There’s a frickin’ elephant in the schoolroom [update 2]

If there’s a silver bullet for improving the appalling literacy rates of the youngsters who leave NZ’s factory schools it’s not National Bloody Standards, it’s phonics. Phonics from an early age to teach youngsters properly what those marks on the page sound like, and at a later age to repair the damage of those teachers who told them the marks themselves didn’t matter – that it was okay just to guess.  Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen talks about the reintroduction of phonics in her own neck of the woods [hat tip Leighton Smith]:

    “It’s not often one gets the chance to say this: New South Wales is doing something right. At least it is when it comes to literacy. In recognition of the importance of phonics, New South Wales teaching guides now require teachers to spend part of each day teaching young children the sounds that make up words.
    “It sounds like a no-brainer that children should explicitly be taught the most basic building blocks of learning to read. Yet one more hurdle - the most important one - remains. New research reveals that new teachers on the cusp of entering our schools have little understanding of how to teach phonics.. .”

No wonder. The elephant in the literacy room is the failed ‘whole word’ – or ‘look and guess’ – method of scaring children away from learning to read, a non-method of non-teaching made up out of whole cloth by wholly ignorant academics. Yet the fight to rid schools of the ‘look-and-guess’ nonsense has been interminable, internecine, and still ongoing.

    “The drawn-out delays over better literacy teaching are nothing short of scandalous. This is not some piddling policy that can be set aside for another day. These delays hurt our most disadvantaged children the most; they often miss out on the added support of engaged parents willing and able to encourage reading.
    “These are the children politicians love to talk about when they use their grand rhetoric about education. . . ”

. . . and then generally leave behind once they get into office and get captured by the teacher unions. So it’s gratifying indeed to see there’s baby steps being taken, at least on one side of the Tasman.

  The next critical step is to teach our teachers how to teach reading. . .”

Sure is. But you’ll have to teach most of them to read first.

You have to laugh, or else you’ll cry.

And to help you laugh, here’s a funny story told by a favourite reading teacher of mine – a man who teaches troublesome teenagers to read in the blink of a five-day adventure camp. A story about a frickin’ elephant . . .

Five-year old students are learning to read.

Yesterday one of them pointed at a picture in a zoo book and said,

"Look at this! It's a frickin' elephant!"

I took a deep breath, then asked..."What did you call it?"

"It's a frickin' elephant!

It says so on the picture!"

And so it does...

" A f r i c a n Elephant "

Hooked on phonics! Ain't it wonderful?

UPDATE 1:  By the way, my friends and colleagues at the Maria Montessori Education Foundation – who swear by phonics – tell me I should remind you about two upcoming events for parents in Tauranga, this weekend, and Wellington in two weeks time.

TAURANGA: PUBLIC ADDRESS - 'The Child - A Social Being'
London-based Montessori trainer Cheryl Ferreira talks on Saturday October 10th on how the first step in ‘the child as a social being’ is to help the child develop all his functions as a free individual, which is what fosters that development of personality that actuates social organisation.
* * Saturday October 10th @ 7- 9p.m, $15 payment at the door (includes light refreshments)
* * Historic Village on 17th, Seventeenth Avenue, Tauranga
* * For ticket information and bookings email mmef@ihug.co.nz or phone Carol 021 111 4133.

WELLINGTON:  PUBLIC ADDRESS - ‘Children Creating and Developing Language from Birth Onwards' 
London-based Montessori trainer Cheryl Ferreira talks on Saturday October 17th on how children create and develop language from birth onwards
Join us to discuss the factors that impact on the development of spoken language from 0-6 and how this impacts on writing and reading'.
* * Saturday October 17th @ 7-9p.m, $10 payment at the door (includes tea &coffee)
* * Wa Ora Montessori School, 278 Waddington Road, Naenae, Lower Hutt, Wellington*
* * For ticket information and bookings contact mmef@ihug.co.nz or phone Anna on (04) 232 3428 by Tues Oct. 13th.

If you’re in Tauranga this weekend, I’ll probably see you there.  :-)

UPDATE 2: Sally reckons “Graham Crawshaw is to literacy and phonics campaign as Fred Hollows was to innovative cheap eye surgery.” Sally’s right.

And Graham now has a blog.  Set your bookmarks to: http://www.windyridgeboysfarm.com/

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Philip Field, Fiordland and Foot to the Firewall

Libertarianz  leader Dr Richard McGrath takes his regularly irreverent look at some of the past week’s headlines.

1. Safety fear as Key car speeds – Nearly five years since Helen Clark’s government vehicle averaged nearly 130 km/h to catch a plane flight to a rugby game she admits held no interest for her, we have Speedgate 2 – John Key’s car, according to journalists who were there, reaching 120 km/h on a road in Samoa with a designated limit of 40 km/h. Key’s mouthpiece, Kevin Taylor, reckons the convoy didn’t break much more than 65 km/h. John, this is embarrassing. Get your facts straight. If you can’t reach a decent speed, at least kill the whole story. It is alleged that Helen’s car got to 170 km/h between Waimate and Christchurch. For goodness sake, 65 km/h isn’t in the same ballpark. Shame on the wimp who was driving you around Samoa, John. A real man would have tossed the driver out the door and put foot to the firewall. Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes. Villagers and dogs who got in the way could always be written off as tsunami victims. Memo to John: study the car chase in the Steve McQueen film Bullitt, and next time try harder.

2. Taito Philip Field makes Labour squirm – Oh dear. Labour are circling the wagons after the incarceration of former poster boy T. P. Field. After defending him for a year, and emasculating Auckland QC Noel Ingram’s initial attempts to investigate an allegation of conflict of interest against Mr Field, Labour politicians find themselves in the unlikely position of having little or nothing to say, apart from some mumblings about New Zealanders being equal under the law. Oh, except if you’re the Prime Minister and your car is doing 170 km/h on the way to the airport. The rest of us are cash cows for the traffic Stasi. One irony of the whole sorry T. P. Field saga is that he was earlier convicted and fined $20,000 for a non-crime: converting a garage into a family room and a carport into a garage. Nice to see politicians getting a taste of their own fascism.

3. Fiordland listing a ‘disgrace’ – We’ve been told the government is considering opening Fiordland up to oil and mineral exploration. Hurrah! The Greens are trying to kill this attempt to lessen our dependence on oil imports. Sheesh. Green co-leader Metiria Turei (the Greens don’t think a female could take on the leader’s role without a male to hold her hand) says “they are keen to mine our most precious parks.” And why not? Mankind’s whole existence has relied on adapting the environment to our needs. If the skill of fire-lighting had not been utilized, millions of us would have perished in the cold. Oil exploration is a corollary of mankind’s rightful domination of this planet and the harnessing of natural resources to further the survival of our species. Once again the Greens wrap their anti-human, anti-life agenda in a veneer of compassion and expect us to lap it up. But Metiria needn’t worry – the invertebrates on the Treasury benches are starting to back down already. “Claims that the government is considering granting oil companies exploration licenses in the Fiordland National Park are simply hysterical!” sobbed Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee, after caving in to extreme pressure from Green Party cabinet minister Nick Smith.

