Not PC

Schadenfreude, thy name is Graham

2012-02-24T14:32:00.001+13:00

A few years back, a friend’s father arrived home from a meeting to select National’s successor in the blue ribbon seat of Remuera after Alan Highet’s retirement. Said friend’s father, “It’s always been said we could elect a donkey to stand for National in this electorate and it’d still get in. Well, that’s we’ve done this year.”

The donkey they selected was Douglas Montrose Graham, former Minister of Injustice, known to some in the past as Lord Montrose, and (after a guilty verdict in the High Court today) now known only as Inmate Graham.*

Because this mellifluous piece of human excrement, this canker on justice and bloated sack of self-importance, has today been found guilty of fraud.

Not for what he did as Minister of Injustice in the Shipley Government, when he mandated that defendants have their assets confiscated by the state, even before they’d been found guilty.

Not for what he did as Minister in Charge of Treaty Capitulations in the Bolger Government, when he took millions of dollars out of the pockets of New Zealand taxpayers to give to tribalists for things those taxpayers didn’t do.

Not for what he did as Minister of Apartheid, lecturing NZers at one point during his reign “The sooner we realise there are laws for one and laws for another, the better.”

Not because after a lifetime in the trough he retired to Tuscany to write his memoirs in Italy—and demanded a further sinecure from the taxpayer to pay for sojourn.

Not because he came out of retirement to tell taxpayers “You better keep paying your taxes” so he could be kept in his retirement in the style to which a lifetime of troughing had made him accustomed.

He was not tried in court on any of those things, more’s the pity, but the bastard did finally find himself in court for defrauding investors of Lombard Finance—his defence, ironically enough, was one of incompetence—and was tried and today found guilty.

Guilty of helping to defraud investors of $127 million. [Full judgement here.]

No, it was not for any of those many other things of which he was culpable. But it’s enough. This is an entity who has never made on honest living, his entire wealth having come out of the pockets of unwilling taxpayers and deluded investors. Such a life demands a deserving final chapter.

Never could schadenfreude have come to a more deserving dirtbag. The only tragedy is that hundreds of investors had to lose their life savings to make it happen.

* * * *

* He won’t be, of course. Being guilty of fraud causing losses to investors of around $227 million will never attract a custodial sentence. Jail is for people who attend a different class of social function.

No, McCully wasn’t there

2012-02-24T09:53:00.001+13:00

There’s been an email thread going around the advertising industry in recent weeks, started when an email from the head one big agency calling his competitors “bastards”—bastards moreover who were going to “steal his staff”—was inadvertently sent to that very bastard.

The email started as an informal internal memo telling colleagues to get down to a certain Auckland careers show before those other bastards stole the hot talent they’d just been talking about. Naturally, the abuse and the error were enough to send the email string viral, with much mirth all round at the schadenfreude involved.

And, this being the advertising industry, it was only natural that the whole thing was a complete set-up. A set-up set up by the very talent hoping to be picked up at the careers show, in collusion with the the heads of those big two advertising agencies who were sponsoring the event.

Now you’ve got to admit, that shows real talent.

But what’s it got to do with Murray McCully and his now very public emails?

Well, the little dwarf certainly has no talent, but he sure is a shifty little fuck. Just shifty enough to make wonder whether anyone really stole them. Just the sort of devious attention-seeker who might think letting his own emails out into the wild might garner him some; with just the sort of machiavellian mind that might think numerous emails about overpaid and overfed diplomats might be a good release about the time you’re about to cut the fat out of MFAT.

After all, his (now former) opposite number in Canberra has said much worse than anything in the fairly tame emails released thus far. The rat fucker.

And the local journalists who swallowed whole the story of them being hacked, making the emails and not the cutting of diplomatic FAT the story, are no less gullible than local ad men. Are they.

GUEST POST: Importers ask government to break strike

2012-02-24T09:35:00.001+13:00

Guest post by Daniel Silva of the Importers Institute

The Importers Institute has today asked the government to pass urgent legislation empowering the Port of Auckland to dismiss striking port workers and contract out the work to private operators.

The Union today threatened to extend a two-week strike into three weeks. During that period, importers and exporters will have to spend many millions of dollars diverting cargo to other ports and airfreight, to keep shops and industry supplied. The exodus of shipping services from Auckland to other ports will accelerate.

This is not a genuine labour dispute for better pay and conditions. What the Union is demanding is quite simply a monopoly on wharf work, usurping the right of management to manage the Port. In effect, they are striking for the right to run the Port for the benefit of the Union. Their members will get nothing from this action, except for one month's lost wages and most probably redundancy.

The Importers Institute asked the Port management what the cost would be of moving the work over to private contractors without delay. We were told that is not possible. Under current legislation, a Court would probably force the Port to take back the striking workers. This is apparently something to do with the 'good faith' nonsense legislated by Margaret Wilson a few years ago.

We call it nonsense because the Union has been guilty of the utmost bad faith. They have lied through their teeth concerning the average remuneration of their members (over $90,000) as well as pretty much about everything else concerning this dispute.

The current government has had plenty of time to reverse the legislative excesses of the last government, but chose instead to smile and wave. The time has now come for the government to assume its responsibilities and prevent a bunch of industrial thugs from holding New Zealand to ransom.

We already have legislation that prohibits some forms of industrial action, for example sympathy strikes. That has not stopped the managers of the Union from going off to Sydney to ask their comrades in other countries to boycott New Zealand. The government's obligation is clear and urgent.

Daniel Silva is the head of the Importers Institute, an informal national association of New Zealand importing companies keeping members informed on topical issues of interest, and representing importers’ interests before policy makers and the public.

Drew House, by Simon Laws

2012-02-24T01:30:00.000+13:00

The Australian climate offers opportunity especially for unique holiday houses. Like this one for photographer Marian Drew and family by Simon Laws of Anthill Construction for “a one of a kind campsite” in Seventy South, near Gladstone and right next to “the most northerly surf break on the east Australian coast, at the start of the Great Barrier Reef.”

Prefabricated housing doesn’t have to be dull.

[Hat tip the Organic Architecture blog]

Slavery, secession, states’ “rights” and those who (still) defend them

2012-02-23T16:19:00.001+13:00

Around seven-score and twelve years ago the Confederate slave states of the United States America seceded from the Union in a bid to protect their alleged right to own human beings as property, and brought about the first war of the industrial age.

The obscenity of slavery brought about a war on industrial scale that became the bloody pointer to the “Great War” and its charnel houses on the Somme, at Passchendaele, at Verdun—a war about which there is nothing to celebrate except its end—and attitudes that still taint America today.

The flag of the slave states, the Confederate ~~‘Stars and Bars’~~ Flag of War, is now largely just a symbol of the Bogan. Thank goodness. But astonishingly, there are today still otherwise learned folk about who defend the Confederacy on whose behalf troops took it into battle. Who defend the Secession. Who defend, explicitly, the state collectivism of so called “states' rights” and, implicitly, the barnyard collectivism of state-sanctioned racism.

Disgracefully, some call themselves lovers of liberty. Unbelievably, many of them are happy to pretend the war was never about slavery. Bizarrely, many of them camp out at the Mises Institute (motto taken from Mises’ own, i.e.: “Never Give In to Evil, But Proceed Against it Ever More Strongly”) and help to poison both the name of a good man and the Institute’s otherwise excellent economic work.

Fortunately, a short and easy read by one Jonathan Blanks demolishes this posturing. If this issue is one you’ve ever followed, then I commend it to your attention:

Why “Libertarian” Defenses of the Confederacy and “States’ Rights” are Incoherent
– Jonathan Blanks, CATO Institute

They are all prostitutes. Well, two of them are.

2012-02-23T11:43:00.001+13:00

Whale Oil has done sterling work hunting down the real story behind the case of Tania Wysocki. Turns out the only real prostitutes in this story are Herald journalist Simon Collins and Labour MP Jacinda Ardern,who between them pimped out her story and those of many other undeserving poor in the much celebrated Herald series.

Anyway, after driving out and listening to Tania, something neither Jacinda nor Collins bothered to do, (Collins having written his story on the way and then doing more talking than listening), Whale Oil has a very different story than the one that was pimped out. Take a look:

Ayn Rand was an “illegal” immigrant…

2012-02-23T10:58:00.001+13:00

There’s a few things that US Republican candidates (and other antediluvian anti-immigration bigots) can learn from Ayn Rand—one of them, reckons Shikha Dalmia, is Ayn Rand being an “illegal” immigrant…

[Sorry, video won't embed, so click the pic to watch it at the WSJ site.]

(Bottom line of Rand’s story: you have no more reason to tell the truth to an immigration officer than you do an SS office looking for your child.)

[Hat tip Y. Lee]

It’s still all Greek to some people [update 3]

2012-02-23T09:03:00.001+13:00

You’ll have heard it reported in recent days that Greece has been “saved.” That the Greek government has been bailed out by the European Central Bank and the EU Rescue Fund (EFSF), that things will be tough for a while, but the Greeks will now be able to dig themselves out of their hole.

Nothing could be further from the truth—and the fact Gareth Morgan subscribes to this fiction (among three other fictions) is almost certain proof the outcome won’t be all rosy.

What has just happened in this second Greek bailout (remember how the first bailout was going to save things?) is another enormous tranche of borrowing lent to the Greek government to save it from its previous enormous borrowing. And if that sounds stupid, it is—but only if you think this is a rescue of Greece.

It is not a rescue of Greece.

Because it is not so much a bailout of Greece by European central bankers, but a bailout of European bankers put together by European central bankers—with German taxpayers picking up the tab. Greece is now officially a ward of the international community—and as a ward its only job now is to make its guardians rich, or at least to provide a conduit for whatever of its mis-loaned money its guardians can claw back through good old EuroPolitik.

Face it, there was no other way European bankers were going to get any of their money out of Greece—not with Greek 1-Year Bond Yield having just hit 682%. So when you hear bankers whooping it up because the “rescue” plan has gone through just remember to whom the lifebelt has just been thrown. And it’s not the Greeks.

Frankly, the best thing the Greeks could do now is default, and then leave the Euro Currency Zone. And the best thing German taxpayers could do is let them—and then leave the zone themselves.

NB: Liberty Scott has an excellent summary of how things came to this pass, and how a Greek default would help:

“Greece for Dummies.” – L I B E R T Y S C O T T

PS: Oh, and in case you were wondering … yes, Virginia, bailing out banks is inflationary.

UPDATE 1: Mish summarises the options:

The sooner Greece exits the euro, the more likely Greece will be able to prevent still more capital flight. The smart money has already left. (Please see Germany Draws Up Plans for Greece to Leave Euro; Athens Rehearses the Nightmare of Default; Merkel's Denial Rings Hollow.)…
The best solution would be for Germany to exit the Eurozone first, but that is not going to happen.
The next best option would be for a simultaneous bank holiday involving all Greece, Portugal. Spain, and Ireland at the same time as noted in Why Greece Must Exit the Eurozone, How it Will Happen (and Why Portugal and Spain Will Follow); Does the Euro Act Like a Gold Standard?
That too is highly unlikely. Thus the odds of a protracted, one-by-one, and very costly breakup of the eurozone is the most likely outcome whether or not Greece survives the Ides of March.
For further discussion including an analysis of why it would be best for Germany to exit the Eurozone, please see Eurozone Breakup Logistics (Never Believe Anything Until It's Officially Denied).

Short of a real gold standard emerging, my own opinion is that best economic outcome would see the more solvent countries (solvent only in relative terms, you understand) such as Germany, Finland, Austria, The Netherlands etc. leaving the Eurozone to go back either to their original currencies or a common one, which would quickly find their/its own value; leaving the less solvent, the halt and the lame, to soldier on under the (relative) discipline of a bargain basement Euro.

It would certainly make a southern European holiday something of a bargain.

UPDATE 2: Philip Bagus on “The Future of the Euro”:

“The problems of the eurozone are ultimately malinvestments…    even before the crisis, governments had accumulated malinvestments due to their excessive welfare spending.
    Two causes had incentivized social spending in Europe’s periphery. The first cause is low interest rates… an expansionary monetary policy by the European Central Bank (ECB) and … an implicit bailout guarantee…
    The second cause is that the euro is a tragedy of the commons.”

UPDATE 3: An overview on what just happened in Greece from Krazy Economy, “A Note on Greek Banks Recapitalization”

As an overview, here is what we have:
The Greeks (actually you can insert any European Common Market country you want because the pattern is consistent throughout) borrowed from anywhere they could for a massive spending spree.
They required the banks to be a major lender.
They required the banks to have little or no reserves against the loans to the government.
The government can’t repay the loans.
The banks are failing.
The government, with money acquired from elsewhere because it has done stupid, insane things, is going to buy the failed [Greek] banks.
These banks are even more tied to government policies than before.
The government has ownership and control of the banks.
Does anyone think that the Greek banks will be better off?

Meanwhile, and this is perhaps the main point of the whole fiasco, the reality evasion in high places and low:

The failure of putting two and two together is a common theme in the entire European debt crisis. It is most blatant with the Greeks.
This week there have been more “strikes,” riots, and protests against the terms required by the agencies that would bail out the Greeks. Many of the chanted slogans and posters and banners declare that the foreigners are dictators and imperialists. The protestors want the politicians to “resist”!
    The Greeks appear like angry four year olds who have been told that they can’t have the toy on the shelf because mommy doesn’t have the money. How and what are the politicians suppose to resist? They are suppose to resist the requirement that they do not incur more debt. They are suppose to resist the requirement that they try to pay back their existing debt. They are suppose to resist the requirement that if they are given money they spend it wisely instead of like a drunken sailor (my apologies to sailors).
    The Greek protestors have no contact with reality. None. They have no idea that money has some connection to real things. That real things are made by someone who wants to be paid for their efforts. That borrowing actually means that the lender expects to be paid back.
    The Greek country is a testament to modern education and economic “thinking.”

One year on, and Christchurch is still on welfare [updated]

2012-02-22T15:05:00.001+13:00

I think I agree with Lindsay Mitchell and others who feel uneasy about the mawkishness of the widely publicised public commemorations one year on from Christchurch’s February 22 earthquake. As she says,

The commemoration of tragedy, not confined to Christchurch by any means, is starting to take on a strange religiosity in a largely secular country.

To which reaction I add my disgust at the entities grandstanding in the commemoration who have done nothing since the tragedy but get in the way of individuals trying to recover from the disaster.

The earthquake was the first disaster. It has delivered a second one: the political decisions made in the aftermath.

From day one on, the earthquake has delivered to the kind of person who feels drawn to clipboards and jackboots the power over others they could never get in real life. In fact, virtually the whole panoply of government, central and local, has been ranged against those trying to recover—from Gauleiter Brownlee and Boss Parker on down, with the clipboard wielders in the van: standing athwart individuals trying to rebuild staying “Stop!”

Folk in houses only partially damaged, or not damaged at all, are told by council thugs to “Get Out.” “By order!”

Folk in other houses are still waiting to be told by government’s minions whether or not they will be allowed to rebuild, repair or remove themselves, or whether (or not) EQC will bother paying their repairers.

Builders have been left to sit on their hands while all this happens, since there’s precious little rebuilding going on, or allowed to go on. Not just due to the dithering of EQC et al. Right round the city, while people desperately seek new housing and queue for the few rentals around, there is good land to build houses on. But it can’t be built on and it won’t be built on, because the council’s overlords and underplanners have deemed it all off limits: “off limits” because to build here would violate their precious “strategic plan” for the city—after earthquakes strong enough to shake the city to the core, but not strong enough to shake a “strategic plan” drawn up long before earthquakes were even thought about, and dangerously infected even then with the poison of so-called “Smart Growth.”

Meanwhile, those belatedly selected by the government’s mandarins to build “temporary accommodation” for Christchurch’s evicted hordes have finally coughed up around the city what can only be called refugee camps—the all-too predictable sub-standard apologies of places that will quickly become the slums of tomorrow, while helping to kill residents’ dreams of todays. [Read David Haywood talk here about his move into the spirit-killing Linwood Park “Temporary” Earthquake Village he’s photographed at right.]

Touring around the outskirts of Christchurch one year on an outsider can only be impressed at all the energy and activity going on. Going on in all the homes and businesses located and relocated there on the outskirts, frequently over the opposition of planners who wish them elsewhere.

This is where the real business of Christchurch is now being done—in rubble used as concert chambers, garages being used as factories, in factory units being used as offices, in offices being used as shopping malls, in houses being used as shops offices, factories and over-cramped boarding houses. But the council’s town planners and earthquake mandarins haven’t helped any of this process in any way at all; in the days after the earthquake they stopped owners demolishing dangerous buildings, and since the second they’ve done all they can to hinder these necessary and spontaneous “re-zoning” of activities within the city. And it’s fair to say the council, CERA and Gerry Brownlee have treated business owners with property still inside the CBD with nothing but contempt. Little wonder these business and property owners have been protesting for virtually the whole of the twelve months since the second big earthquake, and for four months before that.

So to see all these various lackies and sawdust caesars standing up on their hind legs today spouting about their good works keeping Christchurch on its knees is too much for me to stomach.

One year on Christchurch continues to struggle. What the earthquake couldn’t do, governments central and local have done instead. The first disaster was the earthquakes. The second disaster is the political decisions made in their aftermath.

Give people back their lives. Give them back their property rights. Discard this pathetic idea that only government can do things—when all it does do is either tax, ban or subsidise. Take Christchurch off its knees, take it off welfare, make it an Enterprise Zone for Galt’s sake …. and then get the hell out of the way.

That’s my advice for the mandarins one year on. Just get the hell out of the way.

UPDATE: Auckland council without an earthquake is considering doing what Christchurch council after an earthquake is not considering, i.e., relaxing (albeit only very slightly) the planners’ ring fence around the city.

But even these baby steps are beyond the pale for Christchurch’s planners.

Stephen Fry, Steven Joyce and Government broadband

2012-02-22T11:59:00.001+13:00

He loves gadgets and he’s tweeted from many places around the world, but Stephen Fry was less than satisfied with government broadband here in EnZed. And he reckons we EnZedders should rise up and take on those responsible.

“You wouldn't put up with potholes in your roads,” he says, though we do, don’t we, “so you shouldn't have to put up with Third World broadband standards as well.”

But we do, don’t we. We not only put up with it, you vote for it.

So who’s responsible for the potholes in local broadband? Well, it’s fashionable to blame the private telcos, of course. But consider that around six years ago, right when those private telcos were considering plans to roll out the next generation of broadband across the country, Labour’s David Cunliffe began dismembering Telecom—to the loud applause of Labour hacks, National stalwarts and Telecom’s competitors—and announcing plans to “roll out” government fibre.

Would-be private investors in next-generation broadband began quietly reconsidering their own investment plans. Why put your own head in the noose when you could reap the benefit of a taxpayer “investment.”

Then around four years ago in a throwback to its Think-Big Muldoonist past the incoming National government began announcing that it would be they who would be “rolling out” the next generation of high-speed, bells-and-whistles broadband, the “roll out” of which would be a flagship policy of their first term.

