Posts Tagged ‘Totalitarians’
Ardern government’s authoritarianism reaches new high (or low)
The news this morning that the police manipulated stolen vehicle reporting data to illegally and unlawfully access private tracking and tracing systems should worry all of us, at least those of us who still value individual liberty, freedom and the rule of law. If you’re an Establishment type, then I guess the means justifies the ends. If you’re that person, then perhaps you should stop reading from hereon.
To recap: This story outlines the background of a woman, or women, who was/were granted exemptions to travel to Northland during the Delta outbreak last year. Essentially, as Granny outlined in October last year:
Northland will move to level 3 tonight after a woman used false information to obtain travel documents and spent several days in the region.
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said the confirmed case travelled from Auckland to Northland and had been to several places, warranting the change.
And it’s believed she was travelling with another woman who authorities have yet to locate.
A reporter at a hastily arranged press conference said they had been told the woman is a sex worker but Hipkins said he could not confirm that – he had not been briefed that was the case.
He said he was incredibly disappointed at the events which have led to Northland being placed into level 3.
“Updated information provided by the police today shows the case moved extensively around Northland after travelling there on October 2,” Hipkins said.
A manhunt commenced, these outlaws were guilty of being unhealthy and forging documents to spread their diseases! Off with their head.
But the truth shall prevail.
Documents that were meant to be declined were mistakenly approved.
The case of three women who travelled from Auckland to Northland hit headlines in October 2021 in the midst of a Delta outbreak – but new documents released under the Official Information Act finally outline the truth behind the saga, and the reason Northland was put into lockdown.
The OIA papers show the women – who had earlier been blamed for using “false information” to get travel permits – had no links to gangs and weren’t sex workers, as had been suggested.
Among the documents released is a summary of a police investigation into the women which found “no offence” and no “deception” in obtaining the travel documents.
So not only no offence, but no false information given, with the travel permit being issued in error. But the story gets worse. It turns out the police, in their valiant attempt at tracking down two dirty, unhealthy, disease-ridden citizens accessed private CCTV footage by, well, lying:
Police falsely reported cars as stolen to gain access to powerful databases that record number plates when hunting for the women whose travel sparked the Northland Covid-19 lockdown last October.
Detectives identified the cars associated with the women then listed the vehicles as stolen which opened access to Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems operated by two private-sector companies with a massive network of CCTV cameras.
Those companies – Auror and Safer Cities – operate cameras across petrol stations, shopping malls, big box stores, supermarkets and other shared public spaces.
A lawyer says revelations that police falsely reported a car stolen to gain access to private companies’ CCTV camera networks could undermine trust and cause information holders to question whether future requests from police were legitimate and lawful.
I literally have no words. This is nothing short of egregious and despicable. Not only have the police, aka the State, accessed private data unlawfully, they did so for basically a couple of women who not only had done nothing wrong, but were just a bit sick from a virus.
As readers will know, I have been utterly dismayed and disgusted by this country’s digressions from the rule of law during Covid. It is the most disheartening episode I can recall in my 50-odd years of living. The police march on the parliamentary protestors was the darkest day in this country’s history since the Springbok tour, all of it backed by both Ardern and Luxon. As far as I’m concerned, they’re both plagues on this country’s health, more that Covid ever was. And this revelation about the actions of the police is just icing on the cake, or rather, another very sour pill to swallow.
I am not a number…
… I am a free man!
That statement is from the opening sequence of the famous 1960’s TV series, The Prisoner, one of the strangest and most off-beat shows in a strange and off-beat decade.
The assertion is shouted back at “Number Two” – the controller of the island where the Prisoner, a former government spy, is being held captive while TPTB try to figure out why he quit his job – and is a response to being labeled “Number Six”.
Of course the response to this is Number Two’s uproarious sneering laughter, something that feels entirely appropriate from our ruling classes over the last two years, a period of time when we have decidedly not been free men.
