Hypocritical Oaf

It's an often asked question: Is God responsible for tragedies, or if not could He have prevented them?

I'm not going to go into the existence of God here, however I will get into how much influence He has on the movements of the Earth. I find it silly that people would claim God has any control over natural disasters, in the same way I find it silly that fundamentalist Christians deny the theory of evolution.

If I was God, hypothetical of course, I wouldn't bother creating a universe that I had to monitor every single moment and control every single aspect. If I'm busy creating universes I'm probably a bit smarter than that. I'd do it more like someone might program a computer game. I'd come up with the concept, draw up some designs, then work on creating a number of algorithms that will allow the universe to go about it's thing. Of course I'd want to be able to alter things from time to time, no one wants to play a computer that has no user input. Hence, I would create physics to allow things to interact without causing too many errors, I'd install evolution to allow things to adapt to their environment and finally some jerks to make it interesting. Then I'd sit back and watch, occasionally collapsing governments or creating new mountain ranges if I was bored.

Now, what irritates me about the question is that people can't seem to decide whether or not He is directly responsible when disaster strikes. The answer to the question is largely based on the outcome of the disaster, particularly in relation to the loss of human life. Here's an example from Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch Barry Jones:

5th September 2010: 'Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch Barry Jones said in the wake of the earthquake many people were finding comfort in the church. "We just have to give thanks to God that there's no-one dead."'

24th February 2011: 'Bishop Jones reminded everyone that bad things happening was not God punishing people, despite the "tragedy that has unfolded in our city over the past 24 hours". "Such thinking is a mistake ... it's not about vengeance," he said.'

We should thank God that people were not killed in September, but can't blame Him when they were in February? You can't have it both ways Mr. Jones. Passive God or vengeful God. At least if it's one of those we know what we're dealing with. Unpredictable, erratic God? How is that any different to having no God at all? Oh, right...

Too many spirits, not enough Christmas

Wanting to get into the Christmas spirit we rented ‘A Christmas Carol’. An animated adaptation of the classic book. Having seen Scrooge flying through the air, sliding down bannisters and lots of pretty colours and whimsical music in the trailer we settled in for some holiday cheese. Oh, dear God, were we not expecting what the next hour and a half would bring. This movie is dark; REALLY dark. Broken-jawed ghosts shackled in chains doomed to walk the Earth for all eternity dark. Struggling families with dying, crippled children dark. Being chased by the shadow of Death and his screaming shadow horses dark. The scenes that didn’t result in horrified recoiling were so lathered in Charles Dickens' olde English that it took all my attention just to decipher what the characters were talking about. Sure, there are a few scenes with pretty colours and whimsical music, but these mostly come at the end, after you’ve already been subjected to an hour of panicked screams, horrifying visuals and insights into the miserable lives of the Victorian-era working class.

I’m not having a go at the story. It’s a story of self-reflection, second chances and all that. The movie probably captured the mood and message of the book perfectly. I didn’t feel it was a particularly good movie in many ways (motion capture animation kind of weirds me out, I blame the uncanny valley, and I found the whole 'ghost of Christmas present' scene to be visually confusing). What struck me most about this is that this movie was marketed at children. It was marketed as a delightful holiday romp. If they hadn’t intended it for children, maybe the trailer should have included the scene where the shadow of Death (ghost of Christmas future) dangles Scrooge over his own grave while he pleads for his life.

There’s a certain ignorance from the studios that causes the mis-marketting of these movies. Anything that doesn’t feature live actors seems to be automatically assumed to be for children. It’s like giving a piña colada to a child because it looks like fruit juice. This phenomenon still dogs The Simpsons for some people. Those people are all the more moronic for it, but I have heard comments like ‘I don’t feel like watching cartoons’. 'Cartoons' they say! Heaven forbid they should ever buy their niece or nephew a birthday present from a Japanese video store ('oh look, this one has a girl in a school uniform holding some sort of microphone, it must be similar to High School Musical'). It also affected Fantastic Mr. Fox, one of my favourite movies and one of the funniest movies of the past few years. The jovial DVD cover image of the characters riding a sidecar was reminiscent of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and in no way did the movie justice. It’s like studios pay people to make movies, watch a 30 second highlights reel and devise a marketing strategy. But there’s more than just ignorance at play. There’s a certain level of irresponsibility that goes along with it. Insisting a movie is for children when it’s not simply because you can’t figure out a way of marketing animated films to adults is almost a form of child abuse. Saying A Christmas Carol is for children because it’s animated is the same as saying Event Horizon is for children because it has a spaceship in it. I wonder how many parents have sat their kids down to watch A Christmas Carol while they were doing something in another room, probably wrapping presents I suppose, only to come back and find them rocking gently in a corner muttering something about Tiny Tim.

