Public Address - OnPoint (Home)

Chasing skin... heads | Oct 27, 2006 03:34

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Every year, I get giddy with excitement. I polish my camera lens, lace up my boots, put on my best neutral-coloured waterproof ungrabbable jacket, then smile: The National Front is in town!

I don't know anyone else who gets so excited about skinheads. Except maybe the anarchists. But I think I get more excited. It's not just the potential for street violence that I love (who doesn't?), but to be honest, I get a perverse joy - not thrill, joy - out of interacting with skinheads.

There's something about a Chink waltzing up to a skinhead asking him - perfectly politely, with a genuine interest in the answer - how his day marching for white supremacy is going. That's fun, but the beauty is in the response. It's an irony sandwich, and the razor-blades are extra crunchy.

Mmmm... sandwich.

I had the good fortune of being temporarily employed by the Herald on Sunday last Saturday, and thus I got paid to hang out with skinheads. That's right, *paid* to hang out with skinheads - how cool is that?

I didn't manage to squeeze much into the quick write-up that I did for the HoS afterwards, but some of the interviews were awesome.

In 2004, while Tze Ming and others led a counterprotest on Parliament, a small group of anarchists and punks chased the National Front down the street. The NF, under the inspiring leadership of Kyle Chapman, jumped into a car and sped off - leaving one of their own, Cale Olsen, behind. He got into a scuffle, got knocked around a wee bit, and was chased down the street - blood dripping down his face - as the mob hounded him.

I felt pretty sorry for him on that occasion. Cale was at the march on Saturday (here's a terribly unflattering photo, unlike this guy, who's just a poster-boy for the National Front), and I took the opportunity to ask him what he had to say to the punks/anarchists.

Cale momentarily struggled between hatred of foreigners and love of media attention. My winning smile won him over.

"I want to say... don't stereotype us."

Sounds promising...

"National pride is not hate."

Uh hur...

"We're free thinking."

Awesome.

Cale wasn't so different from you or I. He has a kid. And he's a musician. What kind of music does he play?

"Nationalist metal."

Gold. Pure gold.

"My band is called Helm of Awe. It's on TradeMe. Support nationalist metal, buy my CDs!"

Yes, gentle readers, you too can complete your nationalist metal collection by purchasing Helm of Awe CDs on TradeMe. Go on. Support nationalist metal in New Zealand. It's only $40 for Helm of Awe's outstanding 5-CD collection.

CD 1 is "relentless black metal" (no relation to the race, I presume). CD 2 is "37 minutes of shredding power chords with soulful melodies". CD 3 is "excellent metal to chill out to". CD 4 is "Raw, Rough, Primitive". CD 5 is "Shredding layers of abstract tremolo guitar, distorted bass, black metal vocals, feeble chanting and chaotic drumming with earthy experimental guitar and drum instrumentals".

That's totally deep.

Also got to spend some quality time with National Front's current Director, Sid Wilson. I chatted to him at the train station as they were leaving, then again as I visited them at the Hutt Park Holiday Park, where they were staying. The second time we met was slightly awkward. It would, under any other circumstances, call for a handshake; although we'd developed a pretty good rapport, I don't think either of us wanted to take our relationship *that* far.

I have to hand it to him, though. He certainly showed a lot of media savvy. He talked to me, and was very nice about it, for starters. God knows, him telling me to go back to China would have made great copy. And, the second I whipped out my camera where they were staying, he stopped his guy from putting up the flag with the neo-iron cross, but left the NZ flags up. Good image management, that.

His speech, though, in my opinion, came on a tad strong. "Multiculturalism is murder. Multiculturalism is genocide. Multiculturalism is holocaust against White and Maori New Zealand."

Carrying flags of the iron cross and having members with SS tattoos while claiming to be victims of "genocide" and "holocaust"? That's another foot-long sub with your choice of a wide variety of fresh, crispy irony.

