Fisking the Treaty Principles debate

Cartoon by Nick Kim

Remember "fisking"?

It's what you feel you have to do sometimes -- not so much to refute idiocies, as to reveal the bad thinking that causes them. Especially if that bad thinking is shared so widely.

Here below is some bad thinking that's shared widely, so I thought I'd do some fisking. Here's the context:

Last week Rawiri Waititi leaked a Ministry of Justice report said to prefigure the Coalition Government's proposed Treaty Principles Bill, which he, the report's author, and TV1 News all say "are at odds with what the Treaty of Waitangi" actually says."

Here's what the relevant bit of the leaked Treaty Principles Bill says:

And here then is a "lecturer in Te Tiriti o Waitangi" who agrees the principles in the leaked Bill have got it all wrong:

So let's follow his arguments and see if he's right.

But first, some history: why does so much law reference "Treaty Principles" rather than the Treaty/Te Tiriti? Simple answer: because from the time of the Fourth Labour Government, governments have been adding at the head of most important legislation words like "must have regard to the principles the Treaty of Waitangi." And because no government then or since have been buying a fight, and also because then Attorney-General Geoffrey Palmer thought that law needed to be vague so that it could be flexible, no bastard ever bothered to define in law what those principles are. So the courts tried to do the job instead, making a complete fustercluck of it, adding nonsense like "partnership," and "participation." (Long story here, if you're interested.) And so, ever since then, embedded at the head of most of the country's important legislation, are weasel words that remain essentially undefined. (Here it is for instance embedded as part of the Purposes and Principles of the RMA.)

Now, as any good lawyer should understand, embedding undefined weasel words into the head of legislation goes against the principle of good objective law. To remind you, good objective law is clear, precise, predictable, contextual, and rights-based. This is none of the above.

So the Coalition Government's proposed Treaty Bill -- alright, let's be honest, David Seymour's bill -- seeks to change all that, change it at least by adding precision to principles that, at the moment, have none. NOTE: the Bill does not seek to change The Treaty/Te Tiriti; it aims instead to change these undefined principles written into so much of New Zealand's law.

That's what Section 8, above, is referring to. It says that the aim of this Treaty Principles Bill is to give to existing legislation both certainty and clarity, so that the written law means what it is intended to mean, not what it could be taken to mean.

Got that? Alright then.

So let's see what our Tiriti lecturer has to say about this, and answer his claims one by one. (His claims in purple; my responses in italics.)

He says that the leaked document "confirms that the government's intention here is not to define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi but to erase them."

If you've followed what I said above, you'll already see that's not the case. As long as those "principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi" remain embedded in so much law, they need to be properly and objectively defined. Which is Seymour's aim.

He says "the intention is to replace the existing principles with three new ones, which are supposedly based on the three articles of the Treaty."

See. Even he doesn't think they're going to be "erased." That was just him jacking up his argument for effect.

"The problem," he says, "is that the 'new' principles don't remotely resemble what Te Tiriti (or even the Treaty) actually says."

Two claims there: that neither English Treaty nor Māori Tiriti "remotely resemble" what the principles in the proposed Bill say. Do you get the sense already he's jacking up the argument again ... ?

See, the Treaty/Te Tiriti has three Articles. They've very short -- which doesn't make them clear -- and they're in two different languages -- but there is at least general agreement on the subject of each clause.

Subject of the First Article is governance, or sovereignty. Subject of the Second is land and resources. Subject of the Third is rights. (As with all good law, the earlier Articles take precedence.)

So let's see what his argument is for the Bill's principles not "remotely" resembling the Treaty's/Tiriti's ...

First off, he says, "the paper uses the term kāwanatanga to say that the govt have the right to govern all New Zealanders. This is a complete fabrication - as scholars like Margaret Mutu have repeatedly said the term kāwanatanga in Te Tiriti gave the Crown a limited power to govern its own people."

He agrees at least that kāwanatanga means governance. And so does Margaret Mutu. Mutu says however, "That kāwanatanga was for Pākehā," She says, "It was never intended for us." And she does say it repeatedly. But saying it does not argue for it.

The Treaty (English text) say that chiefs "give absolutely ... the complete government over their land." Tiriti says "tuku rawa atu" (literally: relinquish; very; away) "ake tonu atu" (from below upwards; permanent; away) "kāwanatanga katoa o o ratou wenua" (governorship; completely, without exception; they/them; land).

That's fairly clear. The only thing undefined there really is that word "kāwanatanga," a missionary neologism (governorship) which Māori would have understood from the power of Roman governors displayed in 'Te Kawenata Hou' ('The New Testament') and from having visited New South Wales and seeing the power there that governor exercised. That this was well understood is evidenced from the discussions at the Treaty signing, where rangatira showed they understood that agreement would mean the Kāwana having police power over them, for example -- "If thou stayest as Governor, then," said Te Kemara, then, "perhaps, [I] will be judged and condemned. Yes, indeed, and more than that--even hung by the neck." This would be puzzling if signatories understood things the way Mutu says they did. 

Because kāwanatanga exercised only over Pākeha would not give the kāwana this power. So Margaret Mutu and others will need to explain how governorship that clearly gives coercive power over everyone, including rangatira if necessary -- which is what signatories understood kāwanatanga to mean -- means instead that it gives limited power and only over Pākeha. She doesn't, and can't.

 Next, our Tiriti lecturer says, "The paper then uses 'tino rangatiratanga' to say that all NZers can exercise chieftainship of their land and property. This is just incoherent. That's not what the term means in tikanga or in state law. Tino rangatiratanga is a power of collective self-determination for Māori."

Two claims there: First, that "tino rangatiratanga" is only for Māori. And on that, in 1840, he's exactly right. (Should it stay that way? Read on.)

Second, that both "tikanga" and "state law" say that "tino rangatiratanga" means "collective self-determination." Well, not quite. "State law" and practice does sometimes suggest it as "a framework from which Māori have continued to challenge governments for recognition of our individual and collective self-determination," so it's certainly an aspirational meaning. And that's sometimes how the courts have decided to interpret this. But that doesn't mean that it did say that at the time, or that it has to say it now. (State law is nothing if not mutable.)

Translating it however even back in 1989, Hugh Kawharu rendered it simply as "unqualified chieftainship." Far from being incoherent, the Bill retains that idea.

But in what way should that chieftainship be directed? For a start, Article Two is about land and resources. (It comes in a natural order from Article One, explaining what sovereignty is for; in this case, to protect land and resources). This is most clear in Article Two (Part Two), which is about how land and resources will be sold, if owners want to. (This part was most important to the colonising government.) And Article Two (Part One) says that government will protect that land and those resources if they don't desire to sell.

Importantly, it also promises this not just to chiefs, but also to "families and individuals [original English text]/"the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand" [Kawharu translation]. This was pretty neat, at the time. (And, yes, at the time "all the people of New Zealand" only referenced tangata māori. And that's because that's who was being asked to sign.)

