Hungry, hungry hypocrisy

Aren’t people strange? Why just the other day someone was having a dispute with their neighbour over the number of dogs he had on his property. This man thought he would solve the problem himself. He had the foresight to get his neighbour to sign a document giving him permission to get his shotgun and rifle and go about “destroying” each of the dogs himself. Pity he didn’t have the foresight to inform the authorities. How strange. Although, that’s not the strangest part. It’s the most horrible, the most sickening and the most inexcusable, but not the strangest. What I find strangest are some of the responses and attitudes of the general public. Not that they disagree with his method of choice, but rather the hypocrisy that flows so freely from them.

Today I noticed that there was a group on facebook entitled “The sickos who killed 33 dogs in NZ should be publicly shot”. On this group’s ‘wall’ there are countless outcries of disapproval, including such hypocritical pearls as “Shoot them in the knees leave them for dead” and “I hate violence, but COKSUCKERS like him can get tortured alive !!!!!!!!”. One kind soul has even provided the man’s name, address and mobile number, just in case someone feels the need to act out their grammatically-deficient threats. Now I am in no way condoning what the man did. I’m a dog owner, and it made me nauseous just to think about it. I strongly believe that there should be harsher penalties for cruelty to animals, particularly towards animals registered as pets. It just terrifies me that someone can effectively say ‘what that person did was totally sick; how could someone even THINK of doing something so horrible? I’d like to gut him with a knife and feed him to my dogs’.

The belief that it’s okay to commit acts of great violence towards people who have committed acts of great violence is in itself barbaric. I don’t doubt that the majority of people who make these bold statements would never, and could never, act on them themselves. So presumably they’re asking some higher power to commit these acts. Are these acts then acceptable if done in the name of justice? I’d agree that Police should be able to use force to diffuse a situation. There are non-lethal solutions; however they shouldn’t be convicted if lethal force is required as a last resort. That’s a different story. While it is taking lives in the name of justice, the offender is still offending and therefore still poses a threat. Calling for violence in the name of justice when the offender poses no threat is archaic and disturbing. Public hangings stopped being trendy for a reason. Wishing for violence makes you no different from the perpetrators of violence before they acted on it. By all means, call for justice though. People shouldn’t get away with actions that negatively affect the lives of others. That’s why we have a justice system, which brings me to another point.

The problem with the justice system is that our society is stuck in limbo; somewhere between capital punishment and group discussions. While some members of the public may demand blood, the truth is that it wouldn’t make any difference to their lives whether the guilty party was dead or locked up. In fact, if any of those people ever put their gallows where their mouth is, they might get enough of that blood on their hands to realise that the death penalty is really a lose-lose kind of deal. So instead we lock our criminals up in small rooms and feed them for a pre-defined period of time until we let them out again. How quaint. Whenever I drive over the Khyber Pass on-ramp in Newmarket and look down at the stone walls of Mt Eden prison I get a feeling of depressed confusion. We’ve repeatedly sent people into space, we’ve got remote control toys on the surface of Mars, video calling is available to anyone with an internet connection and movies can be filmed and shown in all three glorious dimensions. We’re living in the future, and yet locking criminals up in small rooms and feeding them for a pre-defined period of time until we let them out again is the best we can come up with?

There are other options I suppose, such as home detention and mental health counselling. I think part of society wants an alternative approach, it’s just too hard to deal with, and much easier to keep locking people up in small rooms. I can’t offer any better alternatives myself. Puppies Behind Bars sounds like a good idea, although it’s more part of the prison system than an alternative to it. The program “trains inmates to raise puppies to become service dogs for the disabled and explosive detection canines for law enforcement”. That may just be the worst possible treatment for the person mentioned above, or it could be the absolute best. Helping criminals understand how their actions have impacted on the lives of others by putting them in their shoes may not be such a bad idea.

