Pity Pakistan

Founded from the religious separatism, and bigotry that Jinnah inspired in the Pakistan movement, the artificial division of India into two then three states, the hundreds of thousands murdered and who died in the population transfer, as a heterogeneous India became several lands - and Pakistan and India would be antagonists, fighting over borders and Kashmir especially. It became an "Islamic Republic" ensuring that the common law legal system and criminal law it inherited from Britain would be frittered away with Islamic law and its brutal treatment of women.

So with its cold war with India, it was inevitable sadly that it would become nuclear - and so Pakistan is the only predominantly Muslim nuclear weapons state. It also is the location of not a few madrasses, teaching hatred of the West, fomenting the Islamist attitudes of anti-semitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-individualism. So letting Pakistan slide towards the sort of rule of Iran or the Taliban, would not just be scary, it would be downright dangerous.

Fortunately, the vast majority of Pakistanis are not Islamists, there is an Islamist element, but they are, by and large, moderate. So that is why having secular leaders, which has been mostly the case in recent years, is important. Unfortunately, those who Pakistan has had have either been authoritarian or grossly corrupt.

I didn't cheer the arrival of Benazir Bhutto. She may be a pin up of the left because she is a woman in a Muslim country, secular and a socialist, but her and her husband are under charges of corruption for a reason. Apparently a rather large property outside London was found that was paid for by the Pakistani government, which was allegedly for her and her husband (though she denied it), when the government was seeking to sell it off, suddenly they came out of the woodwork. Pervez Musharraf isn't so corrupt, but his state of emergency and martial law were unacceptable.

Now he has not only surrendered control of the army, but has declared the state of emergency will be over in a few weeks, with elections allowed in the New Year. That is all good, but what Pakistan needs is leadership - secular, modernising, reforming and not corrupt. India is growing enormously because it has finally unlocked the entrepreneurship of its people and its enormous market. Pakistan could share in this, if only it wasn't shackled by socialist policies that India has been throwing away, and the stifling influence of Islamism. The former needs reforms, the latter needs a serious battle against terrorism, seeking of peace with India on Kashmir, and to ensure the judiciary is fully independent, respects private property rights and contracts, and to be open. Pakistan is not Iran, but it is a long way from being a Turkey. That is the model it should be looking to follow, and if the economy is opened up, fear of terrorist attacks against Westerners reduced, then the prosperity that would arise would be a useful antidote against Islamism.

A booming Pakistan bordering Afghanistan and Iran will speak volumes, and will be our best hope that the nuclear weapons will stay in the hands of those who are sane.

Hone Harawira's simple approach to life

From his column

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"One media commentator told me that the difference between CNN and Al Jazeera was that “CNN films the missiles being fired from American bases and Al Jazeera films those missiles exploding in Middle Eastern communities” – a simple but powerful analogy that was easy to understand."

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Yes, but who films the bombs being exploded in Middle Eastern communities by Islamist terrorists, or rockets fired by Islamists into Israeli territory? So CNN wasn't in Baghdad during the last two wars against Saddam Hussein?

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In fact, where did the technology come from to allow Al Jazeera to even operate, who conceived it, who built it? Oh Hone, take your Anti-Western bigotry and your crayons and go play.

Green party faith based initiative

Ahhh the regular ballot for private member's bills has brought up one of the loony Green ones, which I already blogged about last year.

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In my assessment last year the "Climate Change (Transport Funding) Bill" was the second looniest one of the lot. What does it do? Well it aims to dramatically increase the proportion of your road taxes (fuel tax, road user charges and motor vehicle licensing fees) spent on modes where the users don't pay any (or the full costs) of any contribution to that fund.

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The effect of this would be to run many of the country's roads into the ground, because it would increase funding of slow modes of transport so much that it would cut significantly into the maintenance budgets for roads. Some work undertaken by Transit NZ in the early 1990s indicated that there were fuel savings/emissions savings and safety gains by maintaining roads to a high standard - something that the USA and much of the UK hasn't learnt - that would be destroyed. So this bill could be the "potholes and lower speed limits" bill.

