Friday, March 11, 2005
Sightings
Marriage reduces crime risk in communities : Social factors such as family instability have a more direct link to crime than economic factors, according to an Australian study which looked at urban and rural communities of different sizes. Residential stability, less ethnic diversity and a higher proportion of married people were some critical factors in reducing crime. In fact, ethnic diversity presented much less of a risk for crime when there were fewer sole parents, more married people, and residential stability.
Children can’t be trusted: Rod Liddle says it is time that British teachers took back control of the classroom.
The man who should be pope : Piers Paul Read looks over the candidates to replace John Paul II.
Australia's government plans to outlaw inciting, promoting or teaching people how to commit suicide on the Internet, but Justice Minister Chris Ellison said on Tuesday the laws were not a bid to spark a euthanasia debate. Use of the Internet to organise suicide pacts has emerged as a grim new problem for Japan, where at least 54 people killed themselves in 2004 in Internet-linked group suicides. Police say the real number was probably higher.
The UN General Assembly has urged governments to ban all human cloning, including the cloning of human embryos for stem-cell research, in a divided vote that handed a symbolic victory to the administration of US President George W Bush. Capping four years of contentious debate, the 191-nation assembly voted 84 to 34, with 37 abstentions, to approve a non-binding statement on cloning. The measure was proposed by Honduras and generally supported by predominantly Roman Catholic countries, in line with Pope John Paul's condemnation of human cloning. It was generally opposed by nations where stem-cell research is being pursued.
Marketing a new god: Is this just a clever marketing ploy, or is something deeper going on? "ghd" is apparently pronounced "god". Particularly look at the Gallery section.
Os Guinness says we are illiterate when it comes to evil. Sadly, the terrorist strike found the United States as unprepared intellectually and morally as it was militarily. The USA is the country with the most radical and realistic view of evil at its core—expressed in the notion of the separation of powers in the Constitution because of human nature and the abuse of power. But various philosophies and ideas have undermined that view over the last 200 years, so that American views today are weak, confused, and divided. Many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil.
In a bid to prod their government into changing the law on euthanasia, a group of senior Dutch doctors have reported themselves for killing 20 disabled infants. The Dutch Justice Ministry has so far declined to say whether it will prosecute them. Currently, euthanasia is allowed even for children as young as 12, provided that their parents approve.
A Stanford University ethics committee has approved a proposal by stem cell expert Irving Weissman to create a mouse whose brain cells are 100% human. Using cells from aborted human foetuses, Dr Weissman has applied to create human-mouse hybrids for his research on diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Researchers are already producing mice with brains that are about 1% human. Professor Weissman says that it is impossible to predict whether the hybrids will show human-like behaviour until they are born. (Note: Parliament is already producing humans with a mouse brain!)
Marriage reduces crime risk in communities : Social factors such as family instability have a more direct link to crime than economic factors, according to an Australian study which looked at urban and rural communities of different sizes. Residential stability, less ethnic diversity and a higher proportion of married people were some critical factors in reducing crime. In fact, ethnic diversity presented much less of a risk for crime when there were fewer sole parents, more married people, and residential stability.
Children can’t be trusted: Rod Liddle says it is time that British teachers took back control of the classroom.
The man who should be pope : Piers Paul Read looks over the candidates to replace John Paul II.
Australia's government plans to outlaw inciting, promoting or teaching people how to commit suicide on the Internet, but Justice Minister Chris Ellison said on Tuesday the laws were not a bid to spark a euthanasia debate. Use of the Internet to organise suicide pacts has emerged as a grim new problem for Japan, where at least 54 people killed themselves in 2004 in Internet-linked group suicides. Police say the real number was probably higher.
The UN General Assembly has urged governments to ban all human cloning, including the cloning of human embryos for stem-cell research, in a divided vote that handed a symbolic victory to the administration of US President George W Bush. Capping four years of contentious debate, the 191-nation assembly voted 84 to 34, with 37 abstentions, to approve a non-binding statement on cloning. The measure was proposed by Honduras and generally supported by predominantly Roman Catholic countries, in line with Pope John Paul's condemnation of human cloning. It was generally opposed by nations where stem-cell research is being pursued.
Marketing a new god: Is this just a clever marketing ploy, or is something deeper going on? "ghd" is apparently pronounced "god". Particularly look at the Gallery section.
Os Guinness says we are illiterate when it comes to evil. Sadly, the terrorist strike found the United States as unprepared intellectually and morally as it was militarily. The USA is the country with the most radical and realistic view of evil at its core—expressed in the notion of the separation of powers in the Constitution because of human nature and the abuse of power. But various philosophies and ideas have undermined that view over the last 200 years, so that American views today are weak, confused, and divided. Many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil.
