Is it just me, or is Peter Low of the Asian Anti-Crime Group absolutely barking? You see, he has a plan: he is training as many as 300 people in martial arts. And if that doesn't work, he is going to call in the Triads.
Let's get this right: Mr Low's solution to the crime problem is to hire gangsters. Apart from the somewhat skewed moral stance displayed by Mr Low, isn't this the sort of thing that happens in martial arts movies?
Not surprisingly, the Sensible Sentencing Trust are involved with his campaign. They and Mr Low are determined to make what they will of the coincidence of three murders happening in a short period. They want people to be afraid, regardless of realities. And of course, its all the fault of the Government: "Kids don't respect their parents any more because of law changes." Wut?
As an added bonus, Pansy Wong has let slip one of the dogs of war: a policy. Apparently, "National believes more has to be done on crime prevention, rather than having dozens of police officers working on homicides." So, how will that work? Will the Police no longer be investigating murders? "I am sorry for your loss madam, but all our officers are busy on anti-tagging patrols."
It's this sort of thing that makes you want to smash a watch: Zen Tiger has got into a tizz about my post on lightbulbs. I made the error of mocking the Market; worse still, I denied Choice to the Consumer.
Bring back asbestos, that's what I say. Consumers have a right to decide. Some might want to build their homes with asbestos, preferring it over other building materials, (such as wattle and daub or flax, the products of pre-capitalist societies which lacked event the most primitive banking systems). Asbestos has many attractive qualities, including flame-resistance, durability and lightness; it also comes in an attractive shade of grey. Consumers, home owners, proud Kiwi dads and mums, battlers even, have the Right to Choose. However, the have been denied this Right by the Nanny State, which determined (on the basis of evidence provided by Scientists working in feather-bedded civil service jobs) that asbestos fibres kill people. This may be so (although the evidence is quite provisional) but consumers are entitled to take risks to have a fire-resistant grey home. House builders, the Entrepreneurs whose enterprise is the foundation of our economy, are equally entitled to take the (potential) risks that may arise from working with asbestos, in order to make an honest living and put food on the table for their families. Without these Rights, we have no Freedoms, and we will find ourselves living under Socialism.
Or, to put it another way, these Market groupies are weird. How, I hear you ask, are they weird? Let us count the ways.
For a start, there is no market in electrickery (slower readers may have thought this was an article about asbestos; it is not: that was just rhetoric). It is a limited resource and one that is not very mobile. That is to say, you can't just make it in one place and sell it to another. Or, to put it another way: if we run out of electricity, we will find it very difficult to make some more and we won't be able to buy some from Australia.
Second, if people save money by spending less on electricity, they can spend in other ways, such as putting extra servings of poisonous synthetic food on their tables, for their kids. This is good for the Market Economy.
Third, the world is facing catastrophe. We should do everything we can to reduce our electricity use; if that means denying some people the right to waste their money, then tough.
Ever since the Perfect Market escaped from its captivity in the Economics Department of the University of Chicago some time in the early 1980s, this sort of nonsense has proliferated. The Market groupies don't like Society, because it implies obligations beyond the getting and spending of money. They also don't like the Environment, which is at best a resource and at worst an impediment. They cling to the belief that Global Warming is a fiction invented by the Greens to undermine the Market. Even if there is a problem, they say, the Market will invent a solution. One cannot help but imagine that, if these people were around during the Second World War, they would have objected to the Government spending public money on aircraft and insisted that rationing was an unfair intervention, since anybody should be able to buy as many scarce resources as he wishes.
Anyway, back to the real world: they are growing potatoes in Greenland
I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.
Like bunking Physics classes, I suppose. The writer is, of course, Emily Gould, here recounting her second fetal position episode during her time as a blogger (yes, dear reader, I read her story to its end, just for you). Ms Gould might have a future as an adviser to John McCain, who is aware of internet.
But, you may be asking, where did Emily acquire her knowledge of electromagnetism? I speculated that she must have attended a private liberal arts college. I was right: she attended Kenyon College, Ohio, founded by Bishop Philander Chase (yes, I know) in 1824, and Eugene Lang College. Probably, you didn't need to know this but, as Emily herself says
The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.
