Not so great debates

Today I am focusing on the 'write' point of this blog today. What I'm currently writing (excluding of course this blog post) is a short series of arguments in the vein of 'Conversations with God' which really is just a showcase of how infuriating it is to have an argument with a believer. So really it's just written from a point intended to demonstrate how infuriating a believer claiming to be 'rational' is, particularly since they tend to always be humble, so I simply made the 'believer' one with no reason to be humble, nor to have any excuse to take refuge in ambiguity. So it's far more about how one feels than the 'reason' of the debate.

Anyway, it's pretty easy to write, you simply pose good questions and answer them with 'because.' until somebody has an emotional breakdown.

Anyway, occasionally when I feel the narrative I'm writing is too circular, (which happens a lot), I turned to 'The God Delusion' and 'Letter to a Christian Nation' and other such books that cover some of the well trampled argumentative paths.

Anyway, through the wikipedia entry there's a link to what is so far a terrible 'debate' (most debates though are pretty terrible, given my own experience as a debator and an adjudicator). Anyway, what I find most convincing of God's non-existence is the Christian communities ability to consistently produce champions as poor as Professor John Lennox.

The video resides here.

Now the debate suffers not just from Professor Lennox's poor arguments, but actually the rhythm of the debate gives Lennox a tremendous advantage. Which is each topic is introduced with Richard Dawkins' arguments. Lennox then gets to respond (poorly) to Dawkins' arguments whereupon Lennox himself just makes a bunch of claims about what he thinks Christianity to be. Then Dawkins' has the next topic thrust upon him and no official response is allocated to Dawkins'.

So provided for you is a critique of some of Lennox's 'killer' blows.

1. Faith is blind; science is evidence based.

Lennox makes a few concessions in order to demonstrate that he believes faith to be of a variety. Falling to him to substantiate why his brand of faith is superior, that is not blind. He plays some semantics with the word 'proof' and distinguishes it from evidence, so really the first minute or so is definitions, no real arguments. He doesn't mention directly the 'scientific method' that is to confirm beliefs through replicatable experiments. (wisely perhaps as none exist that can be applied to his own beliefs).
Thus his first argument is the limits of science that firstly it can't tell us if a poem is beautiful, or piece of music or picture. Which is debatable, but on this at least Dawkins isn't the expert, Hoffstader probably is who would have leapt in and pointed out that all that is understood of artificial intelligence thus far would refute this claim, at least that say you couldn't use means entirely mechanical to build the kind of intelligence that would have 'subjective preferences' it may find different things beautiful for entirely different reasons, but this wouldn't be too different from the reason two different people will most often have completely different preferences for what they find 'beautiful'. The existence of universal preferences of beauty would be a more compelling case for the existence of God, like if there was some underlying vertical heirarchy to FHM's 100 sexiest women annual, instead of the wild deviations that occur year to year.
Then he makes the argument that science can't answer the elementary questions of a child 'Who am I?' 'What is the purpose of my existence?' and 'Where am I going?' which I guess if he was making the point of science being 'blind' is a good one, except he doesn't, and implies that religion isn't 'blind' to the answers to these questions.
The first one, could be answered by one of Des Cartes scientific offerings that stands 'I'm thinking therefore I am' as evidence based, if you experience thought it is the defining characteristic of sentience and you conclude that you are a sentient being. As for the purpose of existence, science (from the Darwinian perspective) would say 'you don't have one.' or perhaps more correctly 'I don't know that you have one, and I know of no reliable source that can answer that for you.' and 'where am I going' would depend on the time and context, but I would hazard a guess that a child would be going to bed, or to school in most incidences.
Thus Lennox's argument is the old 'science explains how, religion explains why' which is blind and dangerous because religion has no basis for answering the why questions, it is just speculation - in other words from the view of science it is just making shit up. So the child could ask me the same questions and I could say 'You are a space whale' 'to destroy the Pharmaceuticals lobby' and 'Disneyland!' and these answers would be blind, they would have no basis and serve as ultimately unsatisfactory. The thing is that with religious beliefs in all probability what in modern english we would call 'made up' would be described by a self proclaimed (or popularly proclaimed) prophet as 'divined' and anyone who accepted 'divined' answers as an explanation would be none the wiser when it got passed down a generation that either their prophet knowingly made up the answers, or mistook their own imaginative process as evidence of some external interference.
Lennox surprisingly rejects 'God of the Gaps' which historically speaking has been the result of religion explaining 'why' in scientific fields that didn't really exist yet, such as physics, chemistry, biology, geology, archeology, astronomy, cosmology, psychiatry, economics... and pretty much every scientific field there is, soft or hard.
Lennox makes a good historical argument, that when people saw natural laws in history they saw in it God. Or the 'scientist looked for law in nature because they assumed there was a lawgiver. Izaac Newton was more impressed with God when he discovered that light followed rules (in his crucial experiment) that Al Kindi himself was an Islamic philosopher that was the originator of the scientific method (thanks SBS) and so fourth.
Which Dawkins actually refutes well in his conclusion to the whole debate, that it took until the 19th century for Darwin to actually overcome the natural intuition that anything that works has to have a designer. That an eye can emerge non-randomly from a very long incremental process of evolution with no mind or design to it at all. It was simply a gene that survived because it helped the organisms survival.

2. Science supports atheism, not Christianity.

Lennox follows on from one of Dawkins arguments that 'if geneticists found some scientific proof of Mary's virgin birth, the Christian sphere would not say "Irrelevent science has no bearing on religion"' which Lennox agrees, Christianity is subject to scientific confirmation, but then sidesteps by talking about historical science given that the events of the Bible happened in the past (since the scientific method wasn't developed until after the rise of Islam, Christianities successor in Judeo religions no scriptural evidence is really verifiable).
Lennox's first argument is a rehashing of his concluding statement from the first topic, namely that scientist have 'faith' that the universe is rationally intelligible. Which I understand to be, they believe there to be natural laws, I would call it a stretch to say that expecting things to obey natural laws (like physics) is the equivalent belief to expect there to be a law maker.
Then he claims that if athiests reduce reason to random electrical impulses in the brain (a fallacy, at least in Darwinian theory, which would say that the brain is an evolved organ that helps an organism survive and reproduce via intelligence) then they are 'cutting off the branch the branch they are sitting on' the central flaw being that athiests don't believe intelligence to be random, except in that it is an 'accident' that life looks the way it does (or doesn't).
The reverse argument is probably the better truism, that the assumption that we are intelligent because we are intelligent, or rather the expectation that the universe exists because we exist to observe it existing is more a case of someone pulling themselves out of the ocean by tugging upwards on their own hair.
Which amounts to the 'Anthropic' principle. Which has numerous criticisms as employed by theists, largely for being a truism, and I like to argue that to conclude that our existence in the universe is submissible as proof that 'the designer' intended to have us in it does not elevate human beings above anything they produce as a result of their intelligence, including jump-suits. Or perhaps more crucially, as 'scientific' reason would not support Christianity above and beyond any other religion, as it appears to be from a scientific and historical perspective an product of human intelligence.
Suffice to say, it is a huge license for people to insight the Universal constants as evidence of a supernatural purpose in producing human life. Particularly given the vast quantity of Universe superfluous to life.
He then claims that the notion of the 'Big Bang' was inspired by the Bible. Lennox makes a point (that later contradicts his dumbest, arguably losing argument of the debate) that Genesis overcomes the Aristotlian world view that the Universe had no beginning and was eternal. Dawkins refutes this himself. I would also point out that Genises says with as much confidence that the Universe began as it does that it was completed in 7 days, that the planets existed before light (implying that planets formed before stars, another falacy given that the chemical elements needed to form planets can only be generated from Hydrogen the base element by stars, and with the variety we have, much, much, much bigger stars than our sun).

3. Design is dead; otherwise one must explain who designed the designer.

Lennox in my view whilst not making a good case thus far, loses the argument completely, on what he describes as 'the schoolboys question' which is 'who designed the designer?' and Lennox (who just minutes earlier explained Genesis as superior to Aristotle's take on science because it described the universe as created), he actually argues that God is not created, he is eternal and was always there.
This is exactly the argument that God is unscientific, because he doesn't work as an explanation, or rather it is a completely 'unsatisfying' explanation, which Dawkins supports by explaining it as an explanation in mathematical terms, that is the Universe or 'Big Bang' has a very complex mathematical model of how a singularity can explode, heating and cooling over gajillions of years to form a Universe. Which is simple compared to explaining an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient eternal designing agent.
The concept of 'simple' and 'simplicity' vs. 'complexity' is something that evades Lennox, suggesting that when he read Dawkins' books (which he suggests he has read) he was reading it with a mind to refute any claim he could latch onto. Dawkins refutes this well himself.

4. Christianity is dangerous.

Lennox's first argument is a popular logical fallacy known as I believe a 'definitional retreat' or perhaps even 'affirming the consequent' where he makes the argument essentially that 'Christianity is not dangerous > because when Christians have done bad things (Crusades, conquistadors, the holocaust) they were not following the teachings of Christ > thus they weren't Christians). Which doesn't address Dawkins conclusion that such belief fosters an environment were it can be employed dangerously. It is in essence arguing that Christianity is not dangerous because anything dangerous arising from it is not Christianity.
Which is self defeating because it gives Christianity no ability to make the world a better or worse place through the extension of its membership or preaching of its teachings, if you acknowledge that it's members will simply be reclassified based on what they do because of their interpretation of the beliefs.
It may be an argument, but it ultimately hurts Lennox's cause. Because it reduces again the realm of Christianity to have any worthwhile effect upon the world.
Historically speaking, I would actually agree with the notion that most attrocities committed by Church leaders weren't 'Christians' because from sociological perspectives the oldest trick in the book to is manipulate the masses by preaching something you yourself don't believe in (their in creating your base of power, free trade being a modern day example). This is known as 'lip service' by the leadership.
It really as an argument reinforces Dawkins' concluding point, that the dangers of Christianity are that it encourages faith as a virtue, faith being the opposite of sceptecism, which it does, undeniably because faith is precisely not doubting God's existence.
The arguments about Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler are well trod and bad ones, because they are athiests. The quickest route to refuting these is to seize upon the Marxist regimes as they are the certifiably athiest states, where one would should be seized that Marxism doesn't preclude the creation of a 'police state' with an absolute ruler that then terrorizes people regardless of class to sustain the lavish lifestyles of an even smaller elite.
The second obvious refutation, is that athiests aren't a community, an athiest is spontaneous where members of various religious sects are the product of a system that produces them. Athiests simply don't believe in God, because their reason tells them not to, and they trust their reason. Dawkins in his book and in the debate further refutes these as following 'religious' social structures, in the book he refers to the 'athiest' regimes as 'personality cults' in other words, religious figures are simply replaced with Mao or Stalin as the new dieties, nothing Jesus didn't do himself on exactly as much evidence.

