With that in mind, I figured I at least owed a bit of an update with respect to where life is at. We’ve just been away at a Soul Survivor team retreat (tarnished only by the website going down while we were unable to do anything) which was a great time to get to know a heap of the new team members, as well as to refresh spiritually. We really are blessed in Soul Survivor to have such an amazingly talented and committed crew on team.

Teaching is going well – though it has been a roller-coaster. Any available blogging effort has gone to my teacher blog: Son of a Teacher Man. Does certainly feel like I’ve found the place I am meant to be – the classroom must be it for the moment. Ran into some students at the shopping centre on Sunday, which was a weird experience.

The biggest struggle in the past few months has been that it’s crappy for Bec to be looking for work. Nobody likes looking for work, and it’s made the isolation of having moved house a lot tougher for her particularly. But there’s light – Bec’s got a trial doing some web stuff for a stationery crew starting tomorrow so lets hope it all goes well (both for her liking it and them liking her) and maybe that might be the end of the dramas. Who knows.

Regardless – there’s the update.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

via Official Google Blog: A new approach to China.

While I realise lots of you will have heard this news already, congratulations are in order to Google who have decided that it’s not enough just to say you’re not going to be evil, and are instead doing something about it as well.

• “No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors”
• “This concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”
• “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to turn them into objects”
• “When a word is deprived of its dimension of action: reflection automatically suffers as well and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah”. “
• “There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world”

All taken from “The pedagogy of the oppressed”. All inspiring. All distracting me from writing my learning theories essay.

“I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.”

Sourced from: Lawyers, Guns and Money: Terrorball

Mulled Wine. Note the mangled lemon and orange pieces

This is normally more of a Bec thing to do – but it’s Christmas so why not have a go. With this year’s Christmas being a relatively chilly one, I decided that our Christmas Eve celebrations should involve my favourite German Christmassy tradition: Glühwein (mulled wine).

Geoff’s Glühwein recipe

• 2 bottles of whatever Red Wine you have lying around
• 1/3 of a bottle of leftover port (also lying around)
• A packet of cinammon quills
• Some brown sugar
• Grated whole nutmeg (much nicer if you can get the whole ones – plus the insides of whole nutmeg looks a lot like brains!)
• Cloves (we didn’t have any whole ones around so it was pre-grated for us)
• Chinese Five Spice (Smells about right)
• A Dash of Orange Juice
• Two Whole Oranges (from our new backyard, Wooo!) – one sliced, the other squeezed for all its juice and mangled
• One Whole Lemon – likewise juiced and mangled
• A (really decent) dash of Cointreau

Directions:

Put everything except the Cointreau together in the saucepan, over a very low heat. Stir until spices and sugar have dissolved. Taste. Add some more of whatever you think is needed, until the harsh edge has been taken off the Red wine. In theory this should take about 5 minutes, but if you’re doing it right it should take about an hour and a half. Enjoy the delicious aroma permeating through the house. Add the Cointreau close to serving time or once you have taken off the heat (don’t want to lose the alcoholability of the liqueur).

Serves best if left for a number of hours to stew in the rind of the citrus and the cinammon sticks, but if not you can probably just serve straight away – nice and hot.

Rich white straight-acting blokes who believe in God, or pretend to, hold a disproportionate amount of the world’s power and have for centuries. It’s not because, as many would like you to believe, it’s a case of ‘we are the best, chuck out the rest’. It’s simply due to circumstance. Class, freedom, money and education are the basis of power. And access to these is almost entirely due to where you were born and to whom. Sexually transmitted hereditary privilege and genitally determined advantage.

via Sexism | discrimination | God | Catherine Deveny.

This quote has been waiting in my draft posts for over a month now, waiting for me to have something valuable to add to it. And like her or hate her (and there are plenty on both sides of that divide), I don’t think that you can really argue that Catherine Deveny is actually wrong here.

Of course if genius-freak children aren’t your thing you could always follow along my teaching adventures over at Son of a Teacher Man.

Starting to think that unemployment is looking like a pretty sweet deal.

The Brandenburg gate in 1989, and today

The fall of the wall in Berlin seems to me to be one of those events that the West has a pure love for: mostly because (at least in the retelling) it is a triumph of “democracy, freedom and capitalism” over the tyranny of communism. It’s a story we can tell where we can unambiguously claim the moral high-ground. And make no mistake: this is a beautiful story: a triumph of the force of will of a people, to overthrow their oppressors. How nice it is to be sure that you’re the good guys in the story.

But I couldn’t let this opportunity go past, and while I have no ability to verify the accuracy of this story, that doesn’t change it’s worthiness. In my year 11 German class, we were studying a bit about the fall of the Berlin wall, and saw a great film: “Das Versprechen” (The Promise). In one scene they were showing the East German guards in their guard towers, while just the other side of the wall, West German propaganda was blaring from cars driving alongside. Through the loudspeaker came one of my all time favourite quotes:

“The Roman soldiers would wear red so that their enemies could never see their blood, and your soldiers wear brown pants”

Feel free to get someone to explain that to you if it doesn’t make sense at first pass.

