Winston wants to waste your money

Oh dear, he's running out of tricks from his hat, so now Winston wants to force you to pay to buy back businesses you don't want to buy (after all, you'd have bought them by now wouldn't you?).

The Dominion Post reports that NZ First would create something called "the New Zealand Fund" instead of giving you tax cuts, to make you invest in businesses that are politically (the word strategic is used, but that is code for political) important.

Oh he also wants to be softer on inflation, use more of your money to give subsidies away to politically and bureaucratically selected "winners" (see the great results Jim Anderton has had in doing that?), oh and he's bashing immigrants again, blaming them for "gangs".

Are the foreigner bashing, talkback calling, shallow minded worshippers of this short man who peddles xenophobia every three years still around in enough numbers to make him matter anymore?

After all - a vote for Winston in 2005 got you Helen Clark and Labour (he'll ensure his supporters quietly forget he's Minister of Foreign Affairs and NZ First grants Labour confidence and supply to govern). Why would anyone who wants a change do that ever again?

Mugabe sells Zimbabwe to new colonialists

Following on from the disgraceful vetoing of a draft UN Security Council resolution by the energy rich kleptocratic quasi-fascist Russia, with quiet approval by the amoral People's Republic of China, comes a report from the Daily Telegraph that Robert Mugabe now has a £4.5 million mansion courtesy of Beijing.

Why?

Because this self proclaimed defender of Zimbabwe's sovereignty against "British colonialism" has happily signed over the mineral rights of the country he keeps under his jackboot to the People's Republic of China. Colonialism surely? EU Referendum blog tells more, you see policy on sanctions is actually not up to the UK government, but the EU as a whole.

So, Mandela has his birthday and calls for more to be done about poverty - whilst South Africa's neighbour Zimbabwe suffers under a brutal thieving fascist dictatorship that sells out its wealth to another dictatorship. The UN Security Council remains totally impotent while it at the behest of Russia and China, both murderous enemies of freedom. Africa does next to nothing. Mugabe enjoys his last years with unimaginable wealth.

Stories from the Sunday papers

The UK Sunday papers are always full of interesting articles. Here are some I found particularly worthy of note:

Ahmad Batebi flees into exile: The Sunday Times profiles Iranian dissident Ahmad Batebi, who has been granted refuge in the USA, after fleeing Iran with the help of a Kurdish underground group. Batebi "had been beaten with metal cables, suspended by his arms from the ceiling and taunted with mock execution and had had his head dunked in excrement until he was suffocating". He had been given a death sentence since his image appeared on the front of the Economist during protests in 1999 against the Islamist regime.

Slave children forced to perform lethal acts in Indian circuses: The Sunday Times reports on how hundreds of children are sold into slavery in India with circuses, and how charities are trying to rescue them.

The 1000 ways the state can break into your home: The Sunday Times reports on the laws that allow central or local government officials the right to enter your home, business or car without warrant. Although to be fair, it only lists five and alludes to three more.

NHS spurns gift of free cancer drug: The Sunday Times reports on how the beloved National Health Socialists (NHS) refuses to administer a drug, which is safe and approved, because the pharmaceutical company producing it is offering it free. This is because it is against policy.

ETA bombs Spanish beach resorts: The Sunday Telegraph reports on a series of small bombs detonating on the northern Spanish coast, as the Basque terrorist organisation ETA continues to operate. There were no injuries.

Iranian adulterers to be stoned: The Sunday Telegraph reports on how eight women and one man are to be stoned to death for "adultery" in the Islamic Republic of Iran. "A man is usually buried up to his waist, while a woman is buried up to her neck. Those carrying out the verdict then throw stones until the condemned dies."

However, I don't expect feminists and peace campaigners to protest about that of course.

The devil riders of Darfur: The Sunday Times publishes an extract from Halima Bashir's book "Tears of the Desert: One Woman’s Story of Surviving the Horrors of Darfur". You'll read about the atrocities of Sudan's Janjaweed militia, a situation aided and abetted and funded by Arab governments and the People's Republic of China.

Teenage soft drug use - so bad?

In this age of fear and incessant orders in the media about how to behave, the article from India Knight in the Sunday Times today challenges one taboo that no mainstream politician dare touch.

Drug use and teenagers.

The mainstream media today is confused about teenagers. On the one hand they are to be cosseted and protected from the evils of alcohol, tobacco, drugs and sex, gentle fragile beings they are, on the other hand they need discipline, they need to learn what's"right from wrong", and they need to learn the consequences of their actions. Coincidentally the media loves them, for being where the fashion industry seeks when it wishes to portray beauty, where the music industry finds image and style to throw onto the soporific soma it calls music. As it so wishes, the media treats teenagers as a group (not individuals) who we need protection from and who need protection, who are reviled and feared, but also (secretly) desired and worshipped.

India Knight's article taps into your desire to protect them, by telling her own story about drugs as a teenager.

Before you type your outraged comment about "not understanding the devastation drugs can cause" etc etc, let me make it clear. Despite my position that drugs should be legalised for adults (but only along with some radical changes to tort law/ACC, state health provision and clarification of private property and contractual rights), I do not believe they should be legal for children, and that supply to minors should remain an offence.

