"Attacks on the Resource Management Act are [National's] stock in trade," she said. "It wouldn't just be the nuclear-free legislation that would be gone by lunchtime."I only wish it were true. Sadly...
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a 700-page doorstopper commissioned by the Blair Government to have an effect on an international audience. It is a political document commissioned by politicians to justify political action -- and in Britain and here in New Zealand the 'Stern Gang' was all ready to hit the ground running with respectively "green taxes" and promises of "carrots and sticks" even before the report was released. The report takes the politicised science as read and unsurprisingly concludes with alarmist calls for government expansion. The UK's Scientific Alliance [Word Doc] "believes that Sir Nicholas’s talents have been misused."His calculations are based on the output of complex computer models, all constructed on the assumption that average global temperatures are directly linked to atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases – in particular carbon dioxide. His estimates are doubtless correct for the scenarios presented, but we question the validity of the starting point.As they drily note, "Not surprisingly, his conclusions are those which the government wanted..." Philip Chaston at the UK-based Samizdata blog gloomily summarises:
Reaction from the public to the Stern Report, which is only officially released today, has not been entirely positive. This BBC forum is an example, with the more popular commenters expressing views like these:The Letter from David Miliband [PDF], the appointment of the political failure Al Gore and the report by Stern are all designed to provide the intellectual ballast for continued government expansion. These taxes are politically unpalatable and would be rejected by the electorate, if levied without green cover. Therefore, climate change and catastrophism are the reasons for a 'greener than thou' ratchet effect, where politicians use Britain and our money to puff themselves up as a moral example for others.
Since the science and the scenarios are still so uncertain, climate change has been adopted as the vanguard for further taxation and a curb on British consumerism. Using the expansion of the state and taxes, rather than market mechanisms, our politicians will dampen our economic growth, steal our wealth, and wrap us in their parasitical hairshirt. The only light in this gloom is that the British electorate may reject such alarmism and the example of our political stupidity will lead India and other nations to seek technological and free-market solutions that do not curb their march away from poverty.
Grafton Bridge (1910):
Auckland Harbour Bridge (1959):
The Raurimu Railway Spiral (1908):
Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World (1985):
The Skytower (1997):
Black Magic NZL32 (1995):
High-voltage DC link between the North and South Islands (1965):
World’s first base isolated building (1982):
Manapouri Power Station:
Wairakei Geothermal Power Station (1963):
McLaren F1 Supercar (1994):
World’s first flying machine (1903):
The electric fence (1936):
The Modern Jet Boat (1950s):
The Taranaki Gate:
John Britten Motorcycles (1990s):
Why am I posting this painting? Because I was fascinated by a discussion of it in one of Bernard Levin's columns.The problem of Cezanne, which we who only want to feast on his pictures canClick on the pick to enlarge, and then spend some time in front of it on your camp-stool. Can you see it?
happily leave to the experts, is how to classify him. To start with, was he an
Impressionist at all? He said himself that his aim was ‘To make of Impressionism
something solid and durable. . .‘, which suggests that he was not altogether at
home in a world where everything dissolves, and if he was the true precursor of
Cubism, that would further distance him from the ‘true’ Impressionists, though
his Cubism was all his own, and it didn’t last long anyway.
A fig for all this taxonomy; go to the Academy and stand in front of
No. 17, ‘View of Bonnières’. Better still, get yourself a camp-stool and sit in
front of it. If you stay there long enough you will see the picture change
before your eyes, first becoming Impressionist, and then sliding imperceptibly
into Cubist. What you are watching through these metamorphoses is Cezanne
becoming Cezanne — no, Cezanne making himself Cezanne, wrenching his genius
apart to see how it works and how it can be put back together and remade.
Brätland's article (pdf) deals with the economic theory of intergenerational sustainability, more popularly known as "sustainable development". The red flags pop up right away for Austrians with this description by a proponent:
Fundamentally, "sustainable development" is a notion of... disciplining our current consumption. This sense of "intergenerational responsibility" is a new political principle, a virtue that must now guide economic growth. The industrial world has already used so much of the planet’s ecological capital that the sustainability of the future is in doubt. That can’t continue.
