NOT PJ: By Golly, It's Christmas!

This Christmas week, Bernard Darnton ventures into a fancy department store, wondering what to buy for the Duke who has everything.

Yesterday I got my first ever Santa photo. The children were also there, reeling off a list of requests for iPads, Lego, Ninja Turtles, and everything else except bikes, which is what we’ve bought them.

They probably thought they could go overboard because we went to see the rich Santa at the fancy-pants central-city department store and not one of his less kempt counterparts at a suburban mall. Rubbing shoulders with a better class of tyke comes at a price. Getting an email with your Santa photo costs an extra seven dollars, which makes Spark roaming data charges on a raft up the Congo look like good value.

We chose the fancy-pants central-city department store because it has a famous window display. This year the children were diverted for several seconds by the glittery unicorns and the Cinderella-does-Venetian-Masquerade diorama before resuming their stampede for the grotto. The masquerade motif was repeated throughout the store, with sparkly masks decorating garlands and trees. The theme represents Christchurch masquerading as the sort of place where one might want to do Christmas shopping.

Not that I want to do Christmas shopping anywhere, with its futile staring at shelves full of generic “giftware” for people I don’t know very well, and the sharper dread of misjudging things for someone I should know better, but they’re small details compared to the major problem of shopping in Christchurch which is that there aren’t any shops.

Except for the fancy-pants central-city department store, which is chock full of all sorts of things I don’t want to buy. There, resurging to the top of the ‘most fashionable toys’ list this year, is the golliwog. These are priced exhorbitantly, presumably in order to prevent riff-raff from buying them non-ironically. If you live in a more progressive centre, the rehabilitation of the golliwog may not yet be apparent. You can draw your own conclusions about why all the golliwogs listed on Trade Me are shipped from either Christchurch or Australia.

However much angst I am driven to by Christmas shopping, I can always calm my mind with the knowledge that others have it much worse.

Imagine what it must be like for Mr and Mrs Middleton. You’re ambitious social climbers and you’ve managed to scrape together enough cash to send your daughter off to an upmarket university where she can rub shoulders with royalty. And then you get the awful news: it was more than just shoulders and now you have to buy Christmas presents for your in-laws, Queen Elizabeth the Second and Prince Philip.

How do you find a gift fit for a Queen? Try and get India back? Even if you own a party planning business worth fifty million pounds, it must be intimidating to know you’re being compared with someone who owns realms and dominions and stuff.

They seem to have over-reacted. Mrs Darnton, who reads the Pointless Bollocks section of the New Zealand Herald, tells me that they’re giving Prince George a ten-thousand-dollar rocking horse for Christmas. Well, rocking zebra. Because everyone from riff-raff to royals has rocking horses but rocking zebras are exotic as fuck*.

If the Middletons also read the Pointless Bollocks section of the New Zealand Herald, or worse, the Daily Mail, they would know that the Queen doesn’t approve of expensive Christmas presents because Christmas is a religious festival. She’s not just Head of the Commonwealth, she’s Defender of the Faith.

The Duchess of Cambridge must be trolling Mummy and Daddy because we know that she knows the rules. At her first Christmas at Sandringham, she bought Prince Harry a two-dollar-shop Grow Your Own Girlfriend kit. In turn, Harry bought the Queen an ‘Ain’t Life a Bitch’ hat. I’m not some fancy archbishop, but I assume this is because amusing rubber sexual aids and nihilistic profanity defend the faith more devoutly than cashmere scarves and Rolexes.

Trudging the retailless streets of Christchurch, I console myself with the knowledge that no one I’m buying for is either rich or religious, as I would then have even less clue what to buy.

Unless I wanted something for Prince Philip. He’d probably appreciate a golliwog.

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Bernard Darnton is NOT PJ O’Rourke. But some Wednesdays he would like to be.

Innkeeping with the Times

This week Bernard Darnton accidentally offends an indigenous homosexual donkey.

On Sunday I took my angel and my shepherd to church for their annual booster shot of Christianity. I like to go to the nativity play and give them a small dose of Mary and Joseph to go alongside Diwali’s Rama and Sita, Pegasus and the Chimaera (from one of the less likely chapters in The Iliad), and a rather saucy graphic novel featuring Rhinemaidens. It’s absurdity, sex, and violence -- that is, culture -- all the way in our house.

At one point, the somewhat non-traditional nativity script switched to the donkey’s point of view, with the donkey complaining about having to carry the heavily pregnant Mary all the way to Bethlehem. The asinine griping ended with the donkey taking offence at the innkeeper’s offer of the stable to Mary and Joseph, when he noted that they’d “have to share with the animals.” The donkey was indignant at the suggestion that sharing with the animals would be a bad thing.

The innkeeper’s insult is a crime known today as “microaggression.” The trick to microaggression is that you don’t know you’re doing it. If the innkeeper had said, “Piss off Joseph, and take Eeyore with you. I fucking hate donkeys,” the anti-donkey sentiment would have been clear. As it was, the unthinking denigration of the donkey as an inferior creature probably wasn’t even noticed by the humans, being part of the dominant culture as they are, but the hurt inflicted by the casual anthropocentrism was apparently keenly felt. (It’s hard to tell if the offence was genuine, because donkeys are generally ornery bastards.)

Microaggression can also be directed at other humans. In my previous life as Libertarianz party leader I once got into trouble for not knowing the correct acronym by which the gender- and sexually diverse identify themselves. I thought it was “LGBT”, but this is microaggressive towards the intersex. Maybe it’s LGBTI; maybe it’s LGBTQI, LGBTQA, or LGBTTIQQ2SA, for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, 2-Spirited and Allies”. I swear I don’t make this stuff up, but even that is exclusive of hijra, takatapui, and fa’afafine. Or is it? To be honest, I wouldn’t have a clue. And I suspect I’m not supposed to. As a curmudgeonly old white heterosexual - can one microagress against oneself? -- it’s easier just to say “Other.”

I relayed all this to a family member, who laughed and said, “Why can’t they just be normal like us?” “Holy shit,” I thought, glowing in relative liberal smugness, “are you even allowed to say that?”

I assume that still counted as microaggression rather than actual aggression -- she didn’t actually claim that God Hates Fags or form a lynch mob -- and probably didn’t mean any harm by it. It’s just that old people are inadvertently way more sexist, racist, and homophobic than the rest of us, who are just ageist.

Microaggression can range from the tasteless, the thoughtless, and the impolite, through to what might be better named “nanoaggression”, “picoagression”, or even just “not aggression”.

Professor Val Rust at UCLA, charged with improving his students’ writing, was demonised -- a word sure to antagonise thin-skinned demons everywhere -- for daring to correct a student’s capitalisation of the word “indigenous.” University authorities were summoned and they quickly capitulated to the illiterate but deeply sensitive students. By asserting that the word didn’t warrant a capital letter, the professor apparently showed disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view. Bastard.

Regardless of colour, skins this thin are not fit for purpose. Those who insist on seeing racism and sexism in any sentence that isn’t perfectly manicured are simply too fragile to go outside. Enough genuine victims have been created through real aggression that there’s no need to create swarms more imaginary victims through perceived “microaggression.”

And yes, there is still real sexism and racism today, but if you heckle someone like Professor Val Rust, one of the inventors of multiculturalism, to silence, the only people left willing to discuss racial questions will be those with pit bulls and swastika tattoos, which might explain something of European politics.

To improve the world you need to take part in it. Pitch a tent in the marketplace of ideas. But you won’t be able to handle it if you have the delicate sensibilities of a California sophomore. Perhaps take a leaf out of the journal of an old dead white guy:

“When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?”
- Meditations 7:26, Marcus Aurelius.

