There are two main reasons I disable Javascript. One is that it is sometimes exploited by sites that have viruses, malware, and other bad behaviour. The second is that some sites, especially news sites, have streaming video or whatever they call it that eats up bandwidth at a rapid rate.

Telkom recently upped the monthly bandwidth allowance to 9 Gigs, and for the last two months we have managed to reach the end of the month without having to buy more bandwidth, but I'm not taking any chances by enabling Javascript for all sites all the time.

Anniversary of this blog

Today is the anniversary of this blog, which I started five years ago today.

I thought it might be interesting to have a look at some statitics, like how many posts there have been, how many readers, and so on.

Here's the answer: There was an error while fetching stats. Please reload page.

The first post was this:

Notes from underground: Seek and ye shall find: "I've lost touch with a few old friends, and so I've entered their details in a 'reverse people finder'"

You can try it here:

And if you look down the sidebar on the right, you can see what the most popular posts have been, though I don't think thay were necessarily the best or the most profound.

Some of my personal favourites, in no particular order, are:

• Notes from underground: Thoughts on Spiritual Warfare (synchroblog)
• Notes from underground: It's cool to be hip but not hip to be cool
• Notes from underground: Orthodox mission in the 21st century
• Notes from underground: Five influences
• Notes from underground: Holy Poverty

19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet

Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog. And that's a pity.

19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet:

Twitter is popular because it is easy. It is easy to setup, easy to copy-paste links into, and easy to write 140 character bits. But, having your own blog remains the strongest platform if you’re serious about sharing ideas and having a continued dialog with the world. Blogging is the antithesis of easy, however it is far more rewarding.

I'm blogging about this in several places, because I think it's quite important.

I use Twitter.

I joined it about 3 years ago (on 14 April 2007, to be precise), and I didn't see much use for it. I thought it would be good for messages to let family members know that I'd be late home for supper because I was stuck in the traffic. The trouble is, no other members of my family were interested in joining Twitter, so they'd never read the messages anyway.

Then some people began to follow me on Twitter, and I began to follow some people I knew, so I began using it to let people know about stuff I or others had written elsewhere that I found interesting. There's not much you can say in 140 characters, but you can use it to post a link with a brief description.

One problem with that was that some links were too long, so there was no room for description, and in some cases the link itself was over 140 characters. Well, there's always TinyURL, but it's a bit of a schlep to go to Tiny URL to shorten the link and then post it on Twitter. Then I discovered su.pr. That automatically shortens the links for you and posts it on Twitter for you, and gives you some interesting statistics on the fate of your tweet.

And I also have Twitter automatically pass on my tweets to Facebook, so my Facebook friends who aren't on Twitter can also see them.

What I find quite odd, though, is that some of my Facebook friends comment within Facebook about the announcement of the post, and not about the content of the post itself, and I wonder if they even bother to read the blog post at all. Sometimes their comments suggest that they haven't. Some have suggested that this is the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of sites like Facebook. Tim Berners-Lee: Facebook Threatens Web, Beware:

Social networking sites are threatening the Web's core principles by collecting and retaining users' information--from their contacts to their photos to their email addresses--then offering up that information to users only within their own websites, Berners-Lee argued.

'Each site is a silo, walled off from the others,' he explained. 'The more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social networking site becomes a central platform - a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it.

He warned, 'The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.'"

And for those who think that bloggin is too difficult and tweeting is too easy, there's a useful compromise in sites like Tumblr and Posterous, which let you post by e-mail, or from a link in your browser, but don't limit you to 140 words. You can see mine at Marginalia.

I find Tweets without links are often qute frustrating. Someone has said something interesting -- but there is no link to where they said it or where one can find more.

So Tweet if you must, but blogging's better.

Sarah Palin’s ‘refudiate’ Oxford’s Top Word 2010

Some have criticised US politician Sarah Palin for her neologisms, like "refudiate", and have accused her of ruining the English language. Others have praised her, and she herself has apparently compared herself with Shakespeare, who also made up new words. .

Who’s laughing now? Sarah Palin’s ‘refudiate’ Oxford’s Top Word 2010 - Business News - Exec Digital:

Sarah Palin's latest self-made source of public mockery has been re-made as merit, being named New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2010 and the latest addition to its official lexicon

I think the English language is in far more danger of being ruined by stupid journalists who misuse "refute" to mean mere denial instead of "prove to be false". If Sarah Palin is guilty of malapropisms, then so are they.

