Beware Celebrities Shouldering Their Hypocrisy So Lightly.

In the West we are trapped in every way by our twenty first century surveillance states: by government debt and tax slavery, first and foremost, then by the classroom formed norms forced on us by a statute welding Arrogance of Altruists chanting their hollowed out ideology that politicians have their self-interest in check and are sane on matters politick, that crusading celebrities have a clue what they’re talking about, that …

(Me – work in progress.)

I could as easily have turned that last phrase toward celebrity hypocrisy.

On this clip, John Campbell two days ago covered the controversy over the building of a Milford/Dartmore tunnel in Fiordland. The clip makes a point of the damning and slamming on environmental concerns of this tunnel by the usual suspects amongst New Zealand’s Hypocrisy of Celebrities. Chief amongst them:

Sam Neill, speaking, no doubt, as a concerned inhabitant of that corner of the country; all the while apparently oblivious that he is currently caught in a controversy of his own, wanting to subdivide and develop another part of that pristine vista to build houses, to the chagrin of his neighbours.

Movie star Sam Neill – historically a rigorous opponent of rural over-development – is one of three landowners trying to subdivide a 25-hectare Dalefield plot and create two house lots.

The application’s been opposed by a council planner who says the proposed building sites are on the property’s most visible spots – and would degrade “the arcadian pastoral character of the site”.

At a hearing this month, a Fitzpatrick Road neighbour said he feared losing valuable mountain views.

Neill created international headlines 13 years ago when he slammed then-mayor Warren Cooper for “willy-nilly” carving up Queenstown rural land. 

More on this from Whaleoil here.

And of course Peter Jackson had to have an opinion also: no to this tunnel. Mind you, a cynic might say that’s okay for him, he doesn’t have to do the four or five hour road trip, whatever it is, without the tunnel to Milford, as he can get there in about ten seconds in his new carbon spewing $80 million Gulfstream private jet. That thing's faster than anything in our air force: truly, it is.

I love both of these men in the work they do in their own field, they make my life better by their creativity and ambition. I reckon they should stick to their specialties, however, rather than telling me how they think I should live my life. Or at the very least, 'live your ideas, and ditch the hypocrisy, guys.' No subdividing pristine New Zealand, Sam; and get on the bus with the other plebs, Peter, but take your packed lunch: the trip takes a while.

Online Sales and Taxes: NZ Retailers Association.

Just a single point in response to the man from the Retailers Association I heard interviewed on the radio ten minutes ago: overseas e-tailers are not receiving a government subsidy via their lower incidence of tax; New Zealand retailers are simply being penalised by government for operating, via the imposition of tax.

The difference in interpretation is the free market, and thus the free, unsurveilled, prosperous society. By arguing for less tax for New Zealand retailers, you would be arguing for freedom and lower prices, a lower cost of living, for consumers; by arguing for higher taxes for your competitors, you are arguing for our continued enslavement, and higher prices, a higher cost of living, for consumers.

Ask yourselves: who do retailers serve - your customers, or bureaucracies?

Related Posts:

Bernard Hickey’s Latest Outage – Wanting Higher Prices for Consumers

Amazon Is Our Hero, Not the Villain In The Piece

Labour’s David Clark Declares War On The Consumer

The Minister of Taking Departs Stage Left

'We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.' Hemingway.

The Revenue Minister who has presided through two governments – absurd in itself - over the demise of the Westminster Principle in our courts, and thus of the remnants of a classical liberalism in the tax field that has clung so desperately by its fingernails to some small liberty we were once left, has resigned in a scandal that is quite frankly farcical.

The Minister is Dead: Long Live the Minister. Because we all know nothing changes as we lurch faster down the statist road to our serfdom; just a new hand at the helm as the Humphrey Appleby’s in the Department in concert with the judiciary continue their crusade against the taxpayer, applying changes in tax precedent retrospectively, re-writing a taxpayer’s history, with apparent impunity as if we were just another despotic banana republic.

And Peter Dunne’s mid-life crisis aside, at the centre of his demise, was his refusal to hand over forty two emails to the commission looking into the GCSB spy report leak: if you ever come up for an IRD audit, try withholding forty two pages of documentation, and see how it goes for you. With the shock and awe powers of the IRD, compared to which our government spooks are as children, you are given no such right to privacy, or to choice. There’s a fair set of rules for you, quite another for the Arrogance of Altruists residing in the Fortress of Legislation, whom strangely feel themselves qualified to run our lives, despite this one of their number seems to have destroyed his career on what may well be a middle aged man's infatuation. 