Potential users and rival telcos alike waited with bated breath while nothing continued to happen. And now that the former promoter of National’s next generation of high-speed, bells-and-whistles broadband Steven Joyce has moved on to bigger, better and brassier things, the non-roll out has been left to first-time minister Amy Adams—who instead of being photographed in front of new high-tech equipment sits in her new office writing press releases boasting :

The Government has set aside $1.5 billion for ultra-fast broadband, and aims to have the service reaching 75 percent of New Zealand in the next 3 5 7 10 years… contracts had been locked in, the rollout was under way, and competitive wholesale prices had been secured, but it was up to the industry to ensure New Zealanders got the quality and performance they expected at prices they could afford…

Or in other words, “we’ve spent lots of your money already with only paper promises and electioneering hype to show for it. But stop whining, because you’ll get it when you get it.”

At least she recognises, if only partially, that government itself delivers nothing. That in the end it is still “up to the industry.” But perhaps she and other EnZedders might reflect that the industry might have done better and much earlier—that big private investment might have been directed into this area much sooner—if big government hadn’t been flexing its muscles for the last six years in the hope of a political windfall.

After all, it looks like up to $33 billion could be the real return to NZ from the investment, if it ever comes to pass, some of which would have rubbed off on private investors. But when any private investment would have been drowned out by government and (no doubt) damned by luddite nationalists in every party, and when NZ’s largest telecommunications company is being dismembered and partially nationalised as a reward for owning and having rolled out the last national network, it’s no wonder no private investor wanted to take the risk.

As a blogger who’s now left the building once said:

If telecommunications companies think someone is going to steal their networks,they won't build any more of them! It's really simple. Now we are stuck with waiting for the government to waste my tax money building something that every private interest is now too scared to.

Former Telstra Australia head Sol Trujillo said much the same when similar threats were directed his way from the Australian government. He:

derided Kevin Rudd's election-promised "partnership" to build an across-Australian broadband network, calling it a "kumbaya, holding hands" theory. It might have been an election promise, but looks like no- one stopped to ask the company supposedly being partnered. Said Trujillo: "We are only going to participate in the things that we own and control."
Mr Trujillo, firmly backed by chairman Donald McGauchie, said Telstra was happy to invest $4 billion or more of its own money rather than the taxpayers' - but only on its terms and pricing…
Australia needs a fast, modern telecoms infrastructure [says Trujillo]. And the quickest way to get there is to allow unfettered competition. Mr Trujillo says that America and Europe learned long ago that “to foster competition the government cannot control the levers, it must let the market work. Virtually every other country has moved towards less regulation in telecoms” …
Worried that giving rivals a free ride would undermine his profits, Mr Trujillo is threatening not to lay the fibre: “My duty is to our shareholders—including 1.6m ordinary Australians. I will only invest where I can earn an economic return.”

So when private investors aren’t able to earn a return? Or they are (falsely) led to believe they can be given an unearned free ride on someone else’s network? Then you end up where you are today. As our late friend Anna Woolf said back in 2008: Remove the Red Tape, the Fibre Optics will follow. Or don’t, and it won’t.

So when you’re complaining about your broadband service today, it’s government broadband you’re complaining about.

Potholes and all.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR'S: A Book Worth Buying

2012-02-21T12:04:00.001+13:00

Libz leader Dr Richard McGrath returns with fire in his belly, his regular column, and a book you just have to buy…

Nanny State has had it good recently, what with the censorship of “disgusting” images of Piri Weepu bottle feeding his infant daughter; the blanking out of “horrific” footage of signage advertising Coca-Cola and fried chicken; and the hysterically defensive reaction following revelations fewer people have been out cycling, and more of them are suffering injury, since cycle helmets (i.e., knob hats) were made compulsory.

Thank goodness for people like James Bartholomew, who documents the far-reaching and almost unerringly negative consequences of state interference in our lives. Along with commentator Lindsay Mitchell, I had the pleasure of dining with James in Wellington a few weeks back during his brief visit conducting research for a new book he is writing. His pet topic is the welfare state in all its forms, and to prepare for James' visit I ordered a copy of his chronicle of Britain's decline from a once great nation to the 'sick man of Europe', entitled The Welfare State We're In.

It was a great, if sobering read.

Published in 2004, the volume traces the origins of the welfare state to the time of Henry VIII and his seizure of monasteries previously functioning as charity hospitals and emergency welfare providers. Bartholomew reveals the increasingly coercive nature of the State in funding and providing health care, unemployment and disability compensation, education, housing and social support.

Unfortunately, as is plainly evident to anyone who cares to look, in each and every area in which the government has intervened - albeit often with compassion and a desire to work side by side with private providers and charities - the result has been the crowding out of the voluntary sector, and an increase in death and misery for the intended beneficiaries.

In other worlds, state welfare is not welfare.

Neither is state education education. After decades of state-funded 'education' in the UK and more than a hundred years of compulsory education, one in four adult Britons is functionally illiterate (sound familiar?). Yet before the advent of government welfare and state education, about 85% of industrial workers in the UK were already members of friendly societies providing welfare and support for members and their families. Since that time, the working class has been taxed into poverty, with many of them unable to make provision for a pension and purchase unemployment insurance.

A pervasive and recurrent theme throughout the book is that the welfare state was not needed in the first place! Where people had the means and the necessity to provide for down times, they did so, and gave huge amounts of their disposable income to the less well-off.

Bartholomew likens the avoidable deaths in Britain's National 'Health' Service to 'a train crash every day,' estimating over more 15,000 souls dying annually than the mortality that would occur under a system of non-government hospitals and primary care. (Sound familiar?)

He documents the terrible results of laws that encourage broken families, and the often horrific consequences when the offspring of solo parents are placed in the care of non-biologically-related males. Most telling are the examples that highlight a general decline in public morality ('the falling off of decency') as a result of intergenerational unemployment and a breakdown in the passing down of values such as hard work, thrift and personal responsibility.

The author relates low levels of taxation to high rates of growth, using the example among others of the World's Greatest Ever Bureaucrat and his hand in creating the world's freest country. James' description of Britain's underperformance in every facet of human advancement - including medical research - since the rise of the welfare state, makes sad reading.

I recommend this book to all readers. It is packed with facts, memorable anecdotes and killer quotes, and is a valuable historical reference. One comes away with a much greater appreciation of the root causes of the United Kingdom's current malaise. In many senses, the origins date back centuries. But it was David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill (who would have guessed?) that really got the ball rolling in the early twentieth century. Once Labour took power in 1945 Britain's fate was sealed, but the die was already cast.

Couldn't happen here, could it?

Dr Richard McGrath is a Masterton GP and the leader of NZ’s Libertarianz Party. When threatened with extreme violence he can sometimes be made to write a column.

Unaffordable housing? No wonder!

2012-02-20T11:13:00.001+13:00

ONCE AGAIN BERNARD HICKEY offers the insalubrious example of a commentator who knows something is wrong, yet knows nothing about how to fix it. Nothing that is beyond yelling “Something Must be Done!” And by “something he means “someone.” And by someone, he means the government.

First, the problem:

Auckland and Christchurch now have massive shortages of waterproof and undamaged homes that regular families can afford to own…
    The Department of Building and Housing forecast this month that New Zealand needs to build around 20,000 to 23,000 housing units a year over the next five years to keep pace with population growth. Meanwhile New Zealand has been building at a rate below 15,000 a year for the last three years…
    The crisis has intensified since 1999 with the introduction of the Metropolitan Urban Limit and the revelations that an entire generation of homes is leaky and will have to be either reclad or rebuilt…
    This crisis is playing out in a variety of ways.
    There is, of course, a rise in homeless numbers. But the more obvious increase is simply in the price of homes and rents. Both are rising quicker than the wider inflation rate and price rises outside of Auckland and Christchurch. There is an inevitable reaction to this, which is for young Auckland and Christchurch workers and families, those who are not property owners, to simply give up.

He is right that rents are rocketing and new homes are becoming less and less affordable. The annual Demographia study has shown for years that even during this Great Recession house prices as a proportion of income in New Zealand’s cities are among the highest in the developed world—and increasing*. And the Productivity Commission (from whom Hickey got his figures) point out that “for younger people and those on lower incomes there is a missing step on the property ladder, particularly in Auckland. The chances of them ever purchasing their first home are decreasing.”

He is right, too, that while would-be home-owners burn, governments in Auckland and Wellington continue to fiddle—with train sets in Auckland, and with a pathetic, partial, poorly-done privatisation programme in Wellington.

The problem then is this: what is to be done? And the problem with Hickey is, he has no bloody idea.

So like every simple statist who Wants Something Done, he simply cries that Gummint Should Do Something!

“Government-owned land would need to be opened up and town planners overruled,” says Hickey, getting it half right, before heading down the route of statists immemorial in calling for “taxpayer money … to be invested and lots of it.” Presumably building those affordable houses that the government has made it unprofitable for private builders to build, using resources that will cost more than the sale price.

It’s the same “solution” put forward by Fran O’Sullivan (left) a few months back when she called for private land to be nationalised—expropriated outright by the grey ones—newly stolen land on which the Gummint Should Do Something.

Like O’Sullivan, Hickey is a business columnist. Yet just like her he has no idea how business works.

And they both write and talk about politics. But neither apparently have any conception of how politicians have caused the very “market failure” they describe. Because while calling for government to fix the problem by doing more, they never even bothered to ask themselves this fundamental question: whether it is government activity itself that has largely caused the problem.

And it has.

IN A NUTSHELL, THE big problem is that government has gone beyond right: it has passed laws giving the Reserve Bank the power to print money, bureaucrats the power to prescribe the methods and materials by which houses are built, and planners the power to control and restrict people’s land.

Let’s look at these one at a time.

In recent years, the new money printed by the Reserve Bank (i.e., monetary inflation) has spilled over into the housing market, producing one housing “bubble” and thousands of NZers deluded into thinking their wealth has increased.

Meanwhile, the Department of Building and Housing were given the power to tell builders how to build houses. Rather than deregulation, which never happened here, builders have endured a flood of new regulation: producing pages and pages of gold-plated building regulations and a rise in the cost to build a house that has out-paced even the rate of house price rises.

And while the printing presses were going overtime printing new regulations and new money, the town planners were busy strangling land-owners and ring-fencing cities under the new powers given them by the Resource Management: the power, essentially, to restrict development of new, affordable housing while charging builders and developers more for the “privilege” of trying to build something on their own land.

THE NET RESULT OF this three-pronged attack on property was to pump up demand with all those freshly-printed dollars while restricting the supply of the stuff they wanted to spend them on.

No wonder we saw a housing bubble.

No wonder price inflation on housing (which is all those price really increases were) went through the roof.

No wonder so many people were deluded by the price inflation into thinking they were becoming rich-instead of just seeing their dollars devalued.

No wonder land prices now account for up to 60% of the cost of a house in Auckland.

No wonder new homes tend to be at the top-end of the market.

No wonder things began to become insane, with the cost to build a house beginning to outstrip even the cost people were prepared to pay for it—meaning the model for speculative housing** (which has for decades been building the means by the vast majority of new affordable homes was built) is now permanently broken.

And as a simple measure of when affordable housing will be built again, it will be when the model for speculative house building returns.

How do we do that?

Simple. We stop what should never have been started.

We get rid of fiat money; we get rid of zoning; we shut planners up and put a stake through the heart of their Resource Management Act; we stop fighting so-called “sprawl” with “Urban Walls” and instead leave people free to develop their own land according to demand.***

In short, we give power back to builders and property owners to do what they do best while taking power away from those who only get in their way.

Yes, government could do more. It could do a whole lot more by doing a whole heck of a lot less.

And Bernard Hickey could either write less, or learn more.

* * * * *

* As the Annual Demographia Surveys ( www.demographia.com ) clearly illustrate - households should not be paying any more than 3 times their annual household income to house themselves - with mortgage loads around 2.5 times. Unfortunately in NZ’s major cities home-owners are now paying from 6 to 8 times their annual household income to house themselves , a figure that increases ever year.

** What is speculative house building? It’s when Joe Builder buys a site, builds a house on it, and sells it to Mr and Mrs New-Home-Owner for more than he’s shelled out—giving him a small profit which he can use to build his next one. This is how “spec” houses have been built since Adam was a lad—but now can’t be.

** The Productivity Commission in its recent report on affordable housing is only half-way there with its own solution, which would at least be a start. The Commission’s key recommendations include:

The urgent need for more land to be opened up for housing, especially in urban areas, because sections now average about 40% to 60% of the cost of a house.
Reconsideration of Auckland’s draft spatial plan. Auckland faces significant housing affordability challenges and the Commission found its current plan, with a target of accommodating 75% of new homes within existing urban boundaries, will be difficult to reconcile with affordable housing.
Improved processes for consenting, to speed up the service and lower costs.
Improving how local council development charges for infrastructure are calculated and applied, including making them reviewable. The Commission found the current model has too much regional variation and is not transparent.

Perhaps Mr Hickey and Ms O’Sullivan could read them?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Creating a job is easy. Creating a remunerative job is not.”

2012-02-19T10:03:00.001+13:00

The 'Consumptionist' Dead End
Jonathan Hoenig: Why the persistent belief that the economy will grow as a result of government spending is flawed.
If you keep repeating a lie long enough, people eventually start to accept it as truth. So even as government debt hit new record highs and bankrupt entitlement states like Greece collapse, how else to explain the persistent belief among many politicians and policymakers that … the economy grows as a result of government spending….

FRIDAY MORNING RAMBLE: Take a look at these!

2012-02-17T09:36:00.001+13:00

Another short ramble around a few things that caught my eye this week…

A new report suggests an earthquake in Wellington would dwarf the economic damage of the Canterbury earthquake . The report, however, takes no account of the enormous economic benefit to the country of the complete destruction of Wellington’s government departments. (We can dream, can’t we?)
Cost of a major Wellington quake? $40b – N Z H E R A L D
Stolen memos and fabricated documents from the climate sceptic Heartland Institute reveals that private individuals who agree with the aims of the Institute gave them money (shock, horror!). Meanwhile, the Institute advanced funds to fellow skeptics like Anthony Watts and NZer Bob Carter to the tune of $88,000 and $1600 respectively, giving such scientists an unfair advantage in over the $1,2 million sucked from the taxpayer by James Hansen and the $300 million warmist campaign of Al Gore.
In other words, “What the Heartland document show is how badly warmists have been beaten by those with a fraction of the resources they’ve enjoyed.”
Hippies hate Heartland - D A I L Y B A Y O N E T
The Anatomy of a Global Warming Smear – Anthony Watts, W A T T S U P W I T H T H A T
If the philosophical father of America was John Locke, then that of New Zealand was utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Murray Rothbard examines the thought, economics and failings of the man whose corpse now entertains students at University College, London.
The case of Jeremy Bentham, should be instructive both to historians of this funny little country, and to “that host of economists that attempt to weld utilitarian philosophy with free market economics.”
Jeremy Bentham: From Laissez-Faire to Statism – Murray Rothbard, M I S E S DA I L Y
The Ayn Rand Institute is thrilled to announce two new ARI ventures “that we believe have the potential to make a huge impact on the fight for capitalism”: a new book, and a new blog.
Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government
– by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins
Laissez-Faire: The Uncompromised Case for Capitalism – A R I

Yaron Answers: What is Capitalism and Why Do You Say It’s Moral?

We’re near the endgame. But when will the tipping point into currency collapse begin? Author of the Paper Money Collapse Detlev Schlicter reckons the EuroZone crisis is just the beginning. “The tipping point comes either when concern about inflation or concern about sovereign solvency (in major countries) reaches a certain point. When people sell bonds and demand higher yields we are in the endgame.” Watch him and his interviewer here:

Steve Coogan used to be a comedian. Now? Not so much.
What the Dickens has Coogan become? – Tim Black, S P I K E D
You want music with a joyful sense of life? You want musical fluency? Then the Hot Club of France are your men. Here’s some rare film of the genii doing one of their quieter numbers (filmed, unfortunately, by a cameraman eager not to show Django’s unique fretwork dexterity).

Check back soon for more…

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Seagull? No, it’s a duck.

2012-02-16T15:27:00.001+13:00

Don’t look now. Dr Richard McGrath is back with his formerly regular column. This week: Is that a bird, or a plane? No, it’s a duck!

Assuming Trevor Mallard still possesses any shred of integrity after a lifetime in the public trough, then his exposure this week as a 'ticket-scalper' will only move forward its inevitable extinction.

In 2006 The Mallard stated quite baldly: "When there is bulk buying of tickets to [major] events simply for the purpose of profiteering, scalping is a rip-off that could deny many people the opportunity to see [the] event."

It’s now revealed he made a tidy TradeMe profit on a major Wellington event happening this weekend.

In 2011 his party went to the polls demanding those accruing profit on their assets be his hard by the grey ones.

And despite him "struggling to see the difference in principle between tickets and houses,” he sees no problem now with either the sale or his price-gouging.

If any integrity is left him after his playing away from home and his court appearance for assault, his lies about “bag men” and cash for policies and his attack on Brethren church-goers as “chinless scarf wearers, then to retain whagt little is left he should at least hand over the dirty profits to the ticket issuer, or perhaps pay a contribution to the government based on capital gain—a voluntary proposition the IRD website helpfully makes possible.

Not that I se any problem myself, mind you, in either ticket scalpers or profit-takers. Unlike the daily labours of politicians, both help the market.

In my view, and against the previously stated views of The Duck, all laws that impede a free, uncoerced market in goods should be scrapped—including any that prohibit the reselling of concert tickets. Ironically, under a government 'led by my Libertarianz party, Scalper' Mallard would be able to sell as many concert tickets to unsuspecting teenagers as he liked. But not a government headed by his own party.

It is difficult however to see how an unapologetic Mallard will possibly be able to explain his way out of this latest disaster, unless of course he truly believes there should be one law for politicians and another law for the rest of us.

Perhaps now the Hutt South Scalper has realised the virtues of the market first-hand he could do the decent thing for a change: "So how about a ticket to the Lady Gaga concert for my daughter?"

Dr Richard McGrath is a Masterton GP and the leader of New Zealand’s Libertarianz Party.
When prodded hard, he writes a ~~regular~~ ~~semi-regular~~ very occasional column for NOT PC.

Blasphemy

2012-02-15T10:59:00.001+13:00

A man has just been deported from one country to another to face the death penalty for a crime that is the ultimate in victimless crimes, i.e., a crime that has no victim.

The man has been deported from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia to face a charge that he blasphemed, i.e., that he defamed Allah in a tweet, i.e., that he “insulted” a non-existent being.

Which means he defamed a victim that doesn’t exist, in a medium few if any in Saudi Arabia are allowed to read, from a jurisdiction that has nothing to with them.

And Islam is still a religion of peace.

Mojo

2012-02-15T09:28:00.001+13:00

Much discussion this morning about the MP with the coolest name in Parliament, Mojo Mathers, and whether you or I should pay for an electronic note-taking system so the new Green MP can do her job.

She’s deaf, you see, and can’t do the job properly without one. It will cost us around $30,000, apparently—about the size of Bellamy’s bar bill on a slow afternoon.

So fair enough, surely. It’s a small enough sum; it can be taken out of the existing Parliamentary Budget without any problems; and this is supposed to be a representative democracy, surely, and when folk from all walks of life are in Parliament their democracy should provide whatever’s need to do their job, no?

