Is There Anyone at Home?

"Of course, this stuff isn't really Grace, as you claim, is it?". So said a skeptical fellow sitting with a glass half full the other day. I like it when someone gets well into thought in the Tavern. It's the place for it. Every Hero and Saint has asked deep questions at one time or another and started off with some doubt. Eric gave me the nod to top his glass up. "This one's on me", he said.

The talk had been a '42er '. What's the answer to Life, The Universe and, well Everything. Some just do not see the Grace we have been given. Some do not - and some will not - drink.

Do we even see what is infront of us? How did it get here? Is anyone else sharing the same elsewhere?  How come its just us in the Tavern? There were plenty of folk putting their oars in the deep waters.

Eric Metaxis opened up but it wasn't long before others joined in.

Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?

In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete—that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 27 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets capable of supporting life. [I hope those zeros are correct].

 http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568?mod=e2fb

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random.

But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researchers have discovered precisely.. 

bubkis—0 followed by nothing.

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

Bill chimed in. 

He's had a dog in the fight too, and for quite a while it seems.

Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest . . . . We should quietly admit that the early estimates . . . may no longer be tenable.”

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. 

Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here.

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

The Moon too, as Bill pointed out. 

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone—beyond itself.

One can sympathise with those who say we have 'begged the question' in the first place. With all our intelligence and technology, are we really seeing what we think we are seeing? 

You do not have to be very intelligent to be a Tavern Keeper (although I do in fact have a brain the size of a small planet) and many who are intelligent are too clever by half. But the more we 'discover', the more questions arise, the more certain some people are and the more discombobulated others become. It is often impossible to differentiate between them. Which is where Grace comes in handy. 

When a chap looks at another and sees that there is a 'vacant' look in his eyes and he wonders if there is anyone at home, it is best to be generous and compassionate. And that is where the Grace does its work.

I filled the glasses and mugs while Amanda Gafter had a chat with a Professor of Exceptionally Clever Stuff. I am not at all sure he thinks Grace is Real. Or anything is for that matter. But what is 'real' and where does 'it' all come from?

Being a Catholic chap, I take it that God created Heaven and Earth and all things visible and invisible. And by the Lord Harry there is much we just do not see. He made Grace too.  Just how He went about it and whether He has a work in progress is yet more to ponder.

The Prof had many really interesting points and many side tracks to explore.

The Case Against Reality

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/ 

Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The Confined Solution

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: 

The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. 

What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Ahha, good old 'evolution'. The 'Theory' that explains some 'facts' and increasingly has to shovel other facts under the carpet. Is the carpet real?

Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. 

This is the aptly named “hard problem.”

On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them. Experiment after experiment has shown—defying common sense—that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. 

The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

So while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality. In short, all roads lead back to the observer. And that’s where you can find Hoffman—straddling the boundaries, attempting a mathematical model of the observer, trying to get at the reality behind the illusion. Quanta Magazine caught up with him to find out more.

Let us listen in and I guess expect that the Theologians are not seen either. 

Gefter: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.”

Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. 

It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

Gefter: You’ve done computer simulations to show this. Can you give an example?

Hoffman: Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order—very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness—in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve—say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. 

Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. 

For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality.

See what I mean by too clever by half? 

Gefter: But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?

Hoffman: There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface.

Oh dear. Its a good job we moved from the 'radio' era into the computer era or he's be using analogies of glass tubes and resistors. 

Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. 

You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. 

And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. 

But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. 

I am reminded that we 'look through the glass-darkly. I am reminded of how we have had matters slowly 'Revealed' to us as we have progressed. 

And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

Gefter: So everything we see is one big illusion?

Hoffman: We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally.

Gefter: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?

Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

Gefter: How did you first become interested in these ideas?

Hoffman: As a teenager, I was very interested in the question “Are we machines?” My reading of the science suggested that we are. But my dad was a minister, and at church they were saying we’re not. So I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. It’s sort of an important personal question—if I’m a machine, I would like to find that out! And if I’m not, I’d like to know, what is that special magic beyond the machine? 