To Mr Dunne, and your assumed entitlement to the lolly shop of my wallet, this blog has never been against you personally, just the Big Brother ideas you represent; your use of the brute fist of state to enforce your ideas over the way I wish to live in the voluntary and prosperous community of the capitalist transaction. I guess this episode at least portrays your fallible humanity: as Hemingway said, 'we are all broken, that's how the light gets in.'  I wish you’d understood that lesson when running the unforgiving machine of IRD and its unconscionable penalty system implementing a hotch potch mess of tax laws as obscene as those laws are incompetently drawn. And building a global surveillance state not for our protection, but to take our money.

Growth of the Western Taxing Surveillance State has Reached Frightening Levels. #Privacy #UN

Excerpt: ‘More people read my blog than will pay just $5 to subscribe to the New Zealand Minister of Taking’s belief in destroying our liberty by means of growing the taxing state: his political party has so few paid members, it has been deregistered.’

Simple equation: taxing state = surveillance state = death of liberty. Even the UN says so. And the growth of the taxing state in the West is voracious. Three stories from the last week show the truth of this, and the implications of it.

The small principality of Andorra is one of the few left without an income tax, and unsurprisingly it is prosperous. But instead of learning from that, the inept Masters of Europe, unable to control their spending – as with New Zealand’s own ministers, including the Minister of Taking, who insists on the need for unrestrained spending as a principle – have now bullied the principality, so as to force its destruction:

Andorra is to introduce a tax on personal income for the first time as it faces pressure from  its European neighbours to tackle tax evasion.

Antoni Marti, the head of the Andorran government, told French President Francois Hollande that he will introduce a bill before 30 June.

The principality will "gradually meet international tax standards", according to the office of the French president.

There is currently no income tax applied to individuals or corporations.

Note this is nothing to do with the welfare mantras that have been used by statists to destroy Europe; namely, equality and fairness, for the Eurozone is in the end-game: these measures are only to grow that huge Western surveillance web being built by the taxing authorities –  government bureaucracies that are starting to make the KGB, Stasi, et al, look like amateurs given the size and breadth of the intelligence organisation they’ve forced on their victims:

EU finance ministers have agreed to start talks with Andorra - along with Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino - on swapping bank account information.

Recently, the European Commission told the European Parliament it wants EU-wide exchange of all types of income data as part of the fight against tax evasion.

EU tax authorities already automatically exchanged information for income such as employment, pensions and insurance but not for income such as dividends and capital gains.

You have to understand how hard it is for me writing this, without simply descending into the gutter with my language: these swine. Hollande has become the monster of Europe. With the history of the twentieth century to show them where a Big Brother state always leads, yet still they do this.

It is as unremarkable as is Andorra’s former prosperity, that these arrogant Masters of my universe continue to foolishly hold to their historically discredited belief in central planning – and despite proof still provided daily. Laughingly, New Zealand’s Minister of Taking is so inept he has even managed to misplace his political party, deregistered for not having more than five hundred members: more people read this blog than will pay just $5 to subscribe to Mr Dunne’s belief in destroying our liberty by means of growing the taxing state to shore up the full-blown surveillance state.  Yet never fear, as dumb as these people are, they manage to be thorough when it comes to the destruction of that freedom once won by Western classical liberalism. Even when individuals and businesses are not breaking the draconian rules of the taxing state, the state’s first recourse is always to shock and awe, regardless. There should be a Western Spring on the substance of the below quotation alone – my highlights:

On May 9th the IRS, the Australian Tax Office and the UK’s HM revenue & Customs announced a plan to share information with tax administrations of other jurisdictions.  This information, which has been gathered and analyzed by the three countries includes data on entities and trusts organized in a number of jurisdictions including Singapore, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands.

While the IRS acknowledges that there is nothing illegal in the use of such entities, the Service points out that such structures are often used to avoid or evade tax.  The announcement does not acknowledge that avoidance of tax is legal.

The information to be shared includes not only the individual owners of the entities but the advisors that assisted in establishing the structures as well.

Do none of the perpetrators of such infamy understand that the Western taxing surveillance state, is always the end of the liberty which was our birth-right? As strange as it is for me to be quoting anything from the UN, I am wholly in agreement with the below report: who will take a wager that our politicians, so keen to take up every UN report supporting state theft, will be running from any knowledge of this one:

In a landmark report, the United Nations today has broken its long-held silence about the threat that State surveillance poses to the enjoyment of the right to privacy.

