Thursday 30 April 2015

Nepali Montessori

Since the Nepal earthquakes, we’ve been asking Montessorian Susan Stephenson how the Nepali Montessori schools are that she helped set up. ( I featured a while back one she had helped set up in Bhutan, if you recall.)  She has now heard news, she says, about two schools where she has worked, including the Shree Mangel Dvip Boarding school for poor children of Tibetan origin: The children are all okay in both, say the reports, but sleeping outside…

... while the damage is great all around the area, all the children, monks and nuns are alive and safe… the damage to the upper floors of the main shrine hall of Tara Abbey is VERY EXTENSIVE and there is MAJOR DESTRUCTION internally to the main hall, the walls and paintings.
The extent of all the damage to the Abbey, School and Monastery won't be know for a while... Electric power was already a problem in Nepal, and now even more than ever communication is difficult and will take time.
    We will keep you informed with updates and status reports here and on the website and let you know what kind of help is needed.

Here is a site recommended by Susan to help: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/…

Saudi u-turn on human rights abuses. PM says: “No drama.”

This just in…

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BREAKING NEWS!!!!!!!!!
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Word is just coming in that internationally popular, highly respected, and super-casual New Zealand Prime Minister, John Key, has just delivered the world an historic diplomatic coup, by persuading the Saudi Royal Family to end it’s centuries long tradition of not having any human rights.
“It wasn’t really a big deal, to be honest,” said Key. “I just said: ‘Look Salman, the people of New Zealand have had enough of this beheading business, and stoning women and stuff. We just don’t like it. At the end of the day, if you want our sheep, you’re going to have to knock beheading on the head. Sorry Salman, but there it is mate."
King Salman, was instantly taken aback (as you can tell from the photo) and issued an on-the-spot proclamation reversing centuries of Wahhabist tradition, law and indoctrination.
“We didn’t realise,” said King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud…
Read more…

The Many Failures of the CPI

Guest post by Mark Thornton

ShoppersEconomists of the Austrian school oppose the whole notion of trying to accurately measure“inflation” which mainstream economists see as a general rise in prices. (Austrians view inflation as a politically engineered increase in the money supply.)

A few years ago, mainstream economists like Paul Krugman chastised the Austrians for the lack of anticipated price inflation in the economy. However, their mistake was a fixation on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). If you looked around at other prices in the economy you could see higher prices in just about every other market, such as commodities, oil, gold, producer goods, real estate, and stocks.

More recently, mainstream economists have returned to fears about there not being enough inflation, and their outsized fear of deflation. For them, their fear justifies Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) and Quantitative Easing (QE), but they fail to explain why we must have rising prices. When it comes to the cost of living, most people prefer falling prices to rising prices, a condition that typically characterises a productive, unhampered, market economy.

The Futility of Price-Inflation Measurements

The practical problems with price indexes such as the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, are the issues of which prices are to be measured and what “weights” will be assigned to what goods. Another problem is deciding what to do about changes in quality. For example, what do you do when Apple introduces a new and improved iPhone at the same price as the previous version?

To deal with this, government statisticians systematically increase the weights for goods that are going down in price and reduce the weights of things are going up in price. If the quality of a good goes up, the statisticians “hedonically” reduce the price of the good.

Those sorts of adjustments do not seem fair to most normal people. If you are eating more ramen noodles and fewer lamb chops you can take little comfort in the fact that that the CPI is staying inside the Fed’s target range. Moreover, under the system of hedonic adjustments, every time entrepreneurs and engineers come up with better products for consumers at lower prices, the Fed takes credit for keeping inflation under control.

A Debate Over Alternative Measures

One economist that takes exception to these adjustments is John Williams, owner of ShadowStats.com. Williams offers alternative measures of government statistics based on older methodologies where the goods, weightings, and quality adjustments play less of a role. His measure of CPI, for example, shows price inflation much higher than government statistics. Whether Williams’s calculations are more accurate than the government statistics is hard to say, however, because both are constructed on the same inherently flawed foundations.

One recent critique of Williams’s statistics comes from Ed Dolan. He criticizes Williams not for his belief that CPI understates the impact of the Fed on the cost of living, but for the way he calculates his alternative measure:

No one really denies that the CPI, as presently calculated, understates the rate of inflation compared to a measure based on a fixed basket of unchanged goods. Rather, what many economists, myself included, find hard to accept is Williams’s estimate of the degree of understatement.

This friendly dispute does not solve the problems of calculating the cost of living or price inflation, but only serves to underscore the futility of such an undertaking, a point first established by Ludwig von Mises.

Furthermore, the whole discussion obscures the real impact of the central bank’s “monetary policy.” In the absence of a central bank, it is generally assumed that the supply of money would grow slowly because real resources have to be expended to create gold and/or silver (or anything else, including Bitcoin) to serve as the monetary base.

In an expanding market economy, improvements in technology, efficiency, and productivity means that you would experience real economic growth per capita of at least 2–4 percent per year. If the supply of money is increasing slower than production, then the economy will experience falling prices and a stronger currency.

What Would the CPI Be With a Fixed Money Supply?

Hiden monetary Debasement  Real Price DeclineThe full impact of the central bank’s monetary policy is better described by adding together consumer price inflation (higher prices) and the foregone price deflation together. The combined amount shows a truer picture of the negative impact the Fed’s monetary policy has on the typical wage or salary earner. Economist Mark Brandly provides an estimate of this damage to an economy that consists largely of workers on fixed wages.

He calculates what the CPI would have been between 1959 and 2005 if the money supply had been fixed. Using data on the actual money supply and actual CPI, he calculates that the actual CPI in 2005 was 6.7 times higher than the CPI in 1959. In the absence of increases in the money supply, however, he calculates that due to increased productivity CPI would have fallen by 80 percent, so that the actual CPI was thirty-four times larger than what the CPI would have been in the absence of the Fed.

What would this mean for the common man? In two words, cheaper stuff. Brandly provides a few estimates about what this world would look like in terms of the prices of goods the consumer would face today:

Let’s put this in everyday terms. Suppose these estimates represent the changes in the prices of goods such as hamburgers, cars, and housing. According to these numbers, a hamburger that cost 60¢ in 1959 would have cost $4 in 2005. If the money supply had been fixed, however, that hamburger would only cost 12¢ today. Similarly, a $20,000 car in 2005 would have cost slightly less than $3,000 in 1959. Again, without the monetary effect on prices, that car would only cost $600 today. The price of a $45,000 house in 1959 would have increased to $300,000 in 2005. With a fixed money supply, that house would cost $9,000 today.

