"Whate'er thou canst not clearly say thou know'st not."

 

"In vain they call upon the lofty TruthWith sombre conjurations; for the darkShe ne'er endures; for her abode is light.In Phoebus' world, in knowledge as in song,All things are bright. Bright beams the radiant sun;Clear runs and pure his bright Castalian fountain.Whate'er thou canst not clearly say thou know'st not.Twin-born with thought is word on lips of man;That which is darkly said is darkly thought;For wisdom true is like the diamond,A drop that's petrified of heavenly light;The purer that it is, the more its value,The more the daylight shines and glitters through it.The ancients builded unto Truth a temple,A fair rotunda, light as heaven's vault.And freely poured the sunshine from all sidesInto its open round; the winds of heavenAmid its ranks of pillars gayly gambolled.But now instead we build a Tower of Babel,A heavy, barbarous structure. Darkness peepsFrom out its deep and narrow grated casements.Unto the sky the tower was meant to reach,But hitherto we've only had confusion.As in the realm of thought, in that of songIt is; and poesy is e'er transparent ..."

~ Swedish writer Esaias Tegnér from the epilogue to his1820 speech to the graduating class at Lund University. Per Bylund (via Bing) renders the key passage as "What you cannot say clearly, you do not know; with the thought the word is born on the man's lips; what is obscurely said is what is obscurely thought."

Foreshore and Seabed issues aren't going away

So they're doing it again.

Anyone — anyone! — has the moral right to assert their ownership of something — and, under a common law system, they have the ability to go to court to try to prove that assertion. To make their claim. (Or try to.)

Common law recognises that not all legitimate claims to land or water use or ownership come as grants from a fictional entity called "the crown." Instead, it recognises the imperfection of that system, and allows claims to be made on occupation, on long use, on recognised practices.

Our common-law system however has been so buried by statute law that it's now hard to find it. And in recent years successive governments of both hues have been desperate to avoid anyone — anyone! — making any sort of common-law based claim of ownership.

That seems to go double for iwi.

The kerfuffle over foreshore and seabed began when Helen Clark rejected the right to Ngati Apa to go to court to try to assert its right to part of the Marlborough foreshore and seabed based on long use and occupation. She decided instead to nationalise it, trumping both court and claim. Ironically now, she sent out John Tamihere to sell the poisonous solution to unwilling Māori buyers.

Bear in mind Ngati Apa were simply arguing for the right to appear in court to try to make a claim. (As they and others of every hue were fully entitled to.) But that was enough for Clark.

The rights rort continued with the John Key Government's further politicisation of the foreshore and seabed, coming up with a bastardised replacement of the Clark Government's Foreshore and Seabed Act that tried to square an illegitimate circle.

Didn't work, said the Court of Appeal last year. Property rights remain legitimate even in the absence of government recognition, they suggested. And iwi, they agreed, are entitled the chance to claim legitimate rights in court (even if National's replacement Act bars full recognition).* And so the Luxon Government is now all a-scramble trying to keep the illegitimate cork in the bottle, acting to legislate away the court's decision.

It's not a good legal look.

Ironically (ironies abound here) the politician promoting the politically-expedient pre-emption, Paul Goldsmith, is a historian by profession. I can't help wondering how different New Zealand's history may have been if principled common law had won out over political expediency over the last one-hundred and eighty-five years.

We may be a different, and better. place for it.

* * * * 

* No Right Turn summarises the court decision, and National's (over) reaction: 

"The decision ... basically reinterpreted section 58 of National's Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act to make it consistent with its purpose clause and te Tiriti o Waitangi by allowing "shared exclusivity" according to tikanga. The upshot is that it would become significantly easier for iwi and hapū to gain customary marine title over their foresore and seabed - a fact confirmed in subsequent court decisions. National doesn't want that to happen - in fact, they don't want Māori to be able to gain customary title at all, despite what they promised Te Pāti Māori when they passed the law in 2011 - and so they plan to legislate it away (which they disguise as "restoring the intent of Parliament" - which is effectively an admission that they dealt in bad faith with their coalition partner in 2011). Of course, they're pitching this as being about beach access, like they always have, even though that is not and never was under threat. But they're quite open in the Herald about what its really about: protecting the aquaculture industry. So Māori rights are going to be sacrificed to protect National's donors and cronies. Which sounds just a little corrupt."

It does a bit, doesn't it.

As I've said before, when the Foreshore & Seabed Act was repealed, it should have just been left where it was at before.

And where it was at before was with Maori needing to prove to the courts that they possessed a common law property right in their portion of NZ’s foreshore & seabed. And if they could prove such a right to a legal standard of proof, then why on earth should anyone object?

What could possibly be wrong with recognising the right of people to claim the property in which they have a right? Everyone, including divers, miners, aquaculture owners, and iwi.