Brätland's basic strategy is to deploy insights from the calculation argument against the neoclassical theory of Robert Solow and others. A few suggestive quotes from Brätland will, I hope, pique your interest in this excellent article:
The concepts of valuation, capital, and income only take on valid or coherent meaning in the context of individual action, private property and market exchange... The critical goal of legitimate sustainability is to establish an expanded system of private property rights that allows the owners to manage resources as capital assets. (p. 21)
...the ethics underlying the acquisition of private property is not even acknowledged in the economics of intergenerational sustainability. The entire resource base of the world’s society is implicitly under the control of some government making allocative decisions. (p. 22)
Without private property, monetary exchange, and capital accounting, no rational economics of asset maintenance could exist... The extent that individual business plans may conflict and be incapable of mutual success creates a barrier to aggregation or "macro-reckoning." Hence, society or a government as its agent has no aggregated measure of capital for which it can legitimately presume to make decisions. (pp. 28,29)
...public control of resources in the name of "sustainability" is not only contradictory but also self-defeating. (p. 41)
LINKS: Austrian Economics Study Guide: Natural sciences and the environment - Mises Institute
In the wake of their shambolic handling of the election funding scandal and their disgust that people voluntarily give more money to the National Party than to them, the Labour Party called for a raft of changes to electioneering rules at this weekend’s party conference.
The NZ Herald reports that the remit called for state funding of political parties, a ban on anonymous donations to political parties, and constraints on third party advertising. The resolution was passed “unanimously and without debate.” And that’s how they like it.
All of these are attacks on free speech. State funding of political parties subsidises some political propaganda, in effect drowning out opposition. Banning voluntary donations can be seen as a move to protect against any potential corruption but, given the general lack of corruption in New Zealand, is more likely to be used as a way to find out who donates to the “wrong” party. Restricting third-party advertising is the most direct attack on free speech as it prevents unapproved groups from expressing their opinions at election time.
Read Bernard's whole post here, and make no mistake that free speech is under attack.
UPDATE: Liberty Scott weighs in as well:Having happily used your money, extracted from you by force, to fund a key part of its election campaign (and none of the other parties having the same funding to spread its manifesto the same way), the Labour Party has voted in its conference to support compulsory funding of political parties campaigns based on the previous party vote... This is an absolute outrage for several very important reasons:Read on for those reasons.
Sustain v.t., to bear the weight of, to hold up, to keep from falling...Not much help there. No, sustainability is more about keeping people down than it is about keeping anything up.
development that "meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."This nostrum was adopted by the Agenda 21 circus in Rio early in the '90s, by schools and universities around the world, and was reaffirmed by the World Sustainability Summit in Johannesburg as recently as 2002. As the Ayn Rand Institute's Robert Tracinski pointed out at the time, the confusion seen at the 20002 summit
is precisely the result of taking "sustainable development" seriously -- with all of the contradictions inherent in the notion.Michael Shaw and Ed Hudgins call 'sustainable development' Sovietization, and they highlight a number of philosophical problems with the notion:
For environmentalists, the campaign for "sustainable development" is not motivated by a legitimate desire for development. Instead, it is an attempt to put a respectable face on their anti-development, anti-industry, anti-technology philosophy. The environmentalists want to pretend that strangling industrial civilization would not consign the world to a permanent hell of poverty, starvation and mass death. They want to evade the monstrous consequences of their ideas.
Thus, they tell us that there is something called "sustainability," a magic mechanism that will help the Third World achieve prosperity -- even as the environmentalists restrict the only known conditions for prosperity: free trade and industrialization. The way to achieve this contradiction, or at least to achieve the illusion of it, is the central idea of the Johannesburg conference: the demand that industrialized nations pay out massive aid subsidies, putting Third World countries on the dole rather than helping them develop their own economic production. It is an attempt to give the Third World some of the results of industrial development without actual industry or development.
But even the promise of aid is a lie, because Western money can do no good when the greens have outlawed all elements of industrial development. For example, there is much talk in Johannesburg about using Western aid to prevent famine, to halt the spread of disease and to provide Third World countries with clean water and sanitation. But it is the environmentalists who have campaigned against the construction of hydroelectric dams, a major source of electric power and clean water. It is environmentalists who have tried to block the use of genetically modified crops, which are more resistant to drought and disease. And it was environmentalists who stopped the use of DDT, allowing the resurgence of malaria, which once again kills millions in the Third World each year.
These campaigns are proof of the greens' real motives. They want to stop development and keep the Third World in a state of poverty -- while they work to bring the same ideal of poverty to industrialized nations...
