The Hate State

Examples of the New Zealand government putting the hate on various minorities and breaking fundamental human rights, 1900 - present.

1900's - The 1901 Opium Act was aimed solely at persecuting Chinese immigrants and their families. The Act banned the smoking of opium. Other forms of opium were allowed for consumption, it was just the smoking of it that was outlawed. Police gained the right to search without warrant any Chinese home or business on suspicion of opium smoking, decades before the practise was made more widespread.

1910's - It was a busy decade for state hatred. Unionists and the working class were subject to Massey's Cossacks. Of course, the Germans were fair game during the Great War. Conscientious objectors to the Great War were locked up, deserters from the army were shot. And if they stayed to fight for King and Country, they were dumped on Gallipoli's coastline with others of Winston Churchill's reject colonial army volunteers - Jews and Australians - and led to senseless slaughter.

1920's - This decade was a bit of a toughie. Post-Great War, post-Spanish Flu pandemic, the state seemed to run out of hate temporarily. Massey eventually died, and it is damned hard to fault the work of the Coates' government's 3 years. Maybe the All Blacks' "Invincibles" tour of Britain and France in 1924 kept the young nation at ease. Argument's sake, let's just call the 1920's an exception to the rule.

1930's - The unemployment riots in Christchurch, Dunedin and Auckland not long into the Great Depression might have made unions another easy target for the state apparatus. It took the first Labour Government to officially hate merchantalism. Cradle to the grave welfare, the Reserve Bank was nationalised, dairy prices guaranteed a minimum.

1940's - Germans and Japanese were the official villains of this decade. However, unofficially, there was plenty of hate set aside for American soldiers, as seen in the Battle of Manners Street.

1950's - Waterfront unions bore the brunt of establishment displeasure during the Waterfront 'dispute'. Teenagers first appeared on the hate radar thanks to the Maezengarb report. In fact, anything that represented un-Christian values or the other official religion of Rugby, Racing and Beer was off-limits. Barry Crump's Good Keen Man was considered a classic NZ novel. Art was for queers and queers were locked up, which explains some of the modernist monstrosities built in the name of the state during this time.

1960's - The newly established NZBC armed with the Broadcasting Act 1961 took a black pen to music, TV shows and movies. Radio Hauraki was one response to this hatred of good things.

1970's - Patricia Bartlett might have kept bleating on about morals during the 1970's, but the tide was against her as well as the anti-abortionists. The state had moved onto other hatreds. The continued French nuclear testing at Muroroa Atoll drew the ire of the Kirk government. Pacific Islanders felt the force of Muldoon's government power with the infamous dawn raids. Maori got some stick too, culminating in mass arrests at Bastion Point. It was not uncommon practice for landlords of the time to state "No Maoris" in their To Let adverts.

1980's - Who can forget the hatred that divided the nation with the Springbok Tour of 1981? John Key apparently can. Everyone hated the French in the 1980's, and with good reason. Nuclear testing was bad enough, but the frogmen and the Rainbow Warrior bombs made it worse. The very worst came with the release of Mafart and Prieur not long into their sentence, when the French government threatened to stick a butter mountain up the NZ government's bum. The French showed NZ up as the tiny, irrelevant little islands it is.

1990's - Risk is the new enemy. The rise of the safety nazis begins with the purge of smokers as people with the Smokefree Environments Act. This was swiftly followed by hatred of recreational cyclists with compulsory bike helmet regulations. Strong Asian immigration flows bring NZ's history of xenophobia to the fore. Winston Peters and NZ First are at record levels of support.

2000's - Smokers continue to lose rights as humans. It is entirely legal, if not encouraged, to discriminate against smokers as workers, tenants and parents. Winston Peters still hanging in there.

2010's - Adult Fun is facing regulation on all fronts. Alcohol, tobacco and cannabis users are now mortal sinners damned until they repent. Workers are tested in ever more invasive ways as risk attains infamy. A toke on a joint on Saturday can lose someone their job with a drug test on Wednesday, demonstrating the complete separation of impairment and risk. Local government councils and government SOEs are leading the charge into persecution with the unions in full agreement with the overlords. The infantilisation of adult life is almost complete.

Sleb Slapping

The following musical interlude is dedicated to Billy Ray Cyrus and his self-inflicted achy-breaky heart:

Cloudbusting

I have been interested in the weather ever since Weetbix had a meteorology card set and booklet giveaway way back in the 1970's. Cyclones, anti-cyclones, isobars and all that laid the foundation work that years later help me get my brain wrapped around the implications of Brownian motion and chaotic field theory. System dependent on initial conditions and all that.

One of the implications of chaos is the bloody-mindedly difficult task of lassoing it in empirical testing. How does one replicate a moment in weather when each is a unique piece of infinitely complex, delicate and unknowable whole? Where does one draw the line in objectivity when, like supercomputers crunching climate change figures, measuring affects the outcome?

