Utopia, you are standing in it!

That’s a direct quote from a speech given a few days ago by a Republican Senator doing the usual reply to the President’s Congressional address (which was decidedly not a State Of The Union address).

It’s something that tens of millions of American voters, Democrat and Republican alike, agree on about their nation in 2021.

Here’s the context around the statement.

“Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them — and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor. From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress.

By doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal. You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country. It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination. And it’s wrong to try to use our…

Commune Barricade

I don’t know if the news has penetrated all the way down to New Zealand but it seems that the Antifa and BLM groups in Seattle have finally decided to go beyond starting riots and instead try to build something.

Specifically – and very much in the spirit of the 1871 Paris Commune – they’ve decided to create an Anarcho-Communist “state” in the middle of Seattle.

They even took over a Police Station in the area, violently attacking the cops there for several days before the Mayor ordered the Police to abandon the station and effectively yield a six block area to Antifa.

This capitulation didn’t go down too well with the Seattle Police Chief, Carmen Best, who made the following address to her people to make it clear that it was not her decision. She also talks about the incredible physical assault Antifa and other groups made…

In discussions about Universal Basic Income, lots of people are attracted by the idea of making things as simple as possible. Sadly, that doesn’t work well once you take a closer look.

The simplest UBI would pay every Australian an amount equal to the single age pension, which is just above the poverty line. That’s $20000/yr per person or $500 billion for a population of 25 million, about equal to total Federal government expenditure. That would replace about $180 billion in existing social welfare spending. That leaves $320 billion, approximately equal to total revenue from personal and income taxes.

To fill the gap, we would need either to double income tax revenue, scrap all other public spending, or some mixture of the two. Assuming that’s not feasible, we need to start complicating things. The most obvious step is to treat children differently, for example by giving them half the benefits…

The insidious nature of prominent media myths is evident in how casually they are invoked, as if their veracity is beyond question.

These blithe, passing references in news articles and commentary seldom are accompanied by much context or explanation. And their appearance signals how deeply embedded some media myths have become.

Two recent cases serve to illustrate this tendency.

Musings in the New York Times

One example appeared last week in an entertaining if overlong New York Timesarticle that mused about the identity of an elusive and anonymous Instagram user whose handle is rg_bunny1. Over the recent months, user rg_bunny1 has unleashed what the Times called “a daily torrent of quirky, particular images that, taken together, speak to an aesthetic that delights, confounds, fixates and infuriates in equal measures.”

What most interests Media Myth Alertwas the article’s passing reference to Carl Bernstein, one of the Washington…

The new Israeli governing coalition had a major stress test in the early morning hours of 6 July. It came through looking really strong! it failed utterly!

On the one hand, the bill in question went down to defeat, 59-59. The bill was to extend and modify an existing law that expires at midnight. So that’s pretty embarrassing, especially when a critical lost vote was a member of the prime minister’s party, Amichai Chikli of Yamina. Chikli had also voted against the government itself in the investiture vote a few weeks ago, when the government was approved, 60-59. In the vote on this bill, instead of one Ra’am MK abstaining, as in the investiture, two did.

Before I go any further, an important disclaimer: I am NOT interested in debate on the substance of the law in question, other than as it pertains to the specific compromises the governing…

Since Winston emerged a few weeks ago giving the government, media and anyone else he could think of a serve for the rapid descent the country is taking into Te Reo and a change of name to Aotearoa I have been considering the likely rise and rise again of Winston and New Zealand First. Then along came the latest Roy Morgan Poll and that served to confirm my thoughts even though the party did not feature in the poll headlines.

The first thing I did was take a look at Curia and KiwiBlog which displays polling averages and these indicate that historically NZFirst has a `core constituency’ of about 3% – possibly more like 2% at present but it fluctuates and Winston would tell anyone who would listen it is as much as 10% on a good day.

What this does tell me is that all NZFirst has to do…