The View From The Couch

Protecting the Backsides of Politicians

Ever the champion of the common dufus (like me), IKEA has hit the headlines.

Furniture giant IKEA has published newspaper advertisements urging Prime
Minister John Howard to fit out his Canberra cabinet office with bright red
swivel chairs.

The advertisement, printed today in Fairfax newspapers, comes after it was revealed in Senate estimates the Federal Government had bought a new set of executive chairs at a cost to taxpayers of $200,000 - or just under $3000 per chair.

IKEA took Liberal backbencher Don Randall to task after he tried to defend the Prime Minister, claiming that Mr Howard should not have to buy the chain's "dodgy" chairs instead of spending $200,000 on plush seating.

The Swedish furniture retailer today ramped up its response in the form of quarter-page broadsheet ads headed: "We respectfully ask Prime Minister John Howard to sit on it."

IKEA pointed out Mr Howard could have refitted the cabinet office at far less cost to taxpayers by purchasing a set of "Jerrik" swivel chairs for $569 each.

The text of the ad reads: "Prime Minister John Howard wants to spend almost $3000 on a single chair while this one here offers quality, design and comfort for only $569.

"In fact, our range of chairs starts from as low as $12.95. Surely that would make us the preferred choice."

Mr Howard also was forced to cancel a planned $540,000 taxpayer-funded upgrade of his private dining room in Parliament House after the figure was revealed during estimates hearings.

I guess sitting in an IKEA "Jerrik" chair would rob the Prime Minister of some dignity, IKEA being Swedish and all. Oh to have a pretty Swede to look after my rearside. :)

The Things Spoken By Paul Keating


It's been a while since good ol' Paul piped up, and today he has a doozy. He says we should quit screwing around with Canberra and just make Sydney the National Capital.

FORMER prime minister Paul Keating has claimed that Sydney should replace Canberra as the capital of Australia. During his speech on the future of Sydney Harbour last night, Mr Keating said Prime Minister John Howard had effectively moved his government to Sydney, and that Canberra had an air of unreality.

"Transport, communications, housing - all these real things are camouflaged in Canberra," he said. "And the Government operates now out of a little office building in Phillip Street, Sydney. "That's where Cabinet meets, except when Parliament's sitting.

"So what we've got is when Parliament's sitting, everyone flies off to the bush capital and they all live in their motel rooms, and then they all fly out again on Friday
morning."

That sound you hear is the sound of axes sharpening, teeth gnashing, and knives being drawn in Melbourne.

Religion, Morals, Ethics and Thought
It's one of those days where the masses are disturbed by radical thought. Richard Dawkins, he of the Socio-Biology school of thought, is also necessarily a logical positivist kind of scientist in that Oxford mold - and so is a radical atheist.

He has been making lovely noises with his documentary 'The Root of All Evil' by taking on all the Levantine religons. The hardest to fight back so far is Christianity.

The thing that springs to my mind is that it's probably very difficult for religious people to come at the notions Dawkins is presenting as scientific fact. Facts are hard to dispute, especially when you don't share a common ground on epistemology. I understand Dawkins and his atheism; heck, I'm probably an Atheist; but only by default. The problem I do have with the current prevalence of Levantine religious thought is that if these lines of thinking are so wonderful, why are they contributing to so much pain and suffering on this planet? Clearly, they aren't working too well.

And so I bring to you today's link.

THEY may be worlds apart, physically and philosophically, but Australian-born
Margaret Somerville, one of the world's leading writers and thinkers about ethics, arrives in Sydney today determined to do battle with arch-atheist Richard Dawkins.

"He is a dangerous man who is causing me disturbed, sleepless nights," Professor Somerville said of the creator of the controversial shockumentary series The Root of All Evil?, showing on ABC Television and which concludes this Sunday.

"By attacking religion Dawkins thinks he is going to eliminate the world's evils, but he is so negative, so destructive in his approach, that he is escalating the conflict between warring cultures at a time when we should be seeking common ground," she said.

Uuh, I dunno about that.
People such as those Islamists/Fund-a-'mental'-ists push for Shariat law, the Zionist Israelis prosecuting their war in palestine, (and theior opposite number with their suicide bombers) and Christian fund-a-'mental'-ism propping up G.W. Bush's Republican Party are all significantly contributing to the conflicts around the planet. The Levantine religions are allowing themselves to be the banners around which power-hungry, violent people are trying to rally people around. Worse still, these banners then become ciphers which close off discussion and argument. And they all share the hallmark that reason should be shunned in favor of faith and irrationality.

Seriously, if they all stopped believing their respective claptrap, they might just find a better way to solve their conflicts. Think about that for a minute. How many conflicts around the planet this minute would drop dead if religion and its self-righteous exclusivist thinking stepped back? Israel-Palestine? Afghanistan? Iraq? East Africa? Pakistan? Kashmir? Compared to this, the Chinese paranoia about Falun Dafa is laughable.

