Feature

Life, Content Mangagement Systems,
and the Answer to Everything

From time to time I have picked at CMS/blog machines, and wondered how to migrate the now denigrated "static" html of my sprawling site to the tidy content of databases. The main attraction has been the incorporation of some way to give readers a voice, assuming there are any readers left out there. A few years ago, they used to send a steady stream of e-mails, but now expect something more instant and public. The voices have fallen silent.... more

Research     [Applied Linguistics] [Formal Linguistics]

Corruption and Other Distortions as Variables in Language Education ; 8877 words; (pre-publication draft on this site); TESOL Law Journal, Vol.2 March 2008

Abstract : This paper examines some of the ways in which foreign language education has been affected by corrupt practices and various other distortions of best teaching practice. Particular attention is paid to South Korea. The nature of corruption and its social origins are identified. Pressures affecting students, teachers and institutions are all seen to play a part. It is noted that mass education is a simulation which leaves space for fraud, whereas actual live language performance is its own test. Perhaps as a consequence, the gradual insertion of a new language code like English into a speech community might succeed over the long term even where immediate educational practices suggest failure. [more]

Poetry

[ also see Thor's Poems at http://thormay.net/literature/poems.html ]

Australian Blue

Centre country scene:

A thousand miles of desert,
Ten thousand miles of shimmering heat.
    In and out the Dead Heart,
    Only one great vastness;
    Up and down the Diamantina,
    Sand torrents stopped and stilled.
Hills dance like rainbow serpents,
Mirages race like shadowed giants,
Trying to vie with the sun in their reach.
    A wild eye is needed
    To view this wilderness decked with blue
    In all its unforgiving beauty.

Thor (cheerfully ripping off Mao Zedong, “Snow”)
April 2008 

SHORT CUTS

215. Democratic Dictatorship

The first article of China's constitution states that the country is a democratic dictatorship. Ponder what this might mean. Black is white? A dictatorial democracy might be that common process worldwide whereby a population is told to vote for monster_X or suffer gross violation of their human rights, even death. That's dumb of course. A more insidious technique is to misuse people's natural good intentions. Perhaps democratic dictatorship is the art of deceiving people about what is right and wrong by screwing their education and manipulating their access to information. Come to think of it, that also describes a wide spectrum of world governance (not least in America).

____________

214. Admired Vegetables
Mon 21-Apr-2008

A primary ambition for the greater part of humanity is to become an admired vegetable. As young plants many of them show much cleverness and adaptability in acquiring those labels and brand names needed to position themselves in a sunny garden plot. Or lacking cleverness, they may show special diligence and do favours for the head gardener. Regardless, it is all to the final purpose of being well fed in a nice undisturbed position which everyone admires. Strangest of all, this rush to lethargy is common to all degrees of humankind, from the highest IQs to the humblest of school failures. It is common to villains and heroes alike. Nearly every man jack of them will fight to the death in a shopping cente car park to avoid walking an extra 50 meters. Getting them to walk though is child's play compared to coaxing them to compose a song, write a book, invent a better widget, start a new kind of business, find a survivable way for 6 billion people to live at peace on one small planet, or doubt the accumulated ignorance in 6000 years of self-congratulation written by the status idols of each generation.

____________

213. A Huckster and a Million Suckers

Tue 18-Mar-2008

The demise of communist ideologies was an inevitable denoument of the fraud upon which they were based : that power and wealth belonging to the few (notably the Party elite) was power and wealth belonging to you and me. The USSR version of that elite, having bought more TV sets and blondes-for-hire than they could handle, blew the nation's surplus on stupid armaments, just as every empire since time immemorial has done (megalomaniacs are short in the imagination department).

The pending demise of capitalist ideology is also an inevitable denoument of the fraud upon which it is based : that power and wealth belonging to the few (notably the ruling elite) is power and wealth belonging to you and me. Their goal is hegemony and monopoly, not diversity and competition. The USA's version of that elite, having bought more mobile phones and blondes-for-hire than they can handle, have blown the nation's surplus on stupid armaments. However, since greed is their motto and their value, they have taken some further steps. One of those steps has been to impoverish the ordinary people of America for generations to come with unrepayable debt for those armaments, at least by the terms of the Faustian laws with which they claim to bind America's people.

To guarantee that their wages of ursury are stashed in gold and property, this American elite, through the mechanism of their banking systems, have spent fifteen years luring domestic borrowers with almost zero interest loans on next to no equity, then reselling this junk debt at multiples of the original price through "financial derivatives". Their conman's claim was to "spread risk". In fact they multiplied risk and promoted uncontrolled asset inflation. Like any ponzi scheme, the whole thing is collapsing in flames, this time around the ears of working America, but the principal architects will assuredly be buying up these fire sales for their monopoly game, and cornering the markets in gold and commodities. Their final step in the scheme of grand larceny has been to defraud their world wide creditors by printing shiploads of US dollars, and devaluing those dollars to the Zimbabwe standard. Something like it has all been done before : take a peek at the 19th century American railroads, built with European money that was never repaid.

Communist, capitalist, name-your-next-ist. Does it matter? There are a clutch of power-junkies to spruik, and a million suckers born every day. The problem is, staying mobile enough to keep out of their murderous ways.

more short cuts ...

WRITING

Managing Downward Spirals - Getting from Here to There

Hey, will you be here tomorrow? Seg back twenty years and all the news was of a planet overrun by recklessly breeding humans. Today in the media of rich nations, the slightly hysterical whisper is that liberated women are on a baby strike and we’ll all be doomed to robot care in our old age. This downward spiral of fertility is an almost sedate affair in the grand scheme of things. Compare it to the supposed disappearance of dinosaurs after the nuclear winter from earth's traffic accident with a giant meteor. People though, count for more than dinosaurs, don't they...

<> Bus to Heaven (a story for learning English)

Every morning Helen put her left shoe on before her right shoe. She combed her hair before she put on any mascara. And she made her bed before she ironed her dress. There wasn't any special reason for doing things in that order. It was just a habit, and she never thought about it...

(continued ...)

<> Mr Dog Looks for Breakfast
   (a children's story for learning English)

Mr. Dog woke up one Spring morning and yawned.

He stretched his legs and wrinkled his nose.

Then he sniffed the breeze. There were many interesting smells in the air.

He could smell the jaoze steaming in Mrs. Li's kitchen. That made his to tongue hang out, and he panted a little with pleasure.

Presently he caught another scent. It was that damned Tabby cat. He frowned, and growled deep in his throat.

The silly thing was watching him for sure, hiding behind a fence or something. He looked around suspiciously, but Tabby was not to be seen...

(... continued)

PHOTOS Chungju Photo Essay

Doubt well, do what you can, then let it be. Presidents, priests, wage slaves, hustlers, men and women, kids, we all live by the grace of those we love to despise...

Leidenschaft ist, was Leiden schafft
(passion is what makes you suffer - German Proverb)

I don't care what you believe in, so long as you don't believe in it too strongly. A belief is a weapon in the armoury of your heart, and its razor edge will murder the innocent. The ice, the fire of your passion will seduce mundane men and women. Your clarity will excite respect. And the first demagogue who comes along with a key to your heart's armoury will wrest the weapon from your moral grasp. The first cause which wears the colours of your belief will enlist you as a soldier in ravaging crusades. Peace friend. Keep your passion to doubt with. Our civilization is a simple matter of live and let live, of giving dreams a go, but stepping back with a wry smile when we get it wrong. Let the fundamentalists perish in their own pillars of fire. Spare a dollar for the living, and have a nice day. 

-  Thor @1 November 1991

Direct Link to Thor's Aphorisms