July 2008
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Month July 2008

A vote for National equals a vote for lower wages

The Stand­ard points out National’s record on wages (via No Right Turn).

Vote for National to lower your wages people.

New Zealand Police soft on serious crime?

It appears the New Zea­l­and Police are soft on ser­i­ous crime. The U.S. Sec­ret­ary of State, Con­doleezza Rice, travels to New Zea­l­and this week­end and I’m ashamed to say she’s able to without a prom­ise from the NZ Police that she will be arres­ted and charged with war crimes, includ­ing tor­ture and the “supreme inter­na­tional crime,” ini­ti­at­ing a war of aggression.

While a $5000 bounty for the citizen’s arrest of Rice might be viewed as a stunt, what other option do decent cit­izens have when a bunch of sub­missive softies run your police force; happy not only to show how weak they are by tol­er­at­ing such a visit but by actu­ally pro­tect­ing her?

A formal com­plaint has now been lodged, so it will be inter­est­ing if the NZ Police can demon­strate any know­ledge of justice. The least they could do is fol­low the UK’s lead and pre­tend they have the balls to enforce the law and then botch it up! Some­how, how­ever, I don’t think even that will happen.

People like Con­doleezza Rice may be safe in their own coun­try, with such a com­pli­ant pop­u­la­tion, but they should not be allowed to travel to oth­ers without fear of being brought to justice.

Spineless politicians drafting spineless law

To draft and sup­port loath­some law like this surely you have to be either extremely ignor­ant of his­tory or have sym­path­ies for fascism.

Some politi­cians clearly have no qualms show­ing off how spine­less they are by using fear to trade our freedoms and make it look like they’re actu­ally doing something.

No Right Turn on the Immig­ra­tion Bill, cur­rently mak­ing it’s way through NZ parliament:

This bill has to be defeated. You can start by sign­ing the peti­tion here.

Check out some of the com­ments too.

Where does this lead I wonder?

Today I watched a bus driver in Lon­don half pull up to a bus stop and then pull away before stop­ping when he saw the only per­son wav­ing him down. She happened to be a little old lady with dark skin and a head scarf. There were mur­murs of dis­taste from the two people stand­ing nearby her but she dis­missed the prob­lem with a wave of her hand and walked off.

There seems to have been a notice­able uptick in this sort of thing over the past few months.

Bush regime drops preconditions to talks with Iran

It appears as if someone sens­ible finally has Bush’s ear.

Maybe Tom Engel­hardt is right.

The quick green guide

Nat Tork­ing­ton shares Clive Matthew-Wilson’s quick guide to cli­mate change (via Hard News):

I nearly ran an energy con­fer­ence and did I ton of read­ing and learn­ing for it. Loved the Dog and Lemon Guide guy. His final com­ment was fuck­ing bril­liant, and I think he was closest to my opin­ion on the whole subject.

Off­sets are easy to explain: you shit and it goes into your sep­tic tank, but your back­yard can’t take it all the years of your turds. So you pay someone to truck your turds away and empty out the tank. You burn fuel (releas­ing green­house gases) or make things that rot (releas­ing green­house gases) or have some other chem­ical pro­cess that releases green­house gases like CO2. The Earth can’t take it all so you pay someone to take your car­bon away and empty out the atmo­sphere. The only way to do this that we’ve got at the moment is to plant trees. (If someone devel­ops a “sequest­ra­tion” sys­tem, aka bury­ing the car­bon back in the earth and thus out of the atmo­sphere, it’ll qual­ify as an off­set too)

Pol­lut­ing = shit­ting. Atmo­sphere = your back yard sep­tic tank. Off­set = pay­ing someone to truck it away.