Ultimately, however, “fixing” the money supply to “fix” CPI would accomplish little. The Federal Reserve and the world’s central banks would continue to do significant harm to the working class and enrich the wealthy and the political class. “The Fed” especially has destroyed the incentive to save and turned financial markets into crony casinos. Meanwhile, economic inequality is the worst in American history. The Fed has blown up enormous economic bubbles and they are stuck with seven years of ZIRP and are too afraid to change course for fear of blowing up the world economy. Tinkering with the CPI won’t solve these problems.

Image source: iStockphoto, Gold Standard Institute


Mark Thornton

Mark Thornton is a senior resident fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and is the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He is the author of The Economics of Prohibition, coauthor of Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War, and the editor of The Quotable Mises,The Bastiat Collection, and An Essay on Economic Theory.
This post first appeared at the Mises Daily.

RELATED READING:

The "Living Wage" Mistake

Guest post by Ryan McMaken

cutting billsMuch of the push to raise minimum wages centres on the assumption that each individual worker should be paid an amount allowing a worker to purchase food, health care, transportation, and housing based on that one wage alone. In many cases, the living wage claims extend to the claim that each worker — or two adult workers, in some cases — should be able to support a family of four or more.

Unfortunately, the “solution” to this challenge generally proffered these days is the minimum wage, which as we have seen here, here, here, and here, only serves to place the burden of subsidising a living wage on the shoulders of the least skilled, least experienced, and often most impoverished workers.

Those who advocate for a living wage generally assume that if the cost of living is high, the primary response should be to simply raise wages. This has the political advantage of placing the costs of the “solution” onto a minority group such as employers (with small, poorly capitalised employers being most impacted by these new mandates) and low-skilled employees (whose jobs will be largely replaced by machines or outsourced as a result of the mandate).

Real Wages Matter Most

Moreover, it should always be remembered that there are two sides to the cost of living equation. There are the nominal wages themselves, measured in the dollars in your pay packet, but there is also the cost of living as manifested in the cost of housing, food, health care, and other costs – in other words, how much can your pay packet actually buy.

In other words, if we wish to make things easier for low-income earners, the actual goal needs to be to raise the real wages of low-income households - and to do this, we must look at their costs as well as incomes.

If we look just at incomes, for example (especially if you do not understand how minimum wages condemn many to unemployment), it’s easy to imagine simply mandating higher wages, sitting back, and expecting stones to be turned into bread. They imagine it’s easy, especially since such mandates do not require any new government outlays or new taxes. They do not realise the real costs are borne elsewhere.

When we look at costs, we realise immediately things are more complex. It’s another matter altogether to decree that housing costs shall be lower, or that patients can only be charged some maximum amount for, say, antibiotics. While many persist in believing that a price floor on wages produce no ill effects, virtually everyone today has been forced to admit that price ceilings on goods and services lead to shortages. Many still remember the price controls of the 1970s that led to gas lines and other shortages. And while rent control persists in some older cities, only the most committed economic illiterates advocate for new rent controls in younger, modern cities. Virtually everyone admits that a price ceiling on rents would simply make new housing development wither away, and thus reduce its supply.

From the interventionist perspective, the only other alternative, therefore, is to subsidise the desired goods and services. “We can’t put a price ceiling on retirement care,” they’ll say, “but we can subsidise it.” This is more politically complicated because in order to subsidise, the government must tax and spend. In the case of retirement care, of course, government lowers the cost of retirement care (for some people) with subsidy programs like the Residential Care Subsidy. With housing, we can subsidise through accommodation supplements, or through programmes that subsidise construction of housing units. Governments can also subsidise public transportation that tends to only be economically feasible in dense urban situations.

Of course, there are alternatives to government mandates when seeking to lower the cost of living. But none of these are acceptable to interventionists. These solutions involve making amenities and necessities like housing, retirement care and transportation more plentiful in the marketplace through entrepreneurial activity, and thus more affordable to households at all income levels.

Lowering the Cost of Living

Not just unacceptable to an interventionist, but damned difficult for them even to imagine. But without their ‘help,’ it is possible.

For example, lowering regulatory barriers to the production of housing, such as removing  inclusionary zoning laws, urban growth boundaries, and ordinary zoning laws would contribute to bringing down soaring housing costs. In addition, mandates on building in streets with old houses that are imposed so that higher-income residents don’t have to look at “cheap-looking” housing when they drive by it on their way to work, would certainly be a step in the right direction as well. And of course, there are controls on immigrant labour that drive up the cost of housing construction; consent fees, development levies and delays with council; the increasing cost of monopolistic building products; and a thousand other little regulations that can move a proposed new housing project from the “profitable” column to the “unprofitable” column, which means less housing is built.

Similarly, with retirement and health care, powerful interest groups ensure that the supply of physicians is limited by cronyist politician-appointed state medical boards, and the cartelisation of medical schools. There are government limitations on the importation of affordable drugs, and the FDA ensures that only the wealthiest and most politically powerful pharmaceutical companies can obtain worldwide approval for new drugs. And Obamacare has now made the introduction of innovative new low-cost treatments more difficult as well.

Similarly, government mandates increase the cost of transportation by maintaining monopoly powers for taxi services while clamping down on cheaper options like ridesharing. Government zoning laws and subsidization of highways reduce urban density which is necessary to make transportation options like bus lines and street cars economically viable. Countless government regulations and programs like Cash for Clunkers that encourage the destruction of old cars drives up the price of used automobiles.

But, if we were to really take a hard look at the true sources of the “living wage” problem, we’d soon find ourselves being forced to admit that what is driving so much of the lack of affordability in housing, retirement health care, and more is the interventionist economy itself

For those who tell us repeatedly that it is the government we must thank daily for keeping us safe, for keeping us healthy, and for giving us the goods that the capitalists are too mean and stingy to give us, taking such a hard look would be anathema. So, instead, they’re left with the simple-minded strategy of mandating higher nominal wages, while watching increases in real wages being constantly eliminated or diminished by an endless array of government prohibitions on economic activities that would make goods less expensive and more plentiful for all of us.


Ryan McMaken

Ryan W. McMaken is the editor of Mises Daily and The Free Market. He has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
This article first appeared at the Mises Daily. It has been altered slightly to fit the local context.

