Swindle feedback

Here's scientist Vincent Gray's assessment of  The Great Global Warming Swindle, screened last night on Prime.

"First: the programme itself is much improved," says Dr Gray of NZ's Climate Science Coalition. "All the objections to the original programme have been cleaned up. [Crawler Carl Wunsch, for example] who claimed he was railroaded into contributing, has gone... This version [which was quite a bit shorter that the original - Ed.] should replace the one already circulated whenever possible."

I have to pause here to note Eric Young's simpering disclaimer at the start of the show -- "Prime TV and Prime News wash our hands of this while thing" he almost said, before announcing that Swindle's maker Martin Durkin doesn't debate with warmists so the panel discussion later didn't include hime [a lie, as it happens; it's Warmist-in-Chief Al Bore who doesn't debate].  Anyway, back to Dr Gray's review:

Then, to the discussion. In  Australia they had a fanatically biased interviewer [Tony Jones] grilling poor Martin Durkin, who had difficulty standing up to him. Here, it was almost fair. Only two scientists to our one. But we won out on the non-scientists. Leighton Smith was the most experienced broadcaster present and he made most of the telling points.  His best one was when he exposed  the lie that very few scientists were critical of global warming theory. The two IPCC scientists ganged up to interrupt as soon as valid  points were made, and the chairman had difficulty controlling them.

Willem de Lange did an excellent job, but it tested his knowledge several times.

David Wratt [from NIWA] put over the same line that he did at his lecture last Wednesday and he honed in on the chief weakness of the Durkin programme, the reluctance to challenge the "Mean Global Surface Temperature Anomaly Record" which was accepted as authentic even by Fred Singer. While Durkin was accused of "cherry-picking," the MGSTAR is consistently chosen by the IPCC as the only authentic temperature guide, and all others are carefully downgraded. For example, Manning quoted the IPCC about "the warming of the last fifty years", carefully omitting mention of the satellite and weather balloon records which do not quite make it, and failing to mention that there was cooling for the first half of the period.  When the USA was mentioned somebody should have said that the corrected temperature record for the USA shows no warming [and that the warmest year in recent times is not 1998, but 1934].

Wratt even dragged out the Son of Hockey Stick which, again depends  on their cherry-picked MGSTAR. Willem made a good point in saying that [in this cherrypicked factoid] the "proxy" measurements stop as soon as they do not agree with the surface readings.

It is unfortunate that Pat Michaels , in The Great Global Warming Swindle did not mention his part in the paper with Ross McKitrick , 2007 which shows that the MGSTAR is biased by "socioeconomic factors".  This paper is published in the peer-reviewed prestigious Journal of Geophysics Research.

Wratt makes great play with how the IPCC only deals with peer-reviewed publications, unless, of course, if it is a Journal they do not approve of, like Energy and Environment. He does not mention that the IPCC controls the Editors and the peer-reviewers  of most of the Journals...

Insufficient play was made by the point made in The Great Global Warming Swindle that everything written by the IPCC has to be approved by the Government Representatives. With the "Summary for Policymakers" they have to approve each line. David Wratt is a "Drafting Author" taking down dictation. They like to pretend they are independent of the politicians and they are not.

Cindy Baxter was a disaster for her supporters. She obviously did not understand a word of the film or what the others were talking about and she made a feeble attempt to accuse us all of being paid off by big oil. The reality is she is paid how to think by Greenpeace Headquarters.

Martin Manning [a 'professor of Climate Change' at Victoria University] has aged considerably from when I first knew him. He looks like a possible suitable candidate for the role of Count Dracula  and did not come over as very convincing.

I find it difficult to believe that anybody who witnessed the programme could possibly still believe that the science behind the global warming theory is settled. I wonder how many watched, anyway?

Anyone like to answer him?

PS: I'm curious how many of you know the reason behind the film's title?  Who can be the first one to post the reason here? (Clue: there's a link to an infamous movie of the seventies.)

UPDATE 1: More comment and debate around the blogosphere, from NZCPR, Poneke, The Hive, Life From Right Field, Grim Planet, Political Animal, I-Shades, Kiwi Biker, the other Save the Humans site, and the communist who posts at the Ethical Martini.  Meanwhile, after failing to ban Prime's screening, the Greens's Frog Blog maintains a studied silence ...