What could possibly be wrong with the protection of property in which people can prove that right, which is all that a repeal of the Foreshore and Seabed Act could have done.

And that’s all there really is to it. See how uncomplicated it really is? Or could still be.

How come "free energy" is so expensive?

Source: OWID: 'Australian solar and wind penetration'

"Back in the dinosaur days when Australia had virtually no wind and solar power, the price for wholesale electricity was $30 a megawatt hour year after year. Then Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and we started to add the intermittent, unreliable generators which have free fuel, but need thousands of kilometres of wires, batteries, subsidies, schemes, farmland, FCAS markets, and an entire duplicated back-up grid that sits around not-earning money for hours, days or five years at a time.
    "And [apart from that brief respite during Covid] we wondered why electricity got more expensive..."

~ Jo Nova from her post 'The more renewables Australia added the more expensive electricity got'

Source: 'AEMO Quarterly Report'

"The prospective return of Trump's deplorable gang of trade advisers to the top trade policy positions in Washington ought to scare the living bejesus out of everyone."

"Donald Trump has had a lifelong adherence to the most primitive form of trade protectionism imaginable. That is, the utterly mistaken presumption that trade deficits are mainly a result of cheating by nefarious foreigners and/or stupid trade deals foisted on the economy by Washington Swamp creatures.
    "Thus, according to the Donald America will not start winning economically again until a tough businessman/negotiator like himself brings the hammer down on cheaters and slams the gates on imports by tariffs and any other means necessary ...
    "What is worse ... [his crackpot advisers] see trade is way too important to be left to the whims of the free market. ... Thus, if you are an exporter [adviser Peter] Navarro insists that you get state approval for what you may or may not sell to the Chinese. And if you are an importer, you might as well get ready to pay a stiff tariff upcharge for the audacity of sourcing the lowest cost of global supply rather than buying from red-blooded, albeit higher cost, American vendors. ....
    "To be sure, there is a giant problem with the $20 trillion of cumulative current account deficits (2024 $) the US has racked up continuously since the mid-1970s. But those massive, chronic trade shortfalls and the devastating off-shoring of domestic industry which had accompanied them are the result of bad money — not bad trade deals, bad actors abroad, or the free market at work. ...
    "Stated differently, when you look for the culprit behind the collapse of America’s trade account and industrial base ... its wasn’t the Chicoms over there or incompetent trade policy officials over here. It was the money printers domiciled ten blocks from the White House. ...
   
"[N]o more insidious notion is at loose in the beltway [in this context] than the Trade Nanny predicate which underlies the Donald’s revived attacks on China’s alleged technology theft and 'economic aggression.' ... [W]hat actually unfolded [under the Trump presidency] was the very opposite of a traditional trade skirmish. Instead, it was an unprecedented act of Washington-led economic aggression against another sovereign state that happens to have unfortunately saddled itself with a statist economic model that we call the Red Ponzi. ... [T]he attack of Navarro and the Donald on China was an attack on the entire warp and woof of its jerry-built $15 trillion red capitalist economy. ...

"[T]he prospective return of [Trump's deplorable gang of trade advisers] to the top trade policy positions in Washington ought to scare the living bejesus out of everyone. ... Navarro is the most dangerous economic ignoramus and fanatical nationalist ever to hold high office in the White House; and Lighthizer is a career swamp creature and the walking embodiment of Washington’s crony capitalist system. ...
    "[A] return to the Trumpian Trade Wars is [not] a secondary matter.

    "What is actually brewing is an epic upheaval of international commerce that will bury Washington even deeper in the Swamp and batter the living standards of Flyover America in trade-based inflation that will make the recent fly-up on Joe Biden’s watch look like a walk in the park."

~ David Stockman from his post 'The Folly Of The Trumpian Trade Wars'

 

NZ Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill: "The better underlying question seems to be why anyone thinks there's a problem here to be solved."

"David Harvey reports that AI scraping could wind up being part of the revised NZ Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. ....
    "He [writes at length about] technical elements on whether the definitions work and whatnot.
    "The better underlying question seems to be why anyone thinks there's a problem here to be solved.
    "It's simple for a website to restrict against scraping. It would similarly be simple for a news site to licence its content for AI training, if anyone wanted to pay them enough to allow it. There is no obvious reason government needs to be involved in any of this."

~ Eric Crampton from his post 'Fun antitrust application'

2020" When "racial politics " took "a deranged and very strange step backwards."

