God is a Trinity, so is Man.

St Paul. (2Thes5vs23)
“And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the comming of our Lord Jesus Christ”.

St Paul clearly teaches that we are more than mere Material beings, more than mere machines.
We are Not Robots! We are not Computorised Automations!

Peter Dunne = EPIC FAIL

Quarter past midnight. Central Wellington. Cosmic Corner is OPEN.

“Do you have any synthetic cannabinoids?”

“Yes.”

“That haven’t been banned yet?”

“Yes. We have …”

Puff is “mellow.”

K2 is “stronger, lasts longer.” Of the two, I’m told K2 is the most popular.

“It’s $30. Two grams.”

“I’ll buy it. Thank you.”

Yes, I know. If I had any sense, I’d smoke cannabis. Not some novel compound with no history of human use sprayed on some unidentified plant material.

If Peter Dunne had any sense—or even an iota of compassion—he’d legalise cannabis. As a recreational drug user, I have choices. Medicinal cannabis users do not. I’m sick of Dunne, and I’m sick of his gang of thugs who are now actively persecuting members of the medicinal cannabis support group Green Cross, including Billy McKee and Stephen McIntyre (recently deceased).

Just go the hell away, Peter Dunne. Now. And don’t fucking come back.

[Cross-posted to SOLO.]

Hole in the head

Yesterday, I read some good news in the Dominion Post.

Colorado folk go for the gun in wake of Batman massacre

UNITED STATES: The massacre in Colorado has prompted a significant upsurge in the number of people attempting to buy guns in the state, it has emerged, confounding expectations the tragedy would see a backlash over perceived lax gun control in the US.

The number of firearm applications in the state increased by more than 40 per cent following the tragedy, the Denver Post reported, with many residents rushing to buy weapons just hours after the shootings.

But Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, continued his lone crusade against gun legislation in the USA.

Lone crusade? Good. Because more guns less crime. And, as an inset, some even better news.

Void in brain may have saved shooting victim

UNITED STATES: Petra Anderson, a promising young composer and violinist, was among the victims of the Colorado cinema massacre; a shotgun pellet passed through her brain but family members now say she is on course for a miraculous recovery.

The post-graduate student, 22, has undergone major brain surgery but in remarkable signs of progress she has already begun to respond to questions and form mostly one-syllable words.

“Mum,” she was heard to say in the Aurora hospital’s intensive care unit this week.

Her mother, Kim Anderson, said her daughter was expected to make a full recovery despite a shotgun pellet passing through her nasal cavity and making its way all the way through to the back of her skull. Doctors believe the pellet may have left the major centres of her brain unscathed.

“She could have lost all kinds of function if the bullet traversed her brain,” Mrs Anderson said. “I believe that she was not only protected by God, but that she was actually prepared for it.”

Surgeons discovered a void inside her brain and they said it was possible it was a pre-existing channel that may have allowed the pellet to pass by without damaging the tissue.

Brad Strait, a pastor who joined the vigil at Petra’s bedside, said he believed the existence of a void in her head saved her life. “[The pellet] turns slightly several times, and comes to rest at the rear of her brain. And in the process, the bullet misses all the vital areas of the brain,” he said.

Doctors said it was possible to survive gunshot wounds to the brain but victims rarely escape undamaged. For survivors, such as the Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman who was shot last year, the recovery can take years and long-term complications are common.

And the best news of all? Petra lives, but you still get to have an Autopsy!

Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language is an essay written by George Orwell in 1946.

Here are some excerpts.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying … And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and … one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

  1. Could I put it more shortly?
  2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright,

I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.

Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

The pen is mightier than the sword

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say

In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that

than to say

I think.

If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.

This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. … There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could … be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible … to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.

If you’ve read this far, then you’re probably chomping at the bit to start applying Orwell’s rules for writing—and thinking!—in clear, fresh, plain language.

Here are a couple of sentences from a well-known political writer.

Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of converting abstractions into concretes, or, more precisely, into the psycho-epistemological equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to reverse engineer them into plain English.

[Model answers are here.]

The serpent-windings of utilitarianism

Judicial or juridical punishment (poena forensis) is to be distinguished from natural punishment (poena naturalis), in which crime as vice punishes itself, and does not as such come within the cognizance of the legislator. Juridical punishment can never be administered merely as a means for promoting another good either with regard to the criminal himself or to civil society, but must in all cases be imposed only because the individual on whom it is inflicted has committed a crime. For one man ought never to be dealt with merely as a means subservient to the purpose of another…

[W]oe to him who creeps through the serpent-windings of utilitarianism to discover some advantage that may discharge him from the justice of punishment, or even from the due measure of it, according to the Pharisaic maxim: “It is better that one man should die than that the whole people should perish.” For if justice and righteousness perish, human life would no longer have any value in the world.

What, then, is to be said of such a proposal as to keep a criminal alive who has been condemned to death, on his being given to understand that, if he agreed to certain dangerous experiments being performed upon him, he would be allowed to survive if he came happily through them? It is argued that physicians might thus obtain new information that would be of value to the commonweal. But a court of justice would repudiate with scorn any proposal of this kind if made to it by the medical faculty; for justice would cease to be justice, if it were bartered away for any consideration whatever.

– Immanuel Kant, The Science of Right

[Reprised from SOLO.]

One Rule Constitution


If I could write one rule, and only one rule, for New Zealand’s Constitution the one rule that I would write would be…

Any legal punishment must be proportionate to the offense.

If you could write one rule, and only one rule, for New Zealand’s Constitution what would that one rule be?

Give me Liberty, or give me Death!