His speech also framed their cause as an essentially anti-globalisation one. I think that all concerned will be disgusted to know that much of the rhetoric and the arguments he used are identical to the ones used at punk/anarchist/socialist anti-globalisation rallies. At least McDonald's will be please to know that they can now count skinheads among their detractors.

One woman I spoke to, Tracy, thought it was counterproductive that there were 80 odd activists yelling at the National Front people telling them to stop being racist scum while the National Front had no idea why people were calling them racists - they're just showing pride in the flag.

So Tracy waltzed in and started asking them questions about what they were doing, why a flag with a Union Jack on it, etc. Why not a Maori flag, or a flag that recognises NZ as it is now - i.e. Multicultural. She got her response - that the NZ flag as it is is a symbol of NZ's British heritage, etc. "And they don't know why that's racist," said Tracy, "well, duh!"

After the skinhead rally, the story (naturally) led me to The Hutt. The Hutt Park Holiday Park, actually, where the National Front was staying. The management were on a strict no-media policy, so it was fortunate that I accidentally got lost and walked the whole camp talking to people before I found the reception at the front gate.

What did they think? Well, what would you think if you found yourself sharing your holiday with 30 skinheads? To the NF's credit, they were a bit boozy but otherwise well-behaved, but if you weren't white - and plenty of the families there weren't - you'd have every reason to be pissed off at park management for hosting a skinhead AGM and not telling you.

However, a tip for the assorted activists who've called up Hutt Park Holiday Park: The person who owns the park does not answer the phone. In fact, a waged labourer (a "worker", if you will) answers the phone. By all means, take your business elsewhere and encourage others to do the same, but FFS, stop calling up and abusing/threatening whoever answers the phone, because they don't make decisions about who stays in the park - they just answer the phones.

Oh, and my favourite photos from the day: Cops, anarchists, cops and anarchists.

--

And now, for this week's NGA:

(Did you hear about this shit? Yes, we're all going to be infertile and we will be the last generation of yuppies. Ever.)

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C**ks**king Hoopleheads (and NGA) | Oct 20, 2006 09:00

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After around two hours of play, I was doing alright. I'd just won a hand with an ace-high flush, drawing two suckers in and draining them dry. I could smell the fear around the table. Then she comes in and puts her chips on the table.

"Hi guys", she says.

The mood of the table changes, but the silent dealer continues to deal silently. I had an ace and an eight, and there was an ace, a king and a three on the table. - all hearts. Was the flush out there? I worked up my skull-piercing gaze and looked around the table.

Then she spoke.

"I'm so hot right now."

Did she have the flush?

"Does anyone want to see photos of me? My picture's on www.webcamgirls.com."

"lol, ur hot", says the man in the hat, Bringyogame223.

--

I'm sure that it'll comfort the founders of Deadwood to know that, a hundred and thirty years later, you can still go into a poker room and have a girl flash her boobs at you.

But like that Wild West, the law is coming to town on the internet. Earlier this month, Bush signed the SAFE Port Act, which increased border security at ports and, oh, by the way, banned banks and credit card companies from sending money to online gambling sites, effectively banning online gambling in America. According to Reuters, this has wiped US$6.5 billion from the value of the online gambling industry.

That's not to say Americans will stop gambling online, of course. The level of knowhow and intellect required to launder money on the internet (via Pay-"I'm using it to purchase educational books"-Pal, etc) is already pretty low, and it will no doubt get lower.

One site, PokerStars, is planning to argue that the law doesn't cover poker, as poker is a game of skill, not chance. Good luck, pal.

Apart from the fact that I've just been watching Deadwood and loving it (especially this shining example of cross-cultural communcations), I really do take the parallels seriously. The pioneering days of the internet are over - commerce is thriving, but lawlessness is still abound, and now the government is trying, for better or worse, to muscle in.

Who's going to get fed to the pigs?

--

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NGA: surplus to requirements | Oct 13, 2006 11:35

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Now in glorious PNG format. Thanks Neil!

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A rather more convenient truth | Oct 11, 2006 17:01

Last month's issue of New Scientist presented the ultimate deus ex machina: The sun will save us from global warming.