ECONOMICS FOR REAL PEOPLE: From the Education of Cyrus to the Education of Economists

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Here’s what’s happening this evening with our friends at the Auckland Uni Economics Group. All welcome!

What's the connection between Cyrus and economics?

In tonight's seminar, we will be looking at an economic idea that has been understood, if only in a rudimentary sense, by economic thinkers since antiquity – all the way back to Xenophon, who talks about it in his Cyropaedia (or The Education of Cyrus). 

Despite this illustrious lineage however, it's an idea that only received its first detailed treatment in the work of an eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher. A seemingly simple idea, which economists far too often take for granted, that has huge implications for the whole field of economics.

Indeed, we’ll see that this idea provides the very foundation of society and economic thought, and can be used to help us answer almost all questions related to economics - whether they be questions about Peruvian hill tribes or sophisticated modern economies.

        Date: Thursday, April 30
       Time: 6-7pm
        Location: Room 040C, Level 0, Owen G. Glenn Business
                                (plenty of parking in the Business School basement, entrance off Grafton Rd)

We look forward to seeing you there!

PS: Keep up to date with us on our 2015 Facebook page.

Wednesday 29 April 2015

From inside Baltimore city [updated]

UPDATE: Other commentary I like: 


Let me say at the outset I am in favour of the rule of law. As is this mother giving her son “the smackdown of his life” for throwing rocks at Baltimore police. (No, beating your kid in public isn't good parenting. But ringing them up in such a way that they don't feel the need to go burning down buildings in the first place surely is....*)

Chris Campbell from Laissez Faire Today, who lives in burning Baltimore, files this report on the rioting city, and argues there may be more going on than you realise …

  • Baltimore City is on Fire: Upon writing, rioters are making glass repairmen rich beyond their wildest imaginations…
  • From Inside the Protests: The protests were, for the most part, peaceful. What’s happening now isn’t a protest…
  • Why Baltimore is Under Attack: Look beyond the surface, and it’s no surprise that riots are happening… again… in Baltimore…
  • A Classic Case of Blowback: It’s easy to be dismissive of the underlying issues. But the riots are only a symptom of a much larger problem…

LFTAs I write today’s missive to you, rioters are running up and down the city on a mission to make Baltimore’s glass repair business owners the richest men in Babylon.

By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard the news of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died of a severe spinal cord injury after police arrested him. And the news about protests and riots since…

I say protests and riots to note the distinction between the two. Most news sources aren’t making this distinction, but I think it’s important.

I observed the protests on Saturday. Over 2,000 protesters -- from all walks of life -- marched to speak out against rampant police brutality in Baltimore. It’s a message that’s easy to resonate with everywhere in the United States. Many American police are overstepping their bounds. And the militarisation of domestic police officers on top of it is setting a dangerous precedent.

The protest began in an area of Baltimore I, admittedly, up until Saturday had never seen. It’s a part on the West side that has been ravaged by decades of de-industrialization, loss of population, drugs, the War on Drugs, police raids and harassment, and gang violence. Whole blocks are boarded up, with the backs ripped out of many of the rowhouses and trash strewn all over the still fenced-in backyards.

It’s something you see in pictures of the third-world. Not something you would expect to be in your backyard. It’s an eerie sight.

The protest was, by itself, peaceful. This is despite much antagonism from the police and other external forces. For example, many protesters were stopped, given random “verbal warning” tickets, and checked for warrants. For protesting.

Protest citation

And in another bizarre example, one man with a camera seemed hell-bent on getting punched by a protester. He repeatedly ran up to random people in the crowd, stuck his camera in their faces, followed them, rattled off meaningless questions, and then repeated the process with someone else. It was bizarre. After seeing him antagonize several people, I shot the following picture. Note the reactions of the bystanders.

Filming of protesters

Despite setbacks, the protest felt productive. The mood was constructive. Unlike in many of the Occupy Wall Street protests, everyone understood why they were there. And the message was lost of all ambiguity:

Protester signs

LFTYes. Baltimore is angry.
Baltimore’s black community, which makes up two-thirds of the city’s population, has been angry about rampant police abuse -- and, of course, living in what could easily be mistaken for third-world conditions -- for a while now.

Baltimore’s public schools are oversized toilets. Baltimore’s government is deeply corrupted -- and has been for decades. And racial tension, despite some people believing it’s no longer a thing, is as real as the burning building I’m looking at outside my window.

But none of this is a secret within the confines of Baltimore city. It’s just not given much attention. But now, as the chaos closes in… and as it starts to hit a little too close to home for many people normally unaffected by such things… Baltimoreans have no choice but to pay heed.

In fact, now the whole world is watching.

LFTUnfortunately, the world will see mostly the deconstructive aspects of the anger expressed…
The mainstream media latched onto one event in particular on Saturday. And then they let it ride. Here’s what went down:

Trading with Saudi Arabia

Moving on from hairpulling yesterday, I’m told that Mike Hosking opined on John Key visiting Saudi Arabia to sign a free trade deal, arguing he should be free to go, that it didn’t stop Phil Goff and Helen Clark signing deals with China – despite their own appalling human rights record and treatment of Tibet – and with Indonesia – despite their own appalling human rights record and penchant for executing folk for victimless crimes.

Hosking argues that trade engages only with the values of the market and should not therefore engage with moral matters.  What goes on in Saudi Arabia is none of our business, he says, and who is little New Zealand to say anything.

Let me engage with that error in a moment. Because David Slack is making what’s seen as the other argument, the argument for Key not going:

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Seems fair enough, right? Much of what goes on in Saudi Arabia  is disgusting – executions, the subjugation of women,  an essentially medieval society -- and much of what they promote outside is even worse – especially their export of Sunni and Wahhabi terrorism.

But here’s something that’s strange. Many of the usual suspects noisily opposed to trade with Saudi Arabia because of their barbaric culture are just as noisily opposed to telling other cultures what to do. It’s not our place, they say. Yet they insist Key tell Saudi Arabia what to do.

So the usual apostles of moral equivalence become of a sudden the apostles of moral propriety.

And yet their new doctrine of moral non-equivalence has some strange omissions.

