It Aint True--And Never Has Been

Alarmists Propose Rebranding ‘Climate Change’

Seek Greater "Shock Value" While Truth Flies Out the Window

Thomas Williams
Breitbart News


Climate change alarmists are pushing for a change in vocabulary to scare people into taking global warming more seriously, starting with terms like “global meltdown” and “climate collapse.”
Writing for AdAge this week, Aaron Hall argues that in order to get people to “take action” against climate change, “rebranding” is crucial, since people have gotten too used to the idea that climate is changing and need to be shocked into the notion that the world as we know it is ending.

“Is there a better way to convey the urgency of the situation, while also encouraging folks to take action? Could the tools of branding and brand naming create a more resonant, powerful name?” Mr. Hall asks.  What he and his marketing team came up with was a series of much more frightening labels to stick on climate change in the hope of jolting people into meaningful engagement.

The PM's Mien of "Bumbling Bureaucrat"

Jacinda Ardern Appears Way, Way Out of Her Depth

The more we read about the actions and declarations of New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern the more troubled we become.  This is a serious business.  A high-up Labour Party staff member has (now) had numerous allegations of gross sexual abuse of work colleagues laid at his door.  The Labour Party decided to handle it in-house--despite the allegations of crimes being committed against the complainants.  

Meanwhile, Jacinda Ardern has repeatedly engaged the ever ludicrous Sergeant Schultz response--"WHAT?  I KNOW NOTHING!  NOTHING!". 

Herald Columnist, Heather Du Plessis-Allan puts the matter into perspective:

We’ve asked the Prime Minister to come on the show this evening to answer questions about the Labour party staffer sex allegations.  Our requests went unanswered.

This is what we want to ask her: When did she know that the allegations against a staffer in her office were of an alleged sex crime?  She told media yesterday: ”I was informed in the very beginning that the allegations made were not sexual.”  She told RNZ this morning that she found out yesterday.

“The first I’ve seen the complaints of that nature was when I read then." Asked when that was, she said "When I saw them in the Spinoff.”  That is very hard to believe.

The Colossal Wreck

Deceived and Deceiving

A colleague was ruminating on the human condition the other day and pointed out one of the paradoxes of human nature.

The only human being who has ever managed to live and die in total, impeccable truth is the Lord Jesus Christ.  He alone spoke and lived in total truth before His heavenly Father, before the angels, before His family, before the state authorities, before all whom He met and with whom he interacted.

Everyone else upon earth, to one degree or other, lives a lie.  Whilst in almost every way humans are superior to all other life-forms on earth it remains true that humans are the only species on earth who live in deceit, lies, and untruthfulness--to one degree or another.  Does not the prophet say, "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it?"  [Jeremiah 17:10]

So, here we have mankind--the highest and most developed being upon the earth--at the top of the evolutionary tree, the humanists would argue.  Yet this one species is in many ways the most flawed and warped of all creatures.

Society's Christian Hangovers

What's Wrong With Cheating?

An interesting article has appeared in the NZ Herald.  If Alice were here, she might call it "curiouser and curiouser".  The essence of the matter is as follows:

More than $2.1 million will be forfeited to the police following a long-running legal battle with an alleged cheating service for university assignments.  In the first case of its kind, a settlement judgment released to the Herald this afternoon comes five years after the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the police first started an investigation into Assignment4U. 

No charges were ever laid, but the police took a civil case under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act, which has a lower evidential threshold of on the balance of probabilities.  The police case was Steven Li and Fan Yang, linked to companies running   Assignment4U, were providing "cheating services" for students to fraudulently submit purchased assignments as their own work.  [NZ Herald]

We are not sure of the ethnicity of the people involved in the systemic cheating enterprise, but their names suggest a Chinese origin.  We have seen cases over the years where students from various countries, but mainly Asian, have engaged in corrupt practices in an attempt to get passing grades in university or college.  Put more directly, they cheated.  Now an enterprising "firm" has made substantial profits from turning the latent demand into a business. 

A question of great moment is begged.

Credibility Long Gone

"Scientist" Hides Behind Ad-Hominem Attacks

Michael Mann is a snake-oiler extraordinaire.  He is one of the greater charlatans abroad today.  He stands forth as one of the best in what is a very competitive field.  Mann is a global warming huckster who has engaged in lots of deceptive and misleading behaviour as he has promoted his scams.