I don’t think such people are laughing anymore – and you should not laugh at fascists, especially when they turn up in the nation that created the ideology.
I wonder if she’ll be locking people in their homes, arresting them for going to the beach or park, directing the government to select which businesses will be open and which will close, shutting down much of society using the Police and “The Law”, and bringing in legal mandates that force people to do things against their will and conscience.
Because that really would be fascist.
“Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening? There is a single answer to all these questions because it defines us because it is our identity, because everything that defines us is now an enemy.
For those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves and so they attack national identity. They attack religious identity. The attack gender identity. they attack family identity.
I can’t define myself as an Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No. I must be Citizen X, gender X, parent one, parent two. I must be a number.
Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators, the perfect consumer. that’s the reason why that’s why we inspire so much fear.
That’s why this event inspires so much fear because we do not want to be numbers. We will defend the value of the human being. Every single human being because each of us has a unique genetic code that is unrepeatable. And like it or not, that it’s sacred.
We will defend it, we will defend God, country and family, those things that disgust people so much. we will do it to defend our freedom. Because we will never be slave or simple consumers at the mercy of financial speculators. That is our mission.
That is why I came here today. Chesterton wrote more than a century ago:
Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.
Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.That time has arrived. We are ready. Thank you.
The CCP backs down?
Hard to believe but apparently it’s true, according to Bloomberg, whose business reporting mean they have pretty good, largely non-political, contacts in China:
Beijing’s stout city leadership rolled out China’s first Covid-19 vaccine mandate last week. The policy made boosters mandatory for some professions, while entry to busy public venues like movie theaters and gyms was restricted to the vaccinated. The public reacted quickly, with many residents turning to social media to declare the mandate an illegal usurpation of their rights. Beijing’s response was just as quick: Less than 48 hours after announcing the policy, the city government rescinded it.
It seems this may have something to do with the CCP’s monitoring of social media, which I’ve always assumed was for purposes of censorship, and tracking down people who “threaten” the CCP, but which may actually be working as a two-way street:
In 2014, the Communist Party-owned Beijing News reported that public and private Chinese entities employ more than 2 million public opinion “analysts.” Among other roles, they “collect the opinions and attitudes of netizens, organize them into reports, and submit them to decision makers.“
So it’s also a good way of heading off a populist revolt before you have to roll out the troops and the tanks, which is what seems to have happened in this case.
In addition, as another article points out, Xi Jinping is building up to the impending 20th Party Congress, to change the rules and put him in power for good, and having massive unrest in the streets might screw that up.
Almost sounds democratic!!
The Democrat Party is a Clear and Present Danger to the USA
In Ken Burn’s famous documentary series, The Civil War, one of the voiceovers from the primary narrator – the wonderfully warm, Mid-Western voice of historian David McCullough – describes one of Abraham Lincoln’s dilemmas:
To preserve the Constitution, Lincoln had for three months gone beyond it: waging war without Congressional consent; seizing Northern telegraph offices; suspending habeas corpus. To keep the border states from seceding, Lincoln sent troops to occupy Baltimore and clapped the mayor and 19 secessionist legislators in jail, without trial. Chief Justice Taney ruled that the President had exceeded his power. Lincoln simply ignored him. “More rogues than honest men find shelter under habeas corpus,” he said, and even contemplated arresting the Chief Justice.
Perhaps when the dust has settled on the Jan6 “investigatory” committee and the rest of the hysteria, especially when it’s decommissioned by the incoming GOP majority in November, the Democrats might try and align themselves with Lincoln in this argument as well; that they’ve had to go beyond the norms of law and a democratic society in order to save democracy. Here’s the latest example.
Add this to the arrest a couple of weeks ago of former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Democrats’ Jan6 committee. No turn-yourself-in style arrest either but the full monty of FBI handcuffs in public at an airport. By contrast Mr Eastman should be grateful they only took his cellphone, even if they failed to show the warrant first as the law demands.
