Time for Assange's defenders to apologise

You've been backing an evil, self-aggrandising cunt.

Time for Keith Locke to resign, and for the Green Party to apologise, for their sycophantic embrace of this vile little man.

Time for the vapid conspiracy theory making tabloid scatologist Bomber Bradbury to apologise, and the smug Idiot Savant to do so as well.

Julian Assange had his moment in the sun about a year or so ago, when he was heralded as a hero by his publishing of stolen US diplomatic communications.  

Of course Assange has an agenda, I made that point late last year.  It is avowedly contrary to that of US and Western foreign policy, so like the vacuous kneejerk activists as they are, the hard left feted him as a "freedom fighter".   He fitted their world view beautifully. He was fighting the power, he was showing up how arrogant the US is, about its plans around the world, about its private meetings with diplomats, politicians and businesspeople.  Good old Julian, fuck the USA right?

Well I said a few weeks ago that he has published the names of anti-government activists in Iran and China, and informants from the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Now it looks a lot worse.  Nick Cohen in the Observer has written further about how vile Assange really is.  He talks of the David Leigh/Luke Harding book Wikileaks with this story.

"A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths."

See for Assange, members of the TALIBAN are more moral than people who oppose them and support the US in opposing them.  Think about how much blind hatred is behind that view of his, how the worshippers of the dark ages, of totalitarian terror, of misogynistic tyranny are better than their opponents.

Then there is Assange's relationship with Israel Shamir, a friend of the Belarus dictatorship:

"On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the "organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones" who had protested against rigged elections."

Nice that, of course this shouldn't surprise you.  Israel Shamir  (not his real name) was appointed as the Wikileaks Russian/Eastern European representative.  Shamir collaborated with the Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus - Europe's last dictatorship, one that is little different from the USSR.   Shamir is anti-semitic, moving among such groups in eastern Europe.   Nice touch, means Israel can be so much easier to attack when you ask if you can get everything the State Department has "on the Jews".

Cohen says it goes further, as Wikileaks endangered opposition journalists in Ethiopia:

"Argaw Ashine fled the country last week after WikiLeaks revealed that the reporter had spoken to an official from the American embassy in Addis Ababa about the regime's plans to intimidate the independent press. WikiLeaks also revealed that a government official told Arshine about the planned assault on opposition journalists. Thus Assange and his colleagues not only endangered the journalist. They tipped off the cops that he had a source in the state apparatus."

Freedom fighters? No. Assange is uninterested in political freedom.  It's far from clear that he even understands it.  He is a the small town boy desperate for attention.

Cohen demands that his supporters be confronted and held to account:

"First, there needs to be relentless pressure on the socialist socialites and haggard soixante-huitards who cheered Assange on. Bianca Jagger, Jemima Khan, John Pilger, Ken Loach and their like are fond of the egotistical slogan "not in my name." They are well-heeled and well-padded men and women who know no fear in their lives. Yet they are happy to let their names be used by Assange as he brings fear into the lives of others."

Some are empty heads, others are typical left wing no thinkers.  However, it's hard to beat Bomber for the utterings of hyperbolic vacuity:

"Assange and wikileaks will be seen as a threat that needs utter annihilation because he disrupts the balance of power in a way no person ever has".

Bomber's an idiot, but Assange is a vile evil little prick who revels in his celebrity status, whose kiddi-socialism has gained him lots of sycophantic followers with similar levels of adolescent simplicity in their beliefs.   The types that attack the West, while living in it, because they like to be rebels, they want to believe that politicians don't tell you everything, that there are grand conspiracies between business, government and media to make sure you don't know the truth.  They ignore real dictatorships because that's not counter-establishment enough, after all the US, Europe and other Western countries already oppose Syria, Belarus, North Korea and the Taliban. 

I hope Wikileaks goes under, I hope Assange loses it all and has to get a real job, and I hope his vapid sycophants apologise for supporting this monster.  Then I hope they give donations to Reporters Without Borders to atone for their stupidity, and start supporting people who do support freedom.

Liberal Democrats don't have a market anymore

This weekend has seen the conference of the Liberal Democrats held in Birmingham.  Of course as the junior coalition partner in government one might think it is a chance to celebrate success - which is, actually, what those who are Ministers have been doing.  Yet it is all in the shadow of record low polling results, as hoards of Liberal Democrat voters have abandoned the party they supported - whatever reason it was that they supported it.

Indeed, that is the crux of the problem for this party.  Having been the third party in one form or another for over 80 years, government was almost always never on the cards since Labour usurped the Liberal Party as the major second party.  However, the Liberal Democratic Party is not the Liberal Party, it is a slut of a mongrel that has hobbled from election to election in the last 30 or so years finding whatever gap it could see in the market, bringing along its disparate parts to heel. 

When it was the Liberal Party, it had a market.  It rejected the social conservatism of the Conservative Party that had resisted the social revolution of the 1960s, but also rejected the Marxist planned economy approach of Labour.  It supported the EEC as a means to reduce barriers to trade with Europe.  Bear in mind that until Thatcher, the status quo was socialism, with the Conservatives hoping to contain industrial action whilst the unions made mischief when Labour wasn't in power.   In fact, in that ossified climate, there was a period when the Liberal Party looked like it was in revival, getting 19% of the vote in the first of two elections in 1974 under Jeremy Thorpe (who was easily the best performing party leader at the time, until scandal ended his career).   The election of Thatcher changed all that.

The Liberals merged with a breakaway wing of Labour - because Labour in the early 1980s was a party of neo-Marxism, with policies such as withdrawal from NATO and nationalisation of industries and unilateral nuclear disarmament.  The SDP comprised Labour MPs who wanted none of that, and they took the Alliance, later the Liberal Democrats on a slalom ride over the years.  Initially it was easy, while Labour was old Labour and the Conservatives were the party of Thatcher, but then New Labour came along and the Liberal Democrats took a swing to the left.  Free university education, abolishing taxes for the poor came along with hopping aboard the environmentalism agenda, supporting interventions to address global warming, and so being part of the movement against fossil fuels, in favour of wind and solar power, against aviation and roads, and in favour of trains.  It opposed replacing Britain's nuclear deterrent.  

The Liberal Democrats became the party of the left.  On domestic policy it was all about having more for free, for more regulation of businesses, for more spending on education and higher taxes on the wealthy and no taxes on the poorest.  On foreign policy the biggest boost was opposition to the invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and a high profile given to human rights, as well as enthusiasm for the EU.  The Liberal Democrats once advocated Britain joining the EURO for instance.

So in the 2010 election, Liberal Democrat voters were comprised of a lot of people for whom New Labour wasn't leftwing enough.  Refugees from New Labour who would never vote Conservative.  Some Liberal Democrats float between the three parties, but the party built itself up as a party of protest.  No to tuition fees, no to war in Iraq, no to Trident, no to Heathrow expansion, no to Euroscepticism, no to climate change. 

Most Liberal Democrat voters don't expect the party to be in power, so when it chose to go with the Conservatives, it burned off its protest vote credentials, and for many its leftwing credentials.   

Meanwhile with New Labour buried along with Gordon Brown's political career, "Red" Ed Miliband reclaims the left back for Labour.  So where do the Liberal Democrats go?

As they have hitched their wagon to the Conservatives, they believe in addressing the budget deficit.  They believe in having a reduced burden for business, and have gone along with the "free schools" idea.  Yet they have also stymied modest reforms for the NHS, effectively delayed the renewal of Trident and are now vetoing a cut in the top income tax rate.   

