Brian

“All progress depends on the unreasonable man”. GBS

[Matthew Horncastle @matt_horncastle]

Why Jacinda Ardern was the worst thing that happened to New Zealand.

Not because every problem started with her.

They did not.

Not because every bad decision was hers alone.

It was because she changed the moral direction of the country.

Before Jacinda, New Zealand still had a rough idea of what it was meant to be.

Free people.

Practical people.

Independent people.

People who worked, built, traded, raised families, solved problems, and expected government to mostly leave them alone.

Then Jacinda arrived with one word.

Kindness.

And that word did enormous damage.

Because kindness is voluntary.

You choose to help.

You choose to give.

You choose to care.

But when the state forces one person to live for another, that is not kindness.

That is coercion.

When the state takes your money and calls it compassion, that is not charity.

That is theft with better branding.

COVID exposed the worldview.

The government decided whether you could work.

Whether your business was essential.

Whether you could travel.

Whether you could see family.

Whether you could come home to your own country.

Whether your speech was acceptable.

Then they told New Zealanders the government would be the single source of truth.

That sentence should have terrified every free person.

Free countries do not have a single source of truth.

Free people think.

Free people question.

Free people disagree.

Free people are allowed to be wrong.

A society with one official truth is not free.

It is being trained to obey.

That was her real legacy.

She made dependency look moral.

She made obedience look virtuous.

She made fear look responsible.

She made control look compassionate.

She moved New Zealand away from the individual and toward the collective.

Away from freedom and toward permission.

Away from responsibility and toward dependency.

Away from truth and toward official narrative.

Away from production and toward redistribution.

Ayn Rand was right.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual.

Once you sacrifice the individual to the collective, there are no rights left.

There is only power.

The state decides who pays, who obeys, who is punished, and who is rewarded.

I do not judge Jacinda by the smile.

I do not judge her by the magazine covers.

I do not judge her by the international applause.

I judge her by one standard.

Did she make New Zealand more free or less free?

The answer is obvious.

She made New Zealand less free.

That is her legacy.

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@TaxpayersUnion How sick & tired are you of all this BS?
1. Very
2. Very very
3. Very very very

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@BillyM2k What’s the point even? If they can’t release it, why even bother. So tiresome! O

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

Hey @elonmusk, all those vehicles that @Tesla bring down to NZ for winter testing are really expensive to ship back out of the country right? Why not leave them here. I know a few Tesla owners (well one anyway) who would snap up the opportunity to buy a @cybertruck or maybe a few cybercabs!!!

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@BasedMikeLee @GinaSaysSo @LeaderJohnThune And the question then becomes WHY?
The system is so corrupt!

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@BasedMikeLee @realannapaulina Seriously? “if the Senate’s wiling to do the hard work.” It’s so obvious that they do not want to do that. In fact they want to do the exact opposite (present company excepted).

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@toddmstephenson @SimonCourtACT @NZQandA They cancel flights left right & centre. They have gone from the best airline in the world to one of the absolute worst! They being @FlyAirNZ for the avoidance of doubt.

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@SimeonBrownMP When you have to work with Labour to get your legislation passed you know you are on the wrong side of the argument. Yet you proceed. These are the acts of traitors.

[Seth Cohen @OverReactor1776]

Now that I’m out of government, I can finally respond for myself: Get bent, soyboy. We didn’t do this for “Silicon Valley . . . companies.” We did this for you, for your family, your community, your state, your nation, and your species.

Nuclear energy provides the safest, highest density, reliable power available on our planet. My career colleagues at DOE and NRC inspired me to think about nuclear as a way to forge American steel and electrolyze aluminum without releasing particulate matter, to desalinate water in the Middle East and save humanity from resource wars. By rejecting the false narratives and Cold War hysteria, we can secure the next American century while raising whole countries out of poverty.

Do you really think I left an incredible career at Kirkland, paid out of pocket for an apartment in DC and dozens of cross-country trips, and left my family on the west coast because I wanted to enrich people I never met before taking this job? I came to D.C. to do something that mattered, to satisfy a driving curiosity (more on that later), and, most importantly, to serve.