See y’all next week!
Doc McGrath

‘Crime’ & Punishment [updated]

It doesn’t happen often, but I’m with Psycho Milt.  There’s something wrong when helping out immigrants in return for some free tiling, and then lying about it, gets two sentences amounting to six years in total – but killing another motorist because they’ve scratched your BMW gets you just three.

There’s something wrong when those sentences for this ‘crime’ are made cumulative, when the sentences for the “human waste” who killed Karen Aim and tried to kill Zara Schofield was made concurrent, “thereby letting him off for the attempted murder and making it clear to the victim of that attempted murder exactly what the judge in that case thought she was worth: nothing.”

The message here is that taking someone’s life, or trying to, is some way down the scale of “bad things to to do in New Zealand” from a political crime – from taking some limited advantage of your position and then trying to conceal it.

Help for some immigrants in return for some free tiling -- and lies about it – these things are "...intolerable in our society and threaten the institution at the foundation of democracy and justice."  But kill people, or try to, and that’s not so bad.  That’s the message from Justice Hansen and his colleagues on the bench.

Frankly, Field has already had whatever punishment he might have actually deserved in his fall from grace and the public shaming he’s experienced.  Frankly, locking Phillip Field up for six years looks nothing like making the punishment fit the crime -- it’s more like making the punishment fit the politics.

This is not justice; it’s retribution.

Field’s real crime is that he fell out of favour with the ruling party just as they were falling out of power.  Because if taking advantage of your position and then trying to conceal it in the manner that Field did was genuinely intolerable and a threat to our institutions, then surely the collar of Bill English would be being felt about now.

LIBERTARIANZ SUS: Israel & Me (Part Two)

Concluding yesterday’s column by Susan Ryder. We left her on her way to do her O.E.  . . .

Fast forward to August 1984. I had arrived back in London after travelling around Ireland. Deciding that I’d firmly exhausted my quota of crappy, menial short-term jobs, I remembered a conversation with an Australian girl some six months earlier who had just returned to the UK after a spell in Israel. She’d had a great time so I made some enquiries. Ten days later I was flying to Tel Aviv as part of a group of British volunteers to live and work on a kibbutz, via an organisation in central London that specialised in such arrangements.

If I needed proof that Israel was a different kettle of fish (gefilte) to other places I’d visited, it was evident before I ever left Britain. In those days there was a separate area of Gatwick Airport specifically reserved for passengers travelling to and from Tel Aviv and Belfast. One of the delights awaiting me prior to boarding was an external body search. It remains my only experience to date and one I’m in no hurry to repeat.

David Ben-Gurion Airport proved to be symbolic of Israel itself: plain, functional, (albeit it in a dry, dusty, Middle-Eastern sort of way) and largely unconcerned with creature comforts. It put me in mind of an aircraft hangar at RNZAF Ohakea near Bulls, a thought that still makes me chuckle.

Its organisation, though, could not be faulted. Israeli authorities have a knack of getting things done with minimal fuss. In next to no time we had cleared formalities, collected our bags and were on a shuttle bus for the journey to Kibbutz Gal’ed further north.

Something that always intrigued me was Israel’s tiny size compared to its global significance. Seldom, if ever, out of the international news circuit, it is roughly one-tenth the size of New Zealand. And yet since its establishment in 1948, this small piece of land remains politically contentious and sought after.

A history of kibbutzim is a history of Israel. Right from the start, the small collective-based settlements neatly doubled as defence outposts. The division of labour saw all children being raised by a handful of women, leaving the majority to work alongside the men for maximum productivity. Meals were communal with the cafeteria being the heart of the settlement.

My kibbutz was typical, consisting of several hundred members. Black and white images on display of its early days bore no resemblance to the settlement I knew. In 1948 it looked like a moonscape: bare, barren and desolate.

By 1984 however it was a modern village boasting acres of apple orchards and a productive dairy farm. Like many kibbutzim, Gal’ed had removed their Jaffa orange groves in favour of growing cotton for better return. The members all lived in neat apartments containing all modern conveniences. And few, if any, children lived in the ‘Children’s House’ anymore, although they still received their primary education there. There were well-maintained lawns and gardens, thanks to vital irrigation systems in a land where access to water is an ongoing concern. The large cafeteria remained central to community life, but many members chose to eat privately in their own homes. In the early days, by contrast, it was almost impossible to even get a cup of tea outside the cafeteria. In spite of their prevalence, only a very small percentage of Israel’s population live on kibbutzim, but the model remains a successful example of collective living.

I quickly learned that Israel is a land of contrasts.

One of the first things to strike a visitor is the immediate security everywhere. It’s a fact of life. Barbed wire sits atop all major buildings and fences. Every second person is a soldier in uniform, with sub-machine guns casually slung over shoulders. And every second vehicle belongs to the military.

But its massive presence is enormously reassuring, the troops being well-trained and well-disciplined. At that time, every non-Arab citizen was required to join the army at 18 years of age, women for two years and men for three, with an annual refresher thereafter for men.

So with all that security, I would have thought hitch-hiking was out. Not so. Everybody – and I mean everybody – hitched rides. Drivers would just stop, enquire as to your destination and have you jump in the back. We’d been told that a concrete pecking order was in place, foreign tourists running a definite third behind female and male soldiers respectively. That turned out to be less than accurate. Males are males, no matter where you go – and there is some advantage in being young, female and not altogether stupid.

Having said that, the people themselves were the most unfriendly I have ever encountered, often verging upon downright rudeness. At first it’s a bit dazing, but then becomes rather comical if you have a sense of humour. Many just didn’t bother with social niceties toward strangers. The brusqueness derived from a sort of wariness of the rest of the world, I believe, because in due course they softened and I made some good friends. On the kibbutz I became very friendly with several migrant families from South Africa and South America, who were delightful. I spent numerous evenings in their homes, listening to their stories and learning about Israel and Judaism.

The people I met wanted to be known as Israeli rather than Jewish, i.e., for their nationality as opposed to their religion. Most people I encountered led secular lives, visiting the synagogue for traditional ceremonies only. Generally, they had little or no time for the black-garbed Orthodox Jews I would sometimes spot in Jerusalem who, I was told, still spoke Yiddish rather than Hebrew because they disapproved of the resurrection and use of what they considered a sacred tongue.

Some claimed that Orthodox Jews had been known to oppose the creation of the Jewish homeland; that their existence as God’s chosen people was supposed to be arduous in this life and actively funded the PLO as a result. I know it sounds bizarre, but there it is. Trust me, oddity and contrast are blood brothers in this part of the world and besides, it wouldn’t be the first time that people had offered themselves as sacrificial lambs. More, anyone who wears that ancient, heavy Eastern European clothing in that climate by choice is rather easy to put in the odd basket.

There is so much to discuss – much more than space permits, such as the biblical places. There is Jerusalem and its four distinct quarters where the world’s three major religions meet. Or Nazareth, where Christ grew up, and Bethlehem, his birthplace; a shabby little spot on the outskirts of Jerusalem where I found myself in the middle of an Arab riot while innocently eating yoghurt one Saturday afternoon. And the memorable day I spent time in the world’s oldest city, (Jerusalem), hottest city, (Jericho) and lowest point, (Dead Sea).