"What came to be known as ‘wokery’ had long been in gestation. .... The first year of lockdown was ... when ... [p]erceptions of race shifted profoundly. The idea that individuals and institutions were ‘unconsciously’ or ‘systemically’ racist had already been established; but this belief, intimating that there was something inherently problematic with white America itself, was now pushed to its extreme. To be white now became problematic in itself. Whiteness became a mark of original sin.
    "Anything associated with the white man and mainstream America was now deemed racist. A pamphlet titled ‘White Supremacy Culture’, published in the late 1990s by academic Tema Okun, proved highly influential. In it, Okun denounced as racist the following ‘white’ values: perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word, individualism and objectivity. ‘In this worldview’, writes Bowles, ‘if black people do somehow exhibit urgency or perfectionism, it means there has been internalised whiteness. And that is a type of death for that black person.’ The new racism had simultaneously demonised whiteness and pathologised blackness.
    "Racial politics had taken a deranged and very strange step backwards. ...
    "The grotesque excesses of identitarian politics in America may seem like something from another planet."

~ Patrick West, from his review 'The year America went mad' of Nellie Bowles's new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

Let's not ask a Marxist about the environment

"Solving our global ecological crises today requires understanding how capitalism has transformed humanity’s relationship to the land," says the Marxist Jacobin website. "Karl Marx’s thought," they say, "gives us the tools to do just that."

Does it? Did it? The record of the Soviet Union and its empire — history's largest experiment in Marxism — was dismal. Air in the city of Nikel, in the Arctic Circle (below), was so bad that occupants routinely wore respirators outside to avoid the sulphuric acid in the air. 

The Caspian Sea was transformed into a sewer. "Hundreds of factories and refineries along the Caspian Sea dump untreated waste into the sea," explains Thomas DiLorenzo, "and major cities routinely dump raw sewage. It has been estimated that one-half of all the discharged effluent is carried in the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. The concentration of oil in the Volga is so great that steamboats are equipped with signs forbidding passengers to toss cigarettes overboard." 

Meanwhile, in Russia's "steel city" Magnitogorsk (to this day now only Russia's third-most polluted city), 

any new arrival to the city [was] likely to notice an industrial tinge to the air, like the whiff of a charcoal brazier and an acrid dryness at the back of the throat. ... [T]he level of benzopyrene in the air, a carcinogen that has been linked to lung cancer, was 23 times the allowed amount. In addition, millions of cubic metres of industrial waste water is pumped into the Ural River each year, according to environmentalists, polluting it with heavy particles, nitrites and other chemicals.... [A]ccording to Anna Rozhkova, head of the environmental group EcoMagnitka, only one in 20 children born in the city is completely free of health problems and allergies. The head of Magnitogorsk’s oncological hospital said in a 2012 interview that “people around the world are susceptible [to cancer], but we unfortunately outpace all others.”

That report is from The Guardian.

Pollution in the Marxist paradise was so inevitable that citizens were literally forced to adapt. A contemporary cartoon shows citizens, having no legal recourse,  using the chemical waste to paint the houses.

And it wasn't just Russia. Victor Sebestyen's book Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire explains that

even by East German standards, Leipzig was a filthy place. Millions of tons of sulphur dioxide were spewed into. the atmosphere nearby each year. The water in the reservoirs and rivers were massively polluted. An official government report, kept strictly secret, revealed that the city's water supply contained twenty substances available only on doctor's prescription, and ten times West German levels of mercury. Journalists and scientists who investigated the high levels of cancers, respiratory ailments and skin diseases around the city — which produced more than two-thirds of East Germany's electricity — were simply arrested.

 

Bring back the slow-news days ...

"A comedian asked today if his audience was getting bored from all these slow-news days. Let’s consider the tumult:
    "Over the weekend, President Joe Biden did what he said he would not do and quit his race for a second term as US president. He also endorsed Kamala Harris for the bid. Overnight millions and millions of mega-donor and celebrity donations poured in for Kamala and the Democrats now that their favorite fossil was out of the race. ..
    "Suddenly, former President Trump has a real campaign to run against veritable competition, and reports started emerging that his campaign people are now doubting hopeful VP Vance is up to the new job because he was supposedly picked to electrify the MAGA faithful, but with the new fight for independent voters, the race becomes a different beast. ... Democrats have swung from all-out despair to surging hope over the course of a weekend. ...
    "That graze by a bullet and deaths caused by the assassination attempt have finally united a divided congress to the task of dividing the Secret Service from its leader. ...
  
"This isn’t just the most tumultuous year of political chaos in the US, geopolitics has ramped up in the last couple of months to suddenly outweigh inflation as a concern for markets ... [with] the prospect of an increasingly fractious Europe, isolationist America and a slowdown in the pulse of world trade. ... after a roaring rally, money is rushing out of potential flashpoints - such as Taiwan's stock market - and into havens such as gold, which hit an all-time high last week….
    "'All of Trump's policies are likely to be inflationary - be it tax cuts, immigration, or re-shoring, and hence dollar bearish...so the [US] dollar is likely to depreciate against gold,' ...
    "China’s growth is slowing even more, resulting in rescue packages from the Chinese government. So is growth under Bidenomics. ...
    "At the same time more than $100 billion has been wiped from the market value of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co in less than a week after Trump sounded equivocal about his commitment to Taiwan's protection and chip industry. ...
    "Things are also only getting hotter in the Middle East ... Israel bombing Yemen with F-15s in reprisal to a drone attack in Israel by the Houthis ... Russia [moving] ships out of Crimean ports due to decimation of its Black Sea navy by the Ukraine ... Meanwhile, in the West, the Paris Olympics look like a police state, while Europe is gearing up for more war with the introduction of military conscription … In fact, Paris now hosts the largest military camp inside of Paris since WWII so that soldiers (not police) can reach any part of the Paris Olympics, which are scattered around the city, in thirty minutes. ...
    "And, of course, on Friday we had the biggest global internet crash in history. ... part of the mad mix of events that have happened all around the world in less than one week’s time. ..."

