Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Flemington Melbourne Brees, Samuel Charles, 1810-1865
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| Flemingtion (1853) Chinese workers headed for Victorian gold fields |
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
The Larrikin Principle
The Larrikin Principle
The Larrikin Principle has no official status in management, or any other brand of theory. It would be un-larrikin to pretend otherwise. It is more productive to leave the concept open, unsystematic, accumulating an inexhaustible range of dynamic, heterogeneous ideas around it. In this book, it emerges from the intersections between culture, history and chaos theory, to engage with some core issues for management and organisation studies.
Yet exploratory ways of proceeding are scientific, as good science is often done. We illustrate with a popular science book on the search for 'dark matter' by Ken Freeman, Duffield Professor of Astronomy at the Australian National University.
Freeman tracks the curious fate of astronomer Fritz Zwicky's 1930s proof of 'dark matter' in the universe. Zwicky combined good Newtonian mathematics with Einstein's theory of relativity to demonstrate that the shape and observed movements of a galaxy cluster require large amounts of 'dark matter' to be hypothesized. Zwicky's method was good science. He showed that the current model, based on luminous bodies, did not fit what was observed. His proof was ignored.
Freeman himself 'while studying something entirely different' made a key contribution in 1970 that helped to make this theory the orthodoxy it now is. He showed mathematically that observed data did not make sense unless there was 'dark matter' in the halos of galaxies to hold them together.
Levi-Strauss saw an especially important role played by anomalous figures, relationships, places and actions. One such hero was the Trickster. There are many tricksters in ancient myths. For instance the Norse trickster god Loki was a fire god whose name is probably derived from logi, fire. In Roman and Greek society, the Trickster figure had links with commerce.
Trade happened along the dark margins of society, not incorporated within the dominant political regime. The Celtic god Lugh may have etymological links with the larrikin. Julius Caesar identified Lugh with Roman Mercury, god of commerce, another trickster god. Mercury is usually linked with the Greek Hermes, god of boundaries, and the Egyptian Thoth, god of learning.
None of these gods is identical or stable. To complicate matters, among the Scandinavian gods, Mercury is usually linked not with Loki but Woden, who became a supreme god, more like Jupiter. Within and across mytho-logical systems they form a fuzzy set that changes over time, linked by common characteristics, always with distinctive features. Each plays a part in a different set of stories.
All are ambivalent gods, often dangerous, partly outside social norms and constraints, but ingenious and creative, sources of arts and sciences. They are the soil out of which modern trickster figures have grown, including the larrikin. In myths recorded in historical times, the hero is usually a man.
But some of these myths came from early times, when the supreme deity was a woman, the mother goddess. Egyptian Thoth, for instance, was a moon goddess. Greek Hermes combined with Aphrodite, goddess of love, to form the ambiguously gendered Herm-Aphrodite. This ambiguity is well-suited to the modern age, one of whose characteristics has been the globalisation of feminism. Larrikinas may be older than larrikins.
Fuzzy logic and the Larrikin Principle
Another larrikin/chaos thinker is Lotfi Zadeh, born in Iran and becoming a US citizen he's another nomad thinker who specialised in crossing boundaries.
Zadeh was an engineer, an expert in the cybernetics of control systems. However, he found that the crisp logic prized by engineers, scientists and managers broke down in the face of highly complex systems and conditions, including all systems involving humans.
His solution was fuzzy logic in which boundaries around concepts stay fuzzy, and statements may be only part-true. The more we push for absolute precision, he argued, the more meaningless or irrelevant our schemes become.
He captured the core hypothesis in what he termed the Principle of Incompatibility:
Stated informally, the essence of this principle is that as the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour diminishes until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics.
Fuzzy logic is fundamental to larrikin wisdom. It is contained in the common Aussie phrase that alarms all uptight managers: 'She'll be right'.
Everyone who deals with situations of great complexity has to cope with the fuzziness of language. Words shift and buckle in spite of the wishes of their users. In this section we try to offer guidance and help.
We illustrate fuzzy critical analysis as applied to larrikins, with the larger aim of offering analytic tools to everyone in the world of management and organisations who grapples with this kind of complexity.