The Liberal Democrats are seeking a middle ground, which doesn't really exist.  While Ed Miliband has turned Labour back to the left, it is not the days of Foot and Kinnock, but looks more like the Liberal Democrats.  Rejecting the war on Iraq, supporting a green agenda. supporting more money on the state sector, Labour as the party of opposition with no competition, can now accumulate all opposition to the government.   The Conservative Party, having swung to the centre under David Cameron is now fighting in the middle ground, which despite the shrill rhetoric of the unions and Labour, is not engaging in some major culling of the state, nor radical reforms on any scale.  What do and can the Liberal Democrats stand for?

The quasi-religious environmentalism doesn't get much support in a time of economic malaise, especially with some households harassed by the recycling police and motorists fed up with punitive fuel taxes.  The anti-war rhetoric is worth little now that there has been withdrawal from Iraq and military spending cuts are more an embarrassment than a source of pride.   Claims for spending more money on the state don't wash at a time of modest austerity.   The past EURO enthusiasm is not something Liberal Democrats want reminders of.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, spoke at the conference of cracking down on tax evasion, he told of a half billion pound "infrastructure fund" to "create" jobs  and support infrastructure projects in financial difficulty, whatever that means.   Does he mean projects council have cut back on, or those that have gone wrong - like Edinburgh's tram abortion?

There was a project at the beginning of the coalition to cut unnecessary laws - a "Freedom Bill" - of which there has been little heard, primarily because when the public were asked what laws to abolish, they responded in droves.  The Liberal part of the Liberal Democrats is rarely heard of.

Having opposed serious reform of the NHS, the Liberal Democrats cannot be seen as a party of rational reform.  Having continued to push the green agenda, with calls to limit executive pay and a shrill line of banker bashing and blaming, it is hardly a party that is pro-business.  It can't hope to reclaim its Liberal credentials when it happily supports more government in so many areas.  Yet, it can't be a party of the left while tied to a party of the right.   

There could be a future for a Liberal Party that embraced smaller government, free market reforms and social liberalism, but not much of one.   There isn't a future for the Social Democrats, who are indistinguishable from old Labour - the party of envy, arrogance, belief in the state, belief in forever taxing the successful, and delivering monopoly social services.

It's rather simple after all - the gap the Liberal Democrats once filled were as the "other" protest party against government.  As part of it, they don't stand for anything other than restraining the ruling party.   Yet when 2015 comes along as people want to support the government, why vote Liberal Democrat instead of Conservative?  Whereas if you oppose it, why would you vote for a party that supported it the whole time?  

The ONLY future for the Liberal Democrats is if Labour makes itself so unelectable that Labour voters choose Liberal Democrats to constrain the Conservatives.   Yet that would be self-defeating for them.  For it would simply result in Labour winning less seats and in more cases than not, it would mean MORE seats for the Conservatives, increasing the likelihood of being able to govern in their own right.  

Given that electoral reform as a saviour wont be on offer again for many many years, the future is bleak for a party without a coherent philosophy or an identifiable market.   As a libertarian I hope it splits, and a Liberal Party can once again assert less regulation, social liberalism (including drug law reform), less government overall and lower taxes.   It would also mean rejecting EUphilia.  

Both major parties will be helping to give the impression that the Liberal Democrats are a third wheel.   They'd be right.  It is.  The Greens and UKIP both fill gaps in the market.  The Greens for the far left and UKIP for the Thatcherite Eurosceptic/somewhat libertarian right.  

The Liberal Democrats fill no gaps any more, and if they stay on their present course, face year after year of decline.

Eurodelusion

Greece is going to default.  It is absolutely inconceivable that it is able to cut spending and raise taxes sufficiently to give confidence to lenders that it can service more debt.

The likelihood that German or French governments will make their taxpayers prop up the Greek profligacy is low, with Angela Merkel simply trying to bluff her way into ensuring there should be confidence in Greece.   Finally, the Free Democrats in Germany have started talking about alternatives to bailouts - whilst the CDU/CSU remains wedded to bailouts and the parties of the left can't think outside the box of European solidarity.

Greece will default, it may leave the Eurozone (as other Euro states fear contagion of the Greek effect), and will face a painful few years as its public sector is shrunk, its economy shrinks, lots will be out of work, then it will export, tourists will come and it will start to grow a real economy.

Allister Heath at City AM is blunter:

EUROPE is in a phoney war. The establishment is still in a denial about the inevitability of a Greek default; the markets don’t believe the politicians. The result is ever higher yields on Club Med debt, growing fears, extreme volatility in the pricing of banks’ securities, tensions in the money markets and a constant and destructive war of words. This chaos, and the dramatically lower share prices of many financial stocks demonstrates the uselessness and idiocy of the short-selling ban in parts of the Eurozone. It achieved absolutely nothing at all. The Eurozone needs to learn that grand gestures and propaganda don’t work. It should listen instead to the former president of the Argentinean central bank, Mario Blejer, who took over in the then devastated country in 2001 after its $95bn default. He thinks Greece, if it ever wants to salvage its economy, “should default and default big. You can’t jump over a chasm in two steps.” Argentina’s GDP collapsed by 10.9 per cent in 2002 before bouncing dramatically back.

A Greek default will be cataclysmic – but attempting to delay the inevitable threatens an even greater catastrophe.

Rugby World Cup public transport success story

Large numbers of people arrived for the Rugby World Cup with nary a problem using some public transport. They were using the commercially driven public transport, that doesn’t need subsidies to operate or to reinvest in capital. It has vibrant competition and a wide range of services. It’s called aviation.

The airline industry has had a few years to plan for the Rugby World Cup and has managed admirably. Air New Zealand delayed retiring aircraft it would have sold, in order to provide more services on routes between the main centres, displacing turbo-prop aircraft to provide some more to provincial centres. It is also using mothballed Boeing 747s for two additional services to London via LA when it ends. It had increased services on its London-Hong Kong-Auckland route. Qantas has done similar keeping aircraft it was to retire to provide additional services for the Rugby World Cup. Other airlines have increased the size of aircraft flying to and from New Zealand.

You can’t pretend the airline industry is in a healthy state. Qantas is undertaking a substantial restructuring of its international services to stem huge losses, and Air NZ is undertaking a thorough review of long haul services given its own losses. Yet they and their competitors all are able to deliver people internationally (and the pair domestically) at a time of peak demand. The corollary of it is that at certain times on certain routes air fares are high, but then so is demand and people prepared to pay get seats, they get a generally consistent level of service. The airports too, all run on a commercial basis, handle the crowds with little fuss.

Contrast that to a mega local authority co-ordinating a rail service that it owns, sub-contracted to a management company on tracks owned by the state.

Finger pointing all round given it is the silly season (election), as the railevangelists blame the Government – because it isn’t completely craven to their endless demands for other people’s money to gold-plate a service that costs more in subsidies than it generates in fare revenue.

The Government blames the council that IT set up running on a network that IT owns. For years the ARC complained that it didn’t have enough control or authority over transport in Auckland, that there were too many agencies. Now it is the Auckland Council contracting Kiwirail, both government bodies. The railevangelists protest that a fortune of your money (well your children’s, they would borrow now and make you pay later) should have been spent years ago building a gold-plated system that would work like clockwork and handle peaks (don’t talk about the subsidies to run them – because we’ll just manufacture figures to claim roads are worse), ignoring that the current socialist administration has spent a fortune to electrify the network (but it doesn’t happen overnight) to meet their dreams. The socialist administration chooses to impose a benign martial law over the Auckland waterfront and blame the Council it set up, cravenly following almost the entire model it inherited from a Helengrad inspired Royal Commission.