~ David Haggith from his post 'The Year of Chaos Roars!'

"Much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers ... "

"In [New Zealand], much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers (and judges). ...
    "It was Geoffrey Palmer, a lawyer, who designed the original Resource Management Act, and it is David Parker, a lawyer, who's currently drawing up plans to implement wealth and capital taxes as part of the Labour Party's platform for the 2026 election. The current Chair of Kiwi Rail is a lawyer. His Deputy Chair is a lawyer. Most of NZ's big firms have boards dominated by lawyers (and accountants) who have no shop-floor experience in the industry in which "their" company is working. How have they got their jobs? From what I have learned, mostly by networking & schmoozing. Is this a world-wide phenomena? No. Who do companies like Tesla have on their boards? To give you a flavor, folks like Mr. Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Mr. Straubel, founder of Redwood Materials, a firm working to drive down the costs and environmental footprint of lithium-ion batteries by offering sources of anode & cathode materials from recycled batteries. ...
    "What has been the objective of those sitting in the Auckland law firms quietly earning incomes of way over $1 million a year? To maximise their fee income, of course. The legal & regulatory structures that have promoted monopoly power in NZ, the frameworks that govern race-relations, and the mountains of red-tape we all must navigate, have been made deliberately divisive, deliberately ineffective, and deliberately onerous by Kiwi lawyers, all to generate more disputes & work for law firms and their partners. The profession that has ground NZ's economy to a halt has been our legal profession — all in the name of its ... quest for higher incomes."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'God Save New Zealand from Lawyers'

"If Kamala Harris takes Biden’s place at the top of the ticket, I’m still a double hater, and I’m still agonised over which presidential candidate I revile the more."

"Like the majority of American voters, I am a 'double hater',' and it’s telling about this election that the tag months ago became a set expression. As I’ve been engaged for over a year in an exhausting internal battle over which presumptive major-party presidential candidate I revile the more, maybe you’d expect that the withdrawal of at least one of these bêtes noirs would make me happy. It doesn’t.
    "If Kamala Harris takes Biden’s place at the top of the ticket, I’m still a double hater, and I’m still agonised over which presidential candidate I revile the more. ...
    "Much as any self-possessed, moderate, not-Trump Republican could have wiped the floor with Biden in November, a self-possessed, moderate Democrat could still wipe the floor with Trump. Kamala Harris is not self-possessed and not moderate. She is a prime example of the way affirmative action puts the Peter Principle on steroids, elevating a worse-than-mediocrity to high office, and now to such a giddy position that she’s in contest for the highest office in the world....
    "All the post-debate drama, the confusion, the what-now? as of Sunday afternoon, and the rushed, cynical makeover of Kamala Harris from millstone around the ticket to the second coming: it’s all Joe Biden’s fault, because he shouldn’t have run for another term from the start. It’s also the fault of innumerable enablers in the administration, in Congress, and in the media, who were all smug in their collusive certainty that they could run a potted plant for president and none of the sad little people who cast their ballots would ever notice it wilts when in need of watering.
    "I’m sure the high-stakes theatre has been fun to follow from a distance. But the one thing you’d think I’d get out of all this tumult is relief from the draining tug of war between two unacceptable choices in my head. Instead ... I’m left still disgruntled, still resentful that no one is likely to be on the ballot for whom I can vote without holding my nose, and still dismayed that we Americans are apt to be choosing between two prospective leaders, neither of whom is by any stretch of the imagination qualified for the job."

~ Lionel Shriver from her post 'Kamala Harris is painfully out of her depth: The ineffectual VP isn't worthy of higher office'

NOTHING will ever be "adequately funded"

"Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: nothing will ever be “adequately funded.” In pretty much any circumstance, someone somewhere will have at least some idea of what else they could do with an extra dollar or two. The fact that they have to forsake something because they have limited resources means that, in their eyes, the problem is simply that the world is not 'adequately funding' whatever initiative [they] think is important.
    "There is a subtle social danger here: it is easy, therefore, to think that social problems are not because we face unavoidable trade-offs but because bad people out there have the wrong values ...
    "Roads and schools could always be better. People could always be healthier. Blaming problems on inadequate funding stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that trade-offs exist and are inevitable. When someone says they have 'inadequate funding' what they really mean is, 'I could do a little more of what I find important if I had a little more money.'
    "There are four problems. First, people can always do something with a little more money... Second, funds for one thing can’t be used for another... Third, [what I find important isn't necessarily what anyone else cares about at all. [Fourth,] even when a cause is adequately funded–or at least funded well enough to win a particular crusade, it usually doesn’t dissolve but moves on to a different crusade ...
    "We shouldn’t blame problems on 'inadequate funding' ... people will always be able to think of something else to do with the next dollar."