So what does Knight say? Well you should read for yourself. However here are some choice quotes to get you thinking:

"I know we’re all supposed to tremble in our boots at the evil of recreational drug-taking but experimenting with drugs just seems to me normal – banal, really. Teenage binge-drinking is another story, because soft drugs don’t cause you to get cirrhosis when you’re still in your early twenties, or render you so out of it that you get raped, or leave the streets of Britain awash with vomit"

"By the time I went to university I had grown bored with the druggy scene and had evolved enough to get over the sense that drugs were exciting and naughty"

"All of which makes me think that a bit of teenage soft drug-taking is, for the vast majority, simply a rite of passage. Just as having underage sex doesn’t turn you into a nymphomaniac, so underage drug-taking tends, in the vast majority of cases, not to turn you into a tragic junkie"

"A clean-living friend recently spent a weekend partying (without artificial help) in Ibiza and couldn’t help noting that although every person he came across was on ecstasy, they were all smiling, kind, polite, courteous and friendly.

Compare and contrast, he said, with trying to walk through central London on a Friday night, when every other person is loud, obscene, aggressive and trying to start a fight and there’s always some poor sod on the night bus with a bleeding face, to say nothing of crumpled girls who are either crying or comatose with drink. “I know which I prefer,” he said, and so do I."

Now I know some die from drug use, and I know some have permanent damage from drug use, which of course is the same for alcohol, and the same for driving, adventure sports, diving and other activities. However, has prohibition made dying from drug use more or less likely? Is it more or less likely that drugs obtained in a criminal environment will be tainted or diluted by poisionous third substances? Is it more or less likely than teenagers will confess to parents about drug use if it is criminal? Is it more of less likely than teenagers will approach Police or go to hospitals if they fear being arrested rather than looked after if drug use goes wrong?

People will take drugs. Drugs if used too much, too regularly or inappropriately (e.g. with alcohol, other medication) are dangerous. People with dire lives due to inadequate, negligent or downright abusive parenting will be prone to drugs, alcohol, crime and reckless hedonism generally. Turning your back against drugs isn't going to make them go away. Those who call for zero-tolerance rarely mean what they say - they wouldn't have the Police raid every teenage party they could sniff out, and then use the means of intelligence and surveillance available to hunt down those who might use, so they could then execute search warrants on teenagers' bedrooms. Carefree liberalism also ignores the truth that drugs can be very dangerous.

That's why there needs to be a dialogue about change, part of that change is taking this out of the criminal justice system, but it is also about not treating all drug use as devastatingly destructive. Many young people use drugs, as they use sex, responsibly and without serious long term consequences. It is called experimentation and learning about life - but the lines between abstinence, responsible experimentation and reckless hedonism scare parents, understandably so. That fear is the reason to talk about it.

OH and while you're at it, read Barbara Ellen's column in the Observer "A little bit of sex education never hurt anyone". Her quote to stir up the middle classes must be:

"There is a point in your child's life when trying to stop them 'knowing stuff' is a bit like trying to put out a bush fire with a water pistol. And, short of dressing your kids in Amish gear, educating them in an underground cell at home, perhaps strangling them when they hit 13 or, indeed, guarding them like Cerberus at the mouth of Hades, there's not an awful lot one can do about it."

Liberal Democrats call for tax cuts

After years of being to the left of Labour, in calling for higher taxes and being the party worshipping the religion of ecologism, the Liberal Democrats have made another swing now - closer to the "Liberal" roots of this unusual third party in British politics (which once had a proud tradition of being more classical Liberal/less government, but which merged with a centre-left faction of Labour disenchanted when Labour went Marxist/Trotskyist in the early 80s).

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg (nicknamed "Cleggover" after telling tales about the number of sexual conquests in his life) announced on Thursday that if elected, the Lib Dems would cut government spending by £20 billion to fund wide ranging tax cuts for low to middle income earners. Although he'd raise tax on high income earners, and assuming I'm bizarrely in this category, then there is no way in hell I'll vote Lib Dem. However, still announcing less state spending is at least new among the big UK parties, although the ways to do it are unconvincing. I doubt £20 billion will be saved by scrapping ID cards, cutting the number of MPs and not expanding nuclear power.

Sadly this rebranding is still dripping with the envy of the left, and full of green taxes which wouldn't be so bad if there was any substance to the call for less state spending. The truth is to cut state spending the Lib Dems have to be tough on the whole state sector, that means slashing subsidies for all sectors of the economy, tightening welfare and encouraging people to make their own choices for health and education, not the current statist behemoths. The Liberal Democrats in the past decade have become the party that many of old Labour have gone too, and it is full of busybodies whose views are given free range in The Independent, as the paper of the ecological finger pointer. Unless the Lib Dems can show a consistent vision of less state and less government in peoples' lives it wont be anything more than a younger version of new Labour. Meanwhile, nowadays it just looks like the 3rd playing political whore, ever looking for a market that the two dominant parties isn't looking after - but straddling the far left against the war in Iraq and the liberal right for lower taxes isn't going to cut it.