‘Crime’ & Punishment [updated]

It doesn’t happen often, but I’m with Psycho Milt.  There’s something wrong when helping out immigrants in return for some free tiling, and then lying about it, gets two sentences amounting to six years in total – but killing another motorist because they’ve scratched your BMW gets you just three.

There’s something wrong when those sentences for this ‘crime’ are made cumulative, when the sentences for the “human waste” who killed Karen Aim and tried to kill Zara Schofield was made concurrent, “thereby letting him off for the attempted murder and making it clear to the victim of that attempted murder exactly what the judge in that case thought she was worth: nothing.”

The message here is that taking someone’s life, or trying to, is some way down the scale of “bad things to to do in New Zealand” from a political crime – from taking some limited advantage of your position and then trying to conceal it.

Help for some immigrants in return for some free tiling -- and lies about it – these things are "...intolerable in our society and threaten the institution at the foundation of democracy and justice."  But kill people, or try to, and that’s not so bad.  That’s the message from Justice Hansen and his colleagues on the bench.

Frankly, Field has already had whatever punishment he might have actually deserved in his fall from grace and the public shaming he’s experienced.  Frankly, locking Phillip Field up for six years looks nothing like making the punishment fit the crime -- it’s more like making the punishment fit the politics.

This is not justice; it’s retribution.

Field’s real crime is that he fell out of favour with the ruling party just as they were falling out of power.  Because if taking advantage of your position and then trying to conceal it in the manner that Field did was genuinely intolerable and a threat to our institutions, then surely the collar of Bill English would be being felt about now.

Friday morning ramble [updated]

I’ve ended up the week with another huge number of things I’d wanted to say to you but never got the chance.  So here, in no particular order, is another ramble through some of the things I’d wanted to talk about at greater length – a bunch ‘o links you can come back to over the weekend and think about yourself.
Enjoy!

• Outgoing European Union President Václav Klaus had some unflattering things to say about his fellow European leaders, and something surprising to say about American president Barack Obama.
  Read Václav Klaus grades EU politicians. [Hat tip Reference Frame]
• Great cartoon and comment over at The Visible Hand on the controversy over Anne Tolley’s canning of night school funding.
  Head over to Cartoon: Night classes.
• College students today face an ideological onslaught from educators who are more concerned with creating "good citizens" than teaching them real knowledge, says Montessorian Marsha Enright, It's time for a new approach, she says, and she’s making one: She’s launching a “finishing school” for intelligent youngsters, to teach them everything they should have been taught in school but weren’t, and to “unteach” all the destructive nonsense they shouldn’t have been taught.
  Anyone who realises the enormously destructive role that leftist capture of the education system has played in the collapse of the culture will want to applaud her, and to read:
  Students Need Mental Ammunition.
• In fact, if you Want Excellence in Education? Return to Reason says Michael Gold at The Egoist Blog.
• And if you want cultural change, we need to get on with the essay competition I talked about last year.  And that’s just the start of it all.  Who’s with me?
• Meanwhile, Rational Jenn offers more another tip for rational parents. "Explaining the virtue of Integrity to children can be difficult,” she says. “I helped my son begin to grasp this idea by pointing out an example of when he displayed that virtue himself."
  Read A Conversation about Integrity posted at Rational Jenn.
• What sort of arsehole architect would design this excrescence on the right for a clinic to treat patients with chronic brain diseases, dementia and cognitive disorders?  Answer: that arsehole Frank Gehry of course.
• As we start to hear calls from the US for yet another “stimulus” package,  throwing good but rapidly depreciating money after bad, it’s time to get the lowdown on the crude Keynesianism at back of all the profligate stimulunacy.
• Here, by the way, are some simple experiments to prove why “stimulus” can not work.
  Read Obama: Please Try This at Home.
• And on a similar theme, why not read up On the Inescapable Contradiction of Fractional Reserve Banking.
• It’s All About Say’s Law, you know. Yes, it really is.
• Bubble, bubble toil and trouble.  Can Bubbles Also Be Made in China?  Looks horribly like it.
• Good quote here from the 3-Ring Binder blog:
  ”1.The concept of individual rights is morality applied to politics.
  2. The purpose of the government is to protect our individual rights.”
• Robert Garmong’s been teaching philosophy to prisoners, and he reports they were far better students than his usual brood. 
  Read Teaching Intro to Philosophy...In Prison.
• By the way, have you ever noticed that when you’re debating with graduates of various subjectivist philosophy courses they invariably end up telling you that your questions are “too complex” to answer successfully.  From whence comes this fetishistic complexity worship?  The Rational Capitalist explains: The Modern Intellectual's Virtue of Complexity, Part I.
• This Bryan Larsen painting (right) is beautiful.  Just thought you’d like to see it too.
  Click on the picture to see it larger.
• I’m still flabbergasted at the Nazis in Hawkes bay who are insisting that a family tear down a seawall they built to protect their home – they have been given until the end of August to pull down the wall, or face the possibility of jail time or a fine of $200000.  Just another example of why the Resource Management Act has to go so New Zealanders can get their property rights back.
• Meanwhile, the Nazis at North Shore City are adding insult to economic calamity for the city’s developers, and those who would like to buy affordable homes from them.  They’ve just hiked their thieving “development levies”  by a whopping 150%.
  Gooner has the news at No Minister: Development levies.
• Speaking of petty fascism, Margaret and Keith Berryman (right) are enduring their last kick in the face from government: delayed for years in their fight for justice by the lying, dissembling and near-fraudulence of everyone from Helen Clark to Jenny Shipley to the NZ Army and beyond, they’ve now been told by a judge that their action against the government will fail because it’s too long after the event.  Poor bastards.
  They’re poster people for Thomas Jefferson’s much-repeated dictum that a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away all you’ve ever earned.
• Mythbusters’ Andy Savage reckons the show will keep going “as long as people keep believing stupid shit.”  Looks like it will be around a long time.  Watch him interviewed here at Reason TV
• Apparently there’s to be a remake of my all-time favourite TV show The Prisoner, opening in October.  There’s a nine-minute preview below.  I’m worried by it. [Hat tip Charles Burris]
  