No. Not really. Not exactly.

Because Speaker Lockwood Smith is reportedly examining whether to impose a new obligation on taxpayers, rather than spending less elsewhere. Like subsiding Bellamy’s, for instance. (Bad Lockwood.)

And yes, it’s a small sum. But even a small sum has to be authorised; has to be taken from someone. And there is nothing in law to justify a new imposition like this. (Laws about subsidising the trough at Bellamy’s on the other hand…)

And fundamentally, small though the sum involved is, the argument about spending it goes back to the nature of government and of parliament ,and and what they’re there for.

Government’s job is not to raise the self-esteem of its participants—its job is to protect individual rights. That’s their only justifiable job.

So Parliament’s job, in this sense, is not simply to be a club wherein participants are made to feel better about themselves. It’s not a place where you go to raise your self-esteem. It is instead an arm of government (at least in principle if not in practice) that helps keep the other arms somewhat in check—to ensure they are protecting individual rights.

And frankly, then as long as taxpayers continue to vote people in to do that job (at least in theory) it doesn’t matter whether you’re deaf, dumb, blind or transgender. If you’ve been voted in to do the job by taxpayers (and even some Green voters do pay taxes) then you should have the tools to do that job.

After all, there’s extra reinforcing needed for Parekura Horomia’s seat. And we’re obliged to pay for that, aren’t we?

Aren’t we?

* * * * *

* Paid for by those taxpayers who voted for them, ideally.

Come on baby, be my econo-Valentine

2012-02-13T14:00:00.001+13:00

It’s not quite “come on sucker, lick my battery” stuff, but economists are warming up for Valentine’s Day with the #FedValentines tag on Twitter [hat tip Offsetting Behaviour]. My favourites, from the SanFrancisco Fed:

I'm going to extraordinary measures to increase your stimulus.

My love is elastic, my commitment too big to fail.

And from NPR’s Planet Money:

But, soft! What light through yonder discount window breaks? It is the East, and Ben is the sun.

I'll be your lover of last resort.

And the Marvin Gayesque:

When I get that feeling I want quantitative easing.

With those out of the way, Craig Biddle identifies a more serious point: the connection between Say’s Law and Romantic Love (and you were going to say you’d just been thinking along those lines, huh?):

The realm of romance, like that of economics, is governed by Say’s Law. Supply constitutes demand. What you produce (supply) is what you have to trade in the marketplace (demand.
    Say’s law does not mean that if you create something people will want it—or “if you build it they will come.” It means that if you want to trade with others, you have to produce something with which to trade—something of value. The values you create—whether computers or works of art or educational services—constitute your demand on the goods and services created by others. What you create is what you have to offer in trade for what others create.
    The same is true in romance. If you want a relationship of mutual love, you have to produce something with which to trade—something that a good person will want and be able to love. The one and only demand you can exert in the realm of romance is what you have made of yourself. That is your “supply”; it’s what you bring to the table.
    This is not an analogy; it is the literal truth. And it applies to both mind and body…
    If we want a wonderful, lasting romantic relationship—if we want to fall in love and stay in love with a great girl or guy—then we have to make ourselves of value to such a person.
    Supply constitutes demand. “Take what you want and pay for it”….

* But maybe if Flight of the Conchords were to try econo-ditties as well as Robo-boogie?

Peace activists?

2012-02-13T10:24:00.001+13:00

Yes, folks, the trial of the Urewera 18, 16, 15, 4 has finally got under way this morning in Auckland’s High Court.

So we may finally hear some facts about what this motley lot are accused of, rather than the self-serving soft-soaping they and their chums have been peddling on their behalf.

It has now been four and a half years since the 18 were arrested. Four and a half years! Four and a half years in which the crown muddled while defendants and their lawyers and their friends in the media churned out press releases, interviews and media events in their defence. In the absence of a real trial we had instead a trial by media—a “trial” in which defendants were feted while all the substantive evidence against them was suppressed at the behest of their own lawyers!

Law has been very much the loser in this case.

But let’s not accept any crocodile tears about how long it’s taken for this crew to finally get before the court—like the crocodile tears John Minto et al were crying this morning about how tough it’s been for them to be on bail for so long. Because right from day one of this whole debacle, the Urewera 18, 16, 15, 4 and their lawyers have been using every delaying tactic in the book. (That their requests for suppression only delayed proceedings even longer puts their crocodile tears now over the delays into damning perspective.) But if a justice system cannot pull together a case in four years, while fending off the shysters out looking for a loophole, that’s a pretty serious indictment of the system’s failure.

And while out on bail Tame Iti was allowed to dance his way around Europe on the taxpayer.

Only in New Zealand, one suspects, would a man facing charges of participating in an organised criminal group, unlawful possession of firearms and possession of restricted weapons be allowed to swan off around Europe on a dance tour while taxpayers sit here at home picking up his tab.

So let’s hope we finally do hear some facts in coming days. Or else we’ll be left to conclude only that our “justice” system is little more than a laughing stock.

That’s a hell of a price for a train set

2012-02-13T09:35:00.001+13:00

“Socialist governments traditionally make a financial
mess. They always run out of other people’s money.”
- Margaret Thatcher

His ambition, he said, was to make Auckland the world’s most liveable city.

It seems, however, that after dreaming up a new train set, a fancy new bridge and various other fantasies, mayor Len Brown is instead intent on making Auckland among the world’s most expensive cities in which to live—with petrol, tax and rate hikes mooted to make up the $10-15 billion shortfall between reality and his fantasies.

And this is on top of the general rates rise he and his minions agreed last year to impose on us this year.

Nice, huh.

We’re in a deep and worsening recession, and all this clown can think about is means by which to extract even more of the hard-earned from those who earned it.

Thank goodness for the “Super” City, eh.

Glendowie Montessori

2012-02-13T09:22:00.001+13:00

I’ve written many times about the benefits of Montessori education for your youngsters, not just through their early years but right on through primary and high school. If you can find them in your neighbourhood, and if they’re not just Montesomething schools instead of the real thing.

Well, lucky old Glendowie. If you’re lucky enough to live in Glendowie, Glen Innes or anywhere in that area, I can tell you that a new Montessori classroom has just opened for your two-and-a-half to six year olds—and this is very much the real thing. It’s called the Glendowie Montessori Preschool, and it opens for business today at 227 West Tamaki Rd!

What’s more, there’s also an excellent Montessori primary classroom that can take your children at six. So if you have young children and this is your stamping ground, then you’ve just fallen on your feet.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I am beginning to think that Christianity has a lot in common with Marxist-Leninism..."

2012-02-12T11:03:00.001+13:00

"I am beginning to think that Christianity has a lot in common with Marxist-Leninism... God is dialectical materialism; Christ is Karl Marx; the Church is the Party, the elect is the proletariat, and the Second Coming is the Revolution."
"How do heaven and hell fit into that?" I asked.
"Heaven is the socialist millennium, of course. I think hell must be the punishment of the capitalists."

And...

"The medieval Church and the Communist state share four basic dictums. Firts and foremost comes the instruction to seek the life of the spirit: seek pure Marxism. Don't waste your efforts on other trivial things. Gain is avarice, love is lust, beauty is vanity.
"Two: Communists are urged to give service to the state, as Christians must give it to the Church--in a spirit of humility and devotion, not in order to serve themselves or to become a success. Ambition is bad; it is the result of sinful pride...
"Three: both Church and Marx renounce money. Investment and interest payments are singled out as the worst of evils.
"Four, and this is the most iportant similarity, there is the way in which the Christian faithful are urged to deny themselves all the pleasures of this world to get their reward in paradise after they die."
"And Communists?" she asked.
"If they work hard and deny themselves the pleasures of this world, then after they die their children will grow up in paradise..."
"You missed out number five," I said... "Victory over the flesh. Both Church and Communist state preach that."

- Excerpted from Len Deighton's novel 'London Match.'
Views are expressed by a defecting Communist.

FRIDAY MORNING RAMBLE: The bewigged edition

2012-02-10T12:28:00.001+13:00

Parliament is back in session, so by Mark Twain’s standards neither life, liberty nor proper should be safe. But apart from questions about Maori Party integrity and Winston Peter’s wig, it’s been a quiet political week.
Thanks goodness.

On with the show…

Steven Joyce talks unusual sense for a politician. He says “Each time we say ‘you can’t’ it carries a cost.” And so it does. But what’s with the “we,” minister?
‘We’ Are a Little Confused - P O L I C Y M A T T E R S
“You’ve heard that America is enjoying a “jobs-led recovery”? Don’t be so sure.
No Evidence of a Jobs Recovery
- O B J E C T I V I S T I N D I V I D U A L I S T
And you thought Bill Clinton was the president who couldn’t keep it in his trousers…
The Truth About President Kennedy – S C O T T H O L L E R A N ’ S B L O G
How to choose from a bad bunch.
Ayn Rand on Selecting a Presidential Candidate? – Burgess Laughlin, M A K I N G P R O G R E S S

“Central bankers are the arsonists of [the present economic]
crisis who now pose as fire fighters quickly labelling
further monetary debasement ‘stimulus’.”
- Detlev Schlicter, “There will be no end to ‘quantitative easing’”

The groundswell against the warmist scam continues. German scientists and German media join the skeptics and “plunge into raucous discord on climate change.”
Body Blow To German Global Warming Movement! Major Media Outlets Unload On “CO2 Lies!”
– N O T R I C K S Z O N E
Yes, John Key and Nick Smith jumped the gun. And you and the unemployed paid the price.
Australia’s 7th State realizes it jumped the gun on climate deal - Steven Milloy, J U N K S C I E N C E
Yes, it’s true.
Man Arrested For Stealing a Glacier - G I Z M O D O

“What is the difference between animal spirits and the confidence
fairy? Why do Keynesians embrace one but not the other?”
- Russ Roberts

The Europeans have a plan, and like all political plans…
Why Europe’s Plan to End the Debt Crisis Can’t and Won’t Work - D A I L Y R E C K O N I N G
Dept. of Yikes: "In effect the EFSF is being used to recapitalize the ECB."
http://soberlook.com/2012/02/efsf-used-to-recapitalize-ecb-on-greek.html
Do government-engineered "soft landings" ever work out as planned?
Are "Soft Landings" really softer? – Darius Cooper, P R A C T I C E G O O D T H E O R Y
Alleged economists suggest printing more to devalue your currency is a good thing and not a disaster. That the job in times of economic disaster is to “boost demand.” The biggest disaster is the economic theory on which such “thinking” is based.
Will Currency Devaluation Fix the Eurozone? – Frank Shostak, M I S E S D A I L Y
You know about gold and how it can protect you when the times become those about which historians like to write. And how bonds can provide a return when they aren’t. But where do gold bonds fit in?
Gold Bonds – Keith Weiner, K E I T H W E I N E R ‘ S P O S T E R O U S
What politicians, economists and environmentalists need to learn from the billion-dollar collapse of Obama’s “green jobs” flagship, but won’t.
Lessons From Solyndra – Robert Murphy, E C O N L I B

“There are few branches of learning as devoid of history’s
light as economics. Economists are rarely informed by it.”
- Jonathan R. T. Hughes’s in his book
The Government Habit,
quoted by Don Boudreaux

Message to those who favour rights for prisoners: properly convicted criminals no longer have all the rights they were born with.
Rights Are Inalienable But Forfeitable – Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D

"It's one of the most ancient insult gestures known," says anthropologist Desmond Morris. And after halftime at the Superbowl, this is the question all America is asking:
When did the middle finger become offensive? - B B C
What are the two most important things in life? Answer from The Philosopher: Work, and sex with someone you love.
The Indispensables: Work, And Sex With A Woman You Love – C H A R L O T T E C A P I T A L I S T
Three suicides; one life-affirming lesson.
Three Suicides – Jim Woods, W O R D S B Y W O O D S
Publish or perish, but at what cost?
Research in universities - the good and bad – John Drake, T R Y R E A S O N
Answering those questions you’ve always asked:
Why Jews don’t farm – Steve Landsburg, T H E B I G Q U E S T I O N S
So the great man was religious? So what.
How religious was Isaac Newton? – Fred Seiler, S E I L E R O N S C I E N C E
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Discuss.
Video: Overcoming Perfectionism – Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D
Good news: Christchurch Art Gallery rescues art from damage. Bad news, however: any damage could only have improved the 'art.’ Take a look…
http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/blog/bunker-notes/2012/02/08/saved/
Dickens’ Novels in 140 Character Tweets: Is this what you might call short stories?
What if Charles Dickens and his characters had written for Twitter? – D A I L Y M I R R O R

[Thanks and hat tips to Geek Press, Marginal Revolution, Watts Up With That, Rational Jenn, Cafe Hayek, The Playful Spirit]

Earthquake engineering is not an exact science

2012-02-10T11:48:00.001+13:00

AFTER THE REPORT ON the collapse of the CTV building, everyone now wants to hang the builder and designers.

“Someone is incompetent!” Is the cry. “Someone must be to blame!” “There's criminal negligence going on there somewhere…."

No. Not necessarily. None of that follows necessarily from the report.

It seems on the face of it that people are not so much blaming people for not being competent, but for not being omniscient.

Because I think the problem is not one of negligence but one of the nature of knowledge.

COMPARING THE POOR STATE of Christchurch’s heritage buildings after the earthquake with most of its modern buildings is enough to tell you that earthquake engineering has improved rapidly over the last century. That knowledge has increased and will continue to increase.

It is a heroic tale. From a position of almost complete ignorance one-hundred years ago, engineers acquired increasing understanding and ingenuity in protecting buildings and the people in them--with new and revolutionary systems introduced in recent decades such as K-Braced Frames, Base Isolation and Ductile Design—saving literally millions of lives around the world, and hundreds of thousands in Christchurch.

Where just seventy years ago in First World countries like ours people still died en masse in earthquakes like the Napier disaster, today the earth can shake well beyond what even modern building were designed to handle—as it did in Christchurch on February 22nd—and ninety-nine per cent are still able to survive heroically and allow people to get out safely.

That we are talking about just two that didn’t (this one and Pyne Gould) is a tragedy on a massive scale. Let’s not downplay that. But that we are talking about just one that didn’t is a testament to the engineering in all the buildings that did. The engineers responsible used all the the knowledge acquired in recent years to design them; knowledge that will increase in future years. But as the knowledge continues to increase, some of the methods used today will also shown to be wrong and less than adequate by engineers fifty years from now (as they undoubtedly will).

That will not make today’s engineers negligent. They will simply be revealed as less than omniscient.

Just like every other human being.

SO EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING IS still an inexact science, with new understanding emerging after every earthquake that helps engineers understand more for the next one. After this one, for example, we’ve learned that the ground can move in very different ways than buildings have been designed for. It’s not necessarily a matter of criminal negligence, then—it’s more the nature of knowledge and how it improves, is tested and expands.

Reading summaries of the report with that in mind, when you boil it down it seems that in the early eighties we knew less about designing buildings to resist earthquakes than we do now. Which is nothing to blame anyone for. And (perhaps) that too little was done to upgrade buildings like CTV’s that were designed before the modern era of seismic design. Which is where any blame, if it’s deserved, probably lies.

This building for example was designed with its bracing walls disposed asymmetrically. But, for whatever reason, the importance of symmetrical bracing was less well understood then.

The building’s floors appear to have “pancaked,” which is what happens when columns collapse and one “soft storey” after another collapses on the one beneath. But back in the early eighties, engineering wisdom was still dictating that beams be designed stronger than columns—a situation eventually recognised as causing columns to fail before beams, leading inexorably to the pancake problem.

The columns are described as “brittle”—which is say they were not ductile—on which were imposed extra loadings from the increased twisting of the building. But the building was designed before the importance of Ductile Design was fully understood.

As the engineers responsible for designing CTV, Alan Reay Consultants, said in a prepared statement yesterday:

We need to remember that the [design methods] of the day, when the building was designed and constructed, were not intended to withstand the magnitude and type of earthquake ... experienced on February 22.

They’re quite right.

Things have changed since then—but to call the engineers of the time negligent because they knew less than they we do now, and will know in the future, is to blame human beings for not being omniscient.

Which is not anything you can blame engineers for.

This is cool

2012-02-08T15:53:00.000+13:00

Workers on BHP Billiton’s new building in Perth, West Australia, replicated the famous ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscaper’ photo from the thirties of workers having their lunch on a steel beam high above Manhattan.

Colding kills

2012-02-08T12:46:00.000+13:00

Several inches of global warming have now covered Europe for eleven days. Here’s the tragedy in a headline:

Europe death toll now 400 from icy weather.

Can we now, please, begin to recognise the dangers to human beings of cold weather—which far, far outweigh the dangers of warming.

Can you own water? [update 2]

2012-02-08T11:33:00.001+13:00

That’s become the question of this political term, hasn’t it, the answering of which is going to hold up the government’s flagship sell-a-little-bit programme for its power companies: Can you own water?

Simple answer: Yes, of course you can.

The ownership of water is not only possible, it’s often highly desirable.

It de-politicises arguments about resources.

It solves the Tragedy of the Commons in water.

It solves the increasing problem of dirty dairying.

It solves the problems involved in the South Island river systems, where there are many competing uses for the limited water available.

Recognising ownership in a water resource is not only moral, it’s practical. The answer to the problems cited and many more besides is to recognise there is no greater protection for both environment and water users than the protection of property rights and the legacy of common law -- if only these were allowed to function as they should, by placing the power of law behind those who truly value the specific resource under threat.

Ownership of water not only could happen, it should happen.

If the way to open those floodgates is by recognising specific claims to ownership, however flawed initially, then so be it.

Better it begins some way than never to begin at all.

* * * * *

* I make no comment at all here on the veracity of claims now hitting the headlines, nor on the anachronistic argument asserting property rights were recognised in New Zealand before 1840.
But as Ronald Coase points out, once a property right is finally recognised in law then (as long as transaction costs are kept low) it will end up in the hands of those who value it the most. And that would be a good result, right?

UPDATE 1: The collectivisation of water has failed New Zealanders.

So in addition to the excellent links I’ve provided above, I’d like to highly recommend a Canadian organisation called Environment Probe who have written many excellent things on The Role of Property Rights in Protecting Water Quality, including these many wonderful publications.

UPDATE 2: Yes, I do own water says Liberty Scott.

If I have land, and collect water on that property, it is mine.
Just because the state treats the sea, rivers and lakes as owned by it and local authorities, doesn't mean that water can't be owned. It is ludicrous to claim otherwise.
Reticulated water costs money. It requires people to work, people to construct, lay, maintain and replace pipelines, dams, pumps and the electricity required to operate them. That isn't free.

Clint: “Keep buying our shitty cars” [update 2]

2012-02-07T16:11:00.001+13:00

Americans stopped buying American cars several years ago. Mostly because they were rubbish.

That didn’t bother American car makers. They kept making the shitty cars anyway and just went cap in hand to the government for a bailout.

"We shouldn't be bailing out the banks and car companies," actor, director and Academy Award winner Eastwood told the Los Angeles Times in November 2011.