I guess the question is do we genuinely want to rehabilitate criminals so that they can become functioning members of society, or do we just want to vent our rage and anger before putting them out of sight and out of mind? Is it even possible to change someone’s mindset enough for the justice system to ever work? I like to think so. I also hold onto the hope that society’s mindset will continue to change. It’s taken a long time for the death sentence to be frowned upon, with any luck the prison system is next. I just hope that in the meantime there are enough people who are refraining from wishing horrendous torture upon criminals long enough to come up with a decent alternative.

The SkyCity's the limit

I love a good movie. I even love quite a few bad movies. What I don’t love is the ever increasing cost one has to pay for the privilege of seeing the movie on the big screen. There was a time when a night at the movies cost nothing more than a lazy Kate from mum, half for the pre-movie combo and half for the movie itself. Admittedly, there was probably a time when a movie cost nothing more than sixpence from Aunt Mildred, half for the movie itself and half for a to the local opium dealer. I don’t remember those times, and there’s a chance they never existed, so let’s stick with the age of the lazy tenner. As time passed the price of tickets increased. That’s not all that strange, the price of everything increases over time due to inflation, with the exception of air travel, for some reason. It’s important that I note here, before I get swept away by the rant inside, that when I refer to ‘cinema’ or ‘they’, I am really referring to SkyCity Cinemas, who own somewhere in the region of 97% of cinemas in New Zealand. There are plenty of other, non-SkyCity cinemas in New Zealand that may be doing a damn fine job, or a damn lousy one, I just haven’t had much experience with them so I’m unable to comment.

In New Zealand the inflation rate is currently 4.3%. So if a movie cost $5 in 1992, due to inflation alone it should have cost $7.38 in the third quarter of 2009 (thank you RBNZ for the handy calculator). Instead, movie tickets were $15.50 in the third quarter of 2009. But wait, you smugly decree, you were a child in 1992, a child’s ticket would have cost $5, not an adult’s. Smugly noted. However, in the third quarter of 2009 a child’s ticket cost $9.50. That’s more than $2 higher than inflation. Not all that much for the individual, but when there are more movie cinemas than ever, implying that movie attendance is higher than ever, that’s a lot of extra profit for movie industry. I’m sure a similar situation exists for adult ticket prices.

During the age of the lazy tenner, 1992, the highest-grossing movie was Aladdin, bringing in US$504,100,000, that’s NZ$931,276,556 at the 1992 exchange rate (thank you again RBNZ). That’s a lot of money, especially when the movie only cost US$23 million to make. You would assume then, accounting for inflation, that in 2009 the highest-grossing movie would make about US$777,122,000. After all, there was a recession on, times were tough, biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Ahh, but when you’re eating soggy newspaper for dinner and living in a shoe box in the middle of the street, what better way to spend the money you earned shining shoes outside the local speakeasy than visiting the world of Pandora in ground-breaking 3D. A world where creatures are almost identical to those on Earth but with an extra pair of limbs; a world where nobody ever takes down their Christmas lights; a world where it’s somehow more cost effective to transfer the consciousness of a biologist into a genetically matched Alien body to go out and observe the local flora than it is for them to simply wear one of those gas masks. It’s also a world where inflation means nothing. US$777,122,000? Try doubling it. In less than a month Avatar grossed US$1,346,805,340 worldwide. That’s 10 digits right there. Titanic has only managed to gross US$1.8 billion in 12 years. Granted, charging an extra $1.50 for the novelty of seeing it in 3D (which is totally worth it by the way) helps boost profits. It’s not like it was the only movie to post an obscene profit in 2009 though. Harry Potter raked in US$934 million, Ice Age 3 got US$887 million and Transformers 2 took in US$835 million. Good lord, even Alvin and the Chipmunks managed to get their grubby little paws on US$177 million, and that was just in a week, or should I say in a 'squeak'? No, definitely not.