Should this not all demonstrate how the incentives to perform for government are so abysmal compared to commercial organisations? Even partially government owned companies like Air New Zealand and Auckland Airport are models of efficiency compared to Auckland’s quaint little commuter railway.

It’s worth noting that there is plenty of public transport in New Zealand that operates efficiently, commercially, without taxpayer subsidy (the Air NZ bailout was unnecessary and the fault of government intervention in the first place) and handles peaks and troughs quite adequately. It also has very high capital requirements, is exposed to extremely volatile changes in input prices (aviation fuel) and exchange rates (affecting costs of capital and fuel, as well as demand). It’s called the airline industry.

On a more modest scale, the entire intercity bus operation also operates efficiently, commercially and without taxpayer subsidy, meeting the needs of tourists and people without cars, with little fuss and no state planning (and also maintains individually unprofitable services because they contribute to the network, such as Napier-Gisborne). The movement planners who are obsessed with using other people’s money to prop up the modes they like, but to take from the ones they don’t, who want to tell landowners to build higher densities because they think it is “good for them and society”, ignore all of that. For it would appear than when governments stop planning so obsessively how people get about, businesses and their customers rather remarkably, seem to manage quite well.

And if you think cities are different, ask yourself why freight seems to move with little effort in cities, the only problem it faces is when bottlenecks of infrastructure or poor pricing mean that the government owned networks stop functioning efficiently.

Vileness appeared today

It had to happen.  The London Metropolitan Police has today protected about 100 protestors who in Grosvenor Square - the location of the US Embassy to the UK - held placards proclaiming "Islam will dominate the world", calling for an Islamic Caliphate for the UK and the US and celebrating that Afghanistan is a graveyard of US soldiers.  They deliberately broke the minute of silence held to commemorate the dead and are now celebrating the same on their website.  They burnt the US flag.

Their website makes it bold:

This is a war between ideologies, namely between those who stand on the side of Islam and those who stand on the side of democracy and freedom. In the West they use different terminologies, they call it a war between freedom and terrorism, it is strange though that all the "terrorists" are Muslim and all those Muslims have as there ideology Islam.

The claim is that the US has lost the ideological war.  They are worshippers of a death cult of slavery and depravity, they openly despise freedom, openly believe laws cannot be created except in the shadow of their misogynistic violent death cult.   They use the freedom of the West to fight against it,

It is worth noting that two groups counter-protested.  A group of Muslims appeared holding placards saying "Muslims against Extremism", "Keep the Silence" and "If you want Sharia, Move to Saudi".  Good for them.  The more British Muslims confront the Islamists the more it will be accepted that the majority of them live in the UK because of freedom, not to destroy it.   According to the Daily Mail one said "If the moderate Muslims all came out and spoke out, that would defeat them..I am proud to be British. I love my country. All these people are doing is breaking Britain apart."

Another group comprised the English Defence League, a group commonly described as fascist/far right, which is largely a bunch of working class men who are loudly and usually rather bluntly against Islamism.  The Police moved them so that the Islamist misogynists could have their protests.  For all of their faults, the EDL is at least NOT against the freedoms and secularism of modern Britain.  Indeed, treating them as being as bad as the Islamists will simply encourage recruitment.

What's most telling is that today, of all days, those who would destroy our way of life were allowed to be unspeakably disgusting and vile.  It makes a profound mockery of so called "human rights" laws that don't allow people to express offensive views based on race, sex, religion and sexuality, when people who hold those very views, are protected by the state to express them.

Now I would not stop people expressing those views, but would also not stop others counter-protesting, and would not move peaceful citizens on to let people protest.   Islamists sought to protest outside the US Embassy, knowing how inflammatory and offensive it would be, and got state protection to do so.  Would anyone who dared go to Muslim majority parts of Britain expect the same protection if they wanted to protest for a secular state, freedom and equal rights for women?

Why should the UK's 50p tax rate be cut?

Gordon Brown introduced the 50% top tax rate in the UK close to the end of his term as Prime Minister.  It cuts in at an income of £150,000, and the excuse was to help the public finances, the real reason was to tap the envy and class hatred of his voting base - the people who hate success, who wish they could earn that sort of money, or rather be given it.   The Daily Mail reported that the Institute of Fiscal Studies has said the 50p tax rate may not have raised any extra money because of the incentive it created to rearrange income sources and investment to avoid it. 

There are plenty of good reasons to scrap it, primarily because it is one of the highest top tax rates in Europe.  The UK already has the highest corporate tax rate in Europe.  The main problem it creates is being a disincentive to entrepreneurs staying in the UK and investing here.  What great incentive is there to taking risks in the UK if you face losing more than half of your income (including "National Insurance", which is another income tax) to the state?

Of course as Harry Phibbs at the Daily Mail says:

There will be plenty who will shout about fat cats and bashing the rich. The merchants of envy will always have a crude populist appeal.

It sends a message that Britain isn't a friendly place for making a lot of money.  Yet it is obvious that there is only one reason why it likely wont happen - the class envy that somehow people on higher incomes "aren't paying their fair share".  

Allister Heath of City AM points out some real facts to show that, unlike the distorted image spread by the Labour Party, trade unions and leftist media, the truth is that the British government is dependent on the "Atlas" of high earners.   The idea that the "rich" have never had it so good, is proven as nonsense.

1% of income tax payers reach into the 50% tax rate, in that they earn over £150,000 a year.   Many of them are not paying more on most of their income (as the tax rate is marginal), but together than 1% pay 27.7% of the income tax in the UK.   The equivalent top 1% of taxpayers in 1982 paid only 11% of all income tax, by 2000 they were paying 21.3% - so much for the Tories being the party of the "rich".

14,000 people in the UK earn more than £1 million a year.  They together pay £14.2 billion in income tax.  They pay almost as much income tax as the 13.9 million people who earn less than £20,000 a year. 

In other words 14,000 pay as much in income tax alone to pay the entire Home Office budget, which covers Police, prisons and the entire criminal justice system.

The top 1% of earners together pay enough income tax and national insurance to cover half of the NHS budget, but the legions of worshippers of that religion (the UK's largest) are hardly grateful for that.

Heath concludes:

All sections of society already pay far too much tax. A wealth tax would be a moral and economic disaster, double or triple taxing income and making a mockery of property rights. We need growth and jobs, not hate and punitive taxation. It is time to halt the war on wealth.

Indeed, the disgusting lie that somehow everyone on higher incomes is some banker who made a lot of money out of bankrupting the economy should be confronted.  I heard it again this morning on the BBC.  The UK's budget deficit (heaven help those who don't know their deficits from their debts) is NOT caused by "bailing out the bankers" because not a penny has been spent on bailing on banks this year, and the proportion of public debt attributable to that is less than 10%.

The long term goal of UK fiscal policy should be to reduce the overall tax burden.  The 50p rate should go, but concurrent with that, in part to placate the envious, but also to contribute to the reduction in tax, the first £10,000 everyone earns should be income tax free.  I mean everyone, not clawed back from higher income earners by lowering thresholds, but make so everyone knows that the first £10k a year is their own money.   Workers, students, employers, entrepreneurs, the retired, everyone.

The only moral argument ever put for the 50p rate is to claim the "rich" should "pay their share", yet with 1% of taxpayers paying over a quarter of all income tax, means they do far far more than that.

Yes some have high earnings because of luck and inheritance, but many more do so because of the career path they chose, the businesses they set up, the investments they made and besides all of that, it is their money.  If you haven't stolen or defrauded people, then you are morally entitled to the fruit of your efforts.  

