Archive for the ‘General Politics’ Category
Something, something, Ouroboros


I sense that Wokism may have peaked, simply because it’s starting to devour its own – as all such revolutions eventually do.


This description seems appropriate:
Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven’s Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.
He’s missing sheer, brain-dead stupidity though.

I’d like to think that this utter cretin has seen the American polling since he wrote that bilge in early 2021? Rather like New Zealand Labour everything Biden and the Democrats have tried has turned to shit and even their own voters have turned on them, leaving behind only the hardcore fanatics, including the Woke brigades, who are the very reason for their low fortunes.
Stunning and Brave

Apparently it’s Pride Month. Again. Our annual opportunity to subtly change what rainbows have meant for thousands of years.
I jest, but in the wake of the last four decades of progress made by the gay community in Western nations the Pride parades have become a bit redundant. There would be few gays, even teenagers, who still live in the closet and need an annual dose of public virtue signalling to tell them they can be proud of who they are. It’s very 70’s.
Certainly the gays I’ve known since the 1980’s regard it now with eye rolling sighs, but then they’re all moderate Right Wingers who just aren’t impressed any longer by their more flamboyant, “look-at-me, look-at-me” associates who are just gagging to perform Josephine Baker’s Danse banane in public.
Also the movement itself has started to split with the latest cutting edge developments around the trans movement and the outrage over why homosexual men won’t date men with vaginas and lesbians refusing to bed women with penises. The Auckland Pride parade hit the skids in 2018 “because of all those racist, homophobic, transphobic, and violent experiences with the police“.
In fact the gay lifestyle is pretty much in your face on an everyday basis in the media, entertainment, and business, with the corporates eager to flaunt their “conscience” in advertising. There’s just one problem, as noted by Intersectionalist Poet, Titania McGrath:

Or this clearer comparison

Actually the “Rainbow” community may be filled with a degree of envy of the way many of those nations enforce their morality, judging by the way things are moving in the West.

Luckily there will always be Nazis to punch.