And "refudiate" is a useful portmanteau word to mean "not only have I shown conclusively that it is false, but I have nothing but contempt for those whose moral turpitude led them to suggest that it was true."

Not that Sarah Palin meant anything like that by it; she probably malapropped her own neologism, if such a thing is possible. But it could prove to be a useful word.

Entropy in the blogosphere: the disintegration of social networking

One of the good things I have found about blogging is that one can find people interested in similar things and exchange ideas with them. There are various tools, like blogrolls, for finding bloggers who say interesting things.

In the past I've found social blogrolling tools, like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, useful for this. But both have recently become considerably less useful, though for quite different reasons. BlogCatalog, as I noted in a recent post, recently decided to change the way it looks and works, and shot itself in the foot. With its reduced functionality it is almost useless.

MyBlogLog continues to function, and it is the behaviour of users that is the problem.

Both of them had little widgets (or "gadgets" as Blogger calls them) that you can put in the sidebar to show who visited your blog. And that is a reminder to me to visit their blogs. OK, some people don't show up there because they read blogs through RSS feeds. But others don't show up there because they have taken themselves out of MyBlogLog entirely, though their blogs remain there like orphaned children.

Here are some of the abandoned ones:

Bishop Alan's blog
The Stroppy Rabbit
Calum Carr's take on... whatever

Some are still there, but have removed the widget from their own blogs:

Skewed view
Conjectural navel gazing: Jesus in lint form
The poor mouth

While others never bothered to put the widget on in the first place.

The trouble with that is that it makes it more difficult to surf from blog to blog -- I visit the blog of someone who has recently visited me, move on to someone who has recently visited them, and so on. But with the widget gone, there's nowhere to go but back. So I'm beginning to feel constricted, as if the number of options is shrinking. It's all rather sad.

On my family history blog I discovered that most of those who visited (as shown on MyBlogLog) were not interested in family history or genealogy, and some were just spammers. But in that field someone revived an old device -- the web-ring. Web-rings let you surf from site to site following a similar theme. The problem with static web pages was that once you had seen them all, you had seen them all. Great for new visitors, but not for people who had seen all the sites. With dynamic web sites, like blogs, however, it is ideal. Each time you visit there is likely to be new content. So perhaps things are not so bad after all. I just have to find a web-ring for this blog, which is such a mixture of stuff it is difficult to fit into any category at all. So, goodbye BlogCatalog, hello blogrings.

"We are not leaving"

I've blogged here and elsewhere about one of the most salient features of the Bush-Blair legacy being the hastening of the exodus of Christians from the Middle East, the region where Christianity began.

Now Notes from a Common-place Book: "We are not leaving" points to two significant articles on this topic by Robert Fisk, one of the Western journalists who probably knows most about the region:

Robert Fisk is a columnist and commentator for The Independent. He has been based in Beirut for many years, and his writing on the region is some of the most perceptive available to Western readers. I consider Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation to be essential reading. Two of his recent columns address the worsening Christian position: Exodus: The Changing Map of the Middle East and Only Justice Can Bring Peace to this Benighted Region. A few excerpts, below:

"Across the Middle East, it is the same story of despairing – sometimes frightened – Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions. Almost half of Iraq's Christians have fled their country since the first Gulf War in 1991, most of them after the 2004 invasion – a weird tribute to the self-proclaimed Christian faith of the two Bush presidents who went to war with Iraq – and stand now at 550,000, scarcely 3 per cent of the population. More than half of Lebanon's Christians now live outside their country. Once a majority, the nation's one and a half million Christians, most of them Maronite Catholics, comprise perhaps 35 per cent of the Lebanese. Egypt's Coptic Christians – there are at most around eight million – now represent less than 10 per cent of the population."

Scott Cairns: Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person

Technical theological jargon may seem boring to many people, but here is an excellent article saying how much we lose by not understanding or using these terms. Scott Cairns: Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person:

Among a good many advantages our predecessors in the early Church could claim was a more nearly adequate vocabulary. For instance, they were in possession of a number of words that indicated a number of amazing truths. Nous, kardia, nepsis and theosis were among those words that helped to keep the young Body focused on the task at hand, the task of healing our shared array of rifts -- rifts within ourselves, between ourselves and others, and, most keenly, between a Holy God and a race of creatures that had broken off communion.

Three of those words -- nous, nepsis and theosis -- have been all but lost to our contemporary conversation, and the deep significance of another, kardia, which is to say 'heart,' has been sorely diminished. With these onetime commonplace words enhancing their spiritual conversations, our predecessors were better able to give their attentions to the profound complexity and the vertiginous promise of the human person, another treasure neglected over the centuries.