So that sets the context for what "chieftainship" means in Article Two. Because it can mean many things, based on the agency and power chiefs then had: power, ownership, independence, autonomy, liberty even. But in this Article, Article Two, the context is clearly land and resources. So in this context "unqualified chieftainship" means, as per the English text, that possession of lands and resources would continue "full exclusive and undisturbed," with all the independence and autonomy therefrom, just as long as owners (chiefs, families, individual NZers) didn't want to sell them to the government.

And that's what the Bill attempts to specify as the principle behind this Article Two: that it is about government promising to protect the property rights of all signatories. (And now, by extension, all New Zealanders.) And since no-one now would to enforce a law allowing land to only be sold to the government, it wisely ignores Article Two (Part Two). (As does our lecturer.) And it takes the liberty of extending this protection to all NZers (since, as a principle, it's a good one.)

Mind you, it doesn't specify it as an individual right, which is a pity. But neither does it specify it to be a collective right, since it can't be. Why? Well we're all aware by now (or should be) that both Treaty/Tiriti and contemporary activists confuse and fudge the difference between individual rights (which governments are properly set up to protect) and so-called "collective rights," which only make sense as individual rights voluntarily delegated. (Q: Why do they fudge? A: Because it grants tribal leaders semi-feudal privileges.)

But we do know that the Treaty's framers were unfortunately equally confused. Translator Henry Williams told signatories at Waitangi that Article Two (Part One) "confirms and guarantees to the chiefs and the tribes, and to each individual native, their full rights as chiefs, their rights of possession of their lands, and all their other property of very kind or degree." You can see the confusion right away. The actual drafting is just as confused. But that doesn't make it right.

Williams's explanation however is helpful, because it makes clear that despite the confusion, an individual property right is still being offered. And that's essentially what the leaked Bill is offering to make clear now.

Our Tiriti lecturer continues: "The 'new' article 3 then says all NZers are equal under the law with the same rights and duties. A nice idea (it'd be cool if my Māori whānau had the same life expectancy as my non-Māori whānau but heoi ano), but that's not what Te Tiriti says. Article 3 is a right of equity."

Several confusions here.  

First, this is not at all a "new" Article Three. As above, it's intended to clarify law in places in which "the principles of the Treaty/Tiriti" has been inserted.

Second, ensuring to all individuals "the same rights and duties" is not at all the same as ensuring to them all the same outcomes. Much could and has been written on the difference between equality before the law, and equality of outcome, and this isn't the place to replicate it.

But it is the place to make clear that what Article Three offers in the English text is equality before the law ("all the rights and privileges of British subjects"), in the Williams explanation it is also equality before the law ("all the rights and privileges of British subjects") and in the Kawharu translation it is still and remains equality before the law ("the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England").

It's true that Kawharu argues that the discussion at the Treaty signing about Hobson being a "father" to signatories suggests a focus on outcomes, or on "equity." But I argue that the repeated use of the “father” figure there is used less in the sense of someone to care over their every need, but more in the sense of either stern judge and a peacemaker, echoing the words of Tamati Waka Nene (harking back perhaps to the need for a mediator after recent wars) and also in the sense of being a teacher or wise adult from the outer world to allow them to learn and grow. Pumuka, for example, chief of the Roroa Tribe, has this sense when he says: "I wish to have two fathers - thou and Busby, and the missionaries." From the latter two he and his colleagues have already learned “Christianity and the Law,” he says (a major theme later at the Kohimarama conference) and they've seen and embraced the cultural change therefrom.

The astute reader will also notice there is a difference between "duties" (per Kawharu) and "privileges" (per Williams and the English text), and it's the former that the Bill plumps for. Which is a shame, since "duties" suggests that government can make us behave in ways of its own choosing. It's a particular shame the word used wasn't "responsibilities," which would make clear who's responsible for outcomes over one's own life. In the formulation of one Ian Fraser several years ago,

"individuals are the rightful owners of their own lives and therefore have inherent rights and responsibilities; and ... the proper purpose of government is to protect such rights and not to assume such responsibilities."

That would make things plainer, perhaps. But that's not what Te Tiriti says. More's the pity.

Our Tiriti lecturer continues: "As this [TV One] article says, the govt's own officials have said the Bill is in breach of both the spirit and the text of the Treaty. That's a fairly direct statement but it's completely warranted. In my opinion this is the most direct attack on Māori by the govt in a generation." 

Government officials say all sorts of things. And these government officials are leaking, so clearly they don't agree with it. But, frankly, we're all entitled to form our own personal view of whether or not the Bill is in breach of either or both the spirit and text or, if indeed, it affirms them. After all, we all have agency, right?

Is it an attack on Māori? I can see that some individuals in Māoridom would see it that way -- especially those who have been granted legal privileges under the court's present principles. (To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, those granted extra-legal privileges are apt to howl when they're taken away.)

But if it is an attack, I would characterise it instead as an attack on bad law-making, and an attempt to correct it before extra-legal privileges become cemented in -- if they haven't already.

Continuing... "The great shame is that rangatiratanga can be good for everyone. The exercise of rangatiranga in the lockdowns kept people safe. Kaupapa Māori orgs led the vaccination effort. Our rivers and lakes are always healthier when Māori share decisions. There are so many examples."

I agree, rangatiratanga can be good for everyone, if and only if the meaning of  rangatiratanga can be agreed upon. Rangatiranga as liberty is very agreeable, and good for all. Rangatiranga as rights of ownership is also good for all. Folk exercising agency individually and voluntarily did help reduce the spread of COVID. Organisations everywhere, from iwi agencies to pharmacies, vaccinated thousands -- and were paid to do so -- and good on them. Our rivers and lakes are healthier when property rights are protected -- as this proposed clarification of the principles of Article Two might help to do. And more affordable homes can be built when rights to one's own land are recognised in law ... As he says, there are so many examples.

He concludes by saying "Te Tiriti" can be good for us all. 

That is possible. But it might first take some clarification.

Here's the Swell Maps:

NB: I've taken both the English text of The Treaty and Williams's explanation of Te Tiriti from Ned Fletcher's book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi (reviewed here). Hugh Kawharu's semi-official translation of Te Tiriti appears at the Waitangi Tribunal site.

"Greta Thunberg's use of the words 'don't act' is very misleading. What she is actually urging is not action, but government action intended to stop private action." Bonus #QotD

"[Greta Thunberg's] use of the words 'don't act' is very misleading. What [s]he is urging when [s]he speaks of 'action' is a mass of laws and decrees — i.e., government action. This government action will forcibly prevent hundreds of millions, indeed, billions of individual human beings from engaging in their, personal and business private action — that is, from acting in ways that they judge to serve their own self-interests. Thus, what [s]he is actually urging is not action, but government action intended to stop private action."