In a bid to prod their government into changing the law on euthanasia, a group of senior Dutch doctors have reported themselves for killing 20 disabled infants. The Dutch Justice Ministry has so far declined to say whether it will prosecute them. Currently, euthanasia is allowed even for children as young as 12, provided that their parents approve.
A Stanford University ethics committee has approved a proposal by stem cell expert Irving Weissman to create a mouse whose brain cells are 100% human. Using cells from aborted human foetuses, Dr Weissman has applied to create human-mouse hybrids for his research on diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Researchers are already producing mice with brains that are about 1% human. Professor Weissman says that it is impossible to predict whether the hybrids will show human-like behaviour until they are born. (Note: Parliament is already producing humans with a mouse brain!)
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
The Death of DIY
Back in the mid-1980s, I began building my own home. Literally, that is ... with hammer in one hand and the building standards handbook in the other. The reasons I did this were fairly complex, but two in particular are important.
1. My wife and I had come to the conviction that God was telling us to go ahead and build without getting a mortgage, and rely on him to provide the resources. We only had $5000 in the bank at the time, so when we told our architect he blanched a little, but then admitted he had started much the same way himself.
2. I come from a long line of artisans and craftsmen. And our family philosophy was always, “you can do whatever you think you can do.”
You might think the fact I had no training whatsoever in carpentry, and knew nothing about building, might be something of a hindrance. But I had seen my dad – and many of his friends - do this sort of thing, and could see no reason why any reasonably intelligent kiwi bloke could not do the same.
Now...I didn’t completely rush in where even fools would fear to tread. I knew that if I did not get the foundations right, there was no chance the rest of the building would go right, and I didn’t want it falling down around my ears in the teeth of a Canty norwester. So I found a builder who was prepared to work on a pay-by-the-hour basis and who let me act as his builders mate, and together we put down the foundations and then the framing up to the rafters level. By that time, the $5000 was well and truly used up, and I had to tell the builder I could not afford to pay him any more.
After that, for the greater part I was on my own. Well, actually not on my own. A lot of friends and family pitched in, making it quite a community effort. Just 10 months after we started, we shifted in to the new house, albeit uncompleted.
You might wonder where I’m getting to with this story. Well, firstly, it’s not that unusual. Thousands of kiwi blokes and blokettes have done exactly the same sort of thing ever since people first came to this land. Countless friends of mine have put in new kitchens, added on rooms, built garages, and so on. Kiwis have been do-it-yourselfers from the year dot. Even if you can’t buy no. 8 wire any more, the number 8 wire mentality remains.
But in a couple of weeks time, the first death bell is going to sound on all this. The new building regulations which come into effect at the beginning of April are a huge nail in the coffin of the kiwi home builder. The regulations are going to be phased in over four years, but the upshot will be that the days of building your own home will be over. A council employee I spoke to yesterday said we’ll be confined to things like relining a room or putting in a sun deck. Anything major will have to be done by a licensed building practitioner, which of course also means that the costs are going to shoot up. Not only will that person add his labour and fees, but he’s due to be faced with big increases in insurance premiums, and that will certainly be passed on to you and me.
All this has come about, not because my home building efforts were shoddy and below standard. In fact, my house passed every city council building inspection, and it doesn’t so much as waver in the Canty nor-wester.
It’s actually come about because of the sub-standard work of professional builders who caused the leaky building scandal a couple of years back. Houses were rotting all over the place because the builders didn’t know how to properly install the new surface claddings that were coming on the market. So the government over-reacted and brought down a raft of new regulations that are catching everybody in the same net. Even though there’s never been any suggestion that home handymen are a problem.
It’s typical of the safety first mentality that is killing us in so many directions. Swimming pool fencing and filtering, playground regulations, OSH regulations, rules that want you to have a caterers licence for a pot luck lunch...on it goes.
My great grand-dad was a blacksmith who built one of the first houses in the middle of what was then called the 40 mile bush. Today it’s in the little town of Woodville. He was a god-fearing Scotsman, and by all accounts a very blunt talker. I can well imagine what he would have said to any government employee who came around telling him he couldn’t do that there. Not that he would have cared. He was too busy building a nation.
Back in the mid-1980s, I began building my own home. Literally, that is ... with hammer in one hand and the building standards handbook in the other. The reasons I did this were fairly complex, but two in particular are important.
1. My wife and I had come to the conviction that God was telling us to go ahead and build without getting a mortgage, and rely on him to provide the resources. We only had $5000 in the bank at the time, so when we told our architect he blanched a little, but then admitted he had started much the same way himself.
2. I come from a long line of artisans and craftsmen. And our family philosophy was always, “you can do whatever you think you can do.”
You might think the fact I had no training whatsoever in carpentry, and knew nothing about building, might be something of a hindrance. But I had seen my dad – and many of his friends - do this sort of thing, and could see no reason why any reasonably intelligent kiwi bloke could not do the same.
