From The Morgue

So, if zombies happened, and if you were carrying a fireaxe and running down the corridor towards helicopter freedom and one zombie lurched into view, one zombie between you and freedom…
…who would it be?
Related: if you were destined to be bitten and turned into a zombie, who would you choose to be the zombie that did the deed?
These are the kinds of things I think about.

This year’s well-received short film by Jenni’s Angels is now on Youtube! Although it doesn’t feature me as a meltyman, it does feature some very dear friends with weird makeup effects, and some very fine writing (top three in Wellington for ‘Best Script’ and ‘Best Makeup’!) which are good reasons to watch. Once you see it, you will want to visit earth!

Post about the making of Destination Earth.
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(Completing the loop…) Is your kettle broken?

I know I said that the argument over whether climate change was happening is now over and we should all move on and leave the laggards to catch up with us. This is still true. But this caught my eye, and its only partly a violation of that intent, so…
Over on Facebook, Derek linked to a video on Youtube wherein a highschool teacher (under the name wonderingmind42) outlined his “silver bullet argument” that we should act to stop global warming, and invited comment and criticism.

It’s become something of a phenomenon, with over a 100,000 views as I write this. Essentially he’s making an argument akin to Pascal’s Wager, namely that the cost of inaction is so great that the only sensible thing to do is take action. Better safe than sorry, in other words. Pascal’s wager is not sound in its original context, dealing with ultimately unknowable subjects, but the range of probabilities we can attach to global warming are enough to rescue this version.
I find this argument utterly compelling. Have done for years, because for a long time we’ve known enough about the dangers of inaction and the costs of action and their relative likelihood, as to make the practical approach obvious. I was excited to see this because it’s the first time I’ve seen it anywhere. (That said, I just googled and found other mentions, notably this column from the Times of London.)
Anyway, wonderingmind42 communicates this quite nicely and I recommend you take a look. Also check out subsequent videos going into more detail than the simple first video, if that takes your fancy. You can see all of them here.
(I also had a bit of back-and-forth with a mate of Derek’s named Gavin, who agrees that action must be taken but wasn’t impressed by the video. We agreed to perhaps continue the conversation here, so I’m now off to message him…)
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I note from sitemeter that I have someone reading this blog in a city called King of Prussia, in Pennsylvania, USA. That is some serious city name right there. That is a city name that would start its evening with many shots of Fighting Cock then follow up with an ultimate fighting spree through numerous back alleys and in conclusion sit watching The Sopranos while towelling the residue from the tonsils of numerous punks off the soles of its shoes. And they would be natty shoes.

Link o’ the day: Smirking Chimp’s account of how we got into this mess in Iraq, fact by fact. (Where “we” equals the US, the West, or the world, depending on your level of identification.) Via Bob Harris.
In comments to yesterdays post, Leon the God gets unnerved, Mr Salmond endorses his earlier recommendation, and T reveals that there was a BBC TV movie of The Woman in Black. A bit of IMDB clicking later and I see that this version earned universally good reviews and was written by Nigel Kneale (who, I also discovered, died last year). Any of the film buffs in the audience seen this, then?
Our new kettle died tonight, less than a month after purchase. I know we’ll be able to get a replacement, but heck, it is a sad thing to be boiling water on the stovetop for a cup of tea.

In the UK, Cal and I were recommended by the Grizzled One to see a small show that seemed to get all its business by word-of-mouth: “The Woman In Black”. It was, Andrew said, a scary treat that he had seen more than once.
We went. It was hella scary, and a damn good time if you like the scary.
And now it comes to New Zealand! 4-8 July at the Westpac St James. It also plays Auckland and Christchurch, and if you’re in London you can see it there. I recommend it to you all most sincerely. Sitting here writing this blog entry at 2.30am and thinking about it – man, it’s actually giving me the creeps right now, a full 2 1/2 years after seeing it. Go and share the scary love.
Woman In Black NZ website

Here is your Friday linky.
Some dude put a tiny camera on his cat and recorded a wandering cat’s view of the world. Fascinating and involving. Mr Lee Catcam, courtesy Nikchik.
pdf-mags.com has dozens and dozens of amazing .pdf magazines from everywhere. Its like being in a really good magazine shop only it is all free. I’ve only scratched the surface and I love it.
Speaking of pdf magazines, AENJ is the Aotearoa Ethic Network Journal, which features the AENJ periodical itself in .pdf form. “The AEN Journal promotes critical debate on issues facing migrants and refugees, ethnic diasporic and religious communities.” Of high value to New Zealanders who think about these issues, and of passing interest much wider than that I hope.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum teamed up with Google Earth to present an amazing usage of Google Earth: Crisis in Darfur

Witness the destruction for yourself. Using coordinates provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google acquired high-resolution imagery over the region of Darfur and Eastern Chad. Now you can witness the destruction in Darfur via Google Earth. Zoom down and see what a burned village looks like from above, the vast tent cities of people displaced from their homes, and photographs on the ground of refugees struggling to survive. Read eyewitness testimony of atrocities in attacked villages. Visualize what genocide looks like today in Darfur.

And last but not least, I give you the most amazing Batman fan film ever: Batman, Defenders of the Night! As introduced to me at the ISB where Chris called it “the single greatest piece of art ever produced by the hands of men.” Watch it with the commentary for full effect!
This has been your Friday linky.