Nowhere is this more evident than in alleged weather control programs:

Fleming, for his part, doesn’t believe that a single one of the weather modification schemes he describes in his book ever truly worked. Even cloud-seeding, he says, as widespread as it is even today, has never been scientifically proven to be effective. Kristine Harper, an assistant professor at Florida State University who is writing a book about the US government’s forays into weather modification, says that doesn’t necessarily mean cloud-seeding is a total waste of time, just that there’s no way to scientifically measure its impact.

HT Arts & Letters Daily. I have thought for some time that dry ice and silver iodide seeding of clouds was one giant bogus placebo, but there's never a way to prove beyond reasonable doubt one way or the other, so why bother. Nah, the thing that scares me isn't this petty voodoo, it's experiments like this that puts the willies up me.

Walk like an Egyptian

While Mubarak refuses to stand down, it is worth pondering some case studies of "the unfortunate, tragic events" with this site of Egyptian citizens who have died thus far.

Grafty Bastard

UK Foreign Minister William Hague is in deep shit after a leak pointing how he used diplomatic channels to raise the share price of an oil company at the expense of the dirt poor Ugandans:

After the visit, Mr Bellingham wrote to the Foreign Secretary, saying “My meeting with President Museveni allowed me to raise a specific trade issue, again regarding Tullow Oil.”

“Consequently, Tullow have concluded the deal with [Heritage Oil], allowing both companies’ share price to rise by approximately 50p and £1 respectively.” 

70,000 quid to save 175 million quid? What kind of unethical moron wouldn't jump at the chance?

Quote of the day

"If ever a Government indifferent at heart to basic rights were to hold office in this country, it could force through, possibly in a matter of hours and by the barest of majorities, legislation opposed to basic principles of justice. Orthodox theory has in the past been that the Courts could not intervene. I am not so sure; the authority of Parliament itself - supremacy as it is often called - ultimately turns on judicial recognition."

- Lord Cooke of Thorndon, "Practicalities of a Bill of Rights" Australian Bar Review 189,201.

Procrastinocracy

Pigs

Some of my cannabis cuzzies have been arrested over the last few weeks, including one poor sod who got busted for weed at Raggamuffin in the weekend. Raggamuffin, for Dagg's sake! This rip from Spare Room is dedicated to them. Kia Kaha.

“We were dressed as ‘Scrabble’ and asked to have a photo with the police,” says Nikki. “They had no idea what we spelt”.

Greens fall at the first hurdle

The Nats and Labour have exited the gate for election year with state of the nation speeches. The Maori party had two state of the nation speeches at Waitangi on one day. Act had their day at the Gibbs estate looking at the art and feeding David Garrett and other animals. The Greens have kicked things off by having their candidate Richard Leckinger missing the deadline for the Botany by-election.

Even the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and the Pirate Party have their shit together better than the Greens. Thank you Greens. ALCP will eat your 756 votes, om nom nom. Following on from Russel Norman's by-election bid in Mt Albert, where the Greens outspent the Act party on dollar per vote spending, there's some serious rebooting needed within that party pronto if they want to cut the 5 percent mustard this year. The mind-mongingly bad stunts have to stop at the very least.

Reagan Exiled

I see some of my right wing mates are commemorating what would have been Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday. The team at Exiled Online are doing their own celebration, with a litany of vicious eulogies. Here's a sample of the latest by John Dolan:

"I’ve always found Nixon a rather sympathetic figure: wretched, ugly, and without much malice for either the forests or the ordinary American. Nixon didn’t even share the worship of “business” forced on us all in Reagan’s reign. Nixon’s dreams were old-fashioned Soviet machinations, full of maps and coups; he was willing enough to toss the rest of us a few bones if we’d let him play with his schemes undisturbed. And some of the bones he tossed us were rather significant. It was Nixon who created the EPA and OSHA. Reagan would have strangled both in the cradle."

Other gold includes Homeless Mourn Passing of Reagan, The Abominable Chimp-Fucker Is Dead! and And Here Lies the Worst of All.

Arresting Moments - The Musical

Following on from yesterday's post, here is the music video of the protest:



Fortunately, the cannabis reform movement is not reliant on MSM for communications, eh.

Arresting moments

I was bemused to flip through the Weekend Herald this morning to see no trace of the protest held outside the Auckland District Court yesterday morning. Although the courts are diagonally opposite the NZ Herald head offices, and despite the protest lasting an hour and a half, not a shred of its passing reached the greater Auckland tabloid readership.

Perhaps it was too early in the morning for the repeaters, nursing hangovers, to go outside at 9am into the blare of vuvezelas outside the "halls of justice." Hey, you stop with the stupid drug war, we'll stop with the stupid annoying drone of resistance.