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You see the Greens see money collected from road users for roads as being money that can be pillaged to pay for their pet projects. Unhappy with a funding framework that has shifted from regarding economic efficiency as the primary criteria for funding transport projects, to a multi-faceted criteria (which they agreed with). Unhappy with a funding framework whereby the Minister can direct Land Transport NZ to spend larger amounts of money on public transport, walking, cycling and the like, now the Greens want to make it mandatory.

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It is a faith based initiative.

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For starters it is anti user pays. The Greens don't like road users money being spent on roads, I mean, how ludicrous that you pay for what you use? They far prefer road users spend money on other people travelling by other modes, or freight going by other modes -EVEN if the benefits to road users are less than what is spent on the subsidy.

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Apparently, the travel time savings, fuel savings, safety improvements and environmental improvements from many road projects are simply ignored by the Greens, but the merits of railways and public transport simply don't need evaluating - they are good so should be funded. The Greens reject objective appraisal criteria to decide if it is better to pay for a road or a railway, because odds are the railway probably wont win, and this goes against the Green article of faith: railway good, road bad. Bus better than car, train better than bus, electric train better than diesel train.

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Jeanette's complete naivety or rather, willful stupidity (as the Greens have advisors who understand the system but don't like its results) is shown in this statement

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"With the cost of fuel steadily increasing, people are already seeking alternatives to using their own vehicles. It is pointless to keep pouring money into more and more new roading projects, which will only end up being very expensive white elephants."

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Well actually Jeanette, if the appraisal by Land Transport NZ indicates that the projects will be little used and not worthwhile, the project wont be funded.

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She waffles on: "It will also decrease the amount of freight transported on roads. Getting freight onto coastal shipping and rail has huge benefits. It gets long-haul trucks off the roads, saving fuel and reducing the amount of CO2 emissions."

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Huge benefits really? That's why the shippers aren't actually choosing to do this without others subsidising them to do it? Utter drivel. If it saved so much fuel, the freight would go by the other modes, but then it isn't all about fuel Jeanette, some of us value other things too.

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Finally the Green press release emits "In the 2007/08 year the National Land Transport Programme spent six times as much maintaining and expanding the road network as it did on providing more sustainable options like public transport."

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Oh sounds awful, except that almost all of its funding came from road users. The faith is seen here, because public transport is "sustainable". How on earth something that requires people who don't use it to be forced to pay for it is "sustainable" takes a belief in the Green faith to cloud your mind to sustainability being about anything other than the environment. You see, nearly empty trains and buses are good, cars are bad.

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Scratch the surface and you see the Greens are completely banal on transport. They treat any emissions from cars and trucks as "bad", but emissions from buses and trains as "good", because those modes CAN carry more people. The holy grail is electric transport, bikes and walking of course. The difficulty they have is threefold:

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1. People make choices based on a whole host of factors. Fuel use, travel time, availability/convenience of parking/public transport, flexibility and other costs/benefits. If you don't respect that, you wont understand why you see trucks carrying freight beside railway lines, or people driving past bus stops. People make the choices best for them.

2. Oil will never "run out", at the most it will become unaffordable compared to other fuels, which are numerous. The trend to private mobility has been inexorable since the 1920s, there has been no sign of this changing, it simply changes pace.

3. Refusing to accept objective analysis that goes against their holy grail. Just because you believe it is so, doesn't mean the evidence supports you. Electric rail in Auckland will do virtually nothing to relieve traffic congestion, and cost a fortune to do it - that's a fact - along with the fact that the users will not pay any more than a small fraction of the cost to have this toy. The Wellington Inner City Bypass is another tale, a tale of constantly refusing to accept the evidence, even after the Greens changed legislation to meet their vision of the transport funding world, the project still got funded. So their own beliefs, when applied objectively, failed to be backed by evidence.

