- an alternative viewpoint by JH, presented in a series of email exchanges.
I recently attended a meeting in Winton with John Boscawen MP. It occurred to me during his delivery on ETS that the time has come for lateral thinking, literally 'outside the square'.
The square we're trapped in lacks substance. It's an illusion and we are held by our own uncritical acceptance of that illusion. Every day of every week I'm reminded that if we "keep doing what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got". Isn't it time now to stop doing what we've always done?
What we've always done is willingly go along with our inherited political system*. It is that system which has given us the Emissions Trading Scheme and leaves the majority of us vulnerable to every dog-wagging political tail that can score sufficient votes from the uncritical.
The trusting, the political 'masses' in fact, fall victim to the tyranny of the cunning few leading the unthinking emotive.
I MAINTAIN THAT there are many more minds, better, wiser, more educated, more capable, outside of Parliament than within it; and it is time these minds were invoked in the running of our country.
Our present system is an illusion. It is the illusion of 'democracy' (which was defined by Lincoln as "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people").
Reality is otherwise — we have government of the people by the party and for the party.
We, the People are nothing more than sheep for the skinning; we have no say in the governing or direction of our country and are 'democratic' on just one day in every thousand — on the day we elect our dictators for the next three years.
We fund the dictatorship involuntarily by way of endless unavoidable taxes; in effect we suffer taxation without representation and the hand reaches into every aspect of our lives.
Few see it yet but more are beginning to, we are not free people, we are slaves.
We are approaching a cusp. The world is coming to a point of monetary systems collapse but we in New Zealand are well placed to ride out the storm. IF we do it right.
Doing it right means a lot of pain for a lot of people but the alternatives are unthinkable. Doing it right will mean rewarding people only for their productive inputs, it will mean harnessing the perfectly natural (and fully entitled) self-interest of every individual.
It will mean a new form of government: government in which the overarching principle is the furtherance not of political parties and politicians but of the productive people themselves.
Survival comes first, prosperity will follow (if allowed).
At Mr Boscawen's meeting much was made of the need for protest and public display to catch the eye of the Government in what could (face it) only be a vain hope. The government is ruthlessly dedicated. Is it credible that waving placards, sending letters, writing petitions or even rioting in the streets will change their minds? I doubt it. Playing the game will not get the rules changed — we need not only to think but also to act outside the square.
* The political system that gave us (forced on us) the effete ETS which is nothing more than a mechanism for transferring money from an unwilling majority to a select few in a form of payment — but for what?
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Best regards
JH
With the best will in the world — but few ever agree with me — 'science' is not open-and-shut, it is never finalised, and scientific 'facts' are forever changing.
Face it, science is a temporal variable; almost a fashion.
Today's irrefutable Global Warming Alarmist's 'fact' will tomorrow be as laughable as this statement from no less a person than the UK's Astronomer Royal not too long ago, words to the effect that "There will never be space travel as there is nothing in space for a rocket to push against".
So when in the course of my reading tonight I came across this gem—
" ... In the pre-history days of emerging human consciousness, upright apes viewed the overt expressions of the complex system that is nature – volcanic explosions, lightning, seasons, drought, pestilence, etc. – and tried to make sense out of it all by organizing around belief systems that today would be considered laughable. At the time, however, dancing around open fires bedecked in certain animal skins, or allowing shamans to sacrifice virgins, were seen as effective methods for controlling the natural chaos ... "
http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCdd.php?id=472
—I just had to share it.
Okay, times change but the scene remains the same, Shamans like Al Gore dance around the stage bedecked in business suits rather than animal skins but they are still sacrificing, only this time it's not virgins but our prosperity.
Either way, virgins or our economy, the end effect of magical thinking upon the disinterested universe remains the same, exactly zilch; and will remain zilch no matter how many virgins or how much of our income goes under the mallet.
Our democratically elected government officials refuse to listen to the sacrificial victims, as always; so isn't it about time we took action — effective action — to ensure that they do? Or better, send them to the works and start running our own lives?
I hope you can use it.
Best regards
JH
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I'm sorry to be so long winded but the issue is much bigger than it appears, it goes far beyond ETS.
Your site is dedicated to combatting the ETS, I respect that very much but see ETS as only partial — I was taught (QA) always to ferret out the Root Cause (literally to ask 'why' at least five times and not be fobbed off). Eliminate the root cause and all else follows. By fighting the ETS we're fighting symptoms, not the disease.
It has been said: "You cannot stop an idea whose time has come" and the notion of Anthropogenic Global Warming is an idea whose time has come. It's a crock, we both know it's a crock — but it's a crock now established in New Zealand law.
Politicians have glibly surfed along on public sentiment is because politicians will never — can never — be held to account.
If they bankrupt every farmer in New Zealand, if they put every factory out of business; so what? The very worst that can happen to them is that they'll face the short-lived opprobrium of the common herd. Big deal.
We need our politicians to be accountable.
By accountable I mean to actually feel themselves the pain they cause.
We need our politicians to be accountable for their policies and actions — let me give an example; if they bankrupt us they should personally pay the bills themselves (to the point of bankruptcy) and/or be jailed until those bills are paid. By us.
If they commit us without a Citizens Referendum to someone else's war they should be sent (as private soldiers, not as officers) to the front lines and remain in active service until their war is over.
In short, they should suffer the pains their decisions and actions cause or create.
