tcpip | A publisher, articles and ancient history

A publisher, articles and ancient history

Well, it looks like I've found a publisher for my Jim Cairns study. Otford Press seem to be enthusiastic and - best of all appropriate. Meanwhile, New Politics have accepted my review of Strangio's biography of Cairns.

This Wednesday between 6pm and 7pm I'm being interviews on a RMIT student radio session (90.7fm) as the founder of Labor for Refugees. Be prepared to pitch me some difficult questions ;-)

Have been html-ising some ancient history, including an article on Magic in Roleplaying and Reality, which I wrote in 1996 for Mimesis and Reflection on the Death of Superman, which was published in Green Left Weekly in 1993. As I said, ancient history. Hopefully I'll manage to collate most of the things I've written this year in a single place!

Greylock alerted me to
this BBC article on luxuries versus necessities. The following table says it all really.

Luxuries
Make-up: $18bn
Perfumes: $15bn
Ocean cruises: $14bn
Ice-cream in Europe: $11 bn
Needs
Eliminate hunger: $19bn
Reproductive health care for all women: $12bn
Clean water for all: $10bn
Universal literacy: $5bn

The rest of the week has consisted of plodding away on my Data Security subchapter of my thesis and coding for the Tetum-Bahasa-Portuguese-English translation programme. Coding for Sesami.org is finished and ConnectIE are happy with the result. If anyone else needs a very motivated and skilled IT generalist for the short or long term you know where to find me.

Spent the weekend being quite sociable - dinner on Friday night with some friends of severina_242, some senior East Timor and military people on Saturday and Sunday all-singing and all-dancing Iranians. Whilst each event was individually very pleasant, it has also reminded me how much I really enjoy my own company - and how little of that I get.

My diet starts today. No, I'm serious. I returned from East Timor slightly thinner than usual - probably clocking in at 84kg. Now, three months back and with the festive season, I'm about 95kg. With a height of around 181 cm, this does put me in the "overweight" range and with a BMI of about 28-29 - which is far too high. Fortunately I'm one of those people who loses/gains weight quite quickly. A few weeks on a diet of complex carbohydrates, pure protein, skim milk, vitamin supplements and cycling should see me return to the more healthly level.

Je-sus. I just checked the BBC BMI site. It reckons that I should go down to about 76kg... I haven't weighed that much since, ummm, 1988... Oh well, here goes...

Update

An interesting experiment. Friend_Whoring. Join.

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Congratulations on finding a publisher! When did you find out? Can't wait to hear more when I see you next.

Whilst each event was individually very pleasant, it has also reminded me how much I really enjoy my own company

That's sort of what I was feeling too.... except in general I just prefer smaller groups of people.

Don't take to much note of those BMI things, they aren't always that good.... as for the cycling you know I would join you if I could LOL

181cm at 76kg?? i don't think so! that's too low. I am going to check this thing soon, I am cringing at what it's going to tell me i should be

that luxuries thing is mind boggling, the essentials are so inexpensive compared to all the other rubbish we waste our money on

The BMI charts were originally designed to give an overall reading of groups of people - it was intended to be an average range.

About 6 years ago, the numbers were adjusted by the US Health Department for no adequately explained reason, making a large number of people who had previously been in the high end of OK, overweight overnight.

Most professional athletes who are not gymnsts or dancers fall into the seriously obese weight ranges because muscle weighs more than fat.

It doesn't take into account bone density, % of body fat, muscle density, resting heart rate, blood pressure or a myriad of other factor which are far more important than the BMI.

The most important thing is NOT what you weigh, but are you fit and healthy. Are you exercising regularly, are you eating a BALANCED diet with foods from all the major food groups, are you sleeping enough, do you drink enough water.

The BMI tables are perhaps the single worst addition to the 'science' of personal health ever invented. The Aitkins & Scarsdale diets would be close behind it.

Do yourself a favour and ignore them.

I probably will largely ignore it, although I do note that the standards acknowledge its own problems at:

http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/923520512.html

About eighteen months ago I had quite a good musculture. This is not the case now. So I suppose if I aim at improving and not be too fussed about weight per se it would be best. In fact, I'd quite happily stay at 96kg if I was mostly muscle....

Ahh, back on that bike I reckon..

Some time ago, I ran a couple of my fetishes together, and compiled figures on gay porn stars (and no-one can do body fascism they way the gay community does).

For those my height (183cm), a sample of 61 gay porn stars had an average weight of 82kg (BMI 24.5) But they ranged from 70kg (20.0 BMI) to 95kg (28.4 BMI).

So, I figure, at best a rough indicator.

Maybe this is a career option....

*giggle*

Plenty of gay porn actors aren't gay. It's a weird business.