I don't think it’s a new phenomenon either. Have you actually seen Dumbo? He gets wasted and starts hallucinating in a scene that would make Pink Floyd shift uncomfortably in their seats. Granted, the rest of the movie is pretty child-friendly, but that scene is a tenth of the whole movie. A lot of the animated films of the 40s and 50s were similar. I can’t say whether they were marketed towards kids at the time, or whether kids at the time routinely got hammered and hallucinated, but they're definitely marketed as nothing but kids movies now.

So, this is a plea to studios and the general public alike. The use of animation in movies and television does not automatically pigeon-hole them as perfect for children. Sometimes it’s not a case of being aimed at kids but still entertaining for adults (a la Shrek, Nemo, How to Train a Dragon etc…). Sometimes they are simply meant for adults, and should require a pre-viewing before subjecting little Bobby to a lifetime of therapy. A movie should be judged on its own merit, not assigned an audience based on how the poster is going to look, especially now that animation has become so versatile. Once the public acknowledges that, the studios might be willing to accept it too and we’ll see more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox doing well at the box office because they’re being marketed at the right audience. That means more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox being made, and that is definitely not a bad thing. We also might be able to start watching movies like A Christmas Carol with the proper expectations and not sit through an hour of dark, dark soul-searching, all the while waiting for the cutesy squirrel character to come bounding onto the screen and lighten the mood.

500m Straw Clutch

Australia did tremendously well at the recently closed Commonwealth Games in Delhi. They blitzed the field with gold after gold, showing that it's not the size of a country's population that matters, but how you use it. Congratulations to them and their athletes. They're a relatively small country that have consistently punched well above their weight. It's hard to fault their performance. Hard, but not impossible. What sort of Kiwi would I be if I didn't waste my time trying to find a way to bring the Aussie's down a peg?

For this I have burrowed through the data to uncover that vital piece of information that I can skew in such a way that if you squint it almost makes Australia look less-than brilliant, and hopefully move NZ up a couple of spots in the process.

In the interest of conciseness, and because making tables in HTML is incredibly tedious, I'm only going to list the top 5 countries (and NZ and Australia if they aren't up there).

Firstly, the standard medals table, ranked by gold medals (and then total if there's a tie):

Ranking	Country	Gold Medals
1	Australia	74
2	India	38
3	England	37
4	Canada	26
5	Malaysia	12
11	New Zealand	6

The only thing you can say about that is that Australia didn't get as many golds as in previous years; it's their lowest gold medal haul since Auckland in 1990. That's about as small a consolation as they come. That's gold though. There's a common line of thought that says that a bigger population means that you should win more gold medals. Another way of looking at it is that a bigger population gives you a higher chance of winning each gold medal because you have more people to choose from. So Australia had a 5 times higher chance of winning each gold than NZ. Wouldn't that be reflected in the total medal count then?

Ranking	Country	Total Medals
1	Australia	177
2	England	142
3	India	101
4	Canada	75
5	New Zealand	36

Well, I guess we moved up a few spots. Unfortunately, Australia didn't budge. It looks like I have to manipulate the data a little bit more to get what I want. Luckily I'm a scientist, so that's pretty much my job.

For my next trick I'll look at number of gold medals per capita. Surely a big old country like Australia will falter when faced with the likes of small-and-mighty NZ. I'll use millions of people per gold medal so the numbers don't get out of hand. The smaller the better in this case.

Ranking	Country	Population per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	0.01
2	Cayman Islands	0.06
3	Samoa	0.06
4	Australia	0.30
5	Bahamas	0.35
9	New Zealand	0.73

Curses! I suppose that knocked them off the top spot. I think I can do better than that though, and maybe even get New Zealand a little higher. Modern sports is all about money, right? Then GDP (in millions of USD$) per gold medal should weasel out the over-spenders.

Ranking	Country	GDP per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	$60
2	Samoa	$163
3	Cayman Islands	$1549
4	Kenya	$2516
5	Cyprus	$6227
9	Australia	$12497
16	New Zealand	$20860

Ha! Take that Australia! What's the matter? Earn too much money do we? So that's the first task, taking Australia out of the top 5. Sadly, NZ has also been pushed down, all the way to number 16. For us to overtake Australia I'm going to need to get things nice and convoluted on the home straight. Here goes. GDP in USD$ per head of population per gold medal. This can't possibly fail...