Now...I didn’t completely rush in where even fools would fear to tread. I knew that if I did not get the foundations right, there was no chance the rest of the building would go right, and I didn’t want it falling down around my ears in the teeth of a Canty norwester. So I found a builder who was prepared to work on a pay-by-the-hour basis and who let me act as his builders mate, and together we put down the foundations and then the framing up to the rafters level. By that time, the $5000 was well and truly used up, and I had to tell the builder I could not afford to pay him any more.
After that, for the greater part I was on my own. Well, actually not on my own. A lot of friends and family pitched in, making it quite a community effort. Just 10 months after we started, we shifted in to the new house, albeit uncompleted.
You might wonder where I’m getting to with this story. Well, firstly, it’s not that unusual. Thousands of kiwi blokes and blokettes have done exactly the same sort of thing ever since people first came to this land. Countless friends of mine have put in new kitchens, added on rooms, built garages, and so on. Kiwis have been do-it-yourselfers from the year dot. Even if you can’t buy no. 8 wire any more, the number 8 wire mentality remains.
But in a couple of weeks time, the first death bell is going to sound on all this. The new building regulations which come into effect at the beginning of April are a huge nail in the coffin of the kiwi home builder. The regulations are going to be phased in over four years, but the upshot will be that the days of building your own home will be over. A council employee I spoke to yesterday said we’ll be confined to things like relining a room or putting in a sun deck. Anything major will have to be done by a licensed building practitioner, which of course also means that the costs are going to shoot up. Not only will that person add his labour and fees, but he’s due to be faced with big increases in insurance premiums, and that will certainly be passed on to you and me.
All this has come about, not because my home building efforts were shoddy and below standard. In fact, my house passed every city council building inspection, and it doesn’t so much as waver in the Canty nor-wester.
It’s actually come about because of the sub-standard work of professional builders who caused the leaky building scandal a couple of years back. Houses were rotting all over the place because the builders didn’t know how to properly install the new surface claddings that were coming on the market. So the government over-reacted and brought down a raft of new regulations that are catching everybody in the same net. Even though there’s never been any suggestion that home handymen are a problem.
It’s typical of the safety first mentality that is killing us in so many directions. Swimming pool fencing and filtering, playground regulations, OSH regulations, rules that want you to have a caterers licence for a pot luck lunch...on it goes.
My great grand-dad was a blacksmith who built one of the first houses in the middle of what was then called the 40 mile bush. Today it’s in the little town of Woodville. He was a god-fearing Scotsman, and by all accounts a very blunt talker. I can well imagine what he would have said to any government employee who came around telling him he couldn’t do that there. Not that he would have cared. He was too busy building a nation.
Top 10 ways Parliament will be different now Margaret Wilson is speaker
1. MPs now to swear allegiance on a copy of 'Helen: Portrait of a Leader'.
2. After a week on the job Molesworth and Featherston forget about Hunt and declare Wilson the greatest speaker in Parliamentary history.
3. Opposition spokespeople to be given larger desks so occupants appear smaller on TV.
4. References to 'the Crown' in future legislation to be replaced with 'University of Waikato Law School'.
5. Father of the House now to be known as Gender-Neutral Kaumatua of the Whare.
6. Opening prayer to be replaced with rousing rendition of 'I am Woman'.
7. The Treaty of Waitangi will be discovered to contain previously unnoticed reference to the CTU.
8. The sheepskin rug on the speaker's chair to be replaced with a handmade Nicaraguan peasant blanket.
9. Messengers instructed to carry out random tests on Mark Peck's "water jug".
10. Parliamentary Question Time runs as smoothly as the Labour Party in the 1980s.
Many thanks to St Molesworth for the above gems.
1. MPs now to swear allegiance on a copy of 'Helen: Portrait of a Leader'.
2. After a week on the job Molesworth and Featherston forget about Hunt and declare Wilson the greatest speaker in Parliamentary history.
3. Opposition spokespeople to be given larger desks so occupants appear smaller on TV.
4. References to 'the Crown' in future legislation to be replaced with 'University of Waikato Law School'.
5. Father of the House now to be known as Gender-Neutral Kaumatua of the Whare.
6. Opening prayer to be replaced with rousing rendition of 'I am Woman'.
7. The Treaty of Waitangi will be discovered to contain previously unnoticed reference to the CTU.
8. The sheepskin rug on the speaker's chair to be replaced with a handmade Nicaraguan peasant blanket.
9. Messengers instructed to carry out random tests on Mark Peck's "water jug".
10. Parliamentary Question Time runs as smoothly as the Labour Party in the 1980s.
Many thanks to St Molesworth for the above gems.