5. No one needs God to be moral.

Lennox comparison, is between DNA and a rock. Certainly because they are both devoid of sentience, however DNA works in an incredibly complicated environment of self replicating sequences that from them arize varius degrees of sentience. That is mechanical organisms like trees that will happily expunge the life from their own 'kin' in competition for sunlight, no single thought undertaken, to dolphins, humans and elephants that have central nervous systems, the ability to forecast, predict, learn, emote etc. Some better than others.
Therefore Lennox chooses to interpret the mechanical process of DNA as somehow denying the complex organisms it produces from having free will, or even arguably behaviour. Thus, whilst the quotation he bases his entire argument around is interpreted in such a way as to deny humans their intelligence, which is untrue, what is true is to say that our intelligence is the non random accidental product of an essentially mechanical process arising from 'natural selection' vis-a-vis the battle of survival. So you can just throw out the majority of speech he makes.

He doesn't then do anything to refute the perfectly relevant points about the shared morals between all peoples (which establishes a base-line morality) that obviously, can be observed as arising without the need of any specific instructional scripture. He also doesn't address the 'shifting moral zeitgeist' argument. Which I admit Dawkins doesn't do justice by calling it 'something in the air' and I was half expecting Lennox to make the claim that that 'something in the air' had to therefore be a God. But nevertheless it establishes that 'age-old' scriptures and the Gods they supposedly service have nothing to do with the social norms of morality (or at least are not directly responsible for) what we call morality because it can be demonstrated that the bible comes out both for and against slavery, (or rather, as Sam Harris notes, Martin Luther King draws inspiration from the bible in his civil rights campaign, just as Confederate states drew inspiration from the bible to defend the practice of slavery).
Then he tries to make a point of Dostoevsky's quote 'if God does not exist, everything is permitted' which is stupid because it's a prime example of the mentality that Dawkins saw fit to address in the book 'God Delusion', that is that everything is permitted, the only real tangible reinforcements of morality, come from a community expunging people who break this law from their society. For example, God didn't strike down Hitler with an impressive bolt of lightning the moment he committed his first atrocity, or abort his fetus before he had a chance to be Evil. Instead the European community, and in a limited sense the global community fought to expunge him from existence. Almost like a manifestation of 'Darwinian' drives to favor our own Gene's selections over his. It works down to a micro scale too where whilst 'evil' is permitted in a physical sense, like killing your wife to take her money is physically possible, society does a lot better than scripture at removing these 'evils' from the community in order to protect itself.

6. Christian claims about the person of Jesus are not true; his alleged miracles violate the laws of nature.

Lennox makes probably his second worst argument here, that is that is that anything that obeys the laws of nature isn't a 'miracle' because it is expected. And that (much like 'being eternal' is a central property of God) the ability to intercede and break the laws of nature as a demonstration of his omnipotence are a central property of God.
In other words, if 'Miracles' can happen that violate the natural laws (namely physics) they would teach humanity one thing and one thing only - that we cant trust our senses. This happens to select individuals in our society who experience 'miracles' in exactly this way, people who can't trust their senses are labelled commonly as schizophrenic, and accuratly as 'insane', that is they have lost their ability to rationally interact with the world around them.
Miracles would be useful in one instance only, where they could help determine a rhyme or reason to the will of god, they would then be subject to the scientific method. You could for example set up a huge oxytorch, and march people through it that you have taken an extensive background check on. Those that pass through the flame unharmed you could deam 'righteous' and run a differential on the various decisions they have made in their life to determine 'righteous' behaviour, those that die in agonising pain you could reject as 'unrighteous' and also use as a control group in your differential.
Of course such experiments don't work, have never worked, and are highly unethical. If you were particularly dogmatic you could say that such an experiment would never work because it is inherantly unrighteous, and those conducting the experiment would not be permitted by God to know his will, of course there exist ethical alternatives like the 'Great Prayer' experiment that if anything showed that if God does exist, he really hates when people pray for the sick, because he seems to kill the patients out of spite. (cited in the God Delusion).

To be honest, after topic 4, Dawkins starts refuting the essential arguments of Lennox himself, tellingly he is willing to stick to his time limits and sacrifice introducing material.

The reason I don't refute any of Dawkins arguments is that Lennox refutes them thoroughly (and poorly) for himself from the get-go. The second reason is because there aren't, not ones I can see. Dawkins follows the rules of logic and knows the science. He may not know the Bible inside or out, but the Bible is neither scientific, internally consistent, interesting or particularly instructive.

The debate is in all honesty an dead chicken versus an alligator in intellectual terms. I'm sure Lennox is good at Maths, but not debate, physics etc. In fact the only thing preventing Lennox from drowning is because he A) really, really believes his own arguments are convincing. B) Dawkins is structurally denied the right of reply to many of the worst arguments Lennox makes.

Thus it remains the only debate that remains impressive to me is that between Noam Chomsky vs William F Buckley Jr. which is like a gigantic alligator versus a buffalo.

Please don't post me links to 'The Battle of Kruger' which was a three way battle anyway, where the Buffalo only 'win' in the sense that they avoid a loss also by ganging up (as Christians often do), resulting in a zero sum game.

When Memes and Genes Collide

Many who actually spend any face time with me, would know that I've had involvement with the Henry George League aka Earthsharing aka Geonomics and various other yet to be effective mantels.
I've been over it before and the theory is fundamentally sound in its stated aims and purposes. If you tax 'inputs' like resources, from land to coal to the electro magnetic spectrum, you get a much better, fairer, equitable and productive system than when you tax 'outputs' like profits, wages etc.
I mean it is pretty much the profit model itself, minimise costs and maximise revenues to create the biggest profits, and yet the tax incentives work counter to this notion, such that accountants try to write up as many expenses possible and shunt profits around the world to minimise profitability (and thus tax liabilities).

But my crises of faith comes from that Keynsian notion, not from any Keynsian theory as such, but from his practice of observing what actually happens.

For example, there is no way Universities will ever be allowed to have a fair and equitable system that identifies actual intelligence when offering places. The wealthy would never allow a system that would judge their progeny on their merits.

In just the same way, I somewhat fatalistically am entertaining the notion that the economy that will blindly survive is one that protects and reinforces the priveledges of the priveledged and not one that actually maximises wellbeing.

It just seems from an evolutionary perspective, that there will always be somewhat of a 'ruling class', and in that light the fact that wealth is becomming more tightly concentrated (something like 56% of the worlds resources are commanded by 1% of its population) would just show that the system is becoming more efficient. A good thing from a cold objective point of view.

'The colony' has less queens and more workers. Genetically at least, it's just a continuation of the same march that first created social behaviours that gave birth to 'leaders'.

Take the common term 'landlord' it's derived from feudal serfdom, where the 'Lord' protected your miserable life from the relatively more miserable life of being pillaged and raped by some neighbouring chief/lord/frenchman. So in turn for maintaining this community security force, you worked not just your own lands but his. A pretty good deal, until they just all became his lands and you worked them, then regional stability came through so he barely even protected you from anything anymore, until present day where a landlord has a right to a share of your income whilst not contributing any actual value at all (or value worth the provision of housing).

Dawkins has a vast number of examples of 'the selfish gene' and how animals that are entirely parasitic (like the Cuckoo) can survive at an evolutionarily stable mass. Too many parasites and the system starves, too few and well... everybody wins except presumably the parasites, but if you have just the right amount both species, parasites and hosts can live on in a stable manner.

These 'facts of life' thus would point to a stable evolution process whereby you can have a parasitical ruling class that eats free lunches, and then everyone else who is glad to be part of a great system that holds up these great parasites.

Now, I don't want to sound like some communist or whatever, but its hard to put such a system of ours into terms that are flattering, though many have tried. You could call it capitalists, entre preneurs, captains of industry etc. Except hopefully we are in a day and age where we can see (certainly with the bail-outs of the financial institutions in the US) that the parasitical behaviour is pretty self evident.

Home owners aren't bailed out, the banks are. Or as Chomsky would put it 'privatised profits and public liabilities'.

My question is, where did the ruling class, the natural aristocracy go wrong?

I think nowadays, that if I were a ruling elite that could order popular nationalist movements by strangled in the cradle, that social reforms be stillborn all to protect my 'vital interests' that from what I've learned, I would be more concerned with rearing my memetic descendants than my genetic ones.

This is because history and genetics tells us that their is no surer way to drive a dynasty, organisation or empire into the ground than by 'keeping it in the family'. Your son is 1/2 of you genetically, your son's son is 1/4, your great grandson is an 1/8th, and after that they are to all effects about as close as a complete stranger, which I'd wager your cousins cousin is to you.

I mean your cousins are only 1/4 genetically similar to you and I'd bet you see big differences between yourself and them. In this day and age, in all probability they will think act and believe completely differently to you.

But genetics and evolution also teaches us, that at least for the early part of human development as a species, genes that tend to look after their offspring tended to be genes that survived. Whereas genes that abandon their young in infancy don't tend to do as well. At least not for a species like homo sapiens.

And that's what I mean by the 'leading' or 'ruling class' going wrong. Yesterday I talked about Xerxes I the great, son of Darius I the great, I have reason to believe that Xerxes was in fact nowhere near as great as his father, at least on the political shrewdness scale, but as history stands is probably one of the better progenys of a great man. Within two generations of Cosimo di Medici, you already had Lorenzo who basically squandered away the family fortune and the dynasty never really recovered (although that fortune was quite immense and served to buy us the renaissance).

But throughout history, the ruling class has been a memetic family much more than a genetic dynasty. One's genetic descendants are predictable, one's memetic descendants can crop up anywhere.

What are memes? Memes are 'self replicating ideas' coined and proposed by Richard Dawkins. So if a descendant is someone who bears in common a set of identical genes, a memetic descendant is going to be someone with a set of identical ideas.

Science gives us a good viewpoint, there's heaps of memetic ancestors, Des Cartes gave birth to a bunch of scientists that bore the 'light as particle' memes, Newton gave birth to a bunch of scientists that bore the 'light as wave' memes. The two competing families of memes fought like the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons, until Einstein revealed the mutated meme 'light is like a particle and a wave' or 'photon' meme. (disclaimer, you shouldn't come to me for physics advice, it's been a long time since I studied it).

So too could you say loosely that Ceaser Augustus was a memetic descendant of Darius the Great, or Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan was a memetic ancestor of them. (except you probably couldn't because there was no meme connection that I'm aware of between the Mongolian Steps and the Meditaranean seas).

