Brett Kimberlin is a Terrorist

Please note: Every time you post on the internet about Brett Kimberlin, he gets emailed a copy of your post.

Now, if you call him a terrorist, he gets upset by this.

Given he is a convicted bomber, it is in no way deformation to call him a terrorist. It is to call him a pedophile, because that matter has not gone before the court. So I’m not calling him a pedophile – he isn’t.

He’s also got a history of lots of other crimes including perjury. In fact he’s such a shameless liar, he’s gone out and got peace order against someone right after a judge told him in no uncertain terms that his last peace order was completely and utterly invalid.

But the idea of annoying a terrorist, particularly a terrorist who’s using the court system to shut down and intimidate people who call him what he is, appeals to me.

So hence the post.

(I know it’s supposed to be Friday, but what the hey – let’s get the party started!)

This is how you post on a legal situation

Readers may find this case interesting.

The link is to a summary of the main post. I do this because the main post is huge. I read at a fair clip, and it still took me over 2 hours to get through it, and another half our or so to read the final court transcript.

But I would make the following points:

1. The way that he even became involved in the first place is just bizarre. Basically, the guy doing the persecution has a history of using the court system to harass anyone who remotely offends him. Apparently, helping someone who he’s attacked with legal services, no matter how trivial or benign those services, counts.
2. He includes all the background and details, not just his conclusions about the information*.
3. He includes all the court details – right down to transcripts of the hearings themselves, and notes where there may be minor errors (he lost a thumb drive)
4. He includes external sources – you don’t need to take his word for it.
5. He waited until the legal system dismissed the claims before writing the post

A quite from his opening lines:

What didn’t occur to him was that there was a security camera that captured what really happened in the courthouse that day.  I have the footage and I have included it in a long post that tells the whole story of how I came to be there that day and what really happened.  You will read with your own eyes the transcripts and documents in which he claimed I beat him up, and then you will see the footage that proves that this was a fabrication.  I have even created a video comparing his description of what happened to the video footage, piece-by-piece.  In other words, you won’t have to believe my word on this.  You will only have to believe your eyes.

But the post will also tell you the harrowing story of the damage this man has done to my life.  He did more than just lie about what happened.  This convicted document-forger produced fake photographs of his supposed injuries and even fake medical records.  And using that falsified evidence and his lies, he convinced the Montgomery County State’s Attorney to maintain second degree assault charges against me for over two months—with a punishment of up to ten years in prison, if convicted—taking it so close to trial that I was forced to take the time and expense of preparing much of my defense.  He has cost me and my wife our jobs because our workplace was frightened that this violent bomber might show up at work.  After all, he had published my home address and work address in court filings, for no reason other than to harass me.  He has obtained a peace order (similar to a restraining order) against me in part for supposed “harassment” for having told the truth about him on this blog.  And you will learn that after the video emerged, the charges were dropped and the peace order was dismissed on appeal.

That last court case transcript is a particularly entertaining read. The judge thew out his claim even before the defense started their case, without being asked.

 Yes, it was that bad.

* It’s one of my pet peves that people so often will describe their conclusions, not the information itself. It’s a good way of getting people on your side when you are in fact in the wrong.

A roundup of stupidity

A few items of “low hanging fruit“

In 2003, Khaled el-Masri, a German car-salesman, was kidnapped by the CIA in Macedonia. He was rendered to a CIA’s secret CIA prison in Afghanistan for interrogation, during which he was beaten, tortured, and raped. Why? Because the CIA couldn’t spell; they thought he was Khalid al-Masri, al-Qaeda mastermind.

Well, I grant you that they got the wrong guy, and treated him barbarically, but I wouldn’t be so quick to jump on their spelling “mistake”. 

The difficulty in Romanizing Arabic was illustrated in the 1980s by the multiple spellings for Libyan strongman Moammar/Muammar Gadaffi/Gaddafi/Gathafi/Kadafi/Kaddafi/Khadafy/Qadhafi/Qathafi/ etc. The official Library of Congress transliteration would be “Qadhdhafi,” but the library opted for “Quaddafi” instead, because the “dhdh” looked so strange in English. In 1986, most publications, including the AP, adopted “Gadhafi” as the new standard. 