If only it would. Meanwhile, as the Huffington Post notes, the New York Times has more important stories to tell than Emily's, stories such as the one about girls getting hurt playing sport. Or you could read a female blogger with something to say, such as Stef, who has true tales from North Korea, among other stories.
I know I do go on about the Herald and I know it is not my business to tell the Editor where to put the copy; but I could not help but notice that today's print edition had a huge photo and story on the front cover about convicts being pressed to clean up tagging on the railway corridors of Auckland; meanwhile, this story about a planned attack on Iran was relegated to one of the obscure pages.
It is written by Catherine Field - a real journalist, the Herald's own, a grown-up, a good writer, etc. Its subject is really important - the USofA and Israel are planning to attack Iran. There goes the neighbourhood: the media are being manipulated to make this plan acceptable. The USofA and Europe are at odds. That ghastly war criminal President Bush is planning to hand his successor a burning chalice, while leaving office covered in war. All of it is bad
I hate to say it, but I must: our media, and us media consumers, can be stupidly provincial. Things happen far away – daccord, because everything is far away. But we don't seem to grasp how much they matter. Or perhaps they don't. Perhaps Laura Norder stories and celebrity gossip are more important than war news.
Perhaps it's just me.
My title is that of the original war-scare story, the 1875 Berliner Post article which probably was planted by Bismarck, should anybody care.
I expect people care even less about Canterbury Rock. Here is Caravan:
Should you be thinking of voting for that nice Mr Key, you really should read this. You will notice that is written by Gordon Campbell, who wrote for the Listener, until Pamela Stirling removed him for his pesky interest in "geo-politics." You will also notice that, while the Herald does puff pieces for National and has tantrums about the Electoral Finance Act, Gordon Campbell (now published by the excellent Scoop) does some journalism: he looks at what National might do if it were to gain power, in the absence of any statements to that effect from National itself.
National's unwillingness to talk about policies, or to cost those it has muttered, presents us with something like the early moments after the Big Bang: there is a lot of stuff moving around but it has yet to form into anything. However, you can see some clusters. And is not as if John Key has no policies to talk about. It is simply that he prefers not to talk to the public about them. Mr Key's admirer, Fran O'Sullivan, gushes about how he is spruiking his vision (ooh-er, Missus) to business audiences. But not to us.
And it is funny she should mention that vision thing, because a friend of a friend has been among those business audiences. And he says that the message John Key conveyed was that National would have to swallow some dead rats before the Election and pretend to be cuddly but, as soon as he was in power, then the real stuff would start. Imagine, as Ms O'Sullivan says a New Zealand "where risk-taking is again exciting." Imagine, indeed. You will be able to take that risk on polling day.
After all, and returning to Mr Campbell's research, National's plans for education involve doubling the amount paid to private schools. But you say, they are private schools; why are we paying anything for them? Well, yes, why indeed? In fact, the private schools receive huge subsidies - half their teaching staff costs, about a quarter of their overall costs; in addition, most private schools are educational charities and so do not pay income tax. So we pay for privilege. We pay for Kings and Corran and St Cuths - the schools which the children of Mr Key's people attend. And they will get more still, while spending increases on the schools which most children attend will be limited to the rate of inflation. So the public schools will rely more on the odious "donations," extorted from parents, while the private schools will be subsidised more and more by us.
People should know this. All those people who think it is time for a change should know what change they will be getting: the privatisation of our society and the subsidising of privilege. They should know that they will be voting their children out of a decent education.
They should also know what company Mr Key keeps, because they won't read about that in the Herald. They can read it on Mr Brown's pages. The Herald prefers to tell us that Mr Key wants for verbal precision. No he does not. He knows what he is doing and so does the Herald. In the private meetings with the business elites he is very precise. What he wants for, when talking to us, is candour; straightforwardness; honesty.