So eventually in the 1980s I went to the artificial-intelligence lab at MIT and worked on machine perception. The field of vision research was enjoying a newfound success in developing mathematical models for specific visual abilities. I noticed that they seemed to share a common mathematical structure, so I thought it might be possible to write down a formal structure for observation that encompassed all of them, perhaps all possible modes of observation.

I was inspired in part by Alan Turing. When he invented the Turing machine, he was trying to come up with a notion of computation, and instead of putting bells and whistles on it, he said, Let’s get the simplest, most pared down mathematical description that could possibly work. And that simple formalism is the foundation for the science of computation. So I wondered, could I provide a similarly simple formal foundation for the science of observation?

Gefter: A mathematical model of consciousness.

Hoffman: That’s right. My intuition was, there are conscious experiences. I have pains, tastes, smells, all my sensory experiences, moods, emotions and so forth. So I’m just going to say: One part of this consciousness structure is a set of all possible experiences. When I’m having an experience, based on that experience I may want to change what I’m doing. So I need to have a collection of possible actions I can take and a decision strategy that, given my experiences, allows me to change how I’m acting. That’s the basic idea of the whole thing. I have a space Xof experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.

Gefter: But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world?

Hoffman: Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world.

Gefter: The world is just other conscious agents?

OK, I didn't interrupt but was thinking that if there were no other conscious agents - ourselves, people, -  for a very long time during evolution, then WHO was the One Conscious Agent that was keeping it all spinning before we got here? 

Hoffman: I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view.

The mind boggles at the fence he builds around us.  He really does need the Grace I serve here.

Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.

Almost Theological, innit ? He stops short of positing an Original Mind, an Originating Mind that creates all the new little minds to generate a unified, single mind for Himself.  But the Prof ain't theological.

Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down.

Gefter: If it’s conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description of the world.

How about that old pre-science idea of 'Turtles all the way down', hehehe.

Hoffman: The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? 

Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.

Gefter: It doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling block for those trying to understand consciousness?

Heck, lady, I was thinking as I listened and filled the pots of the other's hanging on their every round about word, what about David Bohm?  He was a quantum physicist. He tackled that very question and came up with the Implicate and Explicate Orders. That was fifty years ago !!  Perhaps it was because he caught sight of God's coat tails just as St Thomas did, that he was relegated to the science footnotes.

Hoffman: I think it has been. Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist independent of any observers—spiking rates, connection strengths at synapses, perhaps dynamical properties as well. These are all very classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and objects exist absolutely. 

And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress. 

They don’t avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our physics.”

Gefter: I suspect they’re reacting to things like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s model, where you still have a physical brain, it’s still sitting in space, but supposedly it’s performing some quantum feat. In contrast, you’re saying, “Look, quantum mechanics is telling us that we have to question the very notions of ‘physical things’ sitting in ‘space.’”

Hoffman: I think that’s absolutely true. The neuroscientists are saying, “We don’t need to invoke those kind of quantum processes, we don’t need quantum wave functions collapsing inside neurons, we can just use classical physics to describe processes in the brain.” 

I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. 

It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! 

Quantum mechanics says that classical objects—including brains—don’t exist. So this is a far more radical claim about the nature of reality and does not involve the brain pulling off some tricky quantum computation. So even Penrose hasn’t taken it far enough. But most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This is a really, really hard one to let go of.

Hmmmm. I hesitate to say that he has a cheek saying that others 'haven't taken it far enough'. But, we are a work in progress ! 

Gefter: To return to the question you started with as a teenager, are we machines?

Hoffman: The formal theory of conscious agents I’ve been developing is computationally universal—in that sense, it’s a machine theory. And it’s because the theory is computationally universal that I can get all of cognitive science and neural networks back out of it. Nevertheless, for now I don’t think we are machines—in part because I distinguish between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. 

