Labour's tax cuts

So Labour is talking about tax cuts? Now there’s a strategy to try to win the next election – given that the current one nearly lost it for them last time. It is a vindication for National, that Labour is now adopting a small part of its policies and all of the leftwing naysayers either eat their words about tax cuts, or can oppose Labour. However, it does appear to be because United Future and NZ First demanded it – you wouldn’t be getting this with the Greens and Maori Party. (Peter Dunne and Winston will go on about this endlessly no doubt)
.
However, no reason to get too excited, and few are (the state sector unions predict doom and gloom because their solution to prosperity is to take more of your money to "invest" in what bureaucrats do) it is mostly about cutting company tax from 33 to 30% (nice but only a first step and the top personal rates should also follow it), targeted tax credits (more picking winners) and changing depreciation rates. Dr Cullen has said this also could mean changing thresholds for income tax – hardly exciting stuff since he announced that in last year’s Budget. Remember the 70c a week tax cut? Maybe it will be a dollar - wow.
.
So I’m underwhelmed, at best it shows that even Labour sees some merit in tax cuts – the question is whether you want hardly any (Labour), some (National), quite some (ACT), or a lot (Libertarianz).

.

although with it being reported that National would "probably" cut company tax, you have to wonder! Why the "probably"?

News on Sunday - leftwing incompetence at its best

On TV last night was a hilarious documentary called “lefties” where the BBC reminisces about the “good old days” when unreformed communists were fighting for a socialist Britain. This has been a series that I have largely been missing, but last night was classic – it was about a failed attempt at a national socialist newspaper in Britain (bigger than the Morning Star and more leftist than the Guardian) – the News on Sunday. It was inspired by John Pilger and the desperation of trade unions and socialists “convinced” that despite Thatcher winning two elections, the mass of the British public could be encouraged to vote Labour (pre-Blair get Britain out of NATO Labour) because socialism was good for them – if only they realised it!

.

The News on Sunday attempted to mobilise the working classes to support Labour and its hard left agenda of socialism. It failed, the Daily Mirror and the Sun have proved that, by and large, the British working classes want newspapers with royal/celebrity gossip, football and pictures of women with big tits - they don't want to read about strikes in Mexico, Brazilians selling kidneys for cash, or any bunch of murdering militia that the left supports this decade.
.
However, back to the paper. It was a catalogue of disasters in many ways, and showed a litany of sheer incompetence. Remember, these sort of people wanted to take more taxes, run your education and health system and economy. Why oh why would you trust them?
.
1. In the early days Pilger fled to Australia to make one of his “documentaries” for several months, and when he found out the editor was putting together the paper in ways he didn’t like and not running it past him (kind of hard given he was far away), he immediately resigned and wrote articles in other papers damning the News on Sunday before it was even published.
2. The paper was based in Manchester, because it didn’t want to be London focused and saw its heartland as being the working class north. As a result it was distant from capital city politics, and advertising agencies and a pool of more experienced potential employees.
3. The paper advertised for journalists. Something not done in the print media as people usually are discovered or passed on by word of mouth. The number of applications were so high that most did not get a reply, after a few were looked through they were given jobs, there were few interviews and no screening of the vast bulk of applications. Very fair employment policy.
4. Virtually all of the senior staff had never worked on a national newspaper before, many not in the newspaper sector. So there was very little experience of the business.
5. Many of the senior staff had no experience in their administrative roles. For example, the head of personnel had never worked in HR (a qualification that is positive in my view for today), the head of finance had never done accounts for a business, ever!
6. There was an “equal employment policy” which effectively meant if you were an ethnic minority, disabled or gay/lesbian you were more likely to get the job. The goal was to have more diverse points of view in the paper – the result was a combination of hiring people with little skill or at worst incredible patronising of some groups. The black editor had no experience being an editor before. The head of HR described how the paper treated disabled people “we hired all deaf people in the mailroom and to do deliveries, because they could communicate together”. How fucking patronising is that?
7. There was a focus on political correctness rather than good management. One former staff member described how around a week before the first issue he had arrived to work at the office to find it empty. The whole staff were sent on a “deafness awareness course” which consisted of “walking around Manchester wearing earplugs”. How mind numbingly stupid is that?
8. Decisions were made on “consensus” were certain key individuals having “golden shares” that meant they could veto decisions. In effect, there was no clear leadership and endless committee meetings and relitigation of decisions. A democratically controlled workplace saw people observed saying one thing in one meeting and changing for another. As a result, it was dysfunctional.
9. The £6.5 million raised to fund the paper came from trade unions and local authority pension funds. The stereotypical loony leftwing Labour council was not just a stereotype, as several Labour controlled councils frittered away their employees’ savings on this venture. How utterly incompetent is that? What pension fund decides a good way to make money is to back a new leftwing newspaper that is run by amateurs? Why weren’t the councillors being sued by the union? Gee, I wonder.
10. The paper commissioned an advertising agency to launch it. The agency came up with the slogan “no tits but lots of balls” to make the point that it wasn’t a page 3 girl tabloid, but “gutsy journalism”. It upset the feminists too much that the word “tits” was mentioned (as it is degrading to women to use the word – shame so many women use it”), that the campaign was dropped.
11. Leftwing millionaire businessman Owen Oyston offered to take over the paper and inject more money into it if the “golden shareholders” agreed. They didn’t, he walked away and it went bankrupt.
12. The paper ran at a loss through to the 1987 general election, with the staff working to ensure it didn’t go bankrupt before the election – because it would look like major Labour supporters can’t even run a viable newspaper. Which of course, they couldn’t.
13. Owen Oyston bought it off the receivers, and lost around £2 million before folding it 8 months later. Subsequently Oyston was sentenced to six years for raping a girl of 16, this was not the first allegation of rape against Oyston and he claimed it was a conspiracy to “set him up”.
.
The first issue sold 500,000 issues, not bad? Well it needed 800,000 to break even. By the eighth week it was down to a circulation of 200,000. Alan Hayling, who is now head of BBC documentaries (!! Yes the BBC is so demonstrably unbiased) who used to work at a Ford assembly plant, became the Editor – and got several ex. Ford employees to piss money down the drain invest in the project. Those workers were more abused by Hayling and the left than by Ford.