If one of them had enquired, they might have been told how one of our own was facing charges that morning. He had been trading Nixons for Queens and had been held up at knifepoint and robbed. He chased the thief while calling the cops. By the time the cops caught up with the chase, they arrested both of them. By this time, the robber had thrown the knife away and the cops didn't take too much time looking for it. Consequentially, one of ours is likely facing higher charges due to the Nixons.

It is unfair in the same way that unrepentant cannabis users are denied parole due to their beliefs (not addicitons), while other more needful inmates deserving a chance at rehabiliation go wanting. While killers get parole, peaceful cannabis culturalists refusing drug treatment are denied parole and have to serve the length of their sentence. That's another story missed by APN.

The last time Sir Geoffrey got stoned

I understand some media were attracted by the loud buzzing, as well as curious tourists. Maybe this old Maori woman in a wheelchair might have had a story to tell?

Where's the harm?

No arrests either. I wish that were the case across the board, not just when protesters do it.

One of own couldn't make it. He was having surgery. This is him recovering at the club with a harm minimising vaporiser, of the sort that HRH NZ Customs Service are seizing at our borders right now:

Do you really want to lock him up?

We're feeding our babies so much paracetamol, some of their livers are shutting down. Go on, arrest the hippy and keep selling painkillers like lollies in the supermarket check-out aisles, even if the deaths of paracetamol are under-reported compared with "illegal" drugs:

There are times I wish the MSM would go to pot. This was one of them.

Pubthumping

Tully might be full of cowboys, outlaws and river rats, but Innisfail is sweet as. Lots of Italian and Greek culture based on post-WWII immigration up there. Friendly Abbos too. Post-Yasi, this one's for the Garradunga Pub and the zero death toll. Also to the meteorologists who saved the world yet again.

Milk the rich

As any newbie sharemilker can tell you, cows like getting milked. Titillated, in the parlance of our times. That's their motive to walk down the shed twice a day without much effort from the dog. Dilbert guy has thrown a googlie in the Wall St Journal aimed squarely at taxing the only people who have any money these days; the super-rich:

I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power. 

HT Bernard Hickey. The Top 10 is on fire today.

I have been pondering this type of thing for some time. Take the Goff policy of a tax-free threshold for everyone at a cost of roughly a billion and a half dollars a year in real terms. A $10,000 tax minimum would at least have been a third of a Big Kahuna. Alas, Labour would then compound the other problem with the policy, in that there's no funding for it. Tightening compliance will not net a percent of the estimated swag required.

OK, so take that $1.5 billion a year and instead give every NZ born citizen who turns 25 years old the equivalent of the annual average wage in a lump sum.* That should do a number of things, least of all reduce our fucking awful youth suicide stats. Give them a tomorrow to aim for, the maturity and network of friends to do it with, and let them go.

* This money is not for export, and it's to be used for black and red purposes only. Red, in the case of early debt problems with credit cards, student or car loans. Black, in that it is for capital expenditure, setting up a home, business, research project, whatever.

Even just looking at this side of the equation, you can see all sorts of things that could go wrong with that half of it. A black market in repeat claimants, hyper-marketing to self-destructive youth by bankers. Maybe scratch the debt part and make it optional bankruptcy at 25 too. That'll scare the suits and brown out the loan sharks' pants.

Oh, and apart from serious violence offences, their criminal records should be wiped. Everyone deserves a second chance eh.

OK, so you've given every new 'dult a fresh start they've been aiming for during the first bit of growing up in NZ. $40,000 in plain Bill English. Add a multiplier of, say, five high school buddies starting a company, there's $200,000 starting capital right there. Lend against THAT, bankers.

37,500 people give and take year turn 25 every year, and I'm proposing another 37,500 or so people pay for it. Maybe less, depending on how philantropic NZ's super rich really are. I'm sure even Cactus Kate or other ex-pats would be keen on adopting more than one Fresh Starter. I'm sure there's enough snobbery in those circles to make it self-policing too, but there's always insurance in the form of publicly published names and estimated wealth, IRD and all sorts of rotten fruit to throw at avoiders.

Of course, charity without anonymity is slavery. You can't have the super-wealthy owning these young ones. It corrupts both. That's where Central Services aka The Gummint comes in and launders the investment. Maybe both sides have the right to request who their tagged benefactor/ee was after 5 years.

Yes, this clay needs some work but I reckon I'm working good stuff if the same materiel is recognised by Scott Adams.

Pink and White, blew all over

The old man had an oil painting of the Pink and White Terraces on the wall when I was growing up. He told me how the wonder was destroyed when Mt Tarawera erupted. "How were they destroyed?" I used to ask. Were they completely blown up, buried under ash or what? Alas, the only response from Dad was "destroyed." So it is with great pleasure to read that some gronks might have found the terraces from out of the blue:

[S]cientists from GNS Science says they are 95% certain they have identified a crescent-shaped part of the terraces lying in about 60 metres of water at the bottom of the lake.

Well done, great wonks!