Ranking	Country	GDP per Capita per Gold Medal
1	India	$28.7
2	Kenya	$65.2
3	Nigeria	$97.1
4	Uganda	$232.8
5	South Africa	$476.7
7	Australia	$555.7
19	New Zealand	$4747.6

Damn it! Lousy Aussie overachievers. Australia actually did slightly better and NZ did slightly worse. That was a waste of time (unlike the rest of these tables...). Good on India though, sort of. They must have blown a lot of lunch money on training their athletes for these games.

I suppose whatever way you look at it Australia did pretty well. Not even the fact that they have the second highest GDP per capita of all the nations competing at the Commonwealth Games (Isle of Man has the highest) can account for the number of gold medals they are capable of pulling in, they just got too many. I would have loved to look at medals per athlete competing per country, but Wikipedia let me down there. Not even Google could find me the information I needed.

I've tried all sorts of combinations and I just can't get NZ ahead of Australia. I guess the only hope for all my Oz-bound friends, when faced with the inevitable gloating Aussie, is to point out that they earn 40 times as much per person than India and could only manage twice as many golds. If they start pointing things out, like the fact that we earn 30 times as much as India and only managed 1/6th as many gold medals, then just keep spouting figures in terms of foreign currencies, arbitrary multiplications and decimal points until they get bored and start hitting you. Anything is better than that bloody gloating.

Anand then...

I used to think television-induced outrage was reserved for the bitter elderly and the perpetually unemployed. I’ve realised in the past couple of days that it is now the right of every New Zealander to race into a state of hysteria without stopping to think that there might be something more important to worry about.

I am of course talking about Paul Henry’s latest controversy. The crux of the issue appears to be that him asking if Govener-General Sir Anand Satyanand was ‘really a NZer’ and then going on to ask the Prime Minister if he was going to appoint someone who ‘looked and sounded more like a NZer’ was deemed extremely racist. Judging from the sheer amount of outrage, media coverage and water-cooler conversation around the subject, I have to assume that it was more racist than Hone Harawira, a member of parliament, stating that he wouldn’t want his daughters bringing home a pakeha, or Winston Peters’ ‘Yellow Peril’ campaign from a few years ago, or Michael Laws opening his mouth. I don’t think that’s true, not even close.

Paul Henry may be racist. It’s highly likely that he is. Not in an overly malicious way, but from a number of his comments it’s reasonably clear that he holds different opinions for members of different races. However, the questions he asked were not racist, especially not as racist as everyone seems to think.

Firstly, ‘is he really a NZer?’. At it’s base, this is a sign of ignorance, if anything, rather than racism. I myself am a first generation NZer. My mother is Dutch and my father is British. People have said to me ‘oh, I thought you were German’. I wasn’t offended. I was a little taken aback, but that was it. If I did consider myself Dutch then I imagine being called German might be a little offensive, however I consider myself an NZer so I dismissed it as an odd observation. The truth is that in such a multi-cultural country, it is unclear who is an NZer and who is not. It doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t make it any more obvious. When Anand Satyanand was first appointed as Governer-General many people asked ‘is he an NZer?’. In fact, soon after his appointment Sir Satyanand himself said in an interview, ‘I imagine during [my term as Governer-General] there will be some who will say “there is one of us being one of them” while for others it will be a case of saying “there is one of them being one of us”. So even he acknowledged that his Indo-Fijian descent might cause a bit of confusion. The fact is that when you see a person of Indian descent (be it Indian or Indo-Fijian) with an Indian name, your first assumption isn’t that they are from NZ. With nearly a third of the World's population fitting that description and not being NZers, to make that assumption would be statistically ignorant (I’ll confess my own ignorance here, in that I’m not aware of the difference between Indo-Fijian names and those from countries in the sub-continent). It is also not a pre-requisite that the Governer-General be an NZer. So, assuming complete ignorance, that question in itself is not unreasonable, nor is it racist.

That leads me to the next question in question, ‘are you going to choose someone who looks and sounds like an NZer?’. Now I admit, that is a stupid and irrelevant question. It’s not racist, at least nowhere near the level of racism that it’s been elevated to, but it is stupid. It doesn’t matter if the Governer-General instantly portrays an image of being an NZer or not, that's never been a consideration in their selection, so why ask? Most likely it was blurted out to get a cheap laugh, which evidently was a bit of poor judgement. As for the alleged racism buried in the question, I don’t believe that Paul Henry was referring to Sir Satyanand himself. Rather, he was likely referring to the fact that Sir Satyanand looks Indian and has an Indian-sounding name. Given that the Governer-General’s parents are Indo-Fijian, I doubt that stating he looks Indian or has an Indian sounding name would cause him any offense, no more than calling me Dutch or British would cause me offense. The reference Paul Henry made was to the man on paper, not the man himself, and it most certainly was not a reference to every NZer of Indian or Indo-Fijian descent. Extrapolating a stupid question about a man’s name deisgned to get a cheap laugh into full-blown xenophobia is more than a bit extreme.