• The swine flu outbreak has seen everyone look to government to solve the public health problem.  Stephen Hicks offers two cautionary tales to suggest we shouldn’t be so quick to look to government to solve this problem either.
  Read Two cautionary tales about cholera, the plague, and politics.
• Canadian Paul McKeever offers “Required reading for anyone interested in the issue of socialised medicine: the Supreme Court of Canada's 2005 decision, which ended Quebec's ban on private health insurance. The reason: government health care is *rationed* care, which was leaving people to suffer and die.”
  Read Supreme Court of Canada - Decisions - Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General).
• George Reisman reckons you should listen to this phone-in interview on the ObamaCare Plan over at Fred Thompons’s website, including news of compulsory five-yearly counselling sessions on euthanasia for over-65s. “An assault on seniors” Reisman calls it.
  Listen here to the Betsy McCaughey Interview, and visit www.defendyourhealthcare.us/.
• And see also two videos on the reality of ObamaCare.
• So come on, Is Health Care a Right? Answer the question, Congressmen!
• Come on, What 'right' to health care?
• You want a quick post that gives a hint to what a true free market in health care could be like. This is it: Target's Free Market Health Care Innovation.
• Why do so many seemingly intelligent people lose their critical faculties when it comes to public transport – especially public transport by train? Liberty Scott fisks all the idiots gathered around the altar of the train.
• Architectural photographer Julius Shulman died last month. For most people, when they think of modernist architecture, it will be a photograph of Shulman’s – like the classic at right -- that will come to mind.
  Read the Wall Street Journal’s obituary here: How Julius Shulman Told a House’s Story.
• This looks like my kind of art gallery too – a Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow that “has invited art lovers to write their thoughts down in an open Bible on display as part of its Made in God's Image exhibition.”  PZ Myers reckons “It's an interesting idea. I've signed a few bibles at people's request myself — I usually mark up the first page with the question, ‘Where are the squid?’” 
  Read My kind of art gallery.
• Matt Nolan at The Visible Hand reckons there’s now fourteen economics blogs in New Zealand.  Flatteringly, he includes my bumbling efforts in the list.
• If you haven’t yet seen the video of the Inspector General of the US Federal Reserve Bank admitting she hasn’t got a clue where several trillion dollars has gone, then yyou really need to have a look now.  It’s frightening.
• And speaking of mismanagement at The Fed, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been circling the States giving “Town Hall Meetings” to ramp up his popularity in the face of a public appalled at the almost daily evidence of the incompetence of him and his colleagues.  Jeff Perren runs the rule over Bernaanke’s Kansas meeting, saying that “During the entire period the ‘deer in the headlights’ look never left his face.”
  Read Bernanke Grilled At Townhall in Kansas, and see if you can answer Jeff’s question:
  ”It's always a little shocking to see a man who has taught at Princeton be so stupid. What remains a mystery is why men of intelligence like Bernanke absorb and accept the blatant nonsense that a healthy-minded college freshman could poke big holes through without effort.”
  Any ideas?
• What’s the answer?  End the Fed. Economist George Selgin says Congressman Ron Paul's bill may never pass, “but history suggests the US economy would be better off without the Federal Reserve.”