As the Adam Smith Institute says of tax avoiders:

" Rather than harass such people, we should give them a medal for public service, in pointing out just how stupid our tax laws are... It's time to make tax simple and certain. And to ensure that our tax officials are public servants, not public inquisitors."

Part of that is to lower taxes across the board, whilst abolishing complicated rebates and exemptions, whilst putting a serious effort into cutting spending.   Nothing else will give the British economy a chance to be more than anaemic whilst the Eurozone looks to become the world's biggest welfare state economy, and the US remains addicted to borrowing from China to spend its way to depression.

9.11 some thoughts ten years on

The Western world today offers unrivalled freedom and opportunities for humanity.  It may have a small number of naysayers who use its freedom (and capitalism) to damn it, condemn it and criticise it (rarely offering alternatives), but people from all over the world strive to live there, to learn there and do business there.  The wealthy from Africa, the Arab World, Asia and Russia all flock to the West to do their shopping, to have a good time and to buy healthcare for their families and education for the children, even if they return to maintain and profit from the corrupt autocracies that facilitated their opportunities.

9/11 was an attack on modernity.  The philosophy of Al Qaeda, and indeed that of all Islamists is rooted in a rejected of globalisation and capitalism, one reason why retaliation gets such lukewarm responses from the far left in the West (those who moved on from appeasement of the USSR to eco-socialism).  However, it is far more than that.  It is a fundamental rejection of the enlightenment, of political and civil freedoms, of feminism, of secularism and religious tolerance.  It is the embrace of a stone age patriarchal theocracy that no more embraces the secularist leftists of the West any more than the Christian conservatives, or the libertarian capitalists.  It used the tools of modernity to attack it.

Some apologists of Al Qaeda claim it wouldn't have attacked the US if the US had no military presence in the Middle East, or if Israel was destroyed (and presumably replaced by an anti-semitic Islamist theocracy).  However, its interest is not in peaceful co-existence, its interest in peace is seen in how barbarically it treats girls and women - breeding chattels undeserving of education.  It is beyond disgraceful that so many leftwing feminists turn a blind eye to the brutality of Islamist attitudes and treatment of women, for they fear having conservatives, capitalists and true liberals as allies - so adolescently knee jerk they still are.

Peaceful people were murdered by Al Qaeda.  People who took flights and worked on flights, people who worked at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and neighbouring buildings.   Some died instantly, some knew they were going to die, some jumped, some were crushed.   For those who attacked, they were meant to die, their lives were a means to an end.  For that is the collectivist philosophy - that human beings and lives are meaningless, unless they are categorised, pigeon-holed and treated as such.   It was enough that they lived or worked in the USA - a legitimate target.

If my career had been a little different, it could have included me, or people who I know. 

So 9/11 for me is always a day of some reflection - that there are people ready to destroy modernity, civilisation and freedom, for their twisted, backwards, bigoted, totalitarian view of how people should live their lives.  That history did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that there remains people who don't think that human beings have the right to live their own lives, or to think for themselves.

Meanwhile, the freedom and capitalism the West allows also allows conspiracy theorists and deniers to continue to claim that it was a self-inflicted attack by the US, or carried out by Israel.  Whatever it takes to demean and defame the West, feeding the irrational frenzy of hatred, racism, religious insanity that infects much of the Muslim world.  Such people should be treated with the same disdain and irreverence as Holocaust deniers, Moon Landing deniers and flat earthers.  They are a step below those who think it was the USA getting its just desserts, which of course is legitimate if you too think human beings are but a means to an end.  If you think terrorism - blowing up bodies of innocent civilians - is ok, then 9/11 can be justified.  If you express sadness and remorse, but then go "but", you are justifying it, you're expressing the view that it could have been prevented if only someone else had done something that would have meant the perpetrators wouldn't have bothered to murder.   A bit like "it's sad he hits you, but...".    On this day, such people should be ignored, for they are not just wrong, but in appalling bad taste and a combination of stupid and evil.  Nothing can justify such mass murder.  Not even the echoes of vileness from those who have said "not enough bankers died".

As long as there are people willing to do violence to inflict their religious preferences on others, free people cannot rest to confront them and defend themselves and civilisation from their barbarism.  It is as destructive and evil as Nazism, as Marxism-Leninism, as all forms of eliminationist authoritarianism.   On 9/11 they extended from their own vile little fiefdoms of totalitarianism (Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia) into the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Bear in mind that they wouldn't have thought twice had you been there too.

For today we are all Americans.

Is Margaret Mutu's view of racism that unusual?

I first encountered the Critical Race Theory view of racism, that Margaret Mutu has so eloquently expressed, at university. It is part of a wider set of beliefs and philosophy that includes identity politics, race consciousness and Marxist social class analysis that abandons treating people as individuals, and focuses entirely on what they are, not who they are and what they do.

In other words, you can’t possibly claim that Professor Margaret Mutu, a senior academic at a university, is capable of uttering a phrase that is racially discriminatory and degrading, not because of what she says, but because of her subjectively determined (by her) racial background. She is, according to her “world view” (you can have as many as you like, they are all valid – except ones she disagrees with), less empowered than a minimum wage Caucasian labourer. You see, she sees people according to the colour of their skin (and a bit more than that, because “race” is more about “ethno-national identity”) not the content of their character.

When I questioned the notion that someone “who identifies as” Maori heritage “cannot be racist”, I was patronized and it was explained it was she has “less power” than me, despite us both being students at the same level in the same university (and the female Maori student having parents of professional university educated backgrounds, unlike my Glaswegian parents who left school at 15). 

You see, nothing else mattered but race, it apparently spoke more than just who your ancestors were - it defined your social standing, access to money and influence and life opportunities - except of course, that it really didn't.  However, reality is disturbingly complicated to subjectivists.

This extreme radical view of race, power and politics could have simply been confined to the corners of universities where the likes of Mutu could express their views, and have them robustly questioned, if they hadn’t permeated so successfully into the minds of graduates in the 1970s and 1980s, and so the New Zealand political and bureaucratic body politic. Of course, affirmative action isn’t racist, for anyone of Maori (or Pacific Island) background is inherently disadvantaged, and anyone who isn’t is already, by implication “lucky”. Blank out the white, Chinese or Indian kid who is the first in her family to go to university, the family on low incomes working hard to give their kids a fair go Blank out the daughter of two lawyers who I encountered getting a public sector scholarship to complete her legal education, because she was Maori. 

It isn’t about individuals, it is about the “system”. It is a philosophy that has been cultivated at universities throughout the country, in Maori Studies departments, Politics departments and even Law Faculties. It is why when Don Brash calls for “one law for all”, he is deemed to be racist. The very notion of equality before the law denies the view that there is inherent persistent racism everywhere, because Maori are not the dominant race.

It doesn’t matter that government isn’t based on race, it doesn’t matter that laws exist to protect individuals without regard for race, or that taxes and handouts are distributed on a similar basis. See Mutu can say most white immigrants are white supremacists, and it’s ok - but don’t you dare stereotype Maori, otherwise you are being oppressive –unless you are Maori, in which case either you’re having a laugh, or you’re “not really Maori”, but a traitor.

You see race based views of the world are indeed very black and white. You’re either with the structuralist, identity politics view, or you’re racist.   Why else would you reject it?  Like Mao, you either were with the Cultural Revolution, or you were a capitalist roader out to exploit the masses, who was worth less than a dog.

It’s tempting to invoke Godwin’s law, you can do so yourself. When you think of all people and their relationships with others in terms of race, you find lots of allies. Robert Mugabe is the obvious one, but you might add Slobodan Milosevic, Daniel Milan, Robert Kajuga. All people who thought about race, all people who put aside thinking about individual deeds and backgrounds.

