A Cute Baby

This is a Panda pup. Its interesting how we always find babies so endearing - a Basic Instinct I guess to want to nurture and protect our own young which flows out to all other young and defenceless babies. Which then left me wondering how the hell it is that the grossly over rated nicole kidman, after all the hoo ha about adoption and wanting a baby, having finally got one of her own - from Keith Urban, a fellow Kiwi by the way who comes from my home town - is now saying she cant wait to get back to work? As if she needed to ! What a vacuous empty waste of space that woman is.

Another Tony Wood

Unlike my relative of the same name, this Tony Wood is standing in Local Body elections in Sydney on a No Drugs ticket, and he's another case that illustrates my earlier point about people being persuaded by their personal experiences rather than something more objective. The poor mans daughter died after taking ecstasy over 12 years ago and now he feels hes cooled down enough to think clearly about the issue and take action. He's proposing a Zero Tolerance to Drugs policy and making the police enforce it. Or in other words Prohibition.

The trouble with Prohibition is that its already been tried and it doesnt work. All that happened when alcohol was outlawed in the US between 1920 and 1933 was that the perfect conditions were created for an underworld of crime to flourish, giving rise to such evil gangsters as Al Capone, Bugs Moran and the Mafia. They made most of their money from smuggling, producing, and distributing alcohol, but also from prostitution and gambling, and they used it to corrupt the police, the legal profession and politicians, thus eroding the most fundamental pillars of society. Furthermore the Government spent millions trying to enforce these laws which were finaly repealed in 1933. Prohibition however has remained the Policy in respect of every other recreational drug except for cannabis in a few enlightened places. The reality though is that the world wide war on Drugs is a massively expensive failure and a new appproach needs to be developed if any sort of progress is ever to be made. Cranking up enforcement like Tony Wood wants is not going to help. It will just make drugs more expensive and therefore more attractive to criminals and smugglers, and make it harder for users to seek help.

Instead try to imagine what would happen if all recreational drugs were legal, say like alcohol and tobacco are. Firstly the whole underworld of crime that the drug trade has created would no longer exist as there would be no market for the drug lords products; Drug users would no longer be forced into prostitution and petty crime such as robbery and burglary to suppport habits which can cost thousands per day;addicts could freely seek help rather than hide themselves and their illegal activities and contacts from authorities fearing punishment; governments all round the world would save millions if not billions of dollars by not having to spy on people and train sniffer dogs and customs officers and helicopter pilots to look for drugs, and instead spend more money on education about the dangers of drug use, of alcohol and tobacco use and on encouraging people to behave responsibly. Police and the Courts and Prisons could get on with dealing with real crime. Its the Drug Trade that keeps the Taliban in business in Afghanistan, it was the drug trade at the heart of the Crime War in Victoria Australia recently portrayed on the TV drama "Underbelly", its the drug trade that still fuels the Mafia and much of the violent crime on US Streets , its the drug trade that funds the civil war in Colombia - imagine how the world might change if all this drug money just disappeared!

There would of course be problems, and deaths, just as there are with tobacco and alcohol. And just as there are with playing many sports, with fishing and swimming, mountaineering, sailing, driving cars, and even hamburgers, peanuts and chewing gum have choked and killed people.

Instead of banning all these things we simply educate and inform and encourage, and hope that people will behave responsibly. Prohibition was a huge mistake in the 1920's and it created an evil underworld - we need to grow up and move on.

On the Money

Readers, this is where I labour to bring you the gems I dig up out of the news and out of the confused recesses of my brain. I struggle to get one or two posts a week but if you watched TV last night - in Australia anyway, you would see that I can be Right On the Money !! Last nights "4 Corners" on ABC TV was about Firepower and the conman Tim Johnston. I think they took the script for their programme from my Blog Post - watch the Programme or read more about it by clicking here :http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/default.htm. You will see a perfect example of how feelings lead people astray - as I was trying to explain in my post about the Firing Squad - something Johnston obviously understands only too well, for so long being able to make people feel everything was OK even though their own THINKING had made them suspect otherwise. Greed was the motive he appealed to - see how that poor chap smiled when he remembered how the shares he paid next to nothing for were going to list on the London Exchange for at least 1 Pound, maybe up to 6 Pounds.....

As for World Youth Day, I was going to comment on the morons who think that God was responsible for the weather being so good - that reminded me of a woman I remember who Praised God once for providing her with a carparking space right outside the shop she wanted to go to - if God controls the weather then why the bloody Tsunami that killed so many? But I was really disgusted by the way Cardinal Pell and Co responded to the apalling child sexual abuse scandal that makes that whole Church smell so badly - why on earth could not the Pope have given up a little time to really and truly meet and speak with that man whose two daughters were RAPED by a priest - the Pope had time for a snake and an echidna brought over specially for him to pet from the Zoo, but not for this poor grieving father?