I know of one who is married, whose wife cooks for the actors and filming crew. Apparently, she quite likes watching hubby get fucked by guys. One gathers, however, that if he touched another woman ...

The most important thing is NOT what you weigh, but are you fit and healthy. Are you exercising regularly, are you eating a BALANCED diet with foods from all the major food groups, are you sleeping enough, do you drink enough water.

Very good point indeed, though somehow, I managed to fall in what they say is the healthy range! Don't know how I did that O_o though I should exercise more, definitely!

thanks for your wise words :)

that luxuries thing is mind boggling, the essentials are so inexpensive compared to all the other rubbish we waste our money on

If you're interested in this sort of thing I recommend publications from the World Watch Institute, who did the research for the above study. http://www.worldwatch.org/

Or, in a less scholarly and more digestable format with a similar orientation, New Internationalist. www.newint.org/

Or, in a less scholarly and more digestable format with a similar orientation, New Internationalist. www.newint.org/

i twill definitely look into that, thanks for the link hon

Linky BMI no worky.

However, I found it. And it suggests that I should be under 60kg. Which I haven't been since I was about 18.

So... yeah. I'll stay happy in the borderline overweight/obese bracket, I think. Maybe I can whittle it down to merely overweight. :-p

Linky BMI no worky.

Silly me. I linked the cgi results rather than the webpage. Fixed that.

And it suggests that I should be under 60kg.

You are of course quite, ahhh, "top-heavy". ;-)

Yes. And arse heavy too, sadly.

Geepers - and I lost about 13 kgs. I must have been quite bloated. :-ppp

Congrats on the publisher but...

Dude, the Superman thing!
No! Superman is a beautiful immigration story! And in his early appearances is brilliantly pinko swine. Chucking bund leaders, strike breakers and the like into planes. Yes.

Well, I didn't know that about Superman. No wonder they changed his ideology as time went on... Do you have any links to the early pinko Superman?

Not on me.

See, there's a really big debate amongst ... er... comics fans about Superman. Is he a relic of an earlier age, with his 30's morality, stripped of meaning by the changes of the world? Or he is a representative of a higher morality, where our heroes really did refuse to kill people and work with governments and even save cats from trees.

And Dark Knight Returns... I love that book but politically, it's fucking horrible. It's Ayn Rand with tights. Superman is a joke specifically because he works as a government agent.

That's it.

Yes, but that's precisely it. The US government has become the joke. And that's the problem. Superman, the good boy scout, never questioned the morality of his actions - remember his encounter with Green Arrow.

See, I'm not going to disagree with you on the US Government, but I read Dark Knight as a greater allegory. The idea being ANY government automatically stamps all over the rights of the citizen. Strikes me as creepy Libertarianism .

Ah, but the potrayal of Green Arrow doesn't match with this - he was a supporter of the Sandinistas, and the FSLN were most certainly a government.

26.44 BMI

I'm turning into a little fatty! See how huge I am?

I don't trust those BMI things for a second ;)

You are not a fatty!!!! :P

According to the BMI I am ;)

Which is why I don't trust it hehe

Totally understood....

Just checked a couple of other sites that suggest that BMI concerns are over 30 for women and 'over 25 for men. You lasses are supposed to be a little more rounded OK?

No, I'm entirely sure of it either. And 26 is barely over the edge...

link to magic & RP article appears to be broken :(

OK fixed now... You know, usually I hand code accurately... Except on livejournal!

woohoo! fantastic news about finding a publisher :)

not so long ago i toyed with the idea of starting a campaign encouraging people to give up on pets and redirect their potential animal food/vet bill/registration/etc spending toward broader social development issues... but somehow i don't think personal priorities in this area are likely to change in a hurry :)

... all-singing, all-dancing iranians???

but somehow i don't think personal priorities in this area are likely to change in a hurry :)

People are a little close to their pets. And adopting people rather than pets as a substitute is somewhat too creepy. From the list given make-up is probably the easiest (cruise-liner expenditure will just be redirected and Europeans will complain about being singled out for ice-cream).

... all-singing, all-dancing iranians???

Friends of a friend. They made amazing food, they sung with amazing voices and they danced. They even tried to make me dance.

And adopting people rather than pets as a substitute is somewhat too creepy.

i was thinking more along the lines of direct program support. those sponsor-a-child programs irk me. heaps gets spent on administration and marketing so a lot of money raised stays in the donor country.

hmmm... i don't think i can imagine life without eyeliner though :)

They even tried to make me dance

so... did you? :)

i was thinking more along the lines of direct program support.

Direct programme support is the way to go. Especially when it's community managed - sure, they're more liable to make mistakes but it's their mistakes.

so... did you? :)

Not this time.