So far, the main thing occupying the minds of our business people and politicians is how we can introduce an emissions trading scheme without hurting anyone.

Henry offers the tart observation that the introduction of such schemes ”is intended to cause a significant shift in the structure of the Australian and global economies over coming decades; quite possibly the largest structural adjustment in economic history. That is the point of doing it.”

Translation: It’s meant to hurt because that’s what changes people’s behaviour. If it doesn’t hurt it won’t work.

via Ross Gittins.

Found this quote a few days ago, and thought it was a valuable insight; worth cutting through the bleating of both sides of the political aisles as they attempt to make the ETS policies hurt the least they can.

Ben Roethlisberger - Not pretty

As much as I love my footy (AFL) and cricket, I’m probably almost more of a generic sports nut. Put a sport on TV and within 5 minutes I’ve probably decided who I want to win and why, especially team sports. And with the world series on, the NFL and NBA seasons both underway (and being shown on One HD!), UEFA Champions League being played there are ample opportunities to watch games that you have no earthly reason to get excited about, but for the fact that it’s a competition and just 10 minutes ago you decided you had someone here to cheer for.

With that in mind, I offer you the following rules. These have been tested over many meaningless contests, and while they will likely give you a less than 50% winning ratio in two-horse-races, they do guarantee a vaguely satisfied feeling when you’re recently aquired team happens to sneak the win. Except where otherwise specified, an earlier rule trumps a later rule: ie – Rule 1 is unbreakable, and overrules any later rules,

Rule 1: No “Collingwoods”

Also known as the “No Yankees”, “No Lakers”, “No Manchester Uniteds” rule. You can’t support the team with all the money and all the supporters. There’s no satisfaction in that. There’s no glory. That just makes you a sell out, supporting the team with the most money and the least heart. I broke this rule once: as an 11 year old in a foreign land and opted to support Manchester United out of a self-preservation instinct. To this day I am ashamed at my weakness of spirit. It’s not OK.

Rule 2:  A team that could hurt a “Collingwood”

I can’t emphasise enough how key it is that the “Collingwoods” of this world are brought down. So while this rule is less frequently invoked, it remains the second most important rule. In the event that the result of the game you are watching can have a negative impact on a “Collingwood” as defined in Rule 1, then you ought to barrack the the side who is able to inflict damage to that team. Naturally this only comes into play at the end of a season, or perhaps in a group phase of a cup competition: there’s no point choosing a team just because they’ll go a spot above in the middle of the season. The only other addition to this rule is that when a franchise team has an ugly duckling team in the same geographical area – thou must cheer for them. For that reason, teams such as the LA Clippers, or until recently (when a huge injection of funds rendered them to also be a “Collingwood”) Manchester City should automatically have your support – in order that the bigger brother might be shamed. This does not hold true in the event that the sister team wears purple (eg. Fremantle Dockers, Minnesota Vikings).

Rule 3: The underdog

If there is one thing that is sacred, it is the role of the horrendously unlikely underdog. The best example of this would be in FA Cup finals. Because of the nature of the FA Cup, in some rare circumstances you can have a lower division team who has managed to sneak into the biggest day on the English Football calendar. In that instance it is your duty to cheer your heart out for that team. Hasn’t worked yet. But that’s not to say that this strategy never sees any success, in 2002 the first Superbowl I’ve ever watched saw rank outsiders New England Patriots beat the  St Louis “14 point favourites” Rams, and do it in a last play of the game field goal from quite a decent way out. That allegiance for the underdog gave me the superbowl winner in another two Superbowls since then, as well as a very almost perfect season.

Rule 4:  The “Personal Connection” team

Once you still don’t have a team after adhering to Rules 1, 2 and 3,  you are left with the choice that comes down to somewhat more frivolous matters. Once stopped off in the airport of a team? It’s totally OK to choose that team over the other. Does one team have an Australian player/assistant coach/water boy? That could be your farnarkling team for life. Have a friend that goes for one team – probably best that you go for the other team, lest you be left with nobody to rib over your newly found teams superiority.

But always remember

There is one additional principle that must be held truly sacred: once you have chosen a team, that team must always be held above the team you have not chosen. The endgame is that you might eventually have a clear heirarchy of teams in your mind: for instance watching the NFL post-season I was cheering heartily for the Arizona Cardinals (had Ben Graham in their side) and the Pittsburg Steelers (Ben Roethlisberger is the least pretty boy Quarterback in history) all the way to the Superbowl, and was then forced to make a choice. Suffice to say I was lucky that my dislike for Cardinal’s quarterback Kurt Warner was enough to have me choose the Steelers, and I managed another Superbowl win. But the next time these two teams play, there is no longer a decision to be made: even if Roethlisberger was traded to Arizona for Warner, you have to stick with your decisions.

So there you have it, consider yourself ready to go out into the sporting world and find meaning in otherwise pointless contests. Or if you have any additions/suggestions for the rules, I’d be glad to hear it. Just as long as you don’t barrack for Collingwood.

