Greens think smokers are just so stupid and pathetic

Nothing shows the Green Party up for the authoritarian control freaks they are than this press release with this statement:

We need to get smokes out of our homes and out of our shops,” Green Party Co-leader Metiria Turei said. 

So blatantly collectivist, so blatantly uninterested in personal responsibility, choice and property rights.  

Who is this "we" Metiria?  Why do I have to do anything as a non-smoker?  Why should I have anything to do with what other adults do in their homes and their shops?

What are "our homes" and "our shops"?  They are NOT your homes or shops.  YOUR homes and shops are the ones you own, not everyone elses.  Property rights still exist in New Zealand.  It is not some grand socialist uber-state where everyone is responsible for everyone else.  

"Too often the focus is on punishing smokers and not controlling the industry that profits from the drug"  Oh and the Greens want smokers to have the right to smoke on their own property or to allow smoking on their own property, including restaurants and bars?  No. The Greens like punishing smokers too.

She has taken upon herself the role of Big Mother, given that Cindy "Stalin" Kiro no longer has he position:

"Mrs Turei said her main focus was on caring for New Zealand’s babies and children.

“This means giving our wahine, our mothers, all the support they need to quit and to stay smoke free."

New Zealand's babies and children?  They don't belong to the state, or the nation or country or whatever collective entity you want to ascribe to them.  They belong to their parents and guardians.  NOT you.  They are not "our wahine, our mothers".   After all, over 90% don't even vote for you.  

Feel free to give them support Metiria.  Through your own efforts and money.   However, you should stop treating smokers as stupid, pathetic and incompetent children who need you to protect them from their own actions.  How patronising and disgusting it is to think of yourself as better placed to make their decisions for them.

The only people who can get tobacco out of their homes and shops are the people who own them.  Feel free to try to convince them, but get the hell out of the way if they tell you where to go.   Yet the problem with the Greens is that they don't believe in peace, they don't believe in non-violence.  They warmly embrace the violence of Nanny State taking people's money, telling them what to do in their shops, and treating them like children.

I say this as someone who personally loathes tobacco, hates the smell of it and who has seen people I love suffer the consequences of smoking.   However, as much as I would not shed a tear if tobacco became a thing of the past, I find far more threatening the finger wagging patronising petty fascism behind the Greens treating people like they are children.

It makes one want to light up.

UPDATE:  Meanwhile the Netherlands has taken a step towards freedom according to the Daily Telegraph.  The new coalition government, which includes the Party for Freedom (the much maligned party of Geert Wilders who is more a libertarian than anything else despite the braindead media thinking he is aligned to neo-fascists) has abolished the smoking ban for owner-operator pubs.  In other words pubs with no staff.  It is a small step, but it shouldn't be debated.  It is simple.  It is private property.  If you own a pub, then you can decided if you or your patrons smoke there.   It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.  If you don't like it, don't go there.

Want growth? Get a spatial plan

Yes that's what the Green/ACT government thinks.

The headline is "Spatial Plan will ensure economic growth for Auckland".

The main space I can find is between the ears of the press secretaries of Nick Smith and Rodney Hide that have let such empty nonsense escape their offices.  It plunges new shallows of vapidity, reaches new epic heights of failure and demonstrates once again that this government is devoid of philosophical challenge to the leftwing, planning obsessed arrogance of the past.

The press release is so empty that you could drive a train through it, and it shows once and for all that Nick Smith, the Green Party member in Cabinet, is driving policy.

There is more substance between an electron and the nucleus of an atom than this piece of pontificating waffle

"One of the most important roles of the Auckland Council will be to articulate the 20-30 year vision for Auckland through the spatial plan"

Really?  What happens if it doesn't happen? Will there not be economic growth?  Indeed when has ANY local government successfully forecast economic activity by sector, location and the like ever?  Did the local government plans of 20 years ago talk about the internet and online economy?  Of course not.  Did the local government plans of 40 years ago talk about an economy driven by services and tourism from China and India?  Hardly.  So why is it important?  

Take this piece of Sir Humphreyism.. "Cabinet agreed the spatial plan is the key vehicle for developing an integrated approach to managing Auckland’s urban growth."

Why manage it?  Why must there be an integrated approach? Who told you this (the Ministry for the Environment Smart Growth control freaks no doubt)?  