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. 

I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

Hmmmm. I think the good Prof has a long way to go to reach the destination, and is insisting on taking the pretty route. He is in dire need of sustenance to help him on his way.

I filled his glass, but I don't think he saw it. He clearly isn't experiencing it.

Pax. 

Bananas Sink Ships

All around the Hilary Village of Hobart this weekend we have seen arms snapping up in Salute. Old men and young, some ladies too, have been marching through the streets to Remember.  Anzac, as I have been talking about.

So someone asked why I wasn't there. I wasn't an Australian when I fought, said I.  So, no salutin' then, suggested they. No, but someone very close did tell of the 'Salute, and the time when he was Commissioned after spending some years in the ranks. 

On being posted to his new base after being bent and broken and put back together again in training, given the pills to stop his shyte stinking and getting shiny stripes on his shoulders, the first person he encountered was a Warrant Officer. How the WO knew he was brand new, who knows, but as they appraoched one another the WO mouthed quietly, "Wait for it", and gave a Salute.  

He must have seen my friend's hand twitch. The lad was saved from being sunk on his first day. Several years of being a junior and saluting Warrant Officers first are not easy to put behind.

Okd Knights like m'self salute quite differently but old Kings are more used to just a wave of the hand. Ain't promotion grand.

But this fellow does salute from time to time.

I salute some non-military people. I salute Heroes and Saints. I salute aircraft. I salute memories and reminiscences.

Others salute in different ways too.

Here are aircraft saluting. 

Who would fail to salute back.

The salute has a long history to which I can lay some claim. Knights would lift their visor to show they were not about to fight. Their hand would not be holding their sword and their eyes were visible. You could look them in the eye. 

But that was when they were 'in the field' and making their intentions known. On 'parade' they would be more formal like the Officer with his sword at the top of the page. 


Or this fellow to the left.


There are many ways to show intent, or obediance, or Honour.


I salute my favourite aircraft too. I have one on the Tavern wall, top right. 

It was an ugly machine. Not at all pretty. A Thug-flugge. Bent like a banana and built like the proverbial brick khasi for sinking ships. 

A real Knight's Steed.

Bits folded, bite opened out and bits rotated. They were thown around so much that bits fell off too. They fired missiles to order. Martel, TV guided, right up to impact on the superstructure of choice. The last words a ship's Captain might hear was 'Smile, you are on television !'. Really quite cutting edge for those days.

And the men who crewed them were friends of mine. I rememember with affection my time with 12 Sqdn at Honington. Here they are doing what they do. With just a bit of artistic licence. You might notice on the nacelles there is a face. Quite close to home ! 

It is a plane that at least one fine man, a civilian, coveted. He saluted with his wallet and bought one. That is almost unheard of. 

A rich boy's toy. And what a toy.

I can't say that I would buy one, had I the wherewithall. I would buy a PBY and make a Gentleman's Residence in it. 

The fine men I served with and left to get on with things moved around a bit and mixed with others in conflict.

Let this be a Salute to them, their memory and their Professional Art.

Pax.

(Un)Holy Smoke

So, this old fella came by with a 'fee' list that I could chose from for allowing folk into the Tavern. He claimed that we stood on Aboriginal Land and should pay him. I introduced him to my Bouncer. I have to say that Germaine Greer, that maven of Feminism has a lot to answer for encouraging such nonsense, but on the other hand one has to admire the efforts of some Aboriginal folk for pulling themselves into the 21C with a bit of entrepreneurship.

Andy Bolt whet his whisle and told us about the 'smoking ceremony'.  Or rather he brought a few others to tell.

Welcome to what’s actually your country - 

and to an ancient ceremony invented the other day

Tony Thomas checks out the rates charged for a brand new ancient tradition by the Wurundjeri Tribe Land & Compensation Cultural Heritage Council:

Good business.

