Follow the money

email to ING Life Insurance.

I am in the market for life insurance. I am also a true Christian (or try to be; "all have fallen short of the glory of God") in the Assemblies of God. My church believes that the Lord will return sooner than you think, and when he does the church will be taken bodily up to heaven (see http://www.ag.org/top/beliefs/position_papers/4182_rapture.cfm).
The 'Left Behind' series by Tim La Haye goes into this in some detail, explaining that we will be snatched from our cars or our seats on the train or our beds, depending when it happens.
Obviously, this has implications for insurance. What I need to know is whether ING will regard the raputured churchmembers as dead, and pay their life insurance out, or whether it will take the devil's way out and say that those people have just disappeared and their beneficiaries will have to wait seven years and have them declared dead. It's just in those seven years of tribulation that my dear ones (who are not true Christians) (it is an agony to me) will need all the money they can lawfully get, and at the end of seven years Jesus will return in glory and begin the millenium, and insurance money will no longer be an issue, so you can see why I need some reassurance on this matter.
Please send me any queries you may have, if you want a fuller explanation. Indeed, if you want to discuss God's word at any time please call on me before it is too late. In any case, however, can I please have your considered opinion on your liability in the event of the Rapture coming?
Yours sincerely
Chris Borthwick

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Brutal and debauched

The NYT headlines a story "Four US Soldiers and a Marine killed in Iraq". I knew the Americans didn't call Marines 'Army', but I didn't realise that they escaped the dictionary entirely. If they're not soldiers, what the hell are they?
What is it with this Marines thing? In every other country in the world 'marines' are part of the army (or, possibly, the Navy). There's a thesis - hell, there's a faculty of Marine Studies - in there.

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I am the Light and the Horse

This Sunday a commemoration of the 90^th anniversary of the charge at the Nek, one of the most outstanding fuckups of a pretty fucked Gallipoli campaign. The battle honours of the Victorian Light Horse regiments, including grandfather’s 8th, are to be laid up at the Shrine.

Grey day with occasional outbreaks of umbrella. Probably a lovely day in Gallipoli, this time of year.

Lots of Army – soldiers, officers, colourbearers. Apparently the 4^th/19^th Prince of Wales’s (how did that little poon get in there? Why doesn’t he stick to the prestige jam market?) Light Horse is the successor in title to, among others, the 8^th, which was dissolved in the 1920s. Lots of marching and attenhuts.

Service starts with an invocation to almighty and gracious god. We atheists grump quietly. Then a reading from the bible – even worse. “In you, O Lord my God, have I trusted, let my enemies not triumph over me.” Well, ninety years too late for that one.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Ninety-one years too late.

Then a talk by a colonel of some sort who says that they do things very differently now, not attrition but manoeuvre, and basically that you shouldn’t let the Nek dissuade you from joining up.

And then the cream of the crop, one of the triumphs of western music; the Army hymn “Soldiers of Australia”, sung to the tune of Waltzing Matilda;

Soldiers of Australia gathered now to worship god

Under the badge of the Rising Sun

Giving thanks for our country, our families and freedom

Let hearts and voices arise as one.

God of salvation, pride of our nation

You give us strength to follow your ways

With the cross raised so high (oog) shining bright across our southern skies

We’ll serve Australia through all our days.

And who would have thought of setting Binyon to WM? Next verse:

Soldiers of Australia have brought our freedom with their lives,

They grow not old as we grow old

At the setting of the sun and also in the mo-o-orning

We shall remember her deeds so bold..

God of salvation, pride of our nation

You give us strength to follow your ways

With the cross raised so high (double oog) shining bright across our southern skies

We’ll serve Australia through all our days.

Repeat chorus. An almost unequalled combination of immetricality, meretriciousness, and mediocrity. See if Cath wants to learn to sing it.

We pray that the offering of their lives may not have been in vain. Sorry, 90 years too late for that, too.

Light horse prayer. Lord’s prayer (Anglican version). Onward Christian soldiers. A theme seems to be emerging.

Laying of wreaths. Ode to the fallen, this time not to Waltzing Matilda. Last post.

Benediction.

The band starts up the national anthem. About halfway through the first verse the audience realise they’re supposed to be joining in.

For those that dwell across the seas We’ve boundless plains to share. Sorry, ten years too late for that one....