Meanwhile, on Planet Noam, Ryan has a new pyramid; except it is nothing of the kind. He also has a moral imperative: Labour should take a prat-fall, so the plebs will then vote National and get a jolly good spanking; then they will realise what is good for them.
We should leave Ryan to play with his pyramid and get on with the business of telling the electors about the people they might elect. But, before that, we should listen to L7:
This blogeur is more than a little amused by the decision of the North Korean government to present a list of its nuclear facilities to China and the consequent decision of the government of the United States to remove North Korea from its list of nations that support Terrorism.
Leaving aside the all-too obvious fact that China has loads of nukes and an aggressive foreign policy (and an excess of young males due to its one-child policy; but that is another matter, although a worrying one - India has the same problem and nukes as well, but that is by-the-by), the obvious farce of this event is the supposed connexion between North Korea having nukes and its supposed support of Terrorism.
Of course, we all remember the Axis of Evil, the imagined alliance between North Korea, Iraq (old Iraq) and that other country, which we can't quite remember. This Axis was the cause of Terrorism, so we were told. We were also told about the Nukes, which these countries (sorry, regimes) possessed, or were about to possess, or might possess. These they might pass to the Terrorists, who are the sort of people portrayed by David Suchet or Dr Ropata in movies about hijackings of airliners (it is interesting, although not necessarily important, to note that Terrorists in movies are never portrayed by American actors; in fact, it is quite important; but that is another matter).
So, how about that North Korea, Nukes, Terrorism connexion? How does it work out? Well, not at all, if you want my opinion. For a start, is there any evidence that North Korea has any link with any Terrorist organisation? Correct me if I am wrong, but I think not. North Korea is an absurd nation which would be really, really funny if its population were not starving. It is so bat-droppings stupid that it would not make an Axis with anyone, let alone a bunch of Saudi weirdoes who have never had a woman and really, really want to go to Heaven so they can get their quota of virgins for Eternity.
And, if the North Koreans wanted to share their Nukes with the Terrorists, what would the Terrorists do with the Nukes? If you are thinking to yourself, "they will blow up entire cities, in pursuit of their nefarious ends," now is the time that you need to know something about Nukes.
Now, at this point you may be thinking "but you, by your own admission, are but an humble Art Historian, so what do you know about Nukes?" But you forget, I used to work for the Ministry of Defence, in Whitehall, London SW1A 1AA. I am an Art Historian who knows about Nukes, a curiously dangerous combination.
For a start (a second start), it would be very silly of the North Koreans to give Nukes to the Terrorists. They, the Terrorists, might do anything with them; that's what Terrorists are like. Power, responsibility – they don't meet. People who are prepared to fly themselves in planes into tall buildings could not be trusted with Tupperware, let alone bombs. The North Koreans, despite their fondness for parades and cabbage, are not stupid. Give odd people stuff and they will use it in odd ways.
Second, Nukes are really, really high maintenance. You give them to people; those people have to look after them. They are like children, although not so dangerous. They demand constant attention. They emit rays, which boil your liver. They decay, constantly. They need to be turned - yes, this is true: there are people at nuclear bases whose job is to turn nuclear weapons; it is quaint, in a way, like making bread or maintaining a compost heap – but nuclear weapons have to be turned regularly, otherwise the atoms will do bad things.
Third (and following on from the turning thing) everything about Nukes is weird. They don't behave like normal things. Nukes are made from stuff you can find in the ground - Uranium. But take that stuff (which, quaintly again, comes in what are called "cakes") and mess about with it, and it does really, really strange things. Nuclear Physics is very difficult for very good reasons: nuclear things do very odd things (sub-atomic things is even more strange, but that is another matter). Hang around with nuclear stuff for too long and you will glow in the dark; worse than that, you will look like Michael Stipe; you will also feel worse, because your liver will be boiling. In order to work with nuclear stuff, you need to have several inches of lead between you and it, which might be difficult if you are in a motel room in Reno (call me when you try to wake her up, as it were).
Fourth, and this is really, really important, Nukes are difficult. In order to make the most simple Nuke work and kill thousands of people, you have have to make two bits of nuclear stuff come together very, very quickly and in precisely the right place. This is not easy. It involves lots and lots of little explosions, precisely synchronised.