'Sustainability' is not about wealth production, rational analysis or the use of science or technology for advancement of human welfare. Quite the opposite: at root it is about sacrifice, paying penance for our prosperity and our freedom, and like all forms of sacrifice or of altruism, it's more about the present-day sacrifice than it is about future results (if any).The U.N.'s concept of Sustainable Development is antithetical to individual freedom and economic liberty. It is, philosophically speaking, unsustainable. Development in this context refers to the use of naturally occurring materials such as land, forests, rivers, water, and the like. The notion of Sustainable Development assumes that if not managed by some collective body, these materials will be destroyed by individual owners. The United Nations Habitat Conference Report in 1976 stated: "Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice…Public control of land use is therefore indispensable."
This idea plays on the notion that resources are limited. Yet there is no such thing as a "natural resource." There is only matter and energy in the world that we human beings with our remarkable minds are able to make use of for our survival and well-being. Oil, for example, a century and a half ago, was not a resource to a farmer who found it seeping out of his land; it made the land worthless for growing crops or grazing farm animals. Only when men discovered how to use it to heat homes, run electrical generators, and propel planes and automobiles did it become a resource. Since from a human perspective there is no limit to the potentially usable matter and energy in the universe, there is no problem of running out of resources. The only problem is which resources will be developed and at what cost.
There is nascent technology, for example, to generate energy via ocean waves or to use orbiting collectors that would convert and beam energy to Earth via microwaves or lasers.
And University of Arizona, Tucson, Professor John Lewis has done serious work on the technology and economics of mining asteroids for minerals.
Sustainable Development is supposed to meet "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This definition is collectivist to the core. Not only does it ignore individual owners of assets, it in effect bestows title to those assets to an unborn future collective—not even future individuals who might inherit titles to property - but to "future generations." Agenda 21's definition of Sustainable Development was lifted from the 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union.
In addition, this conception assumes that one can judge at any given time whether some use of an asset will be sustainable in the future. But such knowledge is virtually unobtainable. Estimates a century ago that America would soon lose its forests—a renewable resource -- were wrong; we have more woodlands today than at that time. Predictions at that time that America would run out of oil in a few decades also proved spurious. Consider the folly if our ancestors had determined to save whale oil for lighting a few homes during the twentieth century.
But more fundamental is the fact that we cannot know how technology will affect the sustainable use of any given asset in the future. A snapshot is not a movie. America's history shows material progress over past centuries by any measure. If we had asked at any given time whether the use of an asset were sustainable without knowledge of future technologies that are simply unknowable before they are created, not doubt most development and progress would not have occurred.
This brings up another flaw in the definition of Sustainable Development. It is likely that future generations will live better than present ones if governments do not sabotage economic growth through takings, taxes, and regulations. If anything, the present generation makes itself a victim by forgoing the use of resources for the sake of future ones. The present generation bequeaths to the future a wealth of capital and knowledge. That means future generations will not need to reinvent the wheel.
[...]
These problems with Sustainable Development show that at best it is a subjective, collectivist muddle and its application inevitably will destroy private control of property and with it freedom itself.
Sea Level Rise. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not forecast sea-level rises of “18 to 20 feet.” Rather, it says, “We project a sea level rise of 0.09 to 0.88 m for 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 0.48 m. The central value gives an average rate of 2.2 to 4.4 times the rate over the 20th century...It is now widely agreed that major loss of grounded ice and accelerated sea level rise are very unlikely during the 21st century.” Al Gore’s suggestions of much more are therefore extremely alarmist.Read on here for the top 25 one-sided, speculative, misleading and just plain wrong pieces of "evidence" peddled in Al Gore's film, and here (if you haven't already downloaded it) for the full 120-page Skeptics' Guide [PDF]. Given that both National and now Labour have been pushing the bloody film in recent weeks as an excuse to outbid each other in meddling promises of environmentally-motivated authoritarian action, it would seem that a passing acquaintance with its full shallowness is to be necessary self-defence for freedom-lovers in coming months.
Greenland Climate. Greenland was warmer in the 1920s and 1930s than it is now. A recent study by Dr. Peter Chylek of the University of California, Riverside, addressed the question of whether man is directly responsible for recent warming: “An important question is to what extent can the current (1995-2005) temperature increase in Greenland coastal regions be interpreted as evidence of man-induced global warming? Although there has been a considerable temperature increase during the last decade (1995 to 2005) a similar increase and at a faster rate occurred during the early part of the 20th century (1920 to 1930) when carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases could not be a cause. The Greenland warming of 1920 to 1930 demonstrates that a high concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not a necessary condition for period of warming to arise. The observed 1995-2005 temperature increase seems to be within a natural variability of Greenland climate.” (Petr Chylek et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 13 June 2006.)
Bailey came in for a storm of negative publicity in December 2004 after news her $400,000 salary had been doubled to $800,000. The pay rise was even probed in Parliament. Bailey said her salary was based on her "brand" but the criticism still hurt.