~ Art Carden from his post 'NOTHING is "Adequately Funded"'

Reagan's "shining city upon a hill."

"The past few days ... I've thought a bit of the 'shining city upon a hill.' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
    "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still."

~ former Republican president Ronald Reagan from his 'Farewell Address to the Nation.' The contrast with today's Republican Party couldn't be greater.

Vale Bob Newhart

 

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who do like country music, denigrate means 'put down'."

~ comedian Bob Newhart, died at 94 — the man after whom Billy T. James named his new heart. You can tell how old he was 'cos he was making jokes about tobacco...

"Reading books."

"I have always been a reader. There have always been books in my life from my earliest recollection. A voracious appetite for the written word. It has always bought me pleasure and joy. ...
    "[T]here is more to reading and books that any practical or pragmatic considerations. There is the joy or reading. And in that respect I unashamedly prefer the physical book – printed pages between covers – to words on a screen. For me reading is a tangible activity. ... printing [an] article or piece and annotating it or highlighting it with a highlighter. Physical engagement with the text. ...
    "Reading books is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable activities that anyone can do. Books can transport us to different worlds, teach us new things, inspire us, and make us think. Reading books can also improve our mental health, cognitive skills, and creativity.
    "There are a number of elements that make up the joy of reading.
    "One is that books stimulate our imagination. ... We also imagine how we would feel and act if we were in the same situation as the protagonists. Reading books allows us to escape from our reality and enter into a different one, where anything is possible. Reading books can also help us develop empathy, as we learn to understand and relate to the perspectives and emotions of others.
    "Books can enrich our knowledge and understanding of the world. Books can expose us to different cultures, histories, sciences, arts, and philosophies. ...
    "Reading books can also help us improve our vocabulary, grammar, and communication skills. Reading books can also challenge our assumptions and beliefs, and make us more critical and analytical thinkers. Reading books can also inspire us to pursue our passions and interests, and to discover new ones. ...
    "Reading books can spark new ideas, insights, and solutions to problems. ... Reading books can also encourage us to express ourselves, to share our stories, and to create our own works of art. Reading books can also help us develop our own voice and identity, as we reflect on our own experiences and values. ...
    "[B]ooks are always there, ever patient, waiting to be read or, in the case of my many favourites ... re-read. My only concern is that I shall be left with more books than my allotted time allows. But every moment with a book is and will be savoured, celebrated and enjoyed."

~ A Halfling from his post 'The Joy of Reading'

RMA: "It was twenty years ago today..."

 

Crikey! Is it really 20 years since I wrote this cover story (above) for the Free Radical magazine? 

Sure is.

It was twenty years ago last month, and even then it was already well past time to put a stake through the Frankenstein monster of Simon Upton, Nick Smith and Geoffrey Palmer. And now (as the saying goes) a little girl still waits.

And twenty years since this piece first appeared, the RMA is still a current controversy ...

I'll post the whole piece here, below the fold, so you can find out what still happens when you want a bigger home for your grandmother's Morris Minor (there's only two pages more), but in the meantime you can