And try not to be an ass.

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  Bernard Darnton is not PJ O’Rourke. But some Tuesday afternoons, he’d like to be.

NOT PJ: Sexist Pigs in Space

This week saw a perfect storm of spacefaring milestones, loud shirts, and crying. It was enough to bring Bernard Darnton (right) out of retirement.

Last week’s landing of the Philae spacecraft on the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko gave us insights into not just the earliest epoch of the solar system but also the postmodern political universe.

Through the comet lander’s separation, descent, and landing sequence, project scientist Dr Matt Taylor gave a television interview explaining the progress of the spacecraft, its experiments and scientific goals. He concluded his interview by saying, “everyone should enjoy it because we’re making history.”

Not everyone enjoyed it. Because, as well as landing a robot spacecraft on a comet five hundred million kilometres away, he was also wearing a saucy shirt. Twitter, that bastion of reasoned debate, erupted in a shitstorm. Or #shirtstorm.

The tweet at the eye of the storm was snarky, but not unhinged. Unhinged is where the debate quickly headed, aided by both man-hating identity-warriors, desperate to be offended, and woman-hating trolls, desperate to offend, a cyclone of artificial anger fuelled by artificial hurt.

Shortly afterwards, Taylor apologised. All of this would be understandable if Dr Taylor had actually done something nasty, like land his probe somewhere it wasn’t wanted. Instead, he is guilty of that most modern of crimes, wearing an amusing shirt. Or, more to the point, a very unamusing, oppressive, patriarchy-reinforcing shirt that tells girls they’re not welcome in science.

By the way: if you want one of your own, you’ll have to make it yourself but you can order the fabric on the web. If it’s men you’d rather objectify this Christmas, there are plenty of other pin-up fabric options for the lady or out-and-proud homosexual in your life. The International Union of Lesbian Rocket Scientists is split between those who want to order a souvenir set of sexy shirts and those standing with their Twitter sisters, who are not gonna take it any more.

Closer to home, another sexist pig got his comeuppance on Monday. Roger Sutton was forced to resign as head of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. You’d think it would be because, four years after the earthquake, Christchurch still looks like the surface of a comet, five hundred million kilometres from civilisation. But no. Sutton is supposedly guilty of calling a senior CERA staff member “sweetie.”

That doesn’t sound like a firing offence to me and rumours of worse are swirling. But even if Roger Sutton were actually Jack the Ripper, and what we’ve seen were a plea bargain down to the lesser charge of ‘male patronises female,’ the fact that this justification can be used with a straight face is telling. It’s supposed to sound reasonable that calling someone “sweetie” is a resignation offence. The zeitgeist quote from the Stuff article: “I will become a better person. I'm going to tell fewer jokes.”

Offence-taking has become a trump card in modern political debate, an attempt to silence dissent. But it shouldn’t be. Claiming to be offended is just whining, and in the words of Stephen Fry, “so fucking what?”

There’s nothing wrong with saying what you think about a political or religious claim, a dirty joke, or a comedy shirt, but it should be the start of a debate, not the end. Rose Eveleth’s initial criticism could have started that debate: is the dearth of women in science and technology due to Matt Taylor’s shirt? No, of course it bloody isn’t.

But, more interestingly, is there a dearth of women in science and technology? Does it matter? Is there a gender bias in science? How do three-year-old girls who want to know how everything works turn into sixteen-year-old girls with no desire to attend a physics class? And just how casual are casual Fridays at the European Space Agency?

Those who leap to offence don’t care about actually answering the complex questions and today we’d rather judge people on trivia than their real achievements.

It doesn’t matter whether you oversee the exploration of a comet left over from the formation of the solar system, or whether you oversee the smothering of a city that was already on its knees, success or failure in your chosen path is irrelevant in today’s sensitive, censorious society. Just maintain the inoffensive veneer, sweetie.

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Bernard Darnton writes regularly for NOT PC. He promises.

NOT PJ: One Chance

This week, Bernard Darnton is taking his chances. But not on shopping for handbags.

“We’ve got one chance to get this right,” is the catch-cry of the Christchurch rebuild. Based on this one sentence it’s easy to conclude: we’re fucked.

If we’ve only got one chance to get it right, the plan needs to be perfect. No person, mayor, or czar, no committee, council, or cabinet can possibly know enough to synthesize the needs and hopes of hundred of thousands of citizens into the perfect city plan. Therefore, the plan won’t be perfect. Therefore, we’re fucked.

A city isn’t a set of drawing, or a spreadsheet. It is an organism. It can’t be planned from the top down; it has to be built from the bottom up, evolving as the result of a million experiments. Much like the robust and varied natural world, a city is the result of generations of trial and error, of failure and improvement. One problem with grand plans is that planners double down on bad bets whereas evolution clears them away and tries something else.

The idea that we’ve only got one chance to get this right is a self-fulfilling prophecy. CERA, the City Council, the Central City Development Unit, don’t have the ability to get it right in one go—no one does. But the plan must be conformed to and if we can’t get it right then, damn it, we’ll just have to get it wrong.

To get an idea of how wrong, you just have to listen to the cheerleaders. Apparently the key to Christchurch’s future economic success is “high-end retail”. Someone has gone round the great cities of the world and decided that what they all have in common are traffic problems and fancy handbag shops, perhaps failing to notice that these are symptoms of economic success, not causes. So Christchurch is going to get narrow, 30 km/h streets and shops selling shiny, brand-named tat.

The plan is to grass over half the city and build small amounts of expensive office space on the rest. The theory is that Christchurch was failing economically before the earthquakes and so if we triple the cost of office space, that will attract “high end tenants.”

For the record, “high end tenants” means outfits like Inland Revenue, which gives you a good idea of where the planners think that money comes from. Never mind, also, that Inland Revenue has signed a nine-year lease on an office out near the airport.

The ground floors of these expensive office buildings will be filled with “high end retail.” Louis Vuitton has been name-dropped. I have no idea if Louis Vuitton has been informed of their critical role in the rebuild. So the fool-proof “one chance” plan for Christchurch’s economic success revolves around Inland Revenue call centre staff spending their lunchtimes buying Louis Vuitton handbags.

Artist’s impression of central Christchurch. (Inland Revenue employees on their lunch hour not shown.)

The citizens of Christchurch would like to thank, in advance, New Zealand’s taxpayers for their unstinting support.

A rare insight into the planner’s mind came to me at a recent party. I suggested that Christchurch’s rebuilding would be clipping along much better if people were allowed to build whatever they liked on their own land. This was unacceptable said the planner because so much time has been put into the planning. If people just did what they wanted to, they might not conform to the plan (!) and then all that effort would be wasted!!

Even armies, who can shoot people who get in the way, understand that no plan survives contact with the enemy.

When I suggested that maybe they could save all that effort by not doing the unwanted planning in the first place, all I got was sputtering. Many good arguments evoke sputtering. “B … B … But … but … then everyone would die of typhoid!!!”

I bowed to my audience and took the win. To be fair, that response probably owed more to excessive alcohol consumption that to departmental policy, but it provides insight. It’s not that far from in vino veritas to in vino dumb-ass.

The planners know that planning is valuable. What they don’t understand is that the plans themselves are useless. The value comes from thinking about the possibilities, not from the mindless execution of the plans (and those who get in the way).

If Christchurch is only given one chance to get to get it right, the city will die.

If the plan is to build a “high-end” cargo cult and hope that wealth appears magically over the horizon, we will be miserably disappointed.