These are the vocabulary of Christian psychotherapy, which differs considerably from the world's understanding of that discipline.

New health and safety lunacy: banning books

It seems that in the USA they are planning to ban children's books published before 1985, on the ground they they might, just possibly, contain too much lead.

New federal law bans children's books printed before 1985 - National Civil Liberties | Examiner.com:

Until 1985, it was legal for trace amounts of lead to be used in the inks and paints used in children's books. But the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (PDF), which went into effect February 10, bans the sale of any children's products containing more than 600 parts per million (ppm) total lead, no matter how unlikely it is that the items will feature at a toddler buffet. The Consumer Products Safety Commission has 'clarified' the issue with contradictory guidance that has thrift stores and even libraries disposing of mountains of books published before the magic date -- and hoping that a stray copy of The Wind in the Willows doesn't bring down the wrath of the regulators.

Is this the law of unintended consequences, or health and safety concerns gone mad? Ot is it censorship "for your own good"?

Stereotypes of evil and menace

What do you consider the most powerful and scary stereotypes of evil in your society? In the West, perhaps "terrorist" and "serial killer" might spring to mind. In Africa, "witch" or "zombie".

But if you want to find something pretty horrific, try Googling mom's boyfriend or mum's boyfriend. It seems to to be right up there with the others.

Hat-tip to The Western Confucian: Mom's Boyfriend.

Physicist and priest, Polkinghorne balances science and faith

Physicist and priest, Polkinghorne balances science and faith: "John Polkinghorne, 80, is one of the world's most famous physicists, known in part for his role in explaining the existence of the quark, the smallest known particle. He is the former president of Queens College at Cambridge University in England, a member of the Royal Society, was knighted for his work on England's standards for embryonic stem cell research and for the medical industry's ethical positions, and winner of the Templeton Prize.

When he was in his 40s, he left the world of physics and became a priest in the Church of England. He has written more than 30 books on the relationship between faith and science, and is one of the world's leading voices on that topic."

I read one of his books about 50 years ago -- quite good, if I remember correctly.

Aircraft engine failures: strange reporting

There were two incidents recently reported of airliners' engines failing at or just after take-off. One was given wall-to-wall coverage in the international media, while the other got barely a mention in the local press.

Qantas: No Crash / Explosion | Plane Lands In Singapore:

'Qantas flight QF32 was en route from Singapore to Sydney, the number two engine has shut down, so as a precautionary measure we are taking it back to Singapore,' a Qantas spokeswoman said.

Qantas said the airliner landed at 11.45am local time.

DFAT confirmed the flight had landed safely at Changi Airport and that no passengers or crew had been injured.

And then there was this: Daily Dispatch Online:

ELEVEN passengers were injured yesterday during an emergency evacuation after an engine of a 1Time aircraft exploded at OR Tambo International Airport.

The 128 passengers on board Flight 119 to Cape Town at around 10am heard a “loud boom” minutes before take off.

So which one got bigger coverage -- the one in which there were no injuries, or the one in which 11 people were injured?

It was the former. I listened with amusement as a reporter interviewed a passenger on the Qantas flight, where there were no injuries. The reporter was desperately trying to get the passenger to say that he was frightened, and that it was a frightening experience, but the passenger refused to play ball. He wasn't frightened. Yes, an engine had failed, but the plane in question had four engines, and the other three were still working, the plane was still flying, and the pilot was still in control -- what was there to be frightened of?

The other story, in which 11 people were injured, mainly, apparently, because they made an emergency evacuation, got far less coverage. And one wonders why. Ususally the media are interested in injuries, so why less interest in this case?

Could it be because of the manufacturers of the aircraft and the engines? Could it be that the media have a vested interest in boosting some manufacturers and denigrating others? Especially when one learns a couple of days later that the value of the shares of one manufacturer of aircraft engines has dropped drastically. They couldn't be trying to manipulate the markets, could they? Perish the thought.

But it does make one wonder.