She says her "branding" expert told her she was worth $800,000 to read the news. Seems to me she rather overplayed her rather limited hand.
Not surprisingly, a so-called Green Business functions very differently than does a normal business. While a normal business seeks to add amenities to its offerings, a so-called Green Business seeks to subtract them...Read on.
And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters.--Deuteronomy 28:53No, perhaps not.
Beer Fact: Tsingtao is the only Chinese beer to appear in the Beer Hunter Michael Jackson's list of the world’s top 500 beers.
The brewery was founded by Germans in the port of Tsingtao in the early 1900s. At that time, the city was a German port as part of the concessions after the Boxer Rebellion. The Germans were eventually kicked out by the Imperial Japanese Army, who moved in and stayed until they were defeated in the Second Sino-Japanese war. Tsingtao Brewery is now 100% Chinese owned and is the largest in China. Many breweries around the world were established by German settlers including Samoa Breweries, and the producers of the excellent Namibian Windhoek.Smart Growth and other regulations prevent all processing of food in rural zones. These new farmers want to raise their beef, chickens and pigs on site and slaughter them on site - open to the gaze of their buying public. As they say "transparency is the best form of regulation". But these regulations are seriously restraining the development of "local miles" food producers and markets while favouring the massive centralised industrial operations. So the "slow food" and "fresh food" people, and organic farmers should be joining in the campaign against the Auckland Regional Council's Policy Change 6, and similar moves around the country. Again, Smart Growth is not Green.'Smart Growth' policies ring-fence cities with the aim of "reducing ugly sprawl" and "preserving food-producing land" -- they have the result instead of locking people out of rural areas, and pushing up prices for housing and for land in urban areas. Auckland Regional Council's Metropolitan Urban Limit provides an example. As Cox explains, "anti-sprawl policies ration land inordinately increase the price of housing, destroying wealth creation, while intensifying traffic congestion and air pollution."
The new World Watch 'Living Planet Report' provides strong evidence that the space required by urban areas is only a small part of what is required to support human habitation --- that the land required for agriculture, energy production and other factors is far greater --- 90 times greater. The World Watch data thus provides evidence that the urban form --- whether dense or sparse ("compact" or "sprawl") --- is irrelevant with respect to sustainability. [Let me repeat that: it is irrelevant.] If the World Watch prescription is reliable, then strategies to combat "urban sprawl" would yield virtually no progress toward improving sustainability (even at the theoretical level).Full commentary here.
Author Stephen Hicks, himself a professor at Rockford College Illinois, has found "a fascinating recent survey of [American] university faculty political beliefs." Here's some 'highlights' from the summary:Big Brother, bullying and threats to small businessmen. Just another day in the UK then.Some landlords were reluctant to sign up until they were told they faced having their licences revoked...
Drinkers could be asked to leave their fingerprints at the bar every time they buy a pint in a pub or club. They may also need to show a passport or a driving licence and their details will be held on a database available to police...
Guy Herbert, of privacy campaign group No2ID, said : 'People are having to post bail in the form of their fingerprints merely to have a drink.' Liberty's Doug Jewell added: 'The money for these schemes could be better spent on police services.'Meanwhile, Tony Blair insisted there should be 'no limits' on expansion of a national police DNA database, saying it was vital for catching criminals.
He also singled out two other Community & Cultural projects [pictured below]. The Manurewa Aquatic and Leisure Centre (JASMAX Ltd) was “a really simple building, effective yet inspiring; an asset that the local community can use and enjoy at no cost”. And the Auckland Central City Library Redevelopment (GHD Ltd) was “a fantastic facility for the city; a building that invites people in with open arms”.
Mr Clarke also made special mention of two Residential winners [also pictured below]. He said Dunn House in Remuera (Fearon Hay Architects Ltd) was a “simply beautiful house… I defy anyone viewing it not to succumb to the desire to live there.” And the McNaughton Thornton House in Grey Lynn (Malcolm Walker Architects) was “totally refreshing, a one-off house that is very well executed”.Manurewa Aquatic Centre - JASMAX Architects
Dunn House remodelling- Fearon Hay Architects
What was once a very attractive concrete house is now ...
NcNaughton Thornton House - Malcolm Walker Architects
Auckland Library Cafe extension - Auckland City ArchitectsWith this court case abruptly terminated [explains Bernard], I have begun work on a new project - FreeSpeech.org.nz.Bookmark the site and blog now, and keep yourself up to date with his progress.