I like Paul Henry. I think he’s often very funny and is the only celebrity that regular calls out the media on its lazy practices. I don’t agree with everything he says, particularly his extreme right views of some things such as Government spending, and he can definitely go too far at times. On the whole though, I think television is a better place with him on it. I’m glad to see that Rick Ellis, CEO of TVNZ, has said in an interview that he has no intention of sacking him.

People in this country have become extremely sensitive, and often I feel that that sensitivity is extremely misguided. It’s like there are people in this country who just meet up for a protest, pick up a newspaper and decide what to write on their signs. And too often that newspaper is the New Zealand Herald, which makes matters that much worse.

I’m not condoning racism here, I’m saying that I don’t believe what Paul Henry said should be considered racist. I hope everyone moves on before October the 18th, so Paul Henry can come back to Breakfast and start gearing up for the next bout of over-blown controversy that will inevitably come. I expect nothing less.

Update (08/10/2010): Really India? You're angry at NZ because one TV personality laughed at the name 'Dikshit'? Newsflash India, sometimes your names appear funny to us because they contain certain portions that we consider to be rude words. That's funny. Was there a national incident when Billy Birmingham released any of the 'Twelfth Man' CDs, most of which contain jokes about the names of cricket players from the sub-continent? The name 'Dikshit' is actually quite funny because it contains two very closely related rude words. That's not racist. It's only funny when mispronounced anyway, so Paul Henry wasn't even laughing at her real name (although when pronounced properly it's possibly funnier; Sheila Diksit - sounds like an Aussie porn-star). It was childish, but not racist. When I was in London, I giggled to myself every time the voice came over the speaker and said that the train terminated in Cockfosters. And that only has one such word in the name. It isn't a racial slur if you laugh at someone's name. It's not a reflection of the person and it certainly isn't a reflection of their entire race. It's just a reflection of that inner child in all of us that still smiles when we see the word 'poo'. It might be insensitive if you laugh in their face, but the act of laughing alone simply denotes ignorance and immaturity, not racism. Maybe the bit about the name being appropriate because she was Indian was a little racist... If he'd just pronounced it correctly and gone with Aussie porn-star there wouldn't have been an issue.

The GST of it.

I'm sick of all this talk about the GST rise. Firstly, you're not going to pay GST on existing GST. Since every $1 you spend currently includes 11.1¢ of GST, you'll only notice a 2.235% increase in the cost of things, not 2.5%. It's a small detail, but it bugs me nonetheless.

Secondly, the new tax rates will mean that even someone on the minimum wage will be getting an extra $12.28 per week. Sure, that's not much, however they'd have to spend $549.50 in goods and services each week for that extra income to be eaten up by the GST rise. Since they only earn $510 a week before tax, I doubt that's going to happen.

Even if the tax cuts weren't happening it would barely affect you, so stop complaining about it, you're not going to suffer. Unless you're buying a new car, but then if you're doing that you hardly have money issues do you?

I like GST because it's easier for the individual to control than income tax; so have this one National, because you don't get my support too often.

This just inbox.

As an update to Cost. Benefit., I thought I might point out that when the media reports on 'how the government is spending your money', causing major outrage at 'our taxes' being spent on 'blah, blah blah', they're neglecting to report one small detail. Individual income tax only makes up about 39% of the government's core revenue. And that's core revenue; that excludes Crown entities and state-owned enterprises. Core revenue is only ~74% of the government's revenue. That means that individual income tax accounts for ~29% of the government's revenue. You might argue that GST, which makes up 24% of the core revenue, is also 'your money'. I suppose it is, but you have control over that, unlike income tax; and really, who considers GST when they go to buy something? You see a price and decide whether to pay it. Don't even get me started on the fact that the GST rise will see you spending and extra $2.50 for every $100. You'd have to be spending more than $4000 to see the extra expense soar into triple digits.

So, back to the point at hand, for the sake of accuracy in reporting, the media should be taking any ballpark figures they happen to glance at on the internet and dividing them by three. They'll still be doing a shitty job, but at least it will show that they're doing a bit more reporting than just checking their inbox.

Cost. Benefit.

After yet another conversation about the lousy, do-nothing scum that is the unemployed, in which I always do my best to defend those that were once my brethren, I thought I’d look into something that I’ve been wanting to know for some time. To find the information I was after I had to burrow into that most unholy of creations, the government website.

