Since when does 100% = 50%?

When you read it in the Dominion Post, reporting on proposed bus fare increases in Wellington:

"One option would mean the $1 city-section fare would be replaced by an increased one-zone cash fare of $2.

That would effectively mean inner-city bus passengers were facing a 50 per cent increase in bus fares"

Hmmm, good job paid journalists are out there making sure they double check stories and are so thorough, unlike those rogue bloggers right?

So Kerry Williamson let's learn maths:

$2 = $1 + $1

$1 = 100% of $1

Therefore an increase from $1 to $2 is?

Oh and while you're figuring that one out, how about a real question, such as what is the current proportion of cost recovery from bus fares in Wellington? What is the average subsidy per trip and per km? How many services are commercial (unsubsidised)?

For example, on average 51.5% of public transport costs are recovered from fares, is it planned to increase that, as that is the lowest level for Wellington in a four year period surveyed by NZTA?

In other words, how about some information that doesn't just involve reporting what the Greater Wellington Regional Council says?

The bureaucrats for whom freedom is unknown

I have said before that I despise smoking, I don’t like the smell and I hate walking behind smokers and don’t like walking through them outside buildings. So you might think I’d welcome what the Auckland Regional Public Health Service is calling for as reported in the NZ Herald.

ARPHS (why not say ARS) calls for what is effectively a ban on smoking anywhere but in one’s own home, which looks to me quite simply as the sort of nanny state authoritarian bullying that I thought was voted out in the last election. However, it would be a fair bet that those who “work” for that organisation are unlikely to have much philosophical truck with personal freedom.

The thought process appears alarmingly simple:

People smoke - it is bad for them - it's already illegal to allow smoking at places of employment, retail outlets and on public transport, so let's make it illegal everywhere else, except the home (that would be seen as too far).

Banning something that is bad for people is good. The very idea that perhaps it is morally wrong to do this appears to have not crossed their minds, after all it's for the "greater good" (as is the justification for all limitations on personal freedom). Fascists? Well, they wouldn't think so, they just think they are acting for the interests of others. However, they are treating the public as children. It's only one step removed from treating tobacco like an illegal drug.

So what should the response be to this?

Should it be to ask whether a study has been made as to the health benefits to non-smokers of the measures proposed? If not, why not? Why not come clean about what “public good” there allegedly is, or is there really none at all? I suspect the health benefits to non-smokers are virtually undetectable, after all the emissions from motor vehicles are in greater volumes and significantly more toxic (smokers don't die from a lung full of tobacco smoke, but you wont last long intentionally inhaling petrol exhaust).

Should it be to ask to what extent these measures are likely to reduce smoking? If not, why not? How about noting how effective these measures are at reducing illegal drug use?

Why are you not simply being honest about wanting to criminalise smoking other than in the private home? Or does that just show you up for what you are, as petty fascists wanting to change behaviour by force rather than persuasion?

Or, how about simply asking why the hell they think it is their business what adults do with their bodies on their own property or in public spaces?

Clearly the public health bureaucrats have no clue what private property means, and what private property rights mean, for long ago they surrendered the idea that you can decide whether or not to allow otherwise legal acts on your property.

However, they also seek to control public space. To have people prosecuted for smoking as a way of reducing the propensity to smoke. The idea that there are adults who voluntarily choose to smoke because they like it would bewilder them all.

How can people LIKE harming themselves? Well the joyless do-gooders who think they know best for everyone else can't grasp that not everything everyone does is “good” for them. Some people drink to excess, some people eat to excess and don’t exercise. Some people have unsafe sex. Some people take illegal drugs. Some people participate in dangerous sports.

The proportion of smokers who do not know it is bad for their health will be very low, so it isn't about that. Tobacco smoking has addictive qualities, but plenty give up smoking and the state has used other people's money for some years subsidising methods to do this. So the conclusion is that people smoke because they enjoy it.

People have freedom to choose to smoke or not smoke. Those who do should have that right on their own property or with the permission of property owners. Those who do not like it should prohibit it on their own property and not enter places where it occurs. Public (as in local and central government owned) locations should be places where people can peacefully go about their activities without initiating force against others, that includes smoking.

The only appropriate response to this proposal is incredulity.

It demonstrates the profound need for all policy proposals to government to be subject to a test of whether it enhances or detracts from individual liberty, and whether it represents the initiation of force or defending citizens from initiations of force or fraud. Such a simple test would see such proposals dumped in the inbox of the Labour, Green and Maori Parties who think that individuals are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

While we're at it, abolishing the Auckland Regional Public Health Service would make a modest contribution to reducing the budget deficit.

Slavery, deceit, racism and the waiting game

Christopher Hitchen's latest article in Slate is on North Korea. - a "nation of racist dwarfs" he says, with good reason.

North Korea is the most odious regime on earth by an incredibly long margin. Iran, Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan are shining lights of freedom, prosperity, rule of law and moderation by comparison. Yet, for some reason, it gets precious little attention from the likes of Amnesty International, the left inclined protest movement (all too keen to care about Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan) or indeed the international community.

Hitchens notes how much propaganda from North Korea carries racist depictions of Japanese and Americans, akin to the imagery the Nazis produced in the 1930s about Jews (this new book apparently describes the racist dimension of North Korea). North Korea also bemoans the impurity of South Korea, which allows Koreans to breed with foreigners - North Korea forces local women who are pregnant by Chinese to have abortions. Of course nationalism is always an easy refuge for the totalitarian. It was seen vehemently in the Khmer Rouge, it is still seen in China, and was long seen in the Soviet Union. The fraternity of socialism didn't wash when African Marxists visited Maoist China, or indeed North Korea, both countries where black people are both rare and seen as being inferior. The kleptocracies in Africa today accepting Chinese money for minerals don't pause to think about how they see themselves.