.

Pathetic really - a wonderful test of trust (pillaging pension funds and pissing them down a drain), anti-capitalist principles of running business (no decision making, no accountability - everyone blamed everyone else, few with skills or competence) and the reality of leftwing politics - it is an orchestrated arrogance of intellectual minnows who claim to know what's best for the so-called "working classes" when the working classes don't actually want it!

Hizbullah proud of hiding behind civilians

What's it going to take for the moral relativists and the supporters of Hizbullah - the ones who chant down Queen Street and want to "burn Israel" to sit back and see Hizbullah for what it is.

.

They were chanting

.

"Victory to Hizbullah"

"Up, up Hizbullah"

"Burn down Israel"

.

If this was 1940, no doubt they would have been cheering the Nazis (after all "national socialism" seems such a nice idea, and Hitler and Stalin were allies, both nice anti-imperialist anti-capitalist men). I hope they put their money where their mouths are and become human shields for Hizbullah. Peace? My arse. These evil bastards have NO interest in peace when they chant "burn down Israel". I would also like to see them go to Iran, go see how much chance they have to protest on whatever they want, see how easy it is to be openly atheist, to wear what you want, to listen to music you want, to be openly gay or lesbian, to publish leaflets promoting what you want.

.

Hizbullah is NOT liberal - it is NOT tolerant and furthermore, it is PROUD of its civilian casualties and PROUD that it is hiding behind civilians, including children - the "martyrs" for their evil cause. So fucking lovable that little self-obsessed wanky students, union officials and other flotsam and jetsam of society want our society overthrown for Islamic fundamentalists.

.

Hizbullah is proud of this – proud that they hide behind civilians and they bear the brunt of the suffering, while they can fire back behind them. In any civilised society this would be seen as barbaric and cowardly – but what do you hear from the left? Nothing, but hyperbole about how Israel is out to destroy Lebanon. What utter rot. Israel has explicitly said it has no quarrel with the Lebanese government, Israel has no desire to eliminate any country in the Middle East, unlike Iran, Syria and its agent Hizbullah – and there was little upset from the left when the totalitarian Syrian government sent troops into Lebanon and occupied portions of the country for the following 19 years. You see, it is one thing for US backed Israel to do it, but when (then) Soviet backed Syria – a one party state with no freedom of the press, a secret police that crushes dissent and a personality cult for the Presidency (which has just been passed down by inheritance) , silence because Syria is at least not the evil pluralistic, open USA.