However, in New Zealand you might add Hone Harawira. Indeed, the entire Mana Party would hold this view that Maori cannot be racist. By its mere existence, so would the Maori Party. It doesn’t think it is racist to be a political movement inspired to advance one “ethnic group”. That should be obvious.

Yet the same views are easy to ascribe to the Green Party. It carries with it the same neo-Marxist, power based identity politics view that pigeon-holes people based on race, sex and sexuality. Maori lesbians automatically have less power than Chinese heterosexual men. 

You see an objective definition of racism is to act to discriminate against someone purely on the basis of race. It isn’t based upon what race a person is who is saying “x are criminals” or “y are lazy” or “z are mostly fascists”. It is based upon what is said.

The 20th century is littered with the corpses and blood of millions who were killed not because of what they did, but because of what category of people they were deemed to be. Whether it be race, religion, sectarian group, profession, education level, family background or class. The pain and loss of this is incalculable, the waste of talent, creativity, joy and intelligence is inconceivable. 

The only way forward for any civilisation is to reject the history of treating human beings according to what psychologically made up (for this is all they are) group they belong to, and treat them as individuals and judge them by deeds and words, not classify them like farm animals. Mutu does the latter, how many more of our politicians are of her ilk?

For all of the flurry about how Margaret Mutu says she can’t be racist, she can largely be ignored except for her living off of the taxpayer. What shouldn’t be ignored is how many people standing for Parliament share her view? Does the Green Party believe Margaret Mutu was being racist? Does the Maori Party believe it? Does the Mana Party believe it? Does the Labour Party believe it?

Maori don't want to work and prefer welfare

Waikato University activist E. Powell today said that "Most Maori don't want to work, they'd rather sit around and live off other taxpayers and will mug and steal if they aren't given welfare ".  He said that, Maori "do bring with them, as much as they deny it, an attitude of brown supremacy, and that is fostered by the country".  He says movement of such Maori from different parts of the country should be restricted because it threatens race relations.

Powell said "New Zealanders generally support Asian immigration because they aren't lazy and don't come to live off the taxpayer, and Maori who understand a culture of hard work, independence and non-violence"...."They are in a minority just like Maori in this country. You have a minority of Maori who are very good, they recognise the racism, they object to it and speak out strongly against it"

Apparently in New Zealand it is acceptable free speech to stereotype different races and demand immigration restrictions based on race, based on simply making up what you think people are like as a group.

Nothing else can justify a university professor talking like this and still keeping her taxpayer paid job. 

Of course, while New Zealand has Margaret Mutu, South Africa has Julius Malema.  Racist, calculating, hate filled authoritarians, who if given the chance would happily kill those who oppose them.   They both embrace political violence, they both should be treated with the contempt that fascists are typically treated.

Nicky Hager - the agitprop agitator

Speaking of attention seeking pseuds, there is Nicky Hager.

Nicky is a poor little rich boy who like many others allegedly cares so much about poverty because he had none as a child.

He portrays himself as an "investigative journalist" but is no more impartial than Ian Wishart, but with a different point of view.  He is no journalist.  He is an agitprop activist, whose book is motivated, like his others, to help the Green Party at the election.   The way that his leftwing sycophants swallow his every word, and the Greens cheer him on, should make it clear that he isn't a supplier of objective assessment of evidence.   He writes propaganda designed to stir up opposition to the government, to push his own agenda, which is hardly difficult to follow.   His own far left activist history is hardly secretive, although most New Zealand reporters are either too lazy or too sympathetic to question him on his motives.

All of his books have been written from a perspective of far left anti-Western, anti-capitalist politicking.  His 1996 book (election year) Secret Power - New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network raised nothing than anyone comfortable with New Zealand's place in the Western alliance of free liberal democracies would be concerned about.  However, Hager has had a long history in so-called peace movement, which always demanded the West disarm, whilst never showing much concern for its enemies.  

His 1999 book (election year) Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-Environmental PR Campaign again would not have concerned anyone who think state owned enterprises should pursue maximisation of the returns of their shareholder.  However, he wanted to scare people into thinking a government agency was advocating cutting native forests, something he thinks everyone right thinking should be opposed to.

His 2002 book (election year) Seeds of Distrust: The Story of a GE Cover-up again was much ado about absolutely nothing.  A technicality that had no material effect whatsoever, under a law that was practically unenforceable, was blown out of proportion, with unscientific scaremongering and hysteria.  Of course it is Green Party stock and trade to frighten.

His 2006 book (after the election) The Hollow Men: A Study in the Politics of Deception was an attempt to claim that because the Exclusive Brethren supported National, it was somehow a conspiracy because the Nats knew the church was spending money on campaigning in favour of a change in government.  Apparently National wasn't allowed to have a political campaign that wasn't fully transparent.  Hager hasn't written about Labour or the Greens and their political strategies, funnily enough.   Apparently only the National Party deceives about its agenda.

His latest attempt is another book to influence the election.  The book Other People's Wars naturally implies opposition to the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with support from New Zealand forces.  The claim is that New Zealand's "independent foreign policy" (something Hager wants and which means never supporting the USA) was compromised.   He, of course, used property that wasn't his to write his book, but like Assange  "that's ok"  as for him, the ends justify the means.

If New Zealand had effective reasonably balanced journalists, he would be questioned severely about his personal political allegiances and agenda, and asked why he doesn't do a book about Labour's campaign strategy, or about the internal divisions in the Greens.   He ought to be balkanised for what he is - a Green Party supporter and leftwing activist, who is all very well preaching to the converted, but who can hardly be seen as balanced.   Trevor Loudon wrote a little about his background.  It's about time he was treated as what he is - the Green's highest profile campaigner outside Parliament.

Peter Cresswell knows exactly how to treat him too.

Assange shows himself up to be a shallow attention seeker

The concept of Wikileaks has some appeal for a libertarian.  Government secrets can hide criminal behaviour, breaches of individual rights and can show up corruption.  It can also show up things that governments don't want you to know, because they are embarrassed or think they know best.

However, it is one thing to be concerned about governments misusing their power, and engaging in criminal activity.  It is another to think that absolutely everything governments do should be in the public domain.

Some time ago I wrote the post "What is the motive of Julian Assange?" where I noted that Assange tends to leak one side of the story on most things.  Relatively little has been revealed from Russian, Chinese or Iranian sources.  Probably because language is a barrier, possibly because Assange would rather not be in the firing line of authoritarian regimes who are known to not be too fussed about using murder to deal with opponents.    

I later noted:

As interesting as it is for Wikileaks to publish stolen communications from US diplomatic sources, are there not similar communications being made available for Wikileaks to publish from countries that are not Western liberal democracies?


Will it receive such uncritical coverage if it publishes British diplomatic communications regarding strategy with the European Union? How about New Zealand's diplomatic communications on trade access issues?  How about South Korea's diplomatic communications about north Korea defectors?


Would it not be at least as interesting, and indeed more valuable if Wikileaks also gained access to material from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe, Burma, Cuba etc?

Now we have seen things have gone down that path.  Wikileaks has inadvertently published quarter of a million stolen US diplomatic despatches, which includes names of informants in China, Iran and Afghanistan.  People who now have their lives in jeopardy because Assange wanted attention.  The story behind it is complex and described in Der Spiegel, but it has since caused one former Wikileak's staff member to resign, explaining it in the Guardian as follows:

By drawing attention to, and then publishing in full, the unredacted cache of documents, WikiLeaks has done the cause of internet freedom – and of whistleblowers – more harm than US government crackdowns ever could.