…

Next, our democracy is collapsing!?!

This is important. The credibility of Parliament is at stake. Either these rules mean something, or they don’t. And if MPs fail to enforce them, then they will confirm the public’s perception of a culture of corruption and a conspiracy of silence around it.

There’s a conspiracy of silence around MPs inability to value gift baskets!!!  This could bring down our entire democracy!!!

It’s almost like we only expect them to run the country or something. Perhaps we could instead elect our politicians by a The Price is Right championship?

…

On this one, what DPF said. Sometimes, it helps to actually know what you’re talking about before you start calling something a rort.

…

This one is a jaw dropper:

The Budget will be delivered next week, and the government is well into the usual pre-announcements, dribbling out Budget programmes to distract from the ongoing John Banks scandal.

It’s rumored that last year’s budget was almost cancelled because John Banks wasn’t in Parliament.

Yesterday’s “good news” announcement was >more money for elective (meaning unnecessary) surgery and cancer treatment. Yesterday’s bad news was that they are paying for this by raising prescription charges from $3 to $5.

Apparently, if it’s not a dire emergency, you don’t need surgery. He should probably take up a discussion with this guy, who understood what elective  actually means and seemed to consider that National should spend more money on such procedures:

That said, they do make a few suggestions. Unfortunately, they’re not exactly encouraging. On waiting lists for elective (non-urgent) surgery, they talk up a storm about how waiting lists are too long and this is unacceptable. But their “solution” – paying surgical teams a bonus for every operation completed – fundamentally misses the point. Elective surgery waiting lists are not caused by lazy surgeons or inefficient DHBs in need of “incentives” – they are caused by central government not funding enough operations to meet the demand. But National explicitly disavows any solution involving more money, saying that this would simply lead to “cost inflation” and that any gains would only be temporary. The real reason, of course, is that it is money that could be spent on tax cuts.

As for the claim that a $5 charge is too much for some people to afford, one can only wonder in utter disgust at how people value their health so cheaply, and at those who enable such deplorable behaviour by excusing it.

French Turkeys vote for Early Christmas

A few days ago, I opened a newspaper to the “World” section and read a headline that said something like…

French Presidential Candidate Promises to end Austerity

Well, from that moment I knew who was going to win.

I mean, who’d vote for austerity? Pain, suffering and discipline aren’t exactly vote winners – never have been. Winston Churchill made his famous “Blood and Toil” speech, but that was in the face of an immediate and painfully obvious threat.

Actually, the current crisis is also painfully obvious. Governments have been spending more money than they’ve taken in as tax for years. Debt in many European countries is now at crisis levels. But bizarrely, some have convinced themselves that to rectify this situation, the solution is to increase tax, and avoid cutting spending. This in spite of the lessons of history, which tell us that the only sure way to balance a governments books is to cut spending, and the dubious net value of increasing taxes on a small, mobile, minority of “others”.

So now that the French have a new president, it’s all roses.

In addition to Greece – where the pro-austerity quislings have officially lost their majority – there was another important election today: France. And there, Socialist candidateFrançois Hollande has trounced Nicolas Sarkozy to become France’s first left-wing President in 17 years.

This is going to make a big difference. Hollande is opposed to austerity, so he’ll be running a better economic policy in France. But he’ll also be opposing German attempts to impose an austerity straitjacket at a European level – and that will be enough to make sure it won’t happen. The result is …[snip fantasy]

The markets are not going to like this of course (let alone the austerity cultists at the European Central bank), but they are just going to have to learn to cope. The people have spoken, and their message is clear: they are not willing to crucify themselves for the profit of bankers. Politicians elsewhere should take heed.

(The silly thing is that what the French have voted against isn’t austrity at all, but rather a few spending trims around the edge and hikes in taxes. So of course, these programs are going to crash the economies where they’re implemented. It’s just that “removing” such policies is actually going further down the same path and will thus make the situation worse.)

But let’s pretend for a while that it’s real austerity. Even then, there’s a small fly in the ointment.

Liberty Scott spells it out here.

But that’s rather lengthy. I prefer the blunt version.

Dear Greece: you can vote against austerity all you want. Austerity doesn’t give a s**t about election results.