The same folk who oppose a free trade deal with Riyadh for being Islamofascist thugs who sponsor Sunni and Wahhabi terrorists and execute women are generally okay with Tehran having a nuclear bomb, despite Tehran being Islamofascist thugs who sponsor Shia terrorists and execute homosexuals. They'd be okay, I should think, with a free trade deal with Palestine, despite the ruling Hamas training up youngsters to be suicide bombers and executing people for “collaboration.”  And nothing about Indonesian executions this week, or Chinese human rights abuses in general, has raised calls for us not to trade with these places.

So what's the difference? They're not against fascist thugs - they're just against a certain type of fascist thug…  Just a wild stab in the dark here, but my guess is that the type of thug they’re okay with is anti-American, and the type of thug to whom they’re opposed is not.

That’s a very, very strange king of moral non-equivalence to harbour for apostles of moral equivalence.

As is, on a different front, that of Mike Hosking.

Hosking argues that trade does not engage with moral matters; that it engages only with the values of the market place

Read that again: trade does not engage with moral matters; it engages only with the values of the market place. 

This, ironically, is the very opposite argument to that made by the great nineteenth-century free traders, who argued that it is precisely the values of the marketplace that promotes the spread of moral matters.

Richard Cobden, for example, in 1846, advocated for free trade not just because it brings greater prosperity, which it does, but because it is the primary force in spreading peace and real freedom:

I have never taken a limited view of the object or scope of this great principle. I have never advocated this question very much as a trader.
   
But I have been accused of looking too much to material interests. Nevertheless I can say that I have taken as large and great a view of the effects of this mighty principle as ever did any man who dreamt over it in his own study. I believe that the physical gain will be the smallest gain to humanity from the success of this principle.
    I look farther; 
I see in the Free-Trade Principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.
    I have looked even farther. I have speculated, and probably dreamt, in the dim future—ay, a thousand years hence—I have speculated on what the effect of the triumph of this principle may be. I believe that the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails.
    I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies—for those materials which are used for the destruction of life and the desolation of the rewards of labour—will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used, when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.
    I believe that, if we could be allowed to reappear on this sublunary scene, we should see, at a far distant period, the governing system of this world revert to something like the municipal system; and I believe that the speculative philosopher of a thousand years hence will date the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world’s history from the triumph of the principle which we have met here to advocate.

This is not mere cant. The spread of the Free-Trade Principle following the efforts of Cobden and his colleagues did change the face of the world: the prosperity of the industrial revolution was spread around the globe, and freedom with it; further, and despite occasional eruptions, the late nineteenth century was described as an oasis of peace midst a mountain of war: Wars, saying Cobden, being “another aristocratic mode of plundering and oppressing commerce,” when what commerce most desperately needs is the spread of freedom and the maintenance of peace.

The great difficulty, in the nineteenth-century world -- as in Saudi Arabia today -- is pulling the aristocrats from the levers of power so that peace and real freedom can spread.

But unless you’re selling your enemies the rope with which to hang you, a free trade deal is a start.

Comments SNAFU

Yes, the list of “recent comments” on which you all rely has turned to pooh, but fear not: work is afoot to make the necessary repairs.

And rest easy that while your new comments aren’t being listed on the front page, they’re still appearing in all their scintillating glory on the posts’ pages. And every one is treasured.

'Your Ridiculous Election': PJ O'Rourke on the UK Campaign Trail, Part 2

To describe the most confusing British election in modern times, the BBC asked a confused American.

PJ O’Rourke takes his second look at what could be the most interesting campaign in decades

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Click the pic to head to the player…

Tuesday 28 April 2015

New Element Discovered

This is doing the rounds again. Sadly, it never gets old …

News from the Scientific World: New Element Discovered
Victoria University of Wellington researchers have discovered the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.
A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 1 to 3 years (in NZ). It does not decay, but instead undergoes a re-organisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

A villa is not a bungalow

Since I’m such a big fan of what’s called California Bungalows I’ve been meaning since the new Bungalow book (right) came out last year to talk about it, if not talk it up.

Jam-packed with beautiful photographs by Patrick Reynolds (with whom there’s an interview here), unfortunately the text of Bungalow: From Heritage to Contemporary doesn’t always match their quality – and sadly around 250 of its large, glossy pages are filled with text and photos bungalow renovations. I can understand why, don’t worry, but that doesn’t assuage my disappointment at what seems a wasted opportunity.

Anyway, New Zealand cities are filled with bungalows and villas – and with “bungled villas” representing a mongrel mix of the two – yet despite their differences, which are vast, many folk fail to distinguish between the two.

So, to help you, this picture below is an stuffy, upright, formal villa of the general type, usually found with cold, dark boxes opening off a central hallway, many examples of which still litter places like the People’s Republic of Grey Lynn …

imageExample of a Victorian bay villa, from the Auckland Council
Design “Guide” mandating how one should design in a streetful of villas

… and this is a warm, spreading bungalow with few hallways, of the type you might find around the suburbs that exploded out of our cities after WWI:

image

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Can you see the difference?

Why does it matter, you ask?

Because bungalows are almost the only informal, organic house-type built on a large scale in New Zealand – the first designed from the inside-out to impress the occupants rather than passers-by and, (contrary to the text of the book) if you bring out that organic character rather than attempt to suppress it they are easy to renovate, simple to add on to, and richly rewarding if done well.

That’s why I love renovating bungalows – but refuse to renovate villas. Because they are different. A villa is not a bungalow…

  • Villas are constrained and static, with a form, upright appearance; bungalows are dynamic and spreading, stressing the horizontal, the human plane.
  • A villa is the last of the ‘classical’ line, bungalows the first of the modern.
  • A villa stresses the public, a bungalow favours the private
  • A villa has a formal arrangement of rooms, a bungalow an informal arrangement of spaces.
  • Villa floor plans cut up daily life into separate discrete elements; bungalow spaces invite elements of life to flow together.
  • A villa is outside-in; a bungalow is inside-outward.
  • A villa is very much about its relationship to the street; a good bungalow about its relationship to the site.
  • A villa’s verandah is for show; a bungalows decks, porches and terraces are to be used.
  • A bungalow goes out to break the box, a villa to live within it.
  • A bungalow can be as individual as their owners; a villa is produced by a cookie-cutter.
  • Villa windows are spare, small, guillotine windows, one to a room; bungalow’s casement windows appear in horizontal ribbons, and open out to light and air.
  • With its tiny guillotine windows and general demeanour, a villa repels the sun and outdoors; with its wide casements and spreading floor plans, bungalows invite them both in.
  • A villa is intended to impress passersby, a bungalow to please its occupants.
  • Villas value symmetry; bungalows favour balance, or dynamic symmetry.
  • Villa ornament is frou frou and applied; bungalow ornament is integral and organic.
  • A villa has a finial pointing to imaginary heavens; a bungalow has sheltering hands over a welcoming entrance.
  • A villa’s timberwork is cut up by wood butchers and hidden by several coats of paint; a bungalow’s is generally exposed and enjoyed for itself.