Failing to Scale

It took only a few years for me to learn that in corporate environments a lot of things just don’t scale up, despite the fact that such corporations were scaled up versions of the small businesses they had once started out as, even if a hundred years ago prior to endless takeovers, buyouts and so forth.
Centralised accounting certainly scales, as does marketing, IT and a handful of other core functions. But even then there are limits, what test pilots refer to as “the envelope”, outside of which things start breaking down. Even those centralised things are built upon smaller clones of themselves in the corporation. And corporations often stagnate precisely because the small, inventive, creative parts of themselves get stifled or outright killed off.
In fact, one of the secrets to the creation of Silicon Valley and its fantastic wealth, lay in the fact that people inside existing corporations who had ideas that got flattened or ignored, were actually encouraged internally to leave and set up their own companies to develop their ideas, and where they weren’t encouraged they did so anyway as venture capitalism also grew to supply such start-ups with seed money. This “culture” took off, with one company after another spawning new companies:
With the backing of Fairchild Camera and Instrument in Long Island, NY, eight engineers from Shockley’s lab resigned, including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Led by Noyce, Fairchild would eventually grow into the most important company in the history of the Santa Clara Valley after Noyce independently invented the Integrated Circuit along with Texas Instrument’s Jack Kilby in 1958.
And when I say I “learned” that’s only in terms of learning what specific things did not scale in corporations: even by my early 20’s I’d seen enough of life, let alone business case-studies and history, to understand the principle that big is usually not better, and often worse.
To that end, with Three Waters specifically in mind here in NZ, but also with the gigantic beast in the US known as the Federal government, I appreciated this brief “rant” in Ace of Spades, which I’ll re-produce here in full:
An oft-heard theme from preschool classrooms to corporate meeting rooms is that one should not be afraid of failure. Failure sucks and is a miserable experience – failure hurts – but it’s also the mechanism through which one learns. Failure is a great teacher, and makes you less likely to fail next time because you’ve learned from the experience. This is true, but there are limits to the concept. Sometimes failure is catastrophic.
The higher you are, the riskier failure becomes. If you’re running a small team in a corner of a large company to try to make something new and you fail, the results are unlikely to be disastrous. You might get fired and your staff might get fired, too, but the scale of the potential damage is fairly small. If you’re a senior executive who bets the business on something and that something doesn’t pan out, the entire enterprise can fail and everyone ends up fired with the owners holding worthless paper that used to be shares.
So it is with government and its failures and boy do we have a lot of government failures to consider. Fiscal policy has failed. Monetary policy has failed. Energy policy has failed. Medical policy has failed. War policy has failed. Border policy has failed. Drug policy has failed. Environmental policy has failed. Law enforcement has failed. Intelligence has failed (in every possible interpretation). Both domestic and foreign policy, writ large and in totality, has failed. Its failure across the board and at all levels.
Sure, some of it was probably not failure but rather was deliberate destruction, but that distinction is more important in the final reckoning than it is in the day-to-day reality. Malice or incompetence (or malicious incompetence, which I think is closer to the mark) is less important than the results. The results are similar regardless of the motivator. Poor is poor, sick is sick, dead is dead.
And those failures are increasingly catastrophic as more decision-making occurs in Washington D.C.. This isn’t just because of corruption, dishonesty, malevolence and incompetence, but because of scale. We have forgotten the valuable lesson of subsidiarity. Decisions should be made at the smallest workable scale, not the largest possible scale. A town imposing some insane and destructive policy destroys only the town. When Washington imposes some insane and destructive policy, it can destroy the entire country. Subsidiarity isn’t maximally efficient, but it is highly reliable. It’s expensive but robust. Its opposite – what we have today and will have more of tomorrow – is tremendously fragile. It isn’t even efficient because the government is populated with thieves, liars and fools (and often in combination).
Totalitarianism doesn’t and can’t work for this reason. Even assuming the starry-eyed sincerity of the totalitarians (a situation we most decidedly do not have), mistakes have perfect coverage and no one is immune from the totalitarians’ decisions. Failure not only stops being a good thing from which you learn, it becomes a constant threat and source of terror. This is compounded and made infinitely worse when the totalitarians are dishonest, lying, stupid psychopaths.
Centralization and incompetence, centralization and malice, and centralization and malicious incompetence are poisonous combinations.
Misty Mountain Hop


Starting with something beautiful, let’s keep going on that before we plunge into the ugly realities of our world.

As I explained in a post back in January, I hate these people, and with every passing day the hate deepens as their desire to control the rest of us deepens, literally.

They even have their own police.

Among their other plans they’re big on “sustainable farming” – which means that you need to eat much less meat for a start and you may even end up loving various bug-based meals!

This is why the following is not just a flailing, failing US President trying to gaslight people about inflation, but about the same themes as the WEF; you won’t need to worry about inflation on beef, pork and chicken.


The gaslighting isn’t working, at least not for Biden. That poll result – lower than Trump – has to burn, and I don’t think Biden’s reached bottom yet.
I’m not sure that the WEF does opinion polls about themselves because I don’t think they care what anybody thinks of them or their ideas so long as global leaders like Trudeau, Biden, Ardern, Albanese and company love them.
However, unlike the WEF, politicians do have to face the voters sooner or later and there’s only so much gaslighting that can be done before reality breaks through.

More to come; the additional subsidies for Obamacare that were slotted into the Covid-19 spending bills will expire just in time for the mid-term elections, and premiums are already looking ugly. If you ever wondered why US Health Insurance companies supported Obamacare, now you know.

It’s actually hard to see any policies or anything that the Biden Administration has done that has been positive.

I wonder how many American voters (and other idiots around the globe) remember this:

The Internet does – and it has the receipts.


It’s so bad that he’s even started blaming his staff, which is why they’re leaking to their friends in the MSM, leading to that NBC report, which can barely spin it any more.
You do wonder where the bottom is for this senile old fool and his Democrat Party, but increasingly the message from Democrat insiders is “SAVE US”.
Of course some of his MSM pals are still doing their best, with the pitiful Newsweek taking Biden’s Big Soundbite and helpfully incorporating it into a story that’s not about the Republicans at all.