The point being that where one's memetic descendants will crop up is entirely random. Hence if you are a member of the ruling class, trying to errect a barrier whether it be a fortress of ancient times or the IMF and World Bank of the Modern era to lock any new members out, you inevitably will be handing the keys to the 'great beasts' you've been trying to keep out in the form of your genetically similar but memetically still born kid (George W Bush being a fine example) whilst locking out your rightful memetic heir who then becomes a disgruntled competitor.

I could suggest that those fighting against the 'ruling class' most effectively and passionatley are doing so because they are denied their opportunity to take their 'rightful place' but somehow I don't think that suggesting Noam Chomsky or Arundhati Roy are doing what they do because they have been denied the lavish lifestyles of the priveledged few doesn't really ring true.

What I'd be suggesting is the seemingly constant ability of random pockets of destitute oppressed to produce charismatic leaders that lead rebellions and revolutions against the ruling classes with varying degrees of success. Google may be taken as Microsofts memetic heir that succeeded in supplanting their canabalistic patriarch.

But where the whole 'ruling class' really goes wrong is that when painted into a corner, the memetic ancestors ruin the party by spoiling the punchline. They go and expose the secrets of rule to the great beast in a pyrrhic victory.

In time, if technology and information keep flowing, it will become increasingly hard to conceal the markets crimes from itself. Something that had it's hey day in the early 20th century, where south americans could be up to their ankles in mercury purifying silver and gold, and the pretty women that wore it half a world away had no idea, the jewellery untarnished by the inhumanity of its production. When one put a diamond ring on a finger half a century ago, one didn't get the hand amputated from a congalese slave by their warlord's gangsters taking a lead from their belgian forefathers.

As recently as a few years ago, chocolate lovers the world over were ignorant that cocoa was still harvested using slave labour. In other words it is hard to take the exploited amss known as the 'middle class' and employ them in propping up the upper class by using them to help drive the exploitation of the 'lower class' since now thanks to the internet and whatnot, we relatively all live on eachothers doorstop.

Which brings me full circle. The clash of memes and genes is what makes the ruling class fall short of 'the perfect crime' because their memetic heirs may crop up in the cradle of the mindless herd they have been most exploiting. The walls they erected to protect their genetic heirs cuts their progeny off from the vary world that stimulated their own memetic development.

What they want is not a system that I would tacitly suggest is designed so that their genetic heirs actually believe the memetic lies employed to curry popular opinion and secure their own rule, but one that provides the least resistance for their memetic heirs to supplant their genetic ones and inherit their command of resources. This is probably why the richest institutions in the world are private corporations and have generally been more successful as surviving as dynasties longer than many of the great family houses of history.

But it needs to go broader than the private sector, and thats way, in light of their being a ruling class, and from an ammoral perspective the system of rule (our currently flawed economics system) works well in concentrating wealth in the ruling classes hands, a fair and equitable system would most importantly provide what has always appealed to me about Henry George's crank theories, and that is equality of opportunity. A minimum of friction for those that want to take charge, because the smart have a bad habit of being stupid and handing the keys over to their kids, or turning to government to preserve a market for their product long after it stopped being of value to the human race.

Class Action 300

After many years of apathy I wound up watching 300. I didn't have the dilemma many people had on seeing the film, which was they left confused as to whether they had seen an awesome film or a terrible one. At the time it probably was both, but I'd seen it after the South Park parody - 'Lesbos' and thus could not take the movie seriously.

It is I feel characteristic of Frank Miller's work - the man has an incredible knack for visual storytelling and yet is one of worst writers of dialogue etc. Even his best works like Sin City and Batman: Year One had this failing, the dialogue seeing horribly predictable and cliche. It's tolerable in the comics when you don't have actors like Gerard Butler, David Wenham and even Benecio Del Toro hamming it up, but barely.

So yeah, while 300 is well visually stylized, the plot (which is embellished from the comic) is one of the worst takes on history ever.

I think though that while 300 isn't news, given how long its taken me to see it, it is an important illustration of how embellished our view of history can be. I suspect modern day Persian heartlanders (being Iranian) have enough sources of hostility with the world, but if you are a Zoroastrian at the very least, you could be incredibly pissed off at 300 flattering portrayal of Spartans standing for freedom?? versus Xerxes I and the Persian army.

The Spartans presided as tyrannical rulers as the minority ruling class of the region with 80% of the population being made up of the agrarian Helots. When Leonidus derides the Athenians as 'boy lovers' he conveniently glosses over the Spartan practice of pederasty, which expected boys to find an older lover by age 12 or so.

By comparison the persian empire was the first to practice freedom of religion and had a prohibition against slavery, most notably freeing the Byzantine Jewish community. Their capital was built by paid labour and the Persian Empire, the first world empire represented the most civilzed people on earth.

Sure Xerxes marching an Army to Greece the size of 200,000 had its practical drawbacks, namely being way too large to keep well fed logistically, but the '300' spartans were accompanied by around 7,000 other troops. Furthermore the notion of 'victory' is one of those that is ambiguous in history as well.

The stand was bold, brave and costly by the Spartans, but ultimately they were wiped out, which Xerxes seemed to conclude, had made his point. Then Athens was raised to the ground by his forces, Xerxes in a 'Bush-esque' fashion declared victory and went home. A much reduced force was then defeated by the Greeks, who indeed won their freedom, but it was the Athenians who were the founders of democracy, Spartans were a parasitical tyranny, the Helots at least would have stood as much better off under Persian rule.

And that's as much as we can tell. But portraying Xerxes as a 7 foot lesbian, the Spartans noble upholders of democracy and the Persian army as an incompetent, duplicitous travelling freak show does an injustice to the complexity of human civilization and our derived historical identity.

The benefits of either side winning are debatable, Greece after all was absorbed by the Roman empire that engulfed most of Europe in a sophisticated form of military dictatorship, Europe then became a haven for absolute monarchs for what is known in the west as the 'Dark Ages' and in the Middle East as 'the Islamic Golden Age' and somehow through some cruel twist of fate, the situations now seem somewhat reversed, though I'm sure what remains of the future probably belongs to the athiests.

Do the Work

Robert Downey Junior when asked about beating his drug addiction, or alcohol or whatever it was that kept him out of choice roles and away from Oscar consideration for so long aparantly said 'Doing it was quite easy, the hard part was deciding I wanted to.'

Likewise after hovering between 83 and 84 kg since march, in the past two weeks I've dropped down to 81kg and have managed to stay there, despite my kidney stones scare giving me a hiatus on further cross training.

Surprisingly it wasn't hard to do. just deciding to actually dedicate some of my time to exercise was the hard part. Just starting. Starting is always the hardest part for me.

I've reached a point, I'm glad to say where after an incredibly trying both emotionally and mentally year of trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my remaining 60 years, I have emerged from it now equipped with a luxurious accessory few would be willing to outlay as much income as I have to obtain.

That is to say, my accessory is a mental one, too exclusive to be recognized on the street but with a solid and dedicated user group. It is the revelation (or evolution) that makes me realise I am less afraid of failing than I am of just not trying.

Which puts me in good stead to enter a 'scalable' or 'winner takes all' profession, like the artistic or creative ones. Where I face the very real possibility of simply never succeeding. Never finding a market, or acclaim, or connections that will open doors to it actually being viable. And further, being able to say that if people won't pay me for my output, I deserve to starve, be spurned by women, left childless, homeless and forgotten on the wayside. Just as I deserve if I can create and contribute genuine value, a menagerie of fauning devotees that hang on my every word, snap up my every produce before it even reaches a wider market and stop even doubting my ability to produce.

But that luxurious success walks hand in hand with total and catastrophic failure. The die is also loaded, there's one side with 6 pips, and 5 with 1. (actually my odds are probably worse than that). But there is one thing that typically loads up the odds in favor of failure and that is that success requires that you actually decide to do the work.

This is the one characteristic shared by all viable artists in this day and age, it is the overshadowing fallability of the 'fallback' degree or career. I look at the relatively comfortable position of Bryce (in that even with out his full time profession, could probably eek out a quite comfortable living directing musical productions) because he has been doing the work since he was 12, maybe younger.

Or the oversupply of 'Street Artists' or 'Guerilla Artists' of which there are only a couple of hundred that succeed in completely saturating the entire global graffiti market, whom have been willing to go out and break the law since the were 14 or 16, learning the motions, the terrain, the equipment and giving themselves a highly risky, self-education that was far more likely to result in jail-time than than a lucrative career like Banksy.

All successful artists have this one trait in common, that they do the work at the end of the day, they sit down and actually produce something.

In the coming weeks I'm going to buy me a scanner, and this blog will hopefully become a 'sketch-a-day' type post. I'll also still be running, and writing (though I probably won't share my fiction writing here) and lest I end up on my back guzzling litres of water trying to 'pass' kidney stones for a week, I'll keep you posted on those efforts as well.

That's all for now. I have work to do.

Inclination

Once a week now, I get up put on my running gear, ride 8-9 km to Princes Park in Carlton, then I do a run 3.2km round the park and then I get on my bike ride through the CBD and back home via the Yarra Boulevard approx 15km or so.

Why? Why not run around the parks in my hometown burb of Kew? Simple, Kew is hilly, Brunswick is flat.

I would love to see the 7 degree olympic events, where the athletics track from bend to bend is situated on a 7 degree incline. That would actually probably be the only way 800m could be made worse.

But the point is that even though in my adult years, I have the seemingly ability to run any long distance I decide to, which I couldn't do as an adolescent, the endurance is far more mental than physical which consists of just plodding along for 1 hour, 2 hours etc. My body needs a lot of retraining and rebuilding just to run fast, at some kind of pace.

The other difference from adolescence is that I used to run between March to September, and take the whole summer off any formal notion of running, and do no cycling at all.

So trying to run with my non-athletes body at some kind of respectible pace in hotter, dryer conditions than I ever opted into in Ballarat is proving interesting. A whole new experience.

I can now mentally push myself up to a pace where getting overtaken around the park is rare, and if it happened I would expect that the person would be in the last 100-50m of their total distance doing the strong finish.

But I don't feel like an athlete. My legs don't do the work for me, mentally I have to be on top of my back muscles to keep me in proper posture not slouching. But running on the flat allows me to actually experience all the muscles at work and give me a sense of progress, where running on Kew's hills whilst I'm sure is good for mental resilliance and fitness is a confusing array of shifting postures and stride lengths. Destroying rythm as you hit the seeming walls and seeming freefalls of the steep inclines and downhill slopes.