And finally …

  • To renovate a villa successfully requires removing or ignoring everything that makes it a villa; to renovate a bungalow easily and well requires only that you enhance it.

As you can see, I despise villas.

Oddly, however, the dark, stiff, formality of the villa is often loved by those who purport to despise the conventional. And then they go out and spend millions buying houses that place an Edwardian straitjacket of formality on daily life – and spend hours writing District Plans enforcing their preservation.

In my opinion, they can keep their straitjackets and Edwardian formality to themselves.

In my opinion, we should harvest all the beautiful timbers locked up and hidden in these dark, damp, hard-to-develop prisons– all that beautiful matai, rimu, totara and kauri used in villas for foundations, wall framing,weatherboards and painted-over timberwork – by demolishing the bastards and doing something better with it.

That’s a kind of recycling I could get right behind.

[Pics from Auckland Council, and from Jeremy Ashford’s 1994 The Bungalow in New Zealand]

Thursday 23 April 2015

…if environmentalists’ predictions from the 1970s were correct

By now, if environmentalists’ predictions from the 1970s were correct, as reported in leading media of the time, civilisation should have ended; we can no longer see the sun; freshwater fish should all have suffocated; we will have been wearing gas masks for thirty years and thousands annually will be dying from air pollution; the greatest cataclysm in the history of man, the Great Die-Off,  would have happened, the world  no longer be suitable for human habitation, and  the human race would be approaching extinction;  food and oil ran out fifteen years ago, 80% of all species have perished for ever, and 90% of all rain forests have gone; and, finally, the world was eleven degrees colder than the 70s just fifteen years ago, and is now in the grip of an Ice Age.

Instead, well, we’re still here, and we’re still thankful for all the fish.

And around half of those environmentalists are still making predictions about our survival and everything we love.

And the media are still printing them.

Here are Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel, with a message from the 70s:

Inventor(s) of the Day: Two wonderful women and a vaccine

Note to newscasters: not all women want to be or are “victims” in the sense the media make a show of.

Grace Eldering and Pearl Kendrick invented the vaccine against a disease that had been killing up to 6,000 children ever year: Whooping Cough.

Their vaccine now saves around half-a-million lives every year.

Grace Eldering and Pearl Kendrick are heroes. Or heroines, if you prefer.

In any case, I doubt they’d worry about having their hair pulled.

Too busy being fabulous.

[Hat tip The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science]

Since hairpulling is news …

… then horoscopes must be headlines.

So here’s your horoscope for the day:


Pic by Zedd

As for me, my star sign is Uranus.

But my horoscope is still the same as yours.

Now, back to the news …

We’re all redundant

On a day when the major piece of news according to alleged news organisations is an alleged case of hair-pulling, is there really any point in analysing the news any more?

Are we bloggers all redundant?

And what about the satirists? Who is thinking about the satirists? What can they do when the headlines are beyond satire?

Won’t someone think of the satirists.

It don’t mean a thing, unless a 102-year-old can swing!

Back when swing was king and the Harlem Renaissance was in full flight, the first music videos were made.  They called them “soundies.”

A visitor to a 102-year-old woman, who used to dance at the Cotton Club, found soundies she’s never seen of herself dancing with the Harlem swing kings. He shows her – and she wants to get out of bed and do it all over again

Wednesday 22 April 2015

#CountdownToAnzacDay: So who pulled the trigger that started the war? [updated]

So today I had planned to write about the origins of the war that ended peace – ‘'the "seminal catastrophe" of modern times and the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”  -- the war that killed 16 millions and destroyed the health, wealth and material well-being of millions more – that ended empires four empires, bankrupted another, and sowed the seeds for a century of totalitarianism – that destroyed for all time “the pre-World War One world, the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history.”*

But I’ve decided that I won’t. I might do that next week. If you ask nicely.

It’s easy enough after the fact to see who pulled the trigger. Answer: nearly everyone. The difficult question with them all is why … ?

  • Serbian Gavrilo Princip pulled the trigger that killed an Austrian Crown Prince.
  • The German Kaiser pulled the trigger backing Austria-Hungary with a “blank cheque” in how to respond, turning a Balkan conflict into a German-Austrian one.
  • Russian Ambassador to Belgrade M.Hartwig pulls the trigger of support for Serbia, turning it into a Russo-Austrian-German conflict, telling them “After the question of Turkey, it is now the turn of Austria. Serbia will be our best instrument. The day draws near when … Serbia will take back her Bosnia and her Herzegovina.”
  • Austrian Commander in Chief Conrad von Hotzendorf pulled the trigger that, one month later saw his Emperor declare war on Serbia.
  • The Kaiser pulled a safety catch, suggesting Austria-Hungary “halt in Belgrade” then negotiate.
  • It was too late, Conrad having already pulled the trigger beginning Belgrade’s bombardment. (It would take four months more to occupy it, before being thrown out.)
  • The Chairman of the Liberal Party Foreign Affairs Group insists Liberal Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey must tell Russia and France that "Great Britain in no conceivable circumstances will depart from a position of strict neutrality." Grey tells French and German ambassadors in the morning, respectively, “Don't count upon our coming in" and "don't count on our abstention." By afternoon, he has reversed the messages.
  • Winston Churchill pulls the trigger without cabinet approval, sending the Royal Navy on “the exposed eastern channel” to war stations in the Channel and Scapa Flow (meaning the Royal Navy prepared to defend the French coast, on the basis of the undeclared 1905 and 1912 “understanding”s that in time of war the French Navy in return defend the Med).
  • The Liberal Foreign Affairs Group, claiming nine-tenths of  Liberal party support, tells Liberal Prime Minister Asquith they will withdraw their support from the government if Britain goes to war. (Asquith himself estimated around three-quarters of his cabinet and parliamentary Liberal party were “for absolute non-interference at any price,” and in his cabinet only Churchill and Grey wholeheartedly for it.)
  • Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov pulled the trigger mobilising Russian troops, and pressuring their ally France to mobilise – turning it into a pan-European conflict.
  • British cabinet pulls the trigger, ordering all British naval, military, and colonial stations into a prearranged “state of readiness” – turning a continental conflict into a potential global conflict
  • New Zealand, Canadian, and Australian Prime Ministers make public promises of expeditionary forces to help the ‘mother country.’ (NZ was the first to make the offer. Australian PM Fisher pledges support “to the last man and the last shilling.”)
  • The French cabinet pull the trigger ordering French troops to take up position ten kilometres from the French-German border.
  • German Commander-in-Chief Helmuth von Moltke pulls the trigger with a telegram proclaiming “imminent danger of war, which will probably be followed within forty-eight hours by mobilisation. This inevitably means war. We expect from Austria immediate active participation in the war against Russia."
  • The Austro-Hungarian Emperor pulls the trigger mobilising Austro-Hungarian troops against Russia.
  • The Kaiser pulls a safety catch, asking France and Britain where they would stand in a Russo-German war?
  • Conrad pulls the trigger declaring war against Russia.
  • Sir Edward Grey asks France and Germany if they will respect Belgian neutrality. German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow says he can’t say; British Ambassador in France says French government will. 

