White people caused by white bread

At the other end of this year, I had a go at the figment of racism based entirely on UV exposure levels. So I'm particularly pleased to find my intuition reinforced with facts such as why white people are white:

People who live in low latitudes, where they can live off grains, get plenty of sunlight. People who live in dim sunlight cannot grow grains, and so they get vitamin D from the meat and fish that they eat.

The exception? There is only one spot on the planet where grains will grow despite sub-arctic sunlight.

It is where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream wash ashore. The Baltic is the only place on earth where ocean currents keep it warm enough to grow grain despite dim sunlight.

This is crucial news for all the fascist racist BNP supporters and other European neo-Nazis. If anything mucks up that Gulf Stream, it'll be the end of the "white race". In order to preserve their identity, they must support the Climate Change debate or face extinction. Gaia has a great taste in irony.

Word of '09

Voting is now open for the Public Address Word of the Year 2009. For the record, my three choices were:

Sorry
Entitled
*Always blow on the pie*

The third choice avoids that whole brevity criteria, but it deserves a shot.

End of the noughties

It's nearing the end of 2009, and the MSM are at it like Santa writing up lists. Time's Top Ten of Everything 2009 is out. Foreign Policy magazine has its inaugural Top 100 Global Thinkers too. Both are fairly Americanocentric, and FP's ranking seems a bit rank with Ben Bernanke, Dick Cheney and Pope Rottweiler scoring above their dues.

And it is nearly time to pull the sheet over this foul decade that was the start of the 21st century. The Guardian gets it about right with a compilation of the People Who Ruined the Decade. There's a few UK in-jokes there too, but the theme is dead right. The noughties have been a bit shit.

2000 AD kicked off with an anticlimax and went downhill from there. I witnessed the omens on the millennial New Year's Eve celebrations in Gisborne, hyped as the first landmass (give or take) that would see in the 21st century. We were part of an international media event.

Helen Clark's Labour party had just stormed into power. There was optimism in the air. The Gisborne Council had local and central government funding out the wazoo to celebrate the coming new improved era.

Along with the throngs that congregated in the township centre, I witnessed the underwhelming lack of fireworks along with thousands of other expectant revellers. One mediocre pop and that was it.

Dame Kiri was due to welcome in the dawn at the beach. There were hours to kill, so the pack of us headed round the town's bars, which saw fit to milk it and charge Auckland prices.

Later on, coming down at the beach just as dawn's left hand was lightening the eastern skies, we sat with thousands of others waiting for Kiri. The sun breached the horizon. No Kiri. The MC said that Kiri would be there soon. Half an hour later, with the sun a good two fingers above the seas, and still no Kiri. Bugger this, we said and off home we went.

Says it all really. In between then and now, I've helped carry two coffins, lived in two countries (three if you consider Auckland another country), and ended up in 2009 some 200 metres from where I was in 1999. Everything's the same but completely different.

Call me a pessimist, but there'll be a time when we'll all look back at the noughties and say, "Those were the good days."

Dick, Cunt and Arsehole of the Decade, George W Bush. DimPost got it almost right when he chose Radiohead's Idioteque as the song of the decade. Not enough paranoia though. My song of the decade is DJ Shadow's remix of The Gloaming.

Lazy plots

Every plot from House MD:

While we're at it, every other plot from CSI.

Accidents by design

Architect Athfield spoke the other night on sustainable cities. Thanks to the Science Media Centre for putting up the audio. The bulk of his speech is in Part I & Part II covers a wide-ranging Q&A. There's some very good points, from the scattershot infrastructure which could do well from co-ordination, through to 'accidents by design'. The audio was bit hard to understand at times, with a few blurry punchlines, but it's still good value.

Our communities need to be more accident-friendly. In a secular civil society, you can't rely on the traditional accidental networks of just churches or other vanilla groups to broaden the real live non-internet, non-mobile phone social networks. It relies on the risk and reward of maximising coincidences.

But between event management costs, ever decreasing public spaces and hospitality outlets being harrangued and regulated out of business, throw in some Soccer Mum paranoid hysteria, armchair inertia specialists, and a fucktonne of NIMBYs, I'm not holding my breath on the change that is required to reconnect for real.