How the Holocaust is barely mentioned because you can’t escape it anyway and how your heart almost stops when you spot a faded tattooed number on someone’s forearm. But nowhere is it more evident, obviously, than Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum that is numbing in its clinical, chronological depiction of The Third Reich’s worst legacy.

There is the strange juxtaposition of people living a modern life in an ancient land, surrounded by hostile neighbours to varying degrees, with several of whom they have been at war. It is a land of gorgeous beaches and barbed wire. Of traders whose love of commerce goes back centuries. And the Palestinian issue which was not so much the proverbial elephant in the sitting room, as a herd of them.

If you thought this was going to be a political diatribe, you were mistaken. The Middle East makes Ireland look like a familial squabble by comparison, and requires a bit more than several hundred words to outline.

But what I can say is this. In my experience not one Israeli – not one – bad-mouthed Arabs either individually or collectively. They would openly and rationally discuss the situation, presenting many and varied opinions as to the best course of action.

But they all wanted the same outcome. Peace.

* * Read Susan Ryder’s regular column every Tuesday at NOT PC * *

Dairy bubble starts to pop – and guess who’s holding the pin?

The housing bubble went pop a long time ago, and now the dairy bubble is starting to burst.  The Crafars are the tip of a $28 billion pyramid of debt – a pyramid propped up by the very assets that have been inflated by all that debt.  I blogged about this back in June [Read the post: The credit/debt delusion: The faster you go, the bigger the mess]:

    “New Zealand farmers are in debt to the tune of $45 billion, 61% of which is in the dairy sector, leaving dairy farmers ‘reliant on continuing asset gains as income was never going to meet debt-servicing commitments’.  In other words, we’re looking at an agricultural debt bubble that is only being held up by an agricultural asset bubble that the debt itself has helped to inflate.
    “Oh dangerous times.
    “Many farmers have apparently been riding the bubble -- ‘farming for asset gains’ the Agriculture Production Economics report calls it – leaving them exposed on three fronts . . .”

  Home Paddock says “the announcement that Crafar Farms has been put into receivership is not unexpected.”  She got that right. The Crafars’ collapse indicates the first major signal that defeat on all three fronts is now upon us:

    “Bernard Hickey [analyses] the problems with the operation . . .      However [says Home Paddock], it’s not the size of individual farms or operations that’s the problem, it’s the rapid growth of dairying which has led to a shortage of good staff.”

Are you surprised?  Mainstream economists might be, but this is precisely what Austrian economists expect to see as the “rapid growth” of a credit-created boom turns into debt-based bust.   You see, Austrian economists understand two relevant things here that mainstreamers don’t:

1. The first result of debt-based monetary expansion is that those borrowers who are ‘first in’ get first use of the new money before the inflationary results of that monetary expansion are noticed through the rest of the economy.  But the inflation of prices in the class of assets in which the new debt is invested is inevitable – even if it is confused for “growth” and “prosperity” instead of simply price inflation.
2. The reason for the inevitable bust is not simply that these asset prices are inflated beyond real values.  It’s that the resources don’t exist to allow all the projects that the money has been borrowed for to be completed.

The first point is the problem of ‘farming for asset gains’ which I’ve already talked about before.  It’s this second point that Home Paddock identifies, and which I want to talk about here: that when all that “rapid growth” is happening, the resources necessary for all that growth don’t actually exist in either the quantities or at the prices that all the borrowers’ plans require..

Resources are now too short to complete all the projects all the dairy farmers planned, because the newly-created money funding all the new projects wasn’t funded out of the pool of real savings, but out of debt-backed credit created out of thin air – it’s what Austrian economists like George Reisman call counterfeit capital.  And since it’s unbacked by real resources, the resources for these new projects have to be bid away from where they used to be.

Now being ‘first users’ of all the counterfeit capital dairy farmers were certainly able (for a while at least) to bid resources away from those who hadn’t borrowed so heavily, and (for a while at least) were able to delude themselves that all was well, but in the end the resources simply don’t exist to allow all the projects they were planning on to be completed.

Home Paddock highlights the shortage of good staff. As Gene Callahan explains here so concisely,  that’s precisely the sort of shortage every debt-financed bubble inevitably experiences. The economy simply “runs out of gas.”

This is an important point to grasp about the booms created by our fractional reserve banking system, in which debt-based money is simply created out of thin air under the aegis of the Reserve Bank: that the resources don’t exist to allow all the projects backed by that newly created credit to be completed. It’s this shortage that is the primary cause of the inevitable busts of every credit-created boom.

If the credit was funded out of the pool of real savings however, then this problem wouldn’t exist. The pool of real savings would have been built up as a result of savers who abstained from current consumption -- allowing entrepreneurs to put those physical resources into long-term productive — and, the entrepreneur hopes, profitable — pursuits in the meantime.  But this is not the case in the fractional reserve system – the new money hasn’t appeared because consumers forewent their consumption, so those resources on which the borrowers relied are needed elsewhere, and it’s precisely the long-term projects that are crying out for them that suffer. As Tom Woods explains (based on the insights of Ludwig Von Mises), the entrepreneurs have been deluded by the artificially lower interest rates of the counterfeit capital into starting more projects than the economy can finish:

    “Mises draws an analogy between an economy under the influence of artificially low interest rates and a homebuilder who believes he has more resources—more bricks, say—than he really does. He will build a house much different than he would have chosen if he had known his true supply of bricks. But he will not be able to complete this larger house, so the sooner he discovers his true brick supply the better, for then he can adjust his production plans before too many of his resources are squandered. If he only finds out in the final stages, he will have to destroy everything but the foundation, and will be poorer for his malinvestment.”

In the case of New Zealand’s dairy farmers, one of the “bricks” on which they obviously relied was good staff – and in the end there’s not enough of them to go round.   A shortage of good staff is the primary resource of which they’re short.

And the really sad thing is that this effects good operators as well as bad: since those who have borrowed heavily are able to bid staff and other resources away from those who haven’t, the inevitable price competition acts to raise costs for both kinds of operations. And as resources become more and more scarce – as the “bricks” of each operation become harder and harder to come by – ( as Gene Callahan explains) the bottom lines of both kinds of operators suffer.

Essentially you discover at the fag-end of the whole process of credit expansion that all the new credit that fuelled the boom hasn’t actually funded new production at all : it’s simply inflated the prices of assets, it’s raised costs all round, and it’s funded increased consumption all round – including the consumption of real capital.

As Frank Shostak points out, everybody eventually discovers they’ve been robbed. Every entrepreneur discovers the resources weren’t all there, and certainly not  at the prices he planned on; everybody holding dollars discovers that their purchasing power has been diluted by all this new unbacked money; and everyone holding assets discovers all the price gains they’ve been celebrating have only been an illusion.

In other words, everyone’s been “robbed by means of loose monetary policy.”

So if you want to get angry at someone, don’t get angry at the Crafars – get angry at those responsible for creating all the credit-backed profligacy: at the denizens of the Reserve Bank.

It was them who inflated the bubble.  It’s reality that’s now holding the pin.

