This is the new Alchemy site – formerly known as Image Alchemy. Click the menu items above to browse my art, music, photos and videos. You can buy my stuff as well.
The rest of this page contains blog posts on a variety of subjects. Use at your own risk.
I’m always ambivalent about Anzac day.
Unthinking jingoism sucks, but at the same time I do respect people who fight bravely for things they believe in. Even when those things later turn out to be based on lies, the good intentions and bravery are still worth recognising.
We should have a rule, though, that the only politicians who are permitted to mention Anzac day, or speak at a dawn service, are ones who have personally fought in a war. That’d clear the air of a lot of patriotic bullshit.
…a fundamental one, and it’s one that the Catholic church really can’t resile from.
The trouble with the Pope is that the whole concept is so ludicrous, that it’s only the simplest and least educated people, concerned almost solely with survival and with no scientific knowledge to draw upon, who could let it through their plausibility radar. I doubt there is a single Cardinal in the Catholic church who genuinely, in their heart of hearts, really truly believes that God is personally choosing the Pope through them, but that’s what Catholics are supposed to believe.
If God is really personally nominating a human to be his “King on Earth” – to basically be him on Earth, then isn’t he making a bit of a balls-up of the whole thing? Why would he work through the Cardinals to elect Popes who have been shown throughout history to be very bad men? How does that make sense? What is God saying? That He himself can sometimes be a corrupt philandering homosexual paedophile, in direct contravention of the words in the Bible?
And that’s the problem. The vast majority of sane people don’t really think the Pope is God on Earth – they think he’s a senior Catholic who, for whatever reason, won enough support from other senior Catholics to be elected into the role. Even most educated Catholics, I think, would probably say that if asked. BUT, the Catholic doctrine says he’s God on Earth for Catholics…so if you’re a Catholic, you have to believe that and do what he tells you to do as you would if God himself were to descend from the heavens and tell you.
In reality, what happens is Catholics cherry pick the things the Pope says or does that they are prepared to go along with. An example is birth control, where Pope John Paul II decreed that no Catholic was allowed to use a condom – an appalling decree in the face of the HIV epidemic at the time. How many Catholics ignored that decree? My bet is plenty did.
And the whole underpinning of the Catholic church is built on this foundation, of an infallible “God on Earth” Pope. In truth it’s a farcical lie and we see it unravelling bit by bit, as education spreads and inoculates people against such primitive and implausible beliefs.
I give Catholicism 50 years before it’s consigned to the rubbish bin of history. Less outlandish, and dare I say it, hubristic religions may last a little longer.
Polythene Sky is a track from my album “The Things She Never Owned” – you can buy it now on iTunes.
You can now buy my album “The Things She Never Owned”, released under the name Whtsqr.
It’s available on iTunes and Google Play as a digital download. You can buy a physical CD (and a digital download in lots of formats) from Bandcamp.
You can preview all the tracks by clicking on the CD cover image below.
The meteors that fell on Russia this week should remind us all that our time alive and on planet Earth is fleeting at best and could be ended at short notice. You’d better make sure you’re doing the things you want to do now, rather than waiting for some imagined perfect future time when you’ll get around to it.
I just finished mixing a song called “Nothing Good Will Come of This” – a cautionary tale for all you boys and girls out there in the big scary world.
Click the orange play button to have a listen. I hope you like it! Please share it on your Facebook profile, and leave a comment with your thoughts!
Here are some featured images from the Art page.
I’ve had a song (“No Mystery”) included on a CD. It’s called Emu Parade.
It contains a selection of music donated by artists from around the world (but mainly from Melbourne, Australia) with a dual purpose: 50% of profits will assist Stewart Anderson and Jennifer Turrell train and maintain an autism service dog for their 5-year-old daughter Tallulah. 50% will go to Autism Awareness Australia.
The CD was put together by my old friend David Nichols, who also did the artwork for the CD, and the video for No Mystery.
You should go and buy a copy.
Since I rebuilt my web site, I’ve been using some interesting statistics tools that show information about visitors to my web site. Back in the day, pretty much the only traffic you’d see was real people using web browsers to actually look at your site.
These days, the amount of traffic coming from spiders (automated “bots” that crawl the web indexing its pages) is phenomenal. Sadly, these days I get about as much traffic from spiders as I do from actual people.
In addition to the spider-bots, there’s also a lot of traffic from other kinds of malicious bots whose only job is to crawl the web looking for vulnerable scripts that can be used to send spam.
So, if you’re a real human and are you’re here reading this, please leave me a comment to let me know you’re not another spider.
I saw this in the paper today. It tells us that Australia’s own Gina Reinhart is now officially the world’s richest woman. Hooray! Her fortune now stands at almost 30 billion dollars.
For people like this, how much is enough?
And what does she personally do that makes her worth this sort of money? Does she dig holes? Carry ore around? Serve customers? Do the books? Does she do anything useful?
I know some will argue that she generates wealth for others by being an astute operator, and thus providing jobs and paying taxes. That may be so, but does that really make her worth $30 billion? That’s a LOT of money – much more than she could require to live better than anyone could imagine.
And whatever good she might do, can it balance out the harm that must be caused by this sort of concentration of wealth? That money isn’t out floating around in the rest of the economy (where you and I might occasionally see some of it) if it’s stuffed in her bank account (yes, I know her wealth is on paper and that’s not the same as money in the bank, but still…)
At some point, from a group dynamics point of view, someone who manages to accumulate and hold onto such disproportionate wealth HAS to start being viewed by the rest of society (or at least a large part of it) as causing harm to the group as a whole, don’t they?
Perhaps that’s why Gina is buying media resources, so she can start to manage the messages that we hear about her, and not hate her.
Will we one day turn on Gina and people like her - the Wall Street bankers, mega-rich CEOs and their ilk?
Will we need a revolution to get rid of the obscenely rich? It’s hard to see how else such entrenched privilege can ever be undone.