Death by Firing Squad

I was expressing scepticism about Clairvoyants the other day and was told that I could only think it was rubbish because I had never had a "Reading" done. If I did get a "Reading", I was warned, my opinion would change. Now this of course is where the huge mistake is so often made - not just about Clairvoyants but about everything - thinking that ones personal subjective experience is somehow a good guide to the Truth. In fact its about the worst possible trap. The trouble is that our own personal experience is more real to us than just about anything, and so feels very persuasive and powerful. A simple proof of how unreliable our own feelings are about something is the Divorce Rate. Marriage is one of the Biggest decisions a person ever has to make in life, its rarely made lightly and in our society who we marry is very much determined by how we feel about that special someone, that person we just know is so right for us - but how often does it prove to be a mistake, sometimes a huge mistake?

There were two things that started me thinking about this problem of the way our personal experience can't be relied on - the first was the huge Mass conducted by the Pope at Randwick racecourse today. The atmosphere generated among all those hundereds of thousands of people singing and dancing and celebrating together will have been a very powerful subjective experience for all of them I am sure, and most will eventually go home feeling their Religion has once again been validated. But it would have been the same if they were all Hindus or Mormons or Shiites. Agree? But they couldnt all have been right - unless you want to say that the objective reality of their religion is not important, only the experience of it - though of course the actual mormons or Catholics or Hindus would have said their experience validated the actual reality of their Faith.

The other thing I was thinking about was that the Bali Bombers were supposed to have been executed by Firing Squad in the last few days. The father of one of the people killed in Bali was quoted as saying he would be happy to pull the trigger if they would give him a rifle, a viewpoint which is easy to understand, given his personal experience of what happened.I've often thought that if somone precious to me, especially one of my children was brutally murdered I would want to avange their death and track down and murder the killer myself. I would feel that I had that right.

But I would be wrong and I would have allowed my own personal experience to lead me astray, as that mans has, into thinking that killing criminals is somehow right.

The truth that seems evident to me is that Life is precious and has to be protected at all costs. And one of the costs is that vicious killers have to be taken out of society and prevented from doing harm again, but not by killing them. Killing them keeps making it possible for all of us to believe that sometimes its excusable to kill, and once that is established all that remains is for someone to think up an excuse.

If killing and murder and war is ever going to end, the first thing we have to agree on is that theres never an excuse.

Surfing weekend

Its become an annual thing - maybe this will be the last time now Ewin is 17 - but for his birthday each year Ewin and his friend Jack and I head down to the South Coast for a long weekend and stay in a rented beach house so they can go surfing.

We've stayed at Kiama, at Berrara, at Sussex Inlet and this time at Bawley Point. Again this time we were lucky to have great weather, and on our last day at Black Rock whales surfaced just out beyond the breakers. Ewin has a website, http://www.saltvisions.com/ on which he has put lots of great pictures of the surf, but heres a few more.

30,000 children starved to death today

I blame my mother for making me feel guilty about all the poverty and starvation in the world, and making me feel uncomfortable about the affluent life that I lead. Its her fault because when I was a kid if I didnt eat all the food on my dinner plate she would rebuke me severely and remind me that in other parts of the world kids who werent as ungrateful as me were starving to death. The thing is this guilt has stayed with me, and Ive always had a feeling that in some way starvation in the world is my problem and I should be doing something about it. But I never have.

Valerie Browning on the other hand is a remarkable Australian nurse and midwife who did do something, and her story is told in a book I read last weekend called "Maalika" . She has spent her entire adult life living with one of the poorest peoples on earth, the nomads of the Afar region in Ethiopia. This is undoubtedly one of the most inhospital parts of the world, a place of apalling heat and arid desert, a place where maternal and infant mortality is enormous, a place ravaged by starvation, tuberculosis and malaria, a place where female circumcision is widely practiced with horrifying brutality, a place where there has been civil war and yet also a place where a fragile and peaceful nomad culture has existed for millenia.

This place is so poor that there are no roads to much of it so public health officials just ignore it. Valerie on the other hand, is so determined that the people of this vast isolated region wont miss out that she simply walks through the desert to find them. She says its nothing for her to have to walk 50km a day. Once when walking with camels carrying vaccines packed in ice to isolated villages she fell and badly injured her ankle. She ordered the rest of the team to leave her there and to continue on with the precious vaccines then come back for her later. And they did. She describes her bedroom in the book : its a concrete room with a door and no windows, a couple of bits of furniture and some pictures torn out of magazines stuck to the walls. She owns virtually nothing. She had a baby out there and after a long labour needed a caesarean - they made her wait at the Government Hospital from Thursday night to Saturday afternoon because Friday was a Prayer day! But still she forges on against the odds, working day and night to bring vaccines and medicine, education and training, health and nutrition to the people she has committed herself to.

Its her deep christian faith that led her there and sustains her there, but what is so different about her religion, and what I really like about her is that she isnt in the least interested in ramming it down anyones throat.

She is so loved and admired there she is known as Maalika which meaans Queen.

So if youre feeling depressed and bored and finding life a struggle, I suggest reading "Maalika" You will be inspired and amazed at what this exceptional woman has achieved and probably also develop a new and happier outlook on your own struggles.