The rise in movie ticket prices, therefore, can’t be because of inflation, and since inflation takes into account increases in the average wage, it can’t be blamed on the high-rolling individuals the cinemas employ. Movies are continuing to haul in more money than Scrooge McDuck could swim in, so it’s not a failing movie industry that’s driving the price up. I’d like to say its pure greed; however I don’t have all the facts. What if the mob has SkyCity’s daughter and is demanding they increase their ticket prices at a slightly greater rate than inflation over a 20 year period or they’ll kill her? What if SkyCity is in some sort of corporate competition to see who can offer their customers the least value-for-money? Well, if the latter is the case, I hardly think SkyCity can win. The tobacco companies not only charge a lot for a product that costs very little to produce, but they actually say on their packaging that using their product will kill you or worse and people still freely hand over their money! We’re still a good few years away from paying $25 to sit in a cinema while being heavily irradiated, so for now you can rest assured that at least buying a movie ticket is better value than a packet of cigarettes.

I think I lost the point somewhere in the last paragraph. I’ll try and get back on track long enough to wrap this up. Movie companies, like most other companies, exist solely to make the biggest profit they can. I’m sure there a few very wealthy people sitting in a room screaming “another 50 cents!” and rolling around on the floor laughing as they watch more and more people flock to fill up the ever-increasing numbers of cinemas. To those people I begrudgingly quote Brian Tamaki: enough is enough. We get it, you all make a lot of money and you’re diamond-encrusted lifestyles are very impressive. But please, why don’t you try offering us, the loyal customers, a brief respite from your profit-mongering so that we can enjoy the cinema without having to decide between a couple of hours in Pandora and a weekend in Wellington. I promise if you cut a little off the top, maybe taking it back to the age of the lazy tenner, without the combo, I’ll see twice as many movies. That’s a 33% increase in profits. And even if others don’t follow my lead then worst case scenario is that you lose a bit of that wealth and have to go back to simpler, gold-encrusted lifestyles. I’m sure James Cameron can lend you a few million if times get really tough, he owes you that much.

Blessed be the Lord God Almighty...in bed

St Matthew's-in-the-city are raising a new billboard for the Christmas period that brings into question the traditional story of Jesus' birth. You can read about it here.

As a non-religious person, it is quite refreshing to see something that I can actually respect a religious organisation for.

One of the biggest problems with organised religion is their failure to move with the times by clinging to archaic story-telling as though it were inarguable fact. This billboard shows a level of self-awareness that I feel the Church will need more of it is to survive through this age of free-flowing knowledge and understanding.

Besides, self-deprecating humour is so hot right now. Bravo Mr Cardy.

UPDATE 23/12/2009: The billboard has been defaced three times (once at knife-point!?) so the church has said it's not going to put it up again. Strike another one up for the crazy people, or is that strike another one AGAINST the crazy people? I just can't tell any more...

On the egotism of Man

Edit 22/01/2019: I just wanted to say that I am no longer quite the climate change sceptic I once was. I never flat out denied it, I was just cautious. It’s been a while now, and while I don’t know enough to be 100% convinced of man-made climate change, I defer to the thousands of much more knowledgeable people that assure me it’s a scientific certainty. I could delete this post in light of this revelation, but that would be revisionist and cowardly, so I choose to clambour up what little moral high ground I can find in this situation and leave it where it is.

The Copenhagen summit has kicked off and I’m a little worried. When you put that many World leaders in a room and tell then to save the planet, surely no good can come from it.

Let me start by saying that I’m not completely down with all this global warming talk. I’ll accept, at least for the sake of this rant, that global temperatures are rising, and that within 50 years I will be able to hold off switching on the heat pump for an extra week or two. However, I’m not willing to accept that there is enough evidence to say, without a doubt, that humans are solely responsible. I find it typically egotistical for us humans to think we’re destroying the Earth. There are a quite a lot of us, but I know for a fact there is quite a bit of this planet that is human free, roughly 99% of the planet in fact. And not all of that human-inhabited 1% is in a position to be held responsible for having any effect on the world outside their own village. We hear the words ‘scientific consensus’ thrown around like they have meaning. I can tell you, sitting where I am in this world of science, that there is often little consensus. There are, however, scientists who seek funding anyway they can, and therefore follow the trail of money to wherever it may lead. They may convince themselves they believe in the things they seek to prove, however you can’t survive in this industry by holding onto your beliefs. Science has become little more than a business, far from the academic think-tank it once was.