• download a PDF here of the whole piece, which you can then easily print and share — it's sadly still topical
• read a condensed version here that the Herald published without asking (but hey-ho)
• and read just a few of my responses to the tinkering and tepid "reforms" that both Red and Blue Governments have enacted (or promised) ...
• New Zealand's Persecuted Minority: Property Owners - July 2002
• RMA Reforms a Lane-Change, Not a U-Turn - June, 2005
• RMA Amendments: No Stake. No Property Rights. No Surprises - September 2004
• RMA surely don't impress Shania much - Herald, June 2005
• Q: Do you have an inviolable right to do whatever you want on your property? - May 2006
• What will it take for RMA anger to result in REAL change? - July 2007
• Fisking Nick Smith: "Gutting"? What gutting? - August 2007
• No property rights thanks, we're Tories - September 2007
• What would 'Party X' do about the RMA? - PART 3: Small Consents - September 2007
• What would 'Party X 'do about the environment? Part 2: 'A Nuisance and a BOR' - September 2007
• Urban housing, and why NZ doesn't really have it - Oct 2007
• Dirty dairying and dodgy drafting - Feb 2008
• No RMA reform that's worth a damn, with even worse promised - Aug 2008
• National's RMA Policy "like a chocolate-coated turd" - Oct 2008
• National's RMA Buzzword Bullshit - Oct 2008
• Real building reform? You have to be joking. - Nov 2008
• RMA to be reviewed to promote easier theft-by-government - Dec 2008
• Keep ‘em in the dark, and feed ‘em the RMA - Dec 2008
• Planners still stitching up home-owners: NZ cities world’s second-most unaffordable - Jan 2009
• RMA – what “shake-up”? - Feb 2009
• RMA changes: let’s all look at some examples - Feb 2009
• Overhauling the urban planning process, to make life easier for whom? - Oct 2010
• To Don Brash, regarding the RMA - July 2011
• Government finally plans to address unaffordable housing. But… - Oct 2012
• It’s time to put a stake through the heart of the RMA–and time a politician finally said that - March 2014
• “Avoid , remedy or mitigate” - Oct 2014
• So they’re “reforming” the RMA again? - Jan 2015
• RMA reform? Mush, without any details to give it form - Jan 2015
• How the RMA continues to protect polluters - Jan 2015
• RMA: From back when abolition wasn’t just a pipe dream… - Jan 2015
• ‘Coming to the Nuisance’? What’s that about? - July 2016
• RMA: After 25 years, time to euthanase it - Aug 2016
• Smith’s RMA reform: yet another chocolate-coated turd - Nov 2016
• Upton’s disaster continues to unwind - March 2017
• So the RMA is being reviewed again ... - March 2021
• "The National Party believes in private property rights..." - Nov 2021
• But the principles that made the RMA suck will all still stay the same ... - Nov 2022
• RMA: No wonder the lawyers like it. - Nov 2022
• So, what about that RMA replacement then? - Dec 2023
• "The RMA’s starting position is that you need permission. It is going to be dumped." But ... - April 2024
• "Under a better Resource Management system [sic], there would be no need for fast-track approval processes." - April 2024
• "...*if* Mr Bishop delivers on his promise." - May 2024

"How is it conservative to back Putin’s Russia?"

"Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J D Vance as his running mate on Monday ... was a death knell marking the end of the American conservative movement as it was constituted from the mid-20th century until now.
    "The movement’s birth date is typically traced back to 1955 ...  Ronald Reagan would go on to restate the [founding] principles by observing that the [modern] Republican Party ... was held up by a 'three-legged stool' of social and fiscal conservatism, as well as anti-communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, this third tenet was unofficially amended to emphasise the importance of American leadership on the world stage.
    "Though the GOP has always represented these values to varying degrees, Trump was the first to seriously stress-test the stool during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. By promising to implement tariffs, leave entitlements untouched, and seek a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Trump threatened to kick at least two of the movement’s legs out from under it. ...
    "By making Vance his heir apparent, Trump has not only set the tone for what his second term would look like, but what the GOP will stand for in the years that follow.
    "Vance is not merely an advocate of a more restrained foreign policy, he’s a demagogue plagued by a single minded obsession: rewarding Putin for waging a bloody, unprovoked war on Ukraine. ...  

    "He may claim to put America first, but Vance can be better understood as a member of the 'Blame America First' crowd that conservatives once rightly deplored.
    "His economic outlook is similarly indistinguishable from the Right’s ancestral opponents. ... resort[ing] to the simpleminded, envy-laden demagoguery of the Left since entering the political fray.
    "He supports minimum wage hikes and indiscriminate protectionism. He opposes Right-to-Work laws and tax cuts. ... and has suggested that Senators Bernie Sanders (a socialist) and Elizabeth Warren (a quasi-socialist) were his favorite candidates among the 2020 Democratic presidential field.
    "Moreover, Vance’s prioritisation of his own personal ambition over all else throws even his claim to being a committed social conservative into doubt. ... This should come as no surprise. Vance now claims to be proud to be the running mate of a man he once compared to Hitler and agreed was a serial sex predator. ...

"Reagan, and their contemporaries ... fought and won an uphill battle to bring much-needed contrast, not to mention wisdom, back to American politics.
    "By contrast, Vance’s rapid rise has been characterised by his sycophancy toward a single charismatic figure whose coat-tails he hoped to ride.
    "With Trump and Vance cemented as American 'conservatism’s' frontmen for the foreseeable future, it is no exaggeration to say that the values – and the spirit – of the conservative movement shaped by  Reagan [et a] are functionally dormant, if not dead."

~ Isaac Schorr from his column 'JD Vance as Trump’s running mate is the death knell of American conservatism'

"The argument is that 'wealth is a privilege, and with it comes the obligation of paying tax to benefit society'."

"The argument [is that] 

Wealth is a privilege, and with it comes the obligation of paying tax to benefit society.   