A few years ago, a modern myth circulated to the effect that anyone with a PhD in Nuclear Physics could make a Nuke in a garden shed between episodes of Star Trek Voyager, or something like that. For a start (a third start), getting a PhD in Nuclear Physics is really, really difficult; and it has to be in the right kind of Nuclear Physics. Then you have to get the North Koreans to give you the nuclear stuff, then you have to deal with the boiling-your-liver issues, then you have to synchronise lots and lots of explosions. None of this is easy.
But, you say, "aha! You are but an humble Art Historian and you have not considered Dirty Bombs; Triple Word Score." To which I reply: yes, Dirty Bombs; that is where you get all the nuclear stuff and you avoid all the problems of synchronising lots and lots of small explosions and having a PhD in Nuclear Physics and instead you just spread the nuclear stuff over a wide area and give lots of people cancer. Yes, well and good, but how do you spread the nuclear stuff? Consider a bag of flour (yes, sexy, isn't it?) and think about how you would spread it over a wide area, so lots of people got themselves infected by a small amount of flour. Not easy, is it? Things don't spread that easy. And nuclear stuff comes in much smaller amounts - really, really small cakes - than flour. So how do you spread it, without boiling your liver? Answers on one side of the paper, please.
So, there you have it. If you are a Terrorist with nuclear ambitions, you have to find a state which is prepared to trust you with Nukes, then you have to find a way of making nuclear weapons or spreading around a small amount of nuclear stuff so that it kills lots of people. None of this is easy. If, on the other hand, you are a state that possesses Nukes (and, if you are, I hope you are reading) you have to consider what gains you can obtain by giving Nukes to the Terrorists.
Of course, the truth is that Nukes are held by a small number of nations that have the capability to produce and maintain them - that is, people with PhDs in Nuclear Physics and lots and lots of lead. It used to be that those nations were the USA and Britain. Then the Russians got them and the French (yes, I know) and then the Chinese. Not coincidentally, these nations are the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council, but that is another story. Then some of these nations let other nations have their technology, so now some really bat-droppings stupid nations like Pakistan have Nukes. And then we worry about Climate Change.
Enough of this gravity. The magnificent Sean Hughes once said, "I bumped into that Richard Ashcroft on the street:"
Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.
This is the first paragraph of Emily Gould's cover story for the New York Times Magazine. Why do we detest her already? Let me count the ways - because she was 24 and had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where she had been working since she graduated from college (you can bet it was a private liberal arts college in New England) and she was living with her boyfriend (called Henry, for Gould's sake) and (of course) two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
And of course she had a blog, just like every woman like her in New York. And on said blog she told everything about her life to a few hundred voyeurs whom she thought of as friends because they commented on the stories she told of her life and boosted her fragile ego. And we, being more discerning and less prurient readers than her few hundred friends, want to know nothing of her life other than the answer to one question: what stained the Ikea couch?
But we will not be given that answer. Instead, Emily Gould tells us yet more of her life, at great length. She tells how she was invited to write for an important blog, an invitation which fills her with joy. This was a paid job; she became a hack blogger, writing for a big corporate blog which in truth is no more than a celebrity gossip site. But to Emily it was really important: it is at this sort of site, not in the Columbia School of Journalism, where the journalists of tomorrow are found. Of course, it wasn't easy: she had to make as many as twelve posts each day, carefully selecting stories found on other sites and writing short introductions in the sardonic style she had been developing since high school – some might say the style of humour and of writing which she had not grown out of, but that just shows how jaded some of us have become.
But things went horribly wrong, because Henry took exception to what she was writing about him, while lots of other people said nasty things about her. And nobody, not Henry, not the cats, not even the stain on the couch, cared about her. And it all got to much for her and she ended up curled up on the floor.
If you cannot bring yourself to read her story, at least look at the photographs of Ms Gould being vulnerable and showing her tats. And then read the letters from readers – yes, everybody else despises her as well. It is a warming feeling to realise that, on Internet, we are all one big happy family of people who may not have known of Emily Gould until recently, but now know her to be an overbearing, oversharing, attention-seeking hack.