As that article points out, Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, was held to be in contempt of the House for his refusal to cooperate with an investigation by turning over papers he held. Obama’s “wingman” literally laughed it off, as did Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper after lying to Congress about them spying on House reps, as did former Obama CIA Director James Brennan for also lying to the House.
Suffice to say that they’re all living the good life and never even saw a search or arrest warrant, let alone a set of handcuffs, FBI agents and a SWAT team, plus an alerted (alerted by who) CNN TV crew to cover their house at 5am for the arrest.
And here is perhaps the worst aspect of this; there is not one Trump opponent, whether private or public, who is willing to call out this ends-determine-the-means evil. They hate Trump that much that they’re willing to bend or break any rules. They literally do not care about democracy or the rule of law even as they scream that they do at the top of their lungs. As President Reagan once said of similar people:
“[They] reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat and that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause.”
We expect double standards in politics and “rules for thee but not for me” is pretty much an embedded characteristic of the Left. But the US Democrat Party are pushing it to the edge of civil war (perhaps that’s what they want?) and this is the worst turn of that to date. Which brings me back to Lincoln :
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
No it can’t. This is not going to stop with a devastating election defeat this year or in 2024 but only when an empowered GOP is willing to play by these same rules and forgo the civility bullshit and “We’re better than that” attitudes. Until that happens – until people like the Democrats on this committee and elsewhere are subjected to the same rules they’re imposing on others, and are hurt in professional ways beyond mere voting losses – they will continue to push the boundaries of the norms of democracy and the rule of law in order to gain more power and hold on to it.
Fascism, straight up. Or communism. Take your pick. I’ll go with Claremont’s selection of Beria as the sort of person these Committee members are.
It sounds better in the original German
Hot on the heels of the Democrat Party amping up the pressure on Supreme Court Justices over the anticipated overthrow of the current abortion SCOTUS rulings – with illegal protests (no arrests so far) outside the homes of selected Justices by “Ruth Sent Us” and multiple arson attacks on pregnancy centres across the country by “Jane’s Revenge” – comes this lovely little indicator of how the Democrats think when democracy doesn’t go their way:
“This is, in my opinion, a diseased Republican Party. And it needs to be cured and cleansed,” Houlahan said. “So the stakes of having a Republican, as an example, in my seat are more than just policy differences. They are democracy, in my opinion.”
Mmmmmm…. cleansing! Tasty, tasty cleansing.
Ms Houlahan won her competitive Pennsylvania seat in 2020 but is now facing strong headwinds for re-election thanks to Biden being underwater in her state, with 35% approval and 54% disapproval, according to Civiqs. Like Biden and many other Democrats this means she’s had to change her message about her opponents (and their voters) from what she said at the time:
She credited her political success to her message of “civility,” “decency,” “unity,” and “empathy.” “People ask me constantly how I flipped a seat in a competitive district. One of the reasons is that I made civility and decency a core of my campaign,” Houlahan said at the time. “Pennsylvanians want unity. They want leaders who rise above the fray and lead with kindness and empathy towards all Americans.”
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
If you think about it long enough you’ll realise that “cleansing” your political opponents is what civil, decent people do when they’re aiming for unity – and they’ll be empathetic about the process.
Okay, so it’s politics almost as usual, but you’d think she wouldn’t be so blatant, although I appreciate the honesty. Based on a reading of Democrat activists and many ordinary Democrat voters she’s merely being a ventriloquist here.
However, judging by a recent poll it would seem that voters have looked at the words of Ms Houlahan and other Democrats like Nancy “Domestic terrorists” Pelosi and Joe “Ultra-MAGA” Biden and feel that they know who the real threat to Democracy is and who is best to protect it: the Twitter response from this headline says it all.
Awwwww…. another moron who thought the Jan6 “commission” would work brilliantly as anti-GOP propaganda. I’m sure his is not the only Democrat head exploding about this result.