Oh the faith... "The spatial plan will illustrate how Auckland will develop in the future. It will show where and when growth will occur in transport, housing, energy, water, recreation, education and health infrastructure and services"

Will it Nick? Will it, bollocks!  Unless you live in an authoritarian nanny state where you stifle the private sector growing anything that is not in zee plan.  How do you know Auckland will develop like that, and most of all, how do you know it is right?

Oh and he knows what Aucklanders like "Aucklanders will be looking to see that the spatial plan sets out their aspirations for their city – all those that are affordable and feasible – and which supports efficient and effective resource allocation"

No they wont, they will be looking to see how best to live their own lives peacefully, with their family and friends, minding their own business.  Most of them are not busybodies who want to tell other people where to live, how to move and what businesses they should run and where. 

Imagine Auckland without a spatial plan.  It isn't hard. 

Auckland hasn't had one up till now.  However, you voted for National or ACT to make sure there was one didn't you?

The US votes for something different

The Democrats are about to get their nose bloodied, Obama will no longer be able to defer to Congress to write his legislation for him.   He wont be able to increase spending again.  He wont be able to increase taxes.   In other words, he wont be able to spend his way out of trouble.

Yet they wont get it.   

"Though it has been typically misrepresented by the liberal media as a rattlers’ nest of gun-toting fruitcakes who want to ban masturbation and abortion, it is, of course, nothing of the kind. It is – whatever the increasingly redundant Moonbat may claim – a genuine grass roots movement inspired by the one great political cause truly worth fighting and dying for: the cause of liberty. " says James Delingpole in the Daily Telegraph.

The Tea Party is a libertarian inspired movement, which has the backing of more than a few conservatives.   Yes there are some wingnuts, but the Democrats are not without their share of the same. 

Toby Harnden in the Daily Telegraph has written what he thinks will be the top 10 excuses for losing.

1.   Opponents (or enemies) don't believe in science or facts.  They are stupid.

2.   Democrats have been gutless and haven't defended their "amazing achievements" well enough.

3.   Democrats did the right thing, even though it is unpopular (oh yes, really hard decisions to spend more money they didn't have).

4.   It's history, you always lose somewhat after 2 years.  Nothing new.

5.   Democrats were too moderate, not enough change.   Not enough government.

6.   Democrats have communicated badly.  It's about marketing.

7.   Evil big business and foreign (remember these are people who name others as racist) money is feeding the enemy.  They aren't real Americans looking after real Americans.

8.   Racism.  Why else would you oppose a Black President? 

9.   The media is to blame, especially evil Fox News.   It does a lousy job.  It didn't give Obama an easy run at all did it?

10. It's Bush again.  Yes all that small government rhetoric, so common wasn't it?

Obama is desperate to increase turnout by his core of youth, Latino and Black voters, but he isn't inspiring.   Instead of preaching hope, he is preaching fear, based on at best misunderstanding, at worst lies.   Harnden says of Obama "at its core, his message is one of promoting what Margaret Thatcher called the "nanny state" at home and Wilsonian internationalism abroad.  The problem last time was that Obama DID express hope and seemed to embody something different, but what wasn't clear to many was what it meant - it didn't mean an end to pork barreling, it meant more spending, more taxes and no limits on what government was prepared to do.   This has scared people, they fear the world's biggest economy is being hamstrung by being the world's biggest debtor nation, and that free enterprise and free markets aren't important anymore.

The Tea Party is saying to hell with you all, but has managed to inspire enough Republicans to its cause.  

What will happen?  Well Congress wont be quite the same again.  It wont be a matter of Republican majorities back to their old ways, but it also wont be a Congress ready to compromise.   

Indeed, objectivist Harry Binswanger reckons that Republicans should be favoured across the board because the Tea Party has already taken over the political initiative in the party.   In other words, the Republicans will not be in a position to resist the energy and determination of the Tea Party.

It will mean gridlock, as a leftwing President faces a libertarian/conservative House, and a hung Senate.  

It has inspired much comment, as James Delingpole's article shows with over 1000 comments, many from disgruntled British Marxists who want to treat Americans as either stupid or having been duped. 

He describes elegantly the problem:

"in the last 80 or more years – and not just in the US but throughout the Western world – government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant."