"This is, obviously, piffle. For what is being said there is that only by paying tax does wealth benefit society. Which is, obviously, that piffle.
    "It’s actually true that wealth is the product of having benefitted society. As in the William Nordhaus paper about who gains from entrepreneurial activity, it’s us out here, us consumers, who gain the vast, vast proportion of it. The entrepreneurs themselves gain some 3% or so of total value created. Only 3% too.
    "As an example, Jeff Bezos has some $200 billion. A lotta cash, agreed. It’s also true there’s been the 'Amazon Effect.' By making the retail system more efficient the simple existence of the company has knocked 0.1 to 0.2% off the inflation rate. Every year for two decades. No, not 2 to 4% off retail sales that is, but 2 to 4% off the whole cost of living for everyone. That’s a sum vastly larger than the Bezos pile - especially when we convert that annual benefit into a capital sum so as to be able to compare it with the Bezos capital sum.
    "It simply isn’t true, not in the slightest, that the justification for wealth is the tax paid upon it. It’s how much better off are we made by someone having made that wealth?"

~ Tim Worstall from his post 'If people don’t grasp the basics then….'

"The U.S. should abandon its obsession with the anti-immigration policies of the recent past, and instead address the real causes of illegal immigration."

"How can the United States reduce illegal immigration? ...
    "The reality is that only four policies can significantly reduce illegal immigration.
    "The first is allowing more legal immigration. …
    "The second … is to expand free trade. …
    "A more controversial way to shrink illegal immigration is to de-escalate the war on drugs. …
    "A further policy that might reduce immigration is scaling back the U.S. welfare state ... to either reduce that generosity or condition benefits on legal residence for a significant number of years. ...

"The policies that will do little to shrink illegal immigration are increased border enforcement, stiffer punishments for employers who hire illegals, or aggressive arrest policies ... These measures are ineffective because they do not change the fact that wages in the U.S. are attractive compared to wages in poor countries. And, for centuries, immigrants have endured amazing hardships to seek higher income or a better life in America. Longer or higher fences will not change that.
    "Instead, stepped-up enforcement will drive more activity underground....

    "[T]he U.S. should abandon its obsession with the anti-immigration policies of the [recent] past and instead address the real causes of illegal immigration."

~ Jeffrey Miron from his post 'The Right Way to Reduce Illegal Immigration'

Great Barrier Reef is "doomed"?

 

"The Great Barrier Reef is doomed by 2030 without immediate action," said Time magazine in 2013.

"Great Barrier Reef damage is ‘irreversible’ unless radical action taken," said the Guardian in 2014.

"The Great Barrier Reef is a victim of climate change," the Guardian declared in 2021, doubling down on the catastrophising.

And now, in 2024? Well, check it out:

Moral of the story?

The story of the Great Barrier Reef’s recovery challenges the dominant climate change narrative. While it’s crucial to remain vigilant about environmental protection, it’s equally important to base our policies and perceptions on accurate, comprehensive data. The resilience of the Great Barrier Reef serves as a reminder that nature can be more adaptable and robust than we often assume.

"New Zealand lacks a national unifying myth"

"New Zealand lacks a national unifying myth that embodies the shared views of the country’s history and future. The loss of a common national story is central to many of News Zealand’s problems. Myths explain our history, chart a path to the future and help bind the country together.
    "Richard Slotkin, who has written extensively about the various mythologies underpinning the United States experience, suggests that ‘myths are the stories – true, untrue, half-true – that ... provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action.’ A more formal dictionary definition suggests that myths may be popular traditions embodying core social values* ...
    "There have been a number of what may be described as archetypal experiences in New Zealand history that could approach a 'mythological' status that reflect the embodiment of some of the values that underpin the national identity. ANZAC immediately comes to mind. Wartime activity and service brings a people together often because national survival is at stake.
    "Then there is the 'man alone' myth that underpins much of Jock Phillips writing, along with the Kiwi do-it-yourself 'number 8 wire' approach to problem solving. Sport tends to be a unifier but primarily a hysterical support for the All Blacks which rapidly diminishes if the team does anything but win. Sport is meant to demonstrate resilience in the fact of adversity but not, it would seem, on the part of the fans.
    "Historians are well positioned to invent and develop new national stories. ... But historians have not taken on the task of devising a coherent national mythology that can bring unity to a fractured nation. Instead, students are being taught radically different versions of the nation’s past. All this reflects not simply divergent opinions on specific issues, but disagreements about the fundamental character of our institutions and the purposes of our nation.
    "One myth which did possess a unifying feature but which has been badly eroded is the position of the Treaty of Waitangi. The treaty established a foundation for equal citizenship, one people with equal recognition under the law.
    "Hobson at the signing of the Treaty is reputed to have said 'He iwi tahi tatou – 'we are now one people.' ... The problem is that in many respects myths [like this one] contain a great deal of invention and not a lot of evidence. But Hobson’s Pledge, whether it was said or not, provides a solid background for a national identity and the foundation for a common purpose. We should be one people. We should acknowledge our differences but our shared objective should be a unity of purpose. And with that unity of purpose we can become ... a country with well-educated people, who enjoy the lifestyle their unique setting offers and the good health that goes with that ..." 