This feels like a teaching moment, the appropriate time to remind people of some good old Democrat/Left propaganda that has embedded itself as a myth=fact. Take it away Carol Swain, Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University.
BTW, as an example of how far that propaganda has fallen in effectiveness – it’s peak was probably 2008 in the wake of Obama’s victory when the common wisdom was that the GOP was The Party Of Old White Southern Men and they better get with Obama’s policies just to survive – comes news from Texas….
That district voted for Clinton in 2016 by 33 points, Biden in 2020 by 13 points and had been Democrat since 1870. The district is being re-made and Ms Flores will face a tough fight against a pro-life (snigger) Democrat with a 15% + theoretical Democrat lead.
But islands are no match for tsunamis, and the Red Tsunami (GOP) is building momentum.
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.
Radical Emptiness
I must admit that I was bracing myself this Monday morning at the prospect of Labour’s latest plans for tackling AGW, given all the talk about dairy farmers being forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for our terrible Green House Gas (GHG) emission sins!
I was therefore immensely pleased to read this in Kiwiblog on Tuesday morning:
Stuff took the time to tally up these 284 listed actions and classify them.
Over half (158) are not really plans at all, but are plans to make a plan down the road, or to scope the scale of a possible policy, or develop an evidence base to build a policy on.
Excellent. NZ Labour strikes again. Plans and more plans amounting to nothing, although unfortunately a lot of money will be pissed up against various walls. It’s reached a sad stage in government when the best you can hope for is that the ideological fanatics you oppose turn out to be incompetent morons who couldn’t find their assholes with a mirror and a magnifying glass.
Still, let us be grateful for small mercies and the fact that for all the bloviating about the Climate Crisis, Labour have figured out that to really reduce emissions as far and as fast as they want would mean doing things that would be … harsh. This was explored from a US perspective in this article from 2019 where the writer lays out the reality of “getting serious” about reducing GHG emissions by imagining what a True Believer President (Democrat naturally) would have to do:
Inslee had launched his campaign two years earlier as a longshot, single-issue candidate. But events rapidly outpaced what had begun as a boutique candidacy intended to call attention to climate change.
…
As his first act as president, Inslee declared a national climate emergency. As his second, he announced national carbon rationing. Until further notice, consumers were limited to one tank of gas per month. Based on time of year and regional climates, natural gas and heating oil deliveries to households were cut by as much as 60%. Utilities were directed to submit plans within the month to cut total electricity generation by 40% and to optimize their existing generation mix to use as little fossil generation as possible.
In this imaginary scenario Inslee wins because Mother Nature delivers droughts, storms, tornadoes and hurricanes that perfectly fit his campaign. Congress follows Inslee (a real politician btw) and:
- Nationalises the entire US electricity industry (the massive TVA and BPA are already public).
- Creates a National Renewable Energy Corporation to produce enough wind turbines and solar panels to produce 60% of the nation’s electric power by 2030.
- Creates the National Nuclear Energy Corporation, which takes over all private nuclear businesses build 200 single-design reactors in a decade to handle the other 40% of power needs.
- Nationalises the Big Three US automakers to retool all their factories in three years to make EV’s.
While it’s imaginary the writer compares this to what is actually being proposed or being done to show how moderate even the calls of most US greens are.
As many environmentalists and even elected Democrats have come to believe that serious climate disruption is already upon us, it has become fashionable to call for a World War II-style mobilization to fight climate change. But virtually no one will actually call for any of the sorts of activities that the United States undertook during the war mobilization—rationing food and fuels, seizing property, nationalizing factories or industries, or suspending democratic liberties.
In other words even the zealots are full of it, and, although they probably are genuinely alarmed, don’t actually see climate change as the immediate and existential threat they publicly say it is. The article is lengthy and goes into some detail about the post-war history of the US Left in five sections:
- The Libertarian Left.
- From Public Goods to Market Failure.