This reinvented superstition invades even an organisation once devoted to science but now gripped with a global warming alamism which its boss warns ”almost sounds more like a religion”: 

Even the CSIRO, an organisation nominally pledged to rational inquiry and scientific rigour (OK, there is that climate-change hysteria), has bought in to the ‘welcome’ business, having issued guidelines for pay rates and accommodations.... 

when its laboratories need to be cleansed of “evil spirits” 

...by an ochred contractor waving fiery foliage. Exposed and widely ridiculed, those guidelines were quietly removed for the internet. They remain available via Wayback Machine’s web archive, however, and can be read in full here.

The supposedly ancient ‘welcome’ tradition goes back 30-40 years, whereas the House of Commons goes back nearly 700 years. Indigenous entertainers Ernie Dingo and Richard Whalley, of the Middar Aboriginal Theatre, claim to have invented the “welcome to country” in 1976 because two pairs of Maori visitors from NZ and the Cook Islands wanted an equivalent of their own traditional ceremony before they would dance at the Perth International Arts Festival.   

Some ancient traditions go waaaay back. !! 

Another version is that activists shrewdly created the ceremony at about the same time to buttress land-rights claims. And Aboriginal Rhoda Roberts, head of indigenous programming at the Sydney Opera House, says the ceremonies were developed in the 1980s by members of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust which she co-founded. 

Her speaker-for-hire profile claims she personally invented the term “welcome to country” along with the protocols involved.  She would like welcomes to include marking guests with ochre and Aboriginal sweat.

Yet:

Anthropologists and early settlers failed to record anything much resembling “welcome to country” ceremonies. Bess Price, CLP Aboriginal member of the Northern Territory Parliament and Minister for Community Services, has described “welcomes” as “not particularly meaningful to traditional people anyway.

"We don’t do that in communities. It’s just a recent thing. It’s just people who are trying to grapple at something that they believe should be traditional.” 

Anthropologist Ron Brunton found in WA some evidence for permissions being required to enter neighbouring clans’ land (although more honoured in the breach these days) but saw no evidence of any welcome-to-countries in the state where the ceremonies were (probably) first invented.

Adelaide archival researcher and geologist Alistair Crooks says, 

“During years of geological site inspections, I have never seen or heard of a welcome ceremony being performed when entering tribal land (invited), nor have I seen the ceremony performed when transporting Aborigines into or across various tribal boundaries. Nor is any such ceremony described by any of the early explorers or anthropologists that I am aware of.”

But hey, its a great little money spinner, along the lines of a Mafia shakedown. And of course, kow-towed to by almost any organisation funded by taxpayer's money!  

Good for driving out moths from old suits and overpowering 'Old Spice'.

Clearly, if it is to drive out evil spirits, it ain't working.

Note:  Tony Thomas’s new book of essays, That’s Debatable, will be launched at 6.30pm Thursday, May 19, at Il Gamberos Restaurant, 166 Lygon St, Carlton.

And maybe in the Tavern if he pays a small fee.

Pax 

War Suffering: Then and now.

The conversation the other day ahead of the Anzac Day Remembrance elicited some angst and disapproval in the Tavern.  An issue arose which continued for a while in the Oz room and I had to 'step in' to remind people of some perspectives. It was over the issue of  'Offical' phrases that elevate women's suffering position vis a vis that of men.

Officialdom has strange, distorting glasses.

I could well see the point being made by one chap, Mark Dent, and I agreed with him, but I do so not at the expense of the ladies.

The fact is that World War One, which is the keynote conflict remembered on Anzac Day, even though all wars fought by Oz soldiers are included,  did see some ladies killed in action. They were nurses. Fine gals. 

My good friend the Southern Gal has raised the flag for war nurses before, and well too.  The modern matter of encouraging - or rather demanding - front line combat roles for women pivots around the idea that women can do anything a man can, but don't. 

In WW1 Oz lost many a fine gal in the combat zones overseas.  46, so I understand.