Then heres the interesting part to doing a middle distance like 3km as it relates to the 800m, pushing my self to run hard over 3km is how I train for my 'off' distance in the 800m, yes, so if I do a hard first or second lap, this middle distance pace is the relaxed aerobic pace you use to give you a rolling start or 'comfortable' finish.

As yet, both my aerobic and anaerobic fitness are lacking, and particularly my legs muscles structure aren't fully transformed for running vs. cycling, so I have a ways to go.

One thing I can say about commuting to a better park for exercise is that it proves just how reliable kevlar-puncture proof road tires are. I haven't had to face a flat induced 9km walk home yet.

Retrain the Horse

Surely the most frustrating thing as a taxpayer, is corporate welfare. Seeing companies that can't generate enough value in the marketplace to turn their own profits needing subsidies to survive.
To me while their are merits to protectionism and subsidies for starting a new industry, there is none in finishing it, save to disguise unemployment and deny a source of labour to entrepreneurial ventures.

I am a firm believer in product for the market, not market for the product.

As Peter Drucker said in one of his many pearls of wisdom:

'If their was a ministry of Transport in 1900 we would still be riding in handsom cabs with an expensive program to "retrain the horse"'

So too with the arts it seems. I have to hand it to the ABC it has started its long overdue move from a reinforcer of Australia's British cultural identity to become more multicultural and multi-generational. Its probably still my strongest criticism of the station but to me it is still moving in the right direction.

An organisation I had never heard of called the Australian Council however is making no progress at all.



This was on a post Bryce had plugged by Marcus Westbury. Marcus appears to be much more informed than I am of the issues of arts funding and engaged in a number of active debates.

I would just say that when I saw this I was staggered by how skewed the funding is. If you asked me for another how much I would estimate the takings of various orchestras to be, I would assume that there would be markets for it in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and would have optimistically estimated their net income to be around $12 million combined.

I don't know, every time I've seen a symphony orchestra it has been free, but I assume there are some elderly people that would pay $600 for a season pass. Furthermore I would have predicted that these exorbitant prices would result in break even economics given the massive overheads. Same deal with Opera which at least in mainstream press has been regurly attacked as a shamozzle.

So the figure of 63 million sounds like propping up pretty much the entire Australian Orchestral music scene. Which is to say, it seems sadly that all this money is used to make music that cannot attract audiences of sufficient quality and quantity to pay what it costs for the music to be brought to them.

It frankly makes me angry, as someone who draws comics that nobody reads I understand the importance of being able to perform/create art regardless of its popularity or market viability. The difference being that I take responsibility that as yet, nobody is willing to pay me for what I'm currently doing.

If you want to play the tuba or violin and even have a passion for it, or become a conductor, yes it may take a lot of work, expensive tuition and upkeep of instruments and costumes.

But just because you have a passion for something, and strive for excellence in it, doesn't mean the world owes you a living from it. If you can, good for you, if not you should suck it up.

Furthermore councils and funding bodies need to put their dollars between the strong performers, not the weak performers. Keeping symphonies and other orchestras afloat comes at the expense of all those other listed art forms. Who is to argue that any of those people are any less passionate or dedicated, or that their artforms are any more or less culturally relevant.

The point being that even if you adopt the rational that say, theatre is still relatively popular than orchestral music, and literature certainly is quite the viable business. But that just means that a dollar invested in the stage or a book will go much further and stronger than a dollar sunk in some regional center's orchestra.

Furthermore you run the risk of creating a nest egg mentality, where the culture of management behind these arts becomes reliant on hand feeding and no longer feels accountable to its audience.

I'm no fan of Andre Reiu but I would note, that he managed to bring an orchestra out, play terrible music and come home with $100 million or more AU dollars without any government funding. In many cases it was funded by nana's (like mine) that would never bother to go see the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

So you have all this money dissappearing down a black hole, and all you preserve is the worst of classical music, the dogmatists that believe music should be regimented like the army and find the use of electricity sinful. The pretentious wankers at any party. I can't abide pretention, but at least if I meet a pretentious playwright, I can feel like he actually makes his own money and attracts his own audience.

Teach Girls they have a meaningful role in society and the bitchiness will go away

I remember watching like a 60 minutes special on 'bullying' approximately ten years ago where a girl in the audience pointed out 'if guys have a problem with eachother they just settle it with their fists. Girls use psychological attacks' or something, I'm paraphrasing.
On insight tonight, which was a repeat of an episode on 'Why girls are so mean?' which actually spent way more time on looking at 'how girls are so mean' vis-a-vis describing the behaviour rather than looking at the causes. But interestingly a 20-30 year old woman talking about the office politics amongst women made a comment 'It's - I think with men if they've got a problem, you know, you can just confront it or you punch it out. Whereas with girls, it's the whole kind of like ostracism and the sneaking around and the whispering and the emails to each other and you know –'

Which I couldn't help but notice was more or less the exact same observation that was made 10 or more years ago. It could very well have been the same girl.

But I think the Insight show did deliver some insight with the 'Queen Bees and Wannabes' author their to provide insight, but there was far more description of symptoms than exploration of causes. Particularly since if you are doing a show on why Girls are mean to eachother then the premise you have to assume is that when girls get mean it is a distinct phenomena from the male equivalent.

I think the office is a good place to start, because the gender divide is perhaps perplexing in every dimension except social-anthropological ones (these words are too big for me).

As in, in the modern era in a country even as backwards as Australia, it is generally acknowledged from the base stock of intelligence, social skills, street-smarts etc women and men don't differ in any significant way. Yet men are clearly more successful in corporate careers than women are. There still isn't pay parity, and although the proportion of women in executive roles has increased, it still isn't anywhere near 50-50 or even 60-40.

Yet it's not as simple as saying that most companies are controlled by a boys-club that looks after its own interests. I say that because Business is one of those things that is still on the evolutionary front-lines, and in many industries a single performer can actually still overcome a politically savvy group (in other words, people do things in business primarily because it makes money, so if you are a woman and make the company exceptional money, it will be hard for even the tightest conspiracy to do you serious damage. Alternatively if you are Michael Moore and you write an expose on Rupert Murdoch, Ruport Murdoch will himself publish it he believes it will make him money).

I put it to you that starving people fight more viciously for crumbs than well fed people fight for a rack of lamb.

Based on personal experience and observation, Men in corporate settings compete in objective business dimensions and metrics. Who has the most customers, who has the biggest revenue generating accounts, who has the best productivity, who has the most directs. Furthermore it is impersonal much of the time. Like a footrace, men charge in parralal lines at the same finish line trying to outmuscle eachother.

Furthermore, from what I've observed, if men aren't competing in the same event they will be cheering other men on.

That's probably the best metaphore I can/wish to offer. Women in the workplace, I noticed and overheard compete over shit that perplexes me in their insignificance. Many points of contention had nothing to do with work at all. The admin politics were far more cut-throat than the National Sales Managers ever were (predominately female and predominantly male respectively).

Whats funny is that before watching insight I was coming back from a run with my dog and whilst waiting to cross the road noticed a kitted out Japanese import car passby and caught the eye of the token asian girl in the passenger seat and thought quite instantaneously 'that girl is an accessory' or may have even initially thought 'she is fluffy dice'. The flip side of the equation is that while the girl may be a car accessory, the guy is as they say in Japan 'Mr Legs' or basically the girls chauffer service. It's better being single than being an idiot.

But I think much of the girls seemingly 'hard-wired' behaviour has a simple explanation:

They aren't important.

As always I can't be bothered doing any hard research to substantiate this observation, I just put to you that it makes sense because I think we can accept that:

1. There are still clearly definable differences between social conditioning for boys and social conditioning for girls.

2. Education and Corporate structures in many cases still have their ideological foundations in assumptions made prior to any feminist movements.

3. Historically speaking, women have generally been excluded from any social leadership roles.

The basic function of a woman in human society historically speaking was as a baby making factory for a male. Particularly keeping in mind that the atomic family unit erroneously known as the 'traditional family' is a relatively recent phenomena, historically speaking again the most traditional family structure was one man with a harem of many women.

In that context you have a bifurcation of society, or perhaps it is best put as saying that Men lived in their own society and thus their own world and women lived in a different society and thus their own world.

Rather than calling the two worlds 'male' and 'female' worlds, I prefer to call them 'important' and 'unimportant' because thats more offensive, and offensive ideas generally being wantonly rejected my argument is actually better served if you reading this want to reject it.

I would attempt to objectively qualify calling the men's sphere 'important' by pointing out that the political games and executive decisions men made would result in things like this:

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

- Genghis Khan

Who was a male and made the kind of decisions that could see whole communities wiped out of existence.

Thus in a harem style family, you had men competing against the whole world trying to dominate eachother and the resources at their disposal, establishing heirarchies with practical repurcussions fought out in objective terms - the actual strength and intelligence to dominate and command. In recent times the skillset of mobilising warriors to raid, pillage and conquer has shifted in favour of a skillset to mobilise public opinion.

Men have a tendancy to read books on strategy written by Sun Tzu, Machievelli and Musashi Miyamoto. What do women have? 'Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office'.

For women your traditional highest aspiration was to be 'first wife' or matriach of a household, your competition were only ever other women so effectively were you sidelined from the important decision making world. Physical violence against the other wives or concubines it would make sense to be prohibited on account of the dangers of being caught damaging the stable of wombs of any dominant male.

Thus you had I guess the ability to produce sons, attractiveness and physical allure and psychological attacks being the limit of your repertoir. This went on for thousands of years, poorly documented because apart from rare circumstances (Medea comes to mind) the two worlds probably didn't collide.
Memoirs of a Geisha was a hit afterall, a fictitious book devoured by modern day women about the political contests of women who had virtually no power over their own destinies.

Another divide I would point out is my general observation that women will factor the expected earning of their partner into their financial goals where I don't know any men that do. By that I mean, if a man dreams of having a million dollar home he dreams of having a million dollar income. When women dream of having a million dollar home at best they dream of having a million dollar income AND a million dollar earning husband.

Stay at home mums are still commonplace and socially acceptable, I still see little to no hope for the stay at home dad becoming commonplace.

Thus I say the solution (without any actually helpful or constructive suggestions) is to bring the two worlds together. Teach women when they are growing up that if they want to be important they can't marry importance and you'll slowly break the behaviours that make being mean and nasty useful.

Women have wombs as much as men have testes. Both are needed to make children. Men seem to find 'the choice' between career and children very easy. Furthermore it is admittedly also fairly easy for a successful man to have both. (a child often serving as incentive to be more devoted to a career), where women again are probably throwing back to anthropologically hard-wired, or childhood socially conditioned notions that they should live vicareously through their children. (you can't be important but your son can, sort of thing).