  Read End the Fed? A not-so-crazy idea..
• Here’s some vintage pro-inflation propaganda from America’s last Great Depression.  Maybe Ben Bernanke could re-release it?
• Take a look at America’s Debt Clock.  It’s frankly frightening.
• Speaking of a deer in the headlights, perhaps it’s a shame Mr Bernanke hasn’t got a friend like Paddy, an Irish hunter, who dialled 911 to say, "I just shot at something that I thought was a deer but it was another hunter. I'm afraid I just killed Mick." The operator says, "It's OK sir, it may not be as bad as you think. First, make sure Mick's really dead." Paddy says OK and sets down the phone. Then the operator hears a gunshot. Paddy picks up the phone and says, "OK, now what?"
• Afghanistan: Destination? Non-victory.
• Conservative intellectual Bill Kristol – America’s Matthew Hooton -- demonstrates on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart why the term conservative intellectual is an oxymoron.
  Watch here at this link, and you might begin to understand why Ayn Rand called today’s conservatives “futile, impotent and, culturally, dead.
  “They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing [she said]. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.”
  Kristol is Exhibit A for the prosecution. Watch here at this link.
• Or as Andy Clarkson (aka The Charlotte Capitalist) asks, "Are Conservatives Going To Save Socialism Again?"
• If you thought those subjectivist philosophy professors were snarky about Ayn Rand in the New York Times this week, then you should have seen how Friedrich Nietzsche was received by his “colleagues” at Basel University.  Ouch!
  There’s nothing so vicious as a philosophy professor in the face of a competitor who’s telling them their time is up.
• Subjectivist philosophy professors don’t like Ayn Rand, but why are more and more businessmen falling in love with her novel Atlas Shrugged?
  Alex Epstein gives a pithy explanation in Why Businessmen Love Atlas Shrugged.
• Speaking of outraged charlatans, psychotherapists are outraged that Wikipedia has put online the Rorshach inkblot tests that they use to help practice their chicanery. Poor dears.
  Read A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?.
• By the way, you won’t believe the Internet Porn Statistics, even when they’re so elegantly presented.  Watch Internet Porn Statistics.
  Thank goodness we’re all paying $1.5 billion to get broadband, eh?
• A 1951 Phoenix home that famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his son has been sold for US$2.8 million.  That’s its lounge on the right.  Head here to learn more.
• Eric Crampton reckons Phillip Field’s conviction for corruption is Eroding our Clean Green image.
  Although Jim Hopkins reckons that between Phillip Field and Bill English, they might be able to help us close at least one gap with Australia: the corruption gap.
• Here’s what some people are calling “the greatest letter of complaint ever” – a disgruntled Virgin Airlines passenger writing to Richard Branson.  Hilarious.
  Read Greatest ever letter of complaint.
• Fellow Wagner fans fearful of how Katherina Wagner is execrating her grandfather’s work might at least like to know that she’s bring the Bayreuth Festival experience to the web, including live webcasts of performances! Head to the really excellent Bayreuth website here, and you’ll find yourself in heaven. Or at least Valhalla.
• In Ayn Rand's final public talk, she exhorts a group of businessmen to stop apologizing, and stop supporting anti-capitalist institutions: "It is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers." See how the force of her ideas captivated an audience and drew a tumultuous response.
  Watch The Sanction of the Victims.