UPDATE 2: A little bird gives me these audience figures for last night's screening:

    It did quite well for Prime, which probably has an average channel share of around 5%.
For Great Global Warming Swindle last night Prime scored an 8.4% share of "all viewers 5+" watching TV at that time.  It followed one of Prime's top shows, Top Gear, which last night recorded a 10.3% share.   The Prime News special debate afterwards itself rated a 10.4% share (slightly fewer viewers, but a higher share of people watching TV at that time).  The number of viewers increased slightly when TV3's Criminal Intent finished.
    As a comparison, TV One had a 16.6% for most of the night with Sunday Theatre, CSI and Criminal Intent on TV3 had around 20%, and Lock Stock on C4 had a 3.1% share. 

The zig zag hockey stick, and the lessening storms

Two recent pieces of research help to dispel two parts of the warmist mantra. Published in 'Energy and Environment' Craig Loehle takes the average of eighteen 2000-year-long series to confirm for warmists the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. Explains Lubos Motl, with tongue slightly in cheeck

Loehle has eliminated tree ring series from his datasets, explaining that they don't seem to be good temperature proxies. The result is a new kind of a hockey stick (pictured above), the so-called zig-zag hockey stick. ;-) The new blade in the middle of the stick is called the Medieval Warm Period.

Loehle's paper is audited by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit here and here. Head over and join in.

And you've heard that storms have been increasing over the last century? Not so, says research soon to be published in 'Climate Dynamics' that finds "storminess" - high winds - "hasn't changed in Europe during the 20th century" that complements similar numbers showing hurricanes haven't been increasing across the US, despite what the headlines and Al Bore's flawed film might suggest. And Jeremy Clarkson reckons Europe doesn't get good storms in any case. Europeans, he says, need to harden up, before laws are passed forcing us to stay at home when the Met Office has decided it will be windy.

Just thought you'd like to know.

UPDATE 1: On the premise that seems to be that it's okay to lie but it's not okay to call a liar names, some folk are upset at me giving Saint Al the pejorative name Al Bore. This is presumably because they find The Goracle exciting, or perhaps because they think Lord Gore of Nashville deserves greater respect -- though how any thinking person could dredge up respect for the Gorangutang I just don't know.

So if I need to find another something else to call the debate-dodging, media-shunning, unsafe-for-children ecodunce Al Gore III, then what names would you suggest?

UPDATE 2: The insufferably patronising Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a go at Loehle's paper on behalf of Team Warmist. Lubos Motl gives Shmidt an 'F': "Unfortunately, his criticism is extremely vague and in the cases when it is not vague and where I could try to check his statements, they seem to be demonstrably wrong." Steve McIntyre suggests Schmidt can't even plagiarise accurately.

Dawkins on Hitchens on the Big Guy

Those, like me, who find great value in either Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens -- or both -- will appreciate Dawkins' review of Hitchens' book (in many ways a companion to his own) God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

And if that's enough to get you twitching, then you'll enjoy Hitchens' account of taking his book on tour through the bible states of the US -- a sort of literary equivalent of the frightening tour through Alabama that Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear boys did with their cars daubed with slogans such as 'Man Love Rules, OK' and 'Country Music is Rubbish.' Dawkins describes Hitchens' tour, which went off with far less threat to life and limb than did that of Clarkson and the lads:

With characteristic effrontery, [Hitchens] took his tour through the Bible Belt states – the reptilian brain of southern and middle America, rather than the easier pickings of the country’s cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts. The plaudits he received were all the more gratifying. Something is stirring in that great country. America is far from the know-nothing theocracy that two terms of Bush, and various misleading polls, had led us to fear. Does the buckle of the Bible Belt conceal some real guts? Are the ranks of the thoughtful coming out of the closet and standing up to be counted? Yes, and Hitchens’s atheist colleagues on the American bestseller list have equally encouraging tales to tell.

It's worth reading both pieces:

• Bible Belter - Richard Dawkins, Time Literary Supplement.
• God Bless Me, It's a Best-Seller - Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair.
  

Weekend Ramble #24

Another random walk through sites, sounds and smells that caught your editor's eyes, ears and funnybone over the last week.

• If there's one complaint Arrol Gellner hears again and again from contractors, tradespeople and anyone else involved in the practical end of building, it's this: "Why don't architects have to serve an apprenticeship in construction?"

