GUEST BLOG: Ross Meurant – WHO ARE THE GOOD GUYS: WHO ARE THE BAD GUYS?
Just before Easter: the above sign, advertising N95 masks in an Auckland retail outlet approved by government as ‘essential service’.
N95 are top of the range.
Currently, a cluster of ‘well off’ businessperson is shuttling 5 plane loads of medical equipment to NZ from China. Apparently, they are doing this, “at costs” i.e. no profiteering.
Example Herald 2 April:
The Warehouse founder Sir Stephen Tindall is using his China sourcing office and personally underwriting the cost of the PPE, being imported with help from toy company Zuru
These people must be, The Good Guys.
China is supplying! Therefore, these guys must also be; The Good Guys?
This is the same China I blogged in, Who to Blame
and later in, If God defends NZ, Who Defends China?
9 April saw this news hit the headline: Armed Guards hired to protect PPE destined for Kiwi frontline workers:
Reading this link, the clear impression one is left with is, guards are necessary because of deviant conduct by other countries.
Trawl back a few days and we find NATO partners of the US: France and Germany, accusing the US of “piracy”.
An OBJECTIVE ANALYSIS (Man on the Clapman Bus) of the above might lead one to ruminate; “Who are the Bad Guys?”
- Is It Mr. Trump and his henchmen? France and Germany seem to think this.
- Could it possibly be that inside China (which I have defended in my above posts), Corrupt Officials have collaborated with America’s ‘Bad Guys?”
Oh! I almost forgot. The N95 foto in an Auckland Outlet. $12 a mask!
According to the Herald 2 April:
Prices are rising. A full-filter N95 mask bulk-bought for 32 cents in China pre-Covid, now costs $2.80
I am currently negotiating importation of N95 masks.
Without the extrapolation of some of the hidden booby traps (e.g. border control China and Uncle Sam paying off bent Chinese bureaucrats to re-route what I have paid for, to The Land of the Free. Also, freight costs, NZ border costs of entry, and crap happens – as it often does; before costs of delivery within NZ and taxes); let’s just assume that I could land these in NZ at $5 per mask – which is what I’ve costed using approved freight agencies.
Let’s say, I sell these masks at $6.00 each.
Why the markup? In this particular case, for my costs of getting N95 to NZ and all the hassle and risk I take. Such as:
(a) pay up front at China factory;
(b) Get the goods through the labyrinth of deviants and bad guys in China – to NZ.
(c) Get through NZ border controls.
(c) End up with no masks and minus the capital I send to China.
However!
If a ‘essential service’ retail point, buys from me at $6.00 a mask and then sells at $12 a mask, in this time of national tragedy and stress; who really are the bad guys?
Ross Meurant; a former high-ranking police officer, former Member of Parliament, formerly with commercial interests in Syria and Iran and currently Honorary Consul for an African state.
Thinking it through Ross – this is what we need to do rather than jump to positions, either negative or positive.
Thanks for getting us on the cognitive wheel; we need to keep running it to keep our brains active, breeding ideas as prolifically as mice. Now that is an odd picture – any cartoonists feel free to pick up on it and claim it as their own!
Trading is expensive which makes profit a part of any system. It takes a lot of effort and money in the form of taxes for society to provide essential services.
But if a society does not have an adequate system, then it will it show.
I dare say that Capitalism is the best way to provide an adequate amount of essential services. But it does need to be regulated, so wealth is distributed more evenly.
As far as the governments concerned preventing piracy and wide spread social collapse is a rather important part of the governments job.
While cutting defence spending has been pretty widely excepted for ages NZDF is indeed an essential service.
So when some one says that government is intrinsically bad, it’s best to consider what government is preventing them from doing and why.
Sam
Did you read ex kiwi forces on TS? He drops in his feelings about the matter now and then.
Oh Y’know this has been a great theme of mine since refugees from the standard started showing up in 2015 during the run up to the U.S election, they were complaining about getting banned for what looks like routine left wing commentary. Weka, she boxes people into these narratives where they’ve got no place to go. Weka goes so deep into the Internet where they don’t release easily available articles or YouTube clips so these people that she boxes in have no place to go to get easy information and this is what she calls a pattern of behaviour but it’s purely her own biases and the biases of the rest of the authors at the standard.
The standard represents an entire system that believes in peer review and forced citations and you have to go to university to have an opinion in there safe place (and I don’t trust them) they use to few resources and there’s to many sharp elbows. The counter to that is people should just assume that I’m wrong so I’ll eventually find out that I am wrong. And maybe there’s mod notes that no one pays attention to its just standard behaviour, but this pattern of behaviour that standard authors are so scared of doesn’t work anymore.
So let’s just play with this, maybe I’m correct – maybe I’m wrong.
We have an ability to do anything we want to do on blogs so long as we don’t get shut down/banned. How ever there’s a concern that as long as this internet world remains “gated.” So if for example we have this closed world of people pretending to talk amongst themselves and then you have institutions saying they’re only going to deal with authoritative sources then the problem is when you’ve got a state of pretend that’s taking place inside the gated institutional narrative then the institution will predicate its actions on the nonsense. So what ever we do on blogs (unless there’s an insulating layer) unless we can lob grenades over the walls of the citadel then they will continue to act as if we never said anything or that we said something first or pointed it out.
It’s like we’re all at this kids magic show and the magician is completely incompetent, all the lights are on and we can see all the wires and trap doors and the magic show continues to go on. So everyone may see that it’s all bullshit but as long as the institutions agree to pretend that they believe the bullshit then we have a real problem that the blogs didn’t solve.
The standard may not have started it but there’s this real problem where left wing activists are distributing misinformation and it’s a real problem. This idea of wasting your own time by working for free on the standard well then there whole model is based on click bait bullshit.
Imagine if mainstream media completely leaves the building and it’s just us trading bullshit between ourselves but we are also the ones that control the institutions. This is the change Micky Savage (Greg Presland) wanted and that Chris Trotter rebelled against in his recent blogs. So voters get reality and we (the institutions) get to traffic in bullshit, but we’re also figuring out where we are going to stock masks or what our industrial policy is for dealing with tourism or how NZDF should be deployed and where are we going to send solders to protect our Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC = Sea trade, undersea cables, satellites, air travel, industrial and energy policy) and all these kind of things.
That’s what is so concerning. A lot of radically woke lefties are settling for being correct and making the rest of us lefties look like idiots and there point is okay you go be correct there but standard authors still control the levers over here. So those authors stick signs in front of people in moderator notes saying this is xenophobic and racist and so on, as if doing the opposite is some how much more intelligent where in actually fact those authors are just as much an idiot as anyone else who believes in the magic show.