He recently appeared before a US congressional committee.  Here is an account of his behaviour, published in National Review Online:

Michael Mann Embarrasses Himself before Congress 

If the climate-change evangelist can’t be bothered to take a House hearing seriously, why should anyone take him seriously?

Julie Kelly

National Review Online

In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia:

Lysenko was a Russian agronomist and it became Leninist doctrine to impose his views about heredity, which were crackpot theories, completely at odds with the world’s scientists. Under Stalin, scientists were being jailed if they disagreed with his theories about agriculture. And Russian agriculture actually suffered, scientists were jailed, many died in their jail cells and potentially millions of people suffered from the disastrous agriculture policies that followed from that.

The gist of Mann’s anecdote was that scientists who challenge the ruling government’s diktat on any given scientific issue are demonized and punished while innocent bystanders suffer. In the here and now, this would seemingly apply to the minority of scientists brave enough to question the reigning dogma of climate science. After all, these are the folks who have been threatened by top law-enforcement officials, personally and professionally attacked by their peers, and even driven out of their academic positions due to the harassment.

But astonishingly, Mann was not talking about those scientists: He was talking about himself.

Screwtape's Diabolical Advice

God Owes Me--Big Time

"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered."

C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters

The idea that a "legitimate claim has been denied" depends upon a perverted doctrine of human rights.  This doctrine has now been accepted universally throughout the West.  How successful the Satan has been in this instance! 

The idea that "I have a legitimate claim" rests upon a foundation of believing that "I am owed . . . ", which is to say, "People owe me . . ." which in turn is to say, "Society as a whole, or mankind in the abstract, owes me."

Having Cake and Eating It Too

The Self Deceit of the Modern Mind

Chesterton writes the following on the indifference of nature.  As you read this passage, keep David Attenborough in mind, an evolutionist whose breathless reverent descriptions of the natural world and its inhabitants represents the stupidest sentimentality since stupidity first emerged (from the primordial slime, naturally.)

There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature.  Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value.  To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it.  Both aristocracy and democracy and are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.  But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject.  She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable.

What's a Few Falsehoods Between Friends

Lying For the Cause

Victor Hanson has written a piece in National Review Online in which he discusses the proclivity of modern Western society towards untruth and lying.  To be sure, Islamic societies have endorsed and encouraged lying for centuries.  In Islam it is acceptable to lie to one's wife and to one's enemies and to kaffirs when one is engaged in jihad or holy war (which is pretty much all the time, since jihad occurs whenever someone says it does).  In Islamic ethics, the end (enforced submission to Allah) justifies the means.

But traditionally the Christian West has insisted that truth-telling is an absolute moral requirement.  The Ninth Commandment enjoins: "Thou shalt not bear false witness".  But as Western nations have rejected the Lord Jesus Christ and officially and unofficially replaced Him with secularism and atheism, every one of the commandments have been rejected and dismissed.  But this begs a question: if God is not feared and His absolute commandments are not revered, why should anyone bother telling the truth about anything.  There would be nothing wrong with lying and deceit.  It may be inconvenient, but would not be immoral or unethical.

The Commentariat would doubtless splutter about the damage to commerce and property if one were permitted to lie.

Damnable Lying

A Web of Self-Deceit

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott

Telling habitual lies is not unusual amongst intellectuals.  So Paul Johnson alleges in his book, Intellectuals.  [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.]  He cites Rousseau (a notorious dissembler), Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre and Gollancz.  Their lying was systemic, infecting their personal relationships (wives, children, friends), their writing and public personae. 

The more a culture removes itself from the constant exfoliation of Scripture upon the epidermis of its conscience, the more it tends to tolerate, accept, and practise mendacity.

Despite this, and despite in many cases the public exposure of their respective mendacities, the public has continued to fawn over them--both whilst alive and long after their deaths.  In a post-Christian culture, this comes as no surprise.  In a Christian culture--or a culture pervasively influenced by Christian ethics--lying is regarded as an egregious evil.  The reason why rests with God, Who is Truth.  He has declared definitively that He hates lies.