Nearly 3,000 Australian women served as nurses during the First World War.

http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/womens_mobilisation_for_war_australia 

Most of these served in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS), although a dozen are also known to have served as Royal Australian Navy Nurses. The rest joined other Allied organisations such as the Red Cross (French, British and Australian), Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, Territorial Force Nursing Service, Lady Dudley’s Australian Voluntary Hospitals, Salvation Army Nurses and the New Zealand Army Nursing Service. 

Approximately forty women served as masseuses, twenty-nine of these in the AANS. Female doctors, whose services were refused by the Australian military, had been accepted in British army nursing since the war against the Boers, despite lingering reservations amongst some senior military officials about their suitability for active service. Twenty-three Australian women doctors made their own way to Europe to join organisations such as the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, the Endell Street Military Hospital, Royal Army Medical Corps and the French Red Cross, one of whom (Dr. Phoebe Chapple) became the first woman doctor to be awarded the British Military Medal. A further 120 Australian women are known to have served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments established by the Red Cross.

Australian women had a variety of motives for heading off to war, just as did the men who enlisted. Patriotism and a sense of duty featured strongly in their own explanations of why they signed on – a strong feeling that they needed to “do their bit” for their country and the Empire. Many also wanted to be close to their menfolk, whether relatives or friends. And like the men, most were excited by the opportunity that the war presented for travel, adventures and perhaps even romance.

Nurses embarked on the first convoy of ships that sailed to Egypt in November 1914 and, like their male comrades, saw their first action at Gallipoli in April of the following year. Confident of a quick campaign, the Allied command had made little provision for the wounded. For many hours after the landing on 25 April 1915, the wounded lay exposed on the narrow beaches, showered by enemy gunfire. Those who survived were laid out on transports and slowly towed away to safety. Throughout the Gallipoli campaign, the nurses waited to receive the wounded, stationed on hospital ships off the shore or in the hospital camps of Alexandria and Malta, and later on Lemnos Island.

One can only praise these fine women who did what we expect from women. They gave; they nurtured, they were kind and caring, indeed, loving and warm to men who needed their special female succour. 

It is what women are 'fit for' in wartime rather than lugging weaponry and bayonetting the enemy. But in comparing what men and women are 'fit for' we seem to see men as fit to be killed, maimed, suffer horribly, whereas we do not like the idea of woman getting the same 'opportunity'. We just do not see women as having a 'Warrior Spirit', although frankly the battlefields are littered with the bodies of men who do not now see a 'warrior spirit' as much of a recommendation.

The 3000 fine ladies were very likely exceeded in number by the 20+ year old women handing out White Feathers in the street to 14 year old boys.

Compare the 46 who died to the 60+ Thousand men.  The disparity is notable, and even though I do not wish to see or hear of more ladies in body bags, nor does Mark want to hear an 'inclusiveness' that becomes an insult.

Let us hear what Mark had to say. He alerted us to a different kind of war - one waged upon men. The modern one.

Lest We Forget

Every year I attend the ANZAC Day clash between Essendon Football Club and my beloved Collingwood, two traditional rivals playing in the Australian Football League. Aside from the adrenaline which pumps through my veins as I anticipate the spine tingling roar at the conclusion of our national anthem,  there is another  moment when I  must physically brace myself to contain the swirl of emotions which assail my body.  No-it isn’t in reaction to an outrageous umpiring error or a player’s costly mistake. This reaction comes long before the first bounce to commence the clash.

 http://relatingtomen.com/blog/lest-we-forget/

I know that the ANZAC Day ceremony will entail a tribute. This tribute will invariably call upon the one hundred thousand people gathered there to bow their heads as they recall the selfless sacrifice of our brave men and women.

That’s right-the brave men and women.

Being something of a history buff I wonder if perhaps the details of our female battalions who dug in at the Somme and endured the freezing conditions, slept in the mud, blood and guts of their girlfriends and charged the enemy trenches with fixed bayonets had eluded me.