He even mentions New Zealand as among one of the countries maintaining this philosophy:

"Wherever you go, even if it’s somewhere run by a notionally “conservative” administration, the malaise you will encounter is much the same: a system of governance predicated on the notion that the state’s function is not merely to uphold property rights, maintain equality before the law and defend borders, but perpetually to meddle with its citizens’ lives in order supposedly to make their existence more fair, more safe, more eco-friendly, more healthy. And always the result is the same: more taxation, more regulation, less freedom. Less “fairness” too, of course."

Exactly! You can see it in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK, the National-ACT-Maori-Dunne coalition in NZ, and you could see it in the former Howard administration in Australia.  Meet your new boss, same as the old boss, bossing you about, just with a different bitter taste.

Government has been growing barely checked, but as he says:

"With Hitler and Stalin it was easy: the enemy was plain in view. Today’s encroaching tyranny is an of altogether more subtle, slippery variety. It takes the form of the steady “engrenage” – ratcheting – of EU legislation; of the stealthy removal of property rights and personal liberty under the UN’s Agenda 21; of the eco-legislation created by democratically unaccountable bodies like America’s Environmental Protection Agency".

The future starts tomorrow, in the USA.  For Obama will have been stopped in his tracks, and the next step is to carefully find the right Presidential candidate (it is not Palin by any stretch), and for the Tea Party to push on.   For all the next two years will mean is stasis, not progress, so the Tea Party needs to maintain momentum at the local, state and federal levels.

It angers and distresses the left, they will pull out all the stops to portray it as a war against the poor, or driven by rich who are painted like how Stalin described the Kulaks, or the left's old fashioned xenophobia will come out.   They will seek to scare minorities that it is racist or sexist, frighten the poor and the elderly, claim environmental armageddon, and want to not offend anyone (except those who disagree).   Because when you give people back their own money, take away the laws that tell them what to do, give them back their property rights, and make free choice and persuasion the tools protected by government - not regulation, tax and spending - then those who don't like people's choices and do like other people's money will get upset.

Because the future wont be about the initiation of force, but about the power of argument, of convincing individuals to act differently, to spend their money differently.  

Now that is an audacity of hope.

How to kill a boondoggle

Just say no!

That's what the Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, said to a US$11+ billion rail project to build a new line from New Jersey into Manhattan.  A project that was doomed to go over budget, and never make a single cent to contribute towards its capital costs.  He essentially cancelled the project because New Jersey couldn't afford it, although he would have let it proceed had the Federal Government been willing to cover any cost overruns.  There was a 90% certainty that it would have exceeded previous budget estimates of US$9.8 billion, with the highest end estimate being US$13.7 billion.

He wants to use money that had been planned for the project to fix up the state's badly maintained roads and bridges, and refused to increase fuel tax to pay for it.   However that's another story, of state managed roads that are falling apart because of mismanagement and pork barrelling from the past. 

If there was so much demand for rail travel, then fares could go up to generate net revenues to pay for it, yet fares don't pay enough to run the existing services (and yes, the roads to Manhatten from New Jersey ARE already priced, although not particularly efficiently). 

Know any other boondoggles that need someone to say no to them?

What the Green Movement Got Wrong

A documentary with this very title is to be broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK this Thursday.  This article in the Daily Telegraph summarises the key point of the broadcast - that environmentalists were wrong to oppose nuclear power and genetically modified crops.

American activist Stewart Brand said "Environmentalists did harm by being ignorant and ideological and unwilling to change their mind based on actual evidence. As a result we have done harm and I regret it."

None of this is news to me, since identifying the ideological rather than the evidential behind environmentalist claims is rather easy.  Jeanette Fitzsimons, the former Green MP, was a master at this, claiming 1999 was the last Christmas to enjoy potatoes "you could trust".   One of the reasons minds have been changed on GM foods for example, is because people have been eating them for over a decade, without a shred of evidence of any ill health effects.

However, beyond that documentary one of the latest scientific breakthroughs will help put paid to the myth that new roads shouldn't be built, because the "inevitable" end of cheap oil will mean private motoring will be too expensive for most people.

According to Geek.com, DBM Energy, a manufacturer of batteries for forklifts, decided to trial its rechargeable battery in a car.  An Audi A2.  The result?  A battery cheaper than existing Lithium Ion technology in cars, with a range of 375 miles (603 kms), averaging at 55 mph (89 km/h) on a charge of 6 minutes.  Now obviously there are a few steps to take before this becomes mass production, but a future of rechargeable cars might just have moved a little closer. (more on UPI)