“Capill denied parole”

Graham Capill, remember him? “Capill denied parole” is the headline. A better headline would have been “Creationist, moralising, hypocrite child molester denied parole.”  That’d be an example of “truth in sentencing.” But let’s stop with the grammatical jokes.  As my friend Russell Watkins says at his SunLive blog,

    “It really is hard to believe this creep – once a stiffer-sentences, anti-gay, anti-prostitution-law-reform and anti-sex-before-marriage campaigner - would have the gumption to go for parole after interfering with children.
    “If he had any decency, or wanted to set a real example of what he once told us he stood for, he’d ask to be locked up for good.”

Don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be upset if that were to happen.

ICC Champions Trophy Final

Bugger.

LIBERTARIANZ SUS: Israel & Me

Let Susan Ryder take you for a journey.  Her own.

My first real awareness of Israel occurred as a result of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

I was nine years old and caught up in the magnitude and majesty of the Summer Olympics for the first time, which coincided with the event’s first significant television coverage in this country. Mum had fished out the atlas and shown me where Munich was in the middle of Europe. Olga Korbut and Mark Spitz had become household names, their prowess mesmerising the world. And like the rest of New Zealand, we got up in the middle of the night to watch the Eights, live by satellite, magnificently row for gold.

I can clearly remember jumping up and down with tears pouring down my face, as the enormity of a team from a small country at the bottom of the world beating everybody else, dawned on me. It remains my favourite Olympic gold, and I think all Kiwis who remember that occasion retain a soft spot for the memory, too.

Being so young, the dirty world of politics was still unknown to me. But that was all to change with the news that some of the Israeli team had been taken hostage by members of an organisation called ‘Black September’, bringing the Games to an unimaginable halt.

“But why do those men want to hurt the athletes from Israel, Mum?”

I now know why she took a deep breath before answering. And in the next few minutes I heard the words ‘Holocaust’, ‘Nazis’ and ‘Palestine Liberation Organisation’ for the very first time.

None of it made any sense to me. I couldn’t understand why somebody would hate somebody else just because they went to a different church. But then I’d heard rumours that some people didn’t like other people because they were a different colour and I didn’t understand that either. I still don’t.

The ensuing events saw the West German authorities out of their depth, resulting in the murder of all eleven hostages. The three surviving terrorists were later released to a heroes’ welcome in Libya. Four years later, however, history was not to repeat itself.

In June 1976 an Air France flight originating in Tel Aviv and carrying 260 people was hijacked en route to Paris by Palestinian and German terrorists, who forced its diversion to Entebbe Airport in Uganda via Libya. With the full support of Ugandan President Idi Amin, they demanded the release of 53 detainees, 40 of whom were Palestinians in Israel, the refusal of which would result in hostages being killed. Over the course of a week more than half the hostages were released, leaving a total of 105 captive, including the entire French crew who would not leave their 85 Israeli and Jewish passengers.

Having successfully extended the initial deadline by three days, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) received the go-ahead to conduct ‘Operation Entebbe’ under the cover of darkness. An audacious rescue mission, the lightning-quick operation was over in less than an hour, resulting in the rescue of all but four of the hostages and the death of all eight terrorists. Three hostages were accidentally killed during the operation, with the fourth, an elderly woman in Kampala Hospital being treated for an unrelated condition, subsequently dragged from her bed and murdered, along with medical staff who tried to intervene, by Ugandan soldiers on Amin’s orders.

My own memory is of waking to the news on a Sunday morning and being full of stunned admiration for Israel, having watched the terrible images on the nightly news the preceding week and trying to not imagine the horror the hostages were experiencing. While everybody else was wailing and hand-wringing, the gutsy Israelis simply took matters into their extremely capable hands.

To me, it seemed cut and dried. A group of individuals were holding innocent people to ransom and the latter were rescued by their government. If somebody had done that to me for the crime of being a New Zealander, I would have expected my government to do likewise. I thought those commandos were heroes. (And given his recent address to the United Nations, it should be noted that Benjamin Netanyahu’s older brother was the sole commando killed in action during that mission).

Predictably, the United Nations saw things differently. UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim described the raid as "a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state" (i.e. Uganda). I can date my ongoing contempt for the UN from that moment.

And less than ten years later, I went to Israel.

To be continued tomorrow. . .

* * Read Susan Ryder’s column every Tuesday here at NOT PC . . .  and sometimes, if you’re especially fortunate, on succeeding days as well * *

‘Promethia’ - Michael Newberry

 Promethia, 1982, oil on linen,
78 x 58 inches (198.1 x 147.3 cm) Available

Artist Michael Newberry explains why this painting is so special to him:

    I completed Promethia in 1982, when I was 26 years old, while living in Staten Island. The painting is about honoring truth, one’s goodness, and beauty.
    It’s a large painting, over six feet, and I worked, non-stop, for about a year on it. This is one of my most important works because it marks my transition from painting what I saw to what I envisioned. The painting began from my imagination as a concept sketch on a tiny bit of paper – my ideal landscape of architecture, sculpture, and site. I had to merge four completely different subjects into an integrated whole: the landscape background was taken from a study of the desert near Palm Springs; the building is the U.C.S.D. library in La Jolla, California (its original setting was a forest of eucalyptus trees); a marble figurative sculpture (which never existed); and creating the image of the sculpture from a living model.
    I loved modern architecture’s ability to solve complex problems of living requirements, traffic patterns, form follows function, and it’s integration to the site. But I didn’t see modern architecture having much to do with the limited expression of abstract sculpture, so I wanted to show what I would love to see: a beautiful, expressive figurative sculpture set against a stunning and monumental building. Marble doesn’t do to well with the grime and soot of cities, so I chose to have a vast natural landscape of the arid drama of the California desert.
    A dear friend, Jennifer Trainer, posed for this. She brought a lot of character, intelligence, and sincerity to the project. Promethia is the female version of Prometheus with a twist. He was punished for giving the knowledge of fire to humanity, but I wanted change that outcome to show that self-esteem or pride in oneself protects one from being downtrodden – hence her very erect posture and level lift of her face.
    At that time in my life, I was working incredibly hard to excel in figurative art. Yet I couldn’t find, either in Los Angeles, or in Holland, other artists that were ahead of me in this direction, or even some artists working in this direction. I remember that in the early ’80’s no one bought contemporary representational work. It felt like I was the only one that believed in beautiful paintings with vision. Promethia is now (in 2009) 27 years old. And the painting is just as meaningful and beautiful to me as the day I finished it.

Michael Newberry

PS: Promethia will be on display in the Landscape with a Modern Edge exhibition at the Newberry Gallery in Santa Monica, October 17 – November 21, 2009. It will be her first public appearance in 25 years.

Visit Michael here at his website, or his new gallery – or his blog.  (He’s everywhere, he’s irrepressible.)  And here he is again: in a neat 44 seconds film spot on him, his work, and his gallery/studio.

Rosenbaum House – Frank Lloyd Wright, 1938

When blogger  Opinionated Mummy posted that her favourite houses were two by Frank Lloyd Wright, I sat up and paid attention.  And when she said one of them was this ‘Usonian’ beauty, I realised all I’d posted of it so far was the floor plan.  So let me remedy that now.

What  does “Usonian House” mean?  Wright designed fifty-seven of these little minimal-cost beauties from about 1936 on, of which exactly twenty-six were built -- each one utilising a similar style and grammar, and one of five different plan types [see page 17 of this pamphlet for a description of these].  In my view, as a whole these houses represent his finest achievement.