Christchurch doesn’t need one chance, it needs a thousand chances. It needs CERA and the CCDU, who have suffocated the city for two years, to make way for the thousands of individuals who will experiment, and iterate, and evolve the city into something marvellous.

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Bernard Darnton is Not PJ O’Rourke, but you can’t blame him for that.
Read his other posts here.

NOT PJ: Dunedin Born and Brewed

This week, Bernard Darnton is drinking locally, and thinking globally.

Dunedin Born and Brewed

Emerson’s Brewery, a Dunedin icon, was sold to Lion on Tuesday and so is now part of Kirin Holdings, the Japanese brewer. (Kirin, in turn, is part of the Mitsubishi keiretsu, making it a sort of drinking-and-driving conglomerate.)

I drove down to Dunedin the day after the announcement to check that the beer was still OK. It was.

The brewery itself is still in a crappy little industrial building in North Dunedin. You can still take in your empty plastic Coke bottle and get the receptionist to fill it with Bookbinder or London Porter while you peer into the factory floor where the alcoholic alchemy takes place.

I was worried that international conglomeracy might have change the place but I didn’t see any MBAs, PowerPoint presentations, or anyone realigning the supply chain strategy going forward. Just a few people milling around while the malt and hops turned into bloody good beer.

So, is it bad that Emerson’s has been sold? Presumably Richard Emerson doesn’t think so, or he wouldn’t have done it. I can still get great beer at a mildly exorbitant price, so I’m happy too.

But economically? Every recession we’re urged to export our way back to wealth. If it’s good to export beer, surely it’s even better to export a beer-making company and get all the cash in at once.

“But all the profits will go overseas,” cry the opponents of foreign investments. Economists will come in here and compare the sale price to the net present value of the stream of future profits. But I have just one word: Crafar. If you think that the flow of profits overseas is what economic nationalists object to, then the kerfuffle over the bankrupt Crafar Farms is baffling. The objectors should have been overjoyed that some foreign mug was foolish enough to buy that dog. Think of all those lovely losses flowing in from Shanghai!

The first comment I heard about Emerson’s after it was sold was, “There goes that,” as if being part of a big corporate would somehow taint the beer. If they’re not insane, Lion will leave Emerson’s alone to do its thing. The reason corporate brewers want into the craft beer market is because rich, sophisticated drinkers like me refuse to drink the piss-weak lolly water that’s marketed at teenage boys. Why would I drink Tui “pale ale” when I could drink Emerson’s 1812?

A huge part of the purchase price for a respected brand is “goodwill”. They’re certainly not paying for the physical plant, which is not much more than an overgrown home-brew kit. When I see a beer bottle with the Emerson’s logo on it, I think happy thoughts. That’s gold. To imagine that the new owners will blandify the beer for the mass market is to imagine that big corporates know nothing about market segmentation and that they hate profits.

For many entrepreneurs, the thing they do well isn’t making products, it’s making companies. If New Zealand can get rich by making and selling butter, we can get doubly rich by making and selling companies.

The end result is that Richard Emerson has the capital to expand, Dunedin still has it’s brewery, and I still have my beer. I’ll drink to that.

Posted with Blogsy

NOT PJ: What's the Reason for this Folly?

"All I want for Christmas," says guest columnist Bernard Darnton, "is Christmas"

I wasn't one of those who bought a house near the top of the market with a hundred-percent mortgage and then extended the loan six months later to buy a bloody great big shiny new TV, so the recession (if not the Christchurch earthquake) has so far passed me by.

The worst effect of both is that austerity is still fashionable, even amongst those who aren't feeling the pinch. I had hope it would be a passing fad I could easily ignore, much as I ignore most passing fads. Not having a bloody great big shiny new TV I don't usually find out what the passing fads are until they've passed by, reached their destination, gone to the pub, and are having a lonely drink to drown their sorrows having been deserted by their followers.

Regarding the TV thing, I should add that I don't have anything against shiny expensive gadgets – Note to Santa: I quite like shiny expensive gadgets – it's just that I don't want a top notch telly when the programmes are so crap. Shite in high-definition is still shite.

The worst aspect of austerity-as-fashion-accessory is that it has invaded that stronghold of glorious consumption, Christmas. I know there are supposed to be religious reasons for Christmas – Jesus or Sol Invictus or something – but as far as I'm aware no verse in the Bible mentions the real highlight of Christmas, a fat bloke dressed as a Coke can.

This year once again our family has decided to cut back. That is, one person in our family has decided to cut back and told everyone else to comply. I certainly wasn't part of this daft decision, being merely a hanger-on by marriage. (And I only find out about this stuff after the fact. Mrs Darnton does all the present buying and associated carry-on at our place.) I don't think any of us is in financial trouble. I suspect the dig-for-England mentality is just a bit of vaguely Puritan middle-class guilt. A bit like when your mother told you to eat your dinner because people were starving in Ethiopia. Which makes as much sense as putting your coat on because it's cold at the North Pole.

We are now subject to strict present buying rules, which have been laid down by the central authority. Each participant is to buy one present, addressed to a designated recipient, up to a legislated maximum value. Excruciating Christmas morning horrors await.

The primary failure of the centrally-planned Christmas is that not everyone knows the plan. The Christmas Control Authority has been too polite to tell some people that the trimmings have been trimmed. Those without inside knowledge of how the systems works will arrive arms laden and expecting full festivities. Their generosity will be cruelly punished.

The Christmas Control Authority has also become the clearing house for problematic gift-buying decisions. Those who've been assigned a difficult relative or someone they don't know well seem to believe that a bureaucracy clever enough to make up all these rules also knows exactly what everyone wants. No. Expect resources to be misapplied to the novelty sock and amusing coffee mug industries. I'm almost praying for scorched almonds.

On the upside, the atheists are going to have a good time regardless. While the churchgoers are going to church (if they can find one here in Christchurch their God didn’t turn to rubble) the atheists will get in a two- or three-bottle head start to make the proceedings bearable, perhaps even entertaining. Without an explicit liquor ban, this will be the festive outlet of choice.

The question for next year is: will the failed experiment result in a return to laissez-faire or yet another round of regulation to correct the problems caused by the first lot. I wish you a raucous and regulation-free Christmas and hope that Santa hasn't been turned back from your place for the crime of overloading his sleigh.

NOT PJ: The Labour of Subdivision

This week Bernard Darnton looks for a new house and discovers that Christchurch is a handyman's dream.

People think I’m mad to be looking for a house in Christchurch at the moment. But the entire property market’s just been thrown up in the air - literally - and it might be possible to grab a bargain from a “motivated vendor.”

We looked at a property that may meet that criterion over the weekend. It has large rooms, plenty of outside space, and fields either side. It’s zoned “Rural 5” and the barbeque area has a serene country outlook, populated by a few happy lambs.

Closer inspection of the District Plan reveals that “Rural 5” is whimsically nicknamed “Airport Influences”. If there’s one thing I like more than serenity it’s being on the final approach for lumbering military transports returning from Antarctica.

I reckon it’s a reminder of man’s ability to build lumbering military transports that return from Antarctica.

I have nothing but gobsmacked admiration for the extraordinary, distorted-reality world-view of real estate agents. I cannot imagine matching the incredible heights of optimism they reach, where it’s always sunny and the air’s a bit thin. One place we looked at fronted onto State Highway 1. When I expressed some concern about ever being able to get in or out of the driveway, the agent told me that the good news was that the road was being widened from two lanes to four, which would make access easier because I’d have more lanes to choose from.
Apparently there has never been a better time to buy. In fact, we should buy every property we look at - right now. According to one agent, I absolutely have to buy a place in the next month because after that all the houses in the red zone are going to be demolished and the government is going to tip hundreds of millions of dollars into the property market. I’ll be competing with ten thousand other people for every sale.