Before the first publication of carefully redacted cables, human rights activists, NGOs, and organisations working with victims of horrific crimes contacted WikiLeaks begging us to take steps not to publish any names. To be able to assure them details would be protected was an immeasurable relief.

These cables contain details of activists, opposition politicians, bloggers in autocratic regimes and their real identities, victims of crime and political coercion, and others driven by conscience to speak to the US government. They should never have had to fear being exposed by a self-proclaimed human rights organisation.

Wikileaks is no human rights organisation.  It is an activist organisation, driven by the political agenda of Assange, which is to undermine Western governments' interests and embarrass them. 
Wikileaks is no friend of freedom, as Kyle Wingfield writes:

This is not a studied neutrality, or allegiance only to truth. It is for all intents and purposes making a value judgment in favor of authoritarian regimes over democratic ones. To deny this is to deny reality. And second, Assange and his co-conspirators, rather than proving the merits of transparency, have simply demonstrated the danger of letting a small group of unaccountable people wield control over information. They are guilty of everything they accuse governments (but mostly the U.S. government) of doing, and more.

The road to hell is paved ... and all that.  Pardon my language, but Assange is an attention seeking little cunt.  He hasn't a clue about international diplomacy, international relations, human rights or politics.  His own egomaniacal belief in his own genius has been his undoing, as he acts outside the laws of countries and effectively writes his own.  Brave people under totalitarian regimes, that he doesn't dare visit, have their lives at risk, because he knew best in dealing with stolen documents.

He makes the allegations about phone hacking within News International look like a misdemeanor, for that didn't put lives at risk.  His leftwing mates should do some soul-searching before implying that somehow it is a set up (nice bit of wilful blindness you smug little man).  I can only hope no one is hurt by this, but I suspect this has just effectively made any dissidents or activists for political freedom in many countries fearful of ever working with the USA (or any Western governments).  A situation I expect most Wikileaks supporters probably didn't want, but which the cloyingly cliche'd anti-Western agenda of Assange created as an inevitability.

You see, most of the things embassies and consulates do are mundane, some are sensitive, and a few are about providing outposts of support and comfort for dissidents and others.   Over many years thousands of north Koreans have defected from their own embassies or from work, sport or artistic groups, or by simply escaping, through south Korean embassies.  In many authoritarian countries, embassies provide a place for privacy or implicitly providing support and security for political dissidents, or even just ordinary people who want to use a library, open internet access or to learn about a country more openly.   It isn't something Assange and his sycophants understand, because they have never lived somewhere like that.

There are plenty of organisations, from Reporters without Borders to the Global Internet Freedom Consortium and Freedom House, who work hard to promote free and open media across the world.  They know what they are talking about, they have freedom and openness as core values, not banners for publicity, and they believe in individual freedom, not that everything every says should be open to the world.

It is time to turn one's back on Wikileaks and Julian Assange as an experiment led by someone whose primary interest was not freedom of speech, but publishing diarrhoea.  He didn't have the values he purported to represent, but a political partisan agenda, that has picked favours, and has shown that he isn't the god and saviour he'd really like to imagine himself to be.

What went wrong on council estates?

An interesting programme on BBC 4 last night largely lauded the massive expansion in local government owned housing in the UK in much of the 20th century, driven partly by socialist beliefs that the state could supply people with better housing than they had, to the point where eventually 60% of the population lived in council housing.

However, it brought out some rather interesting points that showed both the dark side of the spread of council housing, but also what went wrong.

The dark side was how it was an excuse for slum clearances.  Large swathes of cities, populated by people in poverty, but living on otherwise empty land or in very cheap rental accommodation, were bulldozed to put in housing estates - for other people.  They were not built for the homeless or the needy, but were built for the employed, for couples and families and people had to pay rent sufficient to keep the place maintained.   

To get council housing, people needed to be vetted.  They needed letters of reference from their employer to prove that Mr. X was a fit and proper person, didn't have any criminal convictions and earned enough money to pay the rent.  Those on welfare alone, those without work and those who had committed crimes were not going to get homes provided by the state.  Indeed, their homes could be swept aside with aplomb so that the aspiring working classes could get homes.

The result was that even when the grotesque Corbusier style housing estates started popping up around the UK (many built by private investors with extensive state subsidies), their first generation of residents were proud aspirational people on relatively low to middling incomes.  

They were almost entirely couple or families.  Intact families, not single parent families.  They were almost entirely employed and as they were all people who aspired for a better life, instilled the work ethic they had into their children.  They lived as a community together, and instilled the same ethic in each others' children.  Most of all, because they had to be able to afford to pay rent, they treated these communal areas as their own, with some pride.  When a family gained such a flat, they had it until they wanted to leave as long as they paid up.  If they stayed, their children could inherit the right to remain tenants.

To a non-socialist it sounds absurd, the state providing permanent housing, but it was the state effectively providing housing on a similar basis to the private sector.  By renting to people who aspired, to people who gave a damn, and who had a stake in their new rental homes, it meant the social structure was of people who were not an underclass of criminal parasites, who did not vandalise and terrorise, and who did act as a community of voluntary interacting adults (and children).

What changed?

Some on the left would blame Thatcher and mass unemployment, because it left many families struggling and men in particular lacking "purpose" and motivation.   However, the change happened in the decade or so before Thatcher.

Some on the right would blame mass immigration.  Yet it was pointed out that quite a few residents of these estates WERE Afro-Caribbean or South Asian families, with the same aspiration and work ethic as the indigenous British.   Some would blame a change in the traditional family, as women did not stay at home to look after their children, but went out working.

One factor is certainly the social change in the 1960s and 1970s that saw the rise of divorce and single parent families.  Included with that is the cultural change from families that were tight knit, well disciplined and bound by a Judeo-Christian code of ethics that had hardened during the war, to a moral relativist attitude of "do what you like".   The breakdown of traditional families hit both indigenous British and Afro-Caribbean families the most, as migrants from India and Pakistan tended to retain close family ties.

However, the single biggest factor, explained by the programme, was the removal of vetting for council housing.  It was deemed "discriminatory" for people to be vetted based on income, so council housing was there for the poor, regardless of employment or indeed criminal history.  Council estates became the places were people went to live when they got out of prison, it became the place to live when you couldn't afford anything else or private landlords wouldn't rent to you.   The culture of hard work and aspiration was eroded by a culture of violence, thieving, vandalism and disregard for the property and lives of others.

It was exacerbated by the expansion of the welfare state into supporting single parents who had never been married, or de facto couples, into paying more for every child, and so rewarding fecklessness. 

Council estates moved from being places were having a home was a privilege, earned by meeting minimum standards set by the owner (the council) and paid for, to places where anyone could go.  The result was that they became the breeding grounds for the parasitical entitlement led mob that recently went on a rampage.  

It is what happens when you reward fecklessness and bad behaviour, whilst penalising frugality and hard work.  Consider that the British government is currently printing money and producing ultra low interest credit on a scale that means the average bank account owner LOSES 5% of his money every year, but still insists on adjusting welfare to that inflation (although few working in the private sector are having pay rises to match inflation).   

Consider that there is a debate only now about whether to deny convicted rioters and looters welfare, or to evict them from council housing (and of course the shrill cries from the left about how "unfair" it is and it will just make them do it again - as if their policies stopped it).

The socialism of the 1960s and 1970s saw council estates in the UK sink into the abyss of squalor, bad behaviour and welfarism, as the end of full employment, the breakdown of traditional families, the rewards of unconditional free money and housing, and the end of vetting council tenancies saw the worst of society being hothoused in what one old council tenant described as "holes".

