A piece I'm going to hate to write

There's not much that's much good when a good friend has a terminal cancer, except perhaps that one gets the chance to pen moving tributes to them before they're gone when they can still (we hope) appreciate them.

I haven't yet sumoned up suffcient focus to write my own tribute to good friend Anna Woolf (aka Annie Fox), but Lindsay Perigo has. Read 'Going out in Style,' which title to Anna's enormous credit describes her realism, her honesty and her courage. As John Newnham comments based on what he's gleaned from Anna's blog, "Grace in life, and courage in the face of death." If that's true for Annie Fox's blog, it's even truer for Anna Woolf in person.

Not PC's blog stats for July

Here's some of the main stats for NOT PC's last month:

NZ Political Blog Rank for NOT PC: 6th (May, 5th)
Alexa Ranking, NZ: 590th (last month 558th)
Alexa Ranking, world: 255,026th (last month 254,965th)
Avge. Monday to Friday readership: 996/day (979)
Unique visits [from Statcounter] 30,678 (26,265)
Page views [from Statcounter] 47,957 (42,680)

Top posts:

• Are the Greens Ten Foot Tall?
• It's Not Peak Oil, it's Peak Politics
• Mr Carter: Jordan Bad Luck
• Scientists for Sophistry
• Dirty Old Trains
• Chrysler Building - William van Allen
• Making Nanny Bigger, One Dead Rat at at Time

Top referring sites: 
   Search engines 2395 referrals;  Kiwiblog 1747; Libertarianz 837; No Minister 761;  Whale Oil 520; Cactus Kate 382; Liberty Scott 241; SOLO 231; NZ Capitalist 210;  Anti Dismal 190; Annie Fox 190;
The Hive 170; Lindsay Mitchell 142; Mulholland Drive 133; Real Estate Blog 125; Crusader Rabbit 112
Top searches landing here:
    not pc 423; studionz 96; john key me too 76; peter cresswell 74; beer songs 70; archicad12 66; nipcc 63; china ready olympics 62; broadacre city 47; freedomist 43; worst building in the world 34; heineken mini keg 33; ken ring lunatic 32; peter rabbit tank killer 31;  bobby carlyle 31
They're reading NOT PC here: 

Top countries (measured by Statcounter):
   NZ 57%; USA 15%; Australia 5.2%; UK 3.7%; Holland 1.6%; Canada 1.2%; France 1.1%; India 0.9% 
Top cities (measured by Statcounter):  
   Auckland 16%; Wellington 6.2%; Christchurch 4.6%; Melbourne 3.0%; London 2.2%; Sydney 1.3%; Canberra 1.1%; Amsterdam 0.8%; Atlanta 0.8%; Orlando 0.7%; Manila 0.7%; New York 0.7%

Cheers, and thanks to you all for reading and linking to NOT PC this month, 
Peter Cresswell

News from the Woolf lair

Good news here in the most recent posts from Anna Woolf/Annie Fox. Did I just say "good" news? It's flaming fantastic news!

New blog & new updates

New blog in town is NZ Capitalist hosted by Elijah Lineberry, seen in his usual besuited garb a few posts below at the Libz stand at Fieldays.  Of his new blog Elijah says, "It is intended to have various current events, market matters and other business related comment for you to read; and one hopes you all enjoy!"  Sounds splendid!

And for those of you following Anna Woolf's cancer treatment (that's the treatment of the blogger formerly known as Annie Fox), she's posted the first updates on how she's feeling after her first two sessions of chemo.

Bastard of a thing

Annie Fox gives readers an update on her cancer, which you can see right here:
                                          

"Only" two percent?

I notice so called "cancer experts" are in the news this morning -- something that happens regularly when something as important as health care is politicised.  I'm not going to comment on that case this morning, or on what happens when health care is politicised, at least not directly; I'm going to tell you a brief story about some of the "cancer experts" in our government hospitals.

As some of you know, our friend and fellow blogger Annie Fox had a cancer last year that everyone thought would kill her.  It didn't.  After treatment, about which there can be no complaint, she underwent a year of full-body scans and tests and post-treatment observation to make sure the treatment had been successful.

Early last week she got the all-clear.  She was told the treatment programme had been successful, and apart from regular visits to keep an eye on the cancer, she was fine. 

She didn't even have time to celebrate.  She collapsed that same afternoon with a seizure, and was rushed into hospital. 