Fortunately, I am also counter-assured by Christchurch’s silky-tongued mayor Bob Parker that there’s nothing to worry about because there are 20,000 sections around Christchurch ready to be built on. Well, almost 20,000. Almost ready. By “20,000” he means maybe up to 10,000. At a push. And by “almost ready” he means stuck in an endless loop of consents, notifications, objections, consultations, hearings, and reports.

Even where development is almost certain to occur there are still conditions to be met. And often those conditions are conditions the developers can’t meet because they’re waiting for - guess who - the council. The Prestons Road development can’t go ahead until a new sewer main is built - a council job. Part of Wigram Skies is waiting on the completion of the Western Interceptor (another sewer line) and the Southern Corridor (a road). These last two are at least under construction. Other developments are frozen in similar states.

Even when the critical infrastructure eventually comes into existence, the council forces developers to develop things that nobody wants. Zoning rules set a minimum density for new developments meaning that, for every 600 square metre section that somebody wants, developers also have to provide a 300 square metre section that’s much harder to sell. It’s deeply unfashionable for chickens to live too close together but allowing humans free range in the suburbs is a no-no.

The question of whether my house-buying plans are thwarted by displaced hordes from the Eastern suburbs probably comes down to two things. First: who has the slower bureaucracy? Central government, with it’s red zone payout? Or the city council, with its tortuous consents process? And second, will Roger Sutton, CEO of CERA, use his awesome powers to slash through Christchurch’s Gordian knot of red tape and open up new lands?

We know the demand is coming. Will there be any supply?

Read Bernard Darnton’s column every week here at NOT PC. Except when you can’t.

NOT PJ: Taking the Mickey

This week Bernard Darnton wouldn't steal a car, but he might download one if it was old enough.

Taking the Mickey

Outrage erupted this week as an anti-piracy video featuring comedian Rhys Darby was released to New Zealand schools. Pro-piracy campaigners announced a boycott and said they would immediately stop watching their downloaded Flight of the Conchords episodes. Darby is expected to miss out on revenues of up to $0 a week until the boycott is lifted.

There is an escalating war between the creators and distributors of films and music and the “information wants to be free” crowd who think they should be allowed to consume whatever entertainment they want without paying for it. The law is on the side of the copyright owners and technology is on the side of the pirates. Matters are foggied because the technology has myriad legitimate uses and the law is being used as a blunt weapon to bludgeon the pettiest of offenders and any inconvenient bystanders.

Exhibit A: Steamboat Willie starring Mickey Mouse. This film was released in 1928. Its copyright was due to expire in 1956. Then it was renewed giving a new expiry date of 1984. Just in time, the law changed extending its protection until 2003. Yet again the horrors of public domain were avoided with the passage of the Copyright Term Extension Act, taking the date out to 2023. Ergo, according to the anti-copyright folks, Congress has been bought by “big media” and Disney is writing America’s laws.

Without wanting to fabricate complicated conspiracy stories, the steady increase in copyright protection does look odd. By rights, Steamboat Willie should have fallen into the public domain by now and the file-sharers should be allowed to share and remix this nugget of Americana to their hearts’ content.

At this point you need to put your conclusion-jumping shoes on because we’re off to the land of Non Sequitur. Steamboat Willie is 80 years old and I would be allowed to copy it if not for some shady corporate welfare deal. Therefore copyright is bollocks. Therefore I should be allowed to download X-Men: First Class, which is 8 days old, which is what I wanted to do in the first place before making up this rambling story about Mickey Mouse.
So, a question for the Rhys Darby boycott crowd: if information wants to be free, why didn’t X-Men: First Class just spring into existence by magic? Why did hundreds of people have to spend months of effort and $160 million to bring it into existence?

Like every good political stoush, everyone is yelling, and everyone is wrong. Media corporations are wrong to keep lobbying for extensions of copyright, lawmakers are wrong for criminalising fair use and format shifting, and file sharers are insane for thinking that they can take products without paying for them and expect the producers to keep producing.

Lawmakers are wrong for writing legislation that assumes guilt as soon as copyright infringement accusations are made and wrong again for mandating that internet access be denied to those accused. Opposing lawmakers are wrong when they claim that internet access is a human right. (Tom Paine was silent on the matter.)

Whenever I listen to an argument on this topic I want to stick both sides in a room and reboot the lot of them.

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Bernard Darnton boots himself into action every Thursday here at NOT PC.

NOT PJ: High-Altitude Finance

This week, Bernard Darnton is outwitted by an urchin.

Oxygen deprivation can make you stupid, and stupidity can be expensive. I found this out (like I didn’t already know it) on the walk back down from the Perfume Pagoda in Hanoi. On the way up I had somehow acquired a guide. He was a boy carrying a chilly-bin the same size as himself full of soft drinks. He told me that when we got to the pagoda at the top of the mountain I would be hot and thirsty and he would sell me a drink. “Very expensive,” he said, grinning.

Oh, you little third-world scamp, I thought, your honesty is endearing but I’m wise to your game. True enough: at the top I was hot and thirsty, achingly tired, and my vision was a little blurry as I fought for air. He sold me a drink. It was quite pricey. But I thought the little tyke had earned it. He really had earned it. He was a very good guide; he was knowledgeable, he showed me round the site, and his English was excellent.

On the way back down I complimented him on his English and he told me that he went to a good English school. Sadly, he was going to have to stop his lessons because they cost fifty-five US dollars a month. He paused and then it occurred to him - perhaps I could pay for a month’s lessons. I’d been thinking he deserved a decent gratuity but in a dollar-a-day economy like Vietnam’s $55 would have been a stupendous tip. “How about twenty-five,” I countered. My mouth was out the door running before my brain had even put its shoes on. Two dollars is what my brain suggested when it eventually sputtered into life but by that time my guide had evaporated, carrying a month’s wages.

Back at the bottom of the track, fed, rehydrated, and with oxygen saturation back up to normal levels, one of the others in my group asked sheepishly, “Did anything weird happen to any of you guys up there?”
Some visitors hate Hanoi because of the petty scamming. Usually it’s just for a dollar or two - the taxi ride that goes round in circles, the rickshaw tour to nowhere, the street corner currency trade that doesn’t quite add up - but it’s constant.

I didn’t hate it. I was charmed by its scallywaggery. I wasn’t going to let a couple of dollars ruin a trip that cost thousands. And the little buggers always smile when they’re ripping you off.

Someone else who always smiles when he’s ripping you off is low-ball share buyer Bernard Whimp but he’s far less likely to leave you feeling charmed, and far more likely to walk off with a lifetime’s earnings.

Whimp sends out letters making unsolicited offers for shares at a fraction of their market value. An unending supply of people who have neither any idea what their shares are worth nor the wit to find out willingly make the trade.

There seems to be a steady parade of people who have somehow acquired chunks of Fletcher Building or Contact Energy but have no idea what the share market is. These people provide the fodder for Whimp’s schemes.

His activities have led to run-ins with the Securities Commission and the brand new Financial Markets Authority and a date at the High Court. What I can’t work out is why it’s any of the government’s business. If someone like this offers to buy your shares for far less than they’re worth the correct answer is, “Piss off,” not “Yes - thanks for the cash - but why, oh, why won’t the government do something about me being so stupid?”

