Airline passengers charged by weight?

Given how strict some airlines get about checked luggage, and the growing obesity of airline passengers, an enlightened airline policy could be to combine weights of passengers and luggage to determine if there is an “excess” fare. This means instead of a standard 20kg policy for checked luggage it should be total passenger/luggage weight of (in economy class) say 113kg = 85kg body plus 28 kg for hand and checked luggage. If you weigh 65kg, you get 20kg more luggage, at 110kg you get 3kg to carry/check in, unless you pay more.
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At a certain point girth has to matter too, the narrowest Air NZ seat is on the Boeing 737 at 17 inches, so that’s the test. If you can’t fit 17 inches without overlapping, buy another seat (or on international flights go up a class, where it doesn’t matter as seats in premium economy and business overlap).
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It’s green too – reduces fuel consumption on planes, reduces demand for flying and it would also encourage more people to lose weight.
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Now it shouldn’t be government policy, but I wonder how many people would choose an airline if they could take more luggage if they weighed less, AND knew they could have a seat without someone encroaching on their space?

Anderton praises fan of Berlin Wall and North Korea

Jim Anderton’s eulogy for one of the country’s apologists for the former east germany’s corrupt, brutal, Stalinist dictatorship and the North Korean slave state shows the sickening double standards applied by many on the left.
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Wolfgang Rosenberg wrote often in the New Zealand Monthly Review about how important it was to recognise the Berlin Wall was needed so that well educated intelligent east Germans could stay to rebuild the country and socialism, instead of being selfish and wanting to enjoy a better life. He preferred the imprisonment, the spying of the Stasi and the “shoot on sight” policy of East German border guards to freedom – or maybe Rosenberg simply didn’t believe those who told the world of the stifling horror of lies, torture and execution in the eastern bloc. He once waxed lyrically about how wonderful Pyongyang North Korea was because it had no congestion, unlike Wellington – ignoring that not having a car wasn’t exactly a choice for almost all North Koreans. He enjoyed his academic and political freedom, but didn’t think twice of singing the praises of those who stifled it at the point of the gun.
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Rosenberg sung the praises of Stalinist economics which was not only a complete disaster economically, but was backed up by pure bloody brutality, a litany of lies defended by brutal force, and was so loved that as Kennedy said “democracy may not be perfect, but at least we don’t have to build a wall to keep our people in”.
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If Rosenberg apologised for his rantings and defence of the undefensible I look forward to seeing it, but the evidence is that he sympathised with these murderous regimes to the end – his prominent role in the NZ-DPRK Friendship Society, which is used by the dictatorship in North Korea to prove in its propaganda that it is endorsed by foreigners (having foreign friends it says), indicates this, and New Zeal can confirm it.
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Anderton thinks Ruth Richardson was brutal… maybe he should look at those his friend once defended. Of course had Rosenberg had his way, I'd have been locked up by now for counter revolutionary activity... I wont miss you Wolfgang, sadly you never noticed your own views were closer to Nazism than you'd ever admit.

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UPDATE: There has been a request for the source of Rosenberg's statements about North Korea and the German Democratic Republic (east Germany), simply peruse back issues of the New Zealand Monthly Review in the 70s and 80s. You'll find a wealth of this doggerell.

UPDATE 2: The fetid authoritarian remnants of the Alliance are mourning too, pity they don't mourn all those murdered by the North Korean regime every day, or the deaths of those killed escaping east Germany. Murray Horton, part of the nationalist socialist CAFCA wrote this.

UPDATE 3: New Zeal unfailingly has posted a detailed profile of Rosenberg including one of the quotes I remember reading (my access to NZ Monthly Review is rather limited in London). He claimed in 1987 that "The Wall contributes to peace in Europe and to successful economic and social development in the GDR." Imprisoning peaceful people contributes to peace in his warped little mind. Rosenberg dismisses the likes of Peter Fechter, an 18yo shot by East German border guards as he attempted to flee to West Berlin (they'd get promises of watches for everyone they stopped/caught/shot) and left to bleed to death in the "no man's land" between East and West Berlin. US guards on the western side feared intervening as the Soviet/GDR soldiers would interpret it as an act of war, and GDR guards later retrieved his corpse.

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Rosenberg endorsed that wall, ignored the 192 killed trying to escape the GDR prison, the prison that had just over 3% of the adult population of the GDR spying on the rest of the population for anything that could be construed as being critical of the regime. What a hero! Read the book Stasiland by Anna Funder to see the totalitarian horror that Rosenberg endorsed.

