• Sitting on your roof is illegal

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Stuff is reporting that property owners have been fined $1500 for allowing people to sit on their roof and watch car races. According to Stuff

The infringement notice cited a clause of the Building Act that refers to using or permitting the “use of a building for a use for which it is not safe”.

The Hamilton City Council’s building safety manager says

..he and his staff went to great lengths before the V8s [car races] to warn people what they could and couldn’t do under the Building Act.

[...]

“Our role is the health and safety of people [in the opinion of the nanny state] and we take that quite seriously. We gave everyone the information, but there were people who didn’t listen.”

[...]

…council staff spotted the alleged infringements during the racing and even took photographic evidence.

[...]

“These set-ups put people at risk, we don’t have much choice. It’s rather good luck than good judgment that something didn’t happen.

“Someone could have easily fallen from one of those roofs.”

Yes, someone could have easily fallen from a roof. So what? They chose to go onto the roof, and they chose to take the risk of falling: some would say that if a person fell and died due to a lack of precautions then it’s a case of natural selection .

Personal choice and risk-taking is a terrible thing in the eyes of the Nanny State, which, like a parent dealing with a child, tells everyone “That’s too dangerous, you’re not allowed to do that”. So the council staff – agents of the nanny state – go around before the race telling people what it is permissible to do on and with their private property, then during the race they take photos to use as evidence when they punish the naughty children.

In summary, the state controls your bodily movements on your private property in order to protect you from harm. That’s a violation of personal and property rights, and only an immoral and totalitarian nanny state government would do such a thing.

What do you think about laws that prevent you from sitting on your roof and enjoying the view?

Click here for an update to this post.

Click here for a biblical perspective on this situation.

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• James Cameron on China

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James Cameron is a BBC correspondent who has just finished a three year stint in China and has put together a collection of some of the stories that have stuck with him. It’s a very interesting perspective on the present situation in China.

The article contains links to various other articles, including a particularly interesting one describing the fate of those who petition the Chinese government for justice. Apart from what most people would expect, “the professor who runs Peking University’s judicial expertise centre suggested that 99% of the people who repeatedly petition the government are mentally ill”. What are your medical qualifications, sir? The Soviets used a similar tactic against dissidents: declare them crazy, lock them up, and pump them full of drugs. Yes, in certain totalitarian societies disagreeing with the government is a clear indicator of insanity.

In the article at the first link above Cameron says

But these are subjects [human rights] that the government prefers not to discuss. The Chinese Communist Party prefers to focus attention on its efforts to raise people’s living standards – it argues that economic progress is a much more accurate measurement of human rights.

A gilded cage is still a cage.

Related post:
Tiananmen Square: 20 years after the massacre nothing has changed

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• Tiananmen Square: 20 years after the massacre nothing has changed

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I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to believe that 20 years have passed since the Chinese massacred hundreds or thousands of protesters in Tinananmen Square.

Calling it a “square” probably conjures up the wrong image: it’s the biggest city square in the world at 40.5 ha or 100 acres. It’s 880×500 metres or almost the area of 63 rugby fields and contains such delights as a brutalist mausoleum containing the embalmed body of Mao Zedong and the Monument to the People’s Heroes. It’s in the centre of Beijing, next to the Great Hall of the People (where China’s farcical version of a parliament meets) and is across the road from the former imperial palace, commonly known as the Forbidden City. So it’s a place loaded with history and symbolism that’s able to hold a great many people. It’s believed that a million people gathered there for the June Fourth Movement of 1989.

As we all know, the Communist Party of China didn’t like these protests so sent in troops, tanks and so forth to ensure that the people Party retained control. What has been interesting is how the Party has reacted on the twentieth anniversary. There’s a huge police and/or military prescence, they’re keeping journalists out, and dissidents have been effectively placed under house arrest. Below there’s a link to a tragicomic video where security staff are trying to block BBC cameras with umbrellas – and that’s outside the Square.

The events of 1989 do not appear in textbooks and children born around that time or afterward know little or nothing about it (see link below). I am reminded of the Memory Hole in Orwell’s 1984.

Twenty years after the massacre nothing has changed because truth, free speech and freedom of association clearly remain persona non grata in China. On the bright side, all these security measures indicate some trembling on the part of the Party, which rightly fears the people because only a government that is truly a servant of the people has no need to fear them.

Interesting links:

• State thugs using umbrellas to block TV cameras
• State thugs keeping journalists out and controlling public entry
• Slide show of images and audio from 1989
• BBC interactive map of Tiananmen Square with pictures and video, including man confronting tanks
• John Simpson’s memories of 1989 plus amazing video
• Young people of China share what they know about the massacre
• Tiananmen Square on Wikipedia
• 1989 massacre on Wikipedia
• Google map of central Beijing

What are your thoughts regarding the events of 1989 and today?

Related post:

There is no such thing as “human rights”: a classical liberal perspective on the Electoral Finance Act

(Click on the photo to enlarge) View from the Tiananmen Gate of the Imperial Palace (Forbidden City) looking south over Tiananmen Square. In the centre of the square is Mao Zedong's mausoleum (tomb) and the Monument to the People's Heroes. To the right is the Great Hall of the People. Photo from Wikipedia.

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• Police want to track cellphone locations

According to Stuff, the police want to bring in a new system that will allow people to call for police help using text messages. But there’s a kicker: the police want to “help locate people by tracking their cellphone signal”.

I’ve had a look on the web and I can’t find any more specific information (let me know if you can find anything), but giving police the ability to track cellphone locations is very bad news if you value freedom.

For this system to be effective in rendering help it’s going to have to give a pretty accurate location and cellphone technology isn’t good at that. I’ll bet that one day having GPS in cellphones will be compulsory, for your own good naturally, and before you know it the police will be able to accurately track any cellphone at will.

The state thugs in blue are employing a Trojan Horse (i.e. calling for help via text messages) in order to increase their surveillance abilities.

• Russia will only allow the official version of history

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The BBC has an article saying in part

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the creation of a commission to act against what the Kremlin terms falsifications of Russian history.

The commission will attempt to defend the official version of Soviet history before, during and after World War II.
[...]
The Kremlin is drawing up plans to make such moves a criminal offence.

The laws could see people fined, or even imprisoned for up to five years, for deviating from the official history.

So, free speech is dead in the supposedly-free Russia.

Mr Medvedev said earlier this month: “We will never forget that our country, the Soviet Union, made the decisive contribution to the outcome of World War II, that it was precisely our people who destroyed Nazism, determined the fate of the whole world.”

If that’s the official version of World War Two history then the official version is clearly fictional. What about the thousands of men who died shipping war materiel to Russia? What about the thousands of men who died hammering Nazi Germany from the West? What about the fact that Medvedev’s fellow megalomaniac called Hitler over extended himself when he attacked Russia?

The Soviet old guard is alive and well in Russia.

Related post:
Cherie Blair on Vladimir Putin

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