~ George Reisman, paraphrased from his 2006 post on 'Britain's Stern Review on Global Warming'
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UPDATE 1: School climate strikers should answer these two questions:

Any headteacher who values his or her pupils’ education will not turn a blind eye to today’s absences, still less join the kids for a march, as some are reported to be doing.
They will keep them behind after school and set them two essays to research and write. The first should answer the question: “Does scientific evidence support the notion that ‘the Earth is dying’?” As for resources to answer that question, I point them towards the latest IPCC report as well as the data sources which feed into it. That would include Nasa data on sea ice in the Arctic, which shows a sharp retreat in recent decades, as well as satellite data from the same organisation on wildfires – which shows a fall in the acreages burned in recent decades. They might also like to look at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organisation’s report on hurricanes which last month concluded: “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human activity–and particularly greenhouse warming–has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity”.
    Essay number two should be on the question: “What would it mean for the global economy if governments really did eliminate all carbon emissions by 2025?” Given that this is the central demand of many of the climate strikers, this is a rather pertinent question...

UPDATE 2: A helpful reality check appeared at Bjorn Lomborg's Facebook page, using data from the International Disasters Database:

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Rising housing prices: It's frightening, and there are two leading causes ...

“The tidal wave of cheap money from … central banks has to go somewhere, so now it is flooding into housing and making serfs out of the middle class.”
~ Tweeter 'Rudolph E. Havenstein,' quoting Ken Sherman, in reference to WSJ’s article: 'Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street'

Houses are generally paid for by borrowing. Each time a borrower borrows, a bank creates a new debt. This is now new money comes into existence, borrowed into existence to pay for either consumer borrowing or business borrowing. Debt organised into currency. It's what caused nearly all of history's boom-bust cycles.

Currently, around two-thirds of all the money borrowed into existence in New Zealand was created to buy (or borrow against) houses. [Charts here.] Think about that for a moment: nearly $250 billion of New Zealand's rapidly-rising $320 billion M3 money supply was created to buy (or borrow against) New Zealand's houses.

This is the demand side of the housing problem, about which too few folk have noticed -- demand (in the strict economic sense) being desire backed with money. In this case, borrowed money, and lots of it. This is where the purchasing power emerges to buy houses, and it's been growing each year of the last five by between five and ten percent!

This, ladies and gentlemen and other sane persons, is what monetary inflation looks like. And it's this monetary expansion that (eventually) causes all forms of price inflation, including asset price inflation.

So is it any wonder that the University of Auckland's Jeremy Gabe and Mike Rehm, and James Young, the Research Director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research, argue

that it's not a lack of supply, zoning, or immigration that's the big problem [in rising house prices], rather easy credit. [Listen here to RNZ's interview with the authors.]

Young's research for example [summarised here on page 69] suggests

It was found that [Chinese immigration] had a significant negative impact on the neighbourhoods most favoured by Chinese immigrants, but only for a short period of time. However, the effect was not uniform with more persistent impacts occurring within higher priced market segments. The effects on house prices diminished greatly within 18 months...
....These findings suggest that the use of immigration policy to constrain house prices are likely to produce limited specific results and only for a short period of time.

That is an academic's way of saying that banging on about Chinese immigrants is banging a noisy drum, but the wrong drum. Because immigration is not the long-term problem here. [CONCLUSION 1]

Meanwhile, Rehm and Gabe's research (summarised on page 23 here, comparing rising borrowing with rising prices across 23 US housing markets) finds that those gobs of borrowed money created by the banks was found

to "Granger cause" house prices in markets that experienced comparatively high house price growth during the boom years leading up to the global financial crisis ...
.... [This credit-fuelled] purchasing power maintains a strong, statistically significant positive correlation with house prices after controlling for interest rates in every market analysed.

They do not however conclude with a clarion call, as I would, for a complete review of the system of organising debt into currency. But they do argue for measures

to foster financial stability and dampen housing boom-bust cycles made worse by unbridled credit expansion and contraction.

Which, for any academic, are stern words wrapped around a certain and predictable conclusion: that unbridled credit expansion fuels both boom-bust cycles and explosive house-price growth. [CONCLUSION 2]

Their abstracts, from which I've quoted, don't mention having made any study the "lack of housing supply [or] zoning." (That quoted above was Radio NZ's summary of their research. But it does seems clear that if this rising monetary tide is lifting all boats, then they will be lifted less in those more liberal jurisdictions in which boat-lifting is made easier rather than harder.

And if it's not clear enough, then this graph below from the latest frightening report from Demographia, who do measure that relationship, should make it clear enough (and if Auckland joining Hong Kong, Vancouver & Sydney to be the four most unaffordable cities out of more than 400 measured doesn't frighten you, then it should), i.e., that when purchasing power fuelled by inflated monetary demand meets more restricted supply then it has nowhere to go but up -- up, up, up into the stratosphere of highly unaffordable prices. But when it meets a place in which supply is able instead to expand to meet this artificially-inflated demand, then it can and does expand -- or as economist Eric Crampton puts it, "Easy credit in a city where land use regulations aren't nuts turns into more houses rather than house price appreciation" [CONCLUSION 3]-- and without creating the speculative frenzy that, in places like Auckland, begin to feed upon themselves until they (or the economies around them) just burst.

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MORE READING:

• The Housing Bubble and the Credit Crunch - George Reisman, GEORGE REISMAN'S BLOG
  
• The Organisation of Debt Into Currency: On the Monetary Thought of Charles Holt Carroll - Robert Blumen, MISES DAILY
• REPRISE: How the Stock Market, [Housing Market] and Economy Really Work - Kel Kelly, NOT PC
• Prices Are Stable? - NOT PC
• Land-Use Regulations Matter - Michael Reddell, CROAKING CASSANDRA

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NZ Housing Crisis: Local Government Still Confused

Guest post by Hugh Pavletich

Early 2007, soon after the release of Demographia’s housing affordability survey showing NZ’s housing beccoming increasingly unaffordable, Local Government New Zealand® and the New Zealand Planning Institute® expressed concern about housing affordability, stating:

The New Zealand Planning Institute® strongly supports Demographia’s call for planners, local councils and developers to collaborate more proactively and effectively on the provision of an adequate supply of affordable new residential housing.

Now, some seven-and-a-half years later, 10^th October 2014, Local Government New Zealand®  issues a media release stating … stating …

Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) says local government, central government and the business sector need to work together with communities to address housing affordability across New Zealand.

The emphasis is mine. The sappy confusion is theirs.

My own assessment: Local Government New Zealand® is still lost and confused.