- Communitarian Capitalism.
- Tilting with Windmills.
- Our Divided Neoliberal House.
All of which has led them into a position where they can’t go for the imaginary ideas of a President Inslee. Thankfully, because it would likely be a catastrophe. If you think that’s OTT I suggest you look at what’s happening in Sri Lanka as a direct result of an ideological, scientifically ignorant decision by it’s (former) President to ban agrochemicals for farming. Which led to this:
Within six months of the ban, rice production in the country—a once very sufficient industry—dropped 20 percent, forcing Sri Lanka to import $450 million of rice to meet supply needs and surging rice prices rose nearly 50 percent.
Now, Sri Lanka will pay farmers across the country 40,000 million rupees ($200 million) to compensate for their barren harvests and crop failures. In addition to the funding, the Sri Lankan government will pay $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers impacted by the loss.
Which then led to this:
Sri Lanka is on the brink of bankruptcy and has suspended payments on its foreign loans. Its economic miseries have brought on a political crisis, with the government facing a protests and a no-confidence motion in Parliament.
The reserves declined to $3.1 billion by the end of 2021, and to $1.9 billion by the end of March, he said. With foreign currency in short supply thanks to less tourism and other revenues, official reserves were tapped to pay for importing essentials including fuel, gas, coal and medicines beginning in August 2021.
Which has led to this, with only enough petrol to last one more day.
I note that the NZ Feckless covered this story a couple of days ago and in the story I read did not once mention the organic farming decision that led to all this. Stuff talks only of Chinese infrastructure projects and debts. Dishonest assholes.
Adam Smith once said, in reply to a student’s concerns about Britain being ruined by the loss of the American colonies, that “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. Sri Lanka is about to test the limits of that – and don’t for one moment think it couldn’t happen here if we had equally fanatical environmental decisions made along the lines of “President Inslee”.
I guess this will be my single issue in 2023
I’ve often written that with six co-bloggers focusing on New Zealand there’s no point in me doing the same, and in any case I find US politics far more interesting because ideas that are considered “settled” in NZ are still being fought over there, plus new ideas about how a society should be organised.
But there are times when an idea begins to emerge in New Zealand that is controversial and worth fighting over, and “co-governance” is it.
Up until now I’ve figured that it would have to be fought over at the 2023 election; that Labour could not continue to push forward in the face of growing public alarm and falling polls over a range of issues that might see co-governance as the straw that breaks Labour’s back into the low twenty percent range or even lower. Labour would be forced to either dump it or make the arguments in public as part of an election so that whichever way it goes, we can at least say that a democratic decision was made on the future of the country.
But I’ve concluded that this is not how it’s going to proceed and the reason has to do with comments I saw quoted from none other than former National MP and TOW Negotiations Cabinet Minister, Chris Finlayson.
When I first saw these quotes on Kiwiblog I found it hard to believe that they could have been uttered by a former National Party MP and minister; a person that I effectively voted for over several election cycles and that I thought was an intelligent and compassionate man devoted to rectifying the sins of past colonialisation. Sure, there was grumbling on the Right about some of these deals and the fact that Finlayson had gone from being poacher to gamekeeper on the issue.
So I checked out the Radio New Zealand podcast referred to, The Detail and its episode Co-governance: Time to get on with it?, and discovered they were true quotes:
But as former Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Chris Finlayson explains, the concept itself is nothing new.
…
Finlayson takes The Detail back to the ground-breaking signing of the Treaty settlement between the Crown and Tainui in 1995, and explains how the settlement over raupatu claims led to the formation of the Waikato River Authority.It became the genesis of other co-governance arrangements, giving iwi an opportunity to participate directly with local or regional government to provide advice or take part in the management of a particular resource.
As he describes them, those past settlements that he was heavily involved with were not really about righting wrongs via the Waitangi Treaty tribunal process. No, they were about building small but permanent foundations for an entirely new way of governing this nation; a way that has now sprung into life via the supposed “opposing” party, Labour, backed by The Greens and naturally the Maori Party, with the He Puapua report, Three Waters and so forth.
