FT.com loses the thread

Gideon -

I gotta say that after an entry like that YOU almost deserve to get nuked - or your editor does (only joking btw)!

Your little sketch is so simplistic it astounds me. I think the FT offices must be a little too comfortable and cosy. Your journalistic specs are misting up mate, perhaps your talents are better deployed on matters less gritty than nuclear 'terrorism'.

First of all no serious commentator thinks it likely that a fullscale nuclear device could be detonated by a group of Jihadis. As you well know the real risk is of a so called 'dirty bomb'. Now THAT is not so far outside the bounds of possibility is it?

"Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard, recently wrote that nuclear terrorism in London was the one “high probability, high impact” threat that “fills me with dread”. He is of course talking about the dirty bomb scenario.

Time to rewrite your article already.

This next point might stick in the gullet a little - but I invite you to compare and contrast remarks and policy decisions of two well known political and religious extremists - Pres GWB and Pres Ahmadinejad. Having done so I defy you to be disingenuous enough to tell me there are not close similarities in general tone, levels of belligerence and intransigence as well as apparent gross stupidity between the two.

Ahmadinejad believes that the US is Satan incarnate. GWB believes in the Creation. Ahmadinejad wants to (if you believe the best known translations) wipe Israel off the map. GWB already has 'wiped' Iraq and Afghanistan off the map and may be about to put the boot in to Iran, no doubt with some kind of 'surgical' strike.

Tell me who you think is more 'unstable' or 'millenarian'. Close call isn't it.

You seem to imply that the issue of fissile material emanating from some corner of the former USSR is under control. I invite you to listen to recent World Service reportage on this very subject. That stuff is turning up in cow and pig sheds right across what used to be known as Soviet Central Asia, and some of it is definitely being trafficked - as per senior representatives of the IAEA who are trying to locate the dastardly little stashes.

As a final thought, North Korea, it is worth mentioning, has just done the Deal of the Century. They are still on the map because they have nuclear weapons already. They beat the US to the punch. They appear to have done a smart deal - they will be left alone if they stop building more. Bizarrely, Kim Jong-Il, as sane as they come according to Madeleine Albright, may be the sanest of the little trio we consider here. Scary isn't it.

Or maybe it just doesn't look that way from where you sit.

Kind regards

Jake

Wellington times

I have been doing a spot of volunteering here in Wellington - just basic stuff for the local foodbank run by the City Mission and also helping out with organisation at the Red Cross here for the First Aid courses they teach as fund raisers.

As the film festival began today I took in Rescue Dawn, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Christian Bale. This is easily the most commercial of Herzog's films that I have seen - the other being Wild Blue Yonder and Grizzly Man. Shot in super saturated retro flavoured high contrast jungle colour Rescue seems to tell the story of Dieter Dengler who, whilst flying his first combat mission as a US Navy pilot, a secret bombing mission over the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos, is shot down and subsequently captured by guerrilla fighters below (nowadays they might of course be called 'Terrists'). I say apparently because this really is not a film containing any deep message on the political level. Even the simple stuff like War is Hell is left aside. The story sticks close to Dieter through his multi month sweat drenched ordeal.

It's a kind of Deer Hunter lite. The two films share key elements; the way Dieter leads the rag tag pack of POWs to escape and supports the one comrade who ends up accompanying him into the jungle odyssey which awaits; Bale's realist and pragmatist hero with just enough wildness in his own heart to keep him on the right side of sanity (most of the time anyway).

So it seems a simple story, 'inspired by true events' from the life of Dieter D. Incidentally that particular trope seems to be too ripe to resist since Spielberg used it as an excuse to tell a pack of lies about the Israeli death squads in Munich. But anyway...so we spend a lot of time in the jungle with Dieter. And how beautiful it is to be there. This film does justice to the natural world of South East Asia and contrasts this beauty and its brooding massiveness with the flailing, desperate humans deep beneath the triple canopy. The density and impenetrability of the bush is almost like another character on screen, swiping, entangling and felling the actors in this story of a simple desire to survive.