I never saw footage of limbless, blind, deaf, shell shocked, facially disfigured young girls being carried or wheeled off ships as they arrived home to resume their civilian lives. Perhaps the cameras weren’t operating that day.

Yet year after year we pay tribute and give equal standing to both the men and women. 

How is this gross misrepresentation of the facts allowed to go on unquestioned? 

Of course if one was stupid enough to raise the issue at a dining table the response would be as predictable as the effects of gravity. People would screech in indignant outrage: “Our women worked in the factories, nursed and cared for the wounded and suffered the grief of losing their husbands, brothers and sons!”

Hilary Clinton’s infamous line about women being the primary victims of war comes to mind.

'Primary' victims were the MEN, stoopid.
This from a charlatan who claimed to have come under fire in Bosnia - but did not of course.

If a women was ever harmed in war time, particularly in World War One, it was as a result of an unexpected accident or illness. No woman ever fought side by side with the men nor were they expected to fight. Yet, I repeat-they receive the same gratitude, respect and acknowledgement as the men. 

It is incomprehensible and makes a disgraceful mockery of the Remembrance Day ceremonies.

A handful of men suffer from breast cancer. Can you imagine the outcry we would hear from women if all of the breast cancer awareness campaigns spoke of the dreadful devastation of breast cancer wrought upon our women and men without any reference whatsoever to the enormous statistical discrepancy in which gender is most badly affected?  It doesn’t bear thinking about. 

There’s no need to wonder as it would never happen.

This issue of our media never being gender specific about issues negatively impacting upon men’s lives was brought to a head for me over this weekend when a full page article on suicide titled, You’re Not Alone appeared in the lift out section of the HeraldSun.

As I greedily scanned the paragraphs, hoping I would stumble across the sentence alerting the world to the fact that the terrible tragedy we call suicide disproportionately affects our men, I quickly realised my search was a futile one.

Over 75% of suicides are committed by a male. This of course doesn’t mean we should focus solely on males, but given the disparity in the figures one would think we would be thrown a crumb of sympathy, an empathic wink or a pat on the head. 

Nope…nothing. No mention of men as a gender throughout the entire article. In fact the personal focus was on women who had lost a male partner and how difficult life was for them as a consequence.

On the same day as this article appeared the murder of a little boy by his mentally unstable father was receiving wall to wall coverage. Each time the story was told the announcer reminded everyone that domestic violence was a scourge which overwhelmingly affected women although a small minority of men were also victims. Suddenly it seemed very important for the public to understand that this is an issue that harms women and that is where all of our attention should be focused.

This very deliberate censorship can be found in a number of other issues which overwhelmingly affect men. I have never watched, listened to or read a media story on death and disability in the workplace which states-men are the overwhelming victims of death and disability in the workplace. In fact when the Victorian Government ran a campaign on this issue a few years ago, all of the television, radio and print advertisements referred to the Deaths of Victorians in the Workplace.

Oh- and the dead are referred to as people or workers in all of the documentation. We would never refer to the female victims of domestic violence as "people" or "family members". We would be left in no doubt whatsoever that it was a woman who was slapped, pushed, beaten or verbally abused. Isn’t it funny how gender is of no consequence when males are dying?

When our media speak or write about our homeless-that is all we ever call them. We don’t mention the fact that 67% of our homeless roughing it on the streets are males or 75% taking shelter in boarding houses are males.  Can you imagine this percentage remaining a non issue if it were females wandering our streets and making up 70% of our homeless?

Why is this deliberate deception and censorship so prevalent in our media? One could be led to believe there is some kind of agreement in media circles that anything which could focus attention upon the hardship, loss, grief and injustice men endure is to be hidden, glossed over or ignored.

Some claim that more women are victims of family violence. Nevertheless a very substantial proportion of men are also affected. Understanding this, all domestic violence ads still focus exclusively upon women.

Men are not referred to at all, other than as perpetrators of course.