They were genuinely “green architecture” before that term became a byword for bullshit instead of the common sense and joy it was intended to be. (Frank Lloyd Wright reckoned that the job of architecture is “to make human life more natural, and nature more humane” – a job description that needs neither fashion nor compulsion to succeed, but which these days is made more difficult by both.)

Built for a college couple in 1939 for $12,000, the Rosenbaum House was one of the first Usonians and, at just 143sqm., one of the simplest – but like all of Wright’s small houses it had the soul of a larger house packed in there.

Usonian scholar John Sergeant calls the Rosenbaum house “the purest example of the Usonian.”

    “It incorporates detailing improvements  and combines all the standard elements in a mature and spatially varied interior. [It’s use of “nested space,” for example is superb.] Its exterior has an almost overpowering horizontality.  The street facade forms a cypress wall from which springs the carport, a 20-ft cantilever itlizing concealed steelwork.
    “Ten years after construction, the Rosenbaums had Wright extend the house. It thus becomes the first Usonian to be radically altered, something which owners of Wright houses were loathe to do, but which he himself saw as potentially inherent in an organic building.
    “This addition [like the Hanna House addition] backed a second ‘L’ onto the first, containing a Japanese garden.  With four sons in the family, extra sleeping accommodations were required. A quiet guest room terminated one arm, and the other contained a family, kitchen, bunk-playroom and utility room with second carport.”

PS: If you’re looking to learn more about these beauties, the two best books to hunt down are:

• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Houses, by John Sergeant
• The Natural House, by Frank Lloyd Wright

Apple’s Countdown to another court

Considering Apple Computers’s decades-long legal disputes over its flouting of the intellectual property of the Beatles’s Apple Corps, it’s surely ironic that Apple Computers is now suing Countdown Supermarkets, claiming that Countdown’s new logo is “too close to its own.”

Surely only “a moron in a hurry” -- or a lawyer looking for a payout -- would be misled into confusing a computer store with a supermarket.

‘Smart Growth’ and the coming ‘Housing-Led Recovery’ – or, to put it another way: ‘Oxymorons for Morons’ [updated]

I don’t know about you, but if I keep hearing excited talk about the oxymoron of a so-called “housing-led recovery” I’m either going to scream or blow up a housing project. News that mortgage lending is outstripping business lending by several percentage points is not news to about which we should be excited, but alarmed.

Haven’t we learned already that family homes are not productive investments but consumer goods? That buying consumer goods with investment capital is a great way not to recover, but to go broke?  That durable consumer goods whose prices are inflated by truckloads of the central bank’s counterfeit capital don’t represent “growth” but an asset bubble ready to pop?

If any other class of goods inflated as fast as houses do, and have, we’d want to do something about it.  But not when it’s housing.

The inflation and then the popping of the housing bubble, for which we’re all now paying, was brought about, in simple terms, by the ability of banks in a fractional reserve system to create credit out of thin air; all that newly created credit going predominantly into housing instead of genuine productive investment; and the supply of new housing being kept down by so called “town planners” – more specifically. those planners’ obsession with what they amusingly call “Smart Growth.’ 

None of these things has changed.

There’s no pressure to change or rein in the fractional reserve banking system, and little understanding of the urgent need for this to be done.  There’s very little mainstream understanding of the difference between productive investment and unproductive consumption.  And planners are still obsessed with so called Smart Growth.

If you only come here to read the economics posts, then you probably still unaware of the effect of this Smart Growth delusion on the economic disaster, so do yourself a favour and read Randal O’Toole’s latest critique of Smart Growth – which as Owen McShane says “is a ‘must read’ seeing so many local authorities are rushing to write Smart Growth into their current Plan Reviews” – go here to read How Urban Planners Caused the Housing Bubble. And in case you think this will be totally American centred, or of little interest to economists, then note this quote from page 17:

“In a recent survey of 227 housing markets around the world, former governor of the New Zealand Reserve Bank Donald Brash observes that ‘the affordability of housing is overwhelmingly a function of just one thing, the extent to which governments place artificial restrictions on the supply of residential land’.”

Would that Don, or his successor in the Reserve Bank, understand the effect of that particular institution on the housing bubble.

UPDATE: Vin Suprynowicz points out that continual government interference during the  Depression served only to delay economic adjustment and recovery.  As it was in the Great Depression, so too for this one.

Top ten cures for the blog squirms.

A fellow blogger emailed me asking what I do when I have the ‘blog squirms.’ In other words, what to do on a slow news week -- or when you’ve really nothing to say for the day, but you feel like you really should? So to help him out, here’s my own Top Ten Cures for the Blog Squirms:

10. Listen to Moaning Report, until I feel like throwing something.
9. Listen to Leighton Smith until I feel like writing something.
8. Read the Herald in hard copy until I feel like kicking something.
7. Read other bloggers’ posts until I feel like linking to something worth linking to.
6. Post the conversation I had last night in the pub.
5. Write about a piece of music or a favourite piece of architecture . . . or about global warming. (Now there’s three subjects on which there’s always something more to say.)
4. Pull out and polish off posts that I'd started but never finished.
3. Expand on comments that I've made elsewhere but were worth saying again, and saying longer.
2. Start a blog war.

And finally, the number one thing to do when you’ve got the blog squirms:

1. Post replies you’ve made to emailed enquiries.  Like this one.  ;^)

What do you get when you cross a libertarian and a Fabian socialist?

So what do you get when you cross a libertarian and a Fabian socialist?  Turns out you get a chap who is equally sceptical of both the state and corporate welfare; of the the short-comings of central control by government -- “about the exercise of ministerial power over ordinary people by often heavy-handed government departments” – and of “business indifference to [people’s] needs.” (Well, I did say he’s a socialist, didn’t I.)

“A dose of libertarianism would enhance our democracy” he says in today’s Australian newspaper.

Adventure kindergartens [update 2]

Safety-obsessed New Zealand may not be ready for rugged no-nonsense “adventure kindergartens” – described in yesterday’s rag as “a radical preschool movement that advocates toughening up the little darlings with a back-to-nature approach, including turfing them outdoors in all but extreme weather.”  Story here: A really wild way to grow kids.

But the guy in the story who says New Zealand “may not be ready for it” teaches in Aro Valley, Wellington, so his opinion can be safely discarded. New Zealanders of the old school should embrace this, if they can beat back the bureaucratic bastards who will undoubtedly try to stop it.

There’s nothing “radical” about taking kids out of cotton wool and letting them see the world as it is. About letting them learn about taking risks, and to take responsibility for their own choices. That’s simply how the world, or at least New Zealand, used to be – and should be again.

It’s not all that a good education should be, but it should certainly be part of what a good one looks like.

UPDATE: Sean Fitzpatrick says:

    “To me the interesting issue is not the proposal in itself – it is the idea that such a measure is seen as somehow ‘novel’.
    “To anyone born before the mid-seventies, a childhood full of falling over on concrete covered school-yards, getting stuck up trees or trying to fetch one’s soccer ball from a gorse bush was all par for the course.  It provided us with life experiences, choices to be made and consequences to be handled.  It prepared us all for life.”

Dead right. To paraphrase that much quoted line, the end result of banning risk is to fill the world with molly-coddled fools.