Our hero is out of his depth but gains a fingernail of purchase on the rim of survival against huge odds and just hangs on. Bale, not always convincing previously although perhaps the scripts were to blame anorexia-like starvation notwithstanding, carries this role brilliantly. It is not a film of gravitas and neither is his acting; he and Herzog have struck the right balance. Dieter comes across as a robust and singly determined individual, but also human and full of compassion. He understands human frailty and Bale shows us this in the way Dieter comes across as a man who seems, to his benefit, to be not quite grown up. The little boy who wanted so desperately to be a pilot is getting the adventure he might just have been looking for but it's 20C hotter than he wanted, the machetes are viciously sharp and snakes and worms don't really taste that good it turns out.

Finally there is a happy ending and this doesn't spoil the film because it's not a thriller or even an action movie in many ways. The 'action' is intentionally muted. It is replaced instead by the small minute by minute dramas of the crash and initial evasion, escape and survival in the jungle and the desperate descent into madness of the other POWs.

This is a surprisingly kind film, set in a war zone. We hate neither the captors nor the captured and there is no sledgehammer of condemnation being wielded. That has been done before and will no doubt be done again. Herzog and Bale have trodden a very fine line in telling this story and end up guiding the film into unusual territory.

Bitchin

There is a huge lump on my shoulder. But that is what happens when you land on it doing a 'roll' in Aikido that is more of a self inflicted 'spear tackle' (as it is technically known in rugby speak here). Thankfully much Hypericum, Arnica and Rhus Tox are doing the trick and hopefully the lump will subside quickly. Because Aikido is fun. Possibly because it is a little bit dangerous.

In other news I have just eaten 4 gold kiwi fruit for breakfast and wondered again what hit the Pentagon on Sept 11st. Next up it's pancakes with vegemite.

Cultural boob

So, apart from nearly going to the wrong venue (if you happen to know Wellington you will know immediately what a dick I am for trying to go to the 25,000 seat Cake Tin/Westpac stadium rather than the 4000 seat TSB Arena) and then being unable to find a car park and nearly missing the whole thing my audience with HHDL all went according to plan. At least from my side of things.

While my preparations were all cool, level headed non-attachment and included waking up too late to consider walking into town, then nearly missing a meeting I had at 11am due to not being able to find a parking space (something that was to happen for a second time just a short time later the same day), not having a watch to know how much time I had and then realising that I hadn't enough change for the Pay and Display so necessitating a brief but enjoyable mid-city jog to and from the nearest ATM then in and out of the nearest 24/7, the DL had clearly found himself in disarray that morning following our meeting at the airport on Monday night.

He took his seat calmly enough, raised as it was on a stage and gilded in Tibetan reds and golds, but I could tell from the surfeit of nonchalance in the way he casually softened up the expectant audience with one anecdote after another about what, exactly, he likes to carry in his maroon shoulder bag that he was clearly rattled. However he soon got over his nerves and pulled it together to begin his discourse: World Peace - a Human Approach.

Basically the meat of it was this - World peace depends on cultivating compassion, while at the same time realising that sometimes action is preferable to just looking on with compassion. Where is this compassion to come from? Well, apparently (and here's the Human bit), the seed of compassion is best sown in the strong emotional ties that can be fostered between baby and mother. To illustrate this the Dalai Lama recounted an old family tale from the childhood of his father.

As a boy his father had been very close to his own mother. This woman, the grandmother of the Dalai Lama (pronounced dally laama round these parts), had cultivated an very strong bond with her children, thus ensuring a supportive and solid family structure and environment. Her children would not want for the attention of their mother. A deep spring of compassion and love would flow within the family, eventually manifesting among other things in the person of the 14th Dalai Lama himself. Just how strongly the bond between mother and child had been spun could be seen from the fact that the young boy would rush home after a hard day in the fields and demand to be taken to his mother's breast, there to suckle. Even though there was no milk to be had as it had been 10 years since this birth.

