Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath ransacks the newspapers for stories and headlines on issues affecting our freedom.
This week: Cannabis, Krudd and Gold-plated eels.
1. “Police harass garden shop owners” – Despite the growing problem of violent crime, our police decide to launch raids on garden shop owners. The rationale behind these raids is that these shops would not turn a profit were it not for the sales they make to cannabis growers. Well, I guess it’s easier to pick on peaceful tax-paying middle class New Zealanders than to arrest the scum who murder, rob and rape.
But this is serious interference: raiding 35 legal businesses, arresting 250 people, and executing home invasions on 100 private homes.
How desperately far-fetched is this? By this logic, the owners of supermarkets and petrol stations will be next on the cops’ hit list, as the thousands of cannabis growers surely need food and transportation. Manufacturers of matches and lighters, including corner dairies needn’t think they are immune from official molestation. Nor the makers of stoves, tin foil, sealable plastic bags, weight scales and teaspoons--as these are all, too, illicit drug paraphernalia.
Where will it stop? This bizarre persecution of business owners is proof, if any was required, that if the police take a dislike to you, the anti-pleasure laws and guilt by association give them a toehold to arrest and incarcerate you any time they like.
These are frightening times. The arrests yesterday are symptomatic of the constant erosion of our liberty by the state that is meant to protect our freedoms, but otherwise leave us alone. Decent people are being bullied here. Anyone who trades with anyone else who even looks like they might smoke cannabis is now at risk of arrest, detention, and the destruction of their livelihoods and confiscation of their possessions--thanks to the laws that allows Nanny to seize your property unless you can do the impossible by proving a negative (i.e., that your property was not paid for through the proceeds of crime).
If you are reading this and smirking, thinking you lie beneath the police radar, just ask whether your child, or any of your close friends or workmates might be smoking cannabis, and whether the police might put 2 and 2 together, get 5, and come after you.
2. “National insist on punishing New Zealanders with ETS madness” – Not really surprising, when you think about it. Given the limited cognitive function of tree-hugger Nick Smith, and the albatross around National’s neck, Bill English, National couldn’t really be expected to take on board the U-turn by the Aussie Prime Mentalist and fellow climate psychotic Kevin Rudd, who, in the interests of brevity, I will refer to as “Krudd.”
Despite referring to the mass delusion that the activities of mankind have a significant effect on climate variability as “the greatest moral challenge of our generation”, Krudd has quietly shelved his plans to flay businesses and consumers for using energy to improve the living standards of Australians.
Although Krudd has gone back on his promise to tax those whose activities produce more of the “poisonous” carbon dioxide on which plants thrive, our politicians continue to worship at the Church of Albert Gore.
Why follow others, figure Nick and Bill, when you can be a the first lemming to jump off the cliff? These two are starting to look more and more like a couple of prize pricks, as the days get shorter and cooler and a bit of global warming starts to sound attractive. Pull your heads in and abandon this bloody ETS nonsense. Just admit that--like millions of others--the two of you, your leader, and Krudd were all taken in by the Warmist Pontiff and his conspirators at the IPCC. Admit your error, and move on. If you want to suffer the privations of a life without technology, don’t take the rest of us with you. Some of us enjoy the niceties of Western civilization, thank you very much.
3. “Eels have rights too!” – Wairarapa farmer Lloyd Rayner has been caned for digging a drain on his property because it killed some eels and disturbed a swamp. These must have been very valuable eels, because it cost him $37,000. I didn’t know eel meat was that expensive.
The news item describes the farmer as a “landowner.” Perhaps we should denote farmers like Mr Rayner as LINOs – landowners in name only—because thanks to the Resource Management Act, there is no such thing as freehold title in New Zealand now, and Mr Rayner would do well to remember that.
This man was excavating an existing drain to clear weeds and transform the land into productive real estate.
Currently five hectares of his land is under water and he is now forced to pay a bribe, called a resource consent, to officials if he wants to drain the land he paid for but doesn’t own. The eels evidently own it (with the council goons as their representatives), but just let him try forwarding his next rates bill to the eels on his property and see how far he gets.
Sure enough, the mystics got in on the act, with a local Maori tribal leader saying the earthworks had damaged the ‘mauri’ or life force of the area that Mr Rayner’s eels own. If that’s the case I guess local Maori will have to stop hunting eels and gathering watercress in the name of the sacred life force.
May the force be with you.
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny - when the
government fear the people, there is liberty. “
- Thomas Jefferson
2 comments:
Or more accurately, " ... the sacred life farce."
Regading the raid on the gardening shop. It sounds like some who worked in the shops sold drugs to customers but it sounds as though the idea of charging the company for selling product that could be used in the growing of cannibis is just a fishing expedition.
What I would like to see is something like a district attorneys office to be in charge of prosecutions - if this was the case I doubt such cases would even make it to court and both the accused and the tax payer would save. Likewise I doubt people would be charged for protecting their own poperty.
Post a Comment