Are you keeping up?

  • Belgium rejects the offer of a bigger British trigger, declares its neutrality and begins to mobilise.
  • French General Joffre pulls the trigger mobilising French troops.
  • The Kaiser pulls the trigger mobilising German troops, who begin invading Luxembourg, and declares war on Russia.
  • Churchill pulls the trigger mobilising the Royal Navy, after cabinet rejection of mobilisation.
  • Grey rejects the Belgian ambassador’s request for a British “guarantee” that “if Germany violates the neutrality of Belgium, we [Britain] would certainly assist Belgium.”
  • British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey pulls a trigger suggesting British neutrality if German does not attack France.
  • In response, the Kaiser pulls a safety catch withdrawing troops from Luxembourg.
  • Grey reneges.
  • The British cabinet pulls a trigger, announcing that even if Germany invades Belgium to attack France then the British Expeditionary Force will not be sent to the continent.
  • The Kaiser pulls the trigger again, sending Moltke into France and Belgium.
  • Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Prime Minister pull triggers mobilising “expeditionary forces.”
  • Several British Liberal cabinet members pull the trigger, threatening resignation if Britain goes to war; Churchill pulls the trigger eliciting support from Conservative opposition who might join the cabinet to replace them.
  • The Kaiser pulls a safety catch, notifying London Germany was willing if Britain would pledge itself to neutrality, to agree that its fleet would not attack the Northern coast of France.
  • All this time, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey was massaging his own trigger, leaving no-one until the last minute (including his own cabinet and Prime Minister) any idea how he might use it. In the end, it was his speech to the House of Commons that pulled the final trigger, turning the continental conflict into a global war…


  • The only cogent voice in opposition was that of minority Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald…

So we can see who?  Barely. None of whom achieved their aims; each of whom, by their decision, ensuring only the destruction of everything they claimed to support.

The question remains why were all those important triggers pulled?

Why did a small Balkan disagreement in a place few had heard of set off a global conflagration that would end with the destruction of the known world, and an eruption of further wars.

Why were triggers pulled by leaders, many of whom knew that by doing so they would unleash their own destruction?

This, today, is not an unimportant question. Before the wars set off by this one, said Austrian author Stefan Zweig, “I saw individual freedom at its zenith, after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years.”

But I won’t be answering the question this week.

Instead, since this is so important, in the centenary year of NZ’s involvement, and since theories about why (and even how) the war started are legion, I’ll point you to three interesting contemporary articles making claims that are worth considering, but with which I don’t wholly agree …

… and remind you of the other  posts in this series already causing angst among the easily challenged:

Until then…

PS: Few dramatised documentaries of events as momentous as this are worth watching. But, if you can get hold of it, the 2014 BBC2 dramatisation of the “July Crisis” called 37 Days is definitely worth the candle. Here’s the trailer:


* Ayn Rand’s fuller description of the world that was destroyed for ever, from her introduction to The Romantic Manifesto:

As a child, I saw a glimpse of the pre-World War One world, the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history … If one has glimpsed that kind of art—& wider: the possibility of that kind of culture-one is unable to be satisfied with anything less. I must emphasise that I am not speaking of concretes, nor of politics, nor of journalistic trivia, but of that period's 'sense of life.' Its art projected an overwhelming sense of intellectual freedom, of depth, i.e., concern with fundamental problems, of demanding standards, of inexhaustible originality, of unlimited possibilities &, above all, of profound respect for man. The existential atmosphere (which was then being destroyed by Europe's philosophical trends & political systems) still held a benevolence that would be incredible to the men of today, i.e., a smiling, confident good will of man to man, & of man to life. … It has been said and written by many commentators that the atmosphere of the Western world before World War I is incommunicable to those who have not lived in that period…It is [certainly] impossible for the young people of today to grasp the reality of man's higher potential & what scale of achievement it had reached in a rational (or semi-rational) culture. But I have seen it. I know that it was real, that it existed, that it is possible. It is that knowledge that I want to hold up to the sight of men—over the brief span of less than a century—before the barbarian curtain descends altogether (if it does) & the last memory of man's greatness vanishes in another Dark Ages.

It’s always Earth Day somewhere

Which means it’s always a day to celebrate how fossil fuels make a better earth on which to live.

Quote of the day, by Bernard Darnton

If you read The Atlantic article on ISIS a while back, read this too: Der Spiegel has a quite
different story
, claiming that Islamic State is a reconstitution of Iraq's Ba'ath Party.
Meanwhile, on TVNZ's One News, ‘Five-legged lamb becomes internet sensation.’ I shit
you not.
I don't want to judge people's entertainment choices* but can we please be honest and
rename the programme Crap from You Tube at Six?
- Bernard Darnton

*who are we kidding?

Tuesday 21 April 2015

“Takaharu Tezuka: The best kindergarten you’ve ever seen”

I love Japanese architect Takahura Tezuka’s attitude to designing for children

PS: On the need for some danger, you might want to keep up with Lenore Skenazy at  Free Range Kids.

Q: So why was the WWI battlefield so calamitous?

On the World War One battlefield there was no room for pluck, for courage, for bravery – none of those values espoused in patriotic commemorations of the war.

There was room for mateship, sure, but with a life expectancy in most units for most of the war of only several weeks at best, this was not an unencumbered blessing.