Political trials

Is it just me, or do the trials of Maryanne Thompson and Phillip Field look like political trials more than genuine criminal trials?  Perhaps “payback” for the failure to ping well-connected politicians from the previous regime when they were in power?

Frankly, having heard the evidence against Field I’m still no clearer than I was before what he’s actually done wrong .  And as far as Maryanne Thompson’s PhD thesis at the London School of Economics goes, the witnesses from the London School of Economics hardly covered themselves in glory when they had to explain how they’d lost it “down a black hole,” and why they never effectively communicated regarding her oral examination.

No, these two look like to me nothing more than political trials, complete the with backdrop of barbarians baying for blood that every political trial has ever had.

Looks like a good bloke to me

I'm beginning to like the cut of Phillip Field's gib, especially as it looks like he's happy to thumb his nose at bureaucracy as he has his gib installed.  I had no problem with him helping out a constituent who was being mucked around by the Immigration Department, I appreciated his voting against Labour's speech rationing and nationalisation of children bills, and I enjoyed hearing yesterday's news that he's pushed on with much need building work at his rental homes without worrying himself about getting pesky building consents first.

If he wasn't a politician, I could almost like the man.

Another one down

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, losing one MP from your majority coalition looks like bad luck. But losing two, looks like carelessness.

That's what it looks like now that United's Gordon Copeland has announced he will be joining Phillip Field as the second MP to announce his departure from the ruling coalition, and his plan to set up his own independent party. [See: MP to Quit United Future over Smacking Bill - Newstalk ZB]

So with those two down and the Clark Government now completely reliant on the favours of minor parties to rule, will we see from the influence those minor parties wield over the next year-and-a-bit just exactly how power-hungry the Labour luminaries truly are?

Well, what do you think.

Field or Pledge Card?

Q: Is Helen cutting Phillip Field loose this morning so attention this week is on Field himself instead of Labour and the Pledge Card? Just wondering.

Which is the more important issue, do you think?

RELATED: Politics-NZ, Politics-Labour, Darnton V Clark

Mangere Brown

A friend sent me this map (left) of the area in which I grew up. (If you look hard, you can see Phillip Field's office.) According to the map it's all dark brown. How 'bout that.

This you see, is what use is made of all those census statistics you lot filled out so obediently last year -- they're used by sociologists to produce maps like this: 'The New Zealand Index of Deprivation.' Dark brown means "most deprived." Bright green means "least deprived." The criteria for these measures were chosen by the sociologists who produced the study, as were the colours. Perhaps some of those sociologists have a sense of humour?

Maybe they do. What they don't have however is a broad range of views within their profession -- and who would be surprised about that? In fact, a new study on sociologists themselves (those expensive exercises normally conducted by sociologists) found very little diversity of views among the 'profession.'

In fact, surprise, surprise, the study "found far more support for economic regulations, the regulation of personal choices, and a broad role for government than opposition to them." In other words, they're all slavering state-worshippers.

Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, the authors of the study ("Sociology and Classical Liberalism," THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW, Summer 2006), sent letters to 1000 members of the American Sociological Association asking their preferences about 18 public-policy topics. The 347 responses they received suggest that the sociology profession in the United States tilts heavily to the left and has few, in any, classical liberals.

No suprise at all. No surprise then that all such sociological studies as 'The New Zealand Index of Deprivation' is used simply to justify even more state intervention in areas where atate intevention has already caused more than enough problems.