UPDATE 2: Opinionated Mummy has further thoughts:

“We are now so used to thinking in terms of preparing for the very worst and the least likely scenarios, that that we do not realise how overbearing and ridiculous our safety measures have become. We are so concerned about safety that we forget what we are giving up for our children: freedom, resourcefulness, learning the value of hindsight and using common sense, or believing that common sense has any value at all.”

Exactly.  We substitute the possibility of physical damage with the certainty of mental and spiritual damage – and since children grow up unable to properly assess risk for themselves, the strong possibility of physical damage at some unspecified time in the future. Read Risk paranoia for more.

Quotes of the Day: On the politics of global warming [update 4]

“The politics [of global warming] are tough now because conservatives years ago allowed the debate to get away from them; frightened of being labelled nature-haters, they declined to attack anti-progress green arguments as they were being formed. Result: in 2009 they’re dealing with a full-blown religion, and they’re discovering that logic isn’t much of a weapon against faith.”
…………………………………. – Tim Blair, commenting on ‘Malcolm Turnbull’s Malcontents’

 

“The current Global Warming Debate is not about temperature or CO2 levels. It is an ideological clash between those who want to change us (rather than the climate) and those who believe in freedom, markets, human ingenuity, and technical progress. The advocates of global warming alarmism ask for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion, of government intervention into our lives and of government control over us. We are pushed into accepting rules about how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to consume, what to eat, how to travel. It is unacceptable.”
………………………………………….- Hon Vaclav Klaus, President Czech Republic.

 

Grasp those two points, and you’ll understand why warmists are so excited – and why they can be taken seriously when they campaign to have industry shackled by forty percent from 1990 levels: because if you haven’t grasped it already this is not about logic. It’s an ideological clash.

And as Muriel Newman reminds us in her latest newsletter, the clash here in New Zealand is about to reach an historic climax:

“National’s Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill is now in front of the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee. Submissions close on the 13^th of October, giving a scandalously short time frame for the preparation of submissions on legislation of this scale. Emissions’ trading is the biggest government policy to be imposed on New Zealand in recent times and promises to be just as invasive and cancerous as income tax.”

So read her latest and scientist Chris de Freitas’s briefing before getting your submission in quick smart:

• A Threat to Freedom and Prosperity – Muriel Newman
• Prologue to Copenhagen – Chris de Freitas

UPDATE 2:  As more and more scientists and science writers see a whole decade of temperatures refusing to rise in accord with the predictions of their models, after years of non-warming – after an day in which the largest snow fall in 25 years has closed the Desert Road and the Napier-Taupo highway, it’s starting to look like the climate alarmism of Time magazine might actually be justified.  It’s just that it took thirty-five years to show it.

UPDATE 3: The draft of the Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty, on the basis of which all the world’s Emissions Trading Scams are being drawn up, is looking less of a climate treaty and more of a blueprint for world socialism.  See for example ‘From The Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty’ at the Coyote Blog, and more along these lines at Anthony Watts’s blog.

UPDATE 4: Oh, and the Coyote Blog is also the home of the free online book  'A Layman’s Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming'. It’s purpose is simple:

     “. . . to provide a layman’s critique of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory, and in particular to challenge the fairly widespread notion that the science and projected consequences of AGW currently justify massive spending and government intervention into the world’s economies.  This paper will show that despite good evidence that global temperatures are rising and that CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and help to warm the Earth, we are a long way from attributing all or much of current warming to man-made CO2. 
    “We are even further away from being able to accurately project man’s impact on future climate, and it is a very debatable question whether interventions today to reduce CO2 emissions will substantially improve the world 50 or 100 years from now.”

Ayn Rand has something to say to Glenn Beck [updated]

You know what’s wrong with America now? According to top-rating Fox TV host Glenn Beck it’s … wait for it … “God is no longer trusted in America”! The number one reason America is going to the dogs? Says Beck, it’s because the numbers of godless heathens in America are growing! And what’s going to save America from the ObamaMessiah and his minions? According to Beck, and to those who think like him, it’s more people in America worshipping the big guy in the sky!

Idiocy like this you have to walk around carefully in case you happen to step in it. But he believes in it.  He has faith.

Why was America so successful?  Was it because it was the country whose founding was based on the notion of individual rights? No, says Beck, it was because Americans “recognise God’s authority”  (never mind that there’s better evidence for doing the right thing than “my God told me.”) Because God told Americans what to do (never mind that he also told the leaders in all those theocracies trying to destroy America what to do).  Because Americans are god –fearing.  But stop being god-fearing, apparently, and it’s all over for capitalism, for freedom, for individual rights – and for America.  He really does believes this stuff [hat tip Joe Maurone].  See:

Sheesh already.  As if it were true that “being god-fearing” leads inexorably to freedom (not according to the centuries of Dark Ages and the dictatorial voices of Islamist thugs it doesn’t.) As if it were true that America was founded upon religion?  Not according to the founding fathers it wasn’t.  As if it were true that capitalism and individual rights needs faith and superstition as support. Not if you adhere to reason they don’t. And as if speaking yesterday, instead of back in 1961, Ayn Rand “replies” to Glenn Beck and his false faith-based notion, and knocks all this phony baloney out of the park. [hat tip HWH]

As she points out, the fusion of capitalism and religion on which Beck and his fellow conservatives  is not merely wrong, it's fatal. When you tell people that the foundation of capitalism is religious faith, then you imply that reason and science are on the side of the collectivists.  There is no greater point for a defender of capitalism to concede.

UPDATE: Turns out Ayn Rand Center head Yaron Brook explained this to Glenn Beck a few weeks back. Watch from about 2:30 (the first 2:30 are awful) [hat tip Objectivism Online Forum].

‘Tweeting’ on my mind

Never had time to post the (ir)regular Friday Ramble yesterday, and I won’t have time either today.

So if you want you regular bunch o’links – if you want your fix of good stuff around the net to browse through over the weekend, then why not head to my Twitter page where I find the good stuff so you don’t have to waste your time with the bad stuff.

Check it out:      

And if you want to get the links ‘live’ as I post them, click ‘FOLLOW’ once you’re there.  :-)

Oh, and here’s my ‘song of the week,’ Serge Gainsbourg’s song for Brigitte Bardot, especially for Sam P . . .

Enjoy!

PS: And just for the sake of . . .  completion, why not check out Brigitte Bardot singing Serge’s ode to the ‘Harley Davidson.’  Your weekend will instantly feel a whole lot better.

Beer O’Clock: Oktoberfest

Neil Miller takes a look at his German calendar,and heads straight down to Wellington’s Malthouse clad in leiderhosen . . .

It has begun.

The 176th Oktoberfest opened in Munich on 19 September and will run through to October 4.  Over 6 million litres of beer will be drunk at the event which is both the world’s biggest beer festival and the world’s biggest fair.  Fourteen larger and several smaller beer tents and beer gardens provide enough seating at any one time for 98,000 of the expected 6 million visitors.

Oktoberfest began as an elaborate wedding commemoration for Crown Prince Ludwig (later King Ludwig I) and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen (who had narrowly avoided marrying Napoleon) in 1810.  Since then, Oktoberfest has been cancelled only 24 times due to wars or outbreaks of disease.