Given those parameters, how many ill-thought wars or ETS schemes do you think would go through? Precious few, I'd say.
IN THE SHORT TERM we need our politicians to be fully accountable, as in having a major personal stake in the outcomes of their own actions.
At present politics is a comfortable game for them but grim reality for the rest of us. We need to level that field and make it equally grim for all.
Under the present systems politicians set their sails to the most popular breeze, right or wrong (they have to if they are to remain at the top). Hence all the empty promises made to the empty-headed; promises that are too often recycled from one election to the next* .
Thus the current government has committed us all to the ETS on the premise/promise that so doing will stop AGW and halt Climate Change. (Spoken or not, this is the implied promise; otherwise why did they do it?).
Given that within historical limits the world is already thermally stable, and the polar bears thriving, they could well be onto a winner. Any (cyclic) warming appears already to have ceased and the temperatures levelling out (the Argo system even reports that the oceans are in fact slightly cooling) so they are on to a winner. Nice timing.
However, in the predictable event that the alarmist propaganda doesn't diminish then our politicians and their ETS should be declared to have failed. No?
In fact, the politicians will instead claim that it is too-little-too-late and we must double/redouble our efforts, taxes and more taxes; even shoot all the sheep and cows — anything to save the planet and devil take the hindmost.
In my view if the ETS is seen to not be working, if the propaganda and distorted 'science' continues — our politicians should be recognised as having failed and their schemes useless. Pay back time.
The people who committed us to those schemes should be held personally responsible and made to refund all losses — or be jailed for life.
However, the alarmists are in fact onto a winner.
Their timing is absolutely perfect.
Bouncing as we are between warm spells (Roman warm period, medieval warm period, 1940s etc) and cooling periods (ice age, little ice age, seventies trends etc) we are right now (unnoticed by the emotive voting public) on the cusp of another cooling.
When that cooling inevitably kicks in, as it will, the alarmists will seize the credit: "Look! Our ETS is working exactly as we said it would!".
But if it is delayed (there are many variables) then they will say "Look! It's all your fault, not enough ETS, we need more!"
Win/win, for some ...
No matter the science, no matter how many Concerned Scientists or Oregon Petitions, Plimers, Wisharts, Boscawens, Climategates; no matter even if the world becomes a snowball (again) the idea is presently unstoppable: its time is here.
THE SOLUTION LIES IN getting rid of the layer of unaccountable politicians 'running' our nation. We need to make them accountable; to feel our pain, feel the cold winds of economic and personal reality, themselves.
Why?
I've been told that farmers shear their pregnant sheep before winter so that later on the shivering mummy sheep will seek and provide better shelter for herself and thus for her lamb.
I have no idea how true it is but the logic seems sound.
Suffering individuals will (unless deranged) always seek to improve their own lot, and given the opportunity will do exactly that.
We need to change our systems.
We need to remove the insulation that protects our politicians from the effects of their actions. In fact, we need—
(a) in the short term to make politicians feel the pain they cause
(b) in the longer term to govern ourselves
—option (b) above is what I'm working towards, the New Paradigm.
My best regards
JH
* A case could be made for every MP of the 'coalition in power' to charged/jailed for every unfulfilled electoral promise.
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I think its obvious that the government knows it cannot affect 'climate change' in any way and the whole kiwi ETS thing is window dressing to enhance our (self-awarded) 'clean-green' image.
Perhaps it's best summed up in the snippet below (from a National Party MP in reply to one of my own letters):
" ... I think the most pertinent comment recently is the one that Phil O'Reilly, CE of Business NZ, made on Q&A two Sundays ago when he said it matters little what Rodney Hide or anyone else thinks, the consumers and retailers in the best paying markets in the world think it matters and we need to protect our market position ..."
THIS IS A SENTIMENT that keeps coming through: in order to impress (say) the British housewife we in NZ have to transfer money from those who earn it to those currently in favour — and eventually as a freebie to non-kiwi non-earners overseas.
In short, these admissions by themselves declare that nothing we can do will change the minds of people who already know that the whole thing is a crock. For them pragmatism rules and devil take the hindmost. Get this: they KNOW it's a crock, they WILL persist regardless: and they simply don't care.
Still these pages ring with the efforts of hopefuls who are unaware that nothing they do will have any effect. To put it bluntly, if God Himself were to come down and yell from the clouds that the whole thing is a crock — nothing would change.
We will have to create the change ourselves.
In our Party Democracy (an oxymoron if ever I've seen one) we taxpayers cannot create that change by 'influencing' the leaderships. The leadership is fully committed to a course of action and in no uncertain terms keeps telling us so — impotently waving placards at them won't do it.
The system has us by the oysters. We peasants have bankers and families to feed, we're slaves to our mortgages, businesses, responsibilities, rates, stock. Behind every tax man is a gun and employers are unpaid tax collectors under the modern system. Try not paying your taxes and the gun will appear soon enough; we are slaves.
UNLESS enough of us simultaneously stop paying our taxes. Not by withholding money but by withholding effort; a moratorium on production.
Ayn Rand called it a strike by the producers. But what if—?
WHAT IF farmers simply stopped working? Bakers stop baking? Drivers stop driving?
That's a frightening thought.
Eventually it might come to that, it might have to come to that, but there could be a better way. A better way would be a new system wherein the government is minimal and does what it is told to by the electorates.
World leaders? We could be ...
Best regards
JH