We don’t need laws to stop people like Bernard Whimp. Trading with him is voluntary. If you have no idea what your shares are worth, you’re probably better off with the cash. At the very least, take a deep breath and make sure there’s some oxygen getting to your brain before signing the form. Caveat venditor.

Looking back, that experience outside the cotton-wool of Western consumer protection laws was probably the best value education I ever got. For a few dollars I got a crash course in how not to be a gullible moron. In the same way that being innoculated with live virus keeps you safer than living in an antiseptic bubble, three days in Hanoi prepares you for the world far better than a lifetime of being told that the government will protect you from your own idiocy.

Bernard Darnton writes every week at NOT PC, in between writing letters of refusal to low-ball low-lifes.

NOT PJ: One Mississippi, No Mississippi

This week Bernard Darnton sails down the Mississippi on a raft of bad news.

Nature’s relentless might is on show again, this time in the Mississippi River basin. The river’s catchment is vast - nearly half of the United States - and the water’s all shown up at once. Whether you count in metric or imperial units, there is a cubic shitload of water coming down that river.

The situation is so unusual that it makes an introductory ethics class sound realistic. An out-of-control railcar carrying 80 billion tonnes of water is careering towards New Orleans, population 1.2 million. If you could push a fat man onto the track and divert the railcar to Morgan City, population 12,000, would you do it?

In the ethics class three quarters of the class say it’s wrong to throw fat people at railcars and one quarter say it’s wrong to let the railcar crash into a million people when you could prevent it. Then they argue for the rest of the class about “normative ethics,” “consequentialist ethics,” and so on. Nobody, fat or otherwise, actually dies.

If you’re in charge of the Morganza Spillway however, where the Army Corps of Engineers keeps 125 caged railcar-diverting fatties, the choice of whose homes to destroy is real. And they’ve decided that Billy Bunter is going to take one for the team.

Right now, the control structures designed to contain the Mississippi are more stretched than this railcar-crashing-into-fat-man analogy. The last time an analogy was this stretched was during the flood of 1973, when the Old River Control Structure was compared to King Canute trying to hold back the tide by getting every lard-arse and chubby-cheeks in Humberside to line up along the beach. It was feared then that a torrent of ridiculous wordplay could completely undermine understanding and change the course of writing forever.

The Old River Control Structure, a set of gates that control the distribution of river water, and the Morganza Spillway are not just floodgates, there to divert water after heavy rain. Their real purpose is to keep the Mississippi flowing down its existing channel, even though it would rather jump its banks and take a shorter, steeper route to the ocean.

Over millennia, the Mississippi has whipped around like a fire hose, with its delta moving across from the Florida panhandle almost to Mexico and back again as old channels silt up and new channels are eroded. The river no longer has any desire to follow the current channel through to New Orleans and is fighting to switch course to the west, down the Atchafalaya River and into the Gulf of Mexico.

Without the control structures the area wouldn’t just flood, the river would change its course permanently as it scoured its new path to the sea. If the Old River Control Structure was to fail - something that almost happened in 1973 - it would make the chaos of Hurricane Katrina look like a perfectly scripted tour of a clockwork factory.

If the Atchafalaya captured the Mississippi and the lower river ran dry the effects would be staggering. The Port of South Louisiana extends for 90 km along the river’s banks and handles the imports and exports for 33 states - over 200 million tonnes of cargo a year. The river banks are home to any number of oil refineries that need fresh water to operate. If the river became un-navigable the cost would start at $300 million a day.

Battling the Mississippi seems like an impossible task. The engineers are fighting geography, gravity, and statistics. One day the 500- or thousand-year flood will come. In the long run it’s bound to happen. And in the long run it would probably make more sense to let the river follow its natural inclination and let industry relocate along the new water course. But it’s just never the right day to pull the pin on millions of livelihoods and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure.

The current flood is bigger than the flood of 1973 but the control structures are in better shape and have been extended to spread the load so they will probably hold. Tune in next week to discover whether the Old River Control Structure is a remarkable feat of engineering and a testament to human ingenuity and grit in the implacable face of nature—or if it was a vast, expensive and futile government boondoggle, doomed to failure when pitted against irresistible forces.

Bernard Darnton sails down a river of metaphor every Thursday here at NOT PC.

NOT PJ: TANSTAAFL

This week Bernard Darnton uncharacteristically turns down a free lunch.

Free lunches were promised by Act on Campus this week in conjunction with KFC’s release of the “Double Down”. The thing appears to be a burger in which the bread has been replaced with fried chicken, the gap filled with bacon and the whole calorific horror stuck together with two kinds of cheese. Act on Campus is giving these away in the name of freedom, choice, and individual responsibility - although, if they were being honest, it’s more freedom than responsibility.

It’s a sad indicator of what the world has come to. Chemistry sets with no chemicals - “discover the wonders of salt - it dissolves!” - and where hot drinks are plastered with labels warning that they’re hot. We’re only supposed to eat food that the busy-bodies have tagged with their “tick of approval”. (And, in another sign of what the world has come to, that tick means not much more than, “We gave the Heart Foundation $10,000.”)We live in a world where university students show off their brash irresponsibility by eating a Chicken Kiev.

The promotion is undoubtedly designed to provoke Sue Kedgley into saying something bossy thus providing both parties with free publicity. It’s called “social media” and it’s at least 2,000 years old. If you’re running a film festival you always need to include a lesbian revenge flick so that the local churches will vigorously advertise the event.

If the do-gooders do rise to the bait, my advice is to ignore them completely if they prattle on about KFC causing the obesity epidemic. The last time I had KFC - thankfully many years ago - it was more like a rapid weight-loss program.

The Act on Campus link makes me wonder if this is the secret to Rodney Hide’s miracle weight loss. Rather than go down the Donna Awatere-Huata route of stealing money to pay for a stomach stapling operation, fried chicken could have been just the miracle ticket. He could have a nice little post-coup career as the Jared of KFC, showing off his enormous fat pants and extolling the dietary virtues of chicken drumsticks, undercooked by a careless teenagers.

Robyn Toomath and other fishwives of the health industry industry insist that food like the Double Down is killing people and should be banned or taxed into oblivion. Much like cigarettes, one of these burgers alone won’t kill you but forty a day for four decades probably would. But does that mean they should be banned?

If the thing was an instant health risk - say, hypothetically, it was prepared by hungover youths and therefore full of Campylobacter - then it should be illegal to sell as food. But if it gradually clogs your arteries and causes heart disease or clogs your liver and causes metabolic syndrome over forty years, then no. We all know this stuff is bad for you and decide accordingly. Economists call this “time preference”. We trade pleasure now for a risk of increased mortality later. (Pleasure here is a subjective thing. If I’m going to destroy my internal organs I’d prefer to do it with pinot noir and scotch rather than some polymer masquerading as cheese.)

It’s good to see someone facing the healthists with a wicked grin. Far better than McDonald’s salad-flavoured appeasement. I just wish it wasn’t KFC because their offerings repulse me.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Not one that you’d want anyway.

DISCLOSURE: Bernard Darnton’s NOT PJ column was written after imbibitions of pinto noir and scotch. And a kebab.

NOT PJ: 3D or Not 3D

This week Bernard Darnton reviews a film he slept through.

FILM TECHNOLOGY TOOKANOTHER leap forward this week with the announcement of special “2D” glasses that convert 3D films into an amazing unblurred 2D experience. The relentless march of technology never ceases to amaze me.

Gadget site Red Ferret announced this stunning new development, explaining how the cunningly designed glasses block one of the two images projected onto the screen in a bog-standard 3D film and convert it into glorious flat-o-vision.