There are six things that the Lord hates,
    seven that are an abomination to him:

haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
    and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
    feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
    and one who sows discord among brothers.
(Proverbs 6: 16-19)

Notice that lying gets a condemnatory double billing.

What Do Islam and the Cold War Have in Common?

 Jihad To Control Schools Justifies Lying

We wrote recently about the Muslim practice of taqiyya, which justifies Muslims lying in three circumstances, one of which is war or jihad.  It is discussed extensively in  Patrick Sookhdeo's, Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam. (McLean, VA: Isaac Publishing, 2007), who cites Islamic leaders, teachers, and historical sources, including quotations from Muhammad.

A basic idea is that non-Muslims or outsiders are not owed the truth.  In recent days a potential case study of taqiyya in action has come to light.  Muslims are allegedly trying to take over schools in Birmingham and Bradford in the UK and lying and dissembling appear to be at the heart of their tactical approach.  We say "appear" because at this stage investigations by school authorities, local councils, and the police are underway and are not yet completed. 

But the prima facie case appears pretty strong.

Tangled Webs Being Woven

Who Made Up the Porky?

Where did that fabricated story about the attack upon the US embassy in Libya come from?  This has now become the pressing question of the presidential campaign in the United States.

The story (now proven to be "spin") came to the widespread attention of the country when  Ambassador Susan Rice went on six weekend talk shows one Sunday to tell the nation five days later that the attack upon the US embassy compound in Benghazi, Libya which killed four US government employees including the US ambassador, was a spontaneous demonstration of public rage incited and caused by an anti-Islam film made in the US. 

Up until that time few had heard of the now-demonised video.  Hillary Clinton's US Secretary of State has now gone on the record stating that the State Department at no time, not even at the beginning of the attack thought that it was a public demonstration gone wrong.  This from the Daily Mail:

The Religion of Peace

Don't Offend Us, Or Else . . .

There have been cultures in the past which have institutionalised dissembling, deception and lies. The West, built upon the foundations of the Christian faith and the Ten Commandments, of which only vestiges now remain, still struggles to come to terms with institutional lying or ideologically driven deception. Almost everyone assumes that in the public square people endeavour to speak the truth.

In some Asian cultures, lying or camouflaging the truth, is very common. Stories abound of Japanese and Chinese (often regarded as inscrutable to Westerners) who manifest excessive politeness, yet inwardly despise the barbarian. The truth tends to come out at 3 am in the bars when the sake has freely flowed. The Japanese, of course, are culturally attuned to the practice of layers of deception (or deflection of the truth); they can "read through" the the dissembling. They understand what is going on.

The Cold War was largely a war fought by the respective intelligence agencies. A polite term was invented for the lies that were deliberately told to lead one's "cold enemy" astray. That term was "disinformation". Using lies as a weapon against the enemy has a long and noble history. It was celebrated and lionized, of course, by that ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. But the West largely accepts that in warfare such lying is fair play and within the rules of cricket.

But what happens when the West is faced with a foe or a people which is ideologically committed to lying or deceiving the West whilst there is no war in sight? The result is that the West as a whole becomes an easy dupe--or, as Lenin put it, a useful idiot. Islam is the foe. Or, more accurately, Islam sees the West as one of its foes which must be conquered and subdued as the religion of Muhammed spreads over the globe. Its religious teaching and ideology endorses telling untruths and lies to non-Muslims. To the committed Muslim the infidel is not owed the truth. If the infidel is blocking the expansion and influence of Islam he deserves to be misled and deceived in order to be defeated.

In the US Congress, Representative Peter King is about to kick off a series of hearings to explore how US citizens are recruited to become Islamic terrorists who seek to kill US citizens in their own country. It has the Left in apoplectic conniptions--but that's another story. "Moderate" Islamic leaders in the US are also professing outrage. They are warning of the great damage these hearings will cause.



These "moderate" leaders have been busy assuring everyone that Islam is not a violent religion and that Islamic people are, well, just like everyone else. They have condemned terrorism and violence in the name of Islam. Now, however, they are saying something in addition. They are telling the "useful idiots" that if these hearings are held, Islamic people in the US will be radicalised and will become willing terrorist recruits. The proposition appears to be: if you say something to offend us, we will react with retaliatory violence.  Does anyone sense a slight contradiction here? Both cannot be true. But the Islamic leader appears to have no difficulty whatsoever in speaking out of both sides of his mouth with a very straight face probably because prevarication is an acceptable tactic when dealing with an infidel.