As I learned more about nuclear energy and its history, I developed a conviction that one nuclear’s biggest issues was a culture of cynicism: nothing new or exciting could happen because it would end in disappointment, and that militated against rocking the boat even a tiny bit. The career staff in government and their industry counterparts lived through dark winters before and stopped believing that warm springs could bloom into summers.

I have two core philosophies. First, I believe in ruthless optimism. Rational decision making requires detached risk analysis. But we also cannot win if we believe we can lose. Merging the two requires orienting teams around driving missions. That way, when a real opportunity presents itself, you can take a huge swing.

If I take credit for anything—honestly, almost all of the success belongs to the incredible and dedicated people at @ENERGY and @NRCgov—it’s countering the cultural rot and morass that risked forfeiting American excellence. My colleagues and I gave cover to the scientists and engineers, which freed them up to focus on delivering safe power. And, as success materialized, they started to dream again. That’s why the pilot program succeeded, and why I feel confident about the future of NLICs and NRC reform. Nobody needs me anymore because they can innovate on their own.

My second core philosophy is to assume positive intent. Avi, I know that you heard about my real motivations from multiple people you interviewed when preparing your hit piece on me. Rather than telling that story, one which could help inspire another generation of people to use their talents for the greater good, you ignored them. Instead, you implied that Peter Thiel recruited me for nefarious purposes. (I’ve never met him, but, @peterthiel, if you’re reading this, I’m a huge fan!)

Nuclear regulation starts and ends with safety. I promised everyone I worked with that I would resign before doing or pushing for anything that could compromise public safety. But I also distinguished between real safety and performative bullshit. That’s what the careers came to embrace, too. We love nuclear, why would we do anything that could risk threatening its future?

America faces a crossroads. We can either trod a road of cultural decay or hike our way back to the peak of global innovation. Join me on the latter path. Correct the fear mongering and conspiracies and tell the story of America’s great reindustrialization. Tell the story of our public servants, our great entrepreneurs, our scientific dominance. Tell the real story about how DOGE went nuclear.

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@SimeonBrownMP Don’t know why you didn’t just come out & call it a Trump account. Devoid of your own ideas it seems.

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@elonmusk Is this Elon foreshadowing becoming a septillionaire?

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

@elonmusk @Teslaconomics By the time we’re able to make sufficient quantities of antimatter for that there’ll be no such thing as dollars!

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

To the policymakers and IRD: this approach is driving capital and conviction out of New Zealand. The people building and holding the future of money are noticing. You can keep pretending Bitcoin is just another taxable bauble, or you can have an honest conversation about treating long-term held digital property more like the scarce, sovereign-resistant asset it actually is.
I chose Bitcoin in 2018 because I wanted skin in the game on a better monetary future. I’m still in. But the tax treatment you’ve chosen makes it unnecessarily painful to stay here and build.
That’s on you.
Bitcoin is freedom money. Hands off our property.
@simonwatts_mp @chrisluxonmp @IRDNZ
#Bitcoin #CryptoTax #NZPol #PropertyRights

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

Kiwis, I bought my first Bitcoin in early 2018 with savings I had already paid full tax on. Hard-earned money from years of work. I didn’t borrow it, I didn’t print it, and I certainly didn’t get it from any government handout.
I bought it as a long-term store of value — digital property I believed in.
Now the government wants to tax the gain when I sell my own property. This is egregious (X speak for total BS!).

[Brian @NZDoyleB]

I’m not asking for special treatment. I’m asking for consistency and basic respect for the fact that this capital was already taxed once. Tax the income when it’s earned. Don’t keep coming back for more every time that capital grows in value because the holder was right about the future.
Bitcoin isn’t a government-created asset. Its value comes from the network, the scarcity, and the people who chose to hold it when almost nobody else would. The Crown didn’t produce that value. It has no moral claim to tax it as if it did.