If women are let into the world of making decisions about commanding and dominating physical resources, they will come into the objective realities that make men's social heirarchies straightforward (and relatively pleasent) compared to womens infighting over who has in far too many cases the best access to someone actually important.

I think we are on the right track, I would also observe that in the country I think the problem is smaller, you come across more 'champion' women (whom I find generally more attractive) because I suppose in the older agrarian and hunter-gatherer lifestyles women play a far more active role in running the business, infact quite often the family is the business.

First Home Buyers Grant

Steve Keen will walk to Mt Kosciusko because he lost a bet. A bet I would have bet on too, which is that the Australian housing bubble would burst sometime this year. It seems it has been perpetually on the cusp of a 6 month bust for the past 2 years now, and I for one also stick by my analogy of a drunk behind the wheel of a lamborghini, you know he is going to crash but you can't say when.

What confuses and upsets me, is the amount of people my age, that I generally credit with being intelligent being suckered into the property market now of all times.

I would argue that the conventional wisdom that brings you such idiocy as "Buy land they aren't making any more of it" and "Location, Location, Location" and "Put your money in bricks and mortar" doesn't give you the conventional wisdom of:

"A house is worth as much as the banks are willing to lend for it." such that when the government announces an additional $7 grand you would be expecting first home buyers to Groan and throw their arms up in despair.

In fact rather than the press dutifully reporting the opinions of realtors on the matter, many honestly and candidly denounced the boost to the first home buyers grant.

And still it seems people rushed to take it up. Such that when I looked in the Herald Sun yesterday, they had an article on how Melbourne property prices had soared 22%.

Which is bad news, because I was expecting the median house prices to increase by $7 grand, which is like 2.5% or less. How could housing become even less affordable? Then I put it together with this little piece by Steve Keen, from his blog post 'It's Leverage Stupid' and I think if you are young, you need to read and understand this:

So how has a mere $1.2 billion injection of government money driven the average house price up by 8% in six months? By the “magic” of leverage: the typical First Home Buyer (FHB) took that $7,000 to the bank and leveraged it up to another $40-50,000, which then was handed over to the First Home Vendor (FHV) as cold, hard cash.

The FHV then took that extra $40-50,000 and leveraged it to an additional $200,000-$250,000, which meant that that new place which had been just out of reach prior to the FHOB was now well within range. Competing with other lucky recipients of government and bank largesse, he drove up the price of that middle to upper tier house by an additional $100,000 or more.

The aggregate impact of this government enticement into private debt was that Australian households reversed the deleveraging process that had begun in late 2008, and as a result the mortgage debt to GDP ratio, which had been falling, began to rise once more. The FHOB has led to Australians taking on an additional $50 billion of mortgage debt.

So in my own naivety I'd always thought that when people got the First Home Buyers Grant that it was taken off the total loan sort of after the price had been established, like you would be all 'I can afford $250k, but with the FHBG, I can afford an extra 25Gs, so I can bid up to $275k.' and that was how the vendor ended up with all the 'buyers' grant.

But no apparently you take it to the bank, and the bank acts as if that's real savings. And then they lend you $40-50k. so $7 crappy grand results in $50k more debt. It seems criminally stupid on the banks part to treat a government handout as collatoral to lend someone with literally no financial qualification of higher confidence more money.

Which as a property is worth as much as a bank is willing to lend - you just ran up your debt beyond affordability.

BONUS QUESTION:

Investing is simply understood as buying low and selling high. That is how amateurs try to play the stock market. WHy then do you amateur, buy in to the Australian housing market at its historic peak?

BONUS SECTION: Conventional Wisdom Debunked:

1. Buy land they aren't making any more of it = buy oil you moron, not only aren't they making any more of it, billions of people are actively destroying what we have every day.

2. Put your money in Bricks and Mortar = do that moron, buy a stack of bricks and some bags of mortar and put it in storage, see how much they are worth in 10 years. I wager the same or less. (and definitely less when adjusted for inflation).

3. Location, location, location = is actually the only conventional wisdom that actually makes sense, yes you aren't buying a house or a home, you are buying access rights to infrastructure and/or natural resources, which presumably somebody actually productive (ie earns an income by creating actual value) will want access to that site at some point for income generating purposes. With your monopoly you can extort as much money as a bank is willing to lend. (except even with monopolys there is a right price to buy at and a wrong price).

But I don't think of you

So I'm back training for the 800m, finally. It would be easier if I didn't also weigh 800kg, but I'm working on that and should with dedication get down to a respectable 79ish kgs in the next few weeks.

One thing that I feel demonstrates how completely miserable and hard the 800m is, is that I can beat my dog. My dog is pretty fit, dogs on the whole are pretty fit. My dog could probably beat Usain Bolt in the 100m, I don't know I never timed her. But she has low wind resistance, four legs and is built for chasing down rabbits and shit.

But my dog sucks at the 800m and infact cheats a lot. I run the outside of the oval at 80% (which is still incredibly hard, particularly in my current shape) and she runs about 30m inside of that track and still comes up about 50m behind me to finish.

Sure she doesn't know the competitive nature of the race, but to me it highlights the sheer unnaturalness of the distance. Nothing, ever, in history, has been naturally selected by an ability to cover 800m quickly.

You have cheetah's, springbok, deer, wolves etc that have survived thanks to the ability to run short distances at up to 120km/h. Then you have a bunch of birds that have survived by being able to migrate vast distances to safe breeding grounds where lizards don't eat their young. fucking lizards. But nowhere do you have an animal that has survived by the ability to run the knife edge between anerobic and aerobic exercise.

So while I'm not taking Holdaway lightly, particularly given my current heavysetness, I worry that the fool may have never actually tried to run 800m and doesn't understand the crucial differences between being able to run say 400m fast and being able to run 10km pretty fast that even if you can do both, you may find yourself physically unable to actually run 800m.

Yes, paradoxical I know. And just in case this is John's experience, it is not enough that I beat him by default. I must demolish him.

'Beneath contempt' I believe is the saying, and even if I lap the guy, if I turn around at the finish line (which if by some miracle someone ever lapped anyone in the 800m would probably be pretty near the only place a lapping could occur) and feel even the slightest piece of contempt for him, I know I will have failed.

It must be like crushing an ant underfoot, such that I was not even aware the ant and I were competing against eachother.

Your House and Enron

Enron was a sham, they were the only non-financial sector company in the US to use 'Mark to Market' reporting, that is they could report expected earnings as actual earnings that would knock on to the share price. Once they started accelerating their income, they had to keep accelerating in order to live up to the expectations they were creating.

Can you put a price on a home? Absolutely, and there's two ways, just like Enron had two kinds of profits.

Will start with the exotic, technical and rational way nobody actually does put a price on a house. That is you look at its earnings, its earnings to put it simply are rent. What rent can a house recieve? Even if you live in it, the income would become the savings of renting your next best housing option.

Rent = Income, Income = Rent. So once you know how much a home earns you can determine 'Net Present Value' which we could complicate by adding a 'required rate of return' but for simplicities sake you would just divide the rent by the interest rate. (since your minimum 'Rate of Return' would be to repay the cost of borrowing money to pay for it). Which is about 8% (for any long term projection) so you would earn $20k in rent, divide it by 8% you got a Net Present Value of $250k. So if you were borrowing at 8% for a house that earns $20k you would be rational in your investment if the price tag was $250,000 or less.

A simpler way is to just take a small period like 1 months rental yeild minus 1 months mortgage costs (revenue - cost of ownership) so you make $1,550 repayment per month you need to earn at least $1,550 rent per month to be an investor (because investments earn money).

Actually you wouldn't be an investor, you would be an idiot, because you could put the same money in a government bond and earn at least 3-4% so you need to earn at least 5-7% in rent above your mortgage repayments. That is investment, that is the only way property can be an investment.

Now for the second method, the one people use. To put it simply the price of a house is however much a bank is willing to lend you. Not you specifically but people in general. If the banks are tight with the loans, then housing prices will be tight. If they are all loose then house prices will rise. Why? I don't know, because people are morons or something.

People generally speaking don't look at the rents, they just need for some reason to own a house whether it mkes fiscal sense or not. You will also note that in the aforementioned section on the rational way to determine prices, I didn't mention 'Capital Appreciation' once.

Because unless you are Enron, there is no reason for the price to increase unless the rents increase correspondingly, which would require a wage increase also. So it stands to reason that Capital Appreciation is irrelevant.

If a house can earn as much money as it did last year then it has the same value, why would somebody pay more for the same value, it's just going to eat into the slender profit margins rent already has.

Unlss, you are of course Enron, then you may forecast future earnings. You may anticipate some flimsy reason for rents to go up (which would be just plain crazy right now) such as 'population increase' (The ABS shows that for every new person in Australia between 2001-2006 there was a new dwelling built for every 1.6 new people. In a country that has an average occupancy of 2.4 people per dwelling. Vis-a-vis population growth isn't sustaining housing prices and almost never does). or 'supply shortage' (15.6% increase in the number of unoccupied dwellings between 2001-2006) whatever the bullshit reason, you anticipate some increased future worth of the property then simply 'accelerate' it Enron style into todays prices.

For example a 2 bedroom house in Brunswick (where one can rent a room for $120 per week still) is priceat $450,000 almost double its Net Present Value, the only explanation being that the banks are willing to lend at low interest rates 95% of the value of the home to just about any douchewad still.

The douchewad is buying simply because they anticipate some price increase. They don't know why, just that it always does. In this case the person would be paying about $3g in mortgage repayments per month whilst making (even with the expensive rent of $200 per room per week) would be making only $1700 a month.

In other words the banks get all the actual income from the house, and then they get some of your wages as well. What do you get? You get the capital appreciation.

If I sold you my consulting business and informed you it lost $1300 a month, would you buy it for $450k? Yes, absolutely yes! you would say because if you pay $450k for it today, imagine what it will be worth when it starts making money.

Just admit it motherfucker, you can't explain why house prices go up. You just know they do. House prices went up when they announced the extention and expansion of the federal 'First Home Buyers Grant' money home buyers never see a cent of, as it goes straight to the home seller and is absorbed instantly in the price. Not just that but prices increased more than the amount of the grant resulting in a net loss for the buyer due to its stimulus effect on demand.

Its a clear example of the principle 'A house is worth as much as the banks are willing to lend' because any amount of money made available to purchase houses just gets absorbed in higher prices.