You can chose not to live within your means. But eventually, you’ll have to pay – if not by paying the debt, then by defaulting on it and losing your ability to loan any money at all.

But hey, have fun with those celebrations. You really stuck it to those bankers.

Is there any opposition to asset sales that relies on actual facts?

Some people are embarrassing themselves on this one.

Ms Stringer said selling the assets had been likened to selling the family silver.

But she said it was more akin to “selling off the family cow … or eating your last chicken”.

“You might get one or two meals, but no more daily eggs. What intelligent farmer would do that?” she asked the committee.

Outside of the fact that the government isn’t planning to sell the stake at a cut price, and isn’t selling the majority of anything, that makes perfect sense. That is to say, it makes no sense at all.

 The submissions heard so far today were all against the plan.

David Clark, Labour MP for Dunedin North, said: “I’ve certainly not heard a submitter who supports the bill.”

Apparently the people who support the sales are under the misguided impression that the election had some say in the matter.

Retired schoolteacher of economics and accounting Lindsay Carswell said the Government’s desire to push through the mixed ownership model was “ideologically driven.

He said it was not in the best interest of ordinary New Zealanders to sell the profitable companies, pointing to recent reports showing the four firms generating returns “well in excess” of what it costs the Government to own them.

In other words, they’re making a profit. Wow.

As for the “if they’re making a profit, don’t sell them”, someone better inform the NZX!

The Government has argued that ordinary “mums and dads” will be able to buy shares in the partly privatised power companies.

But Labour List member Clayton Cosgrove asked Mr Carswell if average Kiwi “mums and dads” would be in a position to “rush down to their share broker to buy shares they already own?”

He agreed that they wouldn’t be able to, adding: “Utilities are great companies to own because of the profit – the cash flows are enormous and the big wheeler dealers would snap them up very quickly and mums and dads will be pushed aside.”

Clayton Cosgrove appears to be missing the slightest hint of how markets work. He seems to think

enormous cash flows = more valuable = more expensive = only big boys can own

The reality is that

enormous cash flows  = more valuable = more shares issued for same price = more owners

Basically, most of the opposition to asset sales seems to be based on the assumption that the government will sell something valuable for a fraction of what it’s worth. That might have been the case historicially when government assets were badly managed. That bad management meant that work had to be put in to turn them to profitibility.

But by the submitters own admission, that is not the case here. There is no reason outside of ideological bias to believe that National is going to screw the government’s books to sell these assets cheaply.

Student Allowances

I was browing around with a vauge feeling that there was something I was going to blog on tonight.

Then I remembered – this.

Student allowances will be limited to four years of study and automatic loan repayments will be bumped up to 12 per cent of income, the Government has announced.

In a pre-Budget announcement, Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce has revealed major changes to both the student loan and allowance schemes.

Joyce says the changes will slice $250m off the loan book and create $60m to $70m per annum savings for the Government, which would be re-invested in the tertiary sector.

The changes would be:

- Compulsory student loan repayment rate increased from 10 to 12 per cent.

- Likely cancellation from March next year of National’s loan repayment incentive scheme, which offered a 10 per cent discount on voluntary repayments.

- Four year freeze on the parental income threshold for eligibility to student allowances.

- Allowances for any study over four years cancelled.

Joyce said New Zealand was an “outlier” by international standards in the way that it funded tertiary education. The Government wanted to rebalance spending away from student support and more towards “the actual tertiary space”.

“We’re going to encourage those that have completed their tertiary education to pay off their loan faster to assist those that are coming through next,” he said.

The parental income threshold for allowances had been increasing “rapidly” ahead of the rate of inflation. Freezing the threshold would bring it “back in to balance over time”.

This is very, very wrong.

Why? Because for years, the government did not adjust the thresholds. It was only a few short years ago that the student’s associations woke up and realised that for over a decade, their members were being gradually ripped off, and demanded that allowances caught up.

So for Joyce to now claim that the threshold has been “increasing rapidly”, he’s counting on people not realising that it is in fact catching up on where it should be. That’s a nasty bit of political spin.