That was November 2011. Now, however, in February 2012? He’s delivered an ad for half-time at the US Superbowl over the weekend about job growth, about “the spirit of America,” and how Americans should join together again and buy American cars.

Carefully, however, they show very little of the American cars they want Americans to buy.

Because they’re still shitty.

And the only “roar” is the roar of bullshit, and the sucking sound of money disappearing down a black hole.

UPDATE 1: Speaking of shitty cars … it’s half-time in the Lincoln Tunnel.

UPDATE 2: Here’s how a halftime ad by Clint Eastwood should have sounded …

[Hat tip Small Dead Animals]

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Printing money is not sustainable [updated]

2012-02-07T14:38:00.001+13:00

Morons like Bernard Hickey have been beating the drum for our Reserve Bank to do what every other Reserve Bank in the world has been doing: to cross their fingers and print money like there’s no tomorrow.

[Other governments’] print and hope strategies look set to leave anyone who doesn't print and hope sprawling in the dust [says Hickey].
The last one to print and devalue is the loser.

As I’ve said before, Bernard Hickey is a moron. If anyone in authority listens to him, we will be the losers.

As if we should put our heads in the oven just because everyone else is! As if propping up share markets and bankers’ profits by faking reality is somehow a sound policy. As if the printing of more coloured pieces of paper can somehow bring new resources into existence. As if printing these new bits of paper doesn’t destroy your savings and devalue every existing piece of paper in your pocket. As if printing ever increasing tranches of this bailout crack (just another hit, please Doc!) isn’t like taking a tiger by the tail. As if the creation of new credit “out of the ether” is all it takes to create a sustainable boom…

“The boom can last only as long as the credit expansion progresses at an ever-accelerated pace. The boom comes to an end as soon as additional quantities of fiduciary media are no longer thrown upon the loan market. But it could not last forever even if inflation and credit expansion were to go on endlessly. It would then encounter the barriers which prevent the boundless expansion of circulation credit. It would lead to the crack-up boom and the breakdown of the whole monetary system.”
- Ludwig von Mises, “Interest, Credit Expansion & the Trade Cycle,” Chapter 20 of Human Action

[Hat tip Foundation for Economic Growth]

UPDATE: From Detlev Schlicter’s Paper Money Collapse blog:

    …the public believes it was greedy bankers and ‘unfettered capitalism’ that brought us down. But cheap credit through state fiat money and the systematic subsidization of the housing market are not features of the free market but of politics. The present mess is the result of decades of institutionalized monetary debasement and the accumulation of public debt. These policies have left us with bankrupt welfare states and overstretched banks, yet none of this has diminished the enthusiasm of politicians and bureaucrats to give us more of their medicine…
Prosperity through money printing?
    The persistent debasement of money in the modern state fiat money system is an obstacle to the smooth operation of the market, the production of wealth and the growth in prosperity. It keeps the middle class in bondage as its efforts to save and gain financial independence are constantly undermined by the official policy of inflationism.
   But the central planners and central bankers and their apologists among journalists and economists tell us that it is exactly the other way round: “Prosperity through monetary debasement” is Big Brother’s slogan, and he has spokespeople with outstanding academic credentials to explain this absurdity to the masses. In November 2010, MIT and Princeton man Ben Bernanke, the U.S. government’s money-printer-in-chief, wrote this in the Washington Post when explaining to the less educated why creating $600 billion out of thin air and messaging yields on government debt down was a clever policy:

Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth. For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower corporate bond rates will encourage investment. And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.”

Well, that was 14 months ago. As it turns out, manipulating the economy by artificially lowering rates (lowering rates not by saving but by simply printing money) has not started a virtuous circle. Such manipulations come with nasty unintended consequences, and after a few decades of such a policy the accumulated unintended consequences far outweigh whatever short –lived growth blip money debasement may have manufactured otherwise. None of this has anything to do with healthy growth and a functioning free market economy.
    But it is important that those in positions of authority do not admit that they are clueless. They never make mistakes. Their policy is never wrong. They simply need to do more of the same – and then even more. As I write this, the Fed is, of course, preparing another round of quantitative easing, and so is the Bank of England. And the ‘economists’ on Wall Street and the City of London cheer them on.
    The debasement of paper money certainly continues.

And the morons (and those who get first use of the new printing) stand by and cheer.

Friday Morning Ramble: The ‘Waitangi/Rand’s Day’ edition

2012-02-03T11:10:00.001+13:00

Yesterday was Rand’s Day: Ayn Rand’s birthday. Not everyone wants to celebrate that, but I do.
Not every country has a reason to celebrate its birth. We are one of those happy few, yet we don’t.
So how about more Rand and less Waitangi today. Deal?

This Waitangi Day ‘celebration’ is likely to be as fractious as every other Groundhog Day celebration of the nation’s birth has been since Geoffrey Palmer stuck his oar into race relations, and the Marxists figured they could use the Treaty as a wedge issue.
Rather than repeat myself as I do every year, let me instead just link here to what I said last year, and would have said again on Monday if you’d let me.
Why not print it out and read it out loud to your breakfast companions on Monday.
Why not celebrate One-Law-For-All Day instead? - N O T P C
Big news yesterday was Facebook’s launch as a public company. But why would you invest in them when their revenue model is so, well, lame.
Is a 0.014% ad CTR Facebook's weakest link? – Z E R O H E D G E
The unbearable vagueness of Mark Zuckerberg – F I N A N C I A L T I M E S
Ten Reasons not to invest in Facebook – F O R B E S

“A new report says that Facebook has created over 450,000 jobs. Unfortunately
photos posted on Facebook have ended 550,000 jobs.”
- Fallon

This is the guy who says we have to live with less?
Cameron buying 2,600 acres of land in NewZealand – A P
Ministerial briefings to new ministers are being censored. This incenses the political opposition. These briefings, says Eddie at The Standard, “give the public (via the media) an insight into on coming challenges in portfolios, elaborate on how election promises will be converted into real policies, and—most importantly—reveal things the government is planning. So, it's disturbing that the Nats are censoring them,” says Eddie.
“Arrogant and unresponsive,” says Labour’s Clare Curran.
“Cult of secrecy”! says Idiot/Savant. “We should not tolerate it.”!
So down with censorship; and all power to transparency!
On the other hand, information about school performance (or lack thereof) must be kept from prying eyes, says Trevor Mallard, who wants to make school level assessment information more secretive than security information held by the SIS.
So down with transparency; and all power to censorship!
Don’t bother to examine such a blatant contradiction. Ask yourself only what it achieves.
For your eyes only – Eddie, T H E   S T A N D A R D
Is Amy Adams’ work programme a state secret? – Clare Curran, R E D   A L E R T
No right to know – Idiot/Savant, N O   R I G H T   T U R N
The hypocrisy of Robin Duff - W H A L E   O I L
More on Education and OIA- K I W I B L O G
Eric Crampton finds much to celebrate in Treasury’s briefing paper.
Treasury! O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R

Good advice from Imperator Fish:
“With all these folk swearing off the booze for February, it is important
that the balance of the universe be maintained. Time to up my game.”

It’s a slam dunk. New Labour MP Raymond Huo takes aim at the Chicago School of Economics: it’s all their fault, he says, “that particular school of thought … is one of the main reasons the western world is in the doldrums.” From the financial crisis, to growing income inequality in Europe and the United States, to leaky buildings … it’s all their fault for promoting unfettered free market and deregulation!
Naturally, since he’s writing on a blog, numerous more intelligent commentators leap to their keyboards to put him right—both politely and succinctly.
It’s a slam dunk.
Everybody loves Raymond – W H A L E O I L
Auckland welcomed its 1.5millionth citizen this week. But how will the city accommodate its growing population with the grey ones so firmly in the way?
Are we there yet? Auckland welcomes 1.5 millionth citizen – Phil McDermott, C I T I E S M A T T E R
“Once again I am shocked at how easily and automatically so many intellectuals are willing to use compulsion to solve problems.”
Another anti-freedom conservative: David Brooks – S T E P H E N H I C K S

"Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death."
- Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged

With the coming to these shores of Charter Schools, it’s time to take up the catchphrase “Separation of School and State!”
Restore the Separation of State and School – T H E U N D E R C U R R E N T
You’ve all heard the Keynesian litany from every alleged economist from Krugman to Hickey to Morgan: the world’s economies are collapsing and there’s a worldwide shortage of demand; governments are deeply in debt and can’t provide the necessary investment to make up the shortfall.
What a shame they’re talking crap.
Is government spending really "investment"? – K R U G M A N I N W O N D E R L A N D
Oh, for those of you wishing to gain some insight into our genius overlords' thinking, these four “classes” by Ben Bernanke (Central Planner in Chief) might be of interest.
You could call them a “Master Class,” i.e., lessons the Class of your Overlords.
Make sure you pack some difficult questions.
Bernanke to teach class on Fed at GW in March – M A R K E T W A T C H
Antarctica is melting! says Al Gore, Richard Branson, James Hansen and Kevin Trenberth.
Um, no it’s not, points out Steven Milloy.
Al Gore’s ‘melting’ Antarctic claims refuted by reality – J U N K S C I E N C E
Some people buy gold. Others buy cheese. Here’s how to make your fancy cheeses last.
How to make your expensive wedge of cheese last for weeks – F O R B E S
World-Wide Factory Activity, by Country.
World-Wide Factory Activity, by Country. - W A L L S T R E E T J O U R N A L
You know what’s holding us all back here? Don’t worry, the Ministry of Economic Development has all the answers.
Most notably, they’ve determined that what ails us economically is not their fault. Got that? It’s not taxes, regulations, public sector idiots or bureaucracies getting in our way. No, says the Ministry, it’s not that at all.
No, it’s all our fault.
Arseholes.
Ministry suggests poor management holding economy back - R A D I O N Z

"The man who lets a leader prescribe his course
is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap."
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

A message from Nancy Pelosi:
Do Whatever, Taxpayers will Pay For It - T H R U T C H
Want less inequality? Then how about less government? “Between 1997 and 2010, Govt spending on social services increased by almost 20% more for households in the top half of income spectrum.”
Stephen Whittington - T W I T T E R
A modest proposal to solve inequality at a stroke…
Income inequality and broken families — a modest proposal – S T E P H E N H I C K S
Do smokers pay for themselves? Do junk food eaters get any benefits from their eating?
Healthist bean counters say no. But what would these arseholes know.
Anti-paternalism – O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
Gimmie some sugar – O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to
achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
- Ayn Rand

Guess what? Yesterday was Ayn Rand’s Birthday—and some folk had a great idea to make February 2nd, Rand’s Day, a day worth celebrating!
Randsday is Justice Day. Give YOURSELF a present.
Rand'sDay - A Y N R A N D M Y T H S
And why is a philosopher who died thirty years ago still have Tea Partiers, political commentators, and politicians still taking (and arguing) about her now?
ppy Birthday, Ayn Rand -- Why are you still so misunderstood?
– Don Watkins, F O X N E W S
Ayn Rand: 10 more great quotes on her birthday
Ayn Rand: 10 great quotes on her birthday
- C . S. M O N I T O R

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny
individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
- Ayn Rand

From our environmental page … there is hope for the weka, but only if the grey ones get out of the way.
Hope for the weka? - O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
And on Waitangi Weekend, it’s appropriate that environmentalists ask themselves: “Were Maori environmentalists?” Most NZ environmental law assumes they were. So if they weren’t…
Were Maori environmentalists? - N O T P C , 2 0 0 6
Some environmentalists don’t like oil drilling because of oil spills. But what if you could fight oil spills with cool technology like this?
Magnetic soap made for oil spills - F U T U R E O F T E C H N O L O G Y

"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness
to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason."
- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

You think that Wank Phone in your pocket was invented just last week? Last year?
No, there were folk writing about them way back in 1978!
HP Calculators in 2025, As Predicted In 1978 - G E E K P R E S S
Want to create a great company? Get rid of your bozos.
Why Every Company Needs A "No Bozos" Policy - F O R B E S
Competitive advantage for entrepreneurs.
Want to Stand Out From the Crowd? 3 Tips on How to Do It. - F O R B E S
In Praise of Private Equity: "Private-equity or venture capital investors don't owe society a thing"—Jonathan Hoenig
In Praise of Private Equity – S M A R T M O N E Y
Know what the worst thing about growing up poor and making it later on? You have stupid habits that are hard to shake.
The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor – John Cheese, C R A C K E D
5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor - John Cheese, C R A C K E D
Sometimes you need to remind yourself what a thieving arsehole Donald Trump is.
Donald Trump’s eminent-domain empire – M I C H E L L E M A L K I N
Sexting for Grammar Nerds. You know how you are.
Lucy Carter – T W I T P I C
“The myths of all major religions are so absurd that any new religions would be wholly different. The reason is simple: they're fantasies based on the desire to believe. Science, in contrast, is based on observations of empirical facts. That's the difference that makes all the difference!” – Dian Hsieh
The Impossibility of Re-Creating Religions – Diana Hsieh, P O L I T I C S W I T H O U T G O D
I don’t know about you, but I never knew Salvador Dali illustrated an edition of Alice in Wonderland! The master surrealist meets the Mad Hatter!
Salvador Dalí Illustrates Alice in Wonderland, 1969 – B R A I N P I C K I N G S
Wow! Now this is good news. Hell, it’s great news! The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has finally allowed the great man’s beautiful drawings to be sold as beautiful prints at affordable prices.
Time to fill your boots and buildings up with gorgeous drawings like these while the NZ dollar helps you out!
Frank Lloyd Wright Archival Reproductions Now Available – P R A I R I E M O D

[Thanks to readers Shaun H, Julian D., Paul van D. and hat tips to Thrutch, Anne McElhinney, Stephen Hicks, Bosch Fawston, Noodle Food, Geek Press, ]

Keep watching.
More later.
PC

Cabin porn

2012-02-02T14:16:00.001+13:00

Anybody fancy a snug little cabin many miles from everything that troubles you?

Then the website Cabin Porn is just for you.

But maybe not exactly what you might think….

(Yes, Virginia, it is safe to view at work.)

GUEST POST: Christchurch people say “enough is enough!”

2012-02-02T11:33:00.001+13:00

Guest Post by Hugh Pavletich

At noon yesterday some 4,000 local citizens gathered next to the Civic Building in Christchurch to express their anger at the poor performance of the Christchurch City Council. Many of these people had never attended a protest in their lives before—as New Zealand’s Television Close Up programme “Anger in Christchurch” (Video 3.45 min) explained last night.

Rev Mike Coleman (a leader who has emerged in the east of Christchurch and chairs the Wider Communities Action Network representing the devastated people of the east) ably chaired the protest meeting, facilitated by Peter Lynch and his team, who also spoke. Members of the public who wished to do so were asked by Rev Mike Coleman to express their views as well.

The beloved Christchurch Wizard also spontaneously contributed his well-received views too.

This was very much a spontaneous outpouring by the wider Christchurch community. They left heartened and emboldened from this important gathering.

Within the Close Up programme, Andrea Cummings of North New Brighton is featured. Andrea and her husband, who run a small lawn mowing repair shop, spontaneously became the focal point of their community through the earthquake events – meeting the communities immediate needs and distributing food parcels where required.

As Andrea explains within the interview, this had to happen because the Authorities – and particularly the Christchurch City Council – were not set up to respond because of their centralised structure.

The Simmering Discontent Continues

While there had been deep concern in Christchurch for many years about the poor performance of the centralised Council structure, incapacitated by bureaucratic bloat [the writer has written extensively on these issues – latest October 2011 - Christchurch earthquake recovery: The political circus], the “final straw” was the Council’s decision on the advice of its consultants to award the Council Chief Executive Tony Marryatt a $68,000 14% pay rise mid December 2011.

The public fury was immediate.

Peter Lynch, a local resident with no prior involvement with politics, was so incensed, he set up a Facebook page - No Pay Rise For Tony Marryatt - announcing publicly that there was to be a protest 1 February 2012.

The “blundering” Council decision announcing this extraordinary pay rise to a largely “invisible” Chief Executive of the Council Tony Marratt was followed soon after by an equally odd announcement by the Earthquake Recovery Minister Hon Gerry Brownlee, urging the local elected representatives and citizens to “settle down” and support the Council authorities. Brownlee “threatened” dissenting local representatives (those supporting clean local government) with dismissal, as reported by the local morning daily The Press soon after – “Quake Minister Gerry Brownlee Scolds Council.”

Normally, the summer Christmas breaks in New Zealand are when the country shuts down for a month and the media “goes to sleep” because there is so little news to report.

In Christchurch this year however, following the political blunders of both the local Council and the Recovery Minister Brownlee, the atmosphere was very different, with the public and the local media erupting with “enough is enough.”

South Islands major daily The Press led the extraordinary public conversation, with other print, radio and television media participating as well. The Press however had been covering these issues for a period of 17 months, since the time of the first earthquake event 4 September 2010.

In normal times, Local Government issues tend to attract little media or public interest. But with the earthquake events still persisting (in excess of 9,500 shakes to date), the performance of the political authorities at both the local and national levels, came under increasing scrutiny – as they failed to perform to an acceptable standard.

The Emerging Focus on Solutions

The critically important public conversation over this time has meant that the wider public has an increasingly better understanding of the problems and what the solutions need to be. While there is loose talk about the possibility of “rates revolts” and other approaches, the three major changes required are emerging –

(1) The need for a fresh mid term election as soon as possible – likely April / May.

(2) A replacement Council Chief Executive (realistically – only a newly elected Council can do this).

(3) Abolish the Councils centralised structure and replace it with a One City/Many Communities model – where the “control” is at the local level. This is clearly essential for both elementary reasons of risk management and because, as the TVNZ Close Up programme highlights, the importance of local communities being able to respond quickly and effectively to the needs of local people.

As the writer pointed out in a brief address to the people gathered at yesterday’s protest meeting, some 17 months following the first earthquake event 4 September 2010 the recovery has still not yet got underway in Christchurch – simply because the “top down” approach, with bureaucracies incapacitated with bloat and weak political leadership, have not been able to respond to the community’s and businesses’ needs.

The atmosphere with respect to the Christchurch City Council bureaucracy is that it has long been At War with its communality and business.

In development and construction terms, Christchurch has long been considered a “disaster zone” well before the first earthquake struck September 2010. The writer has covered these issues extensively within earlier articles [see Performance Urban Planning].

The Christchurch Rebuild Disaster

The situation has only worsened since the time of the first earthquake – and is best illustrated by the new housing consent construction performance through 2011.

Christchurch, with a population of some 370,000 people, consented just 750 new conventional housing units over that period (with 150 relocatables deducted) – a miserable consent rate of just 2 units per 1000 population - well below replacement levels in a normal market, let alone through an earthquake recovery.

By contrast, to the south and west of Christchurch is the county of Selwyn with a population of about 40,000, which over the same period consentedwell in excess of 400 new residential units through the year – a consent rate of about 10 units per 1000 population.

To the north of Christchurch is the county of Waimakariri, of (again) some 40,000 people, which consented around 500 new residential units in 2011 - a consent rate of about 12 units per 1000 population.

So the construction volumes in these two smaller and more responsive Local Government areas are some 5 and 6 times greater than Christchurch on a population basis.