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UPDATE 4: Chris Trotter has sung his praises as well saying "his encounters with the democratic socialists of "Red Vienna" had convinced him of the enormous creative potential contained within "ordinary" human beings. He never doubted that critical thought, free expression and mass organisation were the keys to unlocking this transformative social energy" Free expression is hardly compatible with the Berlin Wall, nor is critical thought compatible with the North Korean slave state. Trotter's delusion includes such claims as "a country where only intellectuals of the Right were accorded unfettered speaking rights." Try and have those rights in a university now if you aren't of the left?

What's wrong with (some) British kids?

The noise around the UN report on the state of children in the UK produced the usual predictable responses. Some on the left saw it as a damning indictment on free market liberalism, thinking that somehow the rather highly taxed, certainly highly regulated UK is some sort of libertarian free for all, also ignoring that France and Austria, two countries with generous welfare systems were barely ahead of the UK. The correlation between the report results and state welfare was poor indeed, but then all too often those of us on all sides of a political argument jump at any chance to let facts line up with our own prejudices.
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The right took to criticising the veracity of the report, or focusing on families. The conservative right tend to call for tougher law and order, discipline and blame divorce and family breakdown. While there is some truth in this, I submit that it is far wider than that. Beating up on misbehaving poor people wont fix things - it is far more insidious than this.
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It’s not poverty. The link between poverty and crime is typically taken to be because those with nothing will steal out of desperation, but as Jenny McCartney of the Sunday Telegraph points out those in poverty today are not skinny and malnourished, but more often overweight – they are seen with MP3 players and brand name sneakers. The so called relative poverty for most in modern day Britain is so remote from the poverty of even forty years ago, that another explanation is needed. Those children living in bleakness today are not doing so because there isn’t housing or they are starving, it is because of chronic parental failure. Parents who either through abuse or neglect are wholly incompetent – incompetent with their own lives, and unfortunately barely competent enough to copulate and then ruin other lives.
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In the past two weeks three teenagers have been murdered in south London, and another in south Manchester. The environment in places like Peckham and Moss side is dire. They make south Auckland, Taita, Kaikohe and Flaxmere look soft. McCartney’s brilliant article cuts to the heart of what is wrong.
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“The real, terrifying poverty among Britain's children now is a poverty of vision, of aspiration, of education and of human empathy. Small children, including those who come from the sort of homes that would make hardened social workers weep, are usually poignantly clear about what they want from life. Above all else, they crave order and affection. The stories and films that they enjoy are usually those that offer some kind of fantasy of cosiness and containment, whether it be from the sight of a dormouse climbing beneath a patchwork quilt or the idealised public school setting of Harry Potter's Hogwarts. With unerring instinct, they gravitate towards adults who are kind, without questioning what that adult looks like or possesses.”

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Children raised in homes where violence and abuse are rife, where there is chronic neglect of not just their education (how many homes are bookless?), but of attention and love. Laws against corporal punishment will do little to combat this – it is a nihilistic culture without affection or kindness for others.

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At best, some of these children live with loving parents working hard to get their children out of these suburban hellholes- the hellholes that the police largely ignore because they are violent, gangridden and nearly lawless. They go to schools where hard work and intelligence are sneered at, and bullying rife.

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At worst, kids grow up without attention and affection, so they seek attention elsewhere. They see adults cynical and envious, using alcohol, drugs and sex to inoculate themselves from emotions and confronting reality. The kids learn this early on too.

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Television, the gutter press, the music industry and youth culture is more and more obsessed with how you look and what you own, with the greatest attention and respect given to those who are the flashiest with it, with the least effort. Boys see footballers and rap stars as role models, girls see modellers, footballers’ parasites (wives) or being a “ho” as role models. Meanwhile, a majority would deny the hardest working, wealth creating City Traders their million pound bonuses, because after all it’s acceptable to make an absolute fortune in the entertainment and football industries, but not banking. Similarly they cheer and laugh at the downfall of their kind. Seeking to embarrass, humiliate and destroy – Jade Goody was a creation of this. She made a fortune out of being an empty headed talentless nobody who was foul mouthed and angry.

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So the “poor” youth grow up wanting it easy, they want to be rich, but sneer at those who work to get there. They don’t give a damn about anyone else, because their parents didn’t either – whoever dad is. So they will bully, intimidate, rob, beat up and in some cases, murder. They have esteem only from others, by being in groups, by getting attention from what they own and show off, and through sex and drugs. Alone they are nothing, and alone they despise and fear those who have something – because they were loved, learnt and worked.

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By contrast, McCartney noted how little kindness is expected or respected. Perhaps it is so easily exploited and so is hidden behind closed doors, the example she gave was of a woman with her two small children on an Easyjet flight. The booster seat would not fit the older child, so a neighbouring woman passenger offered to sit the child on her lap to make it easier. Easyjet ordered the mother and the two children off the flight because of fear of “abuse”.