As Philip K. Dick noted in his great book 'VALIS', the true name of religon is Death. He says, that the point of religion is to find a divinity and kill it. They crucified Jesus, but they also got Mani even worse. Luther's objections to the indulgences sold by the Catholic Church led to the Thirty Years' War in Europe. The Islam surge across North Africa was not bloodless as Muslim scholars make it out. The Crusades, we know about. Let's not forget the Balkans in the 1990s. Frankly, the world would be better if so many people stopped obsessiong over death. If people really want to understand death better, they ought to read philosophy. Try Heidegger for a start. It's a heck of a lot more useful than "ashes to ashes, dust to dust".

As for Margaret Somerville, if your morals can only be propped up by having religion, it's a sign that line of thinking can't reach the status of being ethical thought. Ethics necessarily begins when we abandon the crutch of religious thinking and start analysing values for ourselves. "Because God/Allah/YHWH says so," should be the first line we abandon. - It's scary, risky and frought with dangers, but it's a risk more people should be willing to take. Yes, it opens the door to the likes of Marquis deSade and Gilles de Rais and Adolf Hitler. It also opens the door to Karl marx, Siegmund Freud, and Carl Jung. It opens the door to scientific enlightenment and therefore a true liberation. Simply put, it is more rewarding to abandon the cause of God and take up the causeof reason.

I can't believe I just wrote that sentence. I sound like Diderot. Heck, the cause of reason hs been around for 300 years. It's an indictment of humanity that more have not embraced it. If we had to preserve religons to preserve morality, then I don't think there is much hope for humanity.

Sticking to the old stuff is only going to let us repeat the horrors of the last two millennia. 2000 years of killing and maiming in the name of one God.
It's time humanity grew up and gave up on bad habits.

Was Watching... Jesus!

While I'm on this topic, my favorite movie about Jesus is Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. I've wanted the DVD for a while but the thing has always been $30+. Then, I picked up a copy for $5 at a stall in Birkenhead Point last week. Pretty happy about that!

It's still an excellent movie. Willem Defoe as Jesus is pretty compelling viewing. More so, the passionate portrayal of Judas by Harvey Keitel. There's a scene in which Jesus tells Judas that he has to betray Jesus in order for things to work out to God's plan. There you go, what kind of God has to sacrifice his own kid to save humanity? But that's another debate. :) It's a fantastic, heart-wrenching scene.

While I'm no kind of Christian, having lived in the West for so long, I'm pretty used to the tropes of Judeo-Christian thought. However, my girlfriend who is Japanese to the core, watched the whole thing agog. She said she couldn't believe the silliness of what Christians take on faith as miracles. She said it's like being asked to believe a bunch of fairy-tales and if you don't? - (Insert 'Dragnet' Theme) - "You go to hell!"

Anyway, I recall the brouhaha about this movie because of the sequence towards the end where Jesus gets tempted by Satan into coming off the cross (hence the title of the movie) and lives an oridnary life. He even has sex, and we the audience gets to see it. Watching it now, it's so tame a concept, but I can imagine the fury towards this film is still out there.
But if you ever want to watch a good movie about Jesus, this is it.

This Moose Maybe Cooked


I hate to say this but Moose might be done. His year to date looks like this.

IP: 29.0
Hits: 36
Runs: 21
Earned Runs: 21
HR: 5
BB: 6
K: 12
ERA: 6.52
WHIP: 1.45
BAA: .313

In a 3 game set against the Bosox where the Yankees actually played like, y'know, The YANKEES, Moose alone was the big disappointment. That second game loss where he gave up that homer to the struggling Manny Ramirez - he of the .384 SLG coming into the game - killed me.

In fact Moose's 2 wins for the season were against the struggling Texas Rangers, and he really hasn't been effectual otherwise. In fact he's essentially duplicated the Igawa effort but twice as often, with half the strikeouts.
12k in 29 innings is really crappy, and un-Moose-like.
WHIP of 1.45 says his stuff has been pretty mediocre.
The BAA of .313 says he's been unlcky by just under 4%, which is nowhere enough to shave off from the 6.52 ERA.
The biggest culprit is the 5 HRs he's given up in 29 innings.

It's a shame because I really like Moose, but if he's going to pitch like this, it's going to be better to get somebody else in there. My guess is that the rotation after June will be: Wang, Pettitte, Rocket, Hughes, Clippard/DeSalvo. I think it's also time to give up on Kyle Farnsworth. he's just not helping with his 5.00+ ERA in the pen. I'm sure Chris Britton could do better.

Meanwhile, the Rocket ran into some static at AA Thunder on his comeback trail.

Clemens walked four, struck out five, hit a batter and threw a wild pitch. He
gave up four extra base hits, including three doubles and a triple.
"It was one step in the right direction, a little further down the road," Clemens said.
"I'm glad to get one more done."
The fans were funny though. After Clemens threw two balls to start the game, one yelled:"Come on throw a strike!"

3 runs 6 hits in 5-1/3 innings doesn't sound too dominant to me. I don't know, but it does seem to me it's high time the Yanks stopped whistling by the graveyard at night.