The proposition that Samuel Huntingdon provoked Islamic people to terrorism (as some self-styled moderate Muslims argue) or that somehow Huntingdon is responsible for the radicalization and terrorism of Muslims because of his book Clash of Civilizations would be absurd, unless Islamic ideology teaches that criticism and verbal argument should be dealt with by deadly force.

An interesting question is, which is the lie: the proposition that Islam is not intrinsically violent, or the threat that King's hearing will provoke Islamic Americans to violence and terrorism?

In the nineteen sixties, Bobby Kennedy--then US Attorney General--called for a series of hearings into the role and operations of the Mafia in the US. Nobody at the time argued that the hearings were unfairly discriminatory against the Italian minority. Nor did anyone have the chutzpah to argue that as a result of the hearings Italians would be offended and radicalised and that the Mafia would get many more recruits.

But then that was another day and Italian Americans did not have spokesmen for whom lying was a weapon in an ideological and religious war. Nor did Italian Americans have a common ideology of world religious domination by force of arms if necessary.

Meta-Narratives Either Make One Wise or Foolish

The Power to Persuade

Meta-narratives matter.  A meta-narrative is a "theory of everything"--a narrative which purports to explain everything and into which all reality "fits" and by which it is interpreted.

Christianity is a meta-narrative.  The All-governing, All-conditioning God created all things out of nothing.  He is the Maker of the heavens and the earth; all contingencies, all apparently random events such as the falling of a hair from one's head, or the casting of a lot are in fact ordered and controlled and commanded exhaustively and infinitely by God.In this meta-narrative, even opposition or Unbelief serves the purpose God intends and has planned for it, as He subdues all enemies under the feet of His beloved Son, Jesus Christ.

It turns out, however, that not just Christians believe in a meta-narrative.  All human beings have a meta-narrative of one sort or other.  It is part of what it means to be made in God's image.  It is part of the inescapable imprint of God upon each human being.  The question is not whether to believe in a meta-narrative or not, but which meta-narrative one chooses to submit to. The word "submit" is deliberately chosen: meta-narratives rule and govern; they subjugate us, for better or worse.

Brendan O'Neill in the blog Spiked once again takes up the cudgels against the meta-narrative of global warming.  What he describes shows the power of meta-narrative to command and control those in its thrall.  In this case devotees of global warming are found to be interpreting all reality through the filter of their global warming meta-narrative, such that every piece of data is both pre-interpreted and re-interpreted according to the meta-narrative.  This means it is of little value discussing the "science" or the "facts" without discussing the foundational meta-narrative which first establishes, orders, ranks, prioritises, verifies and interprets the data.

But lest we mock too loudly at the folly of the global warming brigade it would behove all of us to dust off our own meta-narratives.  In truth, each of us is just as conditioned and shaped by our own meta-narratives.  Wisdom requires that we be self-conscious of the all pervasive shaping of our lives by our particular world-view.  If we fail, we risk ending up as foolish as the folk that O'Neill skewers so ruthlessly.

The icy grip of the politics of fear

Brendan O’Neill

You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the chasm that divides today’s so-called expert classes from the mass of humanity than the snow crisis of Christmas 2010. They warn us endlessly about the warming of our planet; we struggle through knee-deep snow to visit loved ones. They host million-dollar conferences on how we’ll cope with our Mediterranean future; we sleep for days in airport lounges waiting for runways to be de-iced. They pester the authorities for more funding for global-warming research; we keep an eye on our elderly neighbours who don’t have enough cash to heat their homes.

This isn’t to say that the entire climate-change thesis is wrong. I’m not one of those people who believes snowfall necessarily disproves every claim made by warming-obsessed climatologists. Rather the snow crisis demonstrated, in high definition, the gap between the fear-fuelled thinking of the elite and the struggles of everyday people. It illuminated the million metaphorical miles that now separate the fantasy politics of our so-called betters from the concerns of the rest of us.
Not surprisingly, with snowstorms smothering Western Europe and the East Coast of America, many asked: ‘What happened to global warming?’

