Bushfires, Isocracy etc, Search for A New Home

[tcpip]

The South-East Australian bushfires continued to rage during the week. Estimates of the dead are now around three hundred, although the official toll has stood at 181 for some time. The number of animals that have died is estimated to be in the millions. Apparently one needs to be university researcher to blame trees and the Greens, and divine inspiration to blame the decriminalisation of abortion.

I have started a new public policy website in accord to my 2009 plan. The idea is to combine elements of liberal, socialist and anarchist theory into a practical and results-orientated perspective. The intention is to gradually build the movement, one person at a time, into something that is both far more interesting and independent than what passes for most political organisations. On a related topic, having become frustrated over the years by the inability of semi-professional organisations to deal with IT workplace issues (wages, OH&S, collective bargaining), I have joined the ACTU-affiliated APESMA.

For sequential unix timestamp day (hat-tip to tajna for the name), caseopaya and I went to the hills to look at housing to buy despite the smell and haze of smoke that covered the city. Our landlords have increased the rent on our apartment by almost 25% and we're in the situation when where we can buy a significantly larger property with a mortgage repayment of less than we're currently paying in rent. So we had a trip out to Belgrave, Sassafras, and Mt. Dandenong and had a very late lunch outside the William Ricketts Sanctuary. No firm decisions yet from the initial scouting mission.

During the week also had a visit from hathalla and ser_pounce; it was a belated birthday gathering for the latter. I provided him a signed copy of robin_d_laws's HeroQuest and made an enormous tiramisu using a famous frou_frou recipe.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to do it for a while.

The general idea is to bring several people a week into the fold. After a while it will have it's own momentum.

Anyone who signs up this stage is a publisher, that is, they can make their own posts..

Please consider doing so yourself!

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

I would love to. I looked around for the signup mechanism and didn't see it, but I didn't have long to peruse at that moment.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ahh, my bad. Defaulted to my standard drupal install which disables logins and account creation on the front page. It is there now.

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

As a secondary thing, the individual articles don't display (at least, on the main page) the authors of the individual blog-posts. It ought to, I think.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You're right. I've modified that as suggested.

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

Typo:

"...An isocracy is republican; there are no hereditary provision [sic] of power. By extension, an isocracy does not engage in moral distinctions in law on the grounds of race, sex etc."

Grammatical revision needed, and it doesn't seem like something I can fix myself.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I might be missing something here; "provision" as in a legal instrument?

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that it ought to read "An isocracy is republican; there are no hereditary provisions of power." Or, alternately, "...there is no hereditary provision of power."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*nods* You're right. I often get 'is' and 'are' incorrect, using them for tense rather than singular/plural distinction.

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

...as a further aside, I would appreciate a broad overview of the specific topics of interest on this page, so I don't go rattling about things that don't really belong there. Being invited to contribute is good and all, but I'd like to know more specifically what issues are being discussed. I gather this isn't just a "politics and current events" blog.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The broad idea is any topic is permissible but with a practical, public policy orientation. For example, a listing of wacky religious beliefs (e.g., http://www.fstdt.com/) is awesome and funny, but not really relevant except in the context of how this affects childhood education, how to balance this with separation of church and state, religious freedom etc.

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

How far afield can we go here? I'm personally for the abandonment of the entire concept of economics, the devotion of human energy to the elimination of economic scarcity, the abolition of nations and the pursuit of unified culture and language.

These are huge ideas, and probably could do with a lot more exploring before I go touting them on someone else's site, you know?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Those sorts of things would be absolutely acceptable - and you're right they are huge ideas.

Unified language is a good one. I've had a look at Esperanto, it's not too bad albeit with a European bias.

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

I think a European bias was probably unavoidable, considering they wanted (as far as I know) to find the simplest language possible, which happened to be some derivative of Polish.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, the words are mostly romance based, whereas the sounds are slavic...

[forwrathandruin.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was the grammatical structure. I know they used Polish as one of the main bases for Esperanto.

In Seattle, there's still an internation Esperanto daily newspaper for sale. It's fascinating - ... ...and completely illegible to anyone. :P