Thus far we have used Zadeh's key term, fuzziness, fairly loosely and informally. This is appropriate for this term, up to a point. It is a fuzzy use of the term fuzzy. Yet the power of the term comes from the fact that it contains or tolerates so many contradictions and makes them manageable and thinkable, including a degree of formalism. Zadeh wrote:
The pervasiveness of fuzziness in human thought processes suggests that much of the logic behind human reasoning is not the traditional two-valued or even multivalued logic, but a logic with fuzzy truths, fuzzy connectives, and fuzzy rules of inference.
Two-valued logic applied to larrikinism would consist of tight definitions, strict deductions, and certain truths. All larrikins would be identical, and different to everyone else, in terms of a specific criterion. It would be possible then to make definite, certain statements: e.g. larrikins do this or that, therefore managers do not.
Vale Ursula Le Guin – 21 October 1929 – 22 January 2018
Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.
She embraced the standard themes of her chosen genres: sorcery and dragons, spaceships and planetary conflict. But even when her protagonists are male, they avoid the macho posturing of so many science fiction and fantasy heroes. The conflicts they face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles.
Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years.
In addition to more than 20 novels, she was the author of a dozen books of poetry, more than 100 short stories (collected in multiple volumes), seven collections of essays, 13 books for children and five volumes of translation, including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. She also wrote a guide for writers.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Churchill – The Horrible Truth
A recent film and media reviews are busy singing the praises of Winston Churchill.
Peter Frost begs to differ.
George W Bush installed a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office at the White House. When Barack Obama came to power he had the bust returned to Britain.
Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned in one of the concentration camps Churchill and his imperialists had invented.
Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was painting huge areas of the world map bloody red.
Just three years later Victoria crowned herself Empress of India, and the rape and pillage that would mark Britain’s advance across Africa and much more of the globe moved up a gear.
At Harrow School and then Sandhurst the young Winston learnt the simple message: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of Christian civilisation.
Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta and later Archbishop Desmond Tutu would sum it up in a beautiful single paragraph.
“When the British missionaries arrived, we Africans had the land and the minerals and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in these various barbarous and criminal adventures. He described them as “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples.”
First came the Swat Valley, now part of Pakistan. Here he judged his enemy were merely “deranged jihadists” whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill.”
He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops.
Next he popped up in Sudan, where he boasted that he personally shot at least three “savages.”
The young Churchill played his part enthusiastically in all kinds of imperial atrocities. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering.” The Boer death toll was in fact almost 28,000.
At least 115,000 black Africans were swept into British camps, where 14,000 died. Churchill wrote of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.” By now he was an MP and demanding a rolling programme of more imperialist conquests.
“The Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” was his battle cry.
As home secretary in 1911 he brought the artillery on to the streets of east London in a heavy-handed battle to flush out Latvian anarchists in the siege of Sydney Street. Welsh miners have never forgotten his outrages against the Tonypandy miners.
As colonial secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians. The Irish have never forgotten this cruelty.
When the Iraqis rebelled against British rule, Churchill said: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
Churchill, as we can see, was happy to be spokesman for brutal and brutish British imperialism. It seems Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than God’s chosen race — the British.
This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back.”
Churchill further announced: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
In 1943, a famine broke out in Bengal and up to three million people starved to death. He bluntly refused any aid, raging that it was the Indians’ own fault for “breeding like rabbits.”
In Kenya Churchill believed that the fertile highlands should be the exclusive preserve of the white settlers and approved the clearing out of the local “blackamoors.”
He saw the local Kikuyu as “brutish children.” When they rebelled under Churchill’s post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps.
He approved various kinds of torture, including electric shocks. whipping and shootings. Mau Mau suspects were burned and mutilated. Hussein Onyango Obama was just one who never truly recovered from the torture he endured.
As colonial secretary Churchill offered what he called the Holy Land to both the Jews and the Arabs — although he had racist contempt for both.
He jeered at the Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung,” while he was appalled that the Israelis “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.”
After the war he was quick to invent the iron curtain as he started the cold war against his hated Bolsheviks despite the fact that they had been his greatest ally in defeating Hitler and his nazis.
When he was re-elected prime minister in the 1951 election he rapidly restarted various imperialist adventures. There was the so-called Malayan Emergency, Kenya and of course the Korean war.