On the 20-hour bus-and-boat-and-train-and-car journey I took from London to Galway, surrounded by people forced to make a similar trek because their flights were also cancelled, there was much jocular banter along the lines of: ‘So this is the climate change we’ve been warned about…’ As people made new friends and arranged impromptu carpools for the final legs of their journeys, there was a palpable sense that the world we inhabit is not the same as that inhabited by greens.

That isn’t surprising when you consider that greens have been telling us for the past decade that snow will disappear from our lives. Literally. ‘Snow is starting to disappear from our lives’, reported the Independent in March 2000. It quoted an expert from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (of recent Climategate fame) who said ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’. In 2006, the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists said winters had become ‘warmer and less snowy’ thanks to global warming.

Other climate-change campaigners told us to prepare for Saharan weather. A book published as part of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ jamboree in 2007 - The Global Warming Survival Handbook - said there would soon be ‘searing temperatures, killer storms, drought, plague and pestilence’. Award-winning green theorists told us to prepare for life on a ‘hotter planet’ in which ‘the traditional British winter [is] probably gone for good’. Newspapers provided us with a ‘hellish vision of life on a hotter planet’ where deserts would ‘reach into the heart of Europe’ and global warming would ‘reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles’.

Dramatic stuff. And unadulterated nonsense. The thing that occupied people’s minds at the end of 2010 was not how to explain to their sweating children in the deserts of Hampshire why snow disappeared from our lives, but rather how to negotiate actual snow. Again, this isn’t to say that the snow proves there is no planetary warming at all: if it is mad to cite every change in the weather as proof that Earth is doomed, then it’s probably also unwise to dance around in the slushy white stuff in the belief that it proves that all environmental scientists are demented liars. But the world of difference between expert predictions (hot hell) and our real experiences (freezing nightmare) is a powerful symbol of the distance that now exists between the apocalypse-fantasising elites and the public.

What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies - and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis.

Indeed, The Global Warming Survival Handbook gave the game away when it encouraged people to see the future through ‘carefully crafted “what if?” stories’. Admitting that it is virtually impossible to predict our climatic future - ‘We can’t even forecast if it will rain next week’ - it advised us to host ‘scenario parties’ to ‘pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends’. It’s the closest we’ve had to an admission by the green movement that its warnings of future desert-spread are based on its own feverish teenage imaginings rather than on scientific forecasts. The snow crisis demonstrated this in Technicolor (well, in bright white): that the expert elites have taken leave of the realm of reality, preferring to seek meaning and momentum in the fantasy notion that they are fighting a hot apocalypse.

Anyone with a shred of self-respect who had predicted The End Of Snow would surely now admit that he was wrong. But no. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the snow crisis is that it was held up as evidence, not that the experts were mistaken, but that the public is stupid. Apparently it’s those who ask ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’, rather than those who predicted ‘no more traditional British winters’, who need to have their heads checked. Because what they don’t understand - ignoramuses that they are - is that heavy snow is also proof that our planet is getting hotter, and that industrialised society is to blame, just as surely as the absence of snow was proof of the same thing 10 years ago.

‘The snow outside is what global warming looks like’, said one headline, in a newspaper which 10 years ago said that the lack of snow outside is what global warming looks like. A commentator said that anyone who says ‘what happened to global warming?’ is an ‘idiot’ because nobody ever claimed that global warming would ‘make Britain hotter in the long run’. (Er, yes they did.) Apparently the reason people don’t understand the (new) global-warming-causes-snow thesis is because they are ‘simple, earthy creatures, governed by the senses’: ‘What we see and taste and feel overrides analysis. The cold has reason in a deathly grip.’
This reveals the stinging snobbery at the heart of the politics of global warming. Because what we have here is an updated version of the elitist idea that the better classes have access to a profound and complicated truth that the rest of us cannot grasp. Where we have merely sensory reactions (experience), they have reason and analysis (knowledge). Our critical reaction to the snow actually revealed our failure to understand The Truth, as unveiled by The Science, rather than revealing their wrongheadedness in predicting an ‘end to snow’. We are ‘simple’, they are ‘reasoned’. In 2011, we should take everything that is said by this new doom-mongering expert caste with a large pinch of salt – and then spread that salt on the snow which they claimed had disappeared from our lives.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.