I am grateful to Mssrs Farrar and Hood for commenting on my previous post, Mr Farrar for relieving me of my confusion and Mr Hood for implying that I might be gay; in fact, I am not that well-dressed.
Being but an humble art historian and not versed in the strategems of Politick, I had assumed that the result of the American Presidential election would affect Labour's chances in entirely different ways. I had thought that, if the black man won, someone like Michael Bassett would reveal that Helen Clark was neither black nor a man, and therefore unsuitable for public office. My concern about the possibility of the Vietnam veteran winning was more grave. Please read on.
I can now exclusively reveal that Mr Ian Wishart will be exclusively revealing that Helen Clark and Judith Tizard were among John McCain's torturers in Vietnam, having volunteered to work for the Viet Cong on their OE. Here is an exclusive extract from the next issue of Investigate:
Early on the third day of McCain's solitary confinement at the Lol Wut People's Re-education Camp, two women entered his cramped cell. McCain recalls that both were white, but spoke English in an unfamiliar dialect, in which the words "six," "sucks," "sex," and "socks" sounded identical. McCain's blood chilled when he noticed that one was wearing crampons, while the other was holding kitchen implements...
An astute observation of current events comes from no less an authority on political matters than Bridget Saunders.
"CAPTURING LOVE, beauty and happiness" says the card of the photographer who took a photo of John Key, Dr Richard Worth, Auckland mayor John Banks and National's Auckland Central candidate Nikki Kaye at a fundraising event on Sunday night. Well, I wouldn't go quite that far but National is certainly feeling mighty cheerful right now. John Key is betting on an election date of October 18. He says it won't be November as the US election is on November 5 and no matter which way that goes, it will be bad for Helen. And if she leaves it till November 15, she will look desperate.
What does Key mean? How could the result of the US Presidential election be bad for the PM?
Is dog-wagging a form of animal cruelty? I only ask because Mr Wishart uses the phrase in his rather incandescent piece about light bulbs, a piece which takes the "dark mood of talk radio callers" to be a portent of the Government's demise. How would he notice? The mood of talk radio callers is always dark and always twitter and bisted about the Government. Somehow I doubt whether the votes of these barking mad misanthropes are central to Labour's election strategy.
Sometimes I do wonder about Mr Wishart. I would have that thought that he might pause for reflection before claiming that the Government is going to be brought down by its light bulb policy. I wonder more about his blog's regular commentators. Note the remarks of Acid Comments, who already has been poisoned by the mercury in a light bulb, although the bulb did not break; somehow the mercury seeped through the glass and out into the atmosphere, giving Mr Comments a migraine headache, a little-known symptom of mercury poisoning. As Mr Comments recalls, "after I'd finish my dinner I was having collapses, burning sensations, numbness, body weakness, etc." I blame the curry.
Then there is KevOB, who finds energy-saving bulbs to be deficient in red, a colour which makes him function better in Winter. Then there is Rick, who will buy a pallet of old-school bulbs so that he will still be wasting his money twenty years from now. Ha! That will show them! Then there is Warrick, who knows that the new bulbs "don't save you 75-80% more like 50%." There, you see, its a bloody con. Finally, there is Zen Tiger, who thinks the Consumer should choose.
Somehow it always seemed rather obvious to me that one should spend as little money as possible on electricity and that any measure to reduce the country's electricity usage would be worthwhile, on both environmental and economic grounds. But then I didn't realise, before I began reading rightish blogs, that there are people like KevOB who obviously become quite aroused by the thought of a 150 watt halogen; nor had I come across men like Rick who want to spend more, just to show the nanny state that they are free, if impoverished, men.
What they do not realise is that the nanny state is not trying to smother them, but to protect the rest of us from these morons.
Is it just me, or is Peter Low of the Asian Anti-Crime Group absolutely barking? You see, he has a plan: he is training as many as 300 people in martial arts. And if that doesn't work, he is going to call in the Triads.