ACTA circuses coming to town

According to the new acta.net.nz site, the Ministry of Economic Development is holding a series of meetings next week, on Wednesday 16th December, to give an update on the ACTA treaty:

The invite reads:
"Last November 2008 at an intellectual property rights enforcement workshop organised by the Ministry of Economic Development, New Zealand’s negotiating team involved in the development of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) gave a presentation about ACTA. The negotiating team would like to give you an update on recent developments with ACTA and discuss the key elements of the agreement being negotiated."

There is no mention at all about this meeting at the MED's website. Even though I sent a written submission to the MED on Section 92A earlier in the year, I am obviously to much of a clown to be invited to this circus. This is no wide-ranging public performance.

According to Michael Geist, New Zealand is holding one of the big Top Secret Copyright ACTA meetings on the week starting April 12th 2010. This round of "bargaining" will be an even more exclusive circus. Canada's being bribed with sweetheart infrastructure deals for signing onto ACTA. What's NZ price for the loss of sovereignty?

We're gonna need a bigger #blackout.

Fear & Loathing with bananas

Strange but true. Every time I see bananas I get weird flashbacks. And I rarely eat the fruit any more. Knowledge brings fear. Boing Boing's recent trope on useless banana consumption tools has set me off again. I broke BB etiquette and self-linked to an old tale. Here's a visual reboot:

The backpacker banana crew.

Me and the local banana farmers at the Garradunga Pub on my last day.

The banana "trees". It's actually called a pseudostem. They are pretty resilient but they're not tree trunks. Practically hollow, they're more like a giant stick of dodgy bamboo. Little wonder cyclones can throw them about like straws.

The packing shed. Bunches of bananas covered in plastic protector bags have been cut down off the top of the pseudostem as per the earlier post. In here, the "hands" of bananas are whisked off the stem with a butcher's knife and put on the carousel, where they're sprayed with water. They're then arranged into cases and weighed, before being stacked on a pallet and wrapped for transit.

A hard earned siesta.

There are many things to beware of when farming bananas. Leptospirosis, taipan snakes, spiders, crocodiles. This was not one of those occasions. A trio of baby possums were living in this bunch. As opposed to the NZ variety, the Oz variety of possum are an endangered species and look somewhat different from our own feral pests.

Note how green the bananas are. For presentation reasons, they're picked that way so they can ripen on their journey south to market (All these bananas were for domestic consumption in Melbourne and Sydney).

The last possum escapes.

Friday night cheap meals down the pub.

Cure for slow news days

To give the devil its due, I must admit that Google Reader's Recommendations is an excellent little feature. Some sort of screwy algorithm does some sort of thingamagig with my RSS feed selection flavours, bouncing up some beautiful bits of random junk from the ether.

Thanks to this, it spun out the Daily WTF story that tickled my fancy enough to pass it onto Bernard Hickey at interest.co.nz. Bang. Instant zeitgeist. Bernard's right about the uncertain veracity. I didn't bother looking for corroboration. I didn't even know if Æxecor was for real, let alone the story. I hoped it was true and that seemed good enough.

Same goes for this clip from YouTube, delivered via Google Recommendations:

*THIS IS NOT FAKE* LOOK AT THIS CLICK ON THIS LINK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRBo15xjobk (ORIGINAL FOOTAGE) JUST RELEASED REMARKABLE FOOTAGE OF SHUTTLE MISSION STS-126,NOVEMBER 20TH 2008. 6 DAYS INTO MISSION AND 2 UFOS EMERGE FROM EARTH AND HAVE A GOOD LOOK AT THE SPACE SHUTTLE WHILST IT IS

Like the 28,000 tonnes of coal story, it would be intriguing if it was true. Who knows.

Definitely for real is this CCTV footage of a meteor strike in South Africa. I had somehow overlooked George Monbiot's column in the Guardian regarding Canada's awful oil sands, but GR had it down. Then there's GR pointing to Now THIS is a LAN Party via Gizmodo Australia, Fifth Gear doing a loop the loop like an old Hot Wheels kit, and Good's nice infographic on US causes of death by age, gender and ethnicity.