World War One was the first fully industrial war, bringing with it “a new conception of men as mere units.”[1] Hints of the destructive power of industrialised warfare were clear enough in the carnage of the American Civil War fifty years before. They were clear enough in colonial wars, in which large swathes of native troops could be killed by small numbers with industrial arms. They were written in blood in the first year of war, in which one million men died to achieve none of the war aims of any power, and it became clear to all that whatever anybody might have thought before plunging the world into war, this was going to be a long, long, and very bloody stalemate.

But no-one in authority had wanted to learn the lesson. Not even now that the age of the machine gun had arrived.


Maxim MG08 (Maschinengewehr 08) - Machine Gun. Pic by MilitaryFactory.Com

“WITHOUT HIRAM MAXIM, MUCH of subsequent world history might have been very different. As Hillaire Belloc put it:

“Thank God that we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”[2]

That was all very well in colonial wars, when the enemy had not, but the strategists among the Great Powers gave no thought to how war would change when all did have the instrument of death. Because good European and Australasian boys died just as well from the muzzle of a machine gun as natives did.

There were those who saw what was coming. One J.F.C. Fuller, for example, known two decades later as a leading theorist of armoured warfare, wrote a paper for the British Staff College

whose main contention was that tactics are based on weapon-power and not on the experience of military history, and that since in 1914 the quick-firing field gun and the machine gun were the two most recent weapons, our tactics should be based on them.[3]

He received a stern dressing down for his temerity.

Russian industrialist Ivan Bloch, for example (also known as Jean de Bloch) wrote hopefully that “‘There will be no war in the future, ‘for it has become impossible, now that it is clear that war means suicide’.”[4] Unfortunately, his warnings, while prescient, were not heard.

Using a wealth of research and a multitude of statistics, he argued that advances in technology, such as more accurate and rapidly firing guns or better explosives, were making it almost impossible for armies to attack well-defended positions. The combination of earth, shovels, and barbed wire allowed defenders to throw up strong defences from which they could lay out a devastating field of fire in the face of their attackers. ‘There will be nothing’, Bloch told [his publisher] Stead, ‘along the whole line of the horizon to show from whence the death-dealing missiles have sped.’ It would, he estimated, require the attacker to have an advantage of at least eight to one to get across the firing zone. Battles would bring massive casualties, ‘on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue’…. Indeed, in the wars of the future it was unlikely that there ever could be a clear victory. And while the battlefield was a killing ground , privation at home would lead to disorder and ultimately revolution. War, said Bloch, would be ‘a catastrophe which would destroy all existing political institutions’. Bloch did his best to reach decision-makers and the larger public…[5]

Unfortunately he was as unsuccessful as British journalist Norman Angell, who argued that in the modern age of trade  and industrial production, that the idea of achieving wealth by conquest was, as his best-selling book was titled,“The Great Illusion.”

“If the Statesmen of Europe could lay on one side the irrelevant considerations which cloud their minds,” he said, “they would see that the direct cost of acquisition by force must in these circumstances necessarily exceed in value the property acquired.”[6]

Angell threw down a challenge to the widely held view – the great illusion – that war paid. Perhaps conquest had made sense in the past when individual countries subsisted more on what they produced and needed each other less so that a victor could cart off the spoils of war and, for a time at least, enjoy them. Even then it weakened the nation, not least by killing off its best. France was still paying the price for its great triumphs under Louis XIV and Napoleon: ‘As the result of a century of militarism, France is compelled every few years to reduce the standard of physical fitness in order to keep up her military strength so that now even three-feet dwarfs are impressed.’  In the modern age war was futile because the winning power would gain nothing by it. In the economically interdependent world of the twentieth century , even powerful nations needed trading partners and a stable and prosperous world in which to find markets, resources, and places for investment. To plunder defeated enemies and reduce them to penury would only hurt the winners. If, on the other hand, the victor decided to encourage the defeated to prosper and grow, what would have been the point of a war in the first place? Say, Angell offered by way of example, that Germany were to take over Europe. Would Germany then set out to ransack its conquests? 
 
   ‘But that would be suicidal. Where would her big industrial population find their markets? If she set out
     to develop and enrich the component parts, these would become merely efficient competitors, and
    she need not have undertaken the costliest war of history to arrive at that result. This is the paradox,
     the futility of conquest – the great illusion which the history of our own Empire so well illustrates.’
[7]

Angell’s book sold well. But it was not read by anyone making decisions on war.

The lessons of strategy in an industrial age were not learned by professional politicians and diplomats and their monarchs. And the lessons of tactics in the machine age were not learned by professional soldiers.

The former made the war possible. The latter delivered to the world a new kind of war on a wholly different battlefield: deadly stalemate midst the horrors of trench warfare.

Why were the lessons not learned?

When faced with the machine gun and the attendant necessity to rethink all the old orthodoxies about the primacy of the final infantry charge, such soldiers either did not understand the significance of the new weapon at all, or tried to ignore it, dimly aware that it spelled the end of their own conception of war.  It would be almost impossible to over-emphasise the myopic outlook amongst the military leaders of the nineteenth [and early[twentieth] century.
    For them, all the progress of the preceding years merely meant that the standard military weapons, the cannon and the musket, became slightly more efficient.  Ranges were longer, rates of fire quicker, muzzle velocities higher, but basically, for them, nothing had changed. The bayonet push and the cavalry charge were still the determining factors on the battlefield. Even in 1926, Field-Marshall Haig could assert that ‘aeroplanes and tanks … are only accessories to the man and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse … as you have ever done in the past.’[8]

Field-Marshall Douglas Haig was the man who, as senior British commander from 1915 to the end of the war, sent  one-million British soldiers to their deaths – and whose “epic but costly offensives at the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) have become nearly synonymous with the carnage and futility of First World War battles."[9]

The machine gun, it should have been clear (especially by 1926) was a dire threat to all previous assumptions about the nature of war.  Yet the officer corps of all countries “clung on to their old beliefs in the centrality of man and the decisiveness of personal courage and individual endeavour” – those martial values still extolled at every cenotaph about the war that destroyed them utterly.[10]

In part, the myopia was a reaction to the age itself. “Machines had brought with them industrialisation and the destruction of the social order.” The generals could do little about that, but  they could ensure –or so they surmised—they would not “undermine the old certainties of the battlefield—the glorious charge and the opportunity for individual heroism.”