Two years ago, in the buildup to the Gleneagles G8, I started wearing a white band around my wrist. It said “Make Poverty History – 2005” on it. It signified my support for the Make Poverty History campaign, which intended to shame the leaders of the G8 nations into taking steps to alleviate global poverty. Radical steps, by any standards: cancelling debts that keep poor nations indentured; reforming and increasing how aid is delivered to nations that need it; and, most importantly, altering the way trade between rich and poor nations is allowed to proceed.
Today, that white band snapped.
I’ve got into the habit lately of taking it off before netball and basketball games, and I was wrenching it free today and it came off. Now it’s a single flat strip of flexible plastic.
I blogged a lot about the G8, two years ago, because I was right in the middle of it. I wrote about why it was important to gather and protest the meeting (because poverty is structural, which means change is possible), about what protest was for since it was so useless at actually changing policies (protest is society talking to itself and reclaiming the public discourse), about what protesting actually achieves (primarily, it offers a different public narrative), and about whether our energy might be better spent elsewhere (maybe, but I didn’t think so). There’s also some great discussion in the comments, where I am challenged on plenty of points, to many of which I still haven’t responded.
I wrote about the great march itself, about police vs. protesters in Edinburgh, and about the march on Gleneagles. And then the London tube bombings happened and that ruined all enthusiasm I had for continuing to relentlessly churn through this stuff on my blog. Too much.
Anyway, I return to the theme now. Of all the posts I made back then, to me the most important was this one, about the Make Poverty History campaign itself, and Monbiot’s criticism of it as part of the problem. I ended up expressing a longer-term view that I maintain to this day:

The Make Poverty History campaign wouldn’t bring justice even if it was entirely successful in ‘winning over’ the G8 leaders. Even so, I am convinced the concessions it seeks will make some positive difference, hopefully more than the negatives that it will legitimise. It’s not enough for real and lasting change, but I’m not comfortable with holding out for a massive restructuring of international capitalism while people are dying. The increase in aid, overall the least important of the MPH demands, is easily the most important in the short term.
There’s not just the short-term gains to think about, though. The MPH campaign has put into discourse the notion that poverty is structural. If the powerful put their seal on the message of the MPH campaign, then they may gain some legitimacy from it in the short term, but in the long term their failure to make real change will become more and more clear. They will have signed up to a demand for justice that cannot be spun away.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both wore white Make Poverty History wristbands. Today George Monbiot wore one as well. There is a battle going on for the meaning and value of the MPH campaign and the message being sent about the G8 meeting; but in the long term it’s a battle only we can win.

Have they signed up to a demand for justice that cannot be spun away? I don’t know yet. Can it be, two years after, that it is too soon to tell? Or am I just reluctant to admit to myself that my hopes were misplaced?
From No Right Turn in early April:

The G8 have betrayed the world’s poor
Two years ago at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, the G8 nations supposedly took a historic step towards helping the developing world. In the face of unprecedented public protests demanding that they make poverty history, they promised to boost aid by US$50 billion. So, what have they done to keep that promise?
Nothing.
Actually, worse than nothing. According to figures from the OECD, aid spending fell in real terms by 5.1% – the first fall since 1997. A lot has been done on debt relief, but this has come at the expense of real aid spending. So much for the G8’s promises…

One of the big problems with human society, expressed in two elegant sentences:

Most organizations would cease to operate efficiently if deference to authority were not one of the prevailing norms. Yet, the norm is so well entrenched in organizational cultures that orders are regularly carried out by subordinates with little regard for potential deleterious ethical consequences of such acts.
– Robert B Cialdini and Noah J Goldstein in the 2004 Annual Review of Psychology chapter on Social Influence

There’s no easy way out of this, either. Furthermore, I’d say (and take the quote further than was intended by doing so) that authority resides not just in persons, but also in systems.
Accept these four uncontroversial premises:
– Systems are massively beneficial.
– Systems only work if they are obeyed.
– Systems that are imperfect cause problems when they are obeyed.
– No system is perfect.
…and you end up with this.

I am now too tired even to link to someone. Been working hard for hours. No netball tonight took the wind out of my sails. I think. For some reason I thought we had signed up to 1 gig/week broadband, but actually it was 1 gig/month, so we blew our cap two weeks into our broadband usage, ha ha. Go click on one of the links in my blogroll and read that instead of this. I swear there have been some great posts by people lately but I can’t handle sorting them out. But still I must blog. Do you know why? It is so I have a blog post each weekday so the little calendar up in the top of my sidebar lights up all the numbers without any gaps. I need the lights all in a row. It is like an addiction. I think I will dream of a red BMX.
Sleep now.

Muriel Newman of NZ pseudo-Libertarian party ACT spammed me.
Her NZ Centre for Political Research (formerly the NZ Centre for Political Debate, an interesting shift of title) – which may just be her alone – was banging the drum recently for the return to our old electoral system, specifically calling for a referendum on the proportional MMP system currently in place. She was exhorting people to answer a poll question about whethe the referendum was needed, and after coming across this in one or two places I clicked through to indicate my opposition. (This post isn’t about why I oppose, it’s about what happened next.)
Not long after a chirpy email turned up in my inbox from Muriel, thanking me for participating and telling me that “the vast majority of respondents are very keen to see a referendum on MMP held”. Also, “I have added your name to the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, so please let me know if you don’t want to receive it.”
Great. So I was now on a spam list. I went down to the newsletter, reproduced at the bottom of the respondent email, and clicked the ‘unsubscribe’ link. An unsubscribe note was sent, and that was the end of it – what a nuisance, and how foolish of Newman to subscribe automatically people who entirely disagreed with her. If nothing else, a significant breach of net etiquette and a bad look for a politician.
Then, a week later, another email arrived. I was still on the list. Excellent. So a political operative who I really have no time for has subscribed me to her emailing list without asking permission and seems unable to process my request to unsubscribe. That’s not just a breach of etiquette – it’s amateurish and stupid, to boot.
I sent the unsubscribe request again. Go away this time Muriel, will you?