.

Check out Not PC for an excellent image which can be applied to Hizbullah.

Church says flying is a sin

"If man was meant to fly God would have given him wings"

.

No not that, but it may as well have been. The Bishop of London has been reported by the Sunday Times (London) as saying:

.

"Making selfish choices such as flying on holiday or buying a large car are a symptom of sin. Sin is not just a restricted list of moral mistakes. It is living a life turned in on itself where people ignore the consequences of their actions.”

.

How absolutely evil. A large car could be because you have a large family. Flying might be because family or friends live far away, or because you want to learn about cultures outside your local nutty leftwing parish. The consequence of flying is that you arrive somewhere quickly, and efficiently and can enjoy different cultures, places and people. It is called civilisation. e'll want us to turn the light off when we aren't reading, or use less appliances. How about that wasteful blogging, using up energy.

.

Claire Foster, the church’s environment policy director, said: “Indiscriminate use of the earth’s resources must be seen as profoundly wrong, just as we now see slavery as wrong.”

.

What rot. So wasting water is as wrong as enslaving a man? Nonsense. The church wastes the eart's resources, and time and produces nothing. If all religion was shut down, there would be an enormous amount of energy saved, time for family and friends and productive activity. I think it is profoundly wrong that the futile nature of religion causes such waste.

.

Besides which, if the Church of England (surely one of the longest running charlatan churches on the planet) wants to exercise "moral authority" on the environment, it should be pointing fingers at the Supreme Governor of the Church - the Queen. She regularly has entire planes just for herself, her mad racist husband and their entourage - so send the Queen by boat everywhere, and her family, then come back to me.

.

Meanwhile I've booked my flight to NZ and back for Xmas/New Year - and the Church of England can get fucked if it thinks that is sinful.

.

UPDATE: Interesting article in the Telegraph fisking the Bishop, who took a free luxury cruise, including connecting flights, over Easter. Although, it still buys into the protestant "don't fly as much" ethic.

Ding dong Ta Mok is dead

Another one, one of the worst, of the murderous butchers of Cambodia is dead.

.

Ta Mok, believed to have directed the most deadly of the purges of the Khmer Rouge regime, died on 20 July after falling into a coma.

.

Words cannot describe the brutality and cruelty this man was a part of - the movie the Killing Fields showed, believe it or not, a sanitised version, the book Survival in the Killing Fields by Dr Haing S Ngor (who played Dith Pran in the Killing Fields) tells it all.

.

Dr Haing S Ngor survived the brutality that Ta Mok inflicted with his comrades, supported by Maoist China, while leftist pinup boy Noam Chomsky claimed stories about the Khmer Rouge horrors were "concocted by the CIA".

.

In order to survive Dr Ngor had to pretend to be an illiterate taxi driver, when he was in fact, an obstetrician. His wife died in childbirth as he watched and could do nothing, because had he revealed his medical skills, he would have been murdered for being "too clever". The Khmer Rouge only valued uneducated labourers, everyone else was a capitalist exploiter or had "foreign allegiances". Dr Ngor, escaped, told his story, the book and movie were made, and then was murdered by a streetgang who demanded the locket around his neck (which contained a picture of his late wife). He refused - the thugs who killed him are in jail.

.

Unfortunately, Ta Mok never saw justice. 2 million Cambodians died due to the Khmer Rouge, Ta Mok is responsible for plenty of them.

.

Nobody should forget what happened in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 - it was the logical end point of radical collectivism and anti-capitalism. The individual was explicitly nothing, money was abolished, any form of foreign education or intellectualising (besides Maoism) was reason to kill. People who used their hands not their heads were worshipped and lauded, everyone who used their minds was put into slavery or killed. Individual homes and all private property was abolished - you lived together, worked together, slept together (not that way), ate together and then had to criticise each other and yourself. Who else thinks money is the root of all evil?

.

Shame Chomsky didn't visit Cambodia like Scottish Khmer Rouge apologist Malcolm Caldwell did mid revolution. Caldwell was killed by members of the Khmer Rouge keen to "embarrass" the regime - justice indeed.