Limerick

There was an old blogger called Jack
Who jotted libel on some hack
‘Til a connoisseur in
The drinking of gin
Sawed off the hands from poor Jack,

Tony Abbott’s Accession

All I can say is:

Te Deum laudamus:
te Dominum confitemur.
Te aeternum Patrem
omnis terra veneratur.
Tibi omnes Angeli;
tibi caeli et universae Potestates;
Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim
incessabili voce proclamant:
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus,
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra
maiestatis gloriae tuae.
Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus,
Te Prophetarum laudabilis numerus,
Te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus.
Te per orbem terrarum
sancta confitetur Ecclesia,
Patrem immensae maiestatis:
Venerandum tuum verum et unicum Filium;
Sanctum quoque Paraclitum Spiritum.
Tu Rex gloriae, Christe.
Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius.
Tu ad liberandum suscepturus hominem,
non horruisti Virginis uterum.
Tu, devicto mortis aculeo,
aperuisti credentibus regna caelorum.
Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes, in gloria Patris.
Iudex crederis esse venturus.
Te ergo quaesumus, tuis famulis subveni:
quos pretioso sanguine redemisti.
Aeterna fac cum sanctis tuis in gloria numerari.
Salvum fac populum tuum,
Domine, et benedic hereditati tuae.
Et rege eos, et extolle illos usque in aeternum.
Per singulos dies benedicimus te;
Et laudamus Nomen tuum in saeculum, et in saeculum saeculi.
Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire.
Miserere nostri domine, miserere nostri.
Fiat misericordia tua,
Domine, super nos, quemadmodum speravimus in te.
In te, Domine, speravi:
non confundar in aeternum.

Here’s wishing the best!

IMB Live Piracy Map

Click here. For some background, go here.

Blog pub meet-up tonight

Thanks to Justin, I’ll be meeting a few bloggers from 6-8 PM tonight at
The Nag’s Head pub (162 St John’s Road, Glebe.)

You’re welcome to come!

Happiness and stuff

I was quite intrigued by this article on a famous longitudinal study (H/T Karen).

Some choice quotes follow:

Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

…

This perspective is shaped by a long-term view. Whereas clinicians focus on treating a problem at any given time, Vaillant is more like a biographer, looking to make sense of a whole life—or, to take an even broader view, like an anthropologist or naturalist looking to capture an era. The good news, he argues, is that diseases—and people, too—have a “natural history.” After all, many of the “psychotic” adaptations are common in toddlers, and the “immature” adaptations are essential in later childhood, and they often fade with maturity. As adolescents, the Grant Study men were twice as likely to use immature defenses as mature ones, but in middle life they were four times as likely to use mature defenses—and the progress continued into old age. When they were between 50 and 75, Vaillant found, altruism and humor grew more prevalent, while all the immature defenses grew more rare.

This means that a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading. A man at 20 who appears the model of altruism may turn out to be a kind of emotional prodigy—or he may be ducking the kind of engagement with reality that his peers are both moving toward and defending against. And, on the other extreme, a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may turn out to be gestating toward maturity.

…

Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

…

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Civilisations clash?

A couple of days ago, I bought from the Broadway Co-Op near UTS a discounted paperback edition of Samuel Huntington’s expanded monograph The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, a seminal book which I’ve long delayed acquiring since initially I wasn’t too impressed by its triggering article. Once one takes various caveats (often introduced by Huntington himself) into account, though, in hindsight I’ve belatedly come to accord it some serviceability in rendering various inherent cultural limitations of effective statecraft palatable to practitioners.

For aught I know, I might give said work some more thought later.

May Day

This evening I was delayed on the way home watching a bunch of catatonic Tamils demonstrating rather hoarsely in George St. concerning something or other. Still, I’m a tad relieved it was them rather than the usual mob of extreme leftists and anarchists doing that; moreover, there seemed to be little damage.

On editorial priorities

I’m bemused as to what induced the Sydney Morning Herald’s editors to engage Miranda Divine as a regular columnist.  Even (nay, especially) when our views happen to correspond, her pieces strike me as shallow, sentimental and more befitting a gossip rag than an august broadsheet of the Herald’s standing.

Take her most recent piece, for instance.  While I’m tentatively inclined to agree with much of it, I nonetheless fail to see what public salience lies therein.

By contrast, the (Sydney) Daily Telegraph has a real gem in Piers Akerman.  While admittedly a bit of a polemicist at times, his pieces have typically displayed proper craftmanship, seldom sensationalise things and primarily concern matters of grave public interest.  In particular, I salute his brave coverage of the Heiner Affair.

One on’t cross beams gone owt askew on treadle

I’ve found various arguments in this thread concerning, inter alia, the Spanish Inquisition, rather fascinating, especially since my position stands somewhat in between the correspondents therein (incidentally, the poster in that thread called “Jane” was substantially influential in the actualisation of my reversion from atheism a few years back through my observing over the years in various fora her utter decency under intense ad-hominem pressure.)

Broadly speaking, while I suspect much English and French (from which a fair proportion of the former is derived) calumny concerning the Spanish Inquisition was exaggerated and paid inadequate attention to the general coarsening of European manners prevalent for most of its operation, talk of its “mercy” seems question-begging at best, and blithe of grave procedural concerns at worst.

Admittedly on a gut level at present, it also seems implausible and potentially disingenuous for certain ultramontane controversialists to assign the preponderance of blame for postulated abuses under the Spanish Inquisition’s ægis to agents of the Castilian, Aragonese and (from 1713-1834) Spanish Crowns. I see nothing inherent to the Cloth per se which renders those in said estates/orders more immune from cruelty than would pertain to diligent persons in lay offices.

West Port Experiment

While perusing this thread, I recently came across the work of 19′th-Century Presbyterian Thomas Chalmers, as expounded on this blog. While I suspect I’m incompetent to offer a detailed critique at this point, nonetheless substantial portions thereof seem potentially worth pondering.