  His usual two-word answer is, "Good question." It seems self-evident, he says, that a person entrusted with designing an entire building should have at least a passing knowledge of how that building will be put together--a proposition that's always made sense to me; it just seems incomprehensible that people directing construction teams so often have literally no idea what they're doing.
  See: Best Architects Get Down in the Ditches - Arrol Gellner.
  

• The Anti-Planner has spent the last week demonstrating that US rail transport is more wasteful of energy than your average fleet of private cars. His conclusion: "Building rail transit provides no assurance of saving any energy." Go visit and learn, and then for Galt's sake take Russel Norman and John Banks aside and give them the news.
  
  
• And now, something for warmists and skeptics alike: If you hated Martin Durkin's film The Great Global Warming Swindle then there's something new to despise. If you thought it the perfect rejoinder to Al Bore's ninety minutes of lying, then you're going to love all the new supplementary video material that's now been released.
  Visit Google Video for: The Great Global Warming Swindle - Supplementary Material (60 min.)
  Infuriate a warmist now: Send them the link with your compliments.
  
  
• Speaking of infuriating warmists, ask the one nearest you which year has been the warmest year on record? If they say 1998, they're wrong. NASA has now admitted (very, very quietly) that the warmest year on record is actually 1934. The man who forced NASA's admission of an error in their gathering and manipulation of surface temperature data is mathematician and Hockey Stick debunker Steve McIntyre, who has been infuriating NASA's James Hansen for some time.
  As readers of Not PC will know, his latest enthusiasm has been tracking down errors in the surface temperature record that's used to provide the evidence for the warmists' creed, and he spotted a strange dislocation in the record about 1999 that he discovered was caused by a change in the method of temperature that had been unaccounted for.
  NASA has wriggled, but admitted the error. Stories everywhere, but the most reasoned sources are these:
  
  • NASA Climate Change Error Spotted by Blogger (sic) - Daily Telegraph (UK)
  • 1998 No Longer the Hottest Year on Record in USA - Anthony Watts
  • Global Warming & James Hansen's Hacks - Michael Fumento, Town Hall, and of course
  • Steve McIntyre's own blog, Climate Audit, on which several stories on this can be found, and several online interviews Steve has given with: CTV Canada, BBC Radio 4 [starting at 17:40], and Washington's Federal News Radio.
    
    
• NASA spokesman and Real Climate blogger Gavin Schmidt admits the error, but sniffily dismisses these adjustments as only "very minor changes." (Don't bother me, don't bother me, don't bother me ... ) Perhaps minor scientifically, but even the uber-smug Schmidt isn't so disingenuous not to know the major political capital that's been invested in alarmist claims based on his organisation's provably shonky statistics.
  
  
• So just for the record then:
  
  • The period between 2002 and 2006, where the average was 0.66ºC above the century's norm, is still warmer than 1930-1934, where an increase of 0.63ºC was the largest in the early part of the century.
  • But both periods are beaten by the 1998-2002 period, in which average temperature was 0.79ºC hotter than normal.
  Make of that what you will--as I'm sure you're going to.
  
  
• What happens when Brit motoring writer Jeremy Clarkson and his two sidekicks try to motor through Alabama with cars daubed with slogans such as "Man Love Rules," Hillary for President," and "Country & Western Sucks"? Watch this YouTube video and find out. [Hat tip Clint Heine]. It's not too much to say they almost died laughing...
  
  
• "Colonisation and slavery have created a sentiment of culpability in the West that leads people to adulate foreign traditions. This," says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "is a lazy, even racist attitude."Pascal Bruckner agrees, condemning the very idea of contemporary multicuturalism as "chaining people to their roots."
  See: Enlightenment Fundamentalism, or Racism of the Anti-Racists? - Pascal Bruckner.
  
  
• A new essay from the Ayn Rand Institute argues that neoconservative foreign policy is fundamentally flawed and incapable of achieving America's true national interests. The authors offer a rational and comprehensive foreign policy alternative here: The Rise & Fall of Neoconservative Foreign Policy.
  