Undeniably, the most popular evidence for man-made global warming is the level of atmospheric CO₂. I can not see how anyone can definitively say that this is causing the globe to warm. “But surely you can’t deny that CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have increased at a rate beyond that occurring in nature alone?” Maybe I could, if I did some more research, but that’s not my point. What I’m saying is that an increase in any two things over time does not necessarily mean they are directly related. Time is a confounding factor in many studies, one that often makes it impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions. Both the number of books you’ve read and the price of milk has increased in the last 10 years; does that mean I should blame your literary thirst for driving up the cost of my morning cereal? Granted, atmospheric CO₂ may be a different story because if it’s responsible for the greenhouse effect then surely the more of it there is the bigger the effect and the higher the temperatures. Just don’t show me a line graph of CO₂ levels and global temperatures plotted against time to prove it, or I might be forced to add the price of milk to that graph and blow your mind. If it is the cause of rising temperatures, it’s bound to be far more complicated, and not something that be easily proven by presenting simple proportional relationships.

So, let us move back to the Copenhagen summit. Is it a bad thing to get all these people together to discuss climate change? Not if this sort of thing happened quite often to discuss the World’s problems. My problem is that ‘climate change’ is such a big talking point at the moment that it distracts from the more important, tangible problems that are more than evident throughout the world. Think about the significance of having all that power focussed on a single issue. Why not shift the focus of that power over to something like, say, World hunger? At least that’s a problem that can be seen to be affecting people, and has a potential solution. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to arrange this many World leaders to get together in one room? I don’t, although I can safely assume it’s a fair bit. The money needed for security alone could probably feed an African nation for at least a couple of years.

Reduce CO₂ emissions by all means, that can’t be a bad thing. However, I beg of you, separate the air-quality issues from the doomsday scenario. I’m sick of being told that every coffee I drink emits the same amount of CO₂ as slapping an orphan across the face with a bottlenose dolphin. Don’t make me feel guilty by using convoluted equations based on vague relationships and clouded logic to blame the end of the world on my mundane lifestyle. And to all the powerful people attending Copenhagen, please don’t come up with some convoluted, misguided, ill-informed tax scheme that will inevitably punish the poorest individuals. Do you think it will be the big companies that will suffer? BP and ExxonMobil forced to change their heathen ways? Hardly. They have way too much political influence to let anything affect them. I’m sure that if anything happens to their profits they, with all their infinite compassion and respect for consumers, will just raise the cost of petrol. Or, if forced to investigate alternative fuels, will simply find a way to produce oil from the tears of baby fur seals, just to make a point.

A few months ago I went to a seminar from a visiting scientist who had investigated a number of schemes being adopted by British companies designed to charge their suppliers based on their CO₂-equivalent emissions. These schemes calculated emissions based on a number of factors, one of which is deforestation. The problem here is that not everyone has records of what their land was used for prior to the magical year of 1990. If you have no records of your crop prior to that year, the calculations default to the maximum. What this means is that if a Kenyan farmer cut down a few trees on a section of grassland to plant his beans, but kept no records of what had been done, it is assumed that he levelled a section of Malaysian rainforest. This farmer, who is hardly raking in the shillings in the first place, can now only get a fraction of what he was getting for his crop, all because a supermarket chain in Britain wants to put a ‘Carbon Neutral’ sticker on their packet of beans. I fail to see how anybody wins in that scenario.