So in addition to the classic “Republicans Pounce” (yes, they’re so unaware of Interwebby Memes that they used that phrase) they also acted as ventriloquists for the phrase, “MAGA Republicans” that Biden first claimed he’d thought up himself – before it was revealed that Democrat focus groups had developed – and after months of “work” to boot. Like their other solutions this one fell flat, with GOP activists eagerly and proudly making it their own. Once again it’s Democrat fluff vs. the brutal reality of their man’s profound inadequacies that can be turned against him on any issue.

It’s also obvious that there’s not much talent they can draw on to replace Biden in 2024, judging by the following.

No aircraft carriers were under attack at Pearl Harbour because they were all at sea that day, especially not the USS Intrepid because it wasn’t commissioned for another two years. Adams is ignorant and more to the point, likely doesn’t care about being ignorant. Rumour has it that Adams has Presidential ambitions and he may be a good match for Democrat voters.
Just the usual double standards and hypocrisy

It would not be politics otherwise.

So are calls to arms when a government decision doesn’t go your way. Next thing you know you’ll have people accusing you of causing an insurrection.🥺

Given how deep she is in the shit as Mayor of Chicago you’d think she’d be focusing relentlessly on that, starting with her reelection, but like most of these grifters she’s probably aiming at some future “activist” position. Certainly fixing the city she’s done so much to wreck is not even on the list.
Or how about having the new Presidential Press Secretary turn out to be a purveyor of dangerous disinformation that could destroy American democracy by tricking people into losing faith in elections.

Then there are the grifters like Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin (the “conservative” voice at the WaPo). After crying for years that his movement away from the GOP was all because of Bad Orange Man the mask is well and truly off, like his stance in abortion in 1998 vs today.

He was always on the other side except for when the Democrats didn’t want to have the US fighting in foreign wars. Given their enthusiasm for the Ukraine war he’s now got everything he wanted and can comfortably move back to the Dems. Plenty more like him too.
Then there are the cliches.

The thing is that cliches become so because they’re true. Love Davis’s response to Pelosi’s bullshit plea.

The “Woman and Children First” is another, with the WaPo giving the modern twist…

Still, there are times when the double standards catch up with people, like with the classic pro-abortion soundbite…


In yet another blow to Chicago it seems that Boeing is moving its Corporate Suite from the Windy City to Washington D.C., the tax breaks that enticed it away from Seattle twenty years ago having expired. This sums it up well.