  
• I'm often asked about the difference between libertarians and Objectivists. I'm proud to say that in NZ the answer is "very little"--most NZ libertarians realise that liberty without philosophy is illusory. Not so in North America however, where the difference between the two is one unbridgeable chasm wide. These two posts and the subsequent exchanges between Peter Jaworski and Paul McKeever of Ontario's Freedom Party highlight the differences between Objectivists and US libertarians, and I think help to demonstrate that without a philosophical foundation, politics is a dangerous pursuit of empty words, floating abstractions, and range-of-the-moment compromises.
  See Libertarians & Objectivists, and What Do You Have to Believe to Be a Libertarian?, and the subsequent exchanges to both.
  
  
• In fact the point for which Objectivists argue is the importance of what blogger Noumenal Self calls "Philosophical Infrastructure." That's such a good turn of phrase says Gus Van Horn that he finds himself jealous. Gus notes particularly NS's "interesting point about privatization":
  

  The same pragmatism that causes today's politicians to prioritize welfare spending over infrastructure also causes today's businessmen to prioritize short-term financial gains over long-term ones. Both act on the range of the moment, seeking to satisfy whichever constituency (voters or stockholders) is making the loudest demands. I think if we privatized infrastructure today, some of it would be run quite well. But some of it would also be run like Enron, which, if you'll recall, actually owned energy-distribution infrastructure.

  Also, be sure [says Gus] to read Galileo Blog's thoughtful comment just after the post.
  
  
• Objectivists argue that the main battle for liberty is not at the political level but at the level of philosophy--the primary battle is the battle for reason. "To save the world is easy," says Leonard Peikoff wryly. "All you have to do is think."
  Now Richard Dawkins is by no means an Objectivist, but he is at the forefront of the public battle for reason--and Galt bless 'im for that. In his latest BBC TV series he takes on that battle explicitly, and you can see the first episode already at Google Video: Richard Dawkins - The Enemies of Reason (Part 1).
  
  
• By the way, should you suddenly find yourself surrounded by fundies heading off to the rapture, then EAC Labs have the peace of kit you need to keep your feet on the ground: it's their most popular seller, the Anti-Rapture Helmet Mark II. "The mark 2 features a variety of impovements," EAC Labs explains, "including an auto-timer which will activate the helmet in the event that you should be so surprised by the ascending Christians that you forget to turn yours on. All recent models have been tested in artificially simulated rapture to ensure that no atheist need spend an eternity with the Christians and their god." And thank god for that.
  
  
• As regards principles in politics, by the way, this cartoon pinched from Pharyngula makes the point better than I could in one-thousand words. That said, Leonard Peikoff makes a fair fist of explaining the point in detail in this brilliantly grounded lecture: Why Should One Act on Principle? [60 min., audio, requires free registration: Listen here on Real Player or here on Windows Media Player. More details here.]
  
  
• What's wrong with income inequality, asks Objectivist Alex Epstein? Income inequality is a desirable consequence of a free and prosperous society.
  See: Celebrating Income Inequality - Alex Epstein, Capitalism Magazine.
  
  
• Oh, before I forget, with all the piss poor journalism coming our of Iraq (here's one of the latest examples) let me put in a plug for two on-the ground journalists on whom you can rely: Michael J. Totten, and Michael Yon. These two are on the ground and they know what's going on. Read them regularly.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Australian David Hicks who was on the ground worshipping with the Taleban is now back home and in thrall to another destructive world-destroying religion: as Tim Blair notes, he's now in thrall to Tim Flannery's warmist religion. As Tim says, maybe the bastard just likes beards?
  
  
• The most recent Free Radical challenges young socialists to watch as their ideology destroys yet another country--as Venezuela collapses into dictatorship and poverty before their eyes. The Venezuela News and Views blog is a good one to bookmark to watch that descent from a distance. Blogger Daniel says he began the blog as a way to keep in touch with friends and family, and now: "Unknowingly, I have written the diary of Venezuela slow descent into authoritarianism, the slow erosion of our liberties, the takeover of the country by a military caste, the surrendering of our soul to our inner demons."
  
  
• Speaking of destructive ideas, and following up on our friend who woke up in Poland to find that communism had gone and the world is now a prettier place, have a look at this pictorial essay of where the petrolhead culture hangout in Murmansk, in Russia's Arctic Circle, and try and imagine how it could have been even less pretty in the days before communism. Apart from the enormous difference that there's now cars and food in the garages, it looks exactly as I remember it from my own visit there in 1991. A sad and lonely place. See: Murmansk's Gorgeous Garages - BBC News.
  