And then me, Manu, Rohini, Jan, Sally and little Chris go off for yum cha at West Lake.

I write a letter to the Age;

My grandfather was one of the rare survivors of the charge at the Nek, and on Sunday I was among the descendants of Light Horsemen at the Shrine of Remembrance to commemorate the 90th anniversary of that disaster. The tragedy of Gallipoli isn’t just a nostalgic family heirloom, of course -- it’s a saga out of Homer where all who fought were united by their courage and endurance under overwhelming but meaningless trials. Because of that, I’d have to say that I would have been happier if some Turks had been asked to join us there, if only because the Turkish troops had made that same astoundingly brave and appallingly stupid charge across that same narrow ridge a month earlier in the other direction, losing even more men than we did, and deserve a share in whatever glory is going.

Similarly, I don’t know that it was appropriate to sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Grandfather was a good Presbyterian, but he fought alongside Jewish troopers and Indian Moslem artillerymen and certainly didn’t see himself as any kind of crusader. If I’d been a Moslem contemplating joining the armed forces, I can’t say I would have been encouraged. Now, more than ever, the Australian army has to avoid incorporating exclusionary religious rituals into its vital regimental pride.

Rather too soft, but I don’t want to be blackballed by the Light Horse Association.

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Hicks

On the 7.30 Report last night Alexander Downer said about David Hicks “he's facing… very serious charges, including a charge of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit war crimes [but] If he were to be returned to Australia the advice we have is that he would be released because we wouldn't be able to take any action against him under our anti-terrorism legislation…”

Is it really true that Australia doesn’t have any laws against attempted murder? If so, someone ought to tell Joe Korp.

They don’t even bother to look for convincing lies any more.



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Recognition of necessity

Mind you, father always did say that the only foreign language any Australian need learn was the Chinese for "I am anxious to collaborate".


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War of the Worlds and Imperialism

It was only to be expected, I suppose, that when the American obsession with being a good father came into contact with invasion that it would produce the Tom Cruse character - someone who is so obsessed with protecting his daughter that he's totally uninterested in the welfare of anybody or, indeed, everybody else, won't help anyone, won't resist the invaders, will, when pushed, kill people who are resisting (well, one person), and who would collaborate like a shot if he was promised that his children would be OK.

For the rest of it, it can be made remotely interesting only by making the obvious Wellsian link between what the Martians are doing to Americans and what we did to the people who were less technologically advanced than us. It maps reasonably well on to Iraq, except for the happy ending (and the quite unnecessary pre-placement of the tripods - how deep were those things? Why would anybody looking at the earth a million years ago have thought they were going to be needed? Why didn't they just come a million years ago?).

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PVS

Dear Mark,

Having finally and belatedly had a look at the Schiavo autopsy report, I should do you the courtesy of passing on my view that the press (and you following them) seems to have overinterpreted it grossly. What it actually says is exactly what was said by the doctors consulted before the event - you can't prove PVS on autopsy.

"5. Was Ms Schiavo in a ... PVS..?

PVS is a clinical diagnosis arrived at through physical examination of living patients. Postmortem correlations to PVS with reported pathological findings have been reported in the literature, but the findings vary with the etiology of the adverse neurological event."

More specifically, Throgmartin (lovely name - right up there with Throttlebottom) points out in the body that while there are pathology reports on people who have been diagnosed as being in PVS "there are no similarly published neuropathologic findings specific to the minimally conscious state' - and that pathology therefore can say at a pinch that a presentation is consistent with PVS but can't at all say that it's not also compatible with MCS (and, a fortiori, locked-in syndrome or recovered-from-PVS state).

He's specifically saying that he can't make a judgement on whether TS was conscious. Massive cerebral atrophy, yes; brain weight small (though bear in mind that that's after two week's dehydration) yes; but that doesn't determine consciousness. To say, as a number of commentators did, that she could never recover is either trivially true or deeply ambiguous, depending on where one's meaning lies on the continuum from 'recover consciousness', to 'recover to the status quo ante'.

Throgmartin does say that occipital lobe damage indicates cortical blindness, and to cover that in any detail I'd have to do rather more lit searching. On the basis of a quick run through medline I'm not absolutely positive that CB can be diagnosed on autopsy with absolute confidence, but I won't die in the last ditch on that one.

Anyway, I wouldn't like you to think that silence meant I'd slunk away.

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