Christchurch in essence is being “hollowed out” as people and businesses are departed for these adjoining counties and other centres throughout New Zealand and Australia.

New Zealand’s Woeful Home Building Performance

Statistics New Zealand announced recently building consents granted in 2011 represent the lowest level in 46 years.

The situation is even worse than these “bald figures” from Statistics NZ suggest – because taking account of the population changes over this 46-year period are not properly taken in to account. New Zealand’s current population is about 4.414 million, and with only 13,662 residential consents issued during 2011 this suggests a low consenting rate of 3.09 consents per 1,000 population. Some 46 years ago in 1966, New Zealand's population was 2.711 million. Adjusted for population, if the consenting rate per 1,000 population in 1966 was 3.09, that would mean that just 8,376 residential consents were issued in that year. It was likely substantially higher then.

The 2011 consenting rate per 1,000 population figure is therefore likely to be the lowest since the Great Depression, or in history. As noted above, the Christchurch situation is even worse still – throughout a supposed recovery.

Blundering Politicians Protecting Mates

To date, the political authorities have persisted with their “blundering responses” to the wishes of the earthquake ravaged city of Christchurch.

Within The Press today there is “Talk Of Rates Revolt as “serial political blunderer” Local Government and Environment Minister Hon Dr Nick Smith is reported to have said that a fresh new mid term election is “highly unlikely,” further compounding the political problems for his Government.

In essence, the current Government has just three options – first, do nothing; second appoint Commissioners; or third, allow a fresh mid-term election so that the locals can directly deal with the local political problems and inadequacies.

The current Council is clearly seriously dysfunctional, and the Smith “non-solution” of appointing Kerry Marshall as an “Observer” in a vain endeavour to dampen the protest down backfired by the Monday. When the Council’s Chief Executive Performance Review saw the light of day Monday, after it was “extracted” under the Official Information Act by the diligent media, Smith’s ham fisted plans were already in tatters. Contrary to earlier public statements by local politicians talking in glowing terms about his performance, justifying the $68,000 pay rise, the Review itself when it finally saw the light of day clearly illustrated otherwise.

The Government will not appoint Commissioners (contrary to the current public musings by Smith), because this would immediately collapse the local public support for the National Party, which did undeservedly well in Christchurch at the last General Election November 2011. The support for the National Party is in no small measure because the Opposition Labour Party is so internally conflicted and confused. As a political participant in local issues, it is currently “missing in action.”

Further to this, the appointment of Commissioners by the Government to the Canterbury Regional Council (Environment Canterbury), was not popular and has not been successful to date.

While Local Government Minister Smith is technically highly ranked in the Cabinet, in reality he is very much seen as “yesterday’s man” so far as political influence within Government is concerned.

Common Sense Must Prevail

It therefore seems likely, that as the local political pressure intensifies and Christchurch and citizens communicate directly with the politicians involved, that Prime Minister John Key and his Government, must see it as “desirable” to allow the local Christchurch people to sort out their own problems - with a fresh mid-term election.

Hugh Pavletich is a Christchurch entrepreneur, the owner of website Performance Urban Planning and the co-author of the Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, 2011 .

Quote of the Day: No, Dr Brash, inflation targeting has not "worked well." Not ever. [Updated]

2012-02-02T06:22:00.003+13:00

"The financial-market crisis is not over but has grown into a vicious sovereign-debt crisis. Nevertheless, monetary policy makers of the major economies go on to practice the same sort of policy that has led to the crisis. Following the model of inflation targeting, they continue to disregard the quantity of money and the amount and kind of credit creation. As they did before, central bankers cut interest rates as low as they can. Few seem to remember that the monetary-policy concept of inflation targeting was adopted with the promise that low and stable inflation rates would produce financial and economic stability. Reality has not confirmed this assurance. On the contrary, inflation targeting was instrumental in bringing about the current financial crisis...."

- Antony P. Mueller, "Inflation Targeting Hits the Wall"

it has become a rule to ignore the expansion of monetary aggregates and to install extremely low interest rates. Inflation targeting has led monetary authorities to ignore not only money and credit growth but also asset prices along with other variables such as the exchange rate. By the rationale of inflation targeting, monetary policy has become blunt and ignorant by design, and in this respect a repetition of an earlier failure has occurred just at a time when the future head of the Federal Reserve felt sure that he could promise that "we won't do it again" and let the US economy fall into depression. Not different from other areas of policies, in monetary policy, too, the only lessons that are learned from history are the wrong lessons.

As was revealed by the recent release of the transcripts of the meetings of the Fed in 2006, central banking is a fraudulent institution where the men at the top act like deliberate ignoramuses.

How about we kill the planners instead? [update]

2012-02-01T16:59:00.001+13:00

It looks like planners helped to kill people in Christchurch. From the ongoing Christchurch inquiry:

The building at 605- 613 Colombo St, … was green stickered following the September earthquake. The Boxing Day aftershock caused much more significant damage to the building, and it was red-placarded. [On February 22 it killed four pedestrians and crushed eight passengers on a bus.]
    Consultation between the owner and its engineers resulted in a decision to demolish the building but, because the building had a heritage classification, the city council required that the demolition application be a notified consent application. This process would have taken some months.
    There was no protective fencing in front of the building at the time of the February earthquake.
    Ann Brower, a lecturer specialising in regulations [who was pinned under rubble on the bus], said: "There's some irony in the fact that it was a failure in regulations that nearly killed me and which did kill those closest to me [on the bus].''
    …[T]he collapse of the facade of the building at 603 Colombo St killed Joan Weild, 76, and Graham Weild, 77, and Israeli backpackers Ofer Levy, 22, and Gabi Moshe Ingel, 22, who were walking in the street nearby.
    The heritage classified building was severely damaged following the September earthquake and was yellow-stickered. Following Boxing Day, it was red-stickered. Make safe works were to be completed before January 31 2011.
    But no make-safe works were completed on the building and instead a decision was made to demolish it. As this building was also heritage classified, the process involved a notified consent, which was to take months…

An entirely avoidable tragedy.

[Hat tip Julian D.]

UPDATE: That was then: Here’s Councillor Frau OberGruppenFuhrer Sue Wells speaking out on CTV after the first quake to tell building owners, sorry to ORDER building owners, that they may not even THINK about demolishing their dangerous buildings, not without the express, explicit, paid-for permission of one her grey ones. The bitch.

And now? … “‘An engineer lashed out at city council processes for being “too time consuming” at the Royal Commission of Inquiry today, after paperwork delayed the demolition of a red-stickered building which later collapsed in the February quake – killing four people…’

Feel free to email Sue and tell her or any other councillor what you think: sue.wells@ccc.govt.nz .

It’s those fantastical ‘Treaty of Waitangi Principles’ again

2012-02-01T10:53:00.001+13:00

Here we are again, having the same tired, washed-out old arguments:

YET AGAIN WE SEE all the political classes jumping into the trough for a mud wrestle over the so-called “Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi,” with the National Party wanting to diminish their impact in the partial sale of SOEs, the Maori Party wanting to use the bout to boost themselves, and Browntable iwi leaders hoping to further feather their nests.

The impossible-to-define "principles of the Treaty" were a late and pragmatic addition to law some twenty-five years ago—and a leading lesson in the dangers of pragmatism in politics. As you might not know, the “the principles of the Treaty” are not part of the Treaty at all, just a recent accretion adding great confusion and a huge amount of expensive litigious activity. Not least because to this day they have still not been adequately defined.

FOR THOSE UNAWARE OF the history of these “Principles,” you might be surprised to hear that were never there at the Treaty’s signing; they only emerged in recent times, and only because of the appalling political judgement of a former ACT Party luminary. A rushed addition to legislation that for the first time put the destructive ideas of “biculturalism” and race-based political “partnership” on the table, into the courts, and into the bank accounts of folk who saw the “Principles” as their main chance at piles of money.

So take a bow Richard Prebble while we tell the story of the birth of these “Principles” that have poisoned politics ever since.

Like Rodney Hide when he first got his feet under a ministerial table, Richard Prebble was so excited to “get things done” he didn’t care how he did them. So when, as Minister of State-Owned Enterprises in the Fourth Labour Government, he wanted to sell state-owned enterprises (a good thing), to quieten down the race-based dissent that started to affect the Labour’s relations with its Maori voting base, he asked his colleague Geoffrey Palmer to insert a section in the new State-Owned Enterprises Act the phrase “principles of Treaty of Waitangi,” insisting that “decision-makers” must have regard to these Principles. Here’s all their now infamous Section 9 said:

Nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

What were these Principles? No one knew.

Had they ever been defined? No, they hadn’t.

Did these two clowns have any idea what they might have started? Not a bit of it.

So in order to get the sales under way, these two simply brought these Principles into being without ever defining what these Principles are.

RICHARD PREBBLE DIDN’T CARE. He just wanted to sell things. And Geoffrey Palmer didn’t care, because his life’s work was based around writing legislation so vague, so ambiguous, that it allowed the courts to define things any way they wanted to. This, said the Idiot Palmer, is how you make law “flexible”: by giving the courts bullets which they could elect to fire in any direction they wished.

So much for the legal acumen of Geoffrey Palmer and the political nous of Richard Prebble. Because in the time it takes to say Motunui, a huge number of claims based on these newly-fangled Principles were rapidly being manufactured and presented, and the courts were beginning to dream up all sorts stuff to fill up Palmer’s empty vessel.

This is where the fictions of “biculturalism” and race-based political “partnership” were born. And this was the beginning of the deluge of claims based on these twin fictions—a deluge unseen by the twin geniuses how gave birth to the legislation (“In the course of a relatively few years,” said the woeful Palmer for example, “most of the outstanding issues in this area will be settled. Most of the claims now are known…” )

The result is that to this day no-one knows with any kind of clarity what these “principles” are supposed to be. They were a legal fiction waiting for courts to define and redefine, and for litigants to quarry in an attempt to make their fortune—which they did, in their droves.

And because, over time, they were inserted in all their vagueness in virtually every piece of quasi-constitutional legislation written since, they became a poison that soon infected every piece of legislation they touched.

What that poison did—as subsequent court cases quietly morphed these “principles” into something ever more lucrative for the lawyers who lived off them—was to transfer the Treaty’s clear and straightforward promise of legal protection of and the recognition of rights into the sort of vague, indefinable mush that help lawyers afford large launches.

THE NET RESULT OF evoking principles that didn’t exist was to to create a Treaty that had never existed at all, except in the wet dreams of a lawyers and activists. And lo, a whole Gravy Train was created to feed off this New Thing.

It’s been a hard Train to stop now it’s got rolling.

It set the platform for a whole generation of youngsters to join the Grievance Industry and become, as virtually their sole occupation, professional Maoris. Three of this ilk, ironically, are now propping up John Key’s National government and throwing a tantrum over this very issue. Many others simply see the tantrum as yet another opportunity for a lucrative dip into this trough.

And it allowed the then Minister of Injustice Doug Graham to mellifluously opine a few years later that “The sooner we realise there are laws for one and laws for another, the better.”

That this piece of human excrement is on this very day before the law courts for fraud—for which his defence has been to limit his dishonesty by talking up instead his incompetence—is perhaps an appropriate contemporary comment on the fraudulent “Principles” themselves.

The Governor resigns. Not before time. [Updated]

2012-01-31T15:55:00.001+13:00

It was no surprise that news of Alan Bollard’s forthcoming resignation from the job of Reserve Bank Governor was followed almost immediately this morning by calls to “shake up the monetary policy.”

Directly out of the blocks before the starter’s gun was even trousered was Ganesh Nana from BERL, never backwards in coming forwards when it comes to being proved an idiot, who opined that the new governor “needed to be ‘actively involved'’ in all avenues of economic policy setting”—in other words, not just focussing on interests rates as a means by which to attempt to control inflation, Bollard’s replacement should be empowered to pull every lever he can find in the pursuit of every policy objective he (or Mr Nana) might think of.

This was bad enough. What was worse, however, was to hear the response of former Reserve Bank Governor Don Brash to this rank stupidity. Not what he said about how no foreigners need apply for the forthcoming job. Sadly, that sort of provincialism is now par for the course in this pathetic authoritarian backwater. (Just ask the receivers of the Crafar farms.) No, it was how Brash had the boldness to say that monetary policy, when focussed only on” keeping inflation under control” by manipulating interest rates, has “worked very well.”

“Worked very well”?

Yeah right.

'Here we sit in 2012, not half-a-dozen years since an orgy of malinvestment and a world’s record housing bubble was inflated in every developed country by the policies of their central banks—the popping of which in large part caused the depression which we are still enduring—and we have a former central banker telling us that the policy that played a leading part in this disaster (a policy that, in the name of a non-existent price stability, spatchcocks together an unstable mix of rampant monetary inflation with a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat dictating interest rates) has “worked very well.”

What a crock.

That a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat is unable even to do this job well, let alone what Messrs Nana, Hickey, Morgan et al would like them to, should be apparent just from the record. But if you want to see just how far from “on top of things” these central bankers are, , just how far from being “experts” these these desiccated economic dictators are, just read the now-released 2006 transcripts of the US Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, i.e, the shysters who “oversee” the economy. These morons don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They really don’t. It’s just laughable. Page after page of “what bubble?” “aren’t we great!” and “can I get the same retirement plan as Alan.”

Or read Alan Bollard’s own book Crisis, which reveals him and his so-called “experts” permanently engaged in a game of “What the Fuck is Going On Out There?!” If there was one “expert” whose record was exploded by the global financial collapse it was surely Alan Greenspan. And if there was a chook with its head cut off during the global financial crisis, it was Alan Bollard.

The point is not that we need better experts in charge. The point is that the people in this job don’t lead the markets at all. Despite their now-exploded claims to omniscience, they just dictate to markets what they will pay for money while staying inside playing catch-up. As I’ve been at pains to point out here at NOT PC over recent years, it is their attempts to lead the market however that caused and causes such calamities as we are now enduring—and will continue to endure as long as the alleged experts continue to insists that things are “working well” [Brash], or that central-bank-based solutions to recovery can be found and acted on [Bernanke].

Not true. Not possible. As The Privateer says in his latest newsletter [hat tip Louis Boulanger],

“Before even a hint of a genuine recovery can take place, there has to be recognition of what it is that the financial world must recover from. What the financial world must recover from is a system whose vital components - money, prices and interest rates - are all controlled by edict and not by the voluntary interaction of people exchanging goods and services in the marketplace.”

I’m all for “changing the role of the Reserve Bank governor. I’m all for “shaking up the policy settings” of an economic dictator who has no place in a free market.

But what I’d like to do is give him less work, not more. Radically less work.

And I wouldn’t even mind if it was a foreigner who was paid not to do it.

UPDATE: Libz Propose Winding Down Reserve Bank

The Libertarianz Party is asking John Key to consider postponing and possibly cancelling any replacement for retiring Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard, ...

Those programmers!

2012-01-31T13:09:00.001+13:00

Those programmers! Always yammering. Always chattering.

Here’s the sort of shit those programmers area always saying. Watch until the end.

[Hat tip Geek Press]

Justice?

2012-01-31T10:54:00.001+13:00

No, apparently it’s not just me who’s wondering.

While I’ve been recuperating over the last week, a man has been thrown in jail, his property seized, his bank accounts frozen, and his business shut down—yet no evidence has been filed in a New Zealand court to assert, let alone prove, his guilt.

It seems too that up to 76 NZ police officers were involved in the raids on Mr DotCom’s home and business, “working with four FBI officers and backed by the Armed Offender’s Squad.”

What on earth is going on?

What New Zealand law(s) allows foreign officers of the law (e.g FBI) to operate within our borders like this?

What New Zealand law(s) and/or international treaties allows for an arrest warrant to be issued without any evidence against the accused even being presented to a New Zealand judge?

I’m no fan of copyright theft, of which Mr Kim DotCom and his MegaUpload site is accused, but there was a time when justice demanded that evidence be adduced before incarceration, and guilt be proved before property is seized, businesses are shut down and livelihoods destroyed.

What on earth has happened to our justice system?

I think we should be told.

[Hat tip Willy S.]

Google Ads

2012-01-31T08:21:00.000+13:00

I’ve just got rid of Google Ads on this blog.

The amount I was earning was worthwhile, but I got sick of advertising things I wouldn’t personally recommend.

Seeing Google Ads pushing Gareth Bloody Morgan’s bogus “investment” vehicle this morning was the last straw. I wouldn’t just not recommend putting your money with him, I would personally recommend you didn’t—not if you wanted to get it all back.

So now I have no ads. Perhaps for the time being, or perhaps until someone makes me an offer.

What have you got?

The Great Depression and the Broken Window Fallacy

2012-01-26T12:19:00.001+13:00

Yaron Brook discusses the economics of the Great Depression, with an explanation of the broken window fallacy, the most common error in economics.

From his talk 'Why Bad Economics Won't Go Away.'

GUEST POST: The absence of PC explained

2012-01-25T20:35:00.000+13:00

Dear readers of Not PC,

Peter suffered a herniated disc. He's in a lot of pain, and hasn't been able to update his blog; or do much of anything really.

Stay tuned; hopefully he'll be back online soon. In the meantime have a look at the 'REGULAR READS' links on the left of the blog for some excellent writing from elsewhere on the Web.

Cheers
Julian Pistorius

P.S. I blame it on the vegetarianism.

P.P.S. There is no substance to the rumours of an assassination attempt by a rabid Ron Paul fan.

Friday Morning Mini-Ramble

2012-01-20T11:12:00.001+13:00

How enjoyable was it yesterday to see so many bloggers and website owners going on strike yesterday over the misguided Stop Online Piracy Act. For one day, the internet shrugged at the projected imposition of security through censorship. And maybe the reptiles in Congress listened. Maybe.
In other news, I’m still waiting for my call-up to be one of the bloggers interviewed on Radio NZ’s Kiwi Summer series. No, not really. I reckon Martin Bradbury has more chance of a call-up, wouldn’t you think?
Anyway, on with the show here. A small one, this morning, of a few things that caught my eye.

