Begun in 2008, it's unlikely that I'll regularly make entries to this blog, so do check my main site at www.fourhares.com This blog is more likely to include posts of a political nature - and one that requires sisu on the part of many! Archives dated prior to March 2008 are entries moved across from either LiveJournal or Octant.
Recent Posts
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A time to live… a time to breathe…
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Slaughter Live Exports
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On Guns, New Zealand, and politics
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On the eve of the French Presidential Election
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On the passing of an exceptional philosopher
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On bureaucracy as anti-democracy
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The Value of Minor Parties in the 2016 Australian Federal Election
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On the Alphabet, Google and Kurzweil’s hesitation about the future of democracy
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On the educational merits of student financial vouchers
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Victoria’s proposed legislation on vaccination
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Philosophy Conference (July 2015)
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Victorian elections 2014
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Wilful Web Woes
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Kinders & Vaccinations
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Serendipitous reflections
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Australian National Curriculum Review
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A most astounding pen…
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Two US-based conferences…
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On the hope of the incoming Federal Senate
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forecasting the new Pope
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Truth, Beauty and the Good
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‘Meet Tarek Fatah’
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Reading the Marseille Tarot
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Why Children Shouldn’t have the World at their Fingertips
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A Pencil, a treat…
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The Daily Bell does it again!
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Reflections on The Secret of the Tarot by Robert Swiryn
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On a new Palestinian State
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Tarot interview
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Australian ‘Greens’ – what an unfortunate stinking joke
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Why I voted NO to Labor in Victorian State election
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Victorian elections 2010
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Hey, UNESCO! Rachel’s Tomb in Israel is NOT a mosque!
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Devaluing human nature
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‘Triumph of the Tea Party’
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‘The Anti-Semite’s Pointed Finger’
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Socio-political links added
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Now THAT’s a camera!!!
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Policies are not just policies
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OS X Server 10.5 → 10.6 – not as straightforward as one would hope.
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Aus. election online user poll
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Election day chart
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In a nutshell: how our system of government works.
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Ausvotes 2010 – Independents’ preferences
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Australian Federal Election 2010: what I would like to see
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From Pope to Pope
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Why I shall NOT be voting Labor this month
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Moving hosting service
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Gaza naval blockade
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A Conversation Between Enrique Enriquez and Jean-Michel David
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NAPLAN 2010 and MySchool
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International Temple Mount Awareness Day
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naplan 2010
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Aus. passports vs citizens
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Propagating murder is not an expression of free speech!
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Avatar – the film
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UN anti-Israel
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Ringing Cedars of Russia
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Play, stories, the brain’s plasticity, Obama’s Prison State and the ‘swine’ influenza ‘pandemic’
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Steiner, NAPLAN and student withdrawals
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NAPLAN – or the demise of pedagogical principles
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being a car kinda bloke…
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Tarot Convention – July 2009
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photographic delights
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Site updates
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Schapelle Corby not over yet!
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Israel’s crisis
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Step 2: Government filters internet
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Oft fear of an evil drives us to another worse
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Rudolf Steiner and Freemasonry
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Adobe CS-4
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World’s Second Oldest Grand Lodge (finally) admits women!
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New Forum
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30 Weeks pdf
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Blogging hits FourHares
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towards safer airports and the loss of human dignity.
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Tarotpaedia
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Concerning the Catholic Church’s Parochial Discernment on the Admission of Homosexuals to Holy Orders.
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Are Asian nuns being used as guinea pigs for genetically modified food-stuff?
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(no title)
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Further papal reflections
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Forecasting the new Pope and personal preferences
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Ethics
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On the Alphabet, Google and Kurzweil's hesitation about the future of democracy
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As many know, I’ve had various reservations about numerous pronouncements from Ray Kurzweil: his desire to make the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear; to increase the life-span of people indefinitely; to ‘create God’… and now his latest (actually, not his latest, as it was already there in his book on the so-called Singularity) where he raises the question with regards democracy in a world that already presumes the living consciousness of machines (quoted in ‘Ray Kurzweil on Giving Future AI the Right to Vote‘):
In a world where AI passes the Turing test, who gets to vote? Does democracy make sense?
Let’s take this a little further… and perhaps take a conceptual look at the kind of political organisation we may aspire to even in a world in which, for example, intelligent conscious beings from another planet or dimension were to be present on Earth (or wherever else we happen to populate). In such a case, perhaps the simplest way to consider the situation is that (should non-humans prefer a different organisational political structure) is for there to be concurrent differences for different entities. The angelic realm are likely not organised according to a democratic model – without this implying that we should, at this stage of our evolution, imitate them in a manner that could only equate to a poor parody.
In a world where a so-called ‘AI’ passes a Turing test, this has no political implications for humanity nor does it negate or minimise values of democracy.
In another article (‘Why Digital Overload Is Now Central to the Human Condition‘) on Kurzweil’s same site (singularityhub.com), a comment that celebrates the diminishment of quietude and the intrinsic need for inner reflective space in order for the spiritual world to be ‘heard with the eyes of the heart’ in worryingly made:
Information technology has created a hyper-connected, over-stimulated, distracted and alienated world. We’ve been living long enough with internet-connected computers and other mobile devices to have begun to take it for granted. But already the next wave is coming, and it promises to be even more immersive. As our lives are increasingly augmented and infused with new digital technologies […]
the article goes on to at least ask the question whether this is good… and we can surmise its answer in light of the view that ‘our lives are increasingly augmented’ and of similar concern is the view that our lives are ‘infused with new digital technologies’!
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…and this brings me, out of entirely different considerations (it just happens that I was considering these within the same week – and I do not post often) to considerations of Google’s enveloping A-Z company.
So now the ‘G’ of Google is held within the ‘A’ of Alphabet… interesting idea: one of the highest named number (googolplex) is contained between the Alpha and Omega of the Latin alphabet (of course, the name ‘Alpha-Bet’ stems from the Greek, and thus also implies it) – abc.xyz as domain name makes this clear.
The ‘G’ within an ‘A’, as millions of Freemasons across the (English-speaking) world are used to, stands for both ‘God’ and his ‘Geometry’… and certainly not ‘Google’, as Larry Page states on the very first page of Alphabet (abc.xyz): ‘G is for Google’.
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