Churchill hated communism at home and abroad. He was always a supporter of British intervention in the young Soviet state, declaring that Bolshevism must be “strangled in its cradle.”
He convinced his divided and loosely organised Cabinet to intervene despite strong opposition from Labour.
In the 1926 General Strike Churchill edited the government’s newspaper, the British Gazette, and used it to put forward his anti-union, anti-Labour, anti-socialist rantings.
He even recommended that the food convoys from the docks should be guarded by tanks, armoured cars and hidden machine guns.
There are far too many other reasons why this champion of all things reactionary simply doesn’t deserve the paeans of praise being heaped on him at the moment.
I’m sure our letters page would welcome your own particular favourites, but let me finish with one that really makes me smile.
Even his reputation as an outstanding orator was, it seems, based on a lie. We now know that many of Churchill’s most famous radio speeches of the war were delivered by an actor, Norman Shelley.
Shelley went on to be a big star on BBC Children’s Radio and as Colonel Danby in the Archers.
Peter Frost begs to differ.
George W Bush installed a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office at the White House. When Barack Obama came to power he had the bust returned to Britain.
Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned in one of the concentration camps Churchill and his imperialists had invented.
Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was painting huge areas of the world map bloody red.
Just three years later Victoria crowned herself Empress of India, and the rape and pillage that would mark Britain’s advance across Africa and much more of the globe moved up a gear.
At Harrow School and then Sandhurst the young Winston learnt the simple message: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of Christian civilisation.
Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta and later Archbishop Desmond Tutu would sum it up in a beautiful single paragraph.
“When the British missionaries arrived, we Africans had the land and the minerals and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in these various barbarous and criminal adventures. He described them as “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples.”
First came the Swat Valley, now part of Pakistan. Here he judged his enemy were merely “deranged jihadists” whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill.”
He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops.
Next he popped up in Sudan, where he boasted that he personally shot at least three “savages.”
The young Churchill played his part enthusiastically in all kinds of imperial atrocities. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering.” The Boer death toll was in fact almost 28,000.
At least 115,000 black Africans were swept into British camps, where 14,000 died. Churchill wrote of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.” By now he was an MP and demanding a rolling programme of more imperialist conquests.
“The Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” was his battle cry.
As home secretary in 1911 he brought the artillery on to the streets of east London in a heavy-handed battle to flush out Latvian anarchists in the siege of Sydney Street. Welsh miners have never forgotten his outrages against the Tonypandy miners.
As colonial secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians. The Irish have never forgotten this cruelty.
When the Iraqis rebelled against British rule, Churchill said: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
Churchill, as we can see, was happy to be spokesman for brutal and brutish British imperialism. It seems Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than God’s chosen race — the British.
This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back.”
Churchill further announced: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
In 1943, a famine broke out in Bengal and up to three million people starved to death. He bluntly refused any aid, raging that it was the Indians’ own fault for “breeding like rabbits.”
In Kenya Churchill believed that the fertile highlands should be the exclusive preserve of the white settlers and approved the clearing out of the local “blackamoors.”
He saw the local Kikuyu as “brutish children.” When they rebelled under Churchill’s post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps.
He approved various kinds of torture, including electric shocks. whipping and shootings. Mau Mau suspects were burned and mutilated. Hussein Onyango Obama was just one who never truly recovered from the torture he endured.
As colonial secretary Churchill offered what he called the Holy Land to both the Jews and the Arabs — although he had racist contempt for both.
He jeered at the Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung,” while he was appalled that the Israelis “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.”
After the war he was quick to invent the iron curtain as he started the cold war against his hated Bolsheviks despite the fact that they had been his greatest ally in defeating Hitler and his nazis.
When he was re-elected prime minister in the 1951 election he rapidly restarted various imperialist adventures. There was the so-called Malayan Emergency, Kenya and of course the Korean war.
Churchill hated communism at home and abroad. He was always a supporter of British intervention in the young Soviet state, declaring that Bolshevism must be “strangled in its cradle.”
He convinced his divided and loosely organised Cabinet to intervene despite strong opposition from Labour.
In the 1926 General Strike Churchill edited the government’s newspaper, the British Gazette, and used it to put forward his anti-union, anti-Labour, anti-socialist rantings.