Trad­ing is also easy. It’s like fish. Fish quota is really a license to catch a per­cent­age of the fish in the water — if the Min­is­ter finds more fish or less fish in the ocean, your quota goes up or down. If you take a break from fish­ing, you can lease your fish quota to other fish­er­men. Com­pan­ies can emit a cer­tain amount of CO2, and as the government’s oblig­a­tions under treat­ies force the coun­try to let out less total CO2 emis­sion, each com­pany gets its quota dialled back. But some com­pan­ies will be super­green and emit less than their quota per­mits them to. They get to sell their sur­plus pol­lut­ing capa­city to other com­pan­ies in NZ, or overseas.

What off­sets don’t cover is the fact that trees rot. Releas­ing green­house gases. So they’re a tem­por­ary meas­ure. At best we should be replant­ing old growth forests, intend­ing them to be around “forever”. If we try to build off­sets out of pine trees, we’re just push­ing the snooze but­ton on our CO2. The sequest­ra­tion is the hal­le­lu­jah option — turn the crap in the atmo­sphere back into crap in the ground. But nobody’s there yet.

Clean energy is all about not shit­ting in the atmo­sphere in the first place. If you didn’t release CO2, you don’t need to off­set or sequester it. That’s hard though, because the fuel we’re addicted to is really con­veni­ent — oil is a beau­ti­ful stor­age sys­tem for energy. Wind power and solar pro­duce elec­tri­city, which doesn’t lend itself to such con­veni­ent stor­age — bat­ter­ies are quite inef­fi­cient, even in their flash new forms. I’m not sure what that in the sep­tic tank ana­logy: fuel = slow release por­ridge for energy, bat­ter­ies = cheap car­bo­hydrates like McD’s, that give you shits. Hmm, maybe not.

I think my meta­phors just exploded.

Why the U.S. won’t attack Iran

The pro­spect of an attack on Iran has been on my mind since the attack on Iraq, not in the least because it would prob­ably pre­cip­it­ate a great depres­sion and turn much of the world into a fireball.

Tom Engel­hardt has a thought­ful piece on why he thinks the U.S./Israel won’t attack Iran, des­pite some of the nut­ters run­ning around the halls of power in those countries.

Let’s hope he’s right.

Iran is not the belligerent party

The media in the West has a lot of blood on its hands already. Is it going to have more blood on its hands in Iran? Iran is not the bel­li­ger­ent party:

When it comes to demon­ising Iran, the US, Israel and Bri­tain have a uni­fied mes­sage and a com­pli­ant media, which has learned noth­ing from its mis­takes dur­ing the run-up to the inva­sion of Iraq, and seems happy to con­tinue to act as a gov­ern­ment pro­pa­ganda arm in some cases.

Thanks to the duti­ful cor­por­ate mouth­pieces, most Amer­ic­ans and Bri­tons have no idea that Tehran is act­ing within its rights under the NPT.

They don’t know that in Decem­ber, a US intel­li­gence estim­ate stated cat­egor­ic­ally that Iran is not cur­rently devel­op­ing nukes or that the nuc­lear watch­dog, the Inter­na­tional Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which mon­it­ors Ira­nian facil­it­ies, has no proof it seeks to do so.

The West’s pro­pa­ganda cam­paign is so effect­ive that the major­ity of West­ern­ers believe that Iran is the bel­li­ger­ent even though the facts sup­port the con­trary argument.

Peter Beaumont throws his toys

Photo of Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor for The ObserverWhat’s Peter Beau­mont up to? First he’s cyn­ic­ally try­ing to sell papers by drum­ming up con­tro­versy where there is none, now he’s threat­en­ing to sue Sur­vival Inter­na­tional for call­ing him out on his bullshit.

Sur­vival Inter­na­tional have pos­ted a silly phone mes­sage from Beau­mont whereby he threatens to sue them for “asso­ci­at­ing” him with the false alleg­a­tions that the uncon­tac­ted tribe pic­tures were a hoax.

Peter, really, pull your head in. If you took a minute to read any of the stuff you’re com­ment­ing on or writ­ing about you wouldn’t be in this silly situ­ation in the first place.

And not pub­lish­ing Survival’s let­ter, that’s childish.