It was these last two concrete details which kind of took the sheen off the moment really. True to form the Lama chuckled good naturedly at his own joke, as is the wont of the Lamas I have thus far encountered. Unfortunately, this being New Zealand, not too many other members of the audience felt inclined to share in his sprightly mirth. I felt a wave of discomfort wash back and forward around me, like a wave in a bath tub filled with 4000 people where you kind of slap the surface and watch the ripples rebound off the sides, to and fro.

This passed after a few moments luckily.

I elected to leave before the final questions but these apparently included one asking for his views on euthanasia and another asking whether or not being in a committed (or presumably any) relationship is a barrier to becoming enlightened. The answer to this last one was apparently a diplomatic 'yes'.

Two birds with one stone

The guy in the grey suit, large checked yellow and pale blue shirt and dark blue tie had strolled down the narrow concourse between the arrival gates some minutes earlier. He was in his mid 30s, with neat but slightly weathered features – like someone who spends time outside. Perhaps they like hiking, or they were in the army. What with the mini scrum of gathering media types, small cameras and security tags hanging from their necks, this lone individual didn’t catch our attention at first, but then N noticed he had a mini earpiece and was doing the ‘talking to the cufflink’ thing every few minutes. Must be the next flight then, we guessed.

It was pretty warm in the terminal and I was starting to get thirsty. I wandered to the drinks machine and back, feeling slightly dehydrated but unwilling to shell out the $3 for a small bottle of what was probably tap water.

As I turned my back to the wall railing and lent against it my gaze caught a new arrival strolling past – amazingly this little jaunt had just killed two birds with one stone. Helen Clark, the NZ PM, walks past with her security detail and into the door of gate 17. Clearly going to say hi to the DL out of the glare of the media. They had been fed the story that this visit wasn’t to be officially recognised as the pair had ‘accidentally’ met at Brisbane airport a week or so earlier, thus obviating the need for them to meet again but it would seem that she is at the very least more polite than that and possibly simply more honourable. I suppose if you line them up together you could argue that you have the two least corruptible public figures in the world side by side.

We hang around a few more minutes and then notice a press man shuffle quickly in front of the open double doors and snap a couple of flashlit shots off. Clearly the arrival is in progress now and a few seconds later a group of about 8 people walk steadily into view, just a metre or two in front of me. The press and a few suited Tibetan types gather ound as they keep moving through. The Dalai Lama is of course exactly as you expect him to be – right down to the bare right arm poking from his robe and the dark cherry red, polished but slightly scuffed clompy shoes he wears with grey ankle socks.

I walk up the concourse next to him with just one security person between us. On the short video N took you can see the small, and I mean small, bald spot on the crown of my freshly clippered head. Casually strolling along next to the Dalai Lama.

He is not a person I had given a great deal of thought to previously, though we have tickets to see him speak on ‘A Human Approach to World Peace’ today in Wellington, but I have to say that as he came into my view from the doors of the arrival gate I felt something. You could barely name it really. If anything it was like the impression of a small pulse or wave passing through and around the immediate vicinity. The ghost of a shimmer. A simple presence perhaps.

As the entourage proceeded along towards the main hall in the terminal filled with coffee, book and underwear shops there was a larger gathering of people, many from the local Buddhist community of course plus the rest of the airport population for the evening, caught unawares but readying the camera phones or getting excited anyway. Some walked past in the opposite direction, looking at this red robed individual with blank unknowing stares, perplexed and even a little put out. Somehow resentful that they didn’t know who this was.

While N struggled to get the perfect shot from behind the gain line, P and I just took up position at the end of the informal greeting queue and casually, gently, shook his soft hand and said hello as he passed by; a slightly stooped 71 year old Tenzin Gyatso without any hand luggage.