EcoRamble: The ‘New IPCC Report’ Edition

“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor
to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither
may a government determine the aesthetic values of artistic creations, nor
limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on
the validity of economic, historic, religious or philosophical doctrines. Instead
it has a duty to its citizens to maintain their freedom, to let those citizens
contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
- Richard Feynman, 1965 Nobel Prize Winner, Physics

As you may have heard, the UN’s alarmist IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has issued a new report, part two of a series of reports forming AR5 (Assessment Report 5). The first of which, what’s called Working Group One, “acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises” which the IPCC’s models struggled to  explain, and now this one has emerged, from Working Group Two, whose aim is to talk up and politicise the problems caused by the temperature rises supposed to have been predicted by Working Group One.
    Here’s a ramble around the reaction to Part Two, preceded by an update on Part One…

“Publication of the IPCC Assessment Report 4 in 2007 was received with international acclaim....Six and a half years later and a week before the release of the IPCC 5thAssessment Report (AR5), substantial criticisms are being made of leaked versions of the Report as well as of the IPCC process itself... What happened?
    “The IPCC was seriously tarnished by the unauthorised release of emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009, known as Climategate. These emails revealed the ‘sausage making’ involved in the IPCC’s consensus building process, including denial of data access to individuals who wanted to audit their data processing and scientific results, interference in the peer review process to minimize the influence of skeptical criticisms, and manipulation of the media.
    “Climategate was quickly followed by the identification of an egregious error involving the melting of Himalayan glaciers. These revelations were made much worse by the actual response of the IPCC to these issues. Then came the concerns about the behaviour of the IPCC’s Director, Rachendra Pachauri, and investigations of the infiltration of green advocacy groups into the IPCC. All of this was occurring against a background of explicit advocacy and activism by IPCC leaders related to CO2 mitigation policies.
    “The IPCC does not seem to understand the cumulative impact of these events on the loss of trust in climate scientists and the IPCC process itself... Based upon early drafts of the AR5, the IPCC seemed prepared to dismiss the pause in warming as irrelevant ‘noise’ associated with natural variability. Under pressure, the IPCC now acknowledges the pause and admits that climate models failed to predict it...
    “If the IPCC attributes to the pause to natural internal variability, then this begs the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural internal variability. Not to mention raising questions about the confidence that we should place in the IPCC’s projections of future climate change.”
The IPCC's Inconvenient Truth – scientist Judith Curry, CLIMATE ETC.

“Everything you need to know about the dilemma the IPCC faces is summed up in one remarkable graph” from Part One. The coloured strips show the predictions of the IPCC’s models in each report (First Assessment Report, FAR, etc.), the bars show the temperature range across the period, ie., what actually happened according to the warmists; own figures. (The big grey patch is there to make a correlation between the two look persuasive):

MORE REACTIONS TO PART ONE:

Consensus?
Contrary to reports, global warming studies don’t show 97% of scientists fear global warming – THE HOCKEY SCHTICK

Oops. Again.
Global warming is just HALF what we said: World's top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong – SUNDAY MAIL

Get the report with integrity, before the UN issues the one that won’t. “The number one antidote to the corrupt alarmist cabal is the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change.”
A realistic view of the climate – POWER LINE

The whole pseudo-scientific scare story amounts to a claim that parts of the world will get submerged in water unless governments force carbon reduction upon us.  “But a look at natural ocean variation shows that official sea level measurements are nonsense.”
Sea level rise: Climate change and an ocean of natural variability – Steve Goreham, WASHINGTON TIMES

They are unproven computerised hypotheses with zero predictive power.
New paper finds current climate models are 'unable to reproduce present or future climate accurately' – THE HOCKEY SCHTICK

So … what’s the mainstream’s reasons for the pause in global temperature rise?
Article in Nature offers 3 natural explanations for the halt in global warming – THE HOCKEY SCHTICK

So...what is the cost of reducing global temperatures by a measly one-fourth of one degree?
Those Stubborn Facts: The Gargantuan Cost of Reducing Global Temperature By Measly 0.25°C - C3

“Any body of scientists that adopts pressure group tactics is endangering its
status as the guardian of principles of scientific philosophy that are worth keeping.”
- New Zealander Charles Fleming (1916–1987), distinguished ornithologist and avian palaeontologist

REACTIONS TO PART TWO:

The new report marks a “formal moving on of the debate from the past, futile focus upon ‘mitigation’ to a new debate about resilience and adaptation.”
If People Are Like Polar Bears, We’ll Be Fine – Patrick Michaels & Chip Knappenberger, CATO

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls itself a scientific body… But a document prepared for the current IPCC meeting in Japan utterly obliterates those claims.”
The IPCC: Providing ‘Hope for Our Earth’ – NO FRACKING CONSENSUS

“The economic costs of 'global warming' have been grossly overestimated, a leaked report - shortly to be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - has admitted.
    “Previous reports - notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review - have put the costs to the global economy caused by 'climate change' at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.
    “But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.”
Global Warming Will Not Cost the Earth, Leaked IPCC Report Admits – James Delingpole, BREITBART LONDON

If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it's around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month

The story of scientist Richard Tol, who asked his name to be removed from the report’s draft because of rampant alarmism that has been inserted:
“[Tol] was involved in drafting the summary but has now asked for his name to be removed from the document.
    "The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together," he told BBC News.
    "This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity."
Dissent among scientists over key climate impact report – BBC NEWS

“Even while it exaggerates the amount of warming, the IPCC is becoming more cautious about its effects.”
Climate Forecast: Muting the Alarm – Matt Ridley, WALL STREET JOURNAL

“The human impact on global climate is small, and any warming that may occur as a result of human carbon
dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions is likely to have little effect on global temperatures, the
cryosphere (ice-covered areas), hydrosphere (oceans, lakes, and rivers), or weather.”
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts: Summary for Policymakers [20-page PDF] – NONGOVERNMENTAL INTERNATIONAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE

“In 2007, the IPCC predicted that rising global temperatures would kill off many species. But in its new report, part of which will be presented next Monday, the UN climate change body backtracks. There is a shortage of evidence, a draft version claims.”
IPCC admission from new report: ‘no evidence climate change has led to even a single species becoming extinct’  - Anthony Watts, WATTS UP WITH THAT

“Natural disasters are costing more and more money… it’s tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They’re not. All the apocalyptic “climate porn” in your Facebook feed is solely a function of perception. In reality, the numbers reflect more damage from catastrophes because the world is getting wealthier. We’re seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose — when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged. And no matter what President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron say, recent costly disasters are not part of a trend driven by climate change. The data available so far strongly shows they’re just evidence of human vulnerability in the face of periodic extremes.”
Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change –Roger Pielke, Jr., FIVE THIRTY EIGHT SCIENCE

“A paper published today in Biogeosciences finds that prior claims about the effects of ocean "acidification" on calcifying plankton are highly exaggerated…”
New paper finds no effect of "acidification" on plankton from CO2 levels 8 times higher than today – HOCKEY SCHTICK

A lengthy post explaining some of the weaknesses in the models and some of the self-serving pronouncements of the IPCC.
A Different Perspective – Tim Ball, TIM BALL.COM

“They will adapt,” [resigning IPCC author]
Mr. Tol said, “Farmers are not stupid.”
- “U.N. climate author withdraws because
the report has become ‘too alarmist’,”
Washington Times

[Hat tip On Liberty Street, Bishop Hill, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Watts Up With That]

Kim DotCon takes another scalp

It seems Kim DotCon is political kryptonite to anyone he touches: starting court cases, ending careers, embarrassing them in front of their friends.  He may not be accident prone himself, but he is certainly prone to causing them to his erstwhile friends.