Then on the flip side…

But the real problem is the cut in student allowance entitlements, from five years to four. This means that students will no longer be able to pursue a double degree or a Masters on a student allowance (it may also mean problems for law students). Unless they have rich parents, of course. So, National is chopping rungs out of the ladder of opportunity, making it more difficult for those at the bottom to access the qualifications needed to better themselves. I guess their rich kids just can’t stand the competition.

Again, most people may not realise that student allowances were only for 5 years. Idiot gets credit for noting that this is merely a decrease of 1 year.

But after that his rant gets farcical. As I mentioned above, threasholds for allowances were eroded over the years. When the government finally stopped this, it was beacuse it was only students who had parents on the poverty line who were able to still get allowances. So anyone with a parent on an average or even slightly below average even, were unable to get allowances.

Strangely during that time, the universities were not emptied of all but a few toffs who spent their spare time talking about their Hawaiian vacations.

The reality is that most students would not even use the 4 years. Yes, this is going to affect masters students, and those who redid their first year and want to do honours. But the reality is that at honours level and above, living costs and tuition costs pale in comparison to the cost of forgoing entering the work force.

But all this means is that people will simply have to loan the money off the student loan scheme.

Which is interest free.

So “will no longer be able to pursue ” actually should read “will no longer be able to pursue without taking out an interest free loan”.

Guess that doesn’t sound quite so dramatic, does it?

 

Shock: Actual Journalism contradicts lynch mob on Zimmerman

The other day I said:

The only reason we even know about this case is because some people decided out of their own bigitory that this must have been a racial killing. Basically, it was painted as a self-appointed white tea-party republican patrolling the streets. We now now that he was in fact not self-appointed, was not white, and is in fact a registered Democrat.

Well, it gets better.

He’s actually part black himself.

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

Some of those in the lynch mob have tried to paint his calls as being “obsessed with black men”. Well, that’s one way to paint the facts.

“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”

It seems he went through a rough patch at one point.

In 2004, Zimmerman partnered with an African-American friend and opened up an Allstate insurance satellite office, Donnelly said.

Then came 2005, and a series of troubles. Zimmerman’s business failed, he was arrested, and he broke off an engagement with a woman who filed a restraining order against him.

That July, Zimmerman was charged with resisting arrest, violence, and battery of an officer after shoving an undercover alcohol-control agent who was arresting an under-age friend of Zimmerman’s at a bar. He avoided conviction by agreeing to participate in a pre-trial diversion program that included anger-management classes.

And that degree? Well, the coverage I’d heard suggested he was starting it. Actually, he’s pretty much finished it.

Zimmerman enrolled in Seminole State College in 2009, and in December 2011 he was permitted to participate in a school graduation ceremony, despite being a course credit shy of his associate’s degree in criminal justice. Zimmerman was completing that course credit when the shooting occurred.

The problem with crime in the area was not a trivial one either.

On August 3, Bertalan was at home with her infant son while her husband, Michael, was at work. She watched from a downstairs window, she said, as two black men repeatedly rang her doorbell and then entered through a sliding door at the back of the house. She ran upstairs, locked herself inside the boy’s bedroom, and called a police dispatcher, whispering frantically.

“I said, ‘What am I supposed to do? I hear them coming up the stairs!’” she told Reuters. Bertalan tried to coo her crying child into silence and armed herself with a pair of rusty scissors.

Police arrived just as the burglars – who had been trying to disconnect the couple’s television – fled out a back door. Shellie Zimmerman saw a black male teen running through her backyard and reported it to police.

After police left Bertalan, George Zimmerman arrived at the front door in a shirt and tie, she said. He gave her his contact numbers on an index card and invited her to visit his wife if she ever felt unsafe. He returned later and gave her a stronger lock to bolster the sliding door that had been forced open.

“He was so mellow and calm, very helpful and very, very sweet,” she said last week. “We didn’t really know George at first, but after the break-in we talked to him on a daily basis. People were freaked out. It wasn’t just George calling police … we were calling police at least once a week.”

In September, a group of neighbors including Zimmerman approached the homeowners association with their concerns, she said. Zimmerman was asked to head up a new neighborhood watch. He agreed.

I’m left wondering what the original source for many of the claims about Zimmerman is. Was it that the initial reporters talked to someone who had their facts wrong, or was it that someone simply started making stuff up and the press started printing it?