American Communism and the Rise of Feminism

I read this article on American communism and the rise of feminism, and I couldn't work out whether it was serious or a tongue-in-cheek send-up. savethemales.ca - American Communism and the Rise of Feminism:

In a 2002 book, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation, feminist historian Kate Weigand states: 'ideas, activists and traditions that emanated from the Communist movement of the forties and fifties continued to shape the direction of the new women's movement of the 1960s and later.'(154)

In fact, Weigand, a lecturer at Smith College, shows that modern feminism is a direct outgrowth of American Communism. There is nothing that feminists said or did in the 1960's-1980's that wasn't prefigured in the CPUSA of the 1940's and 1950's. Many second-wave feminist leaders were 'red diaper babies,' the children of Communists.

Communists pioneered the political and cultural analysis of woman's oppression. They originated 'women's studies,' and advocated public daycare, birth control, abortion and even children's rights. They forged key feminist concepts such as 'the personal is the political' and techniques such as 'consciousness raising.'

Hat-tip to Ibid.

So what do you think it is?

Satire? A serious academic article? A loony rant? Or something else?

Manic street preachers exposed

Hallowe'en is big in America. And it is probably biggest of all in Salem, Massachussetts, where my blogging friend Phil Wyman usually tries to lay on some special events at his church, often in collaboration with the local pagan community.

This year, however, there were some encounters with manic street preachers who threatened to expose him, but ended up being exposed themselves: Phil Wyman's Square No More: You Will Be Exposed! Threats from Fundy-ville. Quite an amusing story.

Hallowe'en has never been big in South Africa, and most of what I knew of it as a child came from Nancy and Sluggo comics. What was big at this time of year was Guy Fawkes night, when everyone was in competition to have the biggest and best fireworks, and the shops had boxes of Ronden's fireworks in various sizes from the cheap and miserable to the droolingly unaffordable. The best ones had big rockets with conical caps that reached the apex of their trajectory and spat out brilliant coloured stars.

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.

Well, this year it was forgot.

I didn't hear a single cracker in our neighbourhood. And the following snippet from a neighbourhood crime watch circular suggests a reason for its being forgot:

We have been fortunate. As far as I could detect nobody celebrated Guy Fawkes last night. It is, however, the beginning of the BIG BANG season. Shooting of fireworks in a residential area is an offence, unless a permit has been issued by the City Council. Please report shooting of fireworks immediately so that we can request the Metro Police to deal with the offenders.

Well, I must say it made life a lot happier for our dogs, and a lot of other people's dogs too, no doubt.

BlogCatalog loses functionality

BlogCatalog used to be a halfway decent social blogrolling tool until a couple of months ago.

Then someone who had never heard the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" decided to fiddle with it, and as a result it's lost a lot of its functionality. Instead of doing what it used to do quite well, it's now trying to do what Twitter does, and does it very badly indeed.

We've already got Twitter. We don't need a third-rate imitation.

And now we no longer have BlogCatalog. Or at least we have it in a very truncated and crippled form.

The part that still works is the widget that shows who's visited this blog.

Oh, and the messages from people who don't visit my blog, but still tell me they want to be my "friend". That I could do without.

What's missing is all the features that made it useful for finding interesting blogs to read.

What used to happen was that I would click on one of the people who visited my blog, and get to see their blog, if they have one, and then some blogs that were similar to theirs, chosen by some mysterious algorithm that seemed to work, more often than not, to show some interesting blog. But that's gone now.

There was also a facility for creating groups or communities of bloggers with a common interest, so that you could see a group of blogs that deal with a topic you were interested in. No longer.

You can't find blogs that you are interested in. You can only find blogs that the people at Blog Catalog want to show you because the blog owners have paid them to do so. In other words, it's become a vast junkmail advertising site. Instead of opening your horizons to the wider blogging world, it now tries to rub your nose in stuff you aren't remotely interested in.

I really don't mind if sites like BlogCatalog have banner ads, or better still, discreetly-placed ads. I know someone has to pay for the service they provide. But when they stop providing the service, I think fewer and fewer people will be using it. I'm certainly spending a lot more time in it than I used to. There's nothing to see there any more.

They should go back to doing what they did well, instead of trying to do what Twitter does, and doing it badly.

The Bush-Blair legacy

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." So wrote Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, and so it has proved with the evil unleashed by George Bush and Tony Blair, which continues long after they have left office.

The City and the World: The continuing tragedy of Iraq's Christians.:

Another survivor of yesterday's siege told the BBC that 'I do not think I and other Christians can stay in Iraq any longer,' while a young Christian from Northern Iraq (which is ostensibly much safer than Baghdad) told the New York Times, 'There is no future for us here.' Accounts like the one given above make for difficult reading, but they remain only a small part of the larger tragedy of Iraq's ancient Christian churches, which have suffered from continual violence, persecution, and dispersion since the fall of Saddam Hussein. My greatest fear at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was that Bush administration war policy would play a direct role in destroying one of the oldest Christian communities in the world; over the past seven years, it has become increasingly clear that those fears are being realized.