Other bits of gossip included Eric Prince, head of fundamentalist mercenary group Blackwater has been a CIA spook up until, like, two months ago. Jesus fucking wept. Or how about The Dude explaining how the Iron Man movie had no script, and was nutted out on a day to day basis.

Well done Goodger & co. I'm hooked.

De facto decriminalisation of cannabis in NZ

I missed this article by Mike Sabin at Voxy last week, where the anti-drugs campaigner bemoans a scheme that all but decriminalises cannabis possession:

"Unfortunately, while the Police will be making the most of this new legislation, at the same time they are effectively waiving a white flag to the customers whose demand supports drug dealers, with a trial of a new policy of warnings for minor offences being widened across Auckland and likely to go nation-wide" said Mr. Sabin. Following a three month pilot on the North Shore in Auckland, Police have announced that they have extended the trial for six months across wider Auckland and will see Police under new 'formal guidelines' issuing warnings at their discretion for offences with maximum penalties of 2 years imprisonment or less, including shoplifting, possession of knives, common assault and possession of cannabis.

Even more telling is the support for this scheme coming from Auckland mayors Len Brown and John Banks:

Super Mayoralty candidates Len Brown and John Banks have signalled their support for the scheme but according to Mr. Sabin "they seem to be missing obvious points regarding their call to maintain a 'zero-tolerance' mantra, in that an endless stream of warnings to offenders, none of which attract any real accountability is hardly likely to deliver any sort of deterrence. To the contrary in fact I believe it sends clear signals that Police see pursuing these sort of minor offences as 'pointless', something already stated by frontline officers to some media" claimed Mr. Sabin.

Working on the principle that anything that annoys Mike Sabin is a good idea, I am impressed that cannabis decriminalisation has occurred under a National government, not a Labour one.

No thunder, no fire, no rain

Boing Boing points to Henry Rollins' article in Vanity Fair looking at Bhopal 25 years after the lethal Union Carbide leak which killed, and is still killing and maiming, thousands of neighbouring households.

Wikipedia notes that the death toll is approximately 20,000 so far, with another 100,000 to 200,000 people permanently debilitated. The average payout to affected families so far has been around $20,000. No-one has been prosecuted for the tragedy.

If you ever need an example of what a world with complete trust in corporate responsibility and minimal government regulation and enforcement looks like, this is it.

Art for art's sake

Thistle Hall is holding a $100 art sale today between 6 and 8pm today. There's an album of what's on sale here, including this nice Paua Mandelbrot necklace. HT Wellingtonista.

This it what happens when you zap a block of acrylic with a particle accelerator. Here's the Telegraph with a gallery of Frozen Lightning.

Wall St meets Main St

A commodity broker gets an unexpected comeuppance when an errant programming error lands him with a real, honest to god commodity; 28,000 tonnes of coal:

For once, Brad was speechless. He had absolutely no idea who that man was and he could hardly understand a word he said. Plus, there was that gargantuan vessel that was slowly moving towards the building. “Uhh,” he stuttered, “wait. Are you delivering… coal? To… uhh, us?”

“Well, yeah! Twenty-eight thousand tons of the good ol’ black gold!” The workman sarcastically furrowed his brow adding, “I mean, we did get the right address, har har. This is Æxecor? And this is Pier 53? And you are Brad, the fella who ordered it, right?”

It was that moment that Brad’s palm almost immediately made contact with his forehead. He realized that something must have really gone awry: instead of virtually trading 28,000 tons of coal, Brad had somehow ended up with 28,000 tons of real coal.

It turns out that Brad found it more difficult to sell actual coal than the virtual variety. Welcome to Main St, Brad.

A life less pleasant

Eric Watson and Russell Crowe duke it out

Bruce Sheppard has poked a stick at the hornet's nest of passive aggressive vigilantism facing ex Bridgecorp director Rod Petrolhead Petricevic. Seems that the hospitality environment is becoming less hospitable for this suit.

Bruce warns on trying to pick a fight with Eric Watson though, citing one alpha-maleness showdown with Russell Crowe which featured the Crowemeister coming off second best. So be warned of possible violence. Send in the women to accidentally spill their drinks on him in bars and clubs instead.