Actually, that’s an improvement

We all know unemployment is bad. But how bad is it?

One of the big themes of National’s New Zealand is the lack of jobs. There’s another example of this in theManawatu Standardtoday:…

not exactly desirable work, and yet it has six times as many applications as there are positions.

Actually, if Idiot were following the news, this is an improvement.

Nearly 2000 people have applied for about 100 jobs at the soon-to-be-opened Bunnings Warehouse in Dunedin.

That was 2 years ago – 20x more applications than positions. Sort of makes 6x look pretty good. (I’d also suggest that carting around heavy, rough sawn timber is a lot worse for your health than pushing a trolley of lettuce.) A few months earlier an Auckland supermarket received 2500 applications for 150 jobs.

So I call that as an improvement.

And yet National still slanders the unemployed as lazy

I’ve never heard anyone in the National party say the unemployed are, as a group, uniformly lazy. I have heard them say that they need more motivation, which is only too true (and here I am speaking from personal experience).

Funny thing is that since Idiot hadn’t even provided a link to his own rantings, let alone an external source, I thought I’d do a google search.

I think the results speak for themselves.

While I’m at it:

1. I hate tobacco with a passion. I think anyone who smokes is an idiot, and the tobacco companies deserve to be driven out of that business. But the fact is that every packaged product has the packaging as part of it’s marketing, so by definition when you remove all other advertising the packet is all that’s left. To say so is common sense, not an indication of some sort of conspiracy to circumvent the law.

2. Idiot claims (once again) that austerity is bad for the economy. Possibly, in the short term. But in the long term, the austerity of the 90s in this country set us up for the undeniable prosperity of the 2000s. In the meantime, the US have racked up eye-popping amounts of debt that will burden their government for generations, and have nothing to show for it except an unprecedented growth in conservative activism.

3. Just because Len Brown accepted a modest (and declared) donation, doesn’t mean jack. He’s simply opposing an idiotic motion by people who think politics is about posturing and pretending. When he  actually does something to support the proposal when there actually is a proposal, call me.

Chuck Colson RIP

I just read on Keeping Stock that Chuck Colson has died.

I read his autobiography a couple of years ago, and I think it should be required reading for all political hacks, title notwithstanding. He was in the thick of the Watergate scandal (though by his reckoning, his alleged contribution was as much due to the fevered imaginations of reporters than anything he’d done) and was the first to plead guilty to related crimes.

Certainly though, his time since has been well spent. After his time in prison, he founded prison fellowship, a ministry that works with prisoners and seeks to reform prisons.

Zimmerman did in fact have a head injury

One of the most bizare parts of the Zimmerman/Martin case has been the way that those who believe that Martin was lynched have seized on minor, inclusive details to “prove” their case.

To be more specific:

1. Zimmerman said “f**king p???” in the 9/11 tape. This indecipherable word is apparently proof that Zimmerman was saying something racist (the word “coons”). Not that it would prove much even if he did say what is being claimed.
2. There was a security video from the police station leaked which did not show any injury to Zimmerman’s head.

Clearly this latter evidence is also ridiculous. The video is grainy, and simply doesn’t have enough detail to prove a lack of injuries – which is what would really say something.

It’s also now been proven false. Patterico has a photo which clearly shows that Zimmerman was injured. To me, it looks like he may have even been cut with a knife.

I am not convinced that Zimmerman’s actions that night were right. It may be that had someone been following him without him noticing, videoing his actions that we might discover that he committed a crime. We may also discover that his account is correct.

But that’s the problem - he wasn’t charged, because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict. The police wanted to charge him but did not do so because the lawyers knew that they could never win the case. He’s only charged now because of the lynch mob.

In a perfect world, we would always have full evidence to determine exactly what happened whenever a person died unexpectedly. But we don’t. Reality is that cases like this (without evidence to prove it wasn’t self defense) happen all the time.

The only reason we even know about this case is because some people decided out of their own bigitory that this must have been a racial killing. Basically, it was painted as a self-appointed white tea-party republican patrolling the streets. We now now that he was in fact not self-appointed, was not white, and is in fact a registered Democrat.

But apparently those facts are only believable if you’re an idiot who listens to fox news.