So what is it central banks are going to inflict on us worldwide? Inflation, or deflation?
Out of Mises’s frying pan – Sean Corrigan, C O B D E N C E N T R E
How Deflationary Forces Will Be Turned into Inflation – Thorsten Polleit, M I S E S I N S T I T U T E
Speaking of central bank inflation … “It's important to watch what European Central Bank president Mario Draghi is doing rather than what he is saying, and right now he is madly printing euros out the backdoor.”
The Dancing Draghi – E C O N O M I C P O L I C Y J O U R N A L
Bernard Hickey hasn’t got a clue about economics. We can all agree on that. But, speaking for all of us who’ve stopped watching terrestrial TV, he can still recognise bad TV when he sees it.
Bernard Hickey was forced to watch some TV ads during the holiday rain and was stunned with what he saw
– I N T E R E S T . C O . N Z
Food Minister Kate Wilkinson justifies her new Food Bill banning some fresh foods and giving police power to raid private kitchens without a warrant on the basis of, basically, some very dodgy figures.
Food Bill - O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
Reader Paul Van Dinther has made the world press with a Google Earth simulation of the path of the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that went aground last week off the coast of Tuscany. Onya Paul!
Track the Costa Concordia's course via a digital simulation - L . A . T I M E S
Anybody else wondering how Gareth “Captain” Morgan managed to be paid $50 to $100 million for a company handling only $650 million in Kiwisaver accounts, the fees on which are a risibly low multiple of the taxpayer-funded purchase price—as Mark Hubbard says, “as I'm going to own this business, can I please have a look at the valuation used to make the offer.” Particularly so since a large lump of the capital being handled is his own (which he’s now threatened to withdraw whenever he has a tantrum) and his company has achieved success only in turning himself into a megaphone and other people’s capital into manure? A And will he be voluntarily paying capital gains tax on his taxpayer-provided windfall, as he demands others be forced to do? People would like to know.
Gareth Morgan Investments Sale To KiwiBank - Some Questions – N O M I N I S T E R
Gareth Morgan: What the hell has happened to him? – Mark Hubbard, S O L O
Gareth Morgan sells to Kiwibank – W H A L E O I L
Egalitarian impulses will sink a struggling economy.
Death by Wealth Tax – Richard Epstein, D E F I N I N G I D E A S
If you want affordable housing in Auckland, then it’s time to throw out the council’s Auckland housing plan. Mind you, if you don’t want affordable housing, just continue supporting the status quo.
Throw out Auckland housing plan says Productivity Commission – D U G A H O L E
The Productivity Commission Report on Affordable Housing - O W E N M c S H A N E
From the “we wish it were only in America” file: The New York Times reports that energy producers are being fined by the U.S. government for not selling a biofuel that doesn't even exist.
Make-a-Wish Politics – G U S V A N H O R N
Sadly, one law that wasn’t written into statute.
“Dressing psychiatrists like wizards on the witness stand” - O V E R L A W Y E R E D
Universities are making it tougher for students to get into university. “Good!” says one mother whose youngster has missed entry.
Universities raise the bar - L I N D S A Y M I T C H E L L
In case you missed it last year, U.S. economists (including, be aware, some who are just alleged economists) explain the last year in terms of their favourite charts
Economic experts explain 2011 in charts – W A S H I N G T O N P O S T
Ever thought about the morality of making a profit. In a free society, "creating value" and "making a profit" are just two sides of the same coin!
Why Is Creating Value Good, But Profits Bad? – Paul Hsieh, P A J A M A S M E D I A
This is the Montessori eucation website you’ve been waiting for.
Aid to Life – A S S O C I A T I O N M O N T E S S O R I I N T E R N A T I O N A L E
And the article about Montessori you’ve always wanted.
The Montessori Method: Educating Children for a Lifetime of Learning and Happiness
- O B J E C T I V E S T A N D A R D
Want to learn about Ayn Rand and Objectivism? Here’s the teaching website you’ve been waiting for.
Ayn Rand Campus – A Y N R A N D I N S T I T U T E
Speaking of which, here’s a new project that tries to match students who want to read Rand with donors willing to buy the books.
FreeObjectivistBooks.org
And since Objectivism is a philosophy for living, it should come as little surprise that some of the best ways to do business are in line Objectivism's ethics and epistemology.
SMART Goals and Philosophy – John Drake, T R Y R E A S O N
“Normal science progresses through the collection of observations (or measurements), the conjecture of hypotheses, the making of predictions, and then through the usage of new observations, the modification of the hypotheses accordingly (either ruling them out, or improving them).
In the global warming ‘science,’ this is not the case.”
On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity and the emperor’s new clothes – S C I E N C E B I T S
How did great artists become great? By intense engagement with the great works of the great minds.
How great artists become great – S T E P H E N H I C K S
I love it when people I like recommend my favourite books…
’Trustee from the Toolroom’ Review - Rachel Miner, T H E P L A Y F U L S P I R I T
Don’t give up the Oxford Comma yet! "The Oxford Comma is not only stylistically necessary, it is logically necessary and its absence can lead to absurdities."
The Logical Necessity of the Oxford Comma – Jason Stotts, E R O S O P H I A
Today is the last Big Day Out. Speaking for myself, who’s never been a fan of stadium gigs, I still endured it three times. It was a mess. You couldn’t get around. You couldn’t get a beer. If you wanted to be treated like cattle, you’d come to the right place. And if you wanted the sound of your favourite music to be delivered in a manner that no music deserved, you couldn’t ask for more. (Mind you, it did bring out the Stooges.) Nevertheless, as an antidote to all the undeserved the BDO nostalgia, here's Gary Steel on why he too just can't care about its death.
BDO DOA? Gary Steel, W I T C H D O C T O R
And don’t say you’ve never wondered…
What's the best animal to slice open and crawl inside to stay warm? – T H E S T R A I G H T D O P E
Finally, here’s a small piece of advice for New Zealand readers: Do yourself a favour. Buy a @DresdenDolls ticket.
If you like punk cabaret; if you enjoy the music of Kurt Weill; if you like smart, sharp women; if you like music with melody and guts performed with humour, attitude and pizzazz; if you like any part of these, then do yourself a favour and get along to Dresden Dolls on Wednesday 25th at Christchurch’s Aurora Centre for Performing Arts, Friday 27th January at The Powerstation, Auckland, and Saturday 28th January in Wellington at The Opera House. And look out for ninja gigs.
Upcoming Shows – A M A N D A P A L M E R . N E T

And to finish on something completely different, here’s one of my favourite sopranos, Gundula Janowitz, singing sing the duet "Sull'aria" from The Marriage of Figaro with Lucia Popp at the Paris Opera. Gorgeous! [Hat tip http://www.greatoperavideos.com]

That’s all from me.
Have a great weekend.
Peter Cresswell

‘Solar Hemicycle,’ by Frank Lloyd Wright

2012-01-19T20:03:00.000+13:00

A 1992 tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s second house for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs—built in 1944—a house he called his “Solar Hemicycle”—with expert guidance by Katherine Jacobs herself.

Scum rises to the top

2012-01-19T07:43:00.000+13:00

As a reward for all his sterling work in Christchurch—including barring businessmen’s access to their own property, evicting people from their own homes, shutting down the CBD while simultaneously closing off the city limits, and (as a consequence) making sure new homes are beyond the price of those who need to buy them—in other words, for pretty much everything his mailed fist has done since the earthquake to make the city worse, to do to the city and its spirit what the earthquake couldn’t, plus all his acts of self- aggrandisement in “running” a dysfunctional council, and mayoral aggrandisement in promoting Mr Parker—for these achievements and more council “Chief Executive Officer” (sic) Tony Marryatt ~~has rewarded himself~~ has been rewarded with a pay rise equal to the size to which the Grand Chancellor used to tower over his city.

Now, why did I say “sic’ after the use of his officially appointed title? Let Joe Bennett explain:

The sickness, as always, shows up in the language. Mr Marryatt, for example, is known as a CEO. But he is not a CEO. A CEO runs a competitive business that has to earn money. The council is a monopoly that does not have to earn money. It just demands money from ratepayers. So Mr Marryatt's job is merely to oversee the spending of a guaranteed income. Spending is easier than earning.
Mr Marryatt's role used to have the more accurate title of town clerk.
I think we should revive it. It is an honourable title but it stresses that the role is clerical. No-one pays a clerk half a million bucks.

That Clerk Tony’s pay hike is even contemplated in the current environment is reason enough for campaigning and marching against it on 1 February.

KiwiBank and Gareth Morgan up a tree … [updated]

2012-01-18T15:09:00.001+13:00

So KiwiBank is to buy out Gareth Morgan Investments, including the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme—a case of the politically appointed “People’s Bank” buying out the self-anointed “People’s Financier.”

KiwiBank’s CEO Paul Brock reckons “The ‘aligned values’ of the two businesses reinforced the decision to buy rather than build.”

Rarely has a truer word been spoke. Their “values”are aligned—and in more ways than one:

KiwiBank was set up by a political tool with truckloads of taxpayer money to help resurrect the tool’s political career. Meanwhile, the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme was set up by a political fool eager to use his notoriety to attract money from gullible fools, and to suck down loads of taxpayers’ money.
As a bank KiwiBank is simply a welfare case; a bank set up with taxpayers’ money to do things profit-seeing banks wouldn’t and unable to survive in the market without frequent injections of ever-increasing tranches of OPM to prop up its credit rating—at the extraction of which from successive Ministers of Finance it has proved outstanding. Meanwhile, the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme has taken advantage of what is little more than a welfare programme for suits, at the exploitation of which it has proved exceptional.
And finally, KiwiBank has delivered the worst return on capital of any bank in the country. While year on year the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme has proved to be the worst performing KiwiSaver scheme in New Zealand.

These are two entities clearly made for each other.

So now the directors of Gareth Morgan Investments are eager to get a payday for their consistent underperformance. And with this buyout of industry-leading underperformers, KiwiBank has once again confirmed their own.

UPDATE: Taking time today out of his busy schedule writing another book about how good he is, Gareth Morgan responded today to criticism of his funds’ less than stellar performance (his balanced fund has returned a negative - 0.1% per annum since inception; its “growth fund” a negative -3.4% p.a.; its conservative fund faring better at a positive 2.4% p.a, which still however sees his investors losing against inflation) blaming, in order, the ignorance (of others), the financial illiteracy (of others), and the league tables produced by ratings agencies Morningstar and Fund Source—who shamefully use actual figures instead of the ones provided by the voices in Gareth Morgan’s head—before pausing to point out his funds had done brilliantly against the “benchmarks” in his head.

He also said a “key focus” for GMI with respect to its KiwiSaver funds was “wealth preservation,” at which performance he maintained anyone criticising his growth portfolio’s return of negative 13.1% just doesn’t understand risk like he does.

He then touted for KiwiBank’s Kiwisaver work, before heading off to the travel agent to book his next holiday.

#SOPA = Silence Opposition Permanently Act [updated]

2012-01-18T11:42:00.001+13:00

The US Congress votes today on their Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA, aka the Silence Opposition Permanently Act, which if passed will do as much to Stop Online Activity here in EnZed as it will in the United Police States of America.

Here’s a quick Q&A on this abomination.

Q: Is there a problem with online piracy?
A: There sure is. Every day online the creators of films, music, literature and inventions are having their property downloaded without reward, making their future pursuit of their careers increasingly impossible.

Q: Will SOPA protect intellectual property?
A: No. The proposed six-strikes-and-you’re-arrested is a legal blunt instrument as imperfect as it is thuggish. So, since anyone determined enough to steal will still be able to do so, online piracy will continue, while a few high profile innocents are shut down or even arrested to demonstrate the Act is “working.”

Q: So what is the purpose of SOPA?
A: Government control of the internet under the guise of protecting intellectual property.

Q: What will it do to the internet?
A: It will put it in the deep freeze. By holding bloggers, programmers, web hosts and ISPs responsible for infringements about which they will not even be aware—on the basis of possibly vexatious complaints and on pain of arrest and even jail—SOPA will chill debate, mangle links and block internet activity

Q: What are the problems in law?
A: The principle of innocent before being proven guilty is totally overturned. And by giving government control of the internet to the government, the internet will be introduced to the lethal virus of censorship—especially dangerous in election periods when a simple complaint will be sufficient to shut down a political opponent .

Q: Should intellectual property be protected?
A: Yes, of course. But in damaging the case for intellectual property, as SOPA’s measures will, it will be more effectively destroy the case for intellectual property than the lame arguments put up by apologists for intellectual theft.

Q: Should SOPA be opposed?
A: Hell, yes!

Diana Hsieh has a much fuller discussion here and links aplenty explaining why SOPA should be opposed.

UPDATE:

NZOA: He who has the gold makes the rules [update 2]

2012-01-18T10:20:00.001+13:00

After TV3 screened the documentary ‘Inside Child Poverty’ just three days before the last election, causing screams of horror from the ruling party*, NZ on Air** is now considering*** banning broadcasters from screening such documentaries ever again so close to election day.

The problem, they say, is that the documentary was too “politically charged” to be screened just days away from when folk would be electing their favourite politicians.

What the hell?

I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing the documentary myself, so I can’t judge whether or not it made its case****. But it would not be possible to tell the story of poverty in New Zealand without involving politics. And frankly, if a documentary about poverty is not “politically charged” then it’s not telling the whole story.

And while I know many would like to see elections being just a saccharine show of politicians with polished teeth and shiny-suited spin doctors telling you what to think*****, but if organisations are banned from telling stories like this in election week then I guess we’re well down the road to making elections just a dumbed-down ritual of bluster and box ticking; A political popularity contest with uncomfortable issues banned from the feast like pariahs, for fear of upsetting the ruling classes.

So documentaries that frighten the horse will be banned, doing to free speech what the Japanese like to do to whales.

Yes, this is censorship pure and simple. But, quite seriously, that’s what you get when the money to pay for your documentaries is doled out by government flunkies. That’s the Faustian pact agreed to by documentary makers—take this here money doled out by the flunkies, but don’t be surprised if the flunkies (and their political masters) tell you what to do with it, and when. In simpler terms, it’s the old time-honoured rule, he who has the gold makes the rules.

When the money comes from the political process, its use is unavoidably politicised. That means either censorship, control, or the establishing of an establishment—which is a different and even more insidious kind of censorship than the one to which most folk are already aware; one establishing a sort of “welfare state of the intellect,” doing to the denizens of culture what the welfare state does to its recipients.

So here’s the take-home message I’d invite you to contemplate: Don’t like production of your documentaries coming under political control? Then take their funding out of the political trough.

* * * * *

* NZ on Air was “spooked by political interference” reckons Tom Frewen at Scoop.

** Who, back in the day we used to call by the richly-deserved name of NaZis On Air, for what we thought were fairly obvious reasons.

*** Apparently the announcement was made by “NZ On Air board member Stephen McElrea (who, in Tom Frewen’s marvellously dry turn of phrase, ‘also happens to be John Key’s electorate chairman and the National Party’s northern region deputy chairman’) [who] has used his dual position of authority to demand answers from the funding body and, simultaneously, make implicit but forceful statements about what constitutes ‘appropriate’ policy material for such a funding body to support.” [ref: Kiwipolitico]

**** Karl du Fresne called it "a disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative programme." But that’s the sort of thing the DomPost pays him to say. Meanwhile, Lindsay Mitchell corrected some of the doco’s “sensationalist” figures. And Martin Bradbury’s Tumeke! blog wrote a press release for the doco’s makers.

***** Which was the frank intent of both the Red Team’s Electoral Finance Act, and The Blue Teams’s subsequent Electoral Finance Act Lite—about which respective opponents were either incensed or disinterested, depending on which team at the time was proposing the saccharinisation .

UPDATE 1: New links added. Picture, courtesy Scoop.

UPDATE 2: New related thread at Twitter (#NZOnAirSongs) has thrown up a few new song titles, including:

Don't fight political corruption, Marsha, its bigger than both of us
Beige Frost
There Is No Election In New Zealand

Mere desire v burning ambition

2012-01-17T14:46:00.001+13:00

Are you burning with ambition?

Or merely harbour a desire for success in your chosen field?

That’s the difference that really makes the difference, you know—as actor Kevin Spacey explains…

[Hat tip Diana Hsieh]

If you want to get things done, find an introvert

2012-01-17T12:30:00.001+13:00

If you want to get things done, then don’t work in an open plan office.

Most of us now work in teams [notes the New York Times], in offices without walls, for managers who prize “people skills” above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
    But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
    One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation…

SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.
    But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it. ….
    [Creative people] many of whom are introverts, are unhappy…. Privacy also makes us productive… Solitude can even help us learn…
    Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity… decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases.

Ground zero in junk economics [updated]

2012-01-17T10:56:00.001+13:00

M.I.T. is a world leading university.

And no, Virginia, I’m not talking about the low-rent second-rate impostor out in Otara. I’m talking about the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The world-leading M.I.T.

The world-leading M.I.T. has a tale to tell that illustrates again the power of ideas to move the world, for good and for bad.

It has produced some 76 Nobel laureates, and around one-third of US astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin. It has been home to some stellar physicists, such as Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. To some explosive chemists. It’s mathematicians are as adept as their stories (John Nash) are Oscar-winning.

M.I.T. has produced some of the world’s leading hard scientists.

In economics however the story is both the same and very different. Sure, its economics graduates are everywhere—but given the catastrophe they produced in recent years (and are continuing to produce) I don’t mean that in a good way.

Central banking is filled with former attendees of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university … At MIT, [Bank of England Governor Mervyn] King, 63, and then-professor Ben S. Bernanke, 58, had adjoining offices in 1983, spending the early days of their academic careers in an environment where economics was viewed as a tool to set policy. Earlier, Bernanke [now head of the US Federal Reserve] and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, 64, earned their doctorates from the university in the late 1970s, Draghi with a thesis entitled “Essays on Economic Theory and Applications.”
[Bank of Israel Governor Stanley] Fischer, 68, advised Bernanke’s thesis on “Long-Term Commitments, Dynamic Optimization and the Business Cycle,” and taught Draghi. Greek Prime Minister and former ECB vice president Lucas Papademos and Olivier Blanchard, now chief economist for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, earned their doctorates from MIT at about the same time.
Other monetary policy makers who have passed through MIT’s doors include Athanasios Orphanides, head of the Central Bank of Cyprus, Duvvuri Subbarao, governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Charles Bean, King’s deputy in the U.K.

Not to mention Paul Samuelson, the writer of the textbook schooled modern Americans in the complex wrongheadedness of the Keynesian disease; New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the man with more all-round wrongheaded advice than Mr Keynes on speed; Lawrence Summers, adviser to both Obama and Bill Clinton; and Christine Romer, head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

These are the people who define “mainstream economics”—the very “macroeconomic” theories that got us into the hole.

Their advice, then and now, is to keep digging.

Given the results of its graduates then, by which I mean the state of the world today, its clear that while M.I.T.’s hard sciences departments should be lauded for their graduates’ achievements, its economics degrees are as much a piece of junk as the bonds still being peddled by European governments.

[Hat tip Tyler Cowen. Arnold Kling comments.]

UPDATE: Peter Boettke suggests, with a bit of nudging, that one primary difference between mainstream economics and Austrian economics is that mainstream theory “can’t handle the complexities of the real world…”

Quote of the day: Downgrade edition

2012-01-16T14:31:00.001+13:00

In case you hadn’t heard, European government debt was downgraded over the weekend.

Not before time.

After four years of attempting government “rescues” of their respective economies by borrowing to bolster “demand”, and two years of belatedly realising that they couldn’t afford the borrowing, and the expected recovery was nowhere to be found, the mainstream rating agencies finally noticed something was wrong.

So the ratings have finally been downgraded—but not yet the economic theory on which the profligate borrowing was based. And talk still continues about , even as the causes of the economic crisis of the last few years continues to be all but ignored.

Which brings me to the Quote of the Day, from page 8 of L. Albert Hahn’s 1949 collection The Economics of Illusion:

As far as government interference itself is concerned, one should never forget that serious economic disturbances are the consequences of basic maladjustments. The effect of correcting or not correcting such maladjustments is infinitely greater than any artificial creation of demand by government in an economy that, in most sectors, is still free. Therefore an economic policy that concentrates on artificially filling up an investment or spending gap rather than on fostering adjustments – and thus creating demand in a natural way – is doomed to fail in any severe crisis.