Alistair Thompson, until yesterday the lynchpin of Scoop, was the latest to fall under his sway and have the inevitable happen  -- resigning yesterday from the baby he began because Cameron Slater was able to reveal that, far from being an independent press gallery journalist reporting for an independent site, he had already assumed the role of Kim DotCon’s Internet Party Secretary, and had registered the Party’s website domain in his own name.

Even his erstwhile brother-in-arms Gordon Campbell finds it indefensible that an independent journalist would stain himself this way.

The manner of his parting makes it particularly sad, for me personally as well.

This is for two reasons.

First, because back in the bright and breezy days of early online activity, back when Scoop has just launched and I was giving assistance to a fellow in a David and Goliath court battle with the Auckland Council for having done him over, Alistair Thompson at Scoop was the only fellow willing to risk his neck publishing my twice-daily accounts of the court battle we dubbed Sludgegate. Every other news outlet from NBR to TVNZ  had been happy to talk up the case before it went to the High Court, but the instant it got there they all went silent.

Enter Citizen journalism, with your own correspondent sitting (alone) in the High Court’s press box for two weeks writing these twice-daily reports that Scoop published and shared around. They’re still there now, as close to the bone now as they were then.

“I hope you’re not going to get us all sued,” Alistair said to me one day while cutting the code to upload the latest report. Fortunately, we didn’t.

What I did get into trouble for however was for the same thing Alistair did.  When the ‘David’ I was supporting was without funds and needed a website for supporters to get behind, without thinking I registered and paid for it. And promptly forget about it.

But sitting in the High Court pressbox a few days later, I discovered both High Court judge and council lawyer mistook me for someone neutral. So when the “barrister representing council vermin” raised the fact my name appeared to have registered the website on which a link to a particular document had appeared, along with some distinctly unflattering prose about said vermin, I was given a stern dressing down by the High Court judge – who told me his “ideal model” of a court reporter to which I should aspire was Owen Poland.

(In googling his name, I’ve only just now discovered who he is. He runs “corporate training.”)So you can see, I do have some sympathy for Alistair.  It’s easy to do what he did so unthinkingly.

All that said, what I don’t share is his sympathy for Kim DotCon – a convicted fraudster, internet pirate and copyright thief.

But if DotCon’s new party were to stand solely on the platform of opposing the Surveillance State, as we’re hearing suggestions this morning, then for that that I would have a great deal of sympathy indeed.

I would even wish them well.

Disclosure: I have neither been approached to shill for the Internet Party or Kim Dotcon, nor have I been offered bagfuls of easy money to offer advice, expertise or white papers full of cliches. But if I do, you’ll be the first to know.

Blogger Cameron Slater harpooned [updated]

As Oscar Wilde once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Blogger Cameron Slater likes being talked about.  No question. So, for him, yesterday was a victory—tempered only by a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket—which is how he characterised his punishment at his Whale Oil blog.

But it was not a victory for free speech.

It was not a victory for free speech because, unlike the rest of the western world, New Zealanders are still considered too immature to be allowed to know the names of sex offenders, frauds, and other assorted criminals before our courts—and Justice Harvey has now confirmed that even hinting in public about the names of those people can see you bailed up in court and given a large fine and a stern talking to.

In New Zealand, very often, justice may not be seen to be done, nor to whom it is done. And that remains the case. The courts themselves have seen to that.

But it was not a victory for free speech because Cameron dropped the ball.

Breaking a bad law on principle and taking your lumps for it is a time-honoured form of civil disobedience. Just ask the suffragettes. Or Rosa Parkes. But you’ve got to carry the ball to the line, making your case in court on principle.

Cameron didn’t do that.  He wriggled.  His lawyers wriggled.  They talked about his depression. About how suppression orders don’t apply to blogs. About how he didn’t choose this as a crusade, instead someone chose to crusade against him.

So the ball got dropped. Instead of the ringing arguments we should have heard about the right of New Zealanders to see what justice is being done in their name, we heard instead (at least, we heard in the media) arguments that binary code is not speech, that Cameron Slater is not the real proprietor of his blog, and about the meaning of the world “publish.”

That was disappointing.

Just as it was to read Justice Harvey bewailing the lack of official “oversight” of the blogosphere in his 70-page judgement.

Unlike newspapers which are subject [sic] the oversight of the Press Council or advertisers who are subject to the Advertising Standards Authority or radio and television which is subject to the Broadcasting Standards Authority, there are no similar regulatory organisations in place in the “blogosphere.”

Harvey says this like it’s a bad thing. I trust Simon “FIGJAM” Power and his colleagues and supporters don’t see it that way too.

I would hate the likes of Jeffrey Palmer, for example—who has never seen a committee, board or tribunal he hasn’t wanted to join—to sit in judgement upon a blogger who has decided that Palmer has a face that needed punching.  But that’s where Harvey’s comments are either intentionally or inadvertently headed.

So this was not a victory for free speech.

We bloggers have been told off.  We may not consider ourselves above the law.  We may, subject now to the constrictions laid down by Harvey J, continue to post what we like and what we think. For the moment.  But a trial balloon has been quietly floated. And to shoot that down we will need more than just harpoons.

UPDATE: See what I mean:

“The judgment [says media lecturer Martin Hirst] probably puts a little more pressure on the government to respond to the Law Commission report on regulation of the Internet…”

A first-day-of-the-month ramble [updated]

Over January I’ve indexed a few stories and websites to talk to you about, but never had the time.  So here they are now.

• “Recent events have shown, rather embarrassingly, that the IPCC is not “the” consensus of scientists, but rather the opinions of a few scientists (in some cases as few as one) in various subject areas whose consensus among themselves is then kludged together by the designers of the IPCC final product who a priori know what they want the ultimate outcome to be . . . ”
  IPCC “Consensus”—Warning: Use at Your Own Risk – MASTER RESOURCE
• The warmist “consensus” is collapsing before our eyes, exposed to the cold light of publicity.
  Ten signs that the warming scare is collapsing  - ANDREW BOLT
• The Demographia organisation produce their 6th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, showing amongst other things that central-planning-ridden Tauranga and Auckland are among world's most pricey places, and the world’s media goes into denial. New Zealand’s provincial media is no exception.
  6th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey [pdf] – DEMOGRAPHIA
  Zoning rules see NZ among least affordable places to buy a home – NBR
• An interesting hypothesis concerning the causes of the explosion in child obesity, adult obesity and metabolic syndrome (diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease).  Could that be caused by central planning too?
  Sugar (and Central Planning): The Bitter Truth – THE RATIONAL CAPITALIST
• “Is it “your” rail network? The Auckland rail tracks and stations are being upgraded at present and, due to disruptions, a special timetable has been issued. On the front of this is written ‘Buses replacing trains while we improve your rail network.’ That’s the socialist lie, here comes the libertarian truth…”
  The myth of public property  - KIWI POLEMICIST
• A precursor of things to come here in New Zealand?
  For Cape Cod Wind Farm, New Hurdle Is Spiritual – NY TIMES
• Michelangelo burned most of his working sketches that would indicate the germination and development of some of his greatest work, but a very few sketches still survive in which you can see the birth of much of his great works of genius. Seattle Museum’s curator talks about a few of the special ones.
  