He even recommended that the food convoys from the docks should be guarded by tanks, armoured cars and hidden machine guns.
There are far too many other reasons why this champion of all things reactionary simply doesn’t deserve the paeans of praise being heaped on him at the moment.
I’m sure our letters page would welcome your own particular favourites, but let me finish with one that really makes me smile.
Even his reputation as an outstanding orator was, it seems, based on a lie. We now know that many of Churchill’s most famous radio speeches of the war were delivered by an actor, Norman Shelley.
Shelley went on to be a big star on BBC Children’s Radio and as Colonel Danby in the Archers.
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Thursday, January 11, 2018
Hugh Owen Meredith – 1878 - 1964
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| Painting by Berna Chapman – Queen's University Belfast |
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| "HOM" aged 22 |
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Tuesday, January 09, 2018
Vale Don McDonald
Statement from ACTU President Ged Kearney
The ACTU joins with the entire Australian Union movement in mourning the loss of Don McDonald, who passed away last week after a battle with cancer.
Don was a fearless advocate for working people and dedicated his life to the improvement of the lives of others. During his time at the Builders Workers’ Industrial Union he was pivotal in winning workers’ compensation, superannuation and redundancy pay for construction workers, historic achievements which have benefited untold numbers of workers in the decades since.
Don also fought to get TAFE courses run during business hours, so that apprentices didn’t have to study at night after working all day.
After the amalgamation Don became a national official with the newly formed CFMEU.
Having experienced firsthand the devastating impact the illness can have, Don established NISAD, an organisation working to discover a cure for schizophrenia.
He will be sorely missed, and my thoughts are with his family and his brothers and sisters at the CFMEU during this time.
The ACTU joins with the entire Australian Union movement in mourning the loss of Don McDonald, who passed away last week after a battle with cancer.Don was a fearless advocate for working people and dedicated his life to the improvement of the lives of others. During his time at the Builders Workers’ Industrial Union he was pivotal in winning workers’ compensation, superannuation and redundancy pay for construction workers, historic achievements which have benefited untold numbers of workers in the decades since.
Don also fought to get TAFE courses run during business hours, so that apprentices didn’t have to study at night after working all day.
After the amalgamation Don became a national official with the newly formed CFMEU.
Having experienced firsthand the devastating impact the illness can have, Don established NISAD, an organisation working to discover a cure for schizophrenia.
He will be sorely missed, and my thoughts are with his family and his brothers and sisters at the CFMEU during this time.
Friday, January 05, 2018
Lyubov Popova
Lyubov Popova was one of the first female pioneers in Cubo-Futurism. Through a synthesis of styles she worked towards what she termed painterly architectonics. After first exploring Impressionism, by 1913, in Composition with Figures, she was experimenting with the particularly Russian development of Cubo-Futurism: a fusion of two equal influences from France and Italy.
From 1914–1915 her Moscow home became the meeting-place for artists and writers. In 1914–1916 Popova together with other avant-garde artists (Aleksandra Ekster, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Olga Rozanova) contributed to the two Knave of Diamonds exhibitions, in Petrograd Tramway V and the 0.10, The Store in Moscow. An analysis of Popova's cubo-futurist work also suggests an affinity with the work of Fernand Leger, whose geometry of tubular and conical forms in his series of paintings from 1913–1914 is similar to that in Popova's paintings.
From 1921 to 1924 Popova became entirely involved in Constructivist projects, sometimes in collaboration with Varvara Stepanova, the architect Alexander Vesnin and Alexander Rodchenko. She produced stage designs: Vsevolod Meyerhold's production of Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922; her Spatial Force Constructions were used as the basis of her art teaching theory at Vkhutemas. She designed typography of books, production art and textiles, and contributed designs for dresses to LEF.
She worked briefly in the Cotton Printing Factory in Moscow with Varvara Stepanova.
Popova died of scarlet fever in 1924 in Moscow. A large exhibition of her work opened in Moscow from December 21, 1924 to January 1925, at Stroganov Institute, Moscow. The exhibition included Popova's works such as seventy-seven paintings, as well as books, posters, textile designs, and line engravings. "Artist-Constructor" was the term applied to Popova by her contemporaries in the catalogue of the artist's posthumous exhibition.
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