Memories

"You're as good as anyone else, and a damned sight better than most"

"Don't ever forget how very very proud I am of you, like a son to me, I couldn't be prouder"

"Don't ever forget how incredibly special you are to your parents, and how much they have given you, they have helped make you into one remarkable young man"

those are things you would say

I am lucky to have known someone who knows the dignity of the self, who doesn't ever let that falter and who demonstrates the same - the quality of not following the herd, of not being concerned of what others think, of not doubting anything about you. No deceit, no pretences, no spin, no weasel words - pure honest passionate humanity, knowing strengths, admitting weaknesses, but not denying the self and what is worthy of that. You taught me what I needed to learn to be able to say "amo". Enlightenment man indeed.

It was...

listening to Bach, Beethoven, Rimsky Korsakov, Wagner

discussing history, politics, education, love and life, people

what I learnt of cultures ranging from Chinese, to Pacific to Jewish.

sharing moments of grief, delight and laughter

while sipping fine Scotch or brandy

looking out upon the harbour or the lights and sky at night

a haven from the world, a beacon that always shone inside me

a place I was welcome, free and which I took with me and is where I always am.

my mentor, my friend, my lifelong inspiration.

the true legacy of one lies in what of oneself is passed onto others

I carry so much of that, and through all the grief and the regret that you were unable to travel out here, it is that privilege that will bring me strength.

I may say thank you, but I know the greatest thanks for you are in seeing me living.

Farewell you beautiful man.

Tyranny of distance

What do you do when you live in the UK and find out one day after the event, that a very close friend, as good as family, has died - and the funeral is too soon to fly over for?

Stupid celebrities

The latest is Sheryl Crow who wants everyone to use one square of toilet paper per toilet visit. Does she shit little self cleaning pellets or something? Seriously, the idea is revolting, although men could presumably save up their single ones for the main event. Silly cow, especially silly for even mentioning it!

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Of course this follows Madonna, who is so concerned about CO2 emissions, she flew on a private jet to Malawi (yes you can fly to Lilongwe, via South Africa, from London), and is opposed to the London congestion charge (presumably she is too stupid to remember paying). She has quite a carbon footprint.

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Play your music and shut the fuck up

Anzac Day

There is no trace of it where I am at the moment (north of England), but I am quietly commemorating it.
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Not PC has made most of my points, in that war is the second worst state of being for any country. The only thing that would've been worse than World War 2 is surrender.
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Very few people in New Zealand today lived through war – directly. I don’t mean the country being at war, but the fighting being far away, which in itself is bad enough for the families of those fighting – but war on your doorstep. In that respect New Zealand is fortunate because of its isolation from invasion. Australia is less fortunate. East Asia carried a tremendous cost during World War 2, and subsequently in Korea and Vietnam specifically. The UK bore a high cost in World War 2, though this was little compared to the cost born by citizens of most other European countries (with the exception of those too gutless to do anything to fight the evils of fascism – there is nothing honourable in neutrality in World War 2, how can it be moral to be indifferent to the bigoted murderous tyrannies of Nazi Germany or militarist Japan?).
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Those who have lived through war have seen many things most of us would choose to not think about. The destruction of buildings, places, utilities we take for granted, the fear of being bombed or shot, the disintegration of normal life in pursuit of day to day survival and avoiding death. When all people do is that, there is little capacity to build, grow or have recreation. At worst, war sees the death and injuries of people, day after day. It is not like a one-off accident, because in war most of the deaths are deliberate. The enemy is out to destroy you, to destroy the means to retaliate, it is out to defeat you so it can conquer and pillage.

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Part of the price of this is destruction, the death of civilians - but then one should never forget who started it. World War 2 was started by Germany and Japan, the Korean War by North Korea, the Vietnam War by North Vietnam. Fighting war to fight tyranny is a virtue, appeasing tyranny is being complicit in the spread of evil - as Neville Chamberlain was to the peril of millions.

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Consider how the allies treated Germany and Japan after the war, how its citizens were treated, cities rebuilt, infrastructure repaired and modern thriving peaceful liberal democratic countries built. Consider how Germany and Japan treated those who it conquered. It was true imperialism, at best pillaging the natural resources, at worst executing the local population or using them for military experiments.
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The so-called “peace” movement would have you surrender for that. It is not that different from saying you shouldn't defend yourself against a murderer, rapist or thief - because you don't want to hurt the source of the harm.
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Liberal democracies don’t go to war lightly. Wars are expensive in terms of money and lives, and unpopular. Liberal democracies go to war in defence of themselves and their allies. Korea and Vietnam were both about that. In the first instance the war ended roughly at the same point as where it started, before North Korea attempted its conquest of the south. In Vietnam, the non-communist allies were so incompetent and unpopular that none of what the West could do saved a rotten regime from being conquered by another rotten regime, which was more popular. More recently, Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been engaged in war had their respective government not started them by their own aggression.
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I understand why people oppose the glorification of war, but ANZAC Day does nothing of the sort. Those who reject commemorating it are happy enough to have the day off work, and are happy enough to enjoy the freedoms protected by those who did fight.
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Those who do not recognise that are either naïve, stupid or sympathetic to tyranny.

