futurism – Page 39

New Zealand Is Losing Badly From Our Refusal to Legalise Cannabis

As the technology and knowledge to best grow cannabis develops further in legal territories, New Zealand falls further and further behind

With news that the North American cannabis industry grew by 30% in 2016 to reach a total of USD6,700,000,000 worth of sales, savvy investors in North America are scrambling to get a piece of the action. Stats show that the cannabis industry is projected to grow at a compound rate of over 25% until 2021, a faster pace of growth than even the Internet managed during the dotcom era.

New Zealand could easily become one of the world leaders in the cannabis industry. Almost nowhere in the world has the same combination of excellent growing conditions and a passionate and knowledgeable workforce. But, sadly, almost nowhere else in the world has a political class as cowardly and short-sighted as ours.

The New Zealand Government and our business elites constantly stress the importance of innovation for our future economic well-being. We are told everyday that we need to be smart and be one step ahead of our competition. Well, our competition is blazing ahead – 21% of the American population now lives in states where recreational cannabis is fully legal. This equates to over 60 million people.

The 4.7 million people trapped on our archipelago at the bottom of the South Pacific are losing out, and because of the incompetence of our political leadership we are falling further and further behind. Every quarter that passes means that our competition in North America advances their business practices further ahead of ours, meaning that it will be harder and harder for New Zealanders to compete in this market once we are finally allowed to do so.

For example, much of the new investment money flowing into the North American cannabis industry is establishing a capital base that, if we keep sitting on our hands, we won’t be able to compete with.

New technologies such as sensors that precisely measure the environmental conditions inside grow rooms, and computer software that makes adjustments to these conditions for the optimal possible plant growth, are being developed and rolled out in territories where it is legal to do so. New LED lighting technology is making it possible for growers to tailor the precise wavelength frequency of the light in their growing operation to the specific needs of the strain being grown.

These are examples of the kind of innovation that is generating money for people in more enlightened jurisdictions. New Zealanders could be competing with the North Americans for a share of this market, but we’re not allowed to.

We are also falling behind our competition when it comes to knowledge.

This is a double mistake because much of the knowledge of how to best produce a cannabis crop is in the hands of Maoris, who are the most desperate for new economic opportunities. As demonstrated by Hikurangi Enterprises, who have conducted a successful trial for growing hemp, many of the most knowledgeable Kiwis when it comes to cannabis are Maoris, who generally never believed the Government’s bullshit about cannabis anyway.

Ironically, a former Waikato farmer, John Lord, has used the agriculture knowledge that New Zealand excels in to become one of the heavyweights of this burgeoning industry in Colorado. He states openly that if New Zealand legalised cannabis like Colorado did five years ago, it would be worth thousands of jobs to the New Zealand economy (his estimate is 15,000). This is over and above the $400,000,000 we would save every year from costs relating to prohibition.

New Zealand is missing out on a plethora of economic opportunities in the cannabis market for no other reason than that our ruling class is backwards, cowardly and ignorant. It’s a terrible waste.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto VIII

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (c. pages 574-658), Breivik puts some statistics on the demographic changes that are occurring in Europe, and tries to determine where this might lead. Like the previous sections in this document, Breivik here lists as many crimes committed by Muslims as he can possibly find – there is nothing too trivial to escape notice. Also like the previous sections, Breivik’s solutions are drastic. At one point he declares that “mass deportation of Muslims is the only viable alternative”.

At the beginning of this section he lists some “projections” of the future Muslim population in European countries. These projections state that France will be a majority Muslim country by 2050, at which point, Breivik contends, social order will start to collapse (if not beforehand).

Worryingly for those tempted to dismiss Breivik as a crackpot, the concerns in this section are backed up by hard statistics. The birth rate of European women in Europe is much lower than the birth rate of Muslim women, and, if this continues, it’s simply a matter of time until Muslims become more numerous.

This logic is mathematical. If a person puts $100 in a bank account at 3.5% interest, and $1,000 in another bank account at 1.3% interest, it’s clear that the first bank account will sooner or later become the larger of the two. The practical evidence is demonstrated by phenomena such as the population of Pakistan increasing five-fold in less than sixty years after 1951.

On some questions, it’s impossible to take any other position than agreement with Breivik, especially when he points out the mathematical likelihood of an ever-increasing Muslim population leading to further civil unrest. Some opinion polls for next year’s Swedish General Election suggest that the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats will become the largest party – a total disaster from the perspective of liberal democracy, but one that was entirely predictable.

The new totalitarians, Breivik tells us, deal in persuasion and manipulation, and this is how they are distinguished from the old totalitarians, who used force. This is a phenomenon that this newspaper refers to as “chains of silver supplanting chains of iron”.

Given what we now know about Breivik, there are some very ominous passages in this section, in particular “My advice to Westerners in general is to arm themselves immediately, first of all mentally with knowledge of the enemy and pride in their own culture and heritage, but also physically with guns and the skills to use them.”

In other words, Breivik considers the movements of peoples that have characterised recent decades to be a war like any other war, in which victory can only come from killing enough of the enemy to force their surrender. He writes that “Islam hasn’t changed in the last 1400 years. Unless we are prepared to accept conversion or dhimmi status, we have to fight.”

It is telling that Breivik reserves his sharpest vitriol for the European elites who have facilitated what he sees as an Islamic invasion. In many ways, he comes down harder on them than on Muslims themselves. After all, the Muslims are merely taking advantage of the weakness of their enemy, an attitude which is entirely understandable and logical.

The European elites, however, are effectively acting as traitors by facilitating the mass migration of Muslims into their countries, with the resulting terrible effects on the native population. They are therefore the real enemy, and this perhaps goes a long way to explaining why Breivik chose the targets he did, rather than shooting Muslims themselves.

