Earth hour's onanistic vileness

Oh yes, the sheeple in the relatively free rich world (and even the relatively unfree middle income world like China) will have a jolly ol' time switching off our lights for an hour. Makes you feel better a bit of enforced poverty doesn't it?

All cities in North Korea will be joining in, like they do every day for a while, at random hours in fact. Most people there would be amazed that there is the Hour of Power in counter protest. If only North Koreans could choose.

Tim Blair has an excellent commentary about how this silly little protest is going. He says the fact the Soccerroos are participating is proof soccer is gay.

However I'll leave my final comment to the Competitive Enterprise Institute

"we are pointing out what Earth Hour truly is about: it isn’t pro-earth, it is anti-man and anti-innovation. So, on March 28th, CEI plans to continue “voting” for humanity by enjoying the fruits of man’s mind. "

I'm doing so tonight as well.

UPDATE 1: The Ayn Rand Institute describes it as "The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization."

One more reason why Auckland shouldn't be a supercity

The Stuff Poll

You want any of those people governing part of your money? Your land?

No - the incompetency of Auckland local government is NOT because it is fragmented, it is because it tries to do far too much, and far too many who get elected (and who manage it) have a competency deficit.

Hopefully Rodney Hide will dump the idea as comprehensively as the government that called for the Royal Commission was dumped at the last election.

Then scrap the ARC - yes it gets rid of the obvious body to lead a supercity.

After all, the ARC barely existed not very long ago, and almost all of what it does is destructive to Auckland's prosperity, or can be better carried out elsewhere.

That ought to be the report Rodney Hide seeks next from DIA. It would be a pilot for the rest of the country.

The way to hell says Czech PM

That's what he thinks of the Obama print money and fiscally abuse unborn children plan to stimulate the US economy says the BBC. See, the Czech Republics knows a bit about hell, as the allies left in the strangling embrace of Stalin and Chris Trotter's beloved Soviet Union for 40 years, rolling some tanks in halfway just to remind everyone of who was boss. The Czech's know a bit about the difference between freedom and statism, which given the Czech Republic's current (6 month) Presidency of the EU is good news for the EU (for now).

Czech (outgoing) PM Mirek Topolanek considers the size of the US budget deficit and the long list of protectionist "Buy America" provisions in the print money and fiscally abuse unborn children plan to be disastrous, as it follows just the same creeping path of protectionism that damaged the global economy in the mid-late 1930s.

He also says the EU is uninterested in pursuing any more of additional stimulus package to follow the US.

Now whilst this comes on the eve of another announcement, wouldn't you think the world would be better off, with Mr Topolanek's term as PM ending, appointing him instead of Helen Clark to run a bloated corrupt and lazy UN megabureaucracy?

Working hard in the Middle East

Yes, that's been me. 14-16 hour days (yes boo hoo all you strict 8 hour wage slaves, life's rough for you), interminable meetings which are 10% in English as the rest is Arabic, dealing with a public sector that works a 6 hour day, noticing a common thread among those I meet who are innovative and hard working, and those who are bureaucratic (those who are innovative and hard working have PCs on their desks, those who don't aren't - a rule that does not apply in the Western world). Reminding myself to always take toilet paper with me, as I am unsure why my bum should be wet with the basic bidet. Remembering that hotel food, even at a five star establishment, is at best average, at worst bizarrely awful (rolls with houmus and labnah, consistently overcooked fish). Not touching the tap water, but not knowing what water is used for the endless cups of tea offered. Remembering that Nescafe is code for diluted instant coffee with 3 or more teaspoons of sugar in it. Wondering why the same fruit and desserts sit exposed in the hotel room for the whole two weeks. Tolerating the rather common practice of smoking inside offices while meetings occur. Tolerating the very common practice of answering phone calls in the middle of meetings, and constant interruptions from virtually anyone - unless you are meeting the CEO or a Deputy.

However, appreciating that in Egypt (but not the UAE), the internet is wide open - unless, of course, you want to insult the President and ruling party. Also appreciating the relative secularism, which is seen in the diversity of TV, movie and internet content available (yet to encounter a blocked website - unlike the UAE where many are blocked). Perhaps the funniest point is how I found in a music store a boxed set of the racist 1970s UK comedy TV show "Mind Your Language"! You wont find that in the UK with much ease I suspect.

Britain loses its toy human

Jade Goody is a name that provokes much emotion. She died today, a young woman of 27 with cervical cancer. That is mildly notable, perhaps a useful warning to young women to be aware that cancer is not necessarily a disease of the old.

However, for me I’ve known far too many people already, younger and older than me, who have battled cancer. Those are people I give (and gave) a damn about, and so the narcotic the media is addicted to regarding Jade Goody’s illness tastes rather bitter to me. It is why I have refused to comment until today. Young death is sad, but nobody I know who suffered from culture was thrown millions by the media because a guilty tasteless public wanted to watch.

The Daily Telegraph calls her “the poster girl of the curious contemporary cult of talentless celebrity”. This was something I noted some time ago when I hoped her career would end after she was obnoxious to Shilpa Shetty. She seemed an anomaly, hopefully she has been a lesson.

The history of Jade Goody says much about the taste and standards of the British tabloid media, which of course reflects its keen consumers. Jade herself did well materially out of being a toy the media and public could abuse, embrace and abuse again, before embracing her (after briefly abusing her again) on news of her terminal illness.

It is a spectacle that should cause more than a few to reflect on how a young woman became a national sport.

Most of the media is being kind to her memory, but the Daily Telegraph’s obituary best describes how Jade Goody’s media career progressed and regressed. The interest in Jade Goody has been perverted. It glorified in her being dim, laughing at her like a retarded child who didn’t know better. It savoured being as unspeakably cruel as possible, both the right wing and left wing tabloids ripped into her. The Telegraph reporting:

“The Sun called her a hippo, then a baboon, before launching its campaign to "vote out the pig". The Sunday Mirror rejected porcine comparisons on the ground that it was "insulting – to pigs"…"Here she is: fat-rolled, Michelin girl Jade in all her preposterous lack of glory," thundered the Daily Mirror”

The Daily Mirror is purportedly centre left too. What culture glorifies in such sadistic language. Jade, after all, was hardly any worse than millions of the British lumpen proletariat, except she was making a lot of money out of simply being that way. She typified the desires of the barely educated hedonistic poor, who wanted to be rich and to get there by doing or being nothing other than their talentless selves. Yet they were jealous. What were the people who “travelled across England to the BB house, where they waved placards and greeted her emergence, spilling out of a pink dress several sizes too small, with chants of "burn the pig"” saying about themselves?

Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph concludes this for me well:

“A streak of callousness goes with being young, and always has done; but the peculiar brutality shown by twentysomethings towards the cancer-stricken Jade, for no better reason than that they didn't like her, is a miserable and worrying sign of the times.”

Many think her cancer story will save lives, maybe it will help some in the short term. However, she will be forgotten as her memory was always timebound by the short term memory of the tasteless who enjoyed her foibles and revelled in hating her.

A better outcome would be for those who joined in the consumption of a rather clueless woman's life as entertainment to move on and treat culture as a celebration of life, achievement and beautiful things and experiences that inspire us to wonder and awe - rather than inspire a near schizophrenic fascination and vitriol for someone who was none of those things, but similarly hardly deserving of the parasitical sadism that earned her money (and the loathsome Max Clifford who did well out of her too).

A good start would be to stop buying the Daily Mirror and the Sun, for obvious reasons.

It's time to move on and up, but many in Britain need to reflect on this sad little episode and what it says about the psyche of all too many.