This gave me an idea for an even better technology in which both lenses of the glasses are replaced by black cardboard. Films would be rendered in zero-D, instantly improving the vast majority of them.
Avatar, for example. It was Avatar’s hype that brought 3D back into fashion and yet it would be so much better in zero-D. I only went to it because I thought it was a documentary on the incarnations of Vishnu.

(This might sound like utter nonsense but this sort of thing happens to me all the time. When I was working in Porirua and commuting from the Hutt Valley, one of my workmates had a meeting to go to and asked me the best way to get to Avalon. At the time I was reading Foucault’s Pendulum and my head was full of esoteric religious nonsense. I thought he meant Avalon the Celtic paradise. It never occurred to me that he wanted to go to Avalon the suburb in Lower Hutt. I looked at him for a moment and said, “You can’t just go there - you have to be a Celtic warrior and die in battle.” He stared at me for an even longer moment and then backed off to ask someone who wasn’t utterly batshit crazy.)

True story. Anyway, Avatar.

Avatar is an action-adventure movie in which a group of humans, called “Americans,” invade a foreign planet populated by a peace-loving people known as “the Arabs” to steal an unobtainable mineral called “oil.” They blow up a tree and the star of the film turns blue (that bit at least was Hindu god-like) and goes native. I think that’s what happened. I was asleep for a lot of it and, if I’d had the benefit of the zero-D glasses, I might have been able to sleep through a bit more of it and really put that three hours to good use.

Even with my sporadic wakefulness it was quite clear that the film had a message to ram home. Americans are nasty and they shouldn’t blow up trees that belong to other people, even if those people speak another language and look like ten-foot tall smurfs. Director James Cameron explained that the film was in fact very patriotic because it’s patriotic to slag off your own country if your own country is crap. Or something. I was asleep during that interview too, with good reason.

Cameron also said, “We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don’t know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil.” Except for that one time when some guys stole some Boeing 767s and crashed them into American landmarks killing thousands. Admittedly, if Cameron can’t remember that event then the last decade of American foreign policy probably looks belligerent.

Not that the War on Terror hasn’t got a stupid name, and hasn’t at times descended into a shambles, but Americans aren’t just crashing around the world to steal oil or to kill people for fun. They are primarily, if not always directly, trying to prevent another 9/11.

Fortunately, the message of moral equivalence hasn’t sunk in. That much was clear in the jubilant scenes on Tuesday night, when we heard that US Navy Seals had delivered Osama bin Laden the bullets he so richly deserved - something that many of us were happy to see with or without special glasses.

Bernard Darnton’s NOT PJ column appears here every Thursday. Except when it doesn’t

NOT PJ: Goodbye England’s Brain

With only a minimum of arm twisting, I persuaded Bernard Darnton to pull the finger out and start typing again. Here then is his (ir)regular column for this week.

Goodbye England’s Brain

As part of Not PC’s extensive coverage here is our exclusive guide to everything you need to know about the Royal Wedding.

It is on Friday.

Do not go anywhere near a television after 10pm.

Thank you. That is all.

NOT PJ: Quake II

Photo by EJ Mathers 

Bernard Darnton was in the centre of Christchurch on Tuesday lunchtime. Here's his story.

“Guess the Magnitude” has become an office sport in Christchurch, with four thousand aftershocks  over the last six months—hundreds big enough to feel. Many of us had got quite blasé about aftershocks. They just become a part of daily life. Wobble. Was that one? Maybe a three point eight. Rattle. Could have been a four point five.

On Tuesday lunchtime I was in Pak ‘n Save on the corner of Moorhouse Avenue and Manchester Street. There was a rattle and I looked at the pallets stacked metres into the air. I walked round to the end of the aisle without real urgency. We get a magnitude five aftershock about once a month and were due one after Boxing Day and January 20th. No big deal. The shaking intensified and produce cascaded off the shelves.

My one “flashbulb” memory of the September 4th earthquake is running into my daughter’s room, screaming her name, and hitting the light switch. The light was on for less than a second before we lost power. In that moment of light the door frame leapt into me and the books exploded off the bookshelf into the middle of her room.

In contrast, on Tuesday a lot of produce came off the shelves but it shook and tumbled like objects that still obey the laws of physics. The alarms wailed and we dutifully strolled out of the building.
Outside it became more obvious that this had been a bigger than normal aftershock. Earthquakes do strange things to soft ground. The ground turns to liquid and sloshes around and then it solidifies again and the waves remain frozen in place. The tarmac had been ripped up and the pieces shoved around. The tectonic forces unleashed were writ tiny in the car park.

Bewilderment struck me as I stepped into Manchester Street. I was on a movie set, in the Blitz, a dream. I walked down the centre line of the road to avoid falling masonry and still had to pick my way through rubble. Every single building—as far as my fallible, malleable memory can tell me—was destroyed. Awnings and façades spilled into an ocean of bricks, concrete, and timber. The only spaces free of rubble were the sites of buildings demolished since September.

Crowds gathered around crushed cars and used makeshift tools to shift tonnes of debris. I joined one group and ripped the windscreen out of a car. I grabbed a piece of collapsed veranda to help lever the roof off. After a few moments of spontaneous, undirected teamwork a dog climbed out of the tiny gap. Behind me cheers went up as a woman was pulled free from another car.

I think your mind protects you in times of shock by not working properly. The landscape and skyline had changed so dramatically in just a few seconds that things didn’t quite register. I looked down one street and thought it looked odd. It was like when my wife gets a new haircut. I know something’s different but I don’t know what. Then it struck me: Oh shit … no cathedral.

I crossed the Avon, swirling with water from burst mains and the grey liquefied earth we all now recognise. The pancaked Pyne Gould building made it obvious that it wasn’t just the pre-1931 buildings, so badly affected in September, that had suffered this time.

I trudged the length of Manchester Street home to St Albans through rubble and sewage, my awesome blue pimping shoes from Maher ruined.

My street was flooded, our garden was full of sand, and our conservatory had moved two centimetres away from the back of the house. A friend texted to check that I was OK and tell me that the quake was a 6.3. In my daze, I thought, “That’s not so bad then,” as if 6.3 being less than 7.1 somehow made up for the destroyed business district, the missing cathedral, and the unknown number of crushed bodies I had just walked past.

The mood after the September quake was strangely upbeat. Despite the massive property damage, the lack of casualties allowed us to think of it as a bit of a jape. Having gone through it marked the insiders from the outsiders. Surviving the disaster—as everyone did—was a badge of honour and gave bragging rights.

Today the mood is sombre. The heart of the city is gone and its spirit is flagging. The names of the dead are not yet known and terrible days beckon as temporary tombs reveal their secrets.

Bernard Darnton is not PJ O’Rourke, but he writes regularly for Not PC nonetheless.
Read his archives here.

NOT PJ: Bernard Darnton is unwell

This week, Bernard Darnton is suffering sleep deprivation following the birth of his second youngster (right) on the 17th of January, leaving him unable to put digit to keyboard.

Feel free to leave congratulations to the father for the new son, and commiserations to the new son for the father.

NOT PJ: Don’t Vote.

This week Bernard Darnton considers a resolution for election year.

P. J. O’Rouke’s latest is Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards. In it he gives us his view of politics as game of “Kill Fuck Marry.”

“Kill Fuck Marry” is a game played by teenage American girls. Being neither teenaged, nor American, nor a girl, I didn’t have the foggiest idea what he was on about. Fortunately the rules are pretty straightforward. One player names three people and, for each of the three doing-words you say who you’d rather do it to (and who you’d rather kill or marry).