And it gets better:
“I simply say to people, one, there’s a new regime, get with it folks; two, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
While he says there’s room for robust debate about the co-governance model between the Crown and iwi and hapū, Finlayson’s advice for dealing with the “sour right” behind the racist, resentful rhetoric: “We’ve just got to leave those losers behind and move on. They don’t like tangata whenua. They dream of a world that never was and never could be,” he says.
Two words Mr Finlayson.
Fuck
You.
My Scottish and Irish ancestors lived for hundreds of years tugging their forelocks to Irish landowners and Scottish Lairds, escaped that, and neither I nor my kids are going to repeat that process with the likes of Prince Willie Jackson and Princess Nanaia Mahuta.
And the thing is that Finlayson fits in so perfectly with them and their born-to-rule arrogance. That wealthy Khandallah childhood; the Latin and French majors; the LLM and mixing in the highest echelons of our legal and political circles, not to mention the leaders of our various great iwi. No wonder National lapped him up and loved him. He could elegantly stick it to Labour and others on these issues.
While all the time he was basically on the same side as them.
And now in keeping with that Olympian attitude of superiority, in his mind the issue has already been decided by The Powers That Be – meaning the political elite of both National and Labour, plus our academic and legal communities – and now it’s just a matter of getting on with it.
Elections? Democracy? Pfft. I would not now be at all surprised if he uttered then same phrase as Willie Jackson about this nation, that “We’re in a consensus-type democracy now. This is not a majority democracy.” Consensus is one of those words which, when I hear it, tells me I’m about to be lied to.
The final question I have, and frankly I think it’s rhetorical now, is how many more like him are there in the National Party? I’m betting enough to push this through eventually under some guise or other:
My prediction, there will be a substantial empowering of iwi in education, heath, housing supply and social policy in the next few years. National will go along with most of this once they are back in government, just as they have done so since 1990.
In that sense Don Brash was a bit of an aberration, one that National is not keen on repeating.
The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks
A farmer and historian in Britain, one John Lewis-Stempel, has published an interesting article in Unherd where he argues that the rise of wheat as the most widely grown crop in the world has, over the millennia, enabled tyranny!
I was immediately caught by the opening paragraph:
“Beef & Liberty”. Such was the slogan of the 18th century London dining club, The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks. The carnivorous Regency gentlemen were sensible in associating the scoffing of sirloin with freedom and the rights of Britons. Food, like the personal, is political.
Being a political tragic it’s ironic that I don’t enjoy the fact that everything is now political, even food, but I can’t deny it when I read of things like actor James Cromwell supergluing his hand to a Starbucks counter so he could lecture customers and staff alike for ages about the iniquity over their surcharge for vegan milk.
Privileged dickhead! I must re-watch LA Confidential so I can see him get his just deserts by being shot in the back.
In Lewis-Stempel’s article he covers the tyranny of wheat, from forcing us into factory-like patterns of tilling, sowing, weeding and harvesting, to being an easy crop for the State to inspect and tax – and confiscate – compared to animals or root vegetables, all the way to the modern tyranny of Monsanto:
…the grains were developed for their ability to cope with a chemical product that Monsanto wanted to flog. So if the farmer buys Roundup Ready seed, then he or she buys the tied-in Roundup herbicid. And Monsanto cashes in twice.
He also goes into some detail about the other chemicals needed to grow wheat and it’s not a pretty picture. The article ends on a note that will be music to the ears of NZ grass farmers:
To save the planet, pastoralism is the intelligent solution. The brain is 60% fat, and omega-rich fat from grass-fed meat is excellent for mental health. The sine qua non of free thinking. Beef and liberty! More meat, less wheat!
Agree or disagree, it’s a fun article so read the whole thing.
No Minister 