The site will become a central resource for information on the freedom of expression in New Zealand. The site has been kicked off with a blog called Section 14.
Later will come background information on freedom of speech and its necessity, longer magazine-style articles on various topics relevant to free speech in New Zealand, information on how and when to annoy your Parliamentarians, and a range of other useful tools.
This is a soft launch. There will be a more formal announcement in a few weeks when there's a bit more information on the site and to coincide with issue 73 of the Free Radical, which will also contain a number of free speech themed articles.
If you have ideas about free speech topics that are relevant to New Zealand, let me know and I'll include them in my plans. Currently I'm looking at restrictions on election advertising (no prizes for guessing what kicked this off), restrictions on liquor, pharmaceuticals, and fast food advertising, sedition, blasphemy, hate speech, self-censorship in the face of Islam, self-censorship in the face of environmentalists, how name and evidence suppression works and what trade-offs are really required.
Contributions are welcome.
Objectivists are divided on the question of whom to vote for in the forthcoming mid-term elections. Given the theocratic thrust of so much of recent Republicanism, philosopher Leonard Peikoff argues that not to vote Democrat for both Houses is immoral:How you cast your vote in the coming election is important, even if the two parties are both rotten. In essence, the Democrats stand for socialism, or at least some ambling steps in its direction; the Republicans stand for religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, and are taking ambitious strides to give it political power.
Socialism—a fad of the last few centuries—has had its day; it has been almost universally rejected for decades... Religion, by contrast—the destroyer of man since time immemorial—is not fading; on the contrary, it is now the only philosophic movement rapidly and righteously rising to take over the government.
Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer, and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer, it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because “both are bad.”
[...] What does determine the survival of this country is not political concretes, but fundamental philosophy. And in this area the only real threat to the country now, the only political evil comparable to or even greater than the threat once posed by Soviet Communism, is religion and the Party which is its home and sponsor.
The most urgent political task now is to topple the Republicans from power, if possible in the House and the Senate. This entails voting consistently Democratic, even if the opponent is a “good” Republican.
Writer Robert Tracinski disagrees. Unsatisfied as he is (and I am) with the Republican Congress, he still suggest the best result is a "humiliating defeat" for the Democrats. "The best thing we can do in this election is to crush the left," he says, "because the Democratic Party adds nothing of value to the American political debate." All the important debates are now happening on the right, he argues, and so "the more the left fades from the scene, the more the national political debate will be a debate within the right."In the American system, of course, we don't vote for parties but for individual candidates. So if your local congressional candidate has championed a particularly evil political agenda, is under indictment, or is named "Katherine Harris," then by all means vote for the other guy.Good advice in any election.
The problem with the scheme drawn up by David Cunliffe to allow up to five-thousand temporary seasonal workers is not the danger of too many overstayers -- and what way is that to talk about other human beings simply looking for a better life -- the problem is too many hoops to jump through.
* The Vegemite story is an example of this. The "horrifying" story about a "Vegemite ban in the US" (Google links here) was first written up by an Australian newspaper and was then picked up by other "news" sources and rewritten for their own pages -- often with added hysteria -- but who had actually paused to determine whether the story was true or a puff-piece from Vegemite manufacturer Kraft? "Expatriates" who were reported as being stopped at airports after the "ban" was put in place turned out to be one reporter from the Geelong Advertiser who wrote as an yet unauthenticated report claiming a ban, and people subsequently reporting a Vegemite shortage in US supermarkets (perhaps as a result of the 'guerrilla advertising' so compliantly peddled by the press?)
Your house, your rules. That would be the easy way for Britons to resolve their present debate about the wearing of the niqab by a Muslim woman. He (or she) who owns the property sets the rules, and she (or he) who visits said property can either abide by those rules or go elsewhere.Britons are absolutely right to criticize the niqab. It is a demeaning, barbaric article of clothing that inculcates shame in women, depriving them of individuality and femininity. But to criticize niqabs will not go very far in making Britain a more integrated, less balkanized nation. Britons' most powerful tool of assimilation is to understand and proudly and convincingly proclaim Western ideals.
“They must understand that what made the West great is individualism, reason, the pursuit of happiness--and that this is objectively superior to the tribalism, superstition, and earthly deprivation that many Muslims seek to live out and bring to Europe. Britons must reject the insidious idea of multiculturalism, which holds that all cultures are of equal value. Cultures are not of equal value: prosperity is superior to poverty, happiness is superior to misery, freedom is superior to slavery, and a visible face is superior to a slit revealing two anonymous eyes."And that's the truth.