LINK: Sociology and classical liberalism - The Independent Review

RELATED: Politics-NZ, Auckland, Politics, Welfare, Racism

Nats not oustanding over Field

NZ Herald: Call the police - National gets tough on Field
National is considering going to the police about the dealings of Labour MP Phillip Field...

Excuse me, but what the heck? When examples of real corruption over serious constitutional issues arise, the parliamentary opposition is silent. Minor scandals like this however, and they're all over them -- and regardless of your views of the propriety or otherwise of Field's helping would-be immigrants (and I do have mine), it is only a minor quibble. Minor things obsess Her Majesty's Opposition. Sign a painting you didn't do, throw a tennis ball, or have a nose to tail in a ministerial car, and this opposition are all over it like gonorrhea in an STD clinic.

However when serious constitutional issues arise such as taking Helen Clark to court over her misappropriation of public money in order to run for office, and the parliamentary opposition parties have this to say: "

. . . . . . . ." That's right. They're as quiet as a man who's just received a course of treatment at the STD clinic. It's somewhat enlightening about their priorities, wouldn't you say?

And what's this: The Nats don't just want to dob Field into the police for ... um ... well, they're not sure really, but on top of that they say they "might also alert other Government agencies ... to accusations that the MP used 'slave labour'."

Are they kidding? Have they looked at a dictionary? Let's check. Wikipedia defines "slave labour" as:

A condition of control over a person against their will, enforced by
violence or other forms of coercion. Slavery almost always occurs for the
purpose of securing the labor of the person concerned. A specific form, known as
chattel slavery, implies the legal ownership of a person or persons.

Did Field have any ownership at all over the Thai would-be immigrants? No. Did they paint and tile his house against their will? No. Did he coerce them? No -- and no one has adduced any evidence he did.

If there was any coercion of these would-be immigrants -- of the restless refuse of teeming Thai shores who were here and yearning to breathe free -- they found it in our absurdly restrictive immigration laws, which left their lives and families in limbo and gave anyone who chose to use it the whip hand over their lives. Instead of coercing them however, as immigration offficials eventually did, Field helped them. I for one have no problem with that. I do however have a problem with the immigration laws that made such help necessary, and that left them so desperate.

If there is one good thing that could come from all this, it is this: With our immigration laws on the table and presently under review, it might be time to realise that would-be immigrants are not cattle, they are human beings. Let peaceful people pass borders freely. With that policy in place, situations like those under discussion just wouldn't even occur.

LINKS: National gets tough on Field - NZ Herald
Darnton Vs Clark - trial website
Definitions for slave labour on the web - Wikipedia
Phillip Field - Not PC (Peter Cresswell)

TAGS: Immigration, Politics-NZ, Politics-National, Politics-ACT

Phillip Field

Well, call me Not PC, but I really have no real problem with what Phillip Field is supposed to have done. The result of the inquiry is certainly one that conveniently avoids the possibility of an inconvenient by-election for Labour, but that on its own is no reason to condemn the man who seems 'guilty' of no more than helping out several individuals who were having troubles with Immigration officials.

Those people who think he was exploiting these poor tempest-tossed folk might like to have a look at a TV programme called (I think) 'Border Control' to see the utterly inhuman way these folk are regularly treated by the bullying scum who work for Immigration. As I said in my Cue Card on immigration, “God damn you if the only two words you can find to put together when talking about people who leave their homelands to seek a better life for themselves and their families are ‘illegal aliens.’” Those would be two of the nicer words used by immigration officials to describe these people seeking a better life.

Phillip Field -- who as Mangere MP would necesarily see more of the results of this bullying than most of us, and probably more than any other MP -- was at least able to see these people as human beings, and to find a non-sacrificial way to offer assistance. Good on him for that.

Personally I have more trouble with the bloody QC who was apparently paid nearly half-a-million dollars for the nine months he spent writing this report, and with immigration laws and officers who treat human beings like cattle.

LINK: Cue Card Libertarianism: Immigration - Not PC

TAGS: Immigration, Politics-NZ, Politics-Labour