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It is not poverty that is wrong in Britain. More money wont help, because healthcare is free, there is plenty of cheap housing and a very intact welfare state. Education may need substantial reform, but there is only so much that can be done in communities where children arrive bored, uninterested and not valuing education at all. Even the most innovative, creative schools can only go so far. Tougher law and order may help somewhat, far too many teenage thugs know they can get away with intimidation, violence, burglary and vandalism and know their “rights”. The current prison crisis must strengthen the hand of them all. While government can be tough on crime, open up education and use welfare as a carrot and stick, there needs to be something else – a cultural shift.

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This is a shift from the empty headed hedonistic escapism so worshipped, and the notion that identity and esteem come from others and from being in a group. A shift from the nihilistic distrust of others, envy and seeing other people as a means to your own end, rather than seeing them benevolently as fellow human beings. A shift towards generously acknowledging when others have achieved and created, rather than sneering that someone was trying to prove to others. A shift away from glorifying in the decline and degradation of others. A culture where it was more important to believe in yourself, than to care what others think. This culture does not come from leftwing identity based politics or conservative religious guilt.

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and the answer is not political, it is philosophical - it has to come from individuals, not the state.

Happy Birthday Kim Jong Il - with a rep from NZ!

If I was in Pyongyang and sat on a newspaper with his face on it, I'd be thrown in a gulag - where over 100,000 other political prisoners are, including young children - all made to work 7 days a week from dawn to dusk, as slaves, being tortured, abused at will by their captors, then executed at random, or used for experiments with chemical weapons. North Korea makes every other regime today look like a holiday camp, Iran is comparatively liberal, Saddam's Iraq was too, so is Syria and even Turkmenistan. China is a bastion of personal freedom compared to North Korea. Think of what you know about authoritarian dictatorships and take it to the limit, read Orwell's 1984 and think of North Korea as a sanitised version of the same, without the two way video monitors in every home.

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So what sort of person would fly over to celebrate the birthday of a tyrant who presides over a slave state, especially by going to the place feted as his birthplace but most certainly is not - Mt Paektu is a North Korean shrine, but Kim Jong Il was actually born in the Soviet Union, one year earlier than is officially noted.

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This man.

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Why doesn't the media ask this man some serious questions? Does Borrie ask why children are imprisoned with their families because of suspected political crimes? Does he ask why he never ever gets to see mental patients, why nobody disabled is ever seen in Pyongyang, why North Korea's regime lies blatantly and systematically about the outside world and its own domestic affairs to its own people? Why has he been the sycophantic boot licker of this regime of Orwellian totalitarian cruelty for the last thirty years? Would someone who supported the South African apartheid government been treated the same, or someone who thought Nazi Germany was misunderstood?

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It is one thing to be a socialist, an admire different societies and cultures - it is another to willingly be supportive of a regime, and used in its propaganda, to justify what is a cold -blooded, murderous slave state. Borrie enjoys freedoms in New Zealand that are completely unheard of in North Korea - so why is he a tool of a totalitarian government, or should I just have left out the words after "tool"?

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Unless Borrie is sacrificing himself for the free world and is an assassin who intends to kill Kim Jong Il, which would be quite something.

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If the North Korean authorities suspect this, then he might learn what life is like for those who he ignores. So I ask the government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to question Don Borrie's intentions, after all his socialist credentials are pretty poor if the NZ Labour Party wont select him to stand in Wanganui (as he sought in 1990). On the other hand, it shows that the Labour Party isn't crazy - imagine having a North Korean sympathiser standing for Parliament! This will also be a test as to whether the Democratic People's Republic of Korea uses the internet to do surveillance of the outside world - and find out who Don Borrie really is?

Hope for Turkmenistan?

Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is not a name to roll off the tongue, but he is the new President of Turkmenistan. While there was widespread concern at the rigged elections in Turkmenistan, reported by No Right Turn, to replace the truly despotic Niyazov who died at the end of 2006, a there may be some hope with his successor.

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The Times reports that one of his first moves is to allow unfettered access to the internet. This starts with web cafes and all schools are to have access as well. This is not the move of a wannabe dictator, and will be the beginnings of much more freedom for Turkmenistan. As a poor country (which actually has made a fortune from oil and gas), few will be able to afford it, but it is a very important first step. Berdymukhamedov apparently will also engage in “educational reform” and will allow more private enterprise. Education reform apparently includes allowing students to study abroad, and returning to 10 years of education (and I expect will quietly see study of Niyazov’s own book – the Rukhana fade away).

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Funnily enough, Ashgabat is quite an important airport hub for people flying between Europe and India/Pakistan, because Turkmenistan Airlines is one of the cheapest ways to get there. It's not old planes either, but Boeing 757s from Heathrow and Frankfurt, though it gets a 2 star ranking from airline ranking company Skytrax and the passenger reports are mostly abysmal.