Don Boudreaux has more.

Climate models “yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change”

2012-01-16T10:34:00.001+13:00

As I blogged last year, temperature “predictions” by alleged climate scientists have failed over recent decades to match the measured surface temperature record. “Predictions” from 1990 for example expected a temperature trend of between 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade—a rate that has quite simply failed to materialise.

The record is even worse when compared to the satellite temperature record over the last 33 years—which, unlike the surface measurements, measures temperatures in the upper atmosphere, precisely where the “predictions” say most warming should occur. The thirty-three year temperature update, released in December, shows temperatures well below computer model predictions.

The end of November 2011 completes 33 years of satellite-based global temperature data… Globally averaged, Earth’s atmosphere has warmed about 0.45 Celsius (about 0.82° F) during the almost one-third of a century that sensors aboard NOAA and NASA satellites have measured the temperature of oxygen molecules in the air [explains John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, where the satellite record is recorded and maintained].

This represents a global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978 of just +0.14 C per decade. Says Christy:

   This is at the lower end of computer model projections of how much the atmosphere should have warmed due to the effects of extra greenhouse gases since the first Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) went into service in Earth orbit in late November 1978, according to satellite data processed and archived at UA Huntsville’s ESSC.
    “While 0.45 degrees C of warming is noticeable in climate terms, it isn’t obvious that it represents an impending disaster,” said Christy. “The climate models produce some aspects of the weather reasonably well, but they have yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change in upper air temperatures.” …
    While year-to-year temperature variations measured by the satellite sensors closely match those measured by both surface thermometers and weather balloons, it is the long-term warming trend on which the satellites and the surface thermometers disagree, [Christy’s colleague] Roy Spencer said, with the surface warming faster than the deep layer of the atmosphere.
    If both instruments are accurate, that means something unexpected is happening in the atmosphere.
    “The satellites should have shown more deep-atmosphere warming than the surface, not less” he said. “Whatever warming or cooling there is should be magnified with height. We believe this is telling us something significant about exactly why the climate system has not warmed as much as expected in recent decades.”

“Something significant” for which climate models are signally unable to account.

Read the whole analysis here.

[Hat tip Jeff Perren]

Thinking positive

2012-01-16T09:36:00.001+13:00

There’s plenty of reasons for a person to feel negative about life in Christchurch. Or not...

Don’t try this at your next lecture

2012-01-13T14:53:00.001+13:00

"How (not) to communicate new scientific information: A memoir of the famous Brindley lecture."

[Hat tip Geek Press]

Golfing on top of the world

2012-01-13T14:17:00.001+13:00

If you’re going to play golf, then this is probably the way to do it.

Like Rory McIlroy. On top of the Burj al-Arab.

Education as an aid to life

2012-01-13T14:01:00.001+13:00

Here’s a recommendation from our friends at NZ’s Maria Montessori Education Foundation:

Dear Friends and Advocates for Young Children.

The new website Aid to Life is now on-line and it is superb!

http://aidtolife.org/

It is primarily a resource for parents, guiding them through how to support their young child’s development from 0-3 years. A wonderful parent resource!

There is information about movement, independence, dressing, and more—complete with videos to help parents.

Highly recommended. Please pass this it on!

Kind regards,
Carol Potts

I have.

No blogging

2012-01-12T14:57:00.001+13:00

Sorry.

No blogging today.

I’ve been assassinated by a crazed Ron Paul supporter.

What would entice them back?

2012-01-11T14:26:00.001+13:00

Recovery authorities are asking business, property owners and customers what would entice them back into Christchurch's quake-stricken CBD.

An Enterprise Zone would.

But never in a million tears would they consider that…

Ayn Rand Campus

2012-01-11T13:21:00.001+13:00

The Ayn Rand Institute’s ‘Online Campus’ has just gone live, a major new educational initiative promising “free courses on Ayn Rand and her ideas in an innovative and interactive learning environment!”

That’s what it says on the label, and it’s looking pretty good.

Initial course offerings include:
•       Ayn Rand: A Writer's Life
•       Ayn Rand: Radical Thinker
•       The Ayn Rand Bookshelf
•       Anthem
•       We the Living
•       The Fountainhead
•       Moral Virtue
•       Philosophy of Education
•       Philosophy: Who Needs It

New courses will be added regularly—the first release post-launch will be an in-depth look at the novel Atlas Shrugged, taught by Dr. Onkar Ghate and appearing in February. The full, public launch of ARI Campus is slated for September of 2012.

Looks like a great online resource!

Organon Architecture’s 2011 Top 10

2012-01-11T12:30:00.001+13:00

Yes, I know it’s 2012 already. But 2011 ended so busy for me I didn’t have a chance to do my semi-regular Top 10—i.e., in the spirit of Epic Beer’s own Top 10, listing the top ten things we achieved at Organon Architecture did in 2011:

1. New offices!
2011 started badly for me, for reasons many of you know. But productivity picked up in July when I opened my new office on Dominion Road—about halfway down, as it happens. Safely sequestered therein, we’ve produced a mountain of work and lots to celebrate.
And being about 400m from Eden Park, it wasn’t a bad location from which to enjoy the World Cup!

2. ‘Art & Architecture Afternoons’
The new offices, corner of Valley and Dominion Rd, now play host to informal Friday afternoon ‘Art & Architecture Afternoons’ from 4pm every Friday. The “art” part is supplied chiefly by local artists Jasmine Kamante and Jesper Sundwall, whose studio is fortuitously just up the road, and between us we have a few plans for presentations in 2012—starting on the 20th. Feel free to drop in and chat.

3. Orders!
Order books are still full, with some exciting new work and renovations going on—and not every architecture practice can say that this year!

4. Bungalows!
In the words of Paul Litterick, “Man is born free, yet everywhere is in villas.” And this year again, no one’s asked me to renovate a villa—folk are getting more excited instead by California Bungalows. Good news, and a very healthy trend indeed. That said, there was one reluctant sale by a client of a very special California Bungalow (right)—news made better by the sale price which more than covered our fairly extensive renovations.

5. Kebyar
I’m still really enjoying my Kebyar membership, which keeps me in touch with like-minded architects overseas (since there’s few enough of them locally).

6. Home Show
Thanks to my sister, a landscape architect, I was persuaded to share a stand at the Whangarei Home Show—the first time I’ve tried that method of promoting the practice. It was fun, and from it came two delightful clients and the prospect of a few very interesting things emerging…

7. Topping out
I was delighted that a project first begun back in 2003 (right) is finally seeing the light of day, with topping out on the top storey all but complete in the last days of 2011. It’s all set now for completion in 2012.

8. New website
Yes, I know, I’ve been promising this for years—pretty much since the year I first cobbled it together--but this year it’s not just long, long, loong overdue (one client suggested if I don’t update it I should just unplug it) but will actually emerge.
Or so I’m promised.

9. New logo
With the move to new offices, I was persuaded by hotshot graphic designer Graham Clark from Clark Design & Marketing that I should change my logo. Quite frankly, I think what we came up with is pretty damn striking.
You can see it at the top of the page.

If you like it, give Graham a call and he’ll do something just as sharp for you.
Tell him I sent you.

10. Good Work
Not that I’m one to boast, but I think 2011 finished with good variety and some pretty good work in the bag—both renovations and new work. Here’s a small selection.

So it didn’t start too well, but in the end not a bad year at all, really.

I look forward to topping it this year.

Hope you had a good year too. Keep enjoying the good life--and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Cheers
Peter Cresswell

[Cross-posted at my Organon Architecture blog]

Beer

2012-01-11T10:01:00.001+13:00

Horrors! I’ve gone through nearly this whole holiday period without a post on beer!

My apologies, gentle readers. Let me remedy that now.

Let me remedy that by talking about affordable beer. And “by talking about affordable beer” I mean talking about what someone else has said about affordable beer. About affordable good, tasty beer.

In fact, let me just quote that someone else, who from hereon in I will call Kevin---chiefly because that is Kevin McLellan’s name. So let’s talk about good beer value, and New Zealand’s best value beer: and Kevin’s detailed, meticulous, rigorous study of this critically important subject.

I enjoy drinking quality beer [says Kevin]. That doesn't mean that I need beer brewed by a silent Belgium monk and costs as much as a pint of saffron… I need to pay the mortgage and I need to know that the beer in my fridge is value for money.
So how do I know that I'm getting value for money? Up until now it has been calculated on-the-fly based on experience, gut-feel and some badly applied maths. I was having a bit of a slow day recently so I decided to devise the beer value formula. I had no idea how this formula would work. All I knew is that it would need to prove that Epic Pale Ale is the best value beer that money can buy in New Zealand…
I worked out a standard cost - $per/100ml – … [and] added a new column to show the Ratebeer overall score. Seeing that Epic scored 97/100 and Heineken 7/100 I knew I was onto something. Now for the formula - I simply divided the Ratebeer score by the cost. The result of this division is effectively how much quality is bought with every dollar spent.

A good start. And what he found—Hallelujah!—is at least half-a-dozen easily available, good value, tasty bottled beers to help the daily restocking of your fridge, with the aforementioned Epic Pale Ale (which took no manipulation whatsoever to achieve top spot with a score of 95.1) and Little Creatures Pale Ale, 82.4, on top spot, and Yeastie Boys Pot Kettle Black (co-brewed by former NOT PC beer columnist Stu) holding up third place with a score of 77.0.

And with shops full of Coopers’ Sparkling Ale (65.6) and Original Pale Ale, and a new local $2.50 “craft” beer hitting the shops since Kevin’s definitive, scientific, peer-reviewed study, there’s no shortage of ways to keep your fridge fully stocked.

It’s summer. So why not start your restocking this afternoon?

PS: My own beer of choice over our holiday break was fill-your-own flagons of Leigh Sawmill Pale Ale, collected regularly direct from the brewer. Good value with a score of 76.1—and, if you’re in Auckland, available in fill-your-own flagons at the Herne Bay Cellars in Jervois Road.

“Let them eat bonds!” Before they eat themselves.

2012-01-10T11:36:00.000+13:00

Despite conventional wisdom, government bonds are not a good investment. The endgame for government bonds is either default or default—either outright default or default by central bank-created inflation.

And as the Euro crisis (really a govt debt crisis) plays out, it’s clear enough that endgame is coming soon.

“The government bond market is still skating on thin ice,’ says Detlev Schlicter, and with it “the entire financial system.”

Read about it here at Detlev’s ‘Paper Money Collapse’ blog.

And learn about his thesis here, in his recent talk to London’s Adam Smith Institute, described by 'Libertarian Home’s Andy Janes as “very impressive, if terrifying.”

He argues that the present financial crisis is far from over; generally misunderstood and misrepresented, it is far from being a ‘crisis of capitalism’. Detlev traces the history of failure of paper money systems and lays out why present policies pursued by various governments and institutions are misdirected and counterproductive.

Thank Galt for warming, eh.

2012-01-10T09:00:00.001+13:00

A reader (thanks Greg) has spotted the warmists’ latest spin, trumpeted by no less than their favourite outlet the BBC.

They are now not trying to hide the decline [notes Greg]. In fact they admit that things are getting colder--but now the spin is that global warming [sic] is slowing down an ice age. This is somewhat like Obama claiming that while unemployment under his watch has sky-rocketed under his administration, it would have been worse if not for him.

So now that the warmists’ religion is collapsing under patently transparent nonsense, what’s going to replace it as the chief weapon in the anti-industrialists armory?

Guess.

‘Body and Soul’

2012-01-10T07:50:00.000+13:00

Could this be the greatest jazz solo of all time? The good folks at Jazz on the Tube sure think so.

Coleman Hawkins, ‘Body and Soul’

Ron Paul

2012-01-09T13:01:00.000+13:00

I’ve had to discuss Ron Paul frequently over the holiday break. Not because I brought him up. For some reason, friends wanted to talk about him. Here below are links saying a little of what I tried to say about him in response, summarised by those more knowledgeable about the subject than I.

Short summary? Ron Paul is not a libertarian. He

rejects the Jeffersonian principle of a "wall of separation" between religion and government;
is anti-immigration (“to the right of most Republicans” says Vodka Pundit Steve Green);
is anti-abortion (Paul describes "the rights of unborn people” [sic] as “the greatest moral issue of our time," and "abortion on demand" as "the ultimate State tyranny");
“plays footsie” with racists and kooks;
is a hypocritical supporter of pork-barrel earmarks for his own congressional district;
is opposed to free-trade agreements (like NAFTA); and
is appallingly “blame-America-first” on foreign policy.

In addition, he is a Creationist—a point of view disqualifying the holder from intelligent discussion of, well, virtually everything.

In short, then, and to repeat, he is not a libertarian: he is a “states-rights” religious conservative, with all the intellectual confusion that implies—yet his growing public prominence as a self-proclaimed spokesman for the ideas of liberty gives grave concern for the fate of those ideas.

And you, sir, are no libertarian – ABC (Australia): T H E D R U M
The Great Society's Great Defender –Mark Steyn, W E E K L Y S T A N D A R D
Ron Paul Doesn’t Want To Talk About His Newsletters Anymore – O U T S I D E T H E B E L T W A Y
"...his views on foreign policy alone singularly disqualify him to run as president."
– Michael Moeller, S O L O
On Foreign Policy, Our Founders vs. Ron Paul – W O R D S B Y W O O D S
"Ron Paul defended the states' rights view..." – Michael Moeller, S O L O
Ron Paul's advocacy of "states' rights" extends to more than just social issues
– Michael Moeller, S O L O
Kook Paul – Gregster, S O L O
Ron Paul on Foreign Policy - Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D
Ron Paul on Israel - - Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D
Videos: An Early Look at the Election and GOP Candidates - Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D

UPDATE: Clearly, Ron Paul is far from the secular freedom lover many would like him to be. Argues Gus Van Horn,

he functions as a Trojan horse for the religious right even as he pretends that personal freedom is as obviously good and uncontroversial as breathing on a regular basis. (Personal freedom is good, but this is neither obvious nor uncontroversial.)

So what then about his claims to being a lover of freedom? What exactly is Paul's vision of "a free society"? On that subject, this Open Letter to Ron Paul is an eye-opener, written by one Duncan Bayne in response to this article by Paul criticising the 1993 BATF & FBI assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco. Says Bayne:

While I agreed with many of your criticisms of BATF and FBI tactics & strategy, it became apparent to me that your article was not primarily concerned with those criticisms: the main thrust of the article was to whitewash the monstrous evil committed by David Koresh and his followers. You wrote:
‘The community of faith that once lived at Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, believed the promise of a free society.’
“This is the "community of faith" that sacrificed twelve-year old girls to Koresh so they could serve as his 'wives' - some of whom bore his children. If that level of barbarism - a religious community complicit in the slavery and rape of young girls - represents anything approaching your idea of what is a ‘free society,’ then I don't want you having any say in how society operates.

Too true. There is no need to defend the barbarism and paedophilia of Koresh’s supporters in order to attack the BATF and FBI goons who killed them. Yet Paul is happy to embrace the barbarity, and in doing so demonstrates the Objectivist argument against irrational libertarianism. Without a rational philosophical foundation, argue Objectivists, without a decent "philosophical infrastructure," politics becomes a dangerous pursuit of empty words, floating abstractions, and range-of-the-moment compromises. How can you call libertarians allies in freedom, ask hardcore Objectivists, when libertarians such as Ron Paul can't even agree on what the word "freedom" stands for? And how can you call someone an advocate of freedom at all when their vision of a "free society" apparently includes the the freedom to rape twelve-year-old girls?

It's clear, just as Van Horn charges, that freedom is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. In fact, personal freedom can and does (and must) be predicated on the base of reason, not of subjective whim. As Michael Berliner points out in this article on Ayn Rand,

She understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. ‘I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,’ she wrote in 1971, ‘but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.’ This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual's right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.

The point could hardly be clearer. Van Horn concludes:

The fight for freedom is, as I have pointed out, a war on two fronts: the political and the intellectual. Of the two, the intellectual is the more fundamental, and cannot be lost. The longer enemies to freedom like Ron Paul can masquerade as friends, the longer it will take for people to become aware of the actual requirements for a society that respects individual rights.

That he can masquerade as a friend to freedom at all demonstrates how far the intellectual battle for freedom still needs to travel.

Because the harsh fact about Ron Paul is that on the few occasions he takes off the tinfoil hat and talks Austrian he’s damn good. But when he’s wearing the tinfoil headwear, as he does the rest of the time, he’s rotten.

Why Wikipedia doesn’t make money

2012-01-09T09:12:00.001+13:00

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales explains why making money isn’t his primary goal—to the surprise of those who think it should be for an Objectivist.

[Hat tip Diana Hsieh, who Jimmy quotes in his Ford Hall Forum speech]

Welcome back

2012-01-09T09:02:00.001+13:00

Welcome back everyone.

How was your holiday?

Mine was a beauty.

And thanks for asking.

So what’s been happening with everyone?

“Balloon Race,” by David Knowles

2012-01-09T08:21:00.000+13:00

“Balloon Race” by Wairarapa artist David Knowles is posted this morning to mark the tragic accident over the weekend—and to remind us of the spirit that animates the sport, and produces this sort of spectacle.

Let the tragedy not destroy it.

Your pocket guide to festive drinking

2011-12-20T15:32:00.000+13:00

Observed Alexander Pope, “Drink is the feast of reason and the flow of soul.”

So drink sensibly this Festive Season, i.e., start early, then lash yourself securely to a bar.

And tell the wowsers to go to hell. It’s what hell was invented for. For wowsers. For wowsers who try to deliver “Good News” like this:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife,
and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
cannot be my disciple.--[Luke 14:26]

Because even if this was his birthday (which it isn’t) that’s not someone whose disciple you’d want to be, or something you’d want to celebrate. Ever.

At Christmas time we don't say "sacrifice and repent," we say enjoy yourself and thrive! Especially enjoyable when you know Islamic "scholars" find "saying Merry Christmas worse than fornication or killing someone." So hold your drinks high, shout loudly “Merry Christmas and a Salacious Saturnalia,” and celebrate the Season as a time of unabashed earthly joy.

Because it’s entirely self-evident that flourishing and being happy about it is good for you.

So as Tom Waits once said, “Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends.” Here’s the Champagne Song from Die Fledermaus to get you started with the appropriate toast: “It’s not how much you drink, it’s what you drink. A toast to King Champagne!” (Kiri’s toast starts about 2:00 in.)

And here’s the drinking song from Verdi’s Otello, sung by an unusually ebullient bunch of Laplanders*. The loose translation is ‘Wet Your Throat,’ but you hardly need an ace translator to work out what they’re singing about.

* Well, almost. Finland is pretty close, right?

Books, books, books, books…

2011-12-20T10:03:00.001+13:00

I’ve been trying to limit my pile of holiday reading this year.

I thought reading books on my iPad would help reduce the stack. But I suspect I’ve overdone it again.

So what’s on your holiday reading list this year?

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

2011-12-19T10:47:00.001+13:00

THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT HISTORICAL event of the last fifty years was the collapse of Communism, and with it the liberation of hundreds of millions from slavery.