P.J. gets us started with the “exemplary” 1992 presidential race: “We kill Ross Perot. We could hardly avoid a fuck from Bill Clinton. And we marry kindly, old George H. W. Bush.”

In New Zealand we could play with the Government front bench. John Key, Bill English, Gerry Brownlee. You kill Bill English for bankrupting us, you fuck John Key and then blackmail him for millions, and you marry Gerry Brownlee because, umm, struggling here a bit – but, hey, free wordwork!

The first third of the book is devoted to America’s political heritage, featuring giants like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Joe Biden.

If you went to P.J.’s talk in Auckland last year and didn’t drink too much you’ll recognise some of the background material in these chapters, but it’s good to have it here as, let’s just say, a reminder.

O’Rourke then turns his attention to the present day. He tackles the bailout, social security, health care reform and then devotes an entire page to climate change: “There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.” A billion people in China want a car. If you fret about climate change he suggests you go to China and tell them they can’t have one. If you survive, go to India and tell another billion people the same thing.

Throughout, the text is peppered with O’Rourke’s trademark strained analogies. That is to say, he taps the sap of the linguistic tree and vulcanises it with Spock-like rationality. He carefully blends the resulting analogy, extending it and spreading it as far it will go. He stretches the rubbery metaphor until it breaks, leaving you exhausted and carrying the bastard child of hyperbole and rhetoric.

Having described America’s political journey, P.J. describes his own. He started off as some ill-defined kind of leftie following the early realisation at college that the beatnik hippy chicks were probably not going to kill or marry him. Getting a job and the accompanying tax bill (as well as realising that his stupid haircut was unbecoming for an adult) he became the nineties libertarian - the Republican Party reptile - that we’re most familiar with. Now, allegedly as a result of fatherhood, he describes himself as a conservative.

As is inevitable with American conservatism, God gets a mention or several. It’s probably the minimum acceptable veneer by American standards but it sticks out like a televangelist’s orthodontics to a secular New Zealander.

Fatherhood hasn’t converted me to conservatism, although that “honour your father and mother” thing might have something going for it.

Conservatism has made P.J. a more serious man. This book is a work of political theory with some jokes in it. It has a lot more reading and thought behind it than some of his previous books but he was funnier when he was a libertarian. Kill The Bachelor Home Companion. Fuck All the Trouble in the World. Marry Don’t Vote.

* * Bernard Darnton is Not PJ O’Rourke, but we
still let him write here every Thursday. * *

NOT PJ: Olden Caprice

This week Bernard Darnton conjures up social policy with a simple jerk of the knee.

I have come up with a great new plan to look as if I’m doing something about the road toll. Something must be done. This is something and therefore this must be done.

The legal aged-driving limit should be cut to 50. Drivers already have to pass a special driving test if they want to continue driving over 80 but people are still dying on the roads. Last year 116 people over 50 were killed on the roads.

Age has a profound effect on driving skills. Effects include slower reaction times, blurry vision and poor night vision, poor concentration, drowsiness, and worsening hand-eye coordination. All of these contribute to reduced driving ability and an increased chance of a fatal accident.

Another common problem with older drivers is lack of knowledge about how to use their cell phones. Sending texts requires their hands to be off the steering wheel much longer than it does for a young person.

While my plan only suggests cutting the aged-driving limit to 50, the School of Public Health at the Wellington School of Medicine has recently published research that shows there’s no safe age limit for driving. Due to a global conspiracy of journal editors, Zimmer frame manufacturers, and the people who make large-print playing cards the research hasn’t been published in a recognised journal - even though it was conducted in full accordance with the scientastic method.

Once my limit of 50 has been introduced I’ll be able to use the public health research to argue for a limit of 30 as a reasonable compromise.

In Australia, Victoria has cut the driving age limit to 20 with fantastic success at cutting the roll toll to almost nothing. National Manager of Road Policing, Superintendent Paula Rose, was asked whether she’d like that limit introduced here but she couldn’t speak because she was sucking on a lemon.

Critics of the plan to cut the legal aged-driving limit have pointed out the the number of over-fifties involved in accidents is no higher than you’d expect given the numbers on the roads, that cutting the limit would rob oldies of the chance to go out in the evening to enjoy a couple of slices of birthday cake, and that further research on the effects of reducing the limit is needed.

The fact is that we don’t have time for fancy-pants “numbers” and “statistics” and “research” while the carnage continues unabated.

* * Read the ongoing results of Bernard Darnton’s ground-breaking public policy research
programme every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

NOT PJ: Maths and Swearing

This week Bernard Darnton uses the power of made-up numbers to answer the age-old question: is infant formula worse than the Holocaust?

Red Nose Day is back. From wherever it is that Telethon and other such institutions go to rest, Red Nose Day has been resurrected. Like the new Telethon it was naff, but then the original wasn’t that great either.

Last week’s Red Nose Day was to raise money for various childhood illnesses, presumably because cot death, the old cause, has gone thoroughly out of fashion. Having changed its name to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome no one knew what it was anymore, and we all promptly forgot that we cared.

Like any expired fashion, it still has a handful of holdouts. Breastfeeding zealots continue to use the fear of cot death to shove their agenda.

Before my daughter was born we went to an ante-natal class. We were informed by the ‘facilitator,’ whose enthusiasm outweighed her knowledge, that babies who were fed infant formula and whose parents smoked had a 75% risk of death.

“But that’s basically murder,” gasped one of my classmates.

“Yes,” said the facilitator seriously.

I was less credulous: “Are you completely fucking insane? Are you sure it’s not 0.75%? Or 75% higher than the base risk - as in the risk goes from five-eighths of bugger all to bugger all?”

“No, not at all,” she said seriously.

“Where did that number come from?” I asked incredulously.

“The Ministry of Health,” she said seriously.

“Did you read it right?” I asked incredulously.

“Of course,” she said seriously.

“Don’t you think the number’s a bit high? Come on - I mean, when Hiroshima was bombed 160,000 people were killed out of a population of 300,000. That’s a 55% death rate. Do you honestly believe that being fed infant formula is more dangerous than being attacked with nuclear weapons?

“The death rate amongst European Jews during the Holocaust was 70%. Do you really believe that being a baby who lives with smokers is more dangerous than being a Jew who lives with Nazis?”

Even those without my shining ability to combine maths and swearing knew that something wasn’t right. Most of us had grown up in the seventies and if the smoking and infant formula data was right, 75% of us shouldn’t have been there. The real number is less than a thousandth of that figure. But it does have a five in it.

The problem goes much further than gross innumeracy. Lots of new mothers are made to feel terrible for not breastfeeding. Some babies won’t latch on properly. For some mothers it’s too painful. Some breasts only serve up green-label milk when babies really want gold top.

An expensive Ministry of Health advertising campaign is currently nagging mothers as they wander round shopping malls and watch crap television. Of course, it’s not the first government department ad campaign encouraging more people to get on the tit. Advertising and media companies must be awed by Nanny’s bounty.

The Ministry’s propaganda team are backed up by legions of do-gooders who put on their pretending-to-help voices and persecute women who can’t, or - the horror - choose not to breastfeed.

Sadly, many women have a cognitive affliction that makes them take notice of other people’s opinions. There’s really no need. The only parenting advice I would ever give is: Run as fast as you can away from anyone who gives parenting advice.

Oh, except one thing: I’m no epidemiologist but if you happen to be grossly fat don’t put your baby in your own bed and then get so drunk you can’t tell if you’re rolling on top of him. Just saying.