And then you have to stand back and look at the 'real' economy. Think of it as you will as looking at Enrons real earnings. Whilst houses are appreciating in price at ever increasing velocity, jobs aren't getting any better, in Australia they are getting worse, no money is leant for production or capital investment. Companies have to do this themselves from retained earnings or share offers, the economy is increasingly concentrated on the resources sector, manufacturing is dissappearing (a value adding activity) there is no investment in R&D, the best graduates are persuing job opportunities overseas. House prices are increasing faster than rent (just like Enrons share prices increased faster than its actual earnings) and rent is increasing faster than wages, and taxation will increase on wages at some point to pay for the debt driven economy (like stimulus packages), so why, oh why the fuck do house prices keep increasing when there is almost no hope that they will increase in actual value rendered to the real economy.

The banks earn all the rental income, and set the asset prices. So basically you are fucked. Even if you sell your house for a profit, you will have to live somewhere again. And when you buy in to the market at this astronomic high (most housing is 'unaffordable' by the definition of mortgage repayments costing no more than 30% of household take home income).

You are buying anticipating an unsubstantiated future gain. You are buying Enron when you buy a house in this country.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Nerds

The Nerd dollar strikes again, remember back if you will to much earlier in the year when Transformers 2 recieved almost universally bad reviews. But customers vote with their feet and it outearned its predecessor.

I only got around to watching it last night. And I have to say, I'm with the critics, there was one brief moment when I thought Micheal Bay had fooled me and that he actually was a brilliant director - when one of the many new annoying characters got eaten by devestator seemingly destroyed forever. But this was wrong and the annoying character burst forth from Devestators mouth and continued to be an offensive racial stereotype in transformer form.

The movie was long, the kooky human cast that had been amusing to tolerable in the first movie was now just plain annoying and aggravating. The women universally had far too much makeup on, the guys behaved as if they didn't know anything about women, there were a bunch of 'cool explosions' characters, being grafted onto the story with little to no backstory, explanation or whatever, of the new transformer characters 90% were annoying and the remainder didn't speak.

The jokes were pedestrian, the explosions massive, the plot poorly paced, the characters cliched, the emotions non-existent. It was a long film that varied between boring and annoying.

Take for example terminator 2, where James Cameron introduced the T1000, a liquid metal terminator whose powers blew our mind. And that concept was were Cameron stopped and just played it out to its fullest potential.

Now Bay was like 'What if a transformer could transform into a human? What if they could be ball-bearing transformers? What about nano-technology? Rail guns are cool! What if Optimus could fly?' It really reminded me of why the Japanese Anime revival of Transformers sucked so much collossal dick.

1. Annoying character archetypes (snivelling henchmen, the 'rad' comedy duo, the french chef, the old british bugger)
2. Super unlimited power-ups (most notably Optimus Prime's super half truck-half jet mode).
3. All style no substance. (explosions come first, emotions come second).

Kind of like Spiderman 3, or myself when I'm overconfident, I don't feel the restraints anymore and go too far. Spiderman 3 was too busy, with 3 villains, Transformers 2, is too busy but tries to absolve itself by spreading the business over 3 hours. (the premise takes an hour to get traction).

But nerds stampeded into watching what I will generously call 'The Best IMAX film ever' I have been convinced that people never go to see a sequal, they go to see the previous film for the first time the second time. Thus I think the real effects of how collossally shit the critics rightly found Transformers 2 to be won't be in its own box office performance but the extreme lack of interest there will be in Transformers 3.

As always though with the nerds that support this shite, if losers win do they stop being losers?

Growth

Today, as crazy as it sounds, I sat down and read 'Fear Of A White Planet' for the first time. It wasn't as painful as I thought. My first impression when I flipped from the cover to the first page was 'Oh god, this drawing is so bad.' It seems to quantumly improve at some point but I don't know when.

Reading it is like learning what I don't know I now know, in terms of anatomy, perspective and fancy shit like that, but also just what I've learned about pens, pencils, erasers in that time and just how much better I have to be to be decent. Even how much I've learned about photoshop pens, brushes and erasers since doing fear of a white planet. It seems an eternity ago, yet I only finished it in March.

Suffice to say, I need to do more to get to some space (if not stylistically then technically) like these guys:



Watch at your leisure. But I need to do more, finally having gotten the spank-bank monkey off my back, I can get rolling on 'Wish'.

Story wise, 'fowp' isn't bad, I was actually surprised at how quickly I read it it must have only taken me 20 minutes. Maybe I did still remember too much, hence I had the 'writers eyes' instead of somebody who needs to use the pictures to decipher whats happening, but I could still pick up where speach bubbles were really badly placed drawing the eye away from the accompanying image. An amatuers error, but I still think that at the least I got the conversations to flow logically with the speach bubble placement.

There's also still some sequences I'm happy with, like when Chief Adama has the thermometer in his mouth, when the monster is driving the car and the beach massacre. I personally didn't think the ending worked as I had intended, I think if I had the kind of luxuries of drawing 2-3 more pages I would have slowed the pace, created a greater sense of pace.

Overall though, I admit that when it came to finishing the pencil phase of Fear Of A White Planet, I contemplated going back and redrawing the first 20 pages, but I left them in because I wanted them as a monument to how shit I was and how much I progressed as a drawer by the end of it.

So I'm just going to keep rolling and start on my next project 'Wish' I'll keep posting more details as I work on it, there's no real need to keep this one super secret, I currently estimate it will be about 125 pages long and hope to finish it by Feb. But that means probably April. It requires a big Quantum leap and I want to be really prepared with studies and technique before I start drawing it. This story I want to do far more justice than FOWP.

That said, one thing that impresses me most about fowp was that I finished it and just got it fucking out somewhere were it can be seen read and bought by people. I think most artists never even get that far and hence end up as an accountant or some shit.

Life after Miki

Which is technically the rest of my life, so there's no real reason to do this today. Except something miraculous happened, infact it's me.

You know all those pasty white guys, losers, as they are commonly known... sure they try to call themselves 'otaku' as if it is somehow cool, or some kind of in-joke. They enjoy certain shallow aspects of Japanese culture, the anime, the pornography, some crappy toys and decide that after graduating from arts/science/engineering they want to earn dick all money teaching english in some crappy suburb of Japan so they can nail their students.

Yeah well I don't respect them either. Furthermore I've always been amazed at the ability for so many of these dickwads to get away with their transparent schemes.

But alas, from the first day of my exchange to japan I was pushed the envelope of the 'prisoners dilemma' through some administrative fuck-up, myself and Brenton were to spend the next 2ish months of our lives in a class full of young Japanese girls. The envelope was literal too, two pretty girls turned around in class and wrote their names in english on my book for me to remember, which I do, Ayumi and Megumi.

A prisoner in this dilemma thinks 'I could really clean up!' but I knew it wouldn't come cheap, just as the real prisoners dilemma, not only would I lose the respect of my peers (which lets face it I never valued that much) I would lose respect for myself.

Thus their came the latest addition to my 'rules' for dating. A quick recap:

1. No dancers.
2. No ex girlfriends of Bryce.
3. No Japanese girls.

One might be quick to point out, I have broken all of these rules at some point. No 2 didn't last long, I broke it almost as quickly as I made it and it remains the only opportunity I ever had to break that rule.

But that's all neither here nor there. The point is I broke my own rule to date Misaki, she was exceptional, and as soon as I did so I got ribbed by everyone I came across for having a thing for Asians. I almost feel as though with my white female aquaintences I became persona non grata.

So what? So what I say what's it matter what the world, my own tribe etc think of me. Fuck them the fucking a-holes.

But there is some notion that, like google the tide of asian girls dating white men is some unstoppable inevitable future. Some male facsimile of the 'once you have black you never go back'.

Well here is what makes me so miraculous. I maintain that Miki was exceptional, just like the ex f Bryce's and the dancer with whom I broke my other two rules. The exception that proves the rule. But to say I crossed some line of no return? Bullshit, and I'm determined to prove the haters wrong.

In Lisa Pryor's 'The Pinstripe Prison' there is at some point I can't be bothered finding again a quote of some guy who says 'I think a lot of people feel the need to travel because they are unhappy with who they are'

I think it would be stating the obvious (also an obvious statement) to suggest that a relationship as an escape from ourselves is one highly likely motive to get into one. Furthermore the appeal of foreign partners, or as Safran put it, 'outside the tribe' is going to hold up as a means to escape all the customs and heritage you may hate about yourself.

But I'm going to be brutally honest, white guys in my experience like asian girlfriends for the same reason that they like Mad Men. That is that 'The Female Eunuch' hadn't come out, Wade vs Roe hadn't been ruled on and in both cultures a woman is a mans property, a disposable commodity.

Another facade I desperately maintain was that I dated Miki because she was hilarious. Which she was. But I confess there was a time when I got up to do the dishes after she cooked dinner for me and she said 'you should rest after eating'. It was convenient at the time, and Japanese girls walk around with the poise grace and mindset of a 1960's fembot. Their women's magazines contain hundreds of hairstyling techniques a month and to my knowledge, no articles on achieving orgasm.

Women serve the drinks, see you off when you leave for work and dedicate 2-4 hours a day putting their face on in the morning and taking it off again at night.

Asian women suck, there I said it. I submit in my own defence that whilst on exchange to Japan in Highschool I met my first year girlfriend Chan, as in short for 'Chantelle', a girl that lacked the poise and grace necessary to greet one with an 'oi' instead of 'hello' or something similarly banal.

This is my miracle, that I could look n the mirror and realise, I like the 'oi' I like women who can throw a stone, open a gate in a paddock, snort when they laugh, wear tracksuit pants in the open, drive stick, eat a meat pie with their hands and break a guys nose with their hands.

They don't have to be rough as guts (which I imagine are rubbery smooth?) but just regular roughness. Like a sharp piece of cheese over plastic craft singles. No need for parmesan.

And here in lies my problem, I'm once again entertaining the possibility of dating someone/anyone, as if you look at the previous post I made a conscious decision in february that it wouldn't be right to date someone whilst working in secret on Spank Bank. But now I have no idea how to meet country girls in the city. I realise now that International House as a residence, might excite the aforementioned douchebags that grow up dreaming of an asian girlfriend as a place to meet international students. (except another place to meet international students is called the CBD, and another place is called Church) It was also an excellent place for meeting girls in Melbourne that were not from Melbourne, but exotic places where I come from like Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shep, Horsham, Sale, Bairnsdale, Orbost, Ararat... my mouth waters at the thought of all those sausage roles and vanilla slices (I didn't intend those a Euphamisms, but must admit it works really well).

So that's the plan, find me a girl with big strong hands, a face full of freckles, a ute and a jumper.

Super Secret Project Unveiled...to my own Horror

In 'Gone Baby Gone' Casey Afleck's character blows the whistle on a crime that results in everyone losing. It is an act of moral absolutism, flying in the face of machievellianism.
I feel kind of like I've done that, except its stupid absolutism, not moral absolutism. My latest project was a stupid idea, when I concieved it, and it remains a stupid idea now I have given birth to it.