One of the most important figureheads in that fall died last night: Vaclav Havel, dissident playwright, Velvet Revolutionary, the first president of the free Czechoslovakia he and his colleagues wrested from the Soviets, and the man who successfully guided the Czech Republic from communism to relative freedom.

His story is as inspiring as his understanding that authoritarianism can never last; that the collapse was inevitable; that authoritarian rule is inevitably the victim of a "lethal principle" that will always destroy it:

"Life cannot be destroyed for good," he wrote in a widely-circulated samizdat letter in the last years of Soviet rule. “A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undermining it. It may be a long process, but one day it has to happen: the crust can no longer hold and starts to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something new and unique."

HAVEL—PLAYWRIGHT, POET, MAGAZINE editor and a dissident against totalitarian rule since the mid-sixties—led the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ which overturned the Communist government of Czechoslovakia, and remained as President of the new country until he retired.

The Velvet Revolution was a revolution of ideas - ideas that in the end saw the Communists concede rather than confront them; Havel won with his principles, which he developed in his many battles to beat the Bolshevik bastards back. He and his supporters were regarded as a major threat by the communists not because of their numbers, but because of what they said. More particularly, the communist government knew that when Havel said something, HE MEANT IT.

Vaclav Havel had no intention of ending up in his country’s presidential palace; it was his fight to keep his own magazine, Tvar, alive and un-banned that got him involved in politics, but the way he fought eventually brought down a government. His fight was based on ideas, it was based on principle, and it required an almost ineffable patience.

Havel learnt a crucial lesson in the power of principle very early in his career. He learned to never rely on the “moderates”—that it is these creatures who are your biggest enemies; it is them who will knife you in the back while smiling. He learned this when he was sold out by his own fellow writers and imprisoned; sold out by souls so cowardly, so in thrall to the Soviets - so craven - that they would rather die on their knees than even give thought to the notion of standing up for their own freedom. Havel and his supporters learnt then that if they were ever to achieve anything they must stand up for themselves. They did, and eventually they won their country.

Two years before the ‘Velvet Revolution’ there were no outward signs that his years of struggle would ever have any tangible effect, yet Havel remained adamant that the struggle was worth it; he was convinced that totalitarianism contained within it a ‘lethal principle’ which would eventually kill it. He described this principle in a illicit ‘samizdat’ essay widely-circulated in the desolate years after the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring

[Havel] described a society governed by fear - not the cold, pit-of-the-stomach terror that Stalin had once spread throughout his empire, but a dull, existential fear that seeped into every crack and crevice of daily life and made one think twice about everything one said and did.
The essay was, in fact, a state of the union message, and it contained an unforgettable metaphor: the regime, the author said, was "entropic," a force that was gradually reducing the vital energy, diversity, and unpredictability of Czechoslovak society to a state of dull, inert uniformity. And the letter also contained a remarkable prediction: that sooner or later, this regime would become the victim of its own "lethal principle." "Life cannot be destroyed for good," [Havel] wrote. “A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undermining it. It may be a long process, but one day it has to happen: the crust can no longer hold and starts to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something new and unique." *

"Life cannot be destroyed for good." Fifteen years after Havel wrote those words in a samizdat pamphlet those streamlets burst forth, sweeping away communist regimes from Berlin to Bucharest and carrying the playwright Vaclav Havel from the ghetto of dissent to the world stage. Those extraordinary events of 1990 enrich that letter with new levels of meaning.

HAVEL FIRST BECAME INVOLVED in political resistance in the mid-sixties in his efforts simply to survive; to keep alive his small literary magazine, Tvar, in the face of pressure from the Communist Party to close it down. In resisting, he discovered what he called "a new model of behaviour":

When arguing with a center of power, don't get sidetracked into vague [nitpicking] debates about who is right or wrong; fight for specific, concrete things, and be prepared to stick to your guns to the end.

That model of principled behaviour served him well:

On Tuesday morning, November 28,1989, Havel led a delegation of the Civic Forum to negotiate with the Communist- dominated government. The issue was not a magazine this time, it was the country. Ten days before that, the "Velvet Revolution" had been set in motion by a student demonstration in Prague; that was followed by a week of massive demonstrations culminating. in a general strike on Monday, November 27. Early Tuesday afternoon, following the meeting, the government announced that it had agreed to write the leading role of the Communist Party out of the constitution. We do not know what was said at the meeting, but I don't think we would be far wrong to assume that the discussion stayed very close to the concrete issue of amending the constitution, and that the Civic Forum delegation stuck to their guns. A principle that Havel and his colleagues had learned decades before now stood them in good stead.

By the end of that month, Havel was President of the country in a process that readers of Atlas Shrugged could easily recognise. The battle begun simply to save Havel’s magazine had ended by saving the people of Czechoslovakia.

Yet he recounts how he began this battle simply by resisting pressure from his local 'Writers Union' to 'persuade' him to close the magazine. He quickly realised that his real enemies were not the Soviets. His real enemies were all those who Lenin had once called his ‘useful idiots’ – all those like the Writers' Union who are prepared to compromise with their enemies and to sell out their friends - supposed allies who, in accepting servitude for themselves, happily impose it on others.

In the end though and despite his resistance, [the banning of Tvar] became more and more inevitable. The Central Committee of the Union had to make it appear as though they were doing it on their own initiative, but in fact they were ordered to do it by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Left to themselves, the anti-dogmatics [as the wowsers were descriptively called] would not have banned us, but we weren't worth a rebellion inside the party so they did it anyway. Of course they explained it to us in their traditional 'anti-dogmatic' way: The struggle for great things - the general liberalization of conditions - demands minor compromises in things that are less important . It would not be tactical to risk an open conflict over Tvar, because there is bigger game at stake [etc., etc]. … This is [the very] model of self-destructive politics. …

We argued that the best way to liberalize conditions is to be uncompromising precisely in those "minor" and "unimportant details, such as the publication of this or that book or this or that little magazine. Our argument was not heard. Nevertheless, a kind of hangover from this experience remained in anti-dogmatic circles. And it began to spread rapidly when we refused to accept their ultimatum silently, and refused to accept the rules of the game as they had played it until then.

Havel and his Tvar team mobilised to defend themselves, organising petitions and meetings amongst their fellow writers, refusing - in Ayn Rand's words - to accept the sanction of the victim. Used to more compliant behaviour from their victims, this unusually principled resistance got under the skin of the Central Committee:

I think our efforts had a great importance, one that has not been recognized, even today. We introduced a new model of behaviour: don't get involved in diffuse … polemics with the centre, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight "only" for those concrete causes, and be prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end. In other words, don't get mixed up in back-room wheeling and dealing, but play an open game.

I think in this sense we taught our anti-dogmatic colleagues a rather important lesson; … They realized that many of their former methods were hopelessly out of date, that a new and fresher wind was blowing, that there were people - and there would obviously be more and more of them - who would not be stopped in their tracks by the argument that a concrete evil was necessary in the name of an abstract good. In short, I think that Tvar had an educational effect on the anti-dogmatic members of the writing community. Suddenly here was the party taking us, a handful of fellows, more seriously than the entire anti-dogmatic "front." And they were taking us more seriously for the simple reason that we could not be so easily talked out of our convictions.

In 1969, Havel wrote to Alexander Dubcek, the face of the brief 'Prague Spring' before it was crushed by the Soviets, pleading with him to leave political life rather than let himself be used as a propaganda pawn. Dubcek did leave office. Reflecting on that letter seventeen years later, Havel wrote:

I had written that even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. In this I found, to my own surprise, the very same idea that, having been discovered by many people at the same time, stood behind the birth of Charter 77 and which to this day I am trying - in relation to the Charter and our "dissident activities" - to develop and explain and, in various ways, make more precise.

In an interview two years before the Soviets fell, when from the outside things still seemed apparently hopeless, Havel reflected that years of seemingly hopeless resistance had indeed produced effects, though not ones that everyone would notice :

[Our various actions], of course, have wider consequences. Today far more is possible. Think of this: hundreds of people today are doing things that not a single one of them would have dared to do at the beginning of the seventies. We are now living in a truly new and different situation. This is not because the government has become more tolerant; it has simply had to get used o the new situation. It has had to yield to continuing pressure from below, which means pressure from all those apparently suicidal or exhibitionistic civic acts. People who are used to seeing society only 'from above" tend to be impatient. They want to see immediate results. Anything that does not produce immediate results seems foolish. They don't have a lot of sympathy for acts which can only be [practically] evaluated years after they take place, which are motivated by moral factors, and which therefore run the risk of never accomplishing anything. …

Unfortunately, we live in conditions where improvement is often achieved [only] by actions that risk remaining forever in the memory of humanity [as] an exhibitionistic act of desperate people.

Havel, reflects that it is the sum total of these many 'hopeless acts' of 'exhibitionism' that in the end force change; that only by not lying down in the face of an apparently hopeless struggle are these crucial and very tangible victories achieved:

To many outside observers [the many small victories of principled action] may seem insignificant. Where are your ten-million strong trade unions? they may ask. Where are your members of parliament? Why does [the President] not negotiate with you? Why is the government not considering your proposals and acting on them? But for someone from here who is not completely indifferent, these [small signs] are far from insignificant changes; they are the main promise of the future, since he has long ago learned not to expect it from anywhere else.

I can't resist concluding with a question of my own. Isn't the reward of all those small but hopeful signs of movement this deep, inner hope that is not dependent on prognoses, and which was the primordial point of departure in this unequal struggle? Would so many of those small hopes have "come out" if there had not been this great hope "within," this hope without which it is impossible to live in dignity and meaning, much less find the will for the "hopeless enterprise" which stands at the beginning of most good things.

Freedom lovers everywhere might reflect on Havel’s words, and his experience. We must sometimes seem to be such an apparently "hopeless enterprise" as he describes, engaged in a doomed an unequal struggle.

But we can learn from Havel that such an apparently "hopeless enterprise" can eventually ignite success. As he suggests, if our own actions are to ever become "the beginning of … good things" we must always let our hope "within" motivate us to action.

We must realise we ourselves are the change we hope to make in the world; that our ostensive enemies are really only paper tigers supported by nothing but lies; that our real enemies are the inertia of thousands with heads full of mush, and our so-called friends with nothing in their souls but marshmallow.

Havel himself had to spend four years in jail before his battle was won. Little wonder. Power does not concede without a struggle. As former American slave Frederick Douglass said, struggling for freedom in the century before Havel’s: " The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! "

The struggle for freedom goes on, its path lit by heroes like Douglass and Havel.

We mourn the loss of Vaclav Havel, and celebrate his life.

* * * *

* Quotes are from the book Disturbing the Peace.

Quote of the day: Christopher Hitchens, (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)

2011-12-17T09:33:00.001+13:00

"My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to
have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere,
any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this
can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.”
- Christopher Hitchens, Free Speech Debate at University of Toronto, 2006

Have a Salacious Saturnalia!

2011-12-16T10:29:00.001+13:00

Those cunning secularists, perverting the “reason for the season”! We hear the same complaints every year, from Fox News to the Vatican, that "Christ is being taken out of Christmas," about the "War against Christmas" (TM) -- about the "widespread revolt" against "Christian values” and “Christian symbols” –about the prevalence of "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" greetings…

Here's what I say to those complainers: Get a life. Learn some history. And try a Christmas joke:

Q: "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?"
A: "There is no God."

Ha ha ha. The harsh fact is, customers, Christ was never even in Christmas --except in fiction and by order of the first Popes.

None of the four gospels gives any notion of what time of year (let alone in what year) the supposed Nativity occurred. Only two gospels mention the virginity of Mary and only one has any mention of a "manger" [i.e., a trough]. Nowhere is there any record of a "stable." Wise men and shepherds are likewise very unevenly distributed throughout the discrepant accounts. So that the placement of a creche surrounded by a motley crew of humans and animals has no more Scriptural warrant than does The Life of Brian. Moreover, the erection of this exhibit near the turn of the year is actually a placation of the old Norse gods of the winter solstice - or "Yule" as the pre-Christians sometimes called it.
I myself [says Christopher Hitchens] repose no faith in any man-made text or made-man redeemer, so when it's Christmas I say "Merry Christmas" with a clear conscience, as I respect Ramadan and Passover, and also because "Happy Holidays" is so thin and insipid. I don't mind if Christians honor the moment by displaying, and singing about, reindeer (a hard species to find in the greater Jerusalem/Bethlehem area). Same for the pine and fir trees that also don't grow in Palestine. I wish everybody joy of it.

And so do I. I just wish the Christians would leave off bashing us over the head with their myth—and their values.

Jesus wasn't even born in December, let alone at Christmas time: he was born in July* -- which makes him a cancer**. Just like religion.

And God doesn’t even like Christmas trees, for Chrissake!

Historians themselves know the "reason for the season," and it's not because of anything that happened away in a stable at a time of a non-existent census. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury knows the truth, conceding a couple of Christmasses ago that the Christmas story and the Three Wise Men - the whole Nativity thing itself -- is all just "a legend."

And I like myths and legends. I’m even happier when we remember they’re stories, not historical accounts.

Fact is, 'Christmas' itself was originally not even a Christian festival at all. The celebration we now all enjoy was originally the lusty pagan festival to celebrate the winter solstice, the festival that eventually became the Roman Saturnalia (right). This time of year in the northern hemisphere (from whence these traditions started) is when days stopped getting darker and darker, and started once again to lengthen. This was a time of the year for optimism. The end of the hardest part of the year was in sight (particularly important up in Lapland, the pagan home of the Norsemen where all-day darkness was the winter rule), and food stocks would soon be replenished.

All this was something worth celebrating with enthusiasm, with gusto and with plenty of food and drink and pleasures of the flesh -- and if those Norse sagas tell us anything, they tell us those pagans knew a thing or two about that sort of celebration! They celebrated a truly Salacious Saturnalia.

One popular celebration involved having a chap put on the horns and skin of the dead animal being roasted in the fire (worn with the fur side inside and the blood-red side outside ), and giving out gifts of food to revellers. This guy represented Satan, and the revellers celebrated beating him back for another year by making him a figure of fun (I swear, I'm not making this up). Observant readers will spot that the gift-giving and the fur-lined red outfit (and even the name, almost) are still with us in the form of Santa. So Happy Satanmas, Santa!

SUCH WERE THE celebrations of the past. But the Dark Age Christian do-gooders didn’t like the pagan revels. Instead of bacchanalia, these ghouls of the graveyard wanted instead to talk about suffering and their sores, and to spread the misery of their religion worldwide; instead of throwing themselves into such lewd and lusty revels, they thought everyone should be sitting at home mortifying their flesh – and very soon they hit upon a solution: first they stole the festivals, and then they sanitised them. Instead of lusty revels with Satan and mistletoe, we got insipid nonsense around a manger along with Magi, stars and shepherds dreamed up almost out of whole cloth. (Just think, the first 'Grinch' who stole Christmas was really a Pope!)

So given this actual history, it's somewhat churlish of today's sanitised saints of sobriety to be complaining now about history reasserting itself and folk claiming Christmas back for their revels.

BECAUSE THE VERY BEST OF Christmas is still very much pagan, thank Odin. The mistletoe, the trees, and the presents; the drinking and eating and all the red-blooded celebrations; the gift-giving, the trees and the decorations; the eating and the singing; the whole full-blooded, rip-roaring, free-wheeling, overwhelming, benevolent materialism of the holiday -- all of it all fun, and all of it fully, one-hundred percent pagan. Says Leonard Peikoff in 'Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial', the festival is "an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life." I'll drink to all that, and then I'll come back right back up again for seconds. Ayn Rand sums it up for mine, rather more benevolently than my brief introduction might have led you to expect:

“The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance....
“The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying is good for business and good for the country’s economy; but, more importantly in this context, it stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decoration put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.

And so say all of us. I wish you all, wherever you are a Cool Yule, a Salacious Saturnalia, and a very Happy Christmas.

And while I’ll be posting occasionally between now and next year, I’ll see you back here again to give it the full press in the New Year.

Be as good as you can be while I’m gone.***

PS: Here’s some related Hot Facts from the Hot Facts Girl. Concentrate as well as you can…

* Yes, this is simply a rhetorical flourish. Jesus' birth may have happened in March. Or in September -- or not at all -- but it certainly did not happen in December. More on that here.

** "A cancer. Like religion." Think that's harsh? You should try Landover Baptist's Bible Quizzes. Or Sam Harris's 'Atheist Manifesto.' Ouch! [Hat tip for both, good old Stephen Hicks] And, I confess, I pinched the quip from Australian comedy team The Doug Anthony All Stars.

*** Panic not, I won’t be away long. I’ll be posting occasionally over the summer break, and be back for good around the second week in January. Or so. Enjoy your holidays. I will be.

Classical realism, in NZ

2011-12-15T13:17:00.001+13:00

I’ve just been to a wonderful show by two hugely talented artists at the start of their careers, artists the like of which you thought you’d never see again.

The “show was a presentation for Angela Mackie’s ‘Art History Cathedral Lectures’ – a whole enormously valuable experience on their own. So rather than listen to me, Here’s what Angela had to say about these two talented souls:

Classical Realism – Thursday 15 December 2011

Two European artists who trained (and met!) in Florence, became engaged in Paris, and married in Auckland – Jesper Sundwall and Jasmine Kamante (center, below, talking to exhibition attendees)– are our guest artists and speakers at our last lecture of the year on Classical Realism. They will be talking to you about their rich experiences training in the Classical Tradition in modern day Europe, and the journey that led them there. In addition, a selection of their drawings and paintings will be exhibited for sale at the lecture.

Jasmine Kamante, of Persian extraction, has had a passion for drawing portraits from a very young age. She began her art studies in New Zealand with a Bachelor of Visual Arts, specialising in glass and clay sculpture. Jasmine then spent three intensive years studying classical drawing and painting techniques in ateliers in Florence and Paris. Now a classically trained artist, she specialises in figurative narratives. Jasmine currently works full time in her studio in New Zealand.
Jasmine's extensive studies of the human figure and, indeed, her own delightful personality and enquiring mind give her an empathy for her subjects which translates into accurate and honest representation of their facial expressions and body language. Her eclectic training has enabled her to blend a variety of techniques to produce exquisite work which has a sense of volume and movement.

Jesper Sundwall (above) is an artist from Stockholm, Sweden. He studied at Parsons School of Design in Paris and New York, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in 1997. He designed for New York clients such as Rolling Stone Magazine, Sony and Korg for six years. During this time Jesper also studied at New York Art Academy. He then went on to pursue his passion for art and hone his painting and drawing skills by studying at an atelier in Florence. He now paints full time in his studio in New Zealand.
Jesper's body of work showcases carefully considered, representational still lifes and figures. His works display a sensitivity that animates even the most inorganic of subjects. With expertly placed brush strokes, he manages to capture the varying tactile qualities of different materials and textures so well that you want to reach out and touch the subject.

And, yes, these works and many more are for sale at Jasmine’s and Jesper’s websites.

An atheist Christmas?

2011-12-15T07:35:00.000+13:00

Q: Is it appropriate for an atheist to celebrate Christmas?

A: “Yes, of course…

The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men...
    “The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance…
    “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.”
            - Ayn Rand