I have asked to be removed from ashtangi.net because I found this when I accidentally clicked while looking at their front page. It was like stepping in cat shit with bare feet.

Now we all plumb significant depths of banality on our blogs from time to time - some more than others it has to be said - and that is a blogger's prerogative. However, innocent web surfers should never be exposed to such a high incidence of banality on one, lone, blog. The only conceivable reason to have activated such a blog is, well, to have a blog. End of chat.

Such 'toilet' (as the vernacular English expression so aptly puts it) amounts to cyber pollution of the worst kind. I would never condone censorship. I would however ensure that I never again have even a tangential association with this type of drivel. Is it even real? I would rather have ads for Lockheed Martin, McDonalds and Robert Mugabe on my blog that have it publicised along side this kind of schmucky nebisch tripe.

The Secret

This film, which springs directly from the little gem that was "What the bleep do we know" and is meant as a further exploration of the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness, is not only a serious misreading of its sources but also both morally repugnant and a sad confirmation of exactly how some in America end up conflating the spiritual and the material, the real and the evanescent - when they should definitely know A LOT better.

Judging from their website I would say that the producers have been reading too much Dan Brown and not enough Fritjof Capra.

It's all very well to get together well known US self help gurus like Jack Canfield, Marci Shimoff and John Gray together with the odd Quantam physicist and have them spout about what great lives they have and how they lived through tough times, transformational experiences and personal redemption. It's another thing altogether to invest these individuals with some sort of mystique ("The Secret") and in so doing confer on their view of the world as we see it post-edit an aura of reality and authenticity, and in the process render this view something to aspire to; whether it be the '$4 million dollar house' or the 'Checks that just keep coming through the mail'.

Let's not forget just how profound and important real self actualisation is and remind ourselves just what all the fuss is about when we bring together theories and philosophies like Quantum Physics and Buddhism.

Eastern spirituality and Quantum Physics both seem to suggest a similar concept of the universe. Although of course one is spiritual and the other physical at the outset nonetheless they appear to converge in suggesting that essentially the universe is empty, that all that exists is energy and that we, and our minds, are nothing more than manifestations of this energy. In seeing this we can either accept the impermanence inherent in our universe or exist in a state of grasping and delusion. The confusion of the permanent with the impermanent and the concepts of attachment and non-attachment are at the heart of Buddhist teaching and it is here that we get to the nub of the problem in The Secret. The much vaunted 'Law of Attraction', the idea that the minute one relinquishes one's attachment to something it can be effortlessly possessed and that we are therefore masters of our own individual universes, is nothing but a grimly distorted and misunderstood interpretation of the concept of non-attachment.

You wanna own that new car? Stop thinking about how you can't do it because this is only ever increasing the impossibility of doing so. Just start thinkin how ya gonna do it and your La-Z-Boy will transform itself into the babe magnet of your dreams. Whatever.

This film mentions cars and money and God an awful lot. It doesn't mention love, compassion or peace. It equates material possessions with happiness in the crudest manner possible and suggests that if you live in utter poverty, at the bottom of the heap then no-one but you can possibly be responsible. Now, I'm not saying that these are the beliefs of the participants or even that this is what the producers are trying to argue. No. But what I am saying is that this is what they have ended up doing. And I wonder why they did that.

Manu Bay and travelling around India with a 7ft surfboard

I went over to Raglan, home to one of the most famous left hand point breaks in the world at Manu Bay, to do a spot of surfing. On arriving at the backpacker hostel I was less than impressed to be honest - it was a bit on the tatty side and my 'double' room left me with just enough space to put the mat down. As I mentioned to a friend who also came down to try out the waves, lucky I don't actually do Garba Pindasana yet because only an expert could have managed it in that tight little spot without headbutting the skirting board.