How Stupid? This Stupid:



I put it up here so that you will recognise it if you see it, and in recognising it when you see it, YOU DO NOT BUY IT. DON'T BUY IT!

Harvard yesterday (who hasn't seen it, even when I used his scanner) pointed out that my urgent pleas not to buy it may result in a reverse psychological pull for people to rush out and buy it.

I'm not fucking around though, I really, really mean: DON'T BUY IT.

I don't want you to read it. I don't mind some anonymous teenager buying it, or even some corporate executive I've never met. I don't mind them reading it. But I don't want you to read it, I don't want you to tell me you've read it, and I NEVER, EVER, want to discuss its contents.

Some parts, notably the actual journal entries, I cannot bring myself to read completely. The thought of you reading it makes me nauseous.

So hopefully I've said enough.

That said, it was an uncomfortable, albeit educational experience for me, for drawing, for thinking and for learning about myself. Watching John Safran's 'Race Relations' kind of helped, because his underwear sniffing segment probably revealed more about him than I did about myself in this.

I can't imagine it is an original concept. But it was still terrifying to print, to staple, to fold, to hand to some dude behind the counter who is not me. It has my name on it, which was important because it would be nowhere near as hard to publish it anonymously or under some pseudonym, now I have to change my name to escape it, possibly even move.

Because in the name of artistic development I have pushed myself to this new threshold of tolerance, widely expanding my comfort zones I have raised myself, belatedly to notch 3.

Thus concludes Super-Secret-Project-2. sorry that for you, it will remain mostly secret.




Actually I'm not sorry at all, you should be sorry to me, mother-fucker if you go behind my back and sneak a peak at my special journal.

Birthdays

My birthday couldn't have come at a worse time, I've been really busy all October and am now really looking forward to a day off. And by day off I don't mean one to catch up with friends, but actually to literally just do my own thing for hours on end.

But who can we kid, Birthdays are a time of reflection, my 25th year was a trying year and surprisingly a highly self indulgent one. On saturday evening I was at a friends birthday party, which followed my own fairly dismal party earlier that afternoon.

There was this guy from the Airforce there that really stuck out, classic 'Driver' personality, extremely extroverted, extremely literal-task oriented. He asked the birthday girl 'Between Oct 16th this year and October 16th last year what have you achieved?' I think he meant it as a positive question, but it was interesting to observe how it played out.

As 3/4 of the population aren't driven task-oriented people, its actually quite a depressing question. My friends repsonse was 'ummm...nothing.' Which I'm sure isn't the case, but fact is she couldn't think of anything. She put the question to me next (since she knew it was around my birthday where the Airforce dude didn't) and my response was:

1. Published my first comic book.
2. Ran a half-marathon.

Which was all that came to mind on the spot. I've actually finished two solo efforts this year, initiated a creative posse whom I'm learning from constantly and we have been able to produce three zines thus far. I folded my first business this year, ran my first strategic review session, wrote a report got quoted in the Age Business Day, restarted tutoring a refugee...

When I think about it, I've achieved a lot, its just that any visable success alludes me. Certainly financial success.

Serendipitously Harvard showed me a TED video, that concluded with the old 'formula' for happiness: 'If money weren't an issue would you still be doing the job you are doing' and the guy concluded with the observation 'you are dead for a long time', which reminds me of the year 12 valedictory breakfast keynote speaker 'Fidds' who pointed out 'life is a brief flash of light between two infinitely long stretches of darkness' and all of this, is to say easily forgotten.

Am I who I want to be? Of course not. But there is a difference, I am at least doing some of the things I need to do to be that person. In my mind, nowhere near enough, its hard to do, so tempting to just let myself decay through idleness into less than myself.

My party was themed 'loser' and I think some people (like my brother who seemed overly concerned I was having a shitty birthday) think I'm in some kind of depressed funk. So if I really reflect though, I can explain this fearful moniker 'loser' in the terms I think about it.

The first thing is that your life is organised for you, you are born, your parents raise you, send you to kinder 12-13 years later you graduate from highschool, these days the majority go on to 'Higher Education' 4-6 years later you graduate, get a job, start earning money, buy a house, no longer have the financial freedom to choose the job and that's your life until you have kids.

You don't notice the current until you swim against it. On the surface I could make the argument that I'm regressing, I had a job, earned more money than I could spend, travelled the world, didn't return to work, opened my own business, spent more money than I could earn, closed the business (fired myself) got a crappy part time job (the one I had before Honda) plan to return to Uni - and then based on history should end up back in high-school.

It's surprisingly hard to not just be idling away my years working on a career, for one, I never noticed before but one feels compelled to apologise for your own existence. You can't for example simply say 'There isn't an employer I've found yet that is suitable for what I'm good at, so I choose not to work' or 'I'm trying to create my own business so I can work under conditions I feel are ideal' or even 'I don't know what to do with my life so I'm just trying a bunch of things until I find traction somewhere' it's really hard.

My dismal business consulting career, involved going into situations that in hindsight I just couldn't win. Or absorbed far more energy for the small victories than the value I was creating. But any time I doubted myself, and listened to my peers I would remember my old job that was accompanied with genuine praise and ample funds involved 4 hours of boredom a day. As I sat in a chair gaining weight and waiting for the rare opportunity to take on something challenging and develop.

I think the way I was gong at Honda was that I had a compulsion that would inevitably end up having me take on too much and get myself fired. I don't mean working 14 hours, I mean taking on the establishement, the global standards of how Honda does Business. I would have been encouraged too because Honda has a wonderful philosophy, but I'm one of the rare people who is at their worst when they are confident, way too cocksure and my ability to empathise just dissappears.

Anyway, I've learnt these three things that I enjoy in the whole process of the last year:

1. Drawing (predominantly or creating)
2. Running
3. Arguing (predominantly, and reasoning)

They are mundane things, but it is incredible what I had to go through, physically and psychologically to find this out. That's the strength of the current right there. If in year ten I had gone to my career councellor and given him these three things, the world is such that I would have walked out thinking I wanted to be an actuary.

Where if he was doing right by me, he would have said: 'These three things combine best in being a Graffiti artist, there's no money and a very real possibility of arrest, but with your running and ability to argue, you would probably do better than a lot of guys. I suggest dropping out of school as fast as you can'.

It doesn't happen. It's incredibly hard to overcome all the grafted desires for things you never really wanted to remember you loved art. If it was hard for someone as stubborn and arrogant as me, I know there must be more people really hard done by their parents/education.

That above list is very very valuable to me. And learning how to be a loser, how to fail and not be afraid of it.

You see beyond the inherent depression of not succeeding, it's liberating. Because the fear of failure doesn't mean you are driven to succeed. In my experience it drives one to simply want to appear to be succeeding.

It wouldn't be my birthday without a basketball analogy, but the way most people live their lives is for fear of going up against Jordan and being humiliated, they instead just go play in the mundane under 12's league, becoming MVP in a competition that is no competition.

Its taken me a long time (like 3 years) to accept that I would rather be in a position to fail at something I want to do, than be comfortable in the success of something that is no achievement to me at all.

You know I am now all about 'be a loser, if thats what it takes to put yourself in the game you want to be playing' stop wasting effort trying to be a winner, because as the cliche goes 'you are dead for a long time'. Alternatively you are not occupying the space of someone who really wants that position.

Dean or Gean

I'm at a stage in my life where mentally this song speaks volumes to me:


Infact it makes perfect sense.

What I need to find is my Gean or Dean, someone with whom I can share a creative vision, and just create.

Finishing GEB:EGB

This morning I decided today was the day to finally fucking finish reading Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas 'Doug' Hoffstader.

It is in itself a difficult book to talk about, I'll put it this way, it is a boring book written about the most fascinating subject matter that possibly exists.

Or should I say: ~Ea:Aa: (a > a') OR ~Ea:Aa: Sa > a ?

I still haven't gotten my head around TNT, but if a represents the hypothetical number that denotes the most fascinating subject matter ever, I think I wrote something akin to, it is the highest number there is on the interest scale.

And now you get a sense of just how witty it is to read Zen Koans translated into Typographical Notation Theory, and then proved that they are not robust enough to prove or disprove there Godel theorem G.

I guess for me, the book was about the foundation of intelligence being a formal system robust to refer to itself in what Doug calls a 'Strange Loop' and whilst the self reference isn't powerful enough to completely comprehend itself on the same level of existence (?) and isn't powerful enough to pop up to a higher referential plane (such as the ability of a person to step out of a photo they are in and contemplate their own role in the photo), we are robust enough as intelligences to deal with this incompleteness of a formal understanding of self, and go on contemplating our own existence, free will, consciousness, music, beauty, truth etc.

The texts obsession with self-reference in formal systems I took to be grounded on needing to understand whether intelligence can be reproduced in something we would traditionally describe as a machine which are typically bound to number theory and as such a formal system that is as Godel proved rigourously - incomplete.

The book feels incomplete as well, as their is no definitive proof, albeit that it fundamentally makes sense that intelligence is not remarkable to a brain, which consists of neurons that either 'fire' or 'don't fire' in the same way that a binary switch is either 'on' or 'off'.

Furthermore there were fascinating explorations on the theme of AI and just what it is, most fascinating to me was the notion that a machine made intelligent (AI) would by necessity actually end up representing human intelligence, most notably an AI would probably be as good at maths or chess as a human is, because intelligence occupies our own capacity to be mechanically reliable like say a calculator, this would be no less true for a machine, who would have to employ their intelligence to use machines in the exact same way humans do.

So I learnt something. To be honest I'd probably have to read the book at least 3 more times to have a firm grasp of what it is about, or what its conclusion was. I think I know but am not confident and since its taken me so many attempts and so long to read it the first time I doubt I will revisit the investment because its already given me enough.

Congratulations me on a job, done.

When You Know

Aside from the 2 hour party that is running a half marathon, this weekend I also went to a wedding, not just that but the wedding of a couple that are convincingly in love. A couple where you dread the thought of them ever separating because you don't want to pick sides, nor face up to the pressure of stepping into the void either partner would leave.
Whilst I don't believe in a universal notion of love and shit, for example I don't think anyone should lead their life in the pursuit of a perfect partner, or someone who makes them giddy with love forever and ever, I will concede that their must be some people that actually through probability, circumstance or brain wiring have this kind of fairytale relationship in earnest. And give and receive blowjobs until they are wrinkly and old.

Contemplating re-entering the dating game myself, and trying to write as close to a 'romance' as I will probably ever right, I'm trawling up memories of the various people I've been in love with over the years, and when I knew.