~ Thomas Cranmer from his post 'A Common Purpose and a National Mythology'

* Myths are not a lie, explains mythologist Joseph Campbell, and to call them that is a misunderstanding — 

"a very strong and narrow opinion of what a myth 'is.' Someone who, perhaps, has only been exposed to the negative use of the term as a phrase for something that is seen as a 'mistruth.' Something told with the intent to deceive, or from the vantage point of a naive or uneducated mind. For many, calling something a 'myth' is to associate it with a profound deception: a feeble or unsophisticated attempt to explain material reality before the advent of the scientific age. Some see the term as an equivalent to the more modern 'fake news.' 

"The contemporary conception of myth as falsehood has led people to think of myths as fairytales (another complex story structure that is often dismissed as containing much less essential truth than they actually do).
"But for Campbell, myth presents a version of the truth that is far more essential than that which can be gleaned from almanacs, censuses, and encyclopaedias, whose 'facts' are dependent on the experience of the field of time and are often outdated as soon as they are published."

Writer Robert A. Johnson sums it up, saying "Myths are a special kind of literature not written or created by a single individual, but produced by the imagination and experience of an entire age and culture, and can be seen as the distillation of the dreams and experiences of a whole culture." 

So neither unimportant nor trivial. And certainly not a lie.

 

"This is America. This is not the way we do away with Presidents. We do away with them in a very civilised manner. We vote. We do not kill people."

 

"On the day President Kennedy died, that evening I was at a lecture that she gave. In the question-and-answer period, somebody said something like 'You never liked President Kennedy so his death is nothing to grieve about.' She got terribly upset about that remark and said 'This is America. This is not the way we do away with Presidents. We do away with them in a very civilised manner. We vote. We do not kill people'."

~ Ayn Rand remark, taken from a 1999 interview with Frederick Feingersh (an NBI student under Rand in the 1960s). Hat tip Ben Bayer.

 

Rock journalism ...

 

"Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read."

~ Frank Zappa from a 1977 interview

"Neither climate nor climate change cause, fuel, or influence weather. Yes, you read that right"

"It is now a ubiquitous cultural ritual to blame any and every weather event on climate change. Those hot days? Climate change. That hurricane? Climate change. The flood somewhere that I saw on social media? Climate change.
    "With today’s post, the first in a series, I go beyond the cartoonish media caricatures of climate change, which I expect are here to stay, and explore the actual science of extreme events — how they may or may not be changing, and how we think we know what we know, and what we simply cannot know. ...
    "Let’s correct one pervasive and pathological misunderstanding endemic across the media and in policy, and sometimes spotted seeping into peer-reviewed scientific research:

Neither climate nor climate change cause, fuel, or influence weather.

"Yes, you read that right.
    "Climate change is a change in the statistics of weather — It is an outcome, not a cause.
    "I often use hitting in baseball as an analogy. A hitter’s batting average does not cause hits. Instead, a batter’s hits result in their overall batting average. Lots of things can change a batter’s hitting performance, but batting average change is not one of them.

"As the Google NGrams figure above indicates, the idea that climate change is a causal agent has become increasingly common in recent decades, departing dramatically from its use in the IPCC and much of the scientific community. I am sure you can point to examples that you encounter every day. ...
    "Weather can be characterised statistically, but weather does not occur as a result of simple statistical processes. Weather is the the integrated result of at least: dynamical, thermodynamical, chaotic, societal, biospheric, cryospheric, lithospheric, oceanic, vulcanological, solar, and, yes, stochastic processes."

~ Roger Pielke Jr. from his post 'Climate-Fuelled Extreme Weather.' [Emphasis in the original. Hat tip Kip Hansen]

 

Labelling everything "far-right" normalises the real far-right

"Progressive devotees have expanded the scope of who and what is 'far-right' ... [But] if milquetoast conservatives get into government as ‘far-right’ and govern in a way with no perceptible difference to the liberal consensus ... then it normalises the idea of far-right government. ...
    "If mothers growing their own food are far-right, the pro-life church lady is far-right, the radical feminist who isn’t keen on transvestites is far-right, the liberal who gets fired for not using progressive speech codes at his corporate job is far-right, then no one is going to bat an eye at the real far-right – whoever they may be and wherever they may lurk. When the progressive says, ‘But he’s far-right!’ about someone with genuinely reactionary political aims and the means to achieve them, no one will recoil in horror.
    "Instead they will think, ‘Ah, so he is just like me.'
    "The funeral pyre of progress has been constructed by the hands of its faithful devotees and awaits only the match that will set it ablaze."

~ Dieuwe de Boer from, his post 'The Funeral Pyre of Progress'