The other danger of giving CO₂ our full attention is that it gives us false hope that we can stop what is happening. What happens if we invest all this time and money into reducing CO₂ emissions, solely for the purpose of slowing global warming, and then in 20 years time we realise it had nothing to do with it and we’re not prepared for the consequences? I have a feeling that we’re busy burning all our books, all the while refusing to accept what’s happening and adjust our grocery budget.

Let’s all take a deep breath, brush aside the hype for a second and think about this. After all, every deep breath locks up the same amount of CO₂ as giving a sugar-coated rainbow to a unicorn.

Indifference is the new hate

I have uncovered the reason so many things get banned. See, people who really love something can actually live without it. They think, “I really, really love this thing. But if it wasn’t here I guess I’d find something else”. Friends, family and pets excepted of course. On the other hand, people who really hate something can’t live with it at all. It eats them up inside. The mere existence of this thing is a pox on their livelihood. “I cannot enjoy life until this thing, however easily ignored it may be, is eliminated from being!”

And for this reason there are protests against things, front-page articles about the state of things, instant-opinions from melodramatic current-affairs shows and naïve, uninformed bumper stickers.

How often do you see a front-page spread about how much people love their local park? Or a current-affairs segment on the nations indifference towards supermarkets?

That’s not news, that’s just life.

Let’s say something exists. This thing is hated by some and loved by others. The haters express opinions; this leads to articles, television-induced opinions and new adornments for your car. The lovers sit back and watch all this take place while they bitch and moan to other lovers whenever they get the chance. Eventually this thing gets destroyed/cancelled/discontinued/eliminated. Both haters and lovers now move on to something else. The haters find something new to hate, the lovers find something new to love and the media finds something new to link to P.

In the end, no one really cares any more.

So why did this thing get disappeared? It's because even though love and indifference make up two-thirds of the emotional spectrum, they only account for about one-eighth when it comes time for action.

The moral of this story is not ‘If you love something, fight for it’. That’ll just cause more front-page articles. The moral is this: if you love something, and its very existence is being threatened, it’s best to become indifferent to it quickly. That way, if the haters succeed, you’ll be first up not to care, and if they fail you can fall in love, all over again.

A Greater Deception

Many people claim they talk to God. Many people also do not, in fact, talk to God. The ratio is probably close to 1. Now, many Catholics believe in God, it's kind of a pre-requisite I think. This goes double for Priests. One day these Priests might rise through the ranks to Bishop, then Archbishop, Cardinal then maybe even Pope. As they graduate they might think, "This is it, this is my chance to talk to The Man". They'll probably be disappointed early on but will be remain hopeful that they might get another promotion and that this'll be the chance.

Now imagine, if you will, a man. A clever man. High intelligence has led him to devote his life to the Church, as he believes that facts are necessary but Faith is also of some importance. He wants answers but is willing to just "Believe" until he finds them. Through this man's determination and intellect he has risen to the top. Numero Uno. The Pope. He's been waiting for his chance to talk to The Dude for his whole life, the proof that he needs, and he thinks, he KNOWS that this is IT. However, a couple of years pass and still He hasn't Called. Now this man is smart, he knows that if anyone gets to Talk to The Chief it should El Popo. At this point he gets to thinking. "I'm the head of the Catholic Church", he ponders, "if I haven't got a Call then maybe it's all just Mumbo Jumbo". So, after 85 years of devout Catholicism, and after making it all the way to CEO of the biggest company in the developed world, our man renounces his faith and moves to Bangladesh to try his hand at Islam.

Here lies my credibility...

There are many rants festering away within me, so I've decided to set up a rant-site (aka 'blog') to get them off my chest.

Don't take anything I write too seriously, or change the way you think about me because of it. Most of the time the rant takes control and I lose all reasonable thought. Just promise me that you'll think about the things I say. It may just help you rethink your own opinions, even if they still don't agree with those I convey here.

The first couple of posts are from an old rant-site I had many years ago. Hopefully it'll get better.