Where there is love, there is cliche and the wedding was no exception, one of the speeches I forget which involved the 'falling in love a number of times, just with the same person' chestnut.
There are some people I fell in love with numerous times, 2 people in fact and both of them from my 'summer of love' relationships. For tactical reasons I normally don't share this information but usually I am in love with someone long before I tell them, normally shortly before I kiss them. It's how it happens for me and Alas AMI hasn't developed a nasal spray for me.

The first girl I loved I don't remember the name of, and it wasn't sexual at all, it must have been grade 2 or 3 and she did the twist with relentless abandon, it was the first time I ever really noticed a girl and I liked the honesty of her exubirent dancing. I remember feeling sad and reclusive when she left the school. This is probably the first time I have written about it.

I fell in love with "Beryl" when she was telling some guy he was a dickhead. She was Yr 8 and I was Yr. 7. She was the first 'skank' I ever saw although the term probably wasn't in fashion at the time. She was also probably the first redeeming feature of public secondary school. I never found out her name, asked her name, or did anything else. She was unpolished and dangerous and I was captivated by her.

I fell in love with Sarah after she found out I liked her, and she walked past me and winked and made the 'chk-chk' sound which I can't make and one usually makes when riding a horse off into the sunset and remains the most intimidating thing to ever happen to me and I was terrified and knew I loved her. I foolishly asked Bryce for advice on asking her out, and then more foolishly told her I loved her at the end of that phone call. It was pretty downhill from there. Lesson learned.

Suzanne I didn't love, but i did love how we started out, which was being shoved into the room she was in with a push in the back from some fugly chick that was hooking us up with the introduction 'here she is'. I was shut in a laundry with her and can't believe I recovered from that.

I loved her, but didn't know it when Eleanor was giving Bryce shit at La Porchetta in the same way I would give him shit. He was dating her then and as guys don't tend to steal women off eachother I thought nothing more of it at the time, since it was a double date and I was with Suzanne at the time (I also learned never go on a double date with Bryce if you don't like being upstaged). I knew I was in love with Eleanor when she suggested our first date be at the Pancake Parlor. I think it was the most in love I've been with anyone ever. I fell in love again when she told me the remote was referred to as 'the Travolta' as if that made sense. If I had known who David Bowie was I would probably have fallen in love with her again. I even fell in love with her amongst the abject humiliation of being beaten at table tennis by her when she held the bat by the pad not the handle and still managed to smash me out of contention. I knew I loved her when she broke up with me for very practical reasons when I departed for Uni, at the exact time I was starting to toy with the idea of trying to keep her around. I was sad, but it didn't hurt.

I knew I loved Chantalle when she found my use of the word 'novelty' highly amusing on the Seijoh mini-bus on some excursion Kimura made all the exchange students take. Then there was a years hiatus, I fell in Love with Chantalle again when I saw her in big-pants in Melbourne town, where frankly speaking she was trying far too hard to be a sophisticated city girl for my liking.

I fell in love with Claire whilst walking with her to her friends place as she unfolded her stupid scheme to get with me, that pretty much involved her friend Sophie alienating me at a dinner party from conversation whilst getting me incredibly drunk in the meantime. It was moderately succesful, but I was more impressed by what an idiot she was bowing to a buddha statue on our walk. It was either that or her tight chopping action when preparing meals, like its something that needs to be taken seriously.

I fell in love with Miki when she attempted to imitate my model strut and fucked it up by turning around and smiling in an almost approval seeking manner and it was the best smile I had ever seen.
I fell in love with Miki when she remarked she didn't like italians as we waited for a table at Tiamos.
I fell in love with Miki when she got up before me at 6am on a workday to get my bicycle ready, an act wholly unnecessary and by the way it sounded to me lying in her bed, really ungraceful.
I fell in love with her again when she ate a big-breakfast at a brunch one day that i refused to help her with at all. She took it really seriously, and I was seriously impressed.
I fell in love with her again when I ironed on 'Come here' and a target that was intended for underwear onto a white cotton chesty bonds shirt and I showed it to her and she made her hand into a pistol and went 'piow piow' at the target.

So Eleanor and Miki remain the bench marks, and I don't know who would 'win' out of the two, because both ended for geographical reasons (as far as I was made aware) and if I saw them tomorrow I'd be skeptical as to whether I still did. The time each had with me was not comparative either. To be honest the opportunity to say or do something that made me fall in love with them: things they said or did that made me fall in love with them probably favors Eleanor. I'm not sure I'm spelling her name correctly though.

I should also say there are omissions too, as there are girls I was in love with but managed to avoid anything approaching a relationship or even friendship. Feral Beryl and the girl from grade 3 are okay, because I don't know who they are or were and if I met them tomorrow wouldn't know any better.

I also realize that there are girls that I've been with that I was never in love with at least not in the way I'm talking about, and more than I suspected.

Anyway whether you find your soulmate or not, there are plenty of opportunities for love out there. Plenty.

Massive Sudden Destimulation AKA Despair

At long last I return to this blog, like a guy who spent the last 4 weeks wondering if he could do better than his current girlfriend and came back with the firm answer 'no'. Which means for one, nobody will be reading this once again.

Anyway today also marked my return to the Half Marathon for the 2nd year in a row. I dropped 10-15 minutes off of last years time. I blame the fact that I broke my foot 3 weeks ago and decided plain and simple to stop training until thursday, when my entire training consisted of just running a half marathon.

I decided to split the race psychologically into 4 pieces, as a result of said training session and it really worked. See from my parents house to the Yarra boulevard is part one, from there to fed square is part 2, part 3 is back to where I began the yarra trail and then part 4 is the remainder to my house.

I guestimate it works out to a 3-10-7-4 split between parts. For todays race I decided part 1 was 8km, part 2 - 14km mark, part 3 - 18km, and part 4 the finish. so thats a diminishing 8-6-4-3 split psychologically.

Here's the thing about me. I have the cardio and the mental fortitude to run middle distance (yes, anything shy of 20km is actually middle distance or so I am lead to believe) and really running long distance is largely a mental exercise. The fitter you are the less mental resolve you need to keep pushing.

Running 21km with almost no training involves talking to yourself constantly and listening to your body.

Today possibly moreso than any other day in my life, my mind was in overdrive for 2 hours keeping me running. When I sprinted (foolishly) over the finish line I was confused and disoriented.

Then for the first time in my life I experienced something I had only heard about previously which is the feeling of despair in a situation that normally should be joyous and celebratory in nature.

I felt the sudden urge to cry uncontrollably for no reason, except it would seem that I had just finished a half marathon. It stuck with me for ten or so minutes, until I became indignant at a girl who just parked herself at the drink table and had like 8 cups while a million people waited.

As Long as I Live I Just Won't Understand Chris Lilley's Appeal

Ever feel like the world has gone mad? Like the crushing last chapters of Catch-22 when Yossarian walks through a destroyed Rome, "The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been!"

The worlds gone mad, mad for Chris Lilley. I remember going round to Bryce's and he and some other dude sat down to watch Summer Heights High like it was some kind of event. After watching mildly amusing character based comedy for what seemed a very long hour, this other dude cried out 'More! MORE!!' like he had some insatiable hunger for it.

I remember another friend turning around at some social function and asking a friend if they were taping Summer Heights High, almost as if one could not predict exactly what would play out on the show that night.

I remember waking up to Syn.fm talking about how some schools had had to ban 'Slap the butcher' or people complimenting eachother for drawing the 'dictation' joke on facebook as if they had somehow made their own funny.

I understand the appeal of the show, it's a mildly amusing character based comedy in the spirit of 'Little Britain' and furthermore it's made in Australia which means standards are lower for just what constitutes an 'achievement' or even 'ambitious'. Thus like Kath & Kim, Two and a Half Men, The Nanny etc I understand how television shows from mediocrastan can have huge followings, even huger followings than TV shows from extremastan like Deadwood, The Wire, Garth Merenghis Dark Place and shit that are most often described as 'cult' TV shows.

What I don't understand is why people I really respect and think of as intelligent seem to think Chris Lilley is somehow brilliant for portraying characters I had always assumed were from Stage Comedy 101, the bitchy slut, the bitchy drama teacher, the gangsta that isn't convincingly gangster, the miss Bucket, the computer geek etc ad nauseum.

They are not I feel in the league of say Ricky Gervais' characters in terms of emotional complexity or believability. They aren't in the league of Sacha Baron Cohen who along with Will Farrel is the only person I can forgive for doing appearing in character for an interview, because of his sheer commitment to being that character in situations deliberately chosen to escalate the danger to his person. They are probably slightly superior to the Little Britain characters, but would you describe them as geniuses? They are catch phrase comedy that follows a predictable formula. The only difference being that when you watch the first episode it is actually really funny. That 'computer says no' chick had me in stitches the first time. But grew tired immeadiately.

To me it's kind of like Models, like everybody goes Gaga for the latest Hollywood starlet, yet Hollywood doesn't actually need to scour the earth to find the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica Alba wasn't found on account of Tibetan Monks scouring small villages in the backwoods of Croatia until they found a child the could believe would be the next incarnation of Sophia Lauren. They found her in a line of 40 actresses auditioning for the lead role in 'Dark Angel'. Success compounds all that shit.

In my high-school I would have said that there might be between 3-5 girls that if they wanted could have become full time fashion models, except they won't they were planning to become doctors or lawyers or some shit. Chris Lilley like a beautiful girl is just not one of those rare comic geniuses like Andy Kaufman, Larry David, Ricky Gervais etc. (I can't think of more ready examples because they are actually really rare) He seems to me to clearly be Harpo, not Groucho.

But I'm wrong, I'm the minority of 1 it seems, I think 2+2=4, HBO the gold standard of Television picks up Summer Heights High. How can I continue to respect HBO. I would have been more understanding if they picked up Salaam Cafe or even Talkin Bout Your Generation.

You know once I was sitting down and watching cricket and mentioned to my housemate 'you know I just don't understand cricket' and then my housemate said 'I kind of appreciate the mental battle between the bowler and the batsman trying to break eachother.' and I looked again and I saw it, and having had that explained to me I 'understood' cricket. It wasn't enough to get me into it, but I understood how someone could watch it or for that matter baseball and be into it.
NFL (or Grid Iron) I understand too, its gone from 'glorified human chess' to 'much more impressive than Rugby' in my estimation now that I understand it.

I don't understand why I'm supposed to think Chris Lilley is brilliant, or even, particularly brilliant. If someone would give me that key insight like 'watch his left hand doofus' and then I 'saw' it and could understand that vital thing that I'm missing I would feel very reassured. But as it stands, I have no fucking idea why I should go out of my way to watch a guy pick on homosexuals.