The machine gun threated to do this. Its phenomenal power could render such charges quite futile. It negated all the old human virtues – pluck, fortitude, patriotism, honour—and made them as nothing in the face of a deadly stream of bullets, a quite unassailable mechanical barrier.  For the old-style gentleman officers such an impersonal yet utterly decisive baulk was unacceptable. So they tried to ignore it.[11]

To paraphrase Ayn Rand, you are free to evade reality; but the troops you command are not free to evade the consequences of reality.

Instead of advancing into glory as charged, their troops advanced instead into that quite unassailable meat grinder called the machine gun.

THE MACHINE GUN WAS was not fired like a hosepipe in the way seen in Hollywood movies. It was even worse than that. The machine guns themselves were set up in protective cover, and set up in partnership to form a series of interlocking cones firing along an advancing line of troops.

The result was a wall of lead into which young human bodies were forced to charge.

As long as ammunition was supplied and barrels kept cool, one well-arranged machine-gun battery could repel (and by repel we mean kill) an army of thousands.

And so they did. Nearly every day for nearly four-and-a-half years.


Francis Derwent Wood | David (Machine Gun Corps Memorial), 1925. Hyde Park Corner, London.
Pic by
Jorge Enrique from Pinterest

THE “NEW CONCEPTION OF man as mere units before the might of the machine guns” had its counterpart in the new age of collectivism the war did so much to usher in – an age in which individuals were as mere units before the might of the state. “Perhaps, concludes author John Ellis,[12]

this new conception of man as mere units before the might of the machine gun was never better expressed than upon [sculptor] Derwent Woods memorial to the Machine Gun Corps [above]. It is a statue of ‘The Boy David’ and still stands at Hyde Park Corner. Its inscription reads:

        Saul hath slain his thousands
        But David his tens of thousands.


This post is part of NOT PC’s #CountdownToAnzacDay. Other posts in the series:

NOTES
[1] From John Ellis’s The Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 145
[2] Ibid, p. 18
[3] From Bond’s Staff College, p. 291. Ironically, Fuller was unable to attract any British interest in his theories of armoured warfare either; they were instead picked up and used by German generals in the Blitzkriegs of World War Two.
[4] From Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War, (Kindle Locations 5077-5078)
[5] Ibid
[6] From Norman Angell’s, The Great Illusion, Kindle version, loc. 4285, 1149.
[7] Quoted in Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War, (Kindle Locations 5108-5121)
[8] From John Ellis’s The Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 17.  Haig’s quote comes in his 1926 review of Basil Liddell-Hart’s book The Tanks, found in the 1959 edition at page 234
[9]  From the Canadian War Museum’s website "Canada and the First World War: Sir Douglas Haig"
[10] From John Ellis’s The Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 17
[11] Ibid, p.17
[12] Ibid, p.145

ERRATA: Casualty figure amended from two-million to one-million.

So, what would it take to prove global warming?

Robert Tracinski keeps it simple. There are three main requirements, he says.

1) A clear understanding of the temperature record…. [that is] a long-term temperature record that allows us to isolate what the normal baseline is, so we know what natural variation looks like and we can identify any un-natural, man-made effect.

That would have to be an untampered-with long-term temperature record.

2) A full understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms…. The glibbest thing said by environmentalists—and proof that the person who says it has no understanding of science—is that human-caused global warming is “basic physics” because we know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.  Carbon dioxide is a very weak greenhouse gas and there is no theory that claims it can cause runaway warming all on its own. The warmists’ theory requires feedback mechanisms that amplify the effect of carbon dioxide. Without that, there is no human-caused global warming. But those feedback mechanisms are dubious, unproven assumptions…. The immense, untamed complexity of the climate is reflected in the poor performance of computerized climate models, which leads us to our last major hurdle in proving the theory of global warming.

Correlation is not causality. But the models can’t even show correlation! Which leads to …

3) The ability to make forecasting models with a track record of accurate predictions over the very long term….  It’s pretty clear that scientists aren’t any good yet at making global climate forecasts. Current temperatures are at or below the low range of all of the climate models. Nobody predicted the recent 17-year-long temperature plateau. And while they can come up with ad hocexplanations after the fact for why the data don’t match their models, the whole point of a forecast is to be able to get the right answer before the data comes in.
    Given the abysmal record of climate forecasting, we should tell the warmists to go back and make a new set of predictions, then come back to us in 20 or 30 years and tell us how these predictions panned out. Then we’ll talk.

Read the whole piece:  What It Would Take to Prove Global Warming – Robert Tracinski, THE TRACINCKI LETTER

Mt Eden access debate descends into lunacy

Guest post by Stephen Berry

If the idea of banning vehicles from the Mt. Eden summit doesn’t sound crazy enough, then listening to the members of the Maunga Authority discuss the practicalities of such a move verges on total lunacy.

On Monday night the authority members voted unanimously to ban vehicle and cycle access to the top of Mt Eden, but in true political style has now deferred a final decision pending discussion on just how vehicle access can be prevented.”

It has been found that the cost of installing iron gates with electronic key pad or swipe card access will be in excess of $100,000, not including on-going maintenance costs. One option involves the issuing of an access code via a call centre which would change every seven days. Another option would see those with mobility issues being given swipe cards that would cost $20 each.

The banning of vehicles would also require the construction of extra carparks, with the existing ones moved further down the cone, and Puhi Huia Rd reconfigured to hold a completely inadequate 30 vehicles.

When these sorts of conversations are taking place between elected councillors and the racially appointed Tamaki Collective, doesn’t it demonstrate the idea is insane?

North Shore councillor Chris Darby somehow manages to go one step even further into the asylum by being  so “dismayed” by the idea of iron gates he would prefer “moving bollards.”

I am equally dismayed. I’m dismayed that six elected representatives could be so blasé when it comes to spending what will become hundreds of thousands of ratepayer dollars simply to prevent Aucklanders from enjoying one of the city’s natural treasures!

And through all of this, the ratepayer funded Maunga Authority still does not consult with ratepayers and the chairman of the Authority gutlessly refuses to talk to media.”

A final decision is now expected to be made in May. The elected representatives on the authority are

I suggest you talk to them. And soon.

RELATED: Keep vehicle access to Mt Eden – Berry – VOXY


Stephen Berry is the Leader of Affordable Auckland, and a candidate for Mayor of Auckland and Albany ward, 2016. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.