It has failed.  It is time to sell out these estates, to stop building new ones, and to let the criminals, the feckless and the anti-social try their luck with charity.   Of course those who claim to give a damn about all of them rarely think it is right that they pay out of their own pocket voluntarily, for a charity to help house rapists, thieves and child abusers - but they want you to be forced to do so.

Annoy the Greens - support a road

OK, so this may be a bit of mischief making, but given that the Greens use public consultation processes as a chance to lobby and gain publicity, I figured that a few of you might want to respond in kind.  Especially since the Greens are telling enormous porkies in their anti-road campaign.

Whilst the Greens and Labour have hosted an anti-car, anti-road, pro-higher subsidies for public transport conference (Smart Transport is a euphemism for "you're not smart, but we are"), the NZTA is consulting on improving the highway from Wellington city to the airport.

Now this project basically involves completing the four laning of Wellington Road and Ruahine Street to a second Mt Victoria Tunnel, and a flyover from the existing tunnel to Buckle St so through traffic bypassing the city can bypass the crowded Basin Reserve roundabout.   The section to be fixed is the only remaining major bottleneck between the city and the airport, given half of the route has been a four lane 70km/h highway since the airport opened.  At the city end the one-way system the Greens were prepared to stand in front of bulldozers to stop, feeds the traffic to and from the motorway to the north of the region. 

All of the land involved in this project was designated for road widening or the tunnel duplication over 40 years ago, and much of it is held by the NZTA for this purpose. None of it should be news as it was envisaged by the De Leuw Cather report on Wellington transport in the early 1960s that proposed the Wellington Urban Motorway (fully built as far as Bowen St, half built to Vivian St then unbuilt) and an underground railway extension to Courtenay Place. However, the Greens (and its ginger group Campaign for Better Transport) are opposing it, because it is a road, and trucks and cars will use it.  They would prefer those going by car to catch the bus, or to spend a fortune of other people's money on their favourite totem - a rail scheme, which of course would lose a lot of money, to be paid for by other people's money, and wouldn't meet the needs of most of the road users.  

There is already a limited stop commercially viable bus service running every 15 minutes that bypasses the congestion from the airport to the city and the Hutt, with free wifi - so there isn't a lack of public transport.

Now you’d expect the Greens to focus their efforts on the most expensive (and permanent) part of the plan and to oppose the second tunnel because it will remove a major bottleneck that slows down car and truck traffic from the airport and eastern suburbs. The effect will be for buses to be less competitive, because many use a parallel one-way bus only tunnel to bypass the congestion. On top of that it doesn’t have a positive benefit/cost ratio, an argument used to oppose extending Auckland’s Northern Motorway to Wellsford, but curiously ignored whenever the Greens advocate rail based projects (unless the results are gerrymandered to suit the outcome sought).

However, the Greens aren’t opposing a second Mt Victoria Tunnel, not loudly anyway. They are opposing the Basin Reserve flyover – because it is a flyover.

The flyover is the part of the project with the best economic return and it will have the most positive impact on pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users. Why? Because reducing about a third of the traffic flow around the Basin will allow for longer crossing phases for pedestrians, and for cycle lanes to be established along with bus lanes. Buses coming from Adelaide Road towards the city wont face queues backing up from Buckle St. However, these facts get in the way of the ideological tunnel-vision of the anti-car, anti-road lobby.   The bridge is "ugly" and part of an “outdated vision” because apparently nowhere else in the world are cities building new roads – except everywhere of course. A few hundred metres of two lane one way road over a roundabout wouldn’t get people excited in Melbourne, Oslo, Vancouver or Paris, but it’s a road, so it’s evil.

Some are pushing for an alternative plan, which doesn't work because it rules out two current major movements (between Adelaide Rd and Mt Victoria Tunnel).

So if you want to show your support for the people who pay for state highways (the whole project is fully fundable from fuel taxes and road user charges), then put in a quick submission in support.  You can be sure the Greens will have rounded up a few thousand to oppose it - because it's a road.

There is an online form here.  So support a decent highway from Wellington airport to the city, indeed from the growing media and film sector based in Miramar to the city.

Oh and the deadline is today.

UPDATE:  See the Greens are already seeking you support their groupthink agitprop.

Some of the nonsense written by Gareth Hughes:

"Wellington needs urgent investment in public transport and safer cycling and walking".

Really? Beyond the hundreds of millions spent on brand new trains, extending electrification to Waikanae, upgrading the Johnsonville line for new trains, upgraded stations, new rail infrastructure, new trolley buses?  What's unsafe with cycling and walking? Missing a footpath? 

"It certainly doesn’t need an 8 metre high flyover that will deface much of Wellington’s heritage precinct including the war memorial, the Mother Aubert crèche and the Basin Reserve."

Much? You mean between Buckle Street and Mt Victoria Tunnel?  That's "much" of the heritage precinct? Deface by having a bridge skirt the northern side?  Hyperbole again.

"In particular, we support light rail from the CBD out to the airport."

Of course you do.  You have a religious passion for light rail.  Forget it would cost hundreds of millions, lose money, not relieve congestion, put a privately run commercial unsubsidised bus service out of business, and not meet the needs of freight or people travelling from outside the CBD to the airport - it's light rail, bow down and get excited, it's cool man.

"Wellingtonians do not need an uneconomic urban motorway that will take out dozens of homes, depreciate land value, reduce the town belt and increase air and noise pollution."

It isn't an urban motorway.  The homes are either state owned or on land long designated for road widening.  The effect on the town belt is derisory, and there isn't evidence it will increase pollution.


"Cities such as Seoul and Seattle regretted building flyovers in their cities and have replaced them with attractive and spacious urban design."

One in Seoul, plenty more remain.  In Seattle it was weakened by an earthquake and it is now being replaced with a tolled bored tunnel highway - exactly the type of bypass for Wellington you all opposed.   Such a conspicuous lie.


"There is no evidence to suggest there is a need for such a costly and imposing roading project." Several kilometre long traffic queues for 1.5 hours every morning from Mt Victoria Tunnel, and the same around Oriental Bay.  No, no evidence at all.  Long evening queues southbound towards the Basin holding up all traffic, including buses heading for Newtown.  No evidence.

"demand for better public transport is sky-rocketing".  Which is why the airport bus frequencies have improved.  More fare revenue, but then you don't really approve of anyone making money from transport.


"In the short-term, better traffic signalling and bus priority measures would largely mitigate congestion around the Basin at a fraction of the cost."

Says who? The architects who developed a "solution" that prohibits traffic movement between the tunnel and Newtown?  How would this mitigate the queue from Mt Victoria Tunnel

"Light rail through the CBD out to the airport is a cheaper and more sustainable option that would  alleviate congestion and offer commuters an affordable option in the face of future oil price rises."

Cheaper?  How?  Don't have a price do you?  Loses how much money?  Where in the world have new light rail schemes alleviated congestion?  How is it an option for freight, or people going to/from the airport from the rest of the region?  How is it affordable when you need to increase rates or other taxes to pay for it?

Just loads of empty vacuous spin, worshipping the altar of new subsidised railways, freight is invisible, as are any people not travelling to and from the CBD.

They are even so backwards in thinking that they don't push congestion charging, bit too much "user pays" and high tech for a party that loves trams?

What's really pathetic is that the Greens have stopped arguing against new roads because of them not being economic, but chooses to lie about what they will do and the basis for them.