If proof was ever needed that Oktoberfest is actually a pretty classy event, look no further than the organiser’s decision in 2007 to ban serial oxygen-thief Paris Hilton.  The official reason was that Paris “cheapened” the festival in 2006 with her attendance but the real reason was perhaps that she had used her time at the festival to run an advertising campaign for canned wine.

Malthouse is looking to start its own October beer tradition with the first annual “Octoberbest” – a month long celebration designed to showcase some of the medal winners from the Brew NZ Beer Awards and some Malthouse staff picks from Beervana and elsewhere. 

Oktoberfest at Wellington’s Malthouse will enjoy some important differences from the German version:

• While entry to both Oktoberfest and Octoberbest is free, a “Mass” (one-litre stein) in Munich this year will cost between €9.30 and €11.60 – almost NZ$24.  That makes it almost as expensive as drinking on Auckland’s Viaduct.  Malthouse prices will be lower.
• On 24 occasions the German Oktoberfest has been completely cancelled due to epidemics (usually cholera) or wars.  Neither of these phenomena is expected to affect Courtenay Place in October.
• Smoking is permitted in the Oktoberfest beer tents even though Bavaria has some of the most stringent anti-smoking laws in the world.  Oktoberfest has an exemption from the smoke-free laws, Octoberbest does not.
• New in the Malthouse fridge is the very appropriate Galbraith’s Munich Lager.  This is a rare bottled beer from the iconic Auckland brewpub.  It is a Bavarian style lager which pours a pale gold with a firm head.  It has a spicy, grassy nose, a sweet, nutty body and a crisp, bitter finish.  Authentic German ingredients are used.

Head brewer Keith Galbraith is a wonderful host and has even inspired some poetry over at the Beer Haiku Daily website.  The poem is called “Perfect”:

Butcher and brewer
Make ESB sausages
Perfect with mashed spuds

This poetic offering is by Rupert Morrish who notes "my local butcher makes these excellent Bitter and Twisted sausages for Galbraith’s."  I suspect this is not the first time the dashing Keith Galbraith has had a poem written about him. *

Finally, a pertinent question, can it really be a coincidence that the first day of Oktoberfest was also International Talk Like a Pirate Day?

* I have no actual evidence of this of course.

Cheers

Beer Writer
Real Beer New Zealand
Beer and Brewer Magazine

‘NZ in Print’ – this has now gone way beyond satire [update 3]

IT’S GETTING HARD TO make a joke these days without some humourless bastard taking it seriously – and it’s getting hard to satirise the statists without giving them new ideas.

Some years ago, back before Al Gore invented the internet, a pale physics student from Otago called Bernard Darnton penned a piece of rollicking satire called ‘Achtung Fatso!’ in which he satirised the food fascists by exaggerating their programmes. Fat taxes. Guidelines on healthy eating issued by a Ministry for Nutritional Responsibility. The commissioning of a Body Mass Index Safety Authority.  These were all satire back in 1997 – or they were, until the likes of Sue Kedgeley started getting ideas.

Bernard has a lot to answer for.

And so does Lindsay Perigo. Years ago when we Libz were opposing the broadcasting fee he satirised NZ On Air with suggestions for a new organisation called NZ in Print.

    “We have a thing in NZ, a government body called NZ on Air. It shells out taxpayer money to local outfits to produce television programmes it deems worthy. It used to collect a dedicated fee from anyone who owned a television set before we freedom-fighters got that abolished.
    “One day, as part of an ongoing campaign against this monstrosity … I went on my radio show and announced that a new statutory body was being set up called NZ in Print, which would collect a levy from every New Zealander and use it to set up a govt-run daily newspaper. "This'll point up how ridiculous and indefensible NaZis on Air is," I thought. Problem was, listeners believed me till I told them I was pulling their tits. "NZ in Print" just didn't seem that unlikely in our Nanny State environment!”

I guess he didn’t realise that people like Fran O’Sullivan was listening.

This week in Wellington, you see, while purporting to talk about political blogging O’Sullivan was shamefully shilling for her employers.  “Increasing commercial pressures on newspapers and diminishing resources to do investigative journalism,” was the bleat. Taxpayers stumping up for electronic media but not for paper-based was her whinge. Bailouts for newspapers! was her solution. What she advocated was that “NZ on Air should become NZ on Media, and all media should be able to apply for worthy ‘local content’ projects whether they be TV, radio, print or Internet.”

Oh. My. Word.  What chutzpah! To confess that your employers’ Victorian-era business model is failing, and then to stand there demanding the taxpayer picks up the slack. To take a bad idea – govt funding of the arts and culture  industry – and to use that to justify an ongoing bailout for your newspaper industry. Talk about a dirty business, and this from a supposed business journalist.

And has she been smacked down for it?  Not a bit of it.  For her trial balloon suggested journalists like her be given a tilt at the trough she’s earned herself a round of applause!

This is the sort of thing David Farrar considers “a really good idea.”

This is what Janet Wilson & Bill Ralston (the man who did to TVNZ News what he’d previously done to Metro magazine) call “an interesting idea.” “Fran has a good point,” they say.  Lead me to the trough! they smirk.

What a bunch of disgusting, grasping  low-lifes.

At times like this you can only wish that satirists would stay silent, and self-interest take a higher road.

It’s not just more welfare for Ponsonby late-lunchers that such a “solution” would deliver.  It would also deliver a further kick in the guts to free speech – and make your daily newspaper effectively an arm of the state.

We already know what “worthy ‘local content’” looks like from the dross delivered by the NZ On Air dole-outs.  Can you imagine what sort of worthy “investigative” journalism would be funded by such a body? It certainly wouldn’t be funding investigations into abuse by government, or of troughing in high places – that much is for sure – just the sort of softcock-Cameron-Bennett handwringing that contaminates your TV screen on a Sunday evening . Because as Nigel Kearney asked at Farrar’s place,

    “Can Sullivan’s plan for a permanent bailout be done without the government deciding what investigative journalism does and does not get funded?”

No, of course it couldn’t. This would be chilling to free speech – it would be what I’ve called once before “a different kind of censorship,” and Ayn Rand called “the establishing of an establishment."

So what the hell does that mean? Sit back while I explain.

LET ME START MY answer to that by mentioning a story run a few years back by the UK Daily Pundit about every liberal's favourite UK newspaper:

    “The Guardian [it said] is effectively being subsidised by the government and could go bust if a Tory government introduced a ban on public sector recruitment through newspaper ads. At present, government recruiting is costing the taxpayer in excess of 800 million pounds per year. Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, is promising to change the system to allows jobs to be advertised for free on a new official website. The cost of running the website would be approximately 5 million pounds per year.”

The Media Bulletin noted that "The Guardian currently dominates this market and, according to research by Reed Personnel Services, advertises two-thirds of public sector jobs." Now, I don't want to talk about that proposed ban or about the cost of employment websites. What I do want to talk about is that advertising. If Reeds are right, and there's no reason they wouldn't be, that's 600 million pounds of government money going to The Guardian every year by this means alone -- and I'm sure no-one would suggest The Guardian and its employees are not so stupid that they don't know which side their bread is being buttered on, and who it is who is doing the buttering.