The report is clear: State surveillance of communications is ubiquitous, and such surveillance severely undermines citizens’ ability to enjoy a private life, freely express themselves and enjoy their other fundamental human rights. Presented today at the UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva, the report marks the first time the UN has emphasised the centrality of the right to privacy to democratic principles and the free flow of speech and ideas.

Issued by the UN Special Rapporteur on the freedom of opinion and expression, the report breaks a tradition long-held by UN human rights mechanisms to remain relatively silent on State surveillance.

After the the naked power of the taxing authorities has been unleashed to fund the intellectual deficit of crony capitalism that caused the global financial crisis from August 2008, I have to believe that impudent blogs such as this one, are imprudent, and I am most probably foolhardy to continue with it. To the politicians, some of whom I know will read this – and again, please read my disclaimer at the bottom of every page - then know that every day you go to work on the endeavour of the surveillance state, you spit on the graves of every man and woman who died fighting the surveillance states of fascism in WW II, and surveillance states of communism in the Cold War; that every day you go to work in the Fortress of Legislation, you are making life worse, not better. You should be as appalled at what you have done, as we free men and women are disgusted by you.

And this in the week that National, the party which farcically believe in small government, despite every annual budget government dollar spend being greater than the last, announced plans to increase middle class welfare by increasing the Working for Families credit for those having bigger families, so that out-of-control family of nine, at the expense of our liberty, can have that extra state house bedroom for their Sky remote.

The Obnoxious School of Feminism – Of Dad / Son Bonding.

On 4 June, 1913, suffragette Emily Davison died from her injuries after throwing herself under King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby, and this after being jailed nine times and force-fed forty nine times in the cause of women’s suffrage: a deliberate tactic employed by these brave women was to deport themselves, for lack of a better term, obnoxiously. This was an excellent tactic in the staid context of the times, to break down centuries old barriers.

However, the Obnoxious School of Feminism in the twenty first century has failed to grasp an important occurrence: times have moved on. What this has meant is that being obnoxious, now, serves no good political end for the feminist movement, or for any of us; it has simply ended in hate sites such as run by the likes of Queen of Thorns (remember her), full of swearing, and railing against decency, f-this and f-that, and then unfortunately with the inevitable false and (of course) anonymous, undeserved impugning of people’s characters. Which is to say, this still active branch of obnoxious feminism has become simply that, obnoxious, and upon that, brainless and absurd. Such as the solo mum in the below story:

A father-son bonding session planned by a North Island primary school was cancelled after a single mother demanded to be included.

Two "Band of Brothers" seminars were arranged by Matakana School to help fathers get more involved in their sons' lives, and as a forum for dads to share their issues. One session was for dads and another was for fathers and sons.

A solo mum wanted to attend but was told she couldn't because her presence would inhibit discussion. She was told a mother and son seminar was planned for later in the year.

…

The woman's son was welcome at the second seminar and the guest speaker offered a specific session with her and her son but she continued to insist on attending, Goosen said, so the school board decided to cancel the event.

In this piece, solo mum’s reasons for destroying this father-son bonding session are never given, but, let me go out on a limb here, put a label on it, Thorny, and attribute this to the further school of Marxist feminism, by which I mean, if solo mum was to be asked, I’d take a wager that one of the following two words would be in her explanation: click the link, you’ll see I’ve covered both words constantly in this blog, the mantras of the surveillance state: equality and/or fair.

This behaviour is obnoxious, childish, and in this instance, doing a very real harm to every person involved in this story. These women need to grow up, and start being responsible for their actions.


Update 1:

The Cult of Thorny is still strong as ever in the Twitterverse. Most of its reaction to this is inane, but as to the accusation that this woman reasonably wanted inclusion, I would like an answer to the following question. (Ignore the typos, it's Twitter).

@graveydice @verbscape @qot_nz 1 of big points of Marxist feminists who've reached out to touch me is u r under no obligation to me/men 1/2
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) June 2, 2013

@graveydice @verbscape @qot_nz Well why are fathers and sons under an obligation to include this mother in father-son sessions to their detriment?
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) June 2, 2013

They're right: women have no obligation to men, per se, but then, turn the logic around: why are these exclusive father-son bonding courses obliged to include women?

Does solo mum feel these men are obliged to allow her in, say, the men's changing rooms?

... and then the final corollary from those who cannot sustain debate on their world-view - the block:

Good gravy, and @graveydice employs the block: can't debate your position, block #tiresome
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) June 2, 2013