Could we be that stupid?  Yes, we could.  After all, it is the fool who has said in his heart that God does not exist. 

 ¹⁸For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. ¹⁹For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. ²¹For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³and exchanged the glory of  the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.  Romans 1: 18--23

All those with the meta-narrative of Unbelief are engaged in just as much foolish massaging and shaping of reality as the fools skewered by O'Neill.  They do it despite the plain evidence that God has shown them of Himself--both external to them in the creation, and internally in their very being.  

Michael "Scorched Earth" Cullen

How to Weaken a Nation

We found ourselves laughing derisively the other day when it was rumoured that Central North Island tribe Tuwharetoa were on the verge of hiring Michael Cullen, former Finance Minister of New Zealand, as their chief negotiator with the Crown over indigenous compensation and Treaty claims. We wondered if the iwi was mad or just plain dumb.

Dr Cullen has to have earned the sobriquet of being the worst negotiator in the world--that is, if you want to avoid deals and settlements that end up costing you billions of dollars. We would rather have Forrest Gump as our lead negotiator than Dr Michael Cullen.

Let's review two disastrous deals that bear Cullen's watermark arrogance.

Firstly, the Crown's purchase of a controlling interest in Air New Zealand. It bears all the hallmarks of Cullenesque skills. It began with an obduracy against any potential owner of Air New Zealand that did not have Qantas in its name. At the time, Cullen was fixated on Qantas owning Air New Zealand because he thought it was inevitable that the two countries would grow closer together economically, and that he could be persuaded to support globalisation and free trade and internationalisation of commerce as long as it did not extend further than the Tasman Sea. Cullen was clearly in a 1970's time warp. Time had passed him by, but Cullen still had an old socialist cloth cap hanging in his closet. Apparently there was no dust on it; it was used regularly in secret rituals and always on the first of May.

He pushed and pulled to stymie a substantial investment by Singapore Airlines in Air New Zealand (which was desperate for fresh capital at the time, after its disastrous foray into (yes, you guessed it) Australia with its much vaunted purchase of Ansett--the sick man of Australian aviation. Ansett had collapsed and Air New Zealand was in a parlous condition.) Cullen wanted Qantas to invest. Qantas bosses were too smart and commercial.

So Singapore Airlines got unceremoniously jilted--which they (and Singapore) will not forget for a long time--so Cullen had to end up putting taxpayer's money at risk, forced to purchase a controlling interest in Air New Zealand. The taxpayers' investment is in the red. Cullen is responsible for a substantial loss to all of us--and it is highly questionable whether the investment will ever now generate a return which matches the cost of capital. Airlines remain one of the highest risk businesses on the planet, and Air New Zealand is a small bit player operating from one of the smallest most far-flung countries in the world.

The second example of Cullen's brilliance is his purchase of Kiwi Rail. He deliberately sidelined his own Treasury officials (he knew they would not approve or endorse his actions) and engaged in direct negotiations with Toll Holdings. Cullen the negotiator, the big commercial kahuna, cutting and thrusting at the front end of commerce, swinging the big deals. He ended up paying an exorbitant price for an asset which Toll regarded as an albatross around its neck. Now, the projected costs for the business have ballooned out to over $3bn.

The Australians could not believe their luck. They called it the "Sale of the Century." They could not believe that Cullen could be so stupid, commercially naive, and ignorant of the true costs of running a capital intensive, moribund business, relying on outmoded technology. But for Cullen--being a socialist--the cost of taxpayers capital was zero. He signed the deal for over $500m purchase cost because to him, $500 million was--literally--nothing! It was taxpayer's money and the cost of that capital was zero. Thus passes the folly and ignorance of a seventies cloth-cap socialist. Now we all have the pay the costs for such madness.

We could go on to mention Cullen's illegal interference in stopping the sale of part of Auckland International Airport to a passive Canadian pension fund investor. Well, what did you expect. Canada is way beyond the limits of the Tasman Sea. Then there is the financial scandal of the ACC. The Labour government, believing in the intrinsic superiority of a state run and owned insurance monopoly, blithely increased its coverage and services (because the cost of capital is zero, after all) and has left us with a $3 billion unfunded shortfall.

As David Farrar says, the graph is eloquent.