Imagine a suicide campaign with the same resources behind it as the Domestic Violence Industry has. This suicide awareness campaign would involve huge billboards, advertisements on television and a barrage of print articles in our major papers. Women would not be referred to in any way whatsoever. They would simply not exist as victims in the world of suicide. When outraged women ask why we are not concerned about female suicide they would be informed that less women kill themselves and for different reasons. Perhaps we could suggest that if they are so concerned about the plight of women who kill themselves they could start up their own movement to bring awareness to the problem.  Our focus just happens to be upon the men. That would surely soothe their indignation.

I would like this revised version of the pre-match ANZAC Day tribute to be read during the pre-match ceremony. It would go some way to addressing the rather absurd, insulting, inaccurate and somewhat deceitful insinuation that women have sacrificed as much as men throughout the many wars we have  endured.

Ladies and gentleman, could we please be upstanding as we pause and offer a minute’s silence in tribute to the courage and sacrifice of tens of thousands of young Australian men and boys who died so that we might live in a peaceful, free society. Others gave great support to our soldiers and we acknowledge the tireless work of the many nurses who took care of our men and gave them comfort in a time of need.

Personally, I agree with all he said there. But there are some who would be as disrespectful of women as our society is disrespectful of men. They would take the truth of the matter and use it as a weapon.

Two wrongs do not make a right.

Pax 

Sinking in Debt - Again

Socialists decry capitalism with its banks and fiscal policies and the dreaded 'Marketplace'. They aren't very good with money.  But they do seem to get a hold of power quite easily and then all financial hell breaks loose.

This month, indeed this very day, marks the anniversary of a famed speech made to the Oz Parliament  in which the Treasurer of the day declared the Federal Gummunt, (at least), free of debt. This was after an heroic effort to pay off almost $100 Billion of debt racked up by the previous socialist mob. 

Of course, the States gummunts still had their wicked ways with the purse and wallet and the average man and woman in the street were carrying far more debt than they could pay off. But at least the Federal Mob had conquored the Debt Dragon.

Of course, having done the hard yards and strightened out an unholy mess, the Conservatives were replaced by.... yes, you guessed, the bloody socialists again. And now where are we?

Just look at the

http://www.australiandebtclock.com.au/

Tick, tock, tick, tock, the hands spin faster that the spin doctors can catch. But the public is all too easily fooled. There is little traction gained by comparing Oz to other countries as it was back then. I know that 'everyone is doing it' : getting into massive National Debt, that is, but every sane person knows that to conduct one's own affairs in such a manner is a recipe for disaster.

And it will come.

But for a brief moment let us look back at just ten years ago. Eddie Sim introduced David Alexander's short chat and tabling of his words in the bar. Eddie said,......

A sobering document that only disciplined conservatives would ever understand. Labor wasted the fiscal surplus that had been solidly repaid and built over the Howard years only to splurge Australia back into debt yet again . Its history repeating itself time and time again and who pays for it ? YOU DO by higher taxes or reduced government services -- when will Australians wake up ?

David gave the news. David Alexander has a sound pedigree and is and was well positioned to observe: he is federal managing director at Barton Deakin and a former senior adviser to Peter Costello.

The lessons of Peter Costello's 'debt-free day' are worth remembering

The fiscal repair job that helped us ride out the GFC stands as a benchmark for the new generation.

Ten years ago today Australia celebrated an unusual milestone – the federal government announced that its debt had finally been paid off.

"Debt-free day," treasurer Peter Costello called it in a speech celebrating the event. "The day we pay off the mortgage."

 http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-lessons-of-peter-costellos-debtfree-day-are-worth-remembering-20160420-goauk5.html

As last week's warnings of a credit downgrade ring in our ears, it is worth considering a few lessons from that special moment in history.

Peter Costello at the announcement of debt-free day in 2006. Photo: Rob Homer

In mechanical terms, the $96 billion debt was essentially paid off by a combination of the government living within its means – creating and then sustaining budget surpluses over many years – and using asset sales to retire debt.