Democracy is not freedom

I'm not as pessimistic as Peter Cresswell over Libya, because the country has never itself been a hotbed of Islamism, and there has been only scant evidence of Islamist involvement in the rebel movement.  Indeed, the loudest claims about Islamists have come from the Gaddafi regime, keen to scare its erstwhile Western friends into supporting Gaddafi.  Libya has had over 40 years of a regime that embraced Islam, but also pushed a secularist agenda based on Gaddafi's erratic Green Book.   Libya neither has the history of Islamism that Egypt has had, nor the poverty and sectarianism that have bolstered Islamism elsewhere.  Of course, I hope I am not wrong, yet there is a window of hope for Libya emerging.

I believe Libya will have a better future without Gaddafi, but let's not pretend that "liberation" of Libya means Libyans will be free - they will simply be less oppressed and have some freedoms that were denied them under Gaddafi.  For the oft-repeated statement "the Libyan people will now be in control of their destiny" or "the Libyan people will not determine their future" has been said in some form or another by the likes of Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy and others.

However what does that mean?

At best what they mean is that Libyan can become a democracy, and that Libyans can then vote for their government.  

However, ticking a box on a ballot is not being in control of your destiny.

A functioning liberal democracy (bear in mind that in the Arab world only Iraq can be said to come close to this) has to have certain core freedoms to function.  Freedom of assembly and association, so that political parties can be formed and operate, and for people to organise politically outside parties, are rather essential.   Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are essential for a proper contest of ideas to occur.   Almost as important are for the core functions of the state to operate objectively, so that when laws are enforced they do not target based on political belief, or when elections are held, the counting or management is not subject to corruption.

It would be a bold presumption to say that Libya is about to get all of that.  For even some ostensibly liberal democracies in Europe have struggled to manage this 20 years after the end of the communist bloc.

However, even if Libya appeared to have all of that, would Libyans really have control of their own destiny?

Unless Libya's future government is constitutionally constrained to protect Libyan's individual freedom, then all democracy will do is put their destiny in the hands of the largest number of hands.   You don't have control of your destiny, when your rights are up for a vote.

For example, will Libya protect apostasy?  It hasn't been a crime so far, but it is a serious criminal offence in much of the Muslim world, including Egypt (with the death penalty in many countries).

Will Libyan private property rights be protected?  Human rights advocates rarely care at all about this, yet it is about protecting the products of people's minds, which is essential for survival.

Will Libyans be entitled to live their lives in peace as long as they respect the rights of other Libyans to do the same?  Or will they face restrictions based on politics or religion?

The only way Libyans will have control over their own destiny, is when the word "they" means "each and every individual independently deciding how to live their lives" in peace with each other.

That could only come if Libya gained a government that existed not to initiate force against them, but to protect them from the initiation of force.   To ensure that under a liberal democracy, it would need a constitution to protect that.   I doubt that in the wildest dreams of most of the rebels that such an idea is in the minds of many.

Eliminating a totalitarian dictatorship, particularly one that was so outwardly aggressive towards other countries (though funnily enough you rarely heard the so-called "peace" movement decrying Libyan imperialism), is positive.  It is likely Libyans will have more freedom than they have had for a long time, but let's not pretend that they will have "control of their destiny".  

At best they will have a very small say in the government that will control their destiny.   It is like asking the slaves to vote on who will be their master.

Keynesians steal from the aspiring middle classes

You might have noticed the price of gold skyrocketing in the past year or so.  You might wonder if this is a bubble that is going to pop, spectacularly.  Well, it might, but there is a reason why gold (and to a lesser extent silver and platinum) are becoming preferred investments, it is because of fears about the alternatives.  Those fears are because of the abject failure of the Keynesians to deal with a financial crisis that started with a fiat money fueled credit bubble, exacerbated by perpetual government deficits and "saved" by printing money.

You see the real bubble which is being manufacted is inflation.  Central bankers and governments invented the euphemism "quantitative easing" to hide what they are really doing - because most kids at school learnt in economics why printing money doesn't make any sense.  However, quantitative easing is printing money.  It is the easy solution of dictators who don't know how to pay their soldiers, civil servants and the like.  Now it is the easy solution of elected governments who are afraid to let prices collapse in those parts of their economies subject to the credit bubbles, and who are afraid of being forced with the full reality that they have been engaging in fiscal child abuse for decades.   The French government for example, started running deficits in the mid 1970s, so it was borrowing off of people who are now in their 30s and facing either higher taxes or less "benefits", so that their parents and grandparents could have an easier life.

Investors are moving into gold because inflation mean that a whole host of typically "safe" investments no longer are.  Conventional bank deposits (even ignoring the risk of some banks that face sovereign debt risks)

will now not pay enough to cover inflation.  Furthermore, government bonds are now seen as significantly riskier than they once were because of the default of Greece and the near defaults of many others.  Those without such risks are paying such low rates of interest (for demand is so high), they are insufficient to compensate for inflation, so investors diversify their "safe" investments.

Of course what this means is that the vast bulk of the population, who put their savings in "the bank" in some form or another, are losing their money.   In effect, their government is stealing from them by printing money in order to avoid the consequences of others facing devaluations in their businesses, property or other assets.

To put it simply, the Keynesians, who can be seen in both government and opposition in most major governments, are stealing from the vast bulk of the population, by stealth, in order to avoid the fallout of letting some selected businesses and assets from collapsing in value to correct the years of the credit bubbles.   Who does that hurt?  It hurts the young and those on relatively lower incomes who do not have property or do not have any other savings mechanisms.   Don't expect the politicians on the centre-right to have an answer, because they'd rather stay in power, like those on the centre-left.  Those on the far-left want to put their heads in the sand completely, and pretend inflation isn't an issue.

It is - the evidence is seen in gold.

One alternative to gold are to buy shares, which of course many have been doing, although the sheer volatility and complexity of it means that it works well for larger investors and institutional investors who have the in-house expertise to spread risk and seek opportunities for bargains, particularly looking at more robust foreign shareholdings.  The other is property, which of course has been the source of part of the problem in the first place.

The property conundrum is that there have clearly been significant property bubbles in many countries facing the crisis, such as Ireland, Spain, the US and the UK.  Australia has a bubble, but that is commensurate to its own commodity led economic buoyancy.  New Zealand's one is more volatile.   However, we may yet see the spectre of property prices easing up as investors see less risk of losing value in property than in inflation.

Now Central Bank governors and governments may claim that if inflation takes off (we are talking around 5% now, so it's hardly dead) then interest rates will be increased, and the usual monetarist solution to inflation will be applied.  Except, of course, what happens with stagflation?  Will the Keynesians insist that when economic growth is nascent that there should be more and more money printed, and forget inflation?  In which case, batten down the hatches for that battle wont be won.  Or will the monetarists tighten the screws on credit and interest rates, and strangle what little growth there is to kill off the bubble of inflation created by the Keynesians?

For Barack Obama, David Cameron or indeed John Key, the hope is that this doesn't come to pass.   None would swallow what they would have to do to ride things out, which is to give up on printing money, let a significant correction in asset prices occur (including a major slump in property prices and share prices), stop deficit spending and begin the long slow road towards economic recovery based on setting businesses free.

Instead for all of their weasel words, they will continue to steal from the vast bulk of the public by creating inflation, devaluing their own public debt, and creating cheap credit to save themselves from facing voters with the reality of many years of boom and bust economics based on fiat money.

Keynesianism failed before, and it is failing now.  It is about time that both it, and monetarism were consigned to history and a serious investigation begin as to how to reform monetary policy with free banking.   If you think that sounds absurd or frightening, then reflect on the past three years and give a better solution.