Turns out that despite the assurances of her "experts" she had a tumour the size of a large marble lodged in her brain.  Turns out that those 'full-body scans' to check against the development of other cancers in the body didn't include the head.  Why?  Because, her family were told when they met with the quacks to find out, "only two percent" of cases like these result in metastases in the brain ... so they don't bother.

Two percent.  So they don't bother.  Too bad if you or one of your loved ones is one of those two-percent, eh?

People buy lottery tickets and make significant long-term investments based on lesser odds than those, but in "our" government hospitals having a two-percent chance (it's only two-percent, eh) means you get tossed in the medical wastebasket.

You can say that such aggregating of averages is justified (it's only two percent of cancer patients, after all -- fuck 'em).  You can say that the health system can't afford such profligacy (if we ration the amount of scanning done, we'll fit under our 'budget cap.' And what about those unfortunate two percent? Oh, fuck 'em).  You can even say that the scanning of heads should be minimised due to the risk of scanning the brain -- but, even then, why in hell wouldn't you set up 'proxies' that give you and the patient some idea about what's going on:  Proxies paying special attention to symptoms that commonly develop when a person contracts a brain tumour, however minor -- headaches, loss of balance, loss of control of some motor functions, problems with vision, insomnia.  Why wouldn't you advise a patient that if any of these did occur they should get their arses back into the quack's office for further investigation?

Why wouldn't you do that?  Frankly, I have no idea.  After all, I ain't the "expert" here.

Like I said, I'm not going to comment this morning on what happens when health care is politicised, at least not directly.  But I have shown you just one story showing what happens when the delivery of health care is decided by rationing.

News about Annie Fox

For those who know and love Annie Fox, I have dreadful news for you. At the end of last week she was told that her Cancer Card has been reissued, and with a vengeance. Her new course of treatment begins today.

With her permission, I'll post regular updates to keep you informed -- and I'll pass on whatever messages you'd like to send her.

Broadband, by order!

New Zealanders need broadband, you say?  Okay, then if they need it as desperately as you say, why don't they seem prepared (as things stand presently) to pay voluntarily for the investment necessary?  Why does one of the two major parties think we need to be forced to pay for nationalised broadband, withdrawing more than $1.5 billion of investment capital from those New Zealanders who voluntarily choose their own investments based on reasonable return, and transferring it to a project that in the present environment is only apparently a goer as long as government force lies behind it.

Do you think perhaps there's a good reason, or several reasons, that New Zealanders haven't paid voluntarily for the sort of broadband that's now being talked about?

The fact is that the alleged need New Zealanders have for broadband -- a need that National says is worth spending taxpayers money at the rate of $2000 per household -- is only a problem from the standpoint of central planning, which necessarily views human beings as a collective incapable of direction, and which finds it simply unfathomable that individuals are capable of understanding and acting in their own best interests.

But this is quite wrong.  In actual fact, if government meddling and government restrictions were removed, then individuals are quite capable themselves of voluntarily redirecting their efforts and their investment capital to filling this alleged need, or any real need.  The fact is that if $1.5 billion of spending were to truly attract a benefit of $4.5 billion (and this figure that's been bandied around isn't just guesswork), then this is $4.5 billion of benefit to specific individuals.  Why wouldn't they be prepared to stump up voluntarily if their risk was minimised by the removal of the various restrictions on doing so?  Or as Annie Fox puts it in itemising the particular restrictions that need to go, "Remove the Red Tape, the Fibre Optics will follow."

Restricting investment and then using government force and taxpayer dollars to pick 'winners' was the leitmotif of an earlier National Government under Muldoon.  Liberty Scott recalls some of the 'winners' that the Muldoon Government picked in its 'Think Big' programme (some of which we're still paying for), muses on the resurrection of this flagship Muldoonist failure, and has eight relevant questions that any supporter of John Boy Thinking Big must be able to answer.

John Key's National Party?  They sure as hell aren't the answer.

UPDATE:  Says Matt Burgess at Anti Dismal:

    This is Think Big 21st century style.
    The objection is not that better broadband is a bad thing. In the 1980s, more electricity was a good thing but Clyde Dam was a disaster. The problem with National's plan is that it's likely to give New Zealanders less broadband at higher cost and lower quality than might otherwise have been achieved, much as Clyde Dam did for electricity.
There are several reasons for this pessimism...

"Have you now, or have you ever been ... ?" (updated)

Guyon Espiner, who's neither a scientist nor apparently a journalist, appears willing however to channel the ghost of one Joseph McCarthy. See the grandstanding fool burning the AGW heretics right here on the Ken and Barbie Show.