You see what I mean by another kind of censorship? As they often say, he who pays the piper calls the tune.  Do you really want the tune the newspaper’s whistling over your morning brekkie to have been composed in a government office?

Do you really want hard stories soft-soaped by journalists with one eye on their investigation and the other on their tender into the government for further work?

It’s as easy for a government to buy a compliant media by doling out taxpayers’ cash as it was for Helen to buy a compliant “creative sector” by doling out grants and dole payments.

SO LIKE I SAY, there is more than one kind of censorship. The first and most straightforward method of censorship is for a government to ban speech that they don't like -- that's just what Labour & National  like to do with their Electoral Finance Act & Electoral Finance Act Lite respectively, and I hope you lot feel disgusted enough about that to do something about it.

It’s the second form of censorship that Ayn Rand called "the establishing of an establishment," and it’s surely no less chilling. As she says so succinctly:

    “Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country... There is another way: governmental encouragement.”

As a form of censorship this one is much more subtle,and much more appealing to trough-snuffling self-interest.

    “Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.”

That’s worse than flat-out censorship, isn’t it. It makes folk indifferent to truth and falsehood (and to the immorality of becoming another bailout bludger) and sensitive instead to what is deemed to be acceptable, and thereby lucrative -- and it encourages and makes lucrative that very form of sensitivity.

This is what Rand called "the welfare state of the intellect," and the result is always as destructive as that other, more visible welfare state.  You see the establishment of politicians, bureaucrats and their minions as arbiters of thinking and taste and ideology; you see the freezing of the status quo; you observe a creeping staleness and conformity, an insidious unwillingness to speak out.  What you see, in short, is "the establishing of an establishment" to which new entrants in a field realise very quickly they will have to either conform or go under. As Rand observed of the behaviour this kind of censorship encourages:

    “If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor [or spin doctor or opposition leader], you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently non-committal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: Play it safe, don't antagonize--whom?—anybody’."

Is that what you want your taxes to encourage?  If you do then you can count me out.

The American Constitution effected a separation of church and state for a reason – one that is observed at least de facto down here at the bottom of the South Pacific. As Ayn Rand observed, the constitutional separation prevents a formal governmental establishment of religion because such a thing is properly regarded as a violation of individual rights. By extension, then,

    “Since a man's beliefs [about religion] are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.”

Think about it.  And then send your thoughts on to people like David Farrar and Fran O’Sullivan and Bill Ralston, who should really know better. Remind them perhaps of that line I quoted above:

“Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country… There is another way: governmental encouragement. . . .”

UPDATE: How quickly they all turn once they’re offered a trough to lie in.  Whale Oil puts his hand up for a piece of the funding pie.

UPDATE 2:  Don’t extend the aegis of the state broadcasting subsidy body NZ On Air to other media, says Liberty Scott -- Don’t extend it: abolish it!

UPDATE 3: Maybe Fran was reading PJ O’Rourke’s satire on this from last November, in which he specially pleaded for “bailouts for print paupers”?

“There are many compelling reasons to save America's print journalism. And I'll think of some while the waiter brings me another drink. In the first place, one out of three American households is dependent on print journalism* . . . We need a swift infusion of federal aid. Otherwise all the information in the US will be about Lindsay Lohan's sex life.”
*For house-breaking puppies.

‘Paris Street: Rainy Weather’ – Gustave Caillebotte

A symphony of umbrellas and pedestrians inhabit a wet and unforgiving Parisian street. But there’s something going on here, isn’t there . . .

Auckland bloggers’ bar bash tonight! – now with an aftermath update!

Oops!  I almost forgot to invite you out for a drink tonight at the regular Bloggers’ Bar Bash at Galbraith’s – and that would never do!

So consider yourself invited.

And take note that there’s a whisper, here, about some celebrity guests – about which, I couldn’t possibly comment.

What: Auckland Bloggers Drinks – a social gathering of bloggers and bloupies (those who read, comment on and hang out with bloggers)
When: Thursday 1 October from 6.30pm
Where: Galbraiths, 2 Mt Eden Road, Mt Eden, Auckland

(Just to help you keep your diary regular, the B3 Bloggers’ Bar Bash happens the first Thursday of every month – with occasional additional affrays when blogging luminaries are in town.)

UPDATE:  Whale Oil summarises the evening:

“Now this is the funny part. We had objectivists, libertarians, fundy Christians, Conservative Christians, atheists, agnostics, homos, dying people, National supporters, Act supporters, Cactus Kate who is a category all on her own and one leftist, green aforementioned obnoxious ass. Everyone but him got on fine with much hilarity for the entire night except for this humourless prick.”

NOT PC’s Blog Stats for September

AS MOST READERS have done their level best to avoid noticing, September was Grand Final month.  It was also a month in which we say a ten percent lift in reader numbers – which is never anything to sneeze at, and there’s no tissues being used here – but as evidence that correlation is not causation, not one of my posts on AFL ranks at all, and reader numbers in Melbourne and Geeelong have failed o go through the roof. Oh well.
There’s nothing obvious to put the jump in numbers down to then, so I’m going to ascribe it to the good old-fashioned reason of good writing bringing in more readers – at least, I’ll keep claiming that until someone can suggest a more likely reason. 
IN the meantime, here we go with September’s stats:

Unique visits [from Statcounter]: 49,469 (August: 44,210)
Page impressions [from Statcounter]: 74,173 (August: 65,826)
Avge. Monday to Friday readership: 1795 readers per day (August: 1514)
NZ Political Blog Ranking for NOT PC in August: 4rd (July: 3rd)
Alexa Ranking, NZ:  1,011th (August: 1,118th)
Alexa Ranking, world: 275,071st (August: 348,280th)

Top ten posts for August:

• DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Maori, Megatron and the Money-go-round
  Doc McGrath takes on everyone, and comes up smiling.
• “Unknown hero” Norman Borlaug dies
  If saving human life is your standard, then Norman Borlaug was the greatest human being who ever lived. Shame today’s journalists never bothered even to note his passing.
• Doing bad to people doing well
  At  a time when businesses are reeling, the business of punishing success is on the uptick. 
• Questions on piracy, lying, racism and more
  Eight impertinent questions for the bad guys. 
• Why so DeSpondre’nt ?
  So why’s everyone so down on Mr Spondre?
• BSA backs chiropractic quackery
  Two journalists and two lawyers tell a medical researcher he can’t smack the quacks.
• It’s not racist, but . . .
  It looks like  racist election bribes have started two-and-a-half years early . . .
• “Leave Us the Hell Alone!”
  Do you like your day job?  I do.  My day job is designing people’s houses – or as I like to call it, building people’s dreams.  How could you not like that? But you know what I don’t like most about my job?  I don’t like all the nannying bastards who get the hell in the way of my clients’ dreams, and my working day.
• Learner driver
  Arrived home yesterday afternoon to find a near-neighbour had an unexpected visitor with a few parking problems.
• Bye-bye Bradford
  How disappointing to hear that Sue Bradford is leaving Parliament in October . . .

Most commented upon posts

• DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Maori, Megatron and the Money-go-round (66 comments)
• Doing bad to people doing well (46)
• “Leave Us the Hell Alone!” (45)
• A troll (39)

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Cheers, and thanks to you all for reading, linking to and talking about NOT PC this month,
Peter Cresswell