Pentecost Sunday, 2016
Today we went to the German Club for lunch. Since Peter’s birthday is tomorrow, which is a working day in Australia, we celebrated with the family already today. Peter took some photos of some of the family. We were a dozen people and had booked a table for our lunch. Every one was very happy with their Mittagessen, meaning we could all order whatever we liked. There was some dance music from the 1950s that Peter and I liked very much. We even had a little dance! Lucas and Alex, our great-grandchildren, enjoyed themselves too. It is great that children are so welcome at this club.
Uta’s Diary
Many months ago we booked our trip. It is exciting that our departure time is getting very close: We’re going to leave for Berlin on Friday, the 3rd of June. So, only three more weeks to go!
Today, Peter, Caroline and I are going to Wollongong. I have an appointment with Dr. Pearson for 9 o’clock. Friday mornings there are always markets in Wollongong. We plan to go to these markets after I’ve seen my doctor. We might be able to buy some fresh vegetables at the markets. In the afternoon I meet my lady friends for our games of Scrabble and Rummy Cub.
On this coming Sunday we’re going to meet the family for Peter’s birthday lunch, and on Monday Peter takes our old car to Warrawong to get it inspected for re-newel of registration. Caroline and I want to go with him to Warrawong to visit a nice cafe there where we’ve been before.
It seems we are busy all the time. I am sure the next three weeks will be gone in a flash. And then it is going to be only four more weeks and we will be back in Australia. We arrive back on the Saturday, the 2nd of July, which is going to be Election Day in Australia!
We talked to Peter’s sister Ilse the other day. She reckons for our family re-union we are going to be some 25 people! We also talked to my brother Peter Uwe recently. He wants to come to Berlin to see all of us. But we can also visit him and Astrid at their place in the country.
How politicians force us to make a choice we should never have to make.
“. . . . a choice we should never have to make.” To my mind
this is exactly right.
Ironic points of light
The phrase, Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite, frequently attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville but in fact coined by French counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, is translated as “Every democracy gets the government it deserves.”
It’s not a sentiment with which I entirely agree: many factors are at work in a liberal democracy such as ours that bring into question the core assumption of informed choice, not least of which is propaganda distributed by media with vested interests, and its collusion with political and financial elites. This piece in Alternet makes interesting arguments against de Maistre’s maxim, describing it as a toxic idea that needs to be laid to rest. It’s worth a read.
I’ve listened carefully to all the pragmatic arguments of ALP supporters, as I have for the last seven years. I know that in almost every way an ALP government is far preferable to…
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At last another Entry in Uta’s Diary
https://auntyuta.com/2016/04/12/utas-diary-tuesday-12th-april-2016/#comments
The last entry in my Dairy was exactly one month ago! Time flies . . . .
At my age time flies more and more.
On the 14th of April I published some comments to a blog by John Lord and Catterel wrote a comment to what I had said on that day:
auntyuta.com/2016/04/14/on-july-25-2014-john-lord-published-a-post-about-whether-grammar-matters/
I said: Finally I’d like to make a comment on the subject. I did not finish high-school and have never been to university. English is my second language. I have been blogging since July 2011. I very much enjoy the contact with other bloggers. I am aware that university educated people do find that there is a lot wrong with the way I write. I know that my daughters as well as my son may point to quite a few errors in any of my writing that I have published.
Here is what Catterel wrote:
“Dear Uta, as long as you communicate honestly and clearly, especially in a language that isn’t your mother tongue, all is forgiven! I’ve seen too many students traumatised into silence by over-critical teachers who leapt on every tiny error and destroyed the learner’s confidence. Yes, grammar matters of course, otherwise we’d be mutually incomprehensible, but it’s only one aspect of a language and like all living things, it evolves.”
Here is a bit of what I wrote on the 15th of April:
auntyuta.com/2016/04/15/how-did-world-war-two-affect-us/
I wonder, how many people, alive today, have never been affected by war? Wars continue to be fought in a lot of countries and a lot of continents. The refugee crisis is now worse than ever. Is mankind going backwards? The few people, who are not affected by wars, do they not ever consider how wars affect the rest of humanity? For as long as some of us can live in peace, we do not care what is being done to the rest of humanity? How can we be so selfish? Has it just got to do with a survival wish?
On the 17th of April Gerard Oostermann wrote the following reply to a Reblog I published on that day:
“There is a lot there, Uta. I think there is so much more in living with someone that many just choose to totally ignore. The ultimate banana skin is what in the west we call ‘love’. Many get blinded by that, especially romantic love, and this is just a cruel trick of nature. As soon as someone says: ‘I truly love you,’ run away as fast as you can. It is so often doomed to fail. When ‘love’ enters, we start to project the most outlandish, wonderful but totally unrealistic qualities onto the person of our affections.
A good friendship, care, consideration and mutual respect might well be the much better and more solid ingredients of love.”
I replied: I very much like your insightful comment, dear Gerard. They say hate and love can be very close together. I suspect that my parents had a love/hate relationship. They probably would have projected the most “outlandish unrealistic qualities” onto each other! And I reckon respect is absolutely essential for a lasting and mutual beneficial love relationship. And of course without friendship, care and consideration you cannot live together in a satisfactory way.
My re-published reflections about my parents you can find here:
auntyuta.com/2016/04/16/reflections-about-war-reflections-about-my-parents/
The following days during last month I just did some reblogging of different authors’ blogs that I found very interesting. After the 20th of April I did no more blogging for quite a while. For weeks I did not even touch the computer to do some reading. I read instead Jonathan Franzen’s Novel FREEDOM which I had acquired at a very reduced price. I thought, reading this novel was extremely well spent time! I actually had a few health problems which caused me not to want to sit at the computer . . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr9dB2Xf9e8&list=RDJr9dB2Xf9e8#t=23
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr9dB2Xf9e8
An ARTICLE called “The truth about my father” you can find in Google.