Cullen knew this--or at least he knew there was a significant unfunded liability to the Crown accounts--but chose, illegally, to cover it over prior to the election. A man full of arrogant guile and deception.

We will not mourn Cullen's passing from political life. He appears to have been a dishonest, deceitful, small-minded man, yet one who saw himself as a legend in his own time. "I have spent it all!" was his arrogant boast. But, worse, he has spent way beyond what the government had. Long years of the yoke of public debt have been left to us. He has done great damage to the country that will take years, if not decades to repair.

We hope Tuwharetoa have their eyes wide open.

When Lying Becomes Lifestyle

The Left Wing and the Lying Tongue

Jerusalem is a city which is deeply committed to truth. The Ninth Commandment requires that we bear no false witness. Everywhere the Scriptures condemn deceit and lying. Athens has no such scruples. This is understandable.

Athens believes almost universally that the cosmos is the product of brute chance. The world is random. If the world is random, truth and truthfulness are at best useful conventions to be used for pragmatic reasons, when it advances one's cause or interests. When, however, truth and truthfulness become inconvenient, when they become an impediment to one's interests being advanced, they can be discarded at will.

In the public sphere, truth is a mere commodity to be used or discarded at will. Thankfully, the courts in Athens are still concerned with truth and truthfulness. But there have been times in the past—and maybe it remains true to this day—that the police have not been interested in the truth. We have seen the spectacle in recent days of an undercover officer who has confessed to lying on the witness stand around 150 times in order to get convictions and “put the buggers away.” He claims he was acting on orders from his superiors. His conscience is now troubling him deeply.

Left wing activists and degenerate politicians in Athens are notorious for lying. Deceit and mendacity are their clothes of choice. They have no conscience, no shame. It is all about achieving the goal, about getting one's way. For years the homosexual network has spread rumours about public figures, sportspeople, celebrities etc being closet homosexuals. The tactic is an attempt to make homosexuality more socially acceptable. Virtually every All Black captain, for example, has been the target of such slurs in recent decades.

After a while, people who live in such deceit become unable to distinguish between truth and lies. They lose the capacity for truthfulness as their consciences become deadened. Lies trip off the tongue without a second thought. They would pass every lie detector test. For them lying has become a natural part of life.

We have recently been subjected to the spectacle of Winston Peters being caught out lying repeatedly in public. No remorse. No apology. No shame. Lying has become a lifestyle choice—a way of living. Deceit and mendacity are useful tools to be employed to one's advantage whenever needed.

Most recently we have been treated to the effortless lying by the Minister of Finance who glibly told reporters that he had had no time to brief the Leader of the Opposition about the government guarantee of bank deposits. Things were moving so swiftly, he purred, we did not have time. Clark and Cullen wanted to secure some political advantage out of something which was forced upon them by Australian moves. So he did not brief the Leader of the Opposition in advance--and then lied about it to cover it up.

However, the truth came out. The Governor of the Reserve Bank told Dr Cullen that he was going to brief the Leader of the Opposition and Cullen explicitly forbade him. (Dr Bollard, being Governor of a legislatively independent Reserve Bank should have ignored Cullen and gone ahead, but he capitulated—but that's an example of poor judgment and possibly cowardice, not of deceit.) To his credit, the Governor later apologized to the Leader of the Opposition.

But Dr Cullen had told a barefaced lie to the public. It was told with glibness. It was told with an honest countenance. Lying has become natural. Dr Cullen is a true son of Athens.

When the Scriptures describe the wicked, it often characterises them as being “unjust and deceitful.” (For example, in Psalm 43: 1, we read: “Vindicate me, O God, and plead my case against an ungodly nation. Deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.”)

When men harden their hearts against God and turn their faces towards their immaterial idols, the law of God is rejected. As a consequence the truth becomes unimportant. It is a worthless commodity. Lies and mendacity are tools of trade. They become a normal part of life. Athens is a city built upon the Great Lie and animated by the Father of Lies. Deceit is the coin of the realm.

But Jerusalem is a city built upon foundations of justice and truth. That is why, eventually, Jerusalem will triumph in the earth. Deceit is self-defeating. Habitual deceit in the end destroys the mendacious. They fall into the very snares they lay for others. The way that Athens will end will be “not with a bang, but a whimper.”