Climate Change Is The Left Wing’s War On Terror

When George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” in the wake of 9/11, right-wing parties in every Western nation immediately won a great victory. Ever since then, they have been able to appeal to the need to fight this war on terror in order to get votes. This has given them a big advantage over the left-wing parties, but now the left wing has its own equivalent of the War on Terror: climate change.

George W. Bush and his Republican Party knew full well that there would never be an end to terror, because there will never be an end to the human nature that impels sexually frustrated young men towards political violence. The Middle East will always be violent, because it’s in their nature to be, and even if they weren’t someone else would be.

Somewhere in the world, there will always be violence and terror, and this means that the War on Terror is an endless war. It is a battle that can never be won. No matter the circumstances, right-wing parties will always be able to use the violence somewhere in the world to justify increasing military spending and cracking down on civil liberties.

This has given them a permanent advantage over the left wing – until now.

If there’s one thing that can be said for certain about Nature it is that she is ever-changing. And she always will be – for over four billion years, Nature has thrown up an ever-shifting set of environmental conditions and admonished her children to adapt or die. There is absolutely nothing we can do about this, because Nature is infinitely stronger than even our collective will.

At any given time, somewhere in the world, there will be people suffering due to the whims of Nature. Somewhere in the world there will be droughts, somewhere else there will be floods, and in other places there will be storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis.

What the left wing has recently caught on to is the fact that, insofar as we have a moral obligation to fight climate change, this obligation will never and can never be discharged.

If the political class is at all capable of persuading the people they rule to submit to further taxation in the belief that the money will be used to “fight climate change”, they will be able to do so in perpetuity, because the climate will always change.

Because it’s a law of Nature that the climate will always change, no matter what humans do or don’t do, the left wing will always be able to use climate change as a justification for increasing government reach and cracking down on civil liberties. In this regard, the left wing has a weapon that matches the power of the right wing’s War or Terror. Any time anything bad naturally happens as a result of freak weather events, the left wing will be able to use it as an excuse to turn the screws.

This is how we have ended up with politicians like Jacinda Ardern saying that climate change is the “nuclear free moment” of our generation. The Labour Party knows that it can thump the drum of climate change forever, and therefore there is greater scope for long-term gathering of political capital if they prioritise this issue rather than issues like cannabis law reform (which will be soon be solved and moved on from).

Ten years, twenty years, fifty years from now, the left wing will still be prattling on about climate change.

Things That Will Stop Happening With A Universal Basic Income

Jordan B Peterson understands the many benefits of a universal basic income

Many people have come to believe that the advent of a universal basic income is necessary to solve the social problems of the medium-term future. The received wisdom has it that increasing automation will soon make the majority of working-class professions obsolete, as they will be replaced with robots. This article looks at the social consequences of instituting a universal basic income.

Conservative interests are dead against the idea of UBI. The reason for this is the entirely reasonable belief that it will be expensive.

If one calculates the cost of a UBI in a country as small as New Zealand, with an adult population of just over 3 million, the cost becomes clear. Assuming that the current unemployment benefit is an amount of money that corresponds to the absolute minimum that a person could live on, 3 million multiplied by $250 per week equals three-quarters of a billion dollars every week.

3 million x $250 x 52 weeks = $39 billion dollars per year. This sounds like a tremendous amount of money – and it is – but according to the NZ Treasury, the cost of social welfare in New Zealand is already $29.8 billion every year. So our current welfare expenditure is already 75% of what it would be with a UBI.

What has to be borne in mind is that this money will not be wasted; indeed, virtually all of it will be funnelled straight back into the economy as it is spent on essential goods and services. Poor people don’t save money, as a general rule, because in order to save one needs a surplus and there is not likely to be a surplus on $250 per week. So the $250 they are given will be immediately put to use in lubricating the economy.

This is in stark contrast to the current system, in which almost the entirely of the operating budget of WINZ is completely wasted. The entire point of WINZ officers is essentially to decide which of their clients to deny an income to, and this role will be completely obsolete with a universal basic income – all of the money currently wasted on employing these gatekeepers will be saved.

The real effect of a UBI will come in the transformations it will make to the work force. Currently, a lot of jobs that are morally questionable or undesirable are done because the person needs to earn money. The threat of homelessness or starvation forces people to take jobs that might be soulless or immoral – and the people who control the money supply know this (and have always known it).

Journalists, for example, mostly produce absolute shit because of the desperate desire to sell advertising. A UBI would mean that instead of writing about sensationalised rubbish (or simply just making things up), journalists could go back to being the Fourth Estate.

Police officers find themselves tasked with enforcing laws that they know are immoral. A large proportion of the Police understand that it’s completely immoral for them to wage a War on Drugs against their own people, but there’s nothing they can do about it if they want to keep food on the table. A UBI would mean that prospective Police officers would be able to say no to enforcing immoral laws.

There are also a lot of people who work in advertising and finance who derive no satisfaction from their work because they know that it’s either completely meaningless or that it actually makes the world a worse place to live in for everyone, but these jobs pay. A UBI would provide an alternative for these soulless jobs.

There is also a belief that a UBI would make people ‘lazy’ and unwilling to work. This is a long way from the truth. In practice, a UBI would make it possible for people to refuse to work jobs with shit pay, shit conditions and shit bosses, which would force the labour market to improve working conditions. Improving these conditions would incentivise people to engage with the workforce.

One effect of this would be to make it much harder for abusive bosses to keep staff. In the New Zealand workplace of today, many employees find themselves having to put up with psychological abuse from their superiors because those superiors control the purse strings, and thereby control whether the employee gets to eat or not.

In summary, bringing in a UBI would sharply reduce the degree of coercive power that moneyed interests would have over people who were dependent on an income for food and shelter.