Regional petrol tax (sigh) again?

So a regional petrol tax is proposed for Auckland, a really stupid idea.
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Why?
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1.Last time it was tried (early 1990s by National, but don’t expect them to remember it) to help fund Auckland and Wellington public transport, the oil companies levied the tax across the country at a level equivalent to what it necessary to raise the same revenue from only Auckland and Wellington. Why? Because petrol is taxed at the “border” it is the equivalent of a customs duty, and it is was administratively simpler to simply apply it to all petrol sold across the country. Unless a new retail sales tax is applied to petrol on top of fuel excise duty, and oil companies are legally forced to charge it in Auckland alone (better define that), this tax is likely to be applied to the whole country at a lower rate.

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2.Even if it IS applied to Auckland only, it will kill off service stations not far from the Auckland “border”, after all, why would you fill up in Pokeno if you could go to Mercer and pay 10c a litre less?

3. If you have a diesel or LPG vehicles you pay NOTHING extra. Why? Because diesel vehicles don’t pay a fuel tax (because the majority of diesel is not actually used on the roads, and a diesel tax for road use would mean a refund scheme for that diesel), but instead pay road user charges (which charge according to distance and weight). Since road user charges are bought in advance, and there is no way of detecting where in the country they are bought (or used), expect sales of diesel cars to go up in Auckland to avoid the new tax.

4. The money raised isn’t to be spent on roads, but on a rail electrification scheme that at the very best could serve perhaps 10% of Auckland commuters (though so could improved buses at a small fraction of the cost). 87% of Aucklanders don’t work downtown, and around 40% of the remainder wont be anywhere near a railway station. Perhaps an additional 2% work near a station outside the city, but in short this project will do next to nothing for most Aucklanders – except those living near a station who work in town and would rather ride a train than a bus.

This tax is to force you to pay for most of the cost of their journey to work, because the fares raised from these trains pay around a third of the operating costs, and they wont pay a cent towards the capital costs.
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This idea is going ahead, despite official advice, because Helen Clark wants to electrify Auckland rail – it’s like a toy, a big expensive toy she wants to leave for Auckland and be remembered for it. Despite record levels of transport funding through both road user taxes and Crown funding through Land Transport New Zealand (LTNZ), it is telling that LTNZ is NOT willing to fund electrification of Auckland rail. This tells me it is an inferior project to all of the other road and public transport projects that it funds, remember it is spending $2.3 billion this financial year, this is 2.5 times the funding it allocated in the year Labour got elected, and this is after Labour changed the legislation around LTNZ so that public transport projects could be funded at a lower threshold for appraisal than road projects.
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The Greens will support it because they have a fetish for electric trains – the economics don’t matter, it is a matter of pure faith that forcing people to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for trains they will never use is “good”. It is a matter of faith that this will reduce congestion, even though there is a not a single city in the new world that has electrified an existing railway service and seen traffic congestion reduce on the parallel corridors because of the electrification. If you can find, please show me the report on the marginal congestion costs for the parallel corridor before and after the electrification – because I actually would like to see the conditions necessary for that TO work.
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This is about totems – Helen Clark and Michael Cullen are building a electric network of totem poles in Auckland, paid for by a stupid tax that is probably going to be paid for by all petrol motorists, but not paid for at all by around 15% of Auckland motorists who don’t use petrol. Setting aside the foolishness of heavy subsidies for public transport, a network of bus priority lanes across Auckland and luxury buses could do nearly the same job for a fraction of the price – but no, we must bow down to the altar of the railway.
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Auckland is not London, Paris or New York, where new electric metropolitan railways can make a difference (in a few cases). Auckland’s entire rail network carries 3.8 million trips a year with around 70 carriages, in London the Waterloo and City tube line (perhaps one of the least used) alone carried 2.5 times that with 20 carriages (and no the tube cars do not have 3.5 times the capacity of the Auckland ones, they would be lucky to be able to carry double).
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That gives you some indication of the difference in economics.

By the way, you already pay a 0.66c a litre tax to every territorial authority in the country (it's the same for them all making it easy to distribute), you might ask Auckland City Council and all of the others whether they spend their share on transport? Go on, few of the so called journalists in the New Zealand media can be bothered to research these things you see.

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Oh and why are Auckland roads congested? Simple. Everyone pays the same to use them regardless of demand - it is tragedy of the commons. Singapore charges according to demand and congestion is kept at a low level - but no doubt most of you think public ownership and funding of roads works, even though virtually everywhere it happens you get chronic congestion in major cities.