Similar to Al Gore's graphs, it correlates sunspot activity with temperatures on Earth. More sunspots = hotter Earth. But of course, it's much more counterintuitive than that. The sunspots are an indicator of the sun's magnetic activity; as the sunspots pop up, it means that the sun's magnetic field widens, which helps to deflect cosmic rays away from the Earth. These cosmic rays actually help *cool* the planet, by changing the air circulation patterns and possibly aiding cloud formation - so the theory goes.

Bottom line: A sunspot crash is expected soon, which in times past have brought on Ice Ages. It's estimated that this sunspot crash could lower the average global temperature by 0.2 degrees - as much as the most optimistic hopes for the Kyoto Protocol by 2050.

Of course, it's also quick to stress that this is not a revival of the old debate that sunspots are to blame for global warming (love these headlines):

Scientists blame sun for global warming (BBC, Feb 1998)

Sun 'not to blame' for global warming (ABC, Sep 2006)

The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame (The Telegraph, July 2004)

Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says (National Geographic, Sep 2006)

The New Scientist article acknowledges that the variations from the sunspot cycles *doesn't* generate enough energy to cause climate change, *but* the magnetic fields and the cosmic rays can make a difference, *but* that's not enough to account for the climate changes, either, *but* a sunspot crash can still reverse or at least slow down some of the effects of climate change.

Bottom bottom line: It won't help solve the cause of climate change, but it will delay its effects for a few decades, during which we can clean up our act and save ourselves. Or live like SUV-riding kings and laugh at future generations. Suckers.

--

My first mainstream cover piece and, arguably, the funniest thing ever published about the New Zealand electricity system, is now online at the Unlimited magazine website. Pertinent to the current debate is the economics of power, and in particular, I take issue with some of Hatfield-Dodds' claims, as articulated by I/S.

Renewable sources of power have a very steep increase in marginal costs. That's to say, producing the second 100MW of power is more expensive than the first 100MW, and the third 100MW will be even more expensive, etc. Why? When you decide to plonk down a wind farm, you choose the place with the most wind, the cheapest land, the lowest transmission cost, the least number of litigious pricks with expensive properties with a view of the site. Then you build your windfarm, and then the next wind farm that you build will have to be somewhere else - and it's going to be more expensive and/or less windy etc.

So, for all the talk of renewables being economically viable - they are - they will only be economically viable up to a point. While technology will work to lower the cost in the long-term, it's worth keeping in mind that the more you have, the most expensive the next one will be.

The way carbon tax works is by raising the cost of fossil fuel electricity generation, thereby making more renewables viable. For example, if coal generation costs 20c/megawatt, then windfarms will be economical up to that point; when carbon tax raises coal generation to 25c/megawatt, then all those windfarm sites where it'd cost 21-25c to generate a megawatt suddenly become economically viable. Hey presto - more windfarms, more expensive power.

But the problem is with how the costs are spread out. First, it's not the power companies who will absorb the cost, it's power consumers. So, with the carbon tax scenario, not only will consumers pay for the more expensive windfarms, but they'll also have to pay that 5c premium on the coal power as well.

The other way to do it, as is done in Australia and Britain, is to require retailers to buy a certain percentage of their power from windfarms. You can still get the same number of windfarms, and consumers still pay for those windfarms, but they don't have to pay the carbon tax as well.

The question is: do we want to encourage renewables, or do we want to punish polluters? The latter isn't without merit, but the problem is that ma and pa *are* the polluters - do we want to zap them with a tax to discourage them from polluting (i.e. using power)?

To make an argument for carbon tax, it needs to influence behaviour at both the generation and the consumption ends. If it was really painless for consumers, it wouldn't have any effect on consumption. And if it only influenced generation, why not just regulate it?

It's unavoidable - if you want people to use less power, you've got to kick them where it hurts, economically speaking. So, do we?

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NGA: Self-medicated | Oct 06, 2006 02:22

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