UPDATE 1: "Panic Mode": "British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore's latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are 'panicking'."

   Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his "flat earth fantasies" for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him.
   "The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn't got warmer since 1998," he points out. "And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We're actually in a period ... of global cooling."
   Monckton contends Gore is now "panicking" because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on "telling the world that we're all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies." He also contends that Gore is the largest "global-warming profiteer."
Gore's group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed "climate crisis." But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his "green investment company" because to do so would violate racketeering laws by "peddling a false prospectus."

[Hat tip Leighton Smith]

UPDATE 2: Annie Fox gets a knock on the door from a Greenpeace lass:

   She ... asked if I wanted a "better world for my children." ... "Yes" I said "I do want a better world for my nieces" and that was precisely why I wouldn't support Greenpeace or any other environmentalist organisations.
   It is the very people that Greenpeace attack that make my world, this world, a beautiful place to live in [I told her]. They provide me with light when it's dark, food when I'm hungry, movies when I'm bored, champagne when I'm celebrating, chemo when I'm dying, planes when I'm in the mood to view this beautiful world. They also provide me all the necessities that allow me to do the job I love - books, computers, software, internet, financial markets, the cup that holds my tea and the tea itself.
   The policies and aim of these environmentalists are no less than a desire to turn man back into animals, scrambling around in caves, or at best eking out a meager existence on a farm. This world they desire would mean millions upon millions would stave to death, and they would be the lucky ones. The rest would live a short and miserable existence in a truly malevolent world. A world that would kill me and my nieces and all future generations of my family. I would no sooner align myself with the green movement than I would the Ebola Virus.

I don't expect the lass will be knocking on that door again for a while.

UPDATE 3: Further to the comment above referencing McCarthyism, Murray Rothbard is unusually perceptive on the legacy of the Senator from Wisconsin.  It was, in fact, McCarthy and "McCarthyism" he argues that provided the main catalyst for transforming the mass base of the right wing from small-government quasi-libertarianism to today's holy-rolling anti-Communism, with all that implied.  This is the very platform from which the Buckley conservatives buried the classical liberal 'Old Right.' Reflected Rothbard in the 1970s: the "problem with anti-Communism as a movement ... is how it diverts domestic policy away from individual liberty toward the police-state paternalism for which 'conservatism' has become synonymous."

At any rate, in retrospect, it is clear that libertarians and Old Rightists, including myself, had made a great mistake in endorsing domestic red-baiting, a red-baiting that proved to be the major entering wedge for the complete transformation of the original right wing. We should have listened more carefully to Frank Chodorov, and to his splendidly libertarian stand on domestic red-baiting: "How to get rid of the communists in the government? Easy. Just abolish the jobs."

No free speech in election year

Labour's Electoral Finance Act has its first result: State censorship has successfully closed down Andy Moore's 'Dont Vote Labour' site. 

And you thought the left were supporters of free speech ...

[Hat tip Annie Fox!]

UPDATE 1: DPF notes the irony of former free speech advocate  Idiot/Savant, who blogs anonymously, arguing that Moore should not be able to advocate against the Government without listing his name and address...

UPDATE 2: We know your name and address, the Pacific Empire boys tell the proudly left blogger Idiot/Savant, who blogs at No Right Turn.  They point out quite correctly "this information is no more than Idiot/Savant thinks is fair for others who choose to express their political opinions online."  Time for him to either front up, shut up, or wake up.

An atheist in a foxhole

It's said that there are no atheists in a foxhole.  When it comes time to stare death in the face, one's thoughts are supposed to turn to the hereafter, and to God. This is all nonsense, says blogger Annie Fox.  With cancer placing her in that metaphorical foxhole for much of last year, she says there are most definitely atheists in foxholes - "and I’m one of them."

   Although I did not want to die so young, I was not afraid of dying. But my lack of fear is not why I’m an atheist--even if I was terrified at the prospect of dying, I’d still be atheist. I'm an atheist because that is the only rational possibility.
   I actually think I could turn the foxhole scenario around and say that on a sunny day at the beach all believers are atheists. The only reason I can fathom that they cling to their belief, is fear: fear of dying, or fear that life does not have that certain meaning, or fear that without religious structure life would be too chaotic, or fear that their family and friends would shun them should they not follow like sheep.
   What kind of horrible mental gymnastics must this take - to dispel all the facts around you and cling to the impossible, just because you are afraid - sounds like a quick path to mental illness.