  
  

 

• “I was at the mall the other day and overheard a mother tell her 2-3 year old: ‘Stop doing that! You're old enough to know better than that!’”  But isn’t that kind of a stupid thing to say to a kid?
  Old Enough to Know Better – RATIONAL JENN
• More on the collapsing warmist “consensus.”  “Despite the claims of the Nobel Prize winning UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, there is no evidence that the warming of the late 20th Century caused an increase in the frequency of natural disasters!” None at all.
  Does Global Warming Cause More Natural Disasters?    - OBJECTIVIST INDIVIDUALIST
• Yet more evidence that the IPCC cooked the books. . . its 2007 claim that global warming could ‘devastate African agriculture’ is just another one busted by real science.
  The IPCC scandal: the African data was sexed up, too – ANDREW BOLT
• And more. 
  Nicholas Stern’s figures were false, too – ANDREW BOLT
• Since I link to Andrew Belt so often on some topics, I need to point out that despite his many virtues he’s still insufferably xenophobic.  He wrings his hands about “boat people” (i.e., human beings escaping tragedy) arriving in Australia in “ever-increasing numbers.” Yet those numbers show . . . what, exactly? That last year there were just 589 arrivals of “boat people” in a country that could fit 100 million.  Bolt needs to buckle up his inner bigot, I’d say.
  Two more in two days – ANDREW BOLT
• January 31st is Mario Lanza’s birthday, and since it’s still January 31st in the US and UK, here’s a birthday tribute: Mario (below) in his greatest role, as The Great Caruso. And Lindsay Perigo re-delivering his own birthday tribute from a few years back.
  Happy Birthday Mario! – LINDSAY PERIGO
  
  
  
  

• Is there any reason, any reason at all, that “that one's religious beliefs, should be respected and not subjected to criticism or satire”?  H.L. Mencken didn’t think so.
  Mencken, Islam, and Political Correctness – Edward Cline, CAPITALISM MAGAZINE
• How to handle all those blog-comments trolls, eh? “Jeffrey Weiss ponders the question of whether the lack of civility evident in the comments section reflects the fact that in the modern age we are becoming psychopaths willing to trade our humanity for a few moments of negative attention. . . Weiss wonders whether or not the comments section isn't an intellectual commons, and thus confronts the same problems that all commons face.”
  Blogology 101: The Important Role of Shaming – COORDINATION PROBLEM (formerly THE AUSTRIAN ECONOMISTS)
• Should Twitter bear this Victor Hugo quote above its portals?
  "To speak with oneself aloud is to carry on a conversation with the god within."
  New Twitter Motto – NEARBY PEN
• While the anti-employment zealots talk up a minimum wage rise in a time of economic penury, Eric Crampton has a few minimum-wage facts for the non-zealots to contemplate.
  Minimum wage - empirics  - OFFSETTING BEHAVIOUR
• UPDATE: And Eric has another minimum –wage reality check today.
  Minimum wage - poorly targeted – OFFSETTING BEHAVIOUR
• A panel of 22 libertarian luminaries from Brian Caplan to Leonard Liggio suggest their best ten pro-liberty books of the decade.  Definitely a strong list, but what have they missed?
  Top Ten Pro-Liberty Books of the Decade  - ATLAS ECONOMIC RESEARCH FOUNDATION
• “Art works best when it celebrates the godlike in us: and this is just what so many contemporary artists fail to do.” Does God really have all the best art?
  The human, above all – THE GUARDIAN
• Landscape painting includes “not only spacious skies, amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesties, but seascapes and cityscapes.” So why have “landscapes have often been rated second-class compared to history and narrative paintings, or indeed any paintings with human figures. How did this attitude develop, and what message or meaning can landscapes offer?” [Hat tip Michael Newberry]
  Landscapes: History and Significance by Dianne Durante – FORGOTTEN DELIGHTS
• National Geographic writer and explorer Dan Buettner shares what the world's longest-lived peoples have in common. Buettner condensed the findings into nine easy-to-remember lifestyle habits.
  Presentation: 9 ways to live better, longer, happier – PRESENTATION ZEN
• Andrew Bernstein’s brilliant argument that the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Inventive Period demonstrate conclusively that conventional morality must be urgently overturned. Read about “the revolutionary identification that has finally, after 2500 years of the history of philosophy, tied values – and by that means, ethics – to facts. Morality is now a science, a field of objective, rational, fact-based analysis; it is no longer a matter of will or whim or desire – whether social or personal.”
  Dr. Andrew Bernstein: 'The Nature of the Good'  - SOLO
• Chris Trotter’s post justifying soaking the rich is is so disgracefully full of holes it cries out for a good fisking,  Who’s up for it?
  Justifying Progressive Taxation – CHRIS TROTTER
• And you thought New Zealand was bad.
  UK Employer told not to post advert for 'reliable' workers because it discriminates against 'unreliable' applicants
• Another reason to despise Avatar. “It isn’t until Jake’s final voice-over that we discover that, what do you know Earth’s dying and this mineral [that the earthmen are ‘raping’ the blue planet for] would have saved it.”  So we’re meant to hate the humans. Hate them just as much as Avatar’s screenwriters hate basic plotting.
  Review: Avatar – CINEMA VERDICT
• Did Republican Scott Brown really say this the day after his landscape-changing election victory in Massachusetts, in which he surfed the wave of anti-Obamacare sentiment? “We're past campaign mode: I think it's important for everyone to get some form of health care. So to offer a basic plan for everybody I think is important. It's just a question of whether we're going to raise taxes, we're going to cut a half at trillion from Medicare, we're going to affect veterans' care. I think we can do it better."  Uh, yes he did.  Just another politician who thinks “campaign mode” means “time to lie.”
• God’s Control Panel must be something to see, don’t you think?

• Eric Crampton likes ACT/National’s three-strike law. “Back in September, I warned against a three-strikes law that eliminated marginal deterrence. It looks like ACT and National have come up with a compromise that sounds pretty sensible.”
  A good strike – OFFSETTING BEHAVIOUR
• Hands up all those who don’t understand individual rights?  Okay, well that’s most of you at the Mises Institute and Kinsella Law, anyway.  Craig Biddle presents a brilliant four-part seminar tracing the foundations of rights, their historical development, the main arguments for and against rights conceptions, and the errors into which even rights advocates fall. (And you can keep track of where you are by the nifty linked sidebar feature on each page). By the end of the four parts, you’ll grasp why this subject is so important, and why it’s so important to get it right.
  • The Source and Nature of Rights (Part I) – CRAIG BIDDLE
  • The Source and Nature of Rights (Part II) – CRAIG BIDDLE
  • The Source and Nature of Rights (Part III) – CRAIG BIDDLE
  • The Source and Nature of Rights (Part IV) – CRAIG BIDDLE

• Ludwig von MIses (right) would neither recognise nor endorse much of of what appears at the Institute that bears his name.  The Online Literature of Liberty however offers you the chance to recognise von Mises’ genius for yourself with their new Online Guide to his Major Writings.
  A great reference for anybody just getting started on studying his work.
  An Introduction to the Major Writings of Ludwig von Mises – ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY
• The murderer of abortionist George Tiller has just been found guilty.  Tibor Machan reflects on the defendant’s ‘argument’ that abortionist’s work, destroying foetuses, justifies their homicide.
  Anti-Abortion Murder or Not – TIBOR MACHAN
• And finally, I enjoyed discovering that Wild Billy Childish, the Billy Bragg of the Buff Medways, thinks scam artist Damien Hirst and his fellows are all plonkers—as do I. Here was a piece by Childish in the UK’s Latest art magazine:

  My contention is that the contemporary art scene is
  cynical, marketed rebellion. far from being
  innovative, vital and avant-garde, it bears direct
  comparison
  with the Victorian salon and treats art in very much
  the same way: as rich man’s sausages.
  