Two must-read articles from Karl du Fresne

Readers will be well aware that my attitude towards the MSM is that that they are, at best, shallow and useless in their reporting and “analysis”, and at worst combine that with massive ideological bias to the Left as well as the occasional bouts of outright partisanship towards, in the case of New Zealand, the Greens, Labour, or the Maori party, depending on how well each of them is doing in supporting a Left wing agenda.
The read I have on the NZ MSM at present is that, as Chris Trotter and Martyn Bradbury have often pointed out, they’ve sold their souls for capitalist money and the “neo-liberal” status quo established since 1984, in exchange for pushing every other piece of Leftist wank. I think those two gentlemen are nostalgic screamers because, at least in the environmentalist world of combating AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) they may get want they want eventually from their rather despised New Left comrades with a return of state ownership or more likely, a regulatory and tax regime that makes a mockery of the term “private enterprise”. Whether the Leftists in the MSM know where the AGW process will lead or not doesn’t really matter, but I suspect that many “reporters” do and are keen on using it to get back to the supposed Nirvana created by the First Labour Government.
As such it’s important that blogs support eachother, so here are two articles by Karl du Fresne that need as much exposure as possible:
This post deals with the steadily growing catastrophe that is Three Waters and the Health re-structuring.
Carterton District Council, one of the smallest in the country (population 9700), expects to spend $850,000 preparing for Three Waters over the next two years. The council’s chief executive says the plan has imposed an “enormous” programme of work that the council’s not resourced to cope with it. Mayor Greg Laing describes the process as “absolutely appalling”.
The Times-Age quotes the Department of Internal Affairs as saying funding will be provided to cover transition costs, but it’s obvious that councils haven’t seen any of the money and don’t know when they will. In any case, South Wairarapa’s mayor Alex Beijen, who presides over a district with a population of only 11,000 (and one that’s already financially stretched to breaking point), says resourcing will be a big challenge even with extra government money.
I laughed at one of the comments where the guy sent a Letter To The Editor concisely pointing some of the problems and found his points about rents and royalties had been excised. Standard censoring of disinformation; I don’t know why he bothered but others made the point that this why blogs and other social media (to an extent, given their own censorship) are important while the MSM dies.
The healthcare problem has been hidden by C-19 Kabuki Theatre and Three Waters but if anything it’s more frightening:
As Powell points out, “With only 40 working days to go, DHBs have no more information on what will replace them on 1 July than they had on 21 April last year when the health minister announced their abolition.” You can read his damning appraisal here.
This all sounds familiar, the same as other SNAFU’s this government has made in the last few years; ill-defined plans; falling behind schedule; last-second scrambles to do something. I really hope I and my family don’t fall sick in any way for the next couple of years.
2. The Free Speech Union meeting that earned a trigger warning from Salient
This is Karl catching up on Victoria University’s response to his talk On the threats to free speech, that was delivered a while ago at the university, courtesy of the Free Speech Union.
It seems that the students have been triggered by a speech that none of them apparently attended and have used the student newspaper, Salient, to express their outrage; Karl points out that it’s prefaced with a trigger warning advising, in bold type:
This article examines some of the racist, transphobic, sexist, and otherwise harmful content discussed at the event in question. Please exercise caution when reading.
Frightening.
You can read the sad, pathetic details of the objections to his speech and while I and a lot of other students never took much notice of such things at varsity – where the Left-wing student radicals dominated such talk via the student unions and their varsity newspapers – it’s clear that such people have much greater influence, some might say control, over their varsities than they did forty or even twenty years ago.
For me, one comment showed how far things have gone:
As a Victoria lecturer and a member of FSU (so I would prefer to be anonymous), I am sad to say this is exactly what I expect from our students. Students nowadays are extremely lazy; most of them don’t even bother to attend lectures. Critical thinking and meaningful debates are just not things under their radars. I don’t blame students but the university administration. The university administration is a bunch of failed academics who do not really care about education and research. All they care is their position and would do everything possible to pander students in order to get money from the government. As a lecturer, our constant pressure from the university is how to make students happy and get more of them, not how to train better citizens of the future.
An unexpected result of the 1990’s reforms of university is that there are a lot of people there who should not be, given their lack of brains, and that the incentives for them to go and the incentives of the universities to get bums on seats, are screwed up. Perhaps if student loans were tied directly to the universities so that they’re on the hook for payment recovery, the universities would be pushed harder to teach productive courses and “train better citizens” in real critical thinking.
Bryce Edwards visits the Anti-mandate protests

Bryce has been quite the Leftie all his life, though rather an old-fashioned kind focused on economics even as he lectures in politics at Otago University.
Looks to be a bunch of fairly ordinary New Zealanders with a few nutters thrown into the mix, as is always the case with such protests.
Notably the NZ MSM ignored the the Antifa/Burn Loot Murder wannabes in the 2020 BLM protests here in NZ, plus some of the Extinction Rebellion folks, and going all the way back to that fabulous Communist Party banner unfurling at the Springbok Tour ground invasion at Hamilton’s Rugby Park in 1981.
All taken in stride by the MSM and those politicians who supported, and support those protests – of course.
The mandates, especially the vaccine mandates, were an “emergency measure” taken by the government in order to achieve their arbitary and world-beating goal of having 90% of the elligible population vaccinated.
“The traffic light system won’t help us very much because it was never designed to dampen down transmission, it was only designed to nudge people towards vaccination,” – Professor Baker
It would be interesting to know how many protestors are actually vaccinated. After all, we were repeatedly told that vaccination would set us free from all these controls. Even the vaccinated people I know (not one-eyed Labour fanatics of course) are now beginning to question this. It is therefore entirely appropriate for National and ACT to also begin questioning the usefulness of mandates now and asking when they will be eliminated, and to do so via Parliament and the MSM of which they are so frightened.