Can't say that I agree with this one at all... my pets don't cost me very much at all and they are what keep me just on the "right"side of sane. How about the money spent on things like chocolate and smoking instead? :)

i think i got the idea when a woman living in an 'ex-pat bubble' next to a sudanese refugee ghetto told me that she only gives her dogs bottle water and gets her driver to pick up beef for them every second day. i then noticed that cat and dog food here is one of the more expensive items in the supermarket as it's all imported... very knee-jerk of me, i admit :)

in theory i (and my lungs) like the idea of redirecting cigarette money. in practice however *coughcough*... :)

Well a situation like that could give you those ideas! :) I admit that I spoil my pet rats but I don't think I would even go as far as to have "special" food delivered to them :)

As for the cigarettes, for me its the chocolate that would be hard to give up (at least permanently) LOL

Congratulations on finding a publisher!

Luxuries Vs Needs
In the western world those luxuries, to some people, would be seen as definite needs. I think that may be because the people who "need" these things have never gone hungry, or had inadequate health care. (Generalizing there...) However, not having makeup won't kill you, but hunger does. Many Perfumes smell very bad, and have really no purpose.(unless you smell really bad, but that's what deodorant is for) All perfumes do is to try and cover your natural scent. How are you supposed to find a mate without that? (Basic instincts, mind you) Those two to things would cover clean water and food, which is essential.
The BBC article just reminded me how shallow people can be.
And thats enough babble from me for now.

Also, good luck on your diet. I hope it goes well for you. :)

What confuses me is that people don't simply make their own.

Flower essence.
Alcohol.
Gycerol.

That's it. Total cost maybe $1 per litre.

Someone is making a lot of money for not much work.

Nota bene: Found this link

http://www.parentsoup.com/havefun/crafts/articles/0,,166506_263560,00.html?arrivalSA=1&cobrandRef=0&arrival_freqCap=1&pba=adid=6861684

Ah, people don't make their own because that would take work and effort Its "much easier" to go to the store and pay money for someone else to do the work for you.

Je-sus. I just checked the BBC BMI site. It reckons that I should go down to about 76kg... I haven't weighed that much since, ummm, 1988... Oh well, here goes...

Same here, though only just (maybe I've overestimated my height). The lightest I've been was 65kg back in 1996 when I lived in the inner city and was walking everywhere. I'm about 17 kilo heavier now, so I probably really should do a bit more...

I'm slack though. I can only justify doing walking if I've actually got a destination I want to go to. None of this 'walking for the sake of exercise' malarchy.

The advantage of inner city life is that one covers more social ground over physical ground (higher density) making the journey on an aesthetic level more pleasing.

For those who really enjoy the stay at home life (not that there's anything wrong with that) the very outer suburbs/rural fringe (just within local 'phone call range for Inet access!) is best.

Congrats on the publisher!

...founder of Labor for Refugees...

I didn't know you were the founder! That's great, I'll try to catch the interview.

Look forward to reading the old articles when I get a chance.

I didn't know you were the founder!

Yeah, that was me... On the morning of the Tampa I started sending out the emails... There was a group already operating in Sydney, but they came under the L4R banner pretty much on the same day. Soon afterwards groups in Qld then WA were set up.

We have about 1000 members last time I checked.

I did catch your interview on synfm. Good job - anything to raise awareness about the issues helps.

Read the BBC recycling of a World Watch press release. (Notice the complete lack of any other comments.)

It's the sort of approach that gives me the irririts. I don't mind the pointing out that people are necessarily happier from having more stuff, though that does not support the 'leaving them dissatisfied' theme.

It's the problem-is-lack-of-money-so-the-solution-is-money-transfer approach. Third World poverty is not created (or even worsened) by First World wealth (if anything, the opposite is true). Third World poverty is a result of institutions that work a lot worse than First World ones do. The trouble is, going down that path leads to awkward things like markets and genuine property rights and they are the 'wrong solutions'.

The list of policy recommendations range from otiose to pathetic. This is strictly policy consumerism -- being seen to care rather than actually doing so. It's fairy-floss compassion -- pink, frilly & empty.

I would humbly suggest that the problem isn't so much where expenditure is occurring but rather where productive resources are allocated; the financial expenses are just a symptom of the cause, and production is ontologically prior to exchange.

What it does highlight is how trivially easy some of the major world problems are to solve in comparison to the luxuries that we in the first world enjoy. You must remember, there is still a lot of people in the first world who believe (and it is a belief) that providing the basics in the third world is "too hard". It's not. In fact, as the table does show (albeit in a populist manner), it's trivially easy - if we had the political will.

No amount of income transfer to the third world would solve third world poverty if the third world's institutions did not change.