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My point is simple. If fuel cell cars and trucks become economically viable within the next 10-15 years, what then is the environmental argument against them and in favour of, what is basically, collectivised transport?

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The USSR restricted car ownership for control, and advanced railways over roads, for control. Is not the "if only people caught the train" mentality a weakened reflection of this failure to understand that in a free society, people often make decisions you don't think they should?

So when does my biased report become news?

New Zealand Herald reports "Wellington law researcher Moana Jackson has repeated a poll he did of 2000 Maori people in 1988 which found that Maori ranked the police 20th out of 20 occupations, and found that earlier this year the police had climbed to 11th out of 20."

Ignoring that Moana Jackson is an extreme leftwing ethnonationalist activist who believes that Maori should have a separate judicial system, no doubt even if they commit crimes against non-Maori.

After all he also said "Mr Jackson restated his 1988 analysis that high Maori crime rates could not be blamed solely on immediate factors such as poverty or dysfunctional families, but could be traced back to 167 years of dispossession and marginalisation. "If you are dispossessed, if your land is taken, if your power is denied, if your right to say things in your own way and to make sense of the world in ways that are unique to you and your history are taken away," he said, "then you are oppressed.""

It's not our fault we bash our kids, it's cuz we were, I mean are like oppressed eh man? I mean we aint allowed to say things in our own way or make sense of the world in our own way - it's rong bro, just rong. No wonder we bash our kids.

In a separate report, parking wardens undertook a poll proving that they are very popular people, who perform a task that is genuinely respected and admired, but that most of the public think they are underpaid. North Korea undertook a poll proving that Americans are the most hated people in North Korea because of the imperialist murderous tyranny they run in South Korea.

Second chance for Muslims to uphold human dignity

Of course I have these in the wrong order, but the case of the 19yo girl sentenced to 90 lashes and six months in prison in Saudi Arabia again speaks volumes about what could be called a different "civilisation".

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Seven men raped her and her former boyfriend when they were in a car together, understandable since only sluts and perverts meet in a car don't they when they are not married? After all, if all the world did this it would be like the West, and we know how so few people want to emigrate to those countries don't we?

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She was married, and her husband criticised the judicial system, so HER sentence went up to 200 lashes.

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However, the boyfriend is getting 90 lashes too, so Saudi Arabia at least treats male and female rape victims identically - as criminals. The Nazis treated the Jews like this.

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The Saudi Justice Ministry is reported as saying "The Saudi justice minister expressed his regret about the media reports over the role of the women in this case which put out false information and wrongly defend her. The charged girl is a married woman who confessed to having an affair with the man she was caught with."

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No, your stone age legal system can't even distinguish between alleged criminal events and where liability stands. EVEN if we were accept your fascist law, this is what should have happened. The rapes, infidelity and meeting illegally should all have been treated as separate charges, with only the second and third cases treated together. All crimes should have been investigated thoroughly. The husband protesting the sentence should be a mitigating factor in sentencing, and the girl should NOT be punished for what HE says.

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So I expect to see Muslims and "peace activists" marching the streets calling for this woman (and man) to be freed and not to be punished for this victimless crime, for them to be left well alone - but no, the former would rather get agitated about a fucking cartoon insulting their ghost, and the latter.... it's not America so they don't get excited about it.

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UPDATE: So while the NZ government has expressed dismay, Helen Clark has said that "New Zealand fully respects the judicial system of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and notes that the case is still working its way through the courts". SOLO's press release on this is damning and quite right.

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NZ only took a strong stance on nuclear issues and apartheid only when a government was determined to do so, governments that listen to MFAT will always be wishy washy and always want to compromise. Imagine if NZ took a strong stance against governments that punish rape victims, wouldn't you think that might do more good than waffling on about the nuclear phobia?