  
• Architect Carlo Scarpa is one of architecture's unsung geniuses, and one of the few organic architects to successfully tackle the unlikely challenge of funerary architecture. Have a look at this photo essay of his masterful Brion Cemetery. Just beautiful:
  The Brion Tomb by Carlo Scarpa, a Photo Essay by Gerald Zugmann.
  
  
• Bad writing alert: The Bulwer-Lytton Memorial Award for Bad Writing has been awarded for 2007 to Jim Gleeson of Madison, Wisconsin for an exemplary performance from an incipient novel that begins like so: "Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee."
  Marvellous stuff, no? Visit the Bulwer-Lytton Memorial Award site to enjoy the entire selection of award winners.
  
  
• And finally, Craig announces the birth of an important minority group: Wellington libertarian homebrewers. See: The Birth of FLAWHB - Beer Croggles.
  
  
• And Helengrad's libertarian homebrewers get right on to answering that important and age-old question: just how the heck do you produce the perfect freedom-loving homebrew?
  See: Homebrew in Pictures - Pacific Empire.

That's me all done. Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Beer O’Clock – Fisking Rosemary McLeod

Beer O'Clock comes from Neil this week:

Late last year, columnist Rosemary McLeod wrote an article called “Girls just can’t hold their beer.” You can read it here. It was nonsense.
Below was my response entitled “A stout defense of beer.”
Rosemary McLeod’s opinion piece “Girls just can’t hold their beer” (23 November) is based entirely on a series of stereotypes, generalizations and false conclusions which Nicky Hager and Robert Fisk would be envious of.
Ignoring her simply false claims that women don’t drink beer (they do) and that fruity ready-mixed drinks are “brimming with health giving vitamins” (it’s mainly sugar and food coloring), Ms McLeod makes a series of claims about beer which simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.
According to her, only beer makes men feel that they can sing in public. I’d advise her to check out any of this country’s fine karaoke bars and observe two obvious phenomena: a) women sing in public and b) people drink wine, spirits and cocktails before singing too. A few really brave souls even sing without drinking any alcohol at all.
Apparently Ms McLeod believes that it is only beer which makes men “ill able” to realize their “wild erotic hopes”. She seems to think the performance impairing effects of alcohol are only present in beer and not in any other form of drink.
I am sure many people were amazed to learn from her column that every single broken bottle in the history of New Zealand was a beer bottle. All those bottles on beaches, gutters, playgrounds and in long grass– if Ms McLeod is to be believed – without exception started life as beer bottles.
She even goes so far as to say every shard of glass she has ever driven over came from a beer bottle. I suspect the Top Gear crew will be on the phone shortly wanting to know what kind of car she drives.
Car nuts will want to hear about a vehicle which has such amazing suspension that the driver can identify by feel alone that the broken glass she drove over came from a beer bottle and not from a wine bottle, a vodka bottle, a coke bottle or a broken mirror.
Jeremy Clarkson could do a colorful little piece on the glass shard identification characteristics of various cars. Top Gear has done whole shows based on sillier concepts.
Ms McLeod needs to recognize that no one type of alcohol has a monopoly on anti-social behavior.
She surely can not argue that it’s only beer which causes people misbehave at office parties. I suppose bottle after bottle of cheap champagne only causes a furtive outbreak of Hegelian philosophy in the store room.
I guess all the first-hand accounts of quite intoxicated people at the Martinborough Wine Festival must have been made up because no beer was served there.
I suspect Ms McLeod sees only what she wants to see. She considers beer to be a second class beverage and feels comfortable attributing all the social ills she observes to it.
To her way of thinking, a $5 bottle of wine is inherently more sophisticated than a $10 bottle of beer. I would remind her that people are not called “winos” because they drink a lot of beer.
Her perspective on beer seems to have shaped by her drinking habits as a student back when she chose beer because it was cheap and less likely to lead men to believe she wanted to go home with them.
Imagine her reaction if I claimed “I drank Marque-Vue as a student so I know that I don’t like champagne…” She would laugh at such absurdity – as we should at her similar argument.
Beers can be bland or poorly made – so can cheap wine and rotgut whiskey.
Beer can be drunk to excess and contribute to anti-social behavior – so can champagne and vodka.
Good beer drunk for the right reasons can be a tasty and socialable experience – just as it can for wine and spirits.
As a result of her faulty argument Ms McLeod reached the somewhat patronizing conclusion that “beer will never be the thinking woman's drink, or the drink of the strategic thinker.”
I’d urge her and her readers to think again – this time based on the facts.
Neil Miller
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Links Article: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3875240a1861,00.html
SOBA: www.soba.org.nz
Realbeer: www.realbeer.co.nz/blog

Prius: Look at me!