On the contrary, aid is often (not always) highly destructive, because it allows institutional change to be avoided. The aid to the Palestinians is particularly destructive, for example, because it props up a klepocratic elite, legitimises 'the problem is Israel' and keeps alive the politics of illusion.

production is ontologically prior to exchange

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. People produce things according to their incentives offered. If their assets are actually capital (i.e. market-property) and they can reliably keep the income from what they produce, strangely enough, they will produce more.

As Hernando de Soto and his network of researchers have found, the problem is not that the poor lack assets, it is that the institutional structures they live in keep their assets from being capital.

If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget to the level recommended by the United Nations -- 0.7 per cent of national income -- it would take the richest country on earth more than 150 years to transfer to the world's poor resources equal to those that they already possess The Mystery of Capital p.5.

No amount of income transfer to the third world would solve third world poverty if the third world's institutions did not change.

No amount of institutional change will solve third world poverty without infrastructure development.

The aid to the Palestinians is particularly destructive, for example, because it props up a klepocratic elite, legitimises 'the problem is Israel' and keeps alive the politics of illusion.

Aid to Palestine is hardly homogenous. An Israel is at least a significant, even majority, cause of the problem.

the problem is not that the poor lack assets, it is that the institutional structures they live in keep their assets from being capital.

Frankly, that's a load of crap. I have seen enough third world and first world countries to know that it simply isn't true. The major lack in the third world can be narrowed down to a lack of education, clean water, health, housing and food from a citizens point of view, and a lack of technical skills, road, transport, and communications infrastructure from a systems point of view.

Not surprisingly, in such conditions democracy and the rule of law don't thrive. Nor does a market economy - because in order for their to be a market economy, first one needs to have rational actors. In order for actors to be rational, as axioms of the free market (found in any first year economics textbook) one has to have security in food, housing and the education to make a rational choice.

If this is not the case, irrational economic choices and behaviour occurs.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean

I think I just answered it. Laissez-faire. To make free, not to leave alone.

On the plight of the Palestinians, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the cause of pathological Arab politics, it is the cause of it. Without Israel, Jews would be a persecuted minority throughout the Middle East as they have been for centuries and Arab politics would still be pathological.

Greeks and Turks managed to get on with their lives after their population swap. That could have happened in the Middle East, but the Arab elites found using the cosmic offense of the dhimmi state far too useful and affronting.

On third world development, a Westerner notices all the absences really easily. What is much less noticeable is what is there but massively underused. (And De Soto is a Peruvian and his international network of researchers were all fellow Third Worlders.)

Good institutions will create infrastructure. And eduation, and health and whatever. These things all come from human action. Institutions are persistent human action.

I find this again and again when talking about economic issues with people on the left. The sense of how things are created is lacking. It's all about transfer, but things have to originally come from somewhere. The West didn't become rich because it had mana-from-heaven infrasctructure or anything else. It's institutions built these things.

It's like blaming the gringos for Latin American poverty. Lima, as a European foundation, is a 100 years old than New York, more than that than Miami.

There's even a joke about it.

Yank: Why do you Mexicans hate us gringoes?
Mexican: Because you stole half our country. What's more, you stole the half with all the paved roads.

The Jewish state of Israel is pretty damn pathological as well, with claims from "From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates" (Herzl).

Basically, Israel was set up a religious-exclusive state so that the non-Jewish Arabs could pay penance for the crimes commited by Europeans.

It would have made more sense to hand over Bavaria or the Czech Republic with that sort of reasoning. But of course, the Europeans wouldn't pay for their own crimes.

Nota bene: In some senses I am an old-fashioned Zionist. I support the establishment of a Jewish religious homeland (not a state) in Palestine. I also consider that "Israel" is a term reserved for special spiritual significance for Jews and not something that should be potrayed in a profane manner.

The West didn't become rich because it had mana-from-heaven infrasctructure or anything else. It's institutions built these things.

The West became rich because it engaged in political imperialism, invasions, and genocide, first in Latin America and, after the United States, gained its own power, throughout Africa and Asia (as any map of the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries makes quite obvious).

It's like blaming the gringos for Latin American poverty.

Well why not? Every time the Latin American nations have attempted to embark on a government that supported land reform that upset the neoimperialist US corporations they ended up being invaded or facing a US sponsored coup d'etat - I could give you 47 instances of the direct use and intervention of US armed forces (troops, navy, command operation) from 1890 - 1994.

Basically, in the case of Israel, the case of European institutions and the case of Latin American, "wealth" is a function of the capacity to engage in warfare, and to destroy indigenous personell and system of property. Claims of democratic politics and free market economics are invariably rareified phantasies to the people that are on the receiving end of those who claim such ideological justifications.

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A publisher, articles and ancient history

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And a word from the land of gay porn

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Something about perfumes....

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Yes, of course the problem is just money

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