Wellingtonista Awards

It's voting season at the 4th Annual Wellingtonista Awards. Head on over to Wellingtonista and vote for the best bits of Wellington. Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony at Mighty Mighty on December 17th.

Pirates, porridge, death and taxes

It has been a good week for porridge recipes. Earlier in the week, Don Brash unveiled his porridge of the future, which is based on a predictable twenty year old recipe he copied off Roger. Porridge judges John Key and Bill English commented that this recipe was too politically hot for the body politic. Cactus Kate had to present an even spicier dish just to make the 2025 Taskforce's 48 declarations seem insipid in comparison.

There are a few points of interest in the 2025 report that might bear closer inspection, moments of lucidity if you will. But the unrelenting zeal of means and ends has been so mangled with benny bashing, 90s Russian Roulette sell-offs, added pork flavouring and a sprig of gerrymandering, it makes it all too easy to dismiss as the bizarre and disjointed ravings of rich old white men hankering for devilled kidneys.

WTF = Russian Roulette sell-offs? Well, that whole sell-off of SOEs for the hell of it, offload all the furniture and hope this thing floats with nothing left in it. Selling TVNZ right now would get nothing more than chump change. Shutting down the long con of the Cullen fund right now and paying down debt at the worst possible part of the cycle is also counter-productive.

Pork flavouring, you say? What has Zespri's monopoly on kiwifruit marketing got to do with enriching the masses? Didn't Turners and Growers, well known associates of certain Taskforce 2025 compilers, merge with former apple and pear monopoly Enza not so long ago? That isn't a productivity strategy, that's special pleading.

The gerrymandering is obvious for what wasn't considered by the taskforce as pivotal to NZ's future. There's the stunning omission of any form of land and capital tax. They lost the argument right there. In the face of the finance company implosions, there's no sign of corporate regulation. Even Alan Greenspan admits that that argument is lost.

And quite how you hack off some 15 billion dollars of government spending in three years without setting off an internal economic shock, I don't know.

So, dismiss that bad bowl of porridge from the Goldilocks menu. While we're waiting for the Tax Working Group to put the finishing touches on its porridge, Gareth Morgan has put out an appealing, tax neutral recipe sketched on the back of a napkin. This one looks much more appetising.

First, let's exile all the B Ark Golgafrinchans. Introduce a Minimum Guaranteed Income of ten grand a year and screw the other paperwork. Kill the overhead non-jobs right there. Introduce a tax free threshold of $40,000 per annum for every man, woman and child. Slap the equivalent of a 25 percent flat tax on everything. Including the family home, LESS the average indexed home price.

In one fell swoop, Gareth Morgan has done what seventy-odd thousand taxpayer dollars on the 2025 Taskforce took months to accomplish. Something realistic, novel and lateral-minded at bugger all public expense.

The 2025 Taskforce can blab all it likes about property rights, but they never talk about the price of property freedom. Taxes. The opportunity cost of holding onto vacant land here right now is sweet FA. As far as I understand matters, vacant land and buildings is actually a tax write-off.

That's not right, especially when housing affordability it at the usurious levels they are at present. I'm not talking interest rates here, but the glutinous appetite of the NZ small investor in haggling each other up into absolutely stupid prices on property. Wars have been fought for less.

The Romans, the British and the Maori have this in common; a use it or lose it principle to property rightsholding. A land tax makes landholders think twice about holding onto under-utilised land when others go wanting. A land tax is certainly much more politically palatable than the other alternative; legalising squatting.

I'm not kidding. Every time I walk past the old Molesworth Tavern, I'm reminded how absolutely mental our property rights are in this country.

View Larger Map

Yeah, it's Thailand government land technically, and probably beyond NZ law to do much about. But awful fucking eyesores like this, right down to For Lease signs elsewhere on empty shop fronts, makes me grit my teeth. Call it a broken windows policy for tenancy, but something has to be done to leverage the landed gentry to yield to more productive usage.

Gareth Morgan has made a better porridge base for the Tax Working Group than Brash's mob. Clean, bold flavours without the bitter after taste that permeates Brash's corned beef palette. I have high hopes that the Tax Working Group will find a porridge recipe that will taste just right for the voters.