  Encrusting a platinum scull with diamonds to belie the
  artist’s fear of death - and gratify his obsession
  with wealth - lends a certain hollow glamour to a news
  bulletin and prospective sausage buyers, but does
  nothing for the poetic heart.

  To popularize art, as Tate modern endeavours to do, is to
  completely miss the point of art, which is not to
  compete with fashion and pop music but to add depth
  and resonance to the lives of people living in an ever
  flimsy and ephemeral world.

  Popularizing a trip to the gallery by turning the
  gallery into an amusement park is not a victory for art
  but a victory for amusement parks.
  Likewise, popularizing a trip to the gallery by turning
  the gallery into the scene of a car accident is not a
  victory for art but a victory for base and morbid
  curiosity.

  The contemporary artist needs to understand that
  although amusement and morbidity are part of our
  experience of life and art, life and art are not are
  not merely amusement and morbidity:
  Art is a personal and transmuted representation of
  experience, not merely the repetition of the experience
  itself, or the lazy artists sausagey finger pointing at
  it.

  If you like, it dose not nurture the suffering soul to
  present it with a shit in bowl.

  Art that enriches our lives requires a commitment and
  love and the the touch of the fairies. Art needs to
  bring beauty into life but not glamour. To stay awake
  the artist purposefully sits on the wrong end of the
  see-saw.
  Billy Childish. 6.6.07

  ‘Isn’t it a miracle what so much money and so little ability can produce,” says critic Robert Hughes of Hirst’s work, before interviewing one the men who bestows so much moolah on the moron.

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Friday’s Summer Six-Pack: Books, blogs and burghers

Six more delicious desserts from the Archives trolley here at NOT PC.  Seen any of these posts before?

* * * *

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Warmists, lies, and 3000 deaths per day from malaria.

    Stop obsessing about global warming says the Neo-Jacobin, an obsession he says that "threatens to marginalize and overlook more pressing problems for humanity in the here and now – like, for example, the fight against malaria in Africa, and other Third World countries."

    “Environmentalists constantly bang on and on about forcing the most powerful leaders of the Western world to do this, that or the other, in order to ‘save us all from global warming’, but meanwhile in the real world, the body count for malaria in Africa alone is a million per year, and rising. What makes me really angry is that these deaths need not have occurred. In fact, all those death lead right back to earlier environmentalists political obsessions – the banning of pesticides [and in particular of DDT].”

    But, say warmists, global warming is itself exacerbating malaria! Isn't it? Well, says malaria scientist Paul Reiter in yesterday's International Herald Tribune, no it isn't. Not only is the self-claimed warmist consensus a "mirage," but the idea that warming is causing the disease to spread is what Reiter calls an "unsubstantiated claim." That's scientist-speak for "the bastards are lying."
The claim in the Blair Government's Stern Report, for example, "released with much fanfare in late October, predicted increases in temperature will produce up to 80 million new cases of malaria."

    “This claim relies on a single article that described a simplistic mathematical model that blithely ignored the most obvious reality: Most Africans already live in hot places where they get as many as 300 infective bites every year, though just one is enough. The glass is already full.”

    Here’s another “unsubstantiated claim,” one of many made by Al Bore in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, "which claims that Nairobi was established in a healthy place "above the mosquito line" but is now infested with mosquitoes because— naturally--of global warming." Notes Reiser:

    Gore's claim is deceitful on four counts. Nairobi was dangerously infested when it was founded; it was founded for a railway, not for health reasons; it is now fairly clear of malaria; and it has not become warmer.”

    In other words it's a lie, just like all the other warmist's lies. Says Reiter, "We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts."
    Ignoring the facts while ignoring real issues. That's so like a warmist, isn't it.

LINKS: Climate change in Africa? Fight malaria instead - A neo-Jacobin
Malaria is alive and well and killing more than 3000 African children every day - World Health Organisation
Dangers of disinformation - Paul Reiter, International Herald Tribune
Global warmist - Urban Dictionary
RELATED: Global Warming, Science, Health, Environment, Politics

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Monday, November 03, 2008

Extreme tree-huggers

If you're wondering what sort of people get so upset about exotic plantation pine forests being converted to productive dairy farms-- upset enough to do this, and this --  then here you have the answer; it's the sort of people who do this:

Morons.  Reminds me of this Nick Kim cartoon:

UPDATE:  Don’t laugh.  Jeff Perren reminds us that tree huggers grow up to be coal industry destroyers.

* * * *

Monday, March 17, 2008

NZ's 'independent' anti-nuclear stance

    New Zealand has enjoyed few really prominent international moments in the sun -- the most celebrated by the chatterati is that 'glorious moment' in the mid-eighties when the country thumbed its collective nose at one of the world's superpowers: telling our ANZUS treaty partner and former ally the United States we wanted no more of its nuclear umbrella, and to go take a hike.
    New Zealand's  foreign policy turnabout was taken in the very midst of the Cold War -- it was celebrated then as a courageous sign of independence and is celebrated still as an outstanding and iconic example of New Zealand's vigorous and free-thinking independence.
    As we now discover, however, tt was nothing of the sort.  It was neither rational, nor independent.
    The knee-jerk anti-American, anti-science anti-nuclearism still infects the country's thinking today, to everyone's detriment.  And far from being an assertion of New Zealand's independence, an article by Trevor Loudon and Bernard Moran from Australia's National Observer magazine confirms the anti-nuclear position to have been a strategy cooked up in Moscow. 
    The 'peace movement' was the chosen trojan horse -- "We have many clever people in the Soviet Union," a local peace activist attending a course in Moscow on how to destabilise a country was told, "but no one has even been able to come up with a weapon potentially as powerful as the peace movement."  The stalking horses were three Labour MPs who still bestride the local political stage.
    That 'peace activist' quoted above was actually an SIS agent called John Van de Ven who was interviewed in 1990 by Loudon and Moran, upon whom they rely for their account.  Van de Ven was told by his tutors that then Soviet leader (and former KGB chief) Yuri Andropov had "initiated a strategy for taking a social democratic country out of the Western alliance, by utilising the 'correlation of forces' provided by the peace movement and the trade unions. New Zealand was given a high priority by the Soviets, for its strategic propaganda potential -- show the strategy worked here, and you demonstrated you could apply the same pressure to less distant dominoes like Denmark.
    The immediate  result of the strategy (and one still evident today) was the Soviet infiltration of the peace movement and the trade unions, and consequently of the left wing of the then Labour Government as well. As the late Tony Neary of the Electrical Workers Union related to an audience in 1987

    "In the New Zealand trade union movement, those who mutter about Reds under the beds must be joking. The Reds are already in the beds and have been there for some years. By now they are sitting up and getting breakfast brought in."