* * Bernard Darnton’s NOT PJ column appears every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

NOT PJ: Snake Oil

This week, Bernard Darnton cuddles an orangutan.

In 2002 the hills of South Wales were redolent with the fragrant vapours of something … chippy. Farmers had discovered that their Land Rovers worked perfectly well on throwaway vegetable oil. They’d also discovered that Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise weren’t collecting fuel tax at the local fish and chip shop. They were just a few years ahead of their time.

Christchurch is currently suffering a plague of rickety old buses plastered with advertisements explaining that we were supposed to get new buses but there was a an earthquake and blah, blah, but the new ones are coming and they’ll be all shiny and run on biodiesel.

Biodiesel is now big business - if by “business” you mean “heavily subsidised fad”. Whereas inventive Welsh motorists saved a small fortune in excise duty with their do-it-yourself tax cuts, in the government’s hands biodiesel had become an expensive boondoggle.

The 2009 budget contained a $36 million subsidy for manufacturing biodiesel, most of which the government will give back to itself in the form of payments to state owned Solid Energy’s Biodiesel NZ division.

Luckily this is outweighed by Solid Energy’s $68 million annual profit from its real business. As a state owned enterprise, the company is required to behave like a proper business and so it can’t invest its own profits in biodiesel because that would be a reckless waste of money. Hence the money-go-round.

New Zealand already has some experience with biodiesel powered vehicles. Earthrace was built in Auckland to showcase eco-friendly technologies and claim a world record for circumnavigating the globe.

After many mechanical difficulties and the killing of a Guatemalan fisherman, Earthrace managed the round trip in sixty-one days, a day slower than the fastest circumnavigation by a nuclear submarine (with no carbon emissions) and ten days slower than the fastest trip by a sailing ship (with no carbon emissions).

Physicist David MacKay (incidentally chief scientific advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change) has noted that Earthrace consumed four times as much fuel per passenger-mile as the QE2, that paragon of environmental ascetism.

With the ignoble exception of Earthrace, which was briefly powered on Pete Bethune’s liposucked arse fat, New Zealand biodiesel is made from canola. Around the world biodiesel is made from many kinds of vegetable oils but they all amount to one thing: burning food.

Between biodiesel and ethanol production for fuel, five percent of the world’s food is now burnt for fuel. In 2008, diversion of food into fuel programmes combined with an Australian drought to push prices up to the point where there were riots in several countries.

In general, however, food production is keeping pace with the world’s population. While environmentalists whined about overpopulation and mass starvation, technology and capitalism got on with the job of feeding everyone. Only the meddlers and do-gooders can bugger it up. Making a bet that we’re all going to starve and then passing laws requiring us to set fire to the grain reserves is just not cricket.

If we want to feed everyone - and it would be unkind not to - then land for growing biofuels has to come from somewhere else. And the only other places that are really good at growing stuff and that aren’t already covered in food are forests.

Conversion of tropical forests into palm oil plantations for biodiesel is already happening in Malaysia and Indonesia. And, in a tragic greenie-on-greenie scrap, that “sustainable” fuel production can only occur by destroying the habitat of orangutans.

So here’s the question: if you’re going to drive an empty bus round and round in circles from one shopping mall to an identical other, should it be powered by burning the remains of animals that died 300 million years ago ,or by burning orangutans today?

* * Bernard Darnton ‘s NOT PJ column appears here at NOT PC every Thursday. * *

NOT PJ: The Todger Screening Administration [update 2]

This week, Bernard Darnton found some nudie pics on the Internet. They're of you.

The latest weapon against airborne terrorism is nudie pictures, with backscatter x-ray machines being installed at airports across America.
    Normal x-rays machines use radiation that passes through an object and can detect dense things like guns, femurs, and the various household objects that people waddle into A&E having “accidently” sat on.   
    Backscatter x-ray machines, however, measure reflected x-rays. While fabrics appear invisible the radiation is scattered by most other things, like guns, explosives, and penises.    The Fiqh Council of North America has issued a fatwa stating that the nudie-scope is un-Islamic for its violation of modesty. Save your breath guys. Strip searches without warrants or probable cause are un-American, too, but nobody’s listening.
    Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’” Those were simpler times. That statement has mutated into, “I’m from the government and I’m here to take photos of your cock.”
    All this is in response to the attempt to blow up a plane last Christmas by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. “Smokin’” Umar, the underpants bomber. Abdulmutallab’s plot raised many questions, chief among them: How do you explain to the seventy-two virgins, who’ve been eagerly waiting for you their whole afterlives, that you’ve just blown your todger off?
    The second question was: What’s happened to al Qaeda? 9/11 was simple, ingenious, and devastating. The underpants plot was so bad it would’ve been rejected by ‘Allo ‘Allo.
    The third question was: What’s the dimmest knee-jerk reaction we can have to our hopeless security lapse?
After 9/11 the instant response was to ban anything sharper than an Oscar Wilde story from aircraft cabins. (In New Zealand the Aviation Security Service was formed so hastily that they forgot to check that it’s acronym wasn’t ASS.)
    After Richard Reid’s shoe bombs (again, WTF al Qaeda?) passengers had to remove their shoes at the security gate. Clearly, getting everyone to remove their pants for x-raying was too dumb even for the Department of Homeland Security so the nudie-scope it had to be.
    Passengers who don’t want to be photographed by the nudie-scope can opt out and have a good old-fashioned groping instead. As Ben Franklin once said, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will end up getting its bollocks gripped by the government.”
    Protesters recommend the groping because it slows down the queue to the point of impracticality and requires the government flunky to molest you face-to-face (or hand to bollock as the case may be) in the hopes that this is embarrassing for him too. November 24th has been designated National Wear A Kilt To The Airport Day.
    What Ben Franklin actually said was, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” He is backed up by Rafi Sela, former head of security at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, a man who knows about fending off murderous nutters. He says that Israel hasn’t bothered with body scanning technology because the machines are “useless.” “I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747.”
    I assume he’s talking about the old cocaine smugglers’ trick. If the machine maps the outside of a passenger’s body in exquisite detail, carry the explosives on the inside. Come on al Qaeda - let’s see how big your arsenal really is.
   The truth is that all this remove-your-laptop-battery, take-off-your-shoes, drop-your-pants nonsense, known as “security theatre,” won’t stop terrorists but it will make life unpleasant for the rest of us. You are now assumed to be a criminal the moment you walk into an American airport.
    Security expert Bruce Schneier believes that security theatre does nothing to protect us. What he claims will protect us is intelligence gathering, understanding Islamic organisations, diligent police work, and having the sort of society where people don’t want to become terrorists.
    Notwithstanding the horror and drama of 9/11, bringing down an airliner won’t destroy our way of life. A hyperbolic and misguided response to the threat just might. It’s time American air travellers told their government to stop taking liberties.

* * Read Bernard Darnton’s NOT PJ column
here every Thursday, barring drinking accidents. * *

UPDATE 1: Lindsay Perigo offers a robust critique of the elephant in the Todger Screening room: “It's the Muslims, Stoopid!.”

UPDATE 2: New #TSAslogans suggested on Twitter include:

• "Remember -- if the government doesn't squeeze your nads, then the terrorists win!"
• Former Sen. Larry Craig defends TSA: Says he really enjoys new pat down policy.
• Molesting. It’s Not Just for Catholic Priests.
• Bend over and take it like a man.
• Please place your hats, shoes, and self respect in the bins.
• We're the people ur mother warned u about.
• You'll need more than 3oz of personal lotion by the time we get through with you.
• If you want to fly, you can't be shy.
• Don't ask, don't swell.