””Rudd has an approval rating of 68 per cent [71 per cent in the Nielsen poll]. He has the unanimous loyalty of his caucus. He has an almost non-existent Opposition.

He is in a unique position to change the debate. Changing the way Australia deals with race would be pretty special – that’s Labor hero stuff.”

Paul Howse, quoted by Peter Hartcher.

When Kevin Rudd was promoted to opposition leader, and then voted in as Prime Minister, there was a great deal of optimism about what that might mean for Australia’s policy framework; specifically with respect to adopting a more compassionate approach, specifically after having read some very very positive things in Rudd’s essay on “Faith and Politics“. And initially it appeared that the hopefulness was justified:  there was an apology to the stolen generation, temporary protection visas were scrapped…

But this recent asylum seekers debate has seen KRudd taking a distinctly Howardly line: “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia.” (source) I can understand Rudd needing to tow a party line, with respect to this issue; but the tone of the rhetoric is bordering on insulting, from the same man who wrote the following:

“Another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.

That is why the government’s proposal to excise the Australian mainland from the entire Australian migration zone and to rely almost exclusively on the so-called Pacific Solution should be the cause of great ethical concern to all the Christian churches.”

I still firmly believe that Rudd, for the most part, wants to do the right thing here. But it’s one thing to write of lofty ideals while you’re the shadow foreign minister. Quite another to carry that out when you’re the guy in charge.

"Sigh No More" by Mumford & Sons

I’ve spent the past two days marveling at this album. Having heard the first single: “Little Lion Man” – I was excited about the album from Mumford & Sons. I was expecting the raw emotion you heard in that track: not too stylistically different from the voice of a Glen Hansard. What I didn’t expect was to find an album packed full of spiritual references, alluding to some genuine struggles with faith in a similar lyrical bent to a Nick Cave type writer (though perhaps with a touch more optimism).

There’s already been a bunch of lyrics I’ve wanted to quote (and indeed have put a few up on Twitter already):

“it’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with the restart”

“If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could have won”

“It seems that all my bridges have been burned. You say that’s exactly how this grace thing works”

“How can you love what it is you have got, when you took it from the weak hands of the poor? Liars and theives you don’t know what is in store”

“These bodies they will live, and these bodies they will die. Where you invest your love, you invest your life. ”

“Love it will not betray, dismay or enslave you it will set you free. Be more like the man you were made to be.”

There’s plenty more too, this is an album has anger, disappointment, love, optimism and sadness. I realise that this feels like it has shifted from being a review to more of an advertisement, but it’s probably now sufficient to just say that I love this album. But be aware little kiddies – “Little Lion Man” does have include some vocabulary best avoided in polite company. All in proper context though.

• Met a girl, flirted with her, started going out with her,  taken a trip with her, got engaged, married, had our first anniversary and are now approximately 22 months into marriage.
• Grown tired of my job, commenced a new job, decided that job wasn’t for me and that I wanted a new career and signed up to become a teacher.
• Taken on a bunch of different roles within the youth ministry at YVV, then stepped back from youth, then moved to Ranges, and are now soon to be looking for a new church in the Northern suburbs.
• Moved house three times, and setting up to move a fourth
• Seen the engagement and wedding of my sister, and the engagement of my littlest sister-in-law

Kind of feels like I’m just about due a chance to take a proper breath. But life continues at break-neck speed, so hopefully we will have things to write about here for a while to come. Thanks for reading these past four years, and commenting intelligently (for the most part), and making it worth sharing thoughts, ideas and stupid little YouTube videos with the rest of the world.

In considering the issue of global warming, the immediate temptation is to think really big picture, and in so doing effectively out-source any sense of responsibility. But societal change rarely finds leadership in political leaders: rather in the gradual change that comes about through considered action from the general populous.

So as I think about my own reaction to the climate change reality, I’m struck at the paralells with our current attempts to lose weight. Both recognise that the way our lives are structured at the moment is essentially unsustainable. Both are fighting against greed and laziness. I thought I might share the closest I can come up with for a method for fighting my carbon obesity.

1. Make the big decision

For Bec and I, we’ve had enough discussions about Climate Change to recognise that we both believe that it’s a reality for the world, and that we are compelled to do something about it. Making the big decision that you want to change something about the way you’re living has to be the starting point.

2. Make millions of little decisions

Having done the easy part: deciding that you’re going to side with the good guys in the battle for societal change, there now comes the much harder part. In the same way as you make a weight-related decision every time you reject or accept the opportunity to snack on a deep fried mars bar – there are millions of decisions we make (or fail to make) that can have an impact on our carbon footprint. Some are big (our two houses since we got married were deliberately near train stations so we could use public transport as much as possible), others not so big (switching the lights off).But the bigger point is that every time you make any decision: whether a big imposition or not, you change something in your mindset. And it becomes easier to make the right choice next time

3. Journey with other people

The reason that we’ve seen relatively positive results with our latest health-kick has been that we’ve done it with my family. All of a sudden you have a group of people that you’re taking the same journey with: people you can encourage, spur on, get competitive with, etc.

So that’s my advice. Save the planet, one light switch at a time.