Hat-tip to Kyrie eleison | A vow of conversation.

Ikons and ikon calendars

Here's a shameless plug for my daughter's ikons and ikon calendars: ikonographics.

There is a special 15% discount on my 2011 calendars (and other prints and greeting cards from RedBubble). To order follow the links in the post below and use the code ikonographics_is_on_sale_2202. The discount is valid until 14 November 2010.

For more information see ikonographics: 2011 Calendars available.

The Tablet - Review: Engineers of the Soul

"One evening in 1932, Joseph Stalin summoned dozens of the more biddable Russian writers – that is, without the likes of Pasternak, Bulgakov, Mandelstam or Akhmatova – to a jolly at Maxim Gorky’s place, and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: to join the Soviet Union’s military-industrial drive. “Our tanks are worthless,” he tells the nervous assembly, “if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. Man is reshaped by life itself, and those of you here must assist in reshaping his soul. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, engineers of the soul.” This was no polite big-up, of the sort that might be bandied about at Islington drinks parties by soft London authors in an attempt to shore up their self-importance: it was an order, and signalled an attempt to turn literature into something it had never been before."

So begins an interesting review of The Tablet - Review: Engineers of the Soul:

Frank Westerman’s marvellous and original book traces the catastrophe – spiritual, ecological, social – that that attempt bolstered. A country addicted to political fictions enlisted writers to give literary substance to them, with the result that, disastrously, not only the people but the state itself began to believe those fictions. One of the enduring geographical dreams of the Soviet Union was to divert its Arctic rivers southwards to turn the deserts of central Asia into a flowering paradise. Westerman tracks down an old professor engaged in this vainglory: “We were smothered beneath an avalanche of praise. The dams and pumping stations we designed were invariably spoken of as ‘more monumental than the pyramids of Egypt’. Try keeping a level head then!” The result: “Some of us let it go to our heads. There were those who dreamed of digging canals using controlled nuclear explosions … ”

Hat-tip to Jim Forest. It reminded me of Recent reading: The socialist sixth of the world Khanya. That wwas written by Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, who sang the praises of Stalin's industrialisation of the Soviet Union, which, according to Johnson, brought peace and plenty, full employment and freedom, at a time when the rest of the world was suffering from the Great Depression. Westerman's book sounds like an interesting counterpoint to that.

Book review: The memory collector

The Memory Collector by Meg Gardiner

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book started off OK. There was a mystery about what had caused an airline passenger to go berserk on board a plane, and whatever it was seemed dangerous and possibly contagious. But after the first fifty pages or so, the plot seemed to come unravelled.

It reminded me of a book I had bought to read on a plane a few years ago, Temple by Matthew Reilly. Reilly was quite frank about his aim to write an action novel where the action never lets up, and so one improbable scene follows another until it descends into mind-numbing tedium. Well Meg Gardiner writes a little bit more articulately than Reilly (not very difficult) but after one or other character jumped the shark for the fifth or sixth (or was it the seventh?) time, I found myself nodding off to sleep in the middle of some exciting action-packed scene with no clear indication of how or why the characters got there. They simply move from one action scene to another.

Well, you get the picture. If you're on a long plane trip and don't mind dropping off to sleep in the middle of what you're reading, it will do.
___
Oh, and while I'm writing about books, NaNoWriMo started yesterday. I'll be giving it a miss this year... again. I'm too busy with non-fiction to spare writing time for fiction. The book I wrote with two co-authors on healing ministry in Zimbabwe is getting closer to publication. And I'm working on another book, on the history of the charismatic renewal movement in southern Africa with Prof John de Gruchy, so my writing time is already pretty fully occupied. I still read trashy novels to unwind, though.

View all my reviews

Speeding ticket

Says it all, really!

Private prison industry helped draft Arizona immigration law

I've been greatly suspicious of the mania for privatisation that began in the Reagan/Thatcher years, and has continued ever since. But this must surely be one of the most egregious examples. Private prison industry helped draft Arizona immigration law - War Room - Salon.com:

When it comes to creating demand for a previously unnecessary service and making a profit by any means necessary, you can't beat the private sector. So no one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship). NPR investigated the prison industry's role in drafting and passing SB 1070. It's pretty depressing.