What I wanted to know is exactly how much the New Zealand government spent annually on the unemployment benefit. People often quote it as one of the country’s largest expenses, something that I can never believe.

The first bit of data I could find was exactly what the government wanted me to find, i.e. a nice big pie chart with over-simplified values designed to both wow and enrage. According to these wedges of need-to-know information the government will spend $70.7 billion in the 2010/2011 financial year. Of this rather significant pie, $21.2 billion will be spent on ‘social security & welfare’. Well, well, well, that is a decidedly fattening slice of pie. I guess I was wrong…or was I…and if I was then by how much…

Burrowing a little deeper, and overcoming such obstacles as the use of the word ‘vote’ to mean an area of spending (seriously government, you can’t go round using a randomised vocabulary to confuse your loyal subjects; it’s undemocratic etc.), I managed to find a breakdown of exactly what ‘social security & welfare’ meant. Here are some of the ‘scopes of appropriation’ that fall under that particular ‘vote’: care and protection services for children ($0.3 billion), orphan’s benefit ($0.1 billion), Ministry of Social Development - capital expenditure ($0.1 billion), student loans ($1.6 billion) and Superannuation ($8.3 billion). That’s nearly half of expenditure that comes under social security & welfare, and although you could argue that orphans, students and retirees are all unemployed, they’re not the ones targeted in the typical anti-DOL-bludging tirade. For those we turn to the next group of scopes, if that makes sense.

Firstly, the domestic purposes benefit. These are the lowly house-bound mothers that would rather pop out a few more children than join the workforce. Their filthy maternal ways are costing the government $1.7 billion a year. Why that’s nearly double the $1 billion we spend on ‘climate change’. Think of all the false economies we could put in place if poor people stopped having children!

Next we’ll look at those most undeserving of our help; those people so arrogant that some of them have turned a blind-eye to society, literally. That’s right, I’m talking about the invalid’s benefit. All those people that are “totally blind, or permanently and severely restricted in their capacity for work”. This isn’t for the sick, they have their own benefit. Our government is giving away $1.3 billion to a group of people that are no longer valid. The merely sick get a mere $0.7 billion. For an extra $0.3 billion we could put together a whole other defence force to prevent people from getting sick and injured in the first place.

Finally, we come to the one. The big daddy. The one benefit to rule all benefits. I am of course talking about the mighty unemployment benefit. The place where all your hard-earned taxes go, just so that some pot-smoking pox on society can sit around the house all day watching the Rugby Channel. In the 2010/2011 financial year, our government is expecting to spend nearly $1 billion on these low-lives; $0.948 billion to be exact (to within 3 decimal places). That’s quite a bit. I’ve run out of other ‘votes’ to compare it to it’s so big. I could add some up, like $0.2 billion for Maori affairs, or $0.1 billion for ‘statistics’, but that wouldn’t change anything.

So it’s quite a lot of money we spend then. Nearly $4.7 billion on the big four is quite a bit of cash. However, all sarcasm aside, I urge to think of it this way. That’s only 6.6% (update 01/09/2010: I hadn't realised Crown entities and state-owned enterprises weren't part of the revenue figures I was looking at; it's really only 4.9% of Government revenue). of the annual budget we spend on people that wouldn’t be able to live otherwise. Sure they could get jobs, possibly. But what if they can’t? I don’t have the numbers for how many people are in complete need of a benefit versus those that are simply ripping off the system. Some of them, possibly the majority, don’t have a choice. Isn’t it a government’s job to look after the people? 39% of the government’s revenue comes from individual income tax. Roughly, that means that only $2.60 (update 01/09/2010: $1.90 with the new calculations) out of every $100 you earn goes towards allowing people far less fortunate live something that to you would barely resemble a life. Sure, you’re funding the odd joint, Sky bill or pint of Lion Red, but mostly you’re spending a couple dollars out of every hundred to try and lift people off rock bottom. If after all that you’re still furious at the amount of money that gets siphoned off the government bank accounts like so much petrol through a stolen hose, then I suggest you take a trip to rock bottom, and see how much you think a roof over your head is worth. More than a couple of dollars I’d wager.

PS: stop whining about all the money our Ministers are spending. Everything they do, including support personnel, official trips and the odd not-so official lunch, costs $60 million a year. That’s $0.06 billion for consistency. We spend more than that on treaty negotiations. These people are running our country. If you’re jealous of all the perks they get then run for office. Literally no one is stopping you.

PPS: if you really want to get riled up about something, how about the fact that our government only spends $0.77 billion on research, science and technology. That's less than they spend on carbon credits. Now that's something to whine about.