Anyway, after a couple of days the whole place really started to grow on me - the lodge was in a beautiful little valley full of fern palms, glow worms and sharp contrasting late afternoon shadows and clear blue sky. Even the paltry excuse for a kitchen began to seem adequate.

The surfing itself was perfect for those at the learner stage - not too big but nice and regular and uncrowded. Wainui beach is wide and basically empty at this time of year, even over a holiday weekend. And I just love being in the water! It brings a smile to my face at the time and afterwards too. Wetsuits required of course but that gave over 2 hours of comfort with just the feet getting a little chilly.

Having wanted for so long to learn to surf I am actually now doing it and as luck would have it the yoga is of course a huge help, not just for the balance and rythmn of the activity but also in terms of attitude, physical condition and upper body stamina and strength. I was beginning to catch and surf waves almost at will, though the takeoff needs to get a lot cleaner and the rides can definitely get longer; and they will, in time. The pleasure of paddling out, watching and observing the swell and sets, duck diving the waves to resume sitting on the board, all of it brings such peace and calm, a feeling of unity and exhilaration perhaps best labelled as joy. And just once, unexpectedly and without thinking I turned, paddled, felt the board begin to slide down the little wave face and popped up perfectly onto the middle of the board, steady and balanced, eyes forward and ready to go, the timing absolutely right, the attitude right, the feeling right, the sum of it all just right.

All of which found me in the board shop in Napier yesterday, looking at 7ft4in boards and accoutrements - but the stumbling block for me is the idea of having to lug that thing around Indian railway stations, streets and airports. Talking to a mate last night we both agreed that even a backpack seems like a hassle sometimes. Now, I haven't investigated the Indian surf scene, though I gather there is some, but for me the main focus is Sri Lanka where I know that down south there are some good breaks to be had, handily near to a yoga centre I plan to visit in the new year. So the dilemma is whether to buy now and cart the thing around or rely on being able to get some kind of half decent board in Sri Lanka when I get there. Hmmm.

The natural order of things

One of the most important things about the internet and BBC World Service is that together they are keeping my brain alive. At the same time this gives me an opportunity to examine the nature of the sustenance required. It’s pretty varied.

To produce 1kg of rice approximately 5000L of water are necessary. In Bangladesh, a country with a population of around 200m, rice accounts for 70% of an individual’s calorific intake. The recommended maximum is 50%. In the mid-1970s, when the World Food Programme began to supply food aid to the nation, approximately 70% of women and children there were malnourished. Today that figure is estimated to be around 50%. In part this may be due to aid, but another contributing factor is the improvement in yields from rice crops due to crossing varieties of rice. Now genetic engineering offers the possibility not only of improving yields but also of dramatically fortifying the nutritional content of this staple food. ‘Golden Rice’, with an orange yellow tint, contains beta-carotene producing DNA transferred from daffodils. Genetic engineering thus offers the possibility of rice containing vitamins and other nutrients not naturally present.

Only 1% of bacteria and viruses can be cultured and examined under laboratory conditions. This means that the remaining 99% are therefore a relative unknown. Microbiologists are working in a very murky and incomplete knowledge environment.

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity produced the famous equation E=mc2. This has no practical value within normal bounds of everyday experience or orders of magnitude. Outside of these however it means that, among other things, as an object accelerates towards the speed of light its mass actually increases. In addition, if it attained the speed of light its mass would by definition be infinite. Thus the impossibility of travelling at the speed of light since the energy required to do so would be infinite too. Another prediction of the theory says that time will pass more slowly for a clock at a given altitude above earth’s surface than for an identical clock on the surface. This concept, though, is actually observed to be the case and is factored into software for devices such as GPS satellites and equipment.

When Chloroform, which overcame many of the disadvantages of Ether, first became available for general use as an anaesthetic in the mid 1800s an enormous debate was ongoing within and without the medical community as to whether it was ‘right’ to use anaesthetics at all to perform major surgery. Some practitioners adopted the new technology while others chose not to do so.

