Some people leave you wondering.......

Is there any intelligent life on Earth?

A moron from Waiuku, Kurt Sharp, tied a goat to his towbar and dragged it down the road, forcing it to run. When it couldn't run any more, he then dragged it until it died.

Said moron was also convicted on several burglary charges.

Not theft. Not fraud. Not right either......

The police appear to be having some difficulty working out what charges to lay against Leo Gao and Kara Hurring, the couple who took the $10M Westpac Bank deposited in their account. It isn't theft, because they didn't steal it as the law described stealing. It isn't fraud because they didn't make any false representations. I'm sure there is a law to cover it, but the apparent confusion on the point is interesting. I'm assuming, of course, the confusion isn't just a ruse to get the pair to return to NZ.

Crime: Reality must be kept at bay!!!

ACT's David Garrett has put the shotgun into the mouth of his credibility again.

Idiot / Savant over at No Right Turn puts verifiable facts up against ACT / National folklore on the murder rate and reality triumphs yet again - at least in a small way.

ACT's David Garrett isn't one to let reality intrude without a fight and he mounts a speculative counter-narrative involving perverse jury decisions, miss-calls and other standard denia-bilia.

Garrett looks to me like a stupid person.

Of lawn mowers and other dumb things...

A lawn mower will just as happily mince your foot as cut the grass if you point it the wrong way. The global economic system has been pointing the wrong way for some time now.The unthinking, unaware (idiotic) whirly-chopper we also know as the global financial system has finally achieved its destiny in a gush of green from severed financial arteries everywhere. The global economy is now bleeding out.

Rather than clotting up and healing, the pace of deterioration in the status quo appears to be quickening as the resources that were available to governments and business as a legacy of the "pre-crash" era begin to diminish and disappear.

There are so many threads running through each day it's a challenge to track them, never mind make sense of them. Here are a few items that caught my eye.

Former US Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, blamed by some for creating the housing bubble, now says it may be necessary to nationalise the country's banks.

In an interview with the Financial Times published on the paper's website on Tuesday, Mr Greeenspan said 'it may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring'

Long one of the world's most powerful proponents of hands-off financial regulation, Mr Greenspan indicated nationalisation may now be necessary.

'I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do,' he said.

At the same time comes news that one of the wealthiest states in the United States, California, is about to go broke. Faced with a drop in tax revenue of US$40 billion, Governor Schwartzenegger is looking at sacking 20% of all state employees as a prelude to shutting down the state government altogether if the legislature is unable to agree on a new budget. The Republicans in the legislature want to cut taxes and spend even less, in line with their ideological view that no government is good government. Looks like they may get to find out.

These two stories, for me, throw into sharp relief the primary elements at play in this whole rolling disaster. A far as I can see, the people who allowed it to happen are now divided in two camps: those who think they did wrong (or could have done better) and want to do something else now, and those who see badness, but no wrong, and want to use this as an opportunity to explore the further limits of the very same policies of non-regulation that lead to the whole mess in the first place. They call themselves "conservatives" while they have done anything BUT conserve. It fair takes one's breath away to read their words and listen to them talk. They obviously had no idea whatever what was going on when times were good and are today equally bereft of any useful model of reality now times are not so good.

People losing their jobs each day now number in the tens of thousands in country after country. This is a disaster these mis-named "conservatives" have wrought....and they can't see it at all. Amazing, yet understandable or they could not have pursued with such vigour and determination the policies that caused it all.

That's all grass (and toes) in the grass catcher now. As these contractions in income feed through into the so-called "real economy" in shrinking demand and more bad debt, there will certainly be an accelerator effect operating for some considerable time yet.

Meanwhile, the US Congress passed its stimulus bill. They are supposedly going to use almost US$800 billion into prop up failed banks and support activity that is supposed to help the economy keep going. The same people who couldn't see the crash coming are now planning how to combat it. Good luck with that. The blind gardeners now turn into surgeons.

The effects of these events will continue reach us here in NZ in the months ahead. Already large numbers of NZ companies have wage freezes and hiring freezes in place. In some cases, these have been ordained by their overseas owners as part of the big corporate picture globally, regardless of how well or poorly the local NZ operation actually did. My own employer, part of a US-based conglomerate, has imposed such policies recently despite the New Zealand / Australia operation having just had its best year ever and good prospects for the year ahead, despite the downturn elsewhere.

If most of what we read each day makes little sense, that's because it doesn't, really. These events are being driven by an economic machine we have allowed to usurp our own conscious control of the world we live in. The gardener doesn't need need to tell each blade of grass how to grow, but he does need to know where to oint the lawn mower and where not to. It bears repeating: A lawnmower will just as happily mince your foot as cut the grass if you point it the wrong way. The global economic system has been pointing the wrong way for some time now.

Hope you have your steel-toed boots ready. They will come in handy about now if you haven't got them on already.

Ya gotta wonder......about cars.

John Key's new government and Cabinet is worthy of closer examination and I will get to it soon. I want to let that one settle a bit.

Today I am thinking about cars. Make that car makers. US car makers.

I remember, back in late 2003, I was standing in the paddock behind the house on a property we have since sold, thinking about cars.

My train of thought had run across and through the US invasion of Iraq and on to a falling US dollar. If past cycles held true, the Saudis and others would seek to compensate themselves for the decline in the currency their oil is valued in and oil prices would rise. Alongside this, the avalanche of war spending that would surely ensue in Iraq over a period of what could only be YEARS would see debt explode and interest rates rise leading to........a recession.

When? Unclear....but as certain to arrive as almost anything I could imagine. The signs would be there along the way.

In this context, cars came to mind. The last time the United States did this to itself, the Vietnam War era, the big US automakers made almost no provision for a possible future that involved selling smaller, more efficient cars. They suffered and the Japanese and European car makers began to eat their lunch.

Surely, this time around, mindful of past cycles, the legion of experts the major US automakers would have on tap would see to it that this contingency was covered. How could I, standing in a paddock in NZ, possibly have more insight into global economic trends than they could or would? Seemed bizarre to me that they would allow this particular process to engulf them.

I clearly recall concluding that they would. I was betting on the myopic stupidity of people I've never met and never will...based on my own knowledge and experience of US corporate culture.

Looks like I was right.

Whenever I think I'm right, I look for an alternative explanation. There is one, but it requires some faith in clever people working for US auto makers and if they really were that clever, they would be able to avoid the whole problem in the first place by being tooled up and ready to make smaller, more efficient cars....and would have been pushing for laws to push people in that direction in order to address climate change, energy independence, national security...or whatever.

It could be that running the US-based auto industry off the cliff is their way of breaking the powerful unions who ensure that US (and Canadian) auto workers have good wages and conditions. While times are good...No problem. When times get tough, the automakers let the shit hit the fan, take the inevitable bail-out....and bust the unions.

This alternative explanation accounts for all the facts BUT FOR the effect such a plan would have on the current crop of executives....who would almost certainly get the sack and have their reputations tarnished and possibly their business careers ended.

Whatever....there are some dumb people in big automaker offices in Detroit.

Another reason to NOT vote for National

Have you ever met Tony Ryall? I have.

I can't vote for any party that would put a party hack like that anywhere near its front bench.

As Minister of Health , Ryall would be the very LAST person you would want anywhere NEAR a PPP.

Having watched him for 20 years, his allegiance is to the party, the ideology and the cronies....and the facts come a very poor 5th.....out of four.

In 1990, on his first run as a candidate, he caught my attention when he wrote a detailed letter to the Kawerau Gazette explaining why we didn't want MMP. But his entire letter was a critique of STV.....an entirely different voting system.

Didn't matter. He was against it - whatever it was.

Deficits and crony capitalism - Kiwi style

It's fascinating watching our local politicians, especially the National Party, following the path laid down by George W Bush in 2000 / 2001.

Throughout the election campaign in the US in 2000, Bush promised tax cuts that he said would benefit everyone, but actually benefited the top 1% of tax payers the most. The rationale for the cuts was based on the prosperity of the Tech Bubble.....and that rationale disappeared in smoke as the Tech Crash in mid / late 2000 unfolded.

But Bush went ahead and implemented the tax cuts anyway and ended the string of budget surpluses, replacing them instead with an unending string of deficits of at least US$250 billion / year prior to the invasion of Iraq and almost double that since then. His crony capitalist mates filled their pockets from the public trough through ten thousand and one PPPs in the US, Iraq and anywhere else the American Empire had a presence.

It has all ended in tears with higher interest rates to fund that deficit eventually leading to the fall of the US dollar, higher oil prices and the credit crunch not unfolding.

It's a wonder then that the National Party, in particular, with all this waste and wreckage in the global rear-vision mirror, is apparently blindly (or purposefully misleadingly) still promising large tax cuts. It says these cuts will be funded by reducing waste. So far, it has not identified any waste within two orders of magnitude of the amount of money required. National now says it will borrow to fund infrastructure and "growth"......though if there were no tax cuts, they would not need to borrow, or borrow as much, to fund that infrastructure. They are essentially saying they will borrow to fund the tax cuts.

That is exactly what George W Bush did and we know where that lead.

I'm not saying borrowing is bad. It's not.

I am saying that borrowing to fund tax cuts is bad. It is.

The way National propose to "save" money is through shifting many government services to public private partnerships - a.k.a. PPPs. I've seen PPPs operating first hand and they most often cost more than the original service, while providing less service, and they are less transparent and thus less accountable than their public sector equivalent. After all, their books are closed and their operations typically described as "commercially sensitive". The funders they are accountable to have strong political incentives to declare success even when failure is obvious.

It's a recipe for pocket-stuffing by political cronies and clients.

Even better, electoral finance laws making donations more transparent allow a government to see clearly who is donating to whom....and the winning of contracts for PPPs may be dependent on delivering exclusive donations to the incumbents. Florida under former Republican governor, Jeb Bush, is an excellent precedent. If you wanted a PPP, you had to donate to only one party - his - in order to improve your chances of getting the business.

National's entire approach is a proven recipe for more cost, less accountability, lower levels of service....and bigger deficits.

The evidence is there for all to see. The US has been doing for the past 10 years or more what National proposes to do here if they win.

Labour has tried to guess where the line between surplus and deficit may lie...and probably hoped to render any additional tax cuts impossible without cutting into "core" services that would be deeply unpopular with voters.....looking toward the 2011 election.

Large numbers of Kiwi voters, unaware of all this, plan to vote for one or other of them. It's like watching a low-motion train wreck.....

Bloated US pork-barrel bailout

The original 3 page proposal from US Treasury Secretary Paulson has grown to a monumental 450 pages of  pork-barrel amendments and additions. In true upsdie-down style, the US Congress is considering committing US taxpayers to a $700 billion bailout package while using the legislation itself to give almost US$100 billion in tax cuts to all manner of special interests, including a company in the state of Oregon who make wooden arrows as kids toys. Similar measures would be enacted on other states in the hope of winning the support of mainly Republican representatives for the bailout measure.

Cutting taxes while blowing out the deficit by a trillion dollars seems an odd way to show commitment to addressing the real problems with the US financial system. 

If ever there was a sign that the whole thing is going to turn into a feeding frenczy for the already well-connected, this is it.

Voting the thing down is looking easier by the minute until these thieves GET IT.....that this bailout - if it happens at all - isn't about filling THEIR pockets.

Wall St bail-out feeding frenzy?

I'm beginning to wonder if the Wall St bail out is a good idea after all. What would happen if there was no bail out?

This NY Times story from last week gives us a hint of what any bailout might be like - a gold rush for any greedy bastard who made a bad investment:

“Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

“Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

“At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

“Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury’s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.”

That behaviour reminds me of our local Contact Energy getting in early and grabbing people's tax cuts in Wellington and the South island with its 11% - 12% price.

Pork chop barbie on an Arctic Ocean beach one day soon

Over on Hot Topic, Gareth reports 2008 could be the worst year for ice cover depletion in the Arctic Sea to date. More disturbingly, whether it is or not, the Arctic Ocean will be all but ice free in 5 years time.

For the hardier souls among us, that may be see the beginning of a northern land rush as the Canadian (and other) "North"s become more moderate and - dare I say it - livable. That may depend on how much sea levels rise. Judging the new coast lines may not be easy.

If it sounds like I've given up on people have any real impact on climate change, I'm close to it. The progress since the Rio Conference in 1992 has been negligible as the greedy pigs who can't lift their snouts out of the daily trough long enough to see the butcher coming continue to frustrate any real progress on the whole issue.

It's so bad, they would rather spend millions frustrating any progress by sowing confusion than spend the same money doing something about the problem.

I've mentioned in other posts that I used to own pigs. They would dig up all the grass to get to the grubs....and when they were done there was neither grass nor grubs. At that point, they had privatised all their profits and expected me to socialise their losses by feeding them....like many modern "capitalists" (major banks loaded with dodgy debt and falling over are prime examples).

So start looking for those prime spots a few kilometers in-shore from the Arctic Ocean. You could be on to a winner. The pigs are running and there may be fresh pork on every barbie following a climate disaster near you.

National's "Bush-o-nomics"

First you lie to the voters. Say any damn thing to get elected.

Then, you put in place big tax cuts and spend like hell. Borrow whatever you need. Break the public service. Impoverish and degrade the social safety net.

You can "cut bureaucracy" be gutting the agencies that protect the environment - air, water quality, worker safety, any sort of "profit-limiting" regulatory body is a target for cutting and gutting.

Most especially, you gut the bodies that monitor the disastrous effects your other cuts are having. If you can't shut them down entirely, you stack them with your people....who will say what you want them to say.

The "public / private parterships" become a system of patronage where only those who make exclusive donations to your party are rewarded with contracts. Jeb Bush lead the way there in Forida and much of the rest of the US is now following his example.

To lock this madness in, get rid of MMP......because democracy is the only thing that can stop it.

The hints abroad so far make it appear that New Zealand is about to head down this long, dark tunnel if National were to govern alone after the elections.

If that came to pass, heading to Australia would appear to be the only way out.

A perspective on lunacy

Reading through the Auckland Public Transport Discussion Forum this morning, I found a post by "Andrew G" linking to an article, "The Threat to the Car" on a US conservative web site.

Author Terence P. Jeffrey describes the private car as an essential part of American liberty and equates public transport with the darkest excesses of freedom-negating socialism. A sample:

"I have no doubt that most Americans who love the freedom of movement they derive from owning and operating a car or truck have recognized efforts by various levels of government to induce them to stop, or limit, their driving and cajole or compel them to leave the free-market transportation system and submit to the socialist transportation system."

It's a hilarious read. Mr. Jeffrey has apparently never taken an airplane - or must own one. Imagine riding to your destination with people you did not choose to be with. Terrible.

"In a free-market transportation system, a person travels solely in the company of people with whom he has freely chosen to travel. In a socialist transportation system, a person may be compelled to travel in the company of people he does not know and who could even be a danger to him."

One would think all those other cars on the motorway hurtling by at 100kph or more were full of Mr. Jeffrey's best mates.

I wonder what people who can't afford to drive cars do? Mr. Jeffrey is silent on this.

One commenter in the forums was concerned Maurice Williamson see this article lest it become National Party transport policy should they win the coming election. Given Williamson's laissez-faire approach to his past portfolios (telecommunications, in particular), that may not be the joke it was intended to be. Balancing that is Williamson's advocacy of electronic toll roads, surely an example of Stalinist oppressive excess limiting freedom if ever there was one. This could go either way.

Mr. Jeffrey's article is one more sign that US conservatism has descended into a dark night of lunatic extremity from which it may not emerge for some time. To the extent Americans vote for ideas like this is - yet again - a measure of their collective intelligence as a nation. In recent years, they have been achieving lower scores than many had hoped.

How capitalism committed suicide

Bloomberg's Mark Gilbert offers an interesting take on the global outlook in his July 9th column "Grandad, tell how capitalism committed suicide".

Basic thesis: In wealthy countries, people got too greedy and borrowed too much, while in poorer countries their rising aspirations lead to competition for resources and rampant inflation. Examples ensue. My favourite is:

``Capitalism sowed the seeds of its own demise because the benefits of a decade-long boom accrued to capital, with nothing flowing to labor. Telling workers who hadn't had a decent pay raise for years to tighten their belts once the good times ended proved disastrous.

``People started to realize that just because communism had lost, that didn't mean capitalism had won. Cracks started to appear. In New Zealand, the government nationalized the country's rail and ferry services, deciding it could do a better job of running the transport network than private industry.

Seems to me any ideology is only as good as the people who attempt to make it real. One can make a credible argument that Communism as an ideal is wonderful, but people are too selfish, lazy and corrupt to make it real. The same can be said for most religions where people fail to live up to the ideal and even pervert it into justification for war when the core message is for peace.

Capitalism is just one more ideology that would appear to have been undermined by selfishness, sloth and corruption. Recent years are littered with fraudulent accounting, dodgy investment (sub-prime mortgages and related securities) and many other scams that have consumed and destroyed nominal wealth on a scale previously unknown in human history. Then we must also consider the REAL cost of all this profligate waste in terms of resources consumed and environment degraded......for what?

Anyone with a clue can see from the outset unregulated capitalism can only lead to monopoly / oligopoly, effective extortion (monopoly rents) and waste. The problem in recent years is that the capitalists have taken over the regulatory bodies in too many jurisdictions and the human potential for selfishness, sloth and corruptions has been realised more fully than is good for us. Instead of inhibiting damaging excess, too often captured regulators have enabled more dmaaging excess. This is particularly evident in the United States in the FERC (Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission) and the nuetering of the EPA (Evironmental protection Agency). In the case of the EPA, the crony-capitalist Bush White House simple marks its reports of degrading environmental conditions "return to sender" and refuses to accept them.

I'm a pragmatist. Ideology is for the faith-ridden. I'm not one of them. Capitalism is no better than the people within it...and was further hindered by treating as a virtue those negative human drivers that would ultimately undermine it.

PPP is acronym for "pork barrel"?

State-owned Enterprises Minister, Trevor Mallard, was thinking out loud on TV the other night and suggested the new Kiwirail's locomotives could be assembled in New Zealand. I did not see the Agenda program, but the reportage of it conveys a whiff of policy on the hoof. A bright idea, now go follow it up and see if it floats.

Without thinking too hard, I can think of several reasons why assembling the locos locally would be a good idea on its own merits: skill retention, reducing exposure to forex risk and a certain amount of protection from technology changes dictated elsewhere....as well as the opportunity to innovate locally.

National's Gerry Brownlee opposed the idea, conjuring up images of "the glory days of NZ Railways, which everyone knew was a huge waste of taxpayer resources."

In Brownlee's view it seems we either don't make the locos at all, or we are recreating the Railways Department. He sees nothing in between.

Brownlee also said "this smacks of pork-barrel politics" because one of the rail workshops that might do the work is in Trevor Mallard's local electorate.

On that basis, no government contracts should be awarded in Auckland without over 20 local MPs (and several list) being accused of pork barrelling. Same goes for Welington, Christchurch and Dunedin.....and all those rural seats held by National, I suppose.

Clearly stupid. But par for the course from Brownlee who too often falls off the far end of the "stupid people" meter at my house.

Brownlee hasn't thought this through. Nothing new there. National is the party who want to download state services and functions to the private sector via Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). It seems more than slightly bizarre and hypocritical for Brownless to be accusing anyone of "pork barrel" politics when National will be handing out state-funded contracts like lollies from Santa's elves at a Christmas parade.

The thrust of National's approach to public services is to allegedly reduce cost to the taxpayer by giving contracts to their supporters in private business to deliver the service. If there have been any funder / provider situations that really ended up saving money and providing better service, I've yet to see it. The contract management and compliance monitoring costs create an entire new bureaucracy that National then describes as waste. Ask any local body, or ARTA, how much they spend while "saving" money on funder / provider management overheads. Why don't we have unified ticketing on Auckland public transport? Why don't the bus routes integrate with the trains? The list goes on...and it comes back to the failings in the funde / provider model National wants to convert everything they possibly can over to. A big trough full of tax money for private business to feed on and effectively not acountable to the users of the service.

Given what Brownlee says, Naitonal's policy can only be seen as pork-barrelling by design....and thousands of new jobs monitoring the pork.

School food: Another spurious outrage

Kiwiblog is into Crosby / Textor overdrive today. Farrar's latest post, erroneously and ironically titled "Smart Kids", is about how school kids aren't allowed to buy unhealthy food in the tuck shop, so they cross the road to the dairy for chippies and fizzy drinks.

I don’t see why anyone should expect schools to be enablers of poor food choices by kids.

Next we’ll be told 18yo students should be sold smokes in the school tuck shop. After all, they just cross the road and buy them anyway. Maybe we should open a TAB next to the new liquor store (18+ only) by the pie cart in the school hall.

But we force these children to wear school-sourced uniforms with (expensive) school crests stitched on every item so parents can't buy cheaper substitutes. If you fail to provide the monopoly uniform for your child, they are denied an education altogether by your local tax-funded state school.

When National opposes school uniforms and the defacto expulsion supporting them, THEN I'll believe they are sincere about "freedom" and choice".

Hypocrisy to the max.

This Crosby/ Textor “nanny-state” BS sands out like dogs balls once you’re aware of the strokes being pulled.

Another spurious "outrage": SPARC

David Farrar over at Kiwiblog has posted today contrasting what the government is doing to support community sports versus what the National party would do.

Exec Summary: National are trying to make the present government look bad for already doing what National says it will do.

The supporting details:

The government is castigated for spending $11.5m over 5 years on "a web site".

Farrar says National would spend this money much better:

"National is saying we’ll take that money and spend it directly on funding and facilities for kid’s sports."

and Farrar quotes this extract as an "interesting comparison":

One big cost for example is the Sparc website. This year Sparc will spend $5.5 million on its website. And between 2006 and 2010, Sparc will spend $11.5 million on its website. That’s enough to give almost $6,000 worth of sporting equipment to every primary school in New Zealand. Or to buy a decent cricket set for every family in Waitakere City.

The conclusion we might draw from this is that it is CRAZY to spend $11.5m on a website instead of buying kids bats and balls and getting them out there to play. Reactions on Kiwiblog in the comments make it clear this IS the comparison being responded to. One can almost hear the sound of a thousand knees jerking.

"Why waste money on a web site for kids to gaze at when the REAL problem is getting them off their arses?"

As usual, the truth is much more interesting. The SPARC web site isn't for kids to gaze at instead of getting outside. SPARC is actually "Sport and Recreation New Zealand". Their role:

"At SPARC (Sport & Recreation New Zealand) we're dedicated to getting New Zealanders moving. That means everything from supporting elite athletes to getting out into local communities and encouraging people to get active."

The web site itself offers information and support to people interested in getting involved in supporting and organising activities promoting health and fitness in their communities. There is skills advice for coaches, organisational advice for setting up sports clubs, and a lot of other information and materials for enabling anyone in the community who wants to get involved in doing something, but doesn't know where to start.

For example, under "active Communities" the site explains how to make a proposal for funding and who to make it to. It's community driven. Local people know what's best. The site's approach is not to dictate anything to anyone, but rather to provide an opportunity for people and communities to learn how to improve things for themselves.

National would have us believe this is a waste of money.

I simply can't agree. SPARC are already providing funding to communities for activities and for sports for kids. The very same thing National says they will do if they are the government.

National's statements on this must be based on the negative approach dictated by their Crosby/Textor campaign advisors.They are trying to make the present government look bad for already doing what National says it will do. The success of the tactic relies on the average person not actually checking to see if the claim is valid. In this case, National's claim is clearly not valid. But you have to look for yourself to see that.

How does it make you feel knowing they want to trick you into voting for them using strategies that assume you're lazy and ignorant? That you aren't curious, don't know and won't make any effort to find out.

I think that's just not good enough. This "outrage" gets the "stupid people" label. It's up to you whether that applies to you for being fooled by tactics like this without questioning them or to National for employing them.

Louisiana: Dumb enough yet?

Ars Technica reports the US state of Louisiana has passed the first anti-evolution (so-called "academic freedom") law in the United States. Other states considering similar laws all failed to enact them. Louisiana has overcome any connection to verifiable reality and beaten them to it.

The bill would allow local school boards to approve supplemental classroom materials specifically for the critique of scientific theories, allowing poorly-informed board members to stick their communities with Dover-sized legal fees. The text of the LSEA suggests that it's intended to foster critical thinking, calling on the state Board of Education to "assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories." Unfortunately, it's remarkably selective in its suggestion of topics that need critical thinking, as it cites scientific subjects "including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Oddly, the last item on the list is not the subject of any scientific theory; the remainder are notable for being topics that are the focus of frequent political controversies rather than scientific ones.

How bizarre is that? Cloning isn't a theory. But it is an issue for the religious Right.

The dumbing down process, underway for decades in the US thanks to fundamentalist religion and TV, appears to have reached the very top in Louisiana.

It seems fair to say Louisiana is now officially the dumbest state in the United States. They voted for people this stupid.

Hypocrisy is ugly

There have been so many "up is down" moments over the past few days, it's damned hard to keep up.

Homepaddock reported this morning how Federated Farmers Dairy Chair, Frank Brenmuhl, said:

"Townies should not expect dairy farmers to donate $15 million so that the price of dairy foods sold in NZ can be reduced.

“They want … and they want … but they do not want to pay.” he said."

Mr. Brenmuhl appears to have no sympathy for Kiwis upset about the volatility of dairy prices, driven by market conditions and political decisions made far from these shores.

Meanwhile, over at the Hive, the very same Frank Brenmuhl is signatory to a letter about the proposed Emissions Trading System (ETS).

[UPDATE1: The Hive has deleted the post containing the letter referred to. I did not make a copy.][UPDATE2: The letter has now been reposted on the Hive and the link repaired.]

The letter makes some good points about the ambitious ETS expressed from a viewpoint that doesn't see any reason at all for New Zealand to provide any leadership on greenhouse gas emissions or be any sort of positive example to the world. Lowest-common denominator is the general tone. Business will abandon New Zealand, disaster, calamity and so on. Oh well. Nothing new there from NZ business when asked to ante up.

Most fun of all, included in this letter, signed by Frank Bremuhl, is this statement:

The reported back Bill fails to provide any safety valve to protect against a high and volatile price of carbon, in an international carbon market that lacks liquidity and where the price of carbon reflects political decisions made in Europe, rather than the least cost emissions abatement.

"lacks Liquidity" means too many people are making too much carbon and there aren't enough CHEAP carbon credits to go around and allow people to continue to do nothing. As more people continue to not do enough to reduce emissions, the price COULD go sky high. But that would only happen if people don't respond to the market signals those carbon prices are sending. That couldn't happen, right? Markets are supposed to be wonderful.....until it's YOU who have to pay, I guess.

Putting these two statements supported by Mr. Brenmuhl alongside each other, he clearly wants to be protected from the volatile price of carbon when the cost is to him, but sees no reason why there should be "any safety valve to protect against a high and volatile price of"......let's say: milk? - when he's the guy raking in the cash.

You'd laugh if it wasn't so pathetic.

"Your price is too high, let the taxpayer pay. My price can be whatever I get can away with and stop your whining!"

Nice one, Frank. I'm thinking maybe I should add a new label to cover stuff like this, but "stupid people" will do for now.

Smacking Hysteria

The petition to roll back the removal of the defense in law for beating your children is a sort of IQ test and it appears roughly 390,000 people have failed.

The question proposed for the referendum is appropriately wide of the mark:

"Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand."

It's hard to see why these people are in such an uproar. Not one parent has been prosecuted for smacking a child since the right to beat your children with impunity was repealed.

The old law said:

Section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961
Domestic discipline
(1) Every parent of a child and every person in the place of a parent of a child is justified in using force by way of correction towards the child, if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances.

In practice, this had allowed lip-swelling, eye-blackening, ear-drum popping physical assault (not just smacking) on children. There are no two ways about that. What is not clear is how serious the assault may be before it becomes unreasonable. Many of us will know of families where "a hiding" resulting in significant physical injury to the child is considered to be reasonable by the parent.

Assault on Children is already illegal under Section 194(a)of the Crimes Act and no distinction is made between parents and non-parents:

194. Assault on a child, or by a male on a female---Every one is
liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 2 years who---
(a) Assaults any child under the age of 14 years; or
(b) Being a male, assaults any female.
Cf. 1952, No. 43, s. 5

Has anyone ever been prosecuted for "smacking" a child"? No. Just as no adult has been prosecuted for a trivial assault on another adult though these are technically illegal, too.

It's now obvious that physical assaults on children have been illegal since at least 1961 when the original Crimes Act was passed, with Section 59 effectively allowing parents to assault their children - legally - provided the police did not consider the assault to be so excessive as to warrant prosecution. That left parents a lot of room to inflict violence on children with no guidance in law as to what was reasonable.

The new law doesn't actually change this much at all. Certainly not from the perspective of parents who do NOT beat their children.

Parental control

(1) Every parent of a child and every person in the place of a parent of the child is justified in using force if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances and is for the purpose of—
(a) preventing or minimising harm to the child or another person; or
(b) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in conduct that amounts to a criminal offence; or
(c) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in offensive or disruptive behaviour; or
(d) performing the normal daily tasks that are incidental to good care and parenting.

(2) Nothing in subsection (1) or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.
(3) Subsection (2) prevails over subsection (1).
(4) To avoid doubt, it is affirmed that the Police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against a parent of a child or person in the place of a parent of a child in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child, where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution.
Subsection (1) was substituted, as from 23 July 1990, by section 28(2) Education Amendment Act 1990 (1990 No 60).
Subsection (3) was inserted, as from 23 July 1990, by section 28(3) Education Amendment Act 1990 (1990 No 60).
Section 59 was substituted, as from 21 June 2007, by section 5 Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act 2007 (2007 No 18).

The new law says much the same thing as the old law. It is illegal to assault children. What has changed is the new law makes it clear that force can be used to prevent children from doing things they need to be prevented from doing, but they cannot be gratuitously assaulted for the purpose of correction (punishment). Further, the law explicitly allows the police to ignore inconsequential assaults for children as they already do for adults.

This is essentially the same thing as the old law, but much more clear than the old law. This additional clarity is important, good and useful to parents and the police. It lowers the bar as to what violence and how much violence is acceptable. That IS a good thing.

How any reasonable, informed person could oppose this law change defies understanding. One can only conclude people opposed to it are either unreasonable, uninformed or both. I suspect reasonable people are merely uninformed. Having seen their materials first hand, the "Family First" group and so-called "Kiwi Party", and their fellow travelers, are a primary source of mis-information on this law change.

One would hope that if there were to be a referendum that Kiwis would actually READ the old law and the new law and see for themselves the hysteria whipped up over this law change is unfounded. That hope may be in vain given roughly 50% of Kiwis who state a preference are happy to vote for a party that refuses to reveal its policies. Whatever qualities Kiwis generally may possess, the evidence of recent political polls suggest that where law and politics are concerned, thoughtfulness and curiosity appear to be minority traits.

Just one more example of unfounded beliefs unconnected from what is verifiable and real. The campaign against this new law is just one more trick being played on people made stupid by their own lack of curiosity as to what the new law actually, REALLY says (and means).

"I know he died but I don't want change"

Each day the sun comes up, I swear the world is a little less rational than the day before. This story from Romania makes me wonder - again - if there is any intelligent life on Earth.

The Romanian village of Voinesti this week knowingly re-elected the incumbent mayor despite the fact he was dead.

(H/T to Dr. Dawg)