Jeremy Clarkson puts the boot into the Toyota Prius, the hippy 'hybrid car' that equates 'good for the environment' with the words slow, fat and ugly, and in the process skewers the motive for so much environmentalist hand-waving.

Saving polar bears, of course, is not the point of a hybrid car. The point is not to save the planet but to be seen trying. I saw a Prius in California the other day with the registration plate “Hug Life” and that’s what the car does. It says to other road users, “Hey. I’ve spent a lot of money on this flimsy p.o.s. and I’m chewing a lot of fuel too. But I’m making a green statement.”

Think of it, then, as a big metal beard, a pair of open-toed sandals with wheels, David Cameron with windscreen wipers.

Anybody want to 'fess up to owning a Prius? Perhaps you've just bought it to use as a backup generator?

LINK: Jeremy Clarkson column - Times Online [hat tip Marcus Bachler]
Prius as backup generator - Ryan.Freebern.Org

RELATED: Environment, Humour

Auckland arseholes try to kill the car

A meddlesome arsehole from the Auckland Regional Council was bleating today that Aucklanders own too many cars ("1.66 cars per household!" says the arsehole from the ARC, "that's one for every person over fifteen!!" compared to "only 1.4 per household for Los Angeles!" [breathless exclamation points mine!!!]), with the clear implication that they intend to do something about that state of affairs by force. True. They do.

Recognising (or perhaps failing to recognise) that nearly every person over fifteen in Greater Auckland has a car since it's the only practical way to get around, live and do business in Greater Auckland, they intend to impose a scheme which will make car use in Auckland unfeasably expensive, and by which they themselves hope to collect scads of cash. Now you know why I've called them arseholes.

(What's not true however is that figure they quote for LA -- the actual figure for Greater LA and not just the benighted downtown is 1.9 cars per household, as the ARC surely know and as Owen McShane pointed out soon after this morning's ARC grandstanding. Fancy a bureaucrat lying to make a point.)

As to the scheme, the ARC and their fellow-arseholes at the Auckland City Council have both been considering the imposition of road-pricing around Auckland in a bid to get people out of their cars and on to, well, not on to public transport since there's barely any in Auckland, but just to impose it because they can, and because they think it will be a particularly lucrative form of theft.

Agreeing to support the measure Auckland Mayor Dickwhack Hubbard said "road-pricing stood to provide $200 million to $400 million of essential public transport improvements." Jolly good, but not nearly jolly enough for Auckland's creaking public transport 'network' (what's the opposite of a network? -- that's the only word for Auckland's pulic transport), as even former Labour MP Richard Northey can see:

"If you talk to anybody in the street, they will say: How on Earth can you seriously consider road-charging when there is no serious alternative for me to get into the central city for my work or my study except in my car?" the former Labour MP said.

Mr Northey said administrative and technical costs would drain away a huge proportion of revenues raised, and although there might come a time when such schemes became feasible, pursuing any of them now would risk losing public credibility for the future.

All true. However, said Dickwhack raising his hand to vote for road-pricing, "The council would be seen as 'Luddites' if it supported Mr Northey's amendments." It would also kiss goodbye to nearly half-a-million in potential revenue, not something a tax-and-spend politician could easily kiss goodbye to you must admit, even if the imposition of the new regime were in fact to strangle Auckland and make that revenue stream an illusory one. Meddling arseholes.

PS: as an antidote to this creeping, all-enveloping, all-statist, anti-car wowserism, try this from Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson: "If you love cars you are up against a global conspiracy to destroy your spirit. You must rebel." Great stuff -- until the last line. [Hat tip Marcus at SOLO]

LINKS: Auckland road tolls clear first hurdle - NZ Herald
Here's to health and safety - Jeremy Clarkson, Times Online

TAGS: Auckland, Urban_Design, Politics_NZ