    The "Reds" were as thoroughly in charge of NZ's anti-nuclear groundswell in the seventies and eighties as they were of the US State Department in the thirties and forties.  The anti-nuclear legislation they brought about here knocked New Zealand permanently out of ANZUS and the western alliance, and it still paralyses both our relationship with the US and our ability to produce clean energy.
    Given its long-lasting and entirely negative results, it's as crucial to understand the mechanics of how it came about as it is to understand that those who learned this methodology are still about. In the Oxford Union debates David Lange famously shot back at a heckler that he could "smell the Uranium on his breath"; it remains unfortunate still that he couldn't smell the borscht on the breath of his foreign policy advisers, or didn't care that he did.
    If you want to understand how the Soviets made the local peace movement and the Labour Party their puppets, then read and digest 'The untold story behind New Zealand's ANZUS breakdown' from the National Observer.

Labels: Energy, History-Modern, History-Twentieth_Century, New Zealand, Politics-World, Socialism

* * * *

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Books for a 21 year old

    A friend asked me to recommend four books to a twenty-one year old boy with a brain but few if any passions; an interest in science and how the world works, but little enthusiasm for really investigating it; and a reading ability that allows him to consume lots of reading matter, but of a type that is mostly of little substance and no challenge.
    I hit on the following list:

• Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead opens up a world in which great passions are played out on a broad stage. More than one person has found that this book has given them a reason to live -- this scene on its own for many readers gives the inspiration it itself describes. Great for readers old and young, especially as an antidote to today's fashionable cynicism and too-cool-to-move languor.
• The more analytical twenty-one year old might prefer to read Rand's Atlas Shrugged first. "Might" because Atlas touches the parts other novels don't even acknowledge, and explains how all those parts fit together to make the world move ... or not. An analytical brain looking for or needing inspiration should eat this up, as they will the adventure story that keeps building and rebuilding on itself. Magnificent fuel for a young fire needing a spark.
• A teacher recommended Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon to me when I was just a teenager, and although I didn't read it until much later it would have fitted the teenaged me like a glove, as it should any youngster with even a passing interest in politics and idealism. This perfectly crafted novel proves, as Nat Hentoff famously described it, "that dishonest means irredeemably corrupt all ends, no matter how noble." And that doesn't just describe the Stalinism of the story, as we older ones soon come to realise.
• If science fiction is already your youngster's bag, then Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love should be their introduction to adult science fiction. The long life of protagonist Lazarus Long and the struggle to give the old Lazarus meaning in that life allow Heinlein to muse rhapsodically on themes of life, death and sex, and what it all means for each of us.

So there you have it. Don't buy that twenty-one year old a book or CD voucher (they'd only waste it). Buy them something to introduce them to the life of an adult, and to show them it's all worth it.

* * * *

Saturday, December 16, 2006

How to write a good blog post, #1: Use a sniper's rifle, not a shotgun

    Okay, for those who wanted it, here it is: my tired, ten-year-old advice on how to write a press release, nipped and tucked so it now advises how to write a good polemical blog post (see if you can spot the joins). Not every blog post is a polemic, but every poster of polemic blogs might find this useful. If you don't need it, don't read it.

    Want to be a libertarian blogger? Great!! Here's a few guidelines to help you put together your posts:
    Unlike this one, every good post needs a hook on which to hang your argument. A post is a seduction, and you have to seduce people into reading it, however you try and do it. The readers you want to seduce are busy people -- you have to find some means of giving them a way in by making it seem worth reading on. And then you have to make sure it is worth reading on.
     Most people won't read beyond the first paragraph (particularly if they're reading you on a news reader), so that opening paragraph must be provocative enough to grab the attention AND to make your point in one hit -- AND try and seduce them into reading further. Make that first paragraph count. That's as much as most people are going to know (or care) about what you think.
    If they want to read further, they probably want to know why you said what you said. Tell them - that's why second, and sometimes third, paragraphs were invented. Explain your position, and make those paragraphs count.
    Notice I said "second, and sometimes third, paragraphs"? Don't piss around. Your readers are busy people, and so are you.
    Press releases need the oxygen of timeliness to survive; not so much for blogs. Press releases make the news; blog posts generally comment on the news. So unlike press releases you can get something off your chest even a week or more later -- a great way to relieve that blood pressure. But a week or so later you have to have something to say that hasn't already been said - and most people's minds were already made up on Day One.
    A good post uses a sniper's rifle rather than a shotgun - it has ONE strong point rather than several, and it doesn't spray its load around: it shoots straight for its target. (If you do have two points to make on a subject, then write two posts.  Or link them.)
    On a similar point: no flab. Put your posts on a diet. If a post was a muesli -- a bit of a stretch, I know -- then it needs lots of sultanas, and bugger-all bran. Too much filler and too many filling words and you're on your way to sounding like a Hubbard's cereal. Edit your posts, with brevity being the virtue prized above all, clarity being second.
    Every post is a missionary, trying to change the world, but each one goes out on its own, without you hanging around to explain what you meant by it all. Before pressing 'publish,' read it through as if you're an intelligent reader without any clue what you're talking about. How does it sound to them? If it sounds like you don't have a clue, then you have more work to do.
    Invite the reader to form your conclusions for you. If for example you're going to insult someone, by the time you've given all your reasons for despising somone your insult should just be the logical conclusion -- your reader should be able to join you in agreeing.
    Argue forcefully. If you don't appear to believe what you're talking about, then why the hell should your reader?
    If they've read all the way to the end, your reader will want to know why they bothered. So leave them a moral. "It's enough to make you vote Libertarianz" is an obvious one. "Politicians are scum," is another. “Need does not create an entitlement,” goes deeper. Whatever it is, try to leave the reader some quotable one liner to remember, one that sums up what you just said.
    And finally, if you want to use words like 'vermin,' 'scum,' 'maggot,' and so on, then just go right ahead. If you don't, your comments section will soon be filled with them anyway -- best you get in first. :-)
    And if people complain then just remember Oscar Wilde’s advice: the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.  And if you don’t want to be talked about, then what are you blogging for?

Hope that helps you. Go to it!! And as my footie coach used to say: Do as I say, not as I do.

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Friday, August 04, 2006

Burgher - Rodin

One of the magnificent 'Burghers of Calais' group, by Auguste Rodin, that I used to love spending time with in a park just south of Westminster.
TAGS: Art, Sculpture

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Thanks for reading.  As your reward, here are three great guitarists. The John Butler Trio:

The great Joe Pass:

And the immortal Django Reinhardt: