"When a government becomes powerful, it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurper which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance for votes with which to perpetuate itself." - Cicero
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force." - George Washington
"In all that people can do for themselves, the government ought not to interfere." - Abraham Lincoln
"The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power." - John Stuart Mill
"The government's role is whatever the government defines it to be." - Helen Clark

Blogarama

Review Kiwi Pundit

< ? kiwi blogs # >







inHOUSE: Software development and services, web design, computer training, crystal reports, sql, business intelligence and reporting in Wellington, New Zealand

 
Prebble resignation

Richard Prebble has resigned as ACT Leader. A replacement hasn't been chosen yet.

UPDATE: There is going to be a 'primary' process to select the new leader. The details are yet to be decided, but will keep you posted.

FURTHER UPDATE: Heh.

 
The McGurk Effect

Fascinating.

(via Secular Blasphemy)

 
I knew it

From Tim Blair, new evidence that the U.S. wanted to attack Iraq before September 11.

 
UN latest

UNSCAM, UNron, Kofigate, whatever you call it, here's the latest:

More than $1 billion (£560 million) collected by the United Nations as its "commission" on Iraq's oil-for-food programme has become a fresh focus for the inquiry into the biggest scandal ever to engulf the organisation.

At least $1.1 billion was paid directly into UN coffers, supposedly to cover the cost of administering the $67 billion scheme, while Saddam Hussein diverted funds intended for the poor and sick of Iraq to bribe foreign governments and prominent overseas supporters of his regime.

A senior UN official who is closely involved in uncovering evidence of the scandal admitted: "The UN was not doing this work just for the good of Iraq. Cash from Saddam's government was keeping the UN going for a few years.

"No one knows exactly what sums were involved because an audit has never been done. That is why they are wriggling and squirming now in New York."

Investigators are also focusing on a separate alleged abuse, under which Iraq's suppliers overvalued goods shipped into the country under the scheme and then paid a "kickback" to Saddam's regime, providing it with highly-prized hard currency.

Thousands of tons of food delivered under the UN programme were later revealed to have been rotten, and many of the medicines - particularly those imported from Russia - were found to be out of date.

 
Where's the outrage?

The Guardian has this story titled 'Muslim women exempt from ID card photos'.

It's wrong for religious beliefs to give people exemptions from laws that everyone else has to follow, regardless of whether it's a Muslim woman or a Catholic priest getting special treatment.

The real issue, though, is that ID cards are being introduced at all. The British government is making no attempt to conceal the ultimate objective:

Blunkett will announce tomorrow a £3 billion scheme to introduce identity cards to Britain. Although at first the scheme will be voluntary, the Home Office will argue that the country should move to a compulsory scheme by 2012. By then the public would not be forced to carry them but would have to produce a card within a limited period if asked by the police. Blunkett has said privately that he wants people to carry them at all times.

This year is the 60th anniversary of the publication of 'The Road to Serfdom' by F.A. Hayek. Now seems like a good time to post the following quote:

How many features of Hitler's system have not been recommended to us for imitation from the most unexpected quarters, unaware that they are an integral part of that system and incompatible with the free society we hope to preserve? It seems almost as if we did not want to understand the development which has produced totalitarianism because such an understanding might destroy some of the dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling.

 
Latest Poll

From One News:

National 48%, Labour 37%

Preferred leader: Clark 32%, Brash 31%

 
FCC acts to protect privacy and dignity of Fidel Castro

Remember the prank phone call where a Miami radio station spoke to Fidel Castro live on the air by pretending to be Hugo Chavez?

The FCC has fined the station $4000 because:

"... the Cuban officials were not provided with notice that their conversations were to be broadcast prior to recording; and that Mr. Castro was only provided with notice of the station's intent to record and broadcast the conversation after the conversation had commenced."

"The rule reflects the Commission's longstanding belief that prior notification is essential to protect individual's legitimate expectation of privacy, as well as to preserve their dignity by avoidance of non-consensual broadcasts of their conversations."

I'm sure we all feel safer knowing that poor, helpless victims like Mr. Castro have U.S. government protection against vicious, out-of-control disc jockeys.

(link via Jeff Jarvis)

 
Watch where you point that thing!

You can read here about a case in the Auckland Distict Court that gave rise to the following comment:

Under cross-examination, Mr Ewington denied using the hamburger as a weapon.

 
I love Google

Waffles

 
Diaperless babies and non-flushing toilets

I think this could be a promising policy for the Greens to advocate in the next election. Check this guy out:

Scott Noelle, editor of the Continuum Concept website and a father, explained why he eventually stopped using diapers on his infant daughter Olivia, in a web essay titled "Going Diaperless."

"In my mind, diapers became the symbol of the Evil Empire of Western Parenting in which babies must suffer to accommodate the needs of their parents' broken-continuum culture: a controlled, sterile, odorless, wall-to-wall carpeted fortress in which to live with the illusion of dominion over nature," wrote Noelle, on the website livingharmony.com.

Despite his concerns, Noelle continued to use diapers on his daughter, despite the fact that he "felt like a monster and a fraud."

Noelle finally chose to go diaperless and looked to traditional cultures for inspiration. "How I longed for a simple, dirt-floored, baby-friendly hut like that of a Yequana family," he wrote.

(via Iain Murray).

 
Life Imitates Seinfeld

From The Doorman:

You remember a few years ago in New York, we had the doorman strike? They have a union, in the fancy buildings, and they went out on strike. Now you would think, if any group of people would not wanna demonstrate what life would be like without them, it would be doormen.

(as belligerent doorman) "Let's see how they do without us!"

There's no doorman, people open the door, they walk in, it's... you know. Who's gonna walk out next? The guys who clean your windshield at the traffic light, with the dirty rag?

(as window washer) "We demand shorter yellows, and longer reds!"

Now, from Marginal Revolution comes this news:

Protesting French actors and technicians, who prompted the cancellation of most summer arts festivals last year and forced the resignation of the French culture minister this spring, are now threatening to disrupt the Cannes film festival next month. They want to pressure the government to bow to their demands on unemployment benefits. On Monday the protesters muscled their way into a Paris theater where the annual Molière theater prizes were being awarded. Amid raucous scenes, that ceremony was held without lights or microphones. Across town they also forced "Il Trovatore" to be given in concert version at the Bastille Opera.

 
PBRF Report Summary

I've been browsing through the Tertiary Education Commission's report on research in Tertiary institutions. The full report is here (2.4MB PDF).

Some observations:

Researchers were assessed on a 0-7 scale for three criteria: research output which counts for 70% of the total, 'peer esteem' which has a 15% weighting and 'contribution to research environment' which also has a 15% rating. The result is a score out of 700, e.g. ratings of 6-4-3 in the three categories would lead to a score of 6*70 + 4*15 + 3*15 = 525.

These scores are then assigned a 'quality category', with A being 600-700, B 400-599, C 200-399, and R less than 200. This means the fact that only 5.5% of eligible participants received an A score is not necessarily a tragedy because an A is very hard to get. The report also says:

'Many staff who produced research outputs of a world-class standard did not secure an 'A' because they failed to demonstrate either the necessary level of peer esteem or a contribution to the research environment of the standard required. Whereas only 5.5% of PBRF-eligible staff received an 'A', 9.5% were assigned a score of 6 or 7 for the research output component of their Evidence Portfolios.'

I imgaine those people must be somewhat dissatisfied with the methodology.

The number-crunching isn't done yet because then they assign number values to the grades: A=10, B=6, C=2 and R=0. I don't know why they couldn't take the score out of 700 and just divide by 70, that must be why they're academics and I'm not. The results are the average of these numbers after adjusting for staff that work only part-time.

The one chart I really wanted that isn't included in the report is a comparison for each subject, across universities. I've created this below. In each box, the first number is the average rating (out of 10, although in a decent-sized department you can't really get much above 6 in practice), and the second number in brackets is the total number of full-time equivalent staff members in the department. The highest scoring university for each subject is in bold.

	Massey	Auckland	Canterbury	Otago	Waikato	Victoria
Accounting and Finance	1.8 (48.9)	2.3 (31.1)	2.3 (15.8)	1.9 (22.2)	2.8 (22.3)	2.3 (19.9)
Applied Biological Sciences	3.3 (65.1)	2.7 (3.0)	4.0 (6.1)	3.0 (14.5)		2.9 (2.0)
Anthropology and Archaeology	3.8 (9.3)	5.4 (19.9)	6.0 (4.0)	5.1 (13.0)	3.2 (5.0)	2.0 (5.0)
Architecture	0.9 (17.4)	3.3 (34.1)	6.0 (1.0)	2.9 (16.0)	6.0 (1.0)	3.3 (32.5)
Biomedical	0.5 (5.9)	4.7 (92.8)		3.9 (52.3)	2.0 (1.0)
Chemistry	3.5 (30.7)	3.8 (62.2)	5.1 (28.4)	4.3 (34.0)	5.1 (13.0)	3.6 (10.0)
Clinical Medicine	0.0 (1.0)	3.6 (94.1)		3.0 (96.6)		6.0 (1.0)
Communications, Journalism and Media Studies	1.7 (15.7)	3.1 (5.5)	2.0 (10.0)	2.2 (6.5)	3.8 (9.0)	2.9 (9.0)
Computer Science and IT	1.3 (84.0)	3.7 (72.5)	3.7 (16.3)	2.7 (49.6)	4.7 (27.7)	3.7 (39.0)
Design	0.7 (44.5)	0.0 (2.0)		0.7 (8.3)		0.0 (1.0)
Earth Sciences	3.5 (16.3)	4.7 (23.3)	4.8 (25.4)	4.5 (19.3)	4.5 (18.5)	4.3 (23.6)
Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour	3.6 (31.0)	5.2 (29.2)	4.7 (25.0)	4.9 (32.9)	4.6 (10.7)	3.2 (19.0)
Economics	2.8 (25.3)	4.6 (27.1)	3.0 (14.8)	3.9 (17.6)	3.4 (11.5)	2.8 (26.0)
Education	1.4 (141.8)	3.7 (66.9)	1.9 (25.8)	2.2 (27.5)	1.8 (130.8)	2.9 (22.7)
Engineering and Technology	2.8 (54.2)	4.5 (122.5)	4.8 (87.8)	4.5 (11.5)	3.6 (19.5)	4.0 (2.0)
English Language and Literature	0.9 (15.0)	4.4 (27.1)	2.7 (18.0)	3.5 (14.9)	2.4 (10.0)	3.2 (18.6)
Foreign Languages and Linguistics	1.1 (15.8)	3.9 (46.0)	3.8 (25.2)	2.3 (20.7)	2.7 (10.8)	2.8 (37.9)
History and Classics	3.1 (25.8)	4.2 (52.3)	3.7 (36.2)	5.0 (23.9)	2.4 (12.4)	3.8 (27.5)
Human Geography	4.5 (6.5)	4.9 (13.6)	3.7 (6.0)	3.7 (3.5)	3.1 (19.6)	4.7 (6.0)
Law	0.8 (15.3)	3.6 (61.6)	3.7 (27.3)	4.1 (28.8)	2.4 (30.5)	3.0 (38.6)
Management	1.5 (83.4)	2.8 (52.4)	2.9 (18.0)	1.9 (23.0)	3.4 (40.2)	3.4 (28.9)
Maori Knowledge and Development	2.5 (31.2)	4.1 (13.6)	2.0 (1.0)	1.9 (11.9)	2.6 (15.5)	4.6 (5.5)
Marketing and Tourism	1.9 (26.9)	3.8 (18.6)	2.0 (4.5)	2.9 (37.2)	2.2 (13.3)	2.3 (19.0)
Mathematics	3.2 (23.0)	3.8 (48.9)	3.7 (21.2)	3.2 (13.0)	5.7 (9.5)	4.3 (16.2)
Molecular and Cellular Biology	3.0 (54.9)	4.0 (75.8)	3.6 (17.4)	3.7 (183.8)	4.2 (12.9)	2.4 (11.0)
Music, Literary and other Arts	2.3 (18.2)	4.8 (24.7)	3.9 (11.5)	4.1 (14.9)	3.9 (8.0)	5.3 (17.0)
Nursing	0.3 (24.2)	0.6 (21.6)		0.4 (21.6)		0.9 (15.4)
Other Health Studies	1.6 (30.2)	1.8 (35.5)	3.7 (6.0)	1.6 (82.4)	10.0 (1.0)
Philosophy	0.8 (5.0)	6.4 (20.3)	4.1 (9.9)	6.2 (8.5)	3.1 (7.5)	4.9 (11.0)
Physics	2.6 (11.5)	4.2 (29.5)	3.8 (30.2)	3.6 (17.8)	3.3 (2.7)	5.1 (9.5)
Political Science	2.1 (10.3)	4.0 (17.0)	4.3 (12.0)	3.1 (11.0)	2.9 (7.0)	4.6 (25.6)
Psychology	2.7 (46.2)	4.7 (42.0)	4.7 (30.8)	5.1 (38.3)	3.1 (22.3)	4.8 (25.4)
Public Health	2.5 (17.6)	3.1 (54.2)		3.4 (86.4)	2.0 (1.0)	1.8 (7.9)
Religious Studies	2.0 (3.0)	6.0 (1.0)	6.0 (4.0)	4.1 (9.7)	3.4 (1.8)	4.0 (5.0)
Sociology, Criminology and Gender Studies	2.4 (52.7)	4.9 (18.8)	2.8 (31.0)	2.9 (27.0)	2.0 (23.5)	2.8 (28.0)
Sport and Exercise	1.6 (10.0)	2.4 (6.8)		2.4 (18.4)	0.0 (1.0)
Statistics	2.2 (20.0)	6.0 (20.0)	2.2 (9.6)	2.5 (15.2)	3.8 (8.0)	3.0 (7.7)
Theatre and Film	4.0 (4.0)	5.2 (5.0)	2.0 (3.0)	2.3 (6.0)	2.4 (5.0)	2.0 (4.0)
Visual Arts	2.9 (24.0)	4.4 (19.8)	3.7 (7.0)	0.0 (1.5)	2.0 (2.0)	6.0 (1.0)

 
School Vouchers

Interesting discussion at Crooked Timber on school vouchers and the Milwaukee example.

See also Dan Drezner and Matthew Yglesias.

 
It doesn't take much

One or two mentions in 18 months of blogging and I'm no. 10 on google for "kiwi porn".

Real kiwi porn sites obviously have a thing or two to learn about how to game the google rankings.

 
OSH and other stuff

Lots of good stuff at David Farrar's blog, especially the OSH policy.

 
Terzain

NZ Pundit wants links using the word terzain.

Here's why.

 
Heh

Latest from Dorking Labs:

 
UNSCAM Update

U.N. and E.U. corruption stories are almost in the 'dog bites man' category now, but here's the latest anyway:

April 20 — At least three senior United Nations officials are suspected of taking multi-million dollar bribes from the Saddam Hussein regime, U.S. and European intelligence sources tell ABCNEWS.

One year after his fall, U.S. officials say they have evidence, some in cash, that Saddam diverted to his personal bank accounts approximately $5 billion from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

Most prominent among those accused in the scandal is Benon Sevan, the Cyprus-born U.N. undersecretary general who ran the program for six years.

"Well, I can tell you there have been no allegations about me," he said. "Maybe you can try to dig it out." And in a Feb. 10 statement, Sevan challenged those making the allegations to "come forward and provide the necessary documentary evidence" and present it to U.N. investigators.

But documents have surfaced in Baghdad, in the files of the former Iraqi Oil Ministry, allegedly linking Sevan to a pay-off scheme in which some 270 prominent foreign officials received the right to trade in Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices.

Maybe they opposed the overthrow of Saddam's regime on the advice of their accountants.

 
Guantanamo Case

The Washington Post has this report from the U.S. Supreme Court arguments in Rasul v Bush and Odah v Rumsfeld

Arguing on behalf of a group of detainees seeking the right to press their claims of innocence in federal court, retired Judge John J. Gibbons told the court to reject the administration's claims that the base, leased from Cuba, is outside U.S. sovereignty and, by extension, the jurisdiction of American courts.

"It is totally artificial to say that because of a provision in a lease the executive branch can create a no-law zone where it is not accountable to any judiciary anywhere," Gibbons declared.

Pretty hard to argue with this. The detainees should have POW status, regardless of whether they're held in the U.S., Cuba, Afghanistan or anywhere else.

As POWs, they obviously don't have the same rights as a criminal defendant. What rights they ought to have is a murky area but in the 21st century they should at least be able to contest their detention in court in some manner.

Whatever is decided should apply to anyone held anywhere in the world. The territory issue is a red herring. A ruling that the courts have jurisdiction because Guantanamo Bay is U.S. territory does not solve the real problem because the U.S. could just keep prisoners on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic next time.

 
How Appealing has moved

Here's the new address

 
Growth and Innovation

From No Right Turn's summary of the Growth and Innovation Advisory Board's survey of our attitudes to economic growth.:

Economic growth, and the economy in general, are not a central concern for most New Zealanders. We care far more about "soft" factors such as quality of life, the environment, education and health instead.

The graph shows that 67% regard economic growth as either very important or important, and only 4% regard it as not important. You can make anything seem unimportant if you rank it in a list that also includes things like health and quality of life. Countries with high GDP per capita have better health and education systems, cleaner environments, better working conditions and higher quality of life generally. The notion of a tradeoff between economic growth and other goals is misguided.

Other results are that economic growth is seen as having significant negative effects (particularly with regards to income inequality and traffic congestion) and as primarily benefiting future generations and younger New Zealanders (who, interestingly, don't agree with this at all), and that a shocking 40% of people don't believe that higher growth will deliver significant tangible benefits to them in health, education, jobs etc.

The survey respondents didn't say that income inequality was a negative effect. In fact the list of 'negative effects' includes 'more immigrants coming into New Zealand' and 'an improved balance between work and family life'. The 'negatives' label reflects the prejudices of the survey authors, not the views of the respondents.

I don't know where NRT gets his claim that 40% don't believe higher growth will deliver significant tangible benefits. I suspect he may have got it from this graph:



The layout is confusing and they should have just used a bar chart, but my reading of this graph is that hardly anyone responded in the 0-4 range. A huge majority support more than oppose the idea that economic growth should be a primary goal for New Zealand to pursue.

What does this mean? The obvious conclusion is that the neo-liberal program in New Zealand is dead. We just don't believe that shit anymore, if indeed we ever did. Politicians trying to sell economic growth and "getting back into the top half of the OECD" as an end in itself are pushing shit uphill.

If everyone knew that that only neo-liberals really care about economic growth, I would be very happy. The problem is that all parties except the Greens claim their policies will grow the economy and, unfortunately, people believe them. It's a pity the survey didn't ask how many people believe tax and spend policies will deliver significant tangible benefits.

The alternative strategy is to sell growth as a means to an end. Don Brash in particular has taken this line, arguing consistently that growth is the way we get and pay for the things we want. The problem with this line is that a) so many "business-friendly", pro-growth policies seem to be destructive of those other, more highly-valued goods; and b) a huge segment of the population don't believe it will have significant benefits to them. If there are no benefits, then why support it?

No Right Turn must have overlooked this graph:



New Zealanders overwhelmingly think that economic growth is likely to lead to better education, health, jobs and other opportunities.

The temptation for the right will be to dismiss these attitudes as stupid, ignorant, or "ill-informed" (Brash calls them "worrying"). I'd welcome that, because I can think of no surer way to guarantee the right another three years in opposition than to deny the validity of people's values and abuse them for believing the evidence of their own experiences.

Obviously we've moved on from the race preferences debate then.

No-one who lived through the 80's and 90's can seriously believe that wealth "trickles down" or that "a rising tide lifts all boats". No-one who living through the aftermath can seriously believe that economic growth is an unquestionable good with no social costs.

The comparison between NZ in 1984 and NZ in 1993 is staggering, few people who lived through both and have good memories would prefer 1984. Anyway there's no need to make baseless assertions about what people believe, we can just look at how they voted:

1975: After passing legislation to massively increase the welfare state, Labour is unceremoniously dumped in a landslide.
1984: National's interventionism, 'Think Big' and the wage-price freeze lead to a heavy defeat.
1987: After three years of neo-liberal economics, Labour actually gains a seat in the election. Since sitting governments almost always lose sets, this is a huge endorsement of the government's approach.
1990: After David Lange's 'cup of tea' and the subsequent lean to the left, Labour gets hammered in an electoral defeat of historic proportions.
1996: National nearly loses the election after abandoning Ruth Richardson's approach. Then they make certain of their defeat in 1999 by giving the country's chequebook to Winston Peters.

The real lesson of the 70s, 80s and 90s is that every change of government was preceded by a significant shift to the left in economic policy. No government was voted out after a shift to the right.

 
Ouch

From The Poor Man via No Right Turn,

Every Damned Weblog Post Ever

I find it very ironic that my political opponents are/are not criticizing something now, when not five months ago they were not/were criticizing something else. This is the very apex of irony to me, and transparently exposes the intellectual dishonesty of everyone who holds positions I don't agree with, several of whom I have baited with trackbacks.

Now, somebody fight with me.

Please.

God I'm lonely.

Hey, not all of us blog because we're lonely, some of us do it to demonstrate to the world how clever and insightful we are.

 
Caught in the speed trap

Good story in the Herald on speeding and accidents.

The writer, Chris Barton, quotes both sides, impartially assesses their respective arguments and even includes a short discussion on the relevant physics. How quaint.

 
John Tamihere's Blog

John Tamihere's Weblog.

When (not if) Tamihere gets into trouble with Helen for stuff he writes there, let's hope he sticks to his guns.

(via Silent Running)

 
Science - Guardian Style

This article on global warming in the Guardian led to this letter from Iain Murray:

Sir, I am used to scare stories about Greenland's ice sheet melting being based on scientific speculation, but your story "Global warming may melt Greenland's ice, scientists warn" (Apr. 8) contained serious errors of scientific fact. The study the article mentions does not say that Greenland might suffer an average annual warming of 2.7 degrees C., which would be a catastrophe in anyone's book as the ice would boil, never mind melt, within a few decades. Instead the study envisages a total warming of around 3 degrees by 2350. Furthermore, an increase of 2.7 degrees C. does not represent an increase of 37 degrees F, nor is an increase of 8 degrees C equivalent to an increase of 46 degrees F. Those are the numbers you'd get if you read across from one scale to the other on a thermometer. But because 0 C is 32 F, the actual increase 2.7 degrees C represents is only about 5 degrees F.

These matters of fact aside, the fear of Greenland melting is itself misplaced. Talk of global average temperatures rising is misleading in many ways, because areas all over the world are cooling. Greenland is one of those. A recent study in the journal Climatic Change found that since 1940 Greenland's coast has "undergone predominantly a cooling trend. At the summit of the Greenland ice sheet, the summer average temperature has decreased at the rate of 2.2°C per decade [since 1987]." The facts say Greenland is cooling. It is only in the imaginary world of computer models that there is any danger of substantial melt.

"Annual warming of 2.7C and an average warming of 8C (46F)". In case you were wondering whether this is the product of carelessness or stupidity, the Guardian clarified matters with this correction:

"In the article below, we stated that an annual 2.7C increase in the temperature of Greenland would melt more than the year's snowfall. In fact, Greenland would boil by 2040 if that were the case. What was meant was that if the annual average increase in temperature reached 2.7C above the present rate, then melting of the icecap would begin."

I can't think of any explanation for this other than that their science writer is an imbecile.

The other major problem with the article is that the study describes what would happen if temperatures increase, but it doesn't make any finding as to whether this is actually happening. The Guardian title for this story is "Global warming may melt Greenland's ice, scientists warn". Yeah, right.

 
New Kiwi Blog

It Just Makes Me Mad

 
Iraqi Nuclear Gear Found in Europe

In the Washington Post:

UNITED NATIONS, April 14 - Large amounts of nuclear-related equipment, some of it contaminated, and a small number of missile engines have been smuggled out of Iraq for recycling in European scrap yards, according to the head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog and other U.N. diplomats.

Mohammed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned the U.N. Security Council in a letter that U.N. satellite photos have detected "the extensive removal of equipment and, in some instances, removal of entire buildings" from sites that had been subject to U.N. monitoring before the U.S.-led war against Iraq.

Link via Nikita Demosthenes.

 
ACC turns 30

Big News has some interesting commentary and links.

 
Hoax

If you saw that picture with the caption: "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad then he knocked up my sister!", it's a hoax. The original image is here.

Well, at least one of the two photos is a hoax.

 
Negative Campaign Ads

From The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC - In the latest round of political mudslinging, both John Kerry's and George W. Bush's election committees have replaced ads that focus on their opponents' shortcomings with ads that personally insult the voting public.

"In the past four years, America's national debt has reached an all-time high," the ad's narrator said. "And who's responsible? You are. You're sitting there eating a big bowl of Fritos, watching TV, and getting fatter as the country goes to hell. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"Are you going to vote for a candidate whose campaign promises would cost America $1.9 trillion over the next decade?" the ad asks. "Of course you aren't. You aren't going to vote at all. In the last election, half of you didn't even show up. So, on Nov. 2, just spend the day right there at your dead-end office job, talking to your coworkers about your new sweater and e-mailing your friends photos of your stupid 2-year-old daughter you shouldn't have had."

The ad concludes: "You make me sick."

And they don't even have United Future and NZ First over there.

 
Good work Jim

New Zealand and China have agreed to begin talks on a free trade deal. More great work by Jim Sutton, National should really consider offering him a Cabinet post after the next election.

The papers are full of nonsense, as they usually are on trade issues, e.g. the Dominion Post:

A Chinese trade breakthrough could put hundreds of millions of dollars in farmers' pockets – but the textile, garment and footwear industries are bracing to pay the price.

In Nick Venter's world, a reduction in clothing manufacturing leads to job losses, but a bigger market for agriculture and forestry doesn't lead to more jobs, instead it leads to 'millions of dollars in farmers' pockets'. Everybody who buys clothes will benefit from tariff removal as well, but I guess they don't count either.

Mark Anderson, business development manager for New Zealand's biggest garment manufacturer – Christchurch-based Lane Walker Rudkin – said local manufacturers could not compete with the Chinese. "The reality is a company in China can employ children, a company in China can pour whatever it likes down the drains. They don't have to pay ACC, they don't have to pay time and a half, they don't have to pay sick pay. And they get government support."

Tariffs make this worse for two reasons. First, Chinese businesses pay their staff less in order to produce goods more cheaply to offset our tariffs and second, tariffs reduce the market for Chinese-made goods and hence the demand for Chinese factory workers. The point about government support is a good one though, it's not free trade if the other side is being boosted with taxpayer funding. This should be addressed in the talks.

 
They were ruthless

Also via Marginal Revolution:

Last week, I took my AP Government students to the computer lab to let them play around with a federal budget simulator to see if they could balance the budget. It was fun to see how a bunch of teenagers, most of them 15 or 16 years old, would balance the budget. They were ruthless. The liberal kids happily cut away at military spending, NASA, and foreign aid. They were then dismayed to find that they hadn't cut very much of the deficit. The conservative kids whittled away at social welfare and increased the tax cuts. They too were unable to make substantial headway on the deficit. However, the cut that both the liberals and conservatives agreed on was whacking away at Social Security and Medicare. Cries of "throw Granny off welfare" and "buy your own drugs" were heard. They were ruthless. Some of them reduced Social Security down to zero, cackling cheerfully all the while.

We need an NZ version of that budget simulator.

 
Education in Finland

Interesting post on this topic at Marginal Revolution.

Education's dirty little secret is that small class sizes are generally bad.

Would you rather have your kid in a class of 20 with a teacher earning $40,000 per annum, or a class of 40 with a teacher earning $80,000 per annum?

The difference in the amount of one-on-one time with the teacher is minimal, but the difference in quality of people attracted to the teaching profession is enormous.

The teacher union solution to everything is smaller class sizes, because it increases their membership and hence their lobbying power and also leads to them having more staff at their disposal. From the individual teacher's point of view, the effect of smaller class sizes is a big pay cut for all teachers in exchange for some extra job security for those teachers who suck at their job.

 
Wow

West Indies 1st innings                                         R   M   B  4 6

CH Gayle                             c & b Batty               69 118  80 12 0

D Ganga               lbw                b Flintoff            10  59  46  1 0

*BC Lara              not out                                 400     582 43 4

RR Sarwan             c Trescothick      b Harmison            90 249 166  8 1

RL Powell             c Hussain          b SP Jones            23  56  39  3 0

RO Hinds                             c & b Batty               36 103  97  4 0

+RD Jacobs            not out                                 107     207  8 3

Extras                (b 4, lb 5, w 2, nb 5)                   16

Total                 (5 wickets declared, 202 overs)         751

 
They were warned!

From John Podhoretz in the NY Post:

Here's what a newly revealed document dated Aug. 14, 2001, had to say about the threat posed to the United States by terrorists:

"Our military superiority will avail us little if a future rival decides it wants to test this nation's soul by using suicide bombers to stage random and large-scale assaults on American civilians on American soil."

Imagine this - only 28 days before 9/11, someone clearly saw the looming threat. And yet our government failed to act. Quick, contact Al Franken, James Carville and Paul Krugman. In their estimation, this would surely be yet another example of a sort-of smoking gun, a kind-of silver bullet.

Guess who wrote that sentence? I did. In these very pages. It came at the end of a column about Israel's horrendous problems dealing with suicide bombers.

How on earth can anybody say that the Aug. 6 PDB is a warning of 9/11 when it never mentions suicide bombing?

It is highly doubtful that a person of good will, reading this memo, could imagine that it should have put the entire government on high alert. It is sobering but hardly terrifying, and it bears no hint of the horror to come or the scale and scope of the threat we faced.

Just keep reminding yourself, when the liberals keep lying about how the Aug. 6 PDF a clear warning of the attack to come: There's no mention of suicide bombing in it.

My Aug. 14 newspaper column was closer to the mark.

 
Rice Transcript

Full transcript is here.

 
Look Out

There is an insidious evil force on the loose in America that, in the words of Attorney-General John Ashcroft, "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."

Thankfully, the U.S Justice Department (because as we know, they have nothing more important to do), has declared war on this menace.

UPDATE: I like this idea from Oxblog:

Let some of the Taliban guys out of Gitmo early on the condition that they volunteer for DOJ's anti-porn task force. They should do a good job, since they tend to share Ashcroft's militantly anti-porn stance. Moreover, they should work for peanuts since they're used to Afghan wages. And then the FBI guys can focus on Al Qaeda.

The biggest drawback to this plan is that it will antagonize opponents of outsourcing. After all, why should we be giving jobs to the Taliban when there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans who want nothing more than to look at porn all day while getting paid by the government?

FURTHER UPDATE: Here's a typically Volokhian response:

It's not like Americans have some great irreproducible national skills in smut-making, or like it takes a $100 million Hollywood budget to make porn. Foreign porn will doubtless be quite an adequate substitute for the U.S. market. Plus the foreign distributors might even be able to make and distribute copies of the existing U.S.-produced stock -- it's not like the imprisoned copyright owners will be suing them for infringement (unless the U.S. government seizes the copyrights, becomes the world #1 porn-owner, starts trying to enforce the copyrights against overseas distributors, and gets foreign courts to honor those copyrights, which is far from open-and-shut, and likely far from cheap).

There's also a picture of John Ashcroft's face, made entirely of little porn people.

 
New Blog

From Auckland, The Whig.

 
PNN has moved

New location here.

 
Universities win PBRF case

The High Court has agreed with Auckand and Victoria Universities that the inclusion of international comparisons in the Government's Performance Based Research Fund report is flawed and misleading.

I'm all in favour of courts reviewing the reasonableness of actions by government departments, but extending that to include the reasonableness of the content of reports and other research is going too far. Lawyers will be the biggest beneficiaries of this decision.

 
Fallujah

Latest by Christopher Hitchens. Read the whole thing.

 
Rotten to the Core

From the Independent:

A senior member of the European parliament yesterday exposed what he claimed was widespread corruption at the Strasbourg assembly by revealing that nearly 200 of his fellow Euro MPs had faked attendance at parliamentary sessions in order to pick up generous daily allowances.

Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian Social Democrat MEP, said he had seen scores of colleagues signing on for parliamentary sessions which they had missed, to claim a daily attendance allowance of ?262 (?175).

"I have witnessed almost 200 MEPs hurrying to the central register to sign on for a session and then watched them drive to the nearest airport or station," Mr Martin told Germany's Bild Zeitung newspaper. "There are countless MEPs who go to Strasbourg and Brussels simply to pick up the ?262. They have told me so themselves."

His revelations have infuriated MEPs whose movements were tracked by Mr Martin, who says he has documented about 7,200 abuses. He has been suspended from the socialist group in the parliament.

To be fair though, those MPs who collect 262 euros per day and do absolutely nothing are probably providing their constituents with better value for money than the likely alternatives.

 
Did you know?

Since 1840, every U.S. president elected in a year ending in zero has died in office, with the exception of Ronald Reagan who almost died following a 1981 assassination attempt.

 
Healthcare Soviet-Style

From the Dominion Post:

Wayne Crosswell fears he will die before he gets the heart operation he needs to bypass his clogged arteries.

Mr Crosswell, 48, has been rushed to Hutt Hospital three times in the past two weeks with frightening attacks of severe angina, which "feels like someone is standing on your chest".

But he still has no date for his surgery, which will be carried out in Wellington.

Mr Crosswell is not alone in his suffering; 179 people are waiting for heart surgery at Wellington Hospital, 31 of whom have waited longer than the accepted maximum of six months.

The hospital pledged last year to keep that number at zero, after two patients died of heart attacks while waiting for surgery.

Maybe the government could pay for it with the money they save by no longer providing holidays in Fiji and Hawaii grants to study hip-hop.

 
Your tax dollars at work

According to a government-funded study into violence on television, the shows featuring the highest incidence of violence were:

- Classic Cartoon, TV2 (cartoons)
- Mad, Mad World of Sport, Prime (sports series).
- WNTV, TV2 (children's magazine show).
- Rugrats, Nickelodeon (cartoon series).
- Action League, Nickelodeon (cartoon series).
- Cat Dog, TV2 (cartoon).
- Pokemon, TV3 (cartoon).
- New Woody Woodpecker Show, TV3 (cartoon).
- Aladdin, TV2 (cartoon).
- The Angry Beavers, Nickelodeon (cartoon).

The bottom line: if your kids grow up to be violent thugs who push coyotes off cliffs or blow them up with Acme explosives, then television is the culprit. You have been warned.

 
Meet the Prick

Gerry Brownlee will open Tame Iti's art exhibition next week, despite (or perhaps because of) the opening having been advertised as 'Meet the Prick'.

Just when National could use another boost in the polls, this gift is handed to them. If somebody throws something at him, National could go as high as 55%.

 
About Time

From the Herald:

Some children's relationships with their parents are destroyed unnecessarily by inflexible family laws, says a senior Family Court judge.

In a strongly worded speech this week, Judge Jan Doogue said laws introduced 10 years ago lacked the sophistication needed today.

She said the laws were "social experimentation", and hinted they were introduced without thorough evaluation.

Speaking at a child and youth law conference, Judge Doogue called for measures to ease the negative effects of the laws while proper research was done into their impact.

Speaking at a child and youth law conference, Judge Doogue called for measures to ease the negative effects of the laws while proper research was done into their impact.

If Judge Doogue wants to do more than just talk, she could start by permanently opening up her courtroom to the media and allow reporting of everything except the identity of the participants in the case.

 
Chicken Feed

Nick Smith has been fined $5000 for contempt of court. Since he had to spend $85,000 on his defence, the penalty on being found guilty is more or less the same as the penalty on being found not guilty.

The trigger for expulsion from parliament is conviction of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term of 2 years or more. One point that slipped my mind earlier is that criminal defendants facing a maximum sentence of three months or more are entitled to a jury trial. Smith didn't get a jury trial, therefore there's no way the expulsion condition can apply.

 
I'm pretty sure it was consensual

The citizens of Pennsylvania must feel safer knowing the police are protecting their kids from dangerous child pornographers:

State police have charged a 15-year-old Latrobe girl with child pornography for taking photos of herself and posting them on the Internet.

Police said the girl, whose identity they withheld, photographed herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts. She then sent the photos to people she met in chat rooms. . . .

She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography. . . .

But would she go in Deborah Coddington's book? (via Volokh)

 
Lesley Martin guilty

Lesley Martin has been found guilty on one of the two attempted murder counts.