The premise of religionists that religion provides "hope" in times of trouble is an illusion built upon sophistry and lies.  To found one's hope upon a fiction--in denial of the obvious facts around you--is the worst kind of fraud.  At such times, relentless focus upon the facts is what saves you, not shroud-waving and false hope.  As she concludes, one of the jobs of hospital security guards should be "to throw out religious vultures that prey on the scared and venerable in times of stress." 

Read the whole post at Annie Fox's.

It's exclusive

Sir Ed's funeral would be better off as a humble private function rather the all-exclusive "state funeral" planned, says Annie Fox.

I thought the idea of a state funeral is that members of the public could attend, if not actually in the building, then out on the lawn. But the lawn outside the Church in Parnell is small and at a guess could hold one thousand people - maybe two thousand - well even at a wild guess five thousand. Hardly the solution for the tens of thousands of people that would like to attend.
So it appears that the funeral is really just for friends and family plus the ruling elite - is this what they mean by state funeral?

Simple answer: Yes.

Auckland's planners giving developers the heave-ho

Developers are leaving Auckland.  This is not new -- the folks who build the city have been quietly leaving for some time in the face of increasing impositions on their efforts -- but apartment developer Conrad Properties decided to speak to Bob Dey to explain why they've had enough.

The short answer is that development in Auckland is now uneconomic.  They point the finger squarely at Auckland City Council, saying they're to blame for two things at least:

One is the introduction this year of an Auckland City Council plan change setting minimum sizes for apartments, and the other is the council's policy on development contributions.

The combined effect of both impositions is to add $120,000 to the cost of a two-bedroom unit, and this is on top of the increased costs and sundry delays associated with changes to the Building Act.  The cost of the "development contributions" alone -- which is a means by which the Resource Management Act allows council to put their hand even further into property owners' pockets --  amounts to around $70,000 per unit.

Annie Fox explains the sort of thing on which this money is usually wasted by council once extracted:  "purchasing multi-million-dollar properties at inflated prices."

One that got my blood boiling for it's total stupidity, was the purchase of the SuperLiquor site on the corner of Ponsonby Road & O'Neill Street, for a staggering $7 million.
Retail? I hear you ask. However, not for retail, but to be demo'ed and turned into a park! The most ridiculous place for a public park, it will be small, which in itself isn't a problem (small parks can be charming) but with roads on two sides (one being a main road) it will be bloody awful place to sit. It will be empty 99% of the time, and anyway within 1km of this site there are 8 reserves and 16 within 2kms.
Apparently, they had to make a purchase to justify all the reserve contributions they have been taking over the years. Why didn't they just give the money back to the developers?

Good question.  Another question should be why they're allowed to damn well take the money in the first place.  The answer is the Resource Management Act, which gives council's carte blanche to boss developers around and to make them pay for it.

But Conrad Properties and developers like them aren't paying any more.  They're getting the hell out  -- and who could blame them -- leaving the supply of Auckland housing up to ... whom?

The fact is that the real culprit here isn't the council officers or planners or regulators who make the plans that are forcing developers out; the real culprits are the Resource Management Act that gives planners and regulators the power over other people's property, and a culture that assumes that local governments need planners and regulators to plan and control the city.  They don't.  On this point I'm four-square behind the Anti-Planner Randal O'Toole, who says that,

"After more than 30 years of reviewing government plans, including forest plans, park plans, watershed plans, wildlife plans, energy plans, urban plans and transportation plans, I've concluded that government planning almost always does more harm than good."

Ain't that the unfortunate truth.  Time to put a stake right through the heart of the RMA, and draw the teeth of the planners and regulators for good.

Cancer Card rescinded

I was as delighted to hear of new blogger 'Annie Fox!' conquering cancer as I was to read her disappointment at the rescinding of her 'cancer card':

The old Cancer Card gets you out of doing anything boring at all if you don't want to – work included. Fan-bloody-tastic, should have got cancer ages ago!
The mysterious thing about the Cancer Card is that its power increases the sicker you become, so after about your 4th course of chemo its power will probably be at its peak and provides many, many a free-pass. The only thing Cancer Card can't actually do is cure cancer.
But I noticed a disturbing thing the other day - mine had vanished! No I hadn't left it in the car to be stolen by the local yobs. But ever so slowly, as I got better and better, its power had diminished. It's like a muscle, the less you use it, the weaker it becomes, until eventually it withers & dies.

See, every silver lining has a cloud.  ;^)