If an aging Knight who has managed to get to this point in life completely free of any debt can offer a view, I think Costello was streets ahead of any Treasurer this country has had in its history. The Best we have had. I do not know what sort of Prime Minister he might have made had he and Mr Howard made a 'transition' of power effectively, nor do I know if him being PM would have secured an election which was in fact lost. 

But I would have bet on it.

The biggest spending cuts occurred in the first budget, while political capital was high and the attachment to programs was low. Over time the focus moved from cuts to refusing to take on new expenditure. Saying "no" was tougher than it sounds – and its significance more important than appreciated. Government spending as a proportion of the economy was always lower under John Howard than the level inherited from the Keating government.

Increased revenues in the early Howard years, through bracket creep and measures such as the superannuation surcharge, helped repair the budget, but tax cuts from 2000 meant the ongoing contribution to debt reduction on the revenue side was limited.

Now imagine several sticks of dynamite attached.

Revenues from the sale of public assets, worth $46 billion up to that point, went to debt reduction rather than other purposes. Asset sales came at very high political cost – the sale of Telstra, for example, stretched the political pain over multiple elections for the three sale tranches.

The vast majority of the debt, it is worth noting, was paid off while Australia's terms of trade were below the historical average. The arrival of the mining boom in 2004, eight years after Howard was elected, was well received but by then task of debt extinguishment was largely done.

Australia took a different path to the US and Britain. Costello rejected the Tony Blair approach of building up spending levels and running high deficits, and also castigated the Bush administration for its unfunded tax cuts.

"Supply-side economics is an example of what not to do," Costello said in 2005, presciently predicting major budget deficits.

Australia had one of the most sought-after fiscal positions in the world – debt-free and assets in the bank. In 2008 Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens lauded the financial position built up by Costello, saying "the capacity to respond, if need be, to developments in the future is virtually without peer".

When the global financial crisis hit months later, the super-strong fiscal position – radiating solidity, allowing tax or spending stimulus – coupled with record terms of trade meant Australia was prepared to outperform the world.

But of course the fickle Oz populous had spoken and the adult, Conservative Gummunt of Howard, PM, and Costello, Treasurer, was replaced by the dismal KRudd and Gillard years which handed them the inheritance and a clean credit card. The massive 'Cash-in-the-Bank' that Costello left them was frittered away by Wayne Swan and co in a trice and the credit card took a hammering.  Very quickly we were not only back where Costello came in but going backward at an horrendous rate.

Whoever was sitting in the treasurer's seat during the GFC – Costello, Wayne Swan, Pistol or Boo – would have overseen a world-beating performance.

There are lessons for today's generation.

First, don't allow debt to build up. Labor blithely surrendered our world-beating position with undisciplined spending, but once it's gone it is extremely hard to get back.

Second, governments need to be genuinely hungry for fiscal repair over a sustained period. Otherwise the desire to do better fiscally will be constantly overridden by other priorities.

Third, give up on wishful thinking. People are always coming through the treasurer's door with a proposal that "will pay for itself". Socialists err on the spending side, supply-siders on the tax cuts side. As seductive as these will be to some in politics – and they are always tempting – there is no substitute for hard graft, deferred gratification and honest accounting.

Fourth, make sure policy levers are working with the grain of societal values. Australians have a strong egalitarian sensibility that Howard instinctively understood and was reflected in his policies. The 2014 budget was always going to fail because it ignored this enduring sentiment.

Don't underestimate the deep dividends that come from getting the budget in order. There is a tectonic surge in confidence from consumers, businesses and investors that comes with healthy government finances. There's usually a handy political dividend, too.

The more hand-outs from the dwindling number of taxpayes to the fiscally irresponsible, the more votes go to socialists. Will we ever learn?

Here we are, sinking again. Up to our wastes.

Pax.