Today we might assume that a concept like the elimination of pain to facilitate life saving surgery might exist in a relatively neutral moral and ethical space. However, in general we now make a value judgement based principally on medical science and individual 'experience' that pain above a certain level of intensity is both bad and unnecessary. This in turn informs ethics and social sensibilities. We can eliminate pain and so, in the instance of open heart surgery, it is both expedient and necessary to do so.

Previously however it seems that medical science was perhaps informed more by social and religious perspectives than its own set of value judgements based on modern concepts of rationality. Society did not view pain as a simply negative experience. Perhaps God guided individuals through the infliction of pain, helping them to make decisions or influencing their lives. Pain was to be borne as it fortified the character and spirit, improving the individual and thereby providing a pay off to wider society. Pain represented punishment and by extension a lesson to others, and a deterrent. Pain was a purifier, a good thing that often preceded a cure or resolution. Pain was simply part of life and so to tamper with it might not be in our best interests as it simply formed a feature of the way the world was, the natural order.

All of which looks like a nice neat, if glib, piece hinting at issues of cultural relativism and contextualisation. The thing that occured to me subsequently however sits roughly along the following lines:

Prior to the publication of the General Theory of Relativity in 1915 the concepts of space and time were seen as existing separately but together in a fixed environment which itself was unaltered by events within it. After the General Theory it seemed that this was no longer the case. Space and time were linked together and existed in a dynamic state whereby they both exerted an effect on, and were themselves effected by, their environment the universe. This paradigmatic shift in thinking has reverberated outwards across art and science ever since and I wonder how much it can be seen to have given rise to the now much criticised concepts of post-modernism which were still dominant, though beginning to look a little tired, while I was at University. The idea that all things are relative to one another and their environment, be that physical or philiosophical, had become something of a mantra as well as being extremely useful for those wishing to subvert ingrained and dominant bodies of thought. But how much do Cultural Relativity and General Relativity really have in common?

Ah well, it keeps me amused anyway.

Be alert, NZ needs lerts.

I almost laughed outloud, but the laugh was beaten to it by a groan upon reading that Ashtanga is to be a demonstration Olympic Sport in Beijing.

I particularly like the proposed 'logo' for the event, and the fact that it is being included 'along with BMX biking'. Does anyone even do that anymore?

I loved the sneaky jibe 'The organisers feel that with the inherent implicit competition present in Ashtanga Yoga, it was not too much of a stretch (groan) to include it as a sport.'

By the time I got to 'The event will be structured similarly to the decathlon. There will be 6 different rounds held for men and women, each representing a series in Ashtanga. Competitors who make it past the first round of the Primary Series will then compete in the Second Series round and so forth.' I was about ready to give it up and find something else to do in life which most immediately included writing to the poster of the article and lambasting the jaunty, relief tinged timbre of the report - 'At last it will be acceptable to openly ask "what posture are you at?"'.

Fortunately I noticed in the byline that it was post on April 1st.

With April 1st a Sunday there was no local media to provide similar entertainment so we kind of missed out. Last year there was a great one in the paper about how the region was going to get an international airport shortly at a tiny community called Bridge Pa. The plans involved practically bulldozing the few dozen pastel shaded clapboard houses which surround the Mormon church out there and then uprooting a few hundred hectares of prime vineyard in order to construct the runway.

The other newspaper joke that springs to mind is from about 1998 when I was working in the City of London. The Financial Times ran an advert from BMW alerting the public to 'fake BMWs' on the market. You could practically feel the shudder run through the cohorts on the dealing room floor. Luckily there was an easy way to spot the fakes; the distinctive blue and white check logo at the front of the bonnet was a mirror image of the authentic ones. Traders breathed a sigh of relief and returned to their screens and the vitally important work of the day, which normally included a fair bit of eating, reading The Sun and leering at anything female within a 200m radius of their phones.