Duncan Storrar became famous after last Monday’s Q & A program. I think what Duncan’s twenty year old son says about his father makes an interesting background story. Duncan seems to suffer from debilitating anxiety attacks. To speak his mind on Q & A was extremely brave of him!
The Refusal of Global Economists to Recognize Women’s Unpaid Labor
Why does the anti-nuclear vote only count in New-Zealand? I don’t get it.
Whose Counting?
Directed by Terre Nash (1995)
Film Review
Whose Counting is a 1995 Canadian documentary about the early life of New Zealand feminist Marilyn Waring. With her 1988 book If Women Counted, Waring was the first to challenge whether GDP (gross domestic product) is an effective way to measure the performance of a national economy.
New Zealand’s Antinuclear Ban
The film begins with Waring’s election to the New Zealand parliament in 1977. The youngest member of Parliament (at 23), she was elected to a safe National (conservative) seat in rural Waikato. After serving three 3-year terms, she brought the government down by “crossing the floor” (ie signaling her intention to vote with the Labour opposition on the anti-nuclear issue).
Then prime minister Robert Muldoon called a snap election. He was voted out of office, with 72% of New Zealanders supporting Labour’s platform of permanently outlawing nuclear weapons and…
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Chernobyl’s $1.4 Billion Containment Dome
This is a reblog from:
Chernobyl +30 – A Look From the Inside with Lucas Hixson
(April 2016)
Chernobyl +30 is a webnar presentation to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In this segment, US nuclear engineer Lucas Hixson briefly summarizes the causes of the Chernobyl accident, the initial clean-up efforts by the Soviets, and the current extent of nuclear contamination in an exclusion zone the size of Rhode Island.
Hixson spent ten days at the Chernobyl site at the end of 2015 for an update on the $1.4 billion* containment dome Bechtel is building to prevent further radiation release. The largest man made structure ever built, the dome will replace the sarcophagus the Soviets placed over the site in 1987. The latter has become contaminated and is emitting gamma radiation. Bechtel’s $1.4 billion dome is predicted to last 100 years.
For me, the most interesting part of the presentation…
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Debt and Deficit Claims
Fact Check zombie: Julie Bishop’s record debt and deficit claim wrong again
Updated
As Australia heads towards a possible double dissolution election on July 2, Deputy Liberal Leader Julie Bishop has sought to attack Labor’s economic record.
“We’ve never seen such record levels of debt and deficit as were bequeathed to us by the former Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Government, and Bill Shorten was part of all of that,” she told Sky News on April 19.
It’s not the first time Ms Bishop has made this claim.
Media player: “Space” to play, “M” to mute, “left” and “right” to seek.
She also made it in early 2015, when she referred to the Abbott government’s budget legacy from the previous Labor administration as “the worst set of financial accounts inherited by any incoming government in Australia’s history”.
Fact Check found that claim to be wrong, but Ms Bishop has continued to repeat it.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-20/julie-bishop-zombie-wrong-debt-and-deficit/7338956
Philosophy’s True Home By SCOTT SOAMES
We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19thcentury that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.
Please follow on here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/philosophys-true-home/?_r=0
Anodyne Language?
Look it up in:
April 15, 2016
A Dictionary of Euphemisms for Imperial Decline
by William Astore
Collateral damage
Boots on the ground
Global War on Terror
This is what it says in the blog about the dishonesty of words:
“To what end this concerted assault on the words we use? In George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he noted that his era’s equivalents for “collateral damage” were “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Obviously, not much has changed in the intervening seven decades. And this is, as Orwell intuited, a dangerous way to go. Cloaking violent, even murderous actions in anodyne language might help a few doubting functionaries sleep easier at night, but it should make the rest of us profoundly uneasy.”
” . . . . the U.S. must be prepared for underhanded tactics and devious weaponry, including ambushes and IEDs (improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs), as well as a range of other “unconventional” tactics now all too familiar in a world plagued by violent attacks against “soft” targets (aka civilians). . . . ”
” . . . . The “gray zone” is a fuzzy term used in military circles to describe the perplexing nature of lower-level conflicts, often involving non-state actors, that don’t qualify as full-fledged wars. . . . the Pentagon’s funding goes to conventional weaponry that’s as subtle as a sledgehammer: big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, main battle tanks, strategic bombers, and wildly expensive multi-role aircraft such as the F-35 (now estimated to cost roughly $1.4 trillion through its life cycle). Much of this weaponry is “too big to fail” in the funding wars in Washington, but regularly fails in the field precisely because it’s too big to be used effectively against the latest crop of evasive enemies. Hence, that irresolvable gray zone which plagues America’s defense planners and operatives.”
COIN (Counterinsurgency)
4GW (Fourth-Generation Warfare)
” . . . . the proliferation of “surgical strikes” by drones and similarly “surgical” Special Ops raids, both of which you could think of as America’s equivalent of white blood cells in its war on the cancer of terrorism. . . . ”
” . . . . the proliferation of U.S. military bases around the world (there are now roughly 800), as well as of drone strikes, Special Ops raids, and massive weapons exports might have a cancerous look to them. In other words, what constitutes a “cancer” depends on one’s perspective — and perhaps one’s definition of world “health,” too.”
“enemy noncombatant,” “no-fly zone” (or even worse, “safe zone”), and “surgical strike”
AuntyUta 