North Korea is a slave state, a prison society where the average height is six inches shorter than in South Korea. It is dependent upon shutting the entire population away from comparing their lives with the outside world, except for a clique around the family that runs the place. They enrich themselves enormously by selling minerals, weapons and whatever else the enslaved masses can extract for them at high cost and little benefit. It is a society where the concepts of truth, honesty and openness have been so wholly bastardised that the psychological damage is incalculable.

By what means does one live knowing that when things go wrong, there is no one to complain to, that when injustice is done, it is better to agree with it and support it, than to challenge it. That no one must be fully trusted, and everyone is expected to spy on everyone else. You included are expected to engage in this monument of telling on your fellow citizens for "crimes" that may not have happened, because to fail to do so implicates you, and you may well be the receipt of such accusations.

How do generation after generation live in a constant state of near war, constantly told attack is imminent, as is victory against forces depicted as demons (Japanese, American and South Korean). That the constant sacrifice is due to this perpetual state of war, that never actually happens, except in news reports of fabricated skirmishes and atrocities.

Where does human creativity, innovation and intelligence go when you are raised and taught to treat two men (one dead) as virtual gods, for whom you are to be grateful for everything, and who know everything and are infallible. Whilst all art, culture, literature and indeed industry are dedicated to glorifying them, and in following their guidance. When all learn that everything you create is to be shared and used by all others, and you are to get next to no credit, but meanwhile all around you struggle to eat, stay warm in winter and live in conditions unchanged for decades.

Finally, where is humanity when it is clear that those who challenge, question or are unconventional, simply disappear. Where there is unrestricted power by the state and all its forces to arrest, torture, imprison, kill and intervene in all aspects of daily life. Where whole families including babies are sent to prison camps for alleged political or economic crimes of one, and where you are constantly told you are the luckiest people on earth, and the rest of the world is in chaos, crime ridden and starving. Where compassion and mercy are only ever granted by the two official gods, and going against the unlimited list of rules, laws and taboos deems one an enemy of the state, the party, society and by necessity, neighbours and family. It is long known, for example, that no disabled people are ever seen in the capital Pyongyang. Given the record of similar regimes in treating the disabled, and given this is a state that imprisons small children in gulags, there is nothing it is not willing to engage in.

So to expect change from this regime is absurd, until Kim Jong Il dies and there is a coup to defeat his successor. North Korea will not give up its store of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, it will not disarm and it will not allow transparent inspection of its nuclear facilities to enable a peace treaty with the USA, until the regime collapses or is dismantled from within.

Military action is futile and excessively dangerous, although it could never win a war against the technology, firepower and capability of South Korea, the US (and Japan if attacked), it could inflict damage on a scale that could take the lives of millions in South Korea and Japan.

It did not attack South Korea during the latter years of the Cold War, because it was so closely aligned to Moscow. Today it does not attack because it fears massive retaliation, of a kind that I would hope President Obama would be unafraid to inflict if North Korea tried.

That fear must be maintained, for a regime that has tolerated the deaths of millions of its citizens, and is willing to treat the remainder like insects. However, in the meantime it deserves to be humiliated and challenged for its treatment of its own citizens as guinea pigs and slaves in ways that would have been familiar to the Nazis and indeed the pre-1945 militarist Japanese.

This should be the number one human rights priority of all those who claim to give a damn about individual dignity, freedom and humanity. Finally, it would be nice if North Korea's useful idiots abroad were humiliated for what they are - supporters of one of the most blood thirsty cruel and dishonest regimes on the planet today. They should be ostracised like Nazi sympathisers, because in truth, they are worse - for the Nazis were defeated in 1945.

Land tax - short memories

If you ever had doubts of the degree to which the National Party could be a political whore (which the shift from Muldoonism to free market economics and the recent return to elements of Muldoonism ought to show), take this issue.

When it was previously in government, the Bolger government abolished Land Tax.

For the current government to even contemplate it, or to not hit it on the head absolutely and finally, speaks volumes about how easily swayed the National Party is to the winds.

More importantly, the idea that a party that sold itself in part on the basis of lower taxes is contemplating new taxes to offset tax cuts, tells you even more about how a vote for National is not, and (with the exception perhaps of 1990, 1993 and 2005) has never been about reducing the size of government.

Diet - Obama style

President Obama is going to freeze government spending for three years.

Wow, attention grabbing, looks like he's going to be tough on the growth of government and ensure better spending.

Well, not until you read the fine print. He's exempting:
Social security (20%)
Welfare (16%)
Medicare and Medicaid (21%) (oh but it's all private in America say the left!)
Veteran's affairs (1.5%)
Homeland Security (1.2%)
and about another 1% of spending.

Beyond that he can't cut around 5% which is debt servicing.

So about two-thirds of federal spending is untouched, and even his grand diet on spending will only slow down the growth of the deficit. So it will get fatter, a little bit slower. Because whatever cuts happen, they are more than offset by the burgeoning growth in these other areas and Obama's grand plans to invest waste money on pork barrel projects, and expanding healthcare.

So that inspired me to dream up a diet for people to lose weight the same way as President Obama proposes to bring government spending under control

Don't snack or eat high fat or high simple carbohydrate foods is how to announce it, but...

This does not apply to chocolate, fish and chips (and other deep fried food), pies, ice cream, pizza, burgers, cakes, biscuits, sugary drinks, beer, sweets and potato chips.

Call it the Obama diet, think of it as having diet Coke while you eat a double whopper burger with supersize fries at Burger King. After all, you could have had cheese with it.

(Hat tip: Not PC)