Stuff reports:

Six people have thrown their hats in the ring to seek selection in New Lynn but the battle is expected to come down to two. 

Among those seeking to stand for Labour in former leader David Cunliffe’s electorate are two current Auckland local board members – Greg Presland​ and Susan Zhu.

If either make it to Parliament then it would trigger a local body by-election.

The four others being considered are: Christina Faumuina​, Deborah Russell, Owen Gill, and Sunny Kaushal.

But sources say the Labour nomination is likely to come down to either Massey University tax expert Russell or Cunliffe confidant Presland.

Will be very interesting to see whom Labour picks.

Newshub reports:

A mud hurling match between Winston Peters and Gareth Morgan has coloured the Opposition Parties’ speeches at Rātana Pā.

Mr Morgan, The Opportunities Party leader, made a long speech in which he declared his party would make constitutional reform in which upholding the Treaty would be a priority.

He went on to attack the New Zealand First leader, calling him an “Uncle Tom” and not supportive of the Treaty.

“His Cheshire Cat grin can’t disguise the fact his party is selling Māori down the river.”

Not one to sit back and take abuse, Mr Peters used his speech to fight back.

“Sorry for laughing,” he said as he began in te reo.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been mauled by a toothless sheep.”

Mr Peters then called Mr Morgan a “thinned-down version of Kim Dotcom” and said he’d been coming to Rātana for four decades, not “driving around Mongolia on a motorbike”.

Heh, would have loved to have been there for that exchange.

The Herald reports:

Controversial American billionaire, Trump donor and venture capitalist Peter Thiel has taken New Zealand citizenship and quietly acquired a Wanaka lakefront estate.

Property records show that Thiel’s New Zealand-registered company Second Star bought a 193ha Glendhu Bay farm in 2015 described as a vacant lifestyle block.

Thiel, who lists San Francisco as his residence in Companies Office records, is Second Star’s sole shareholder. Forbes magazine assessed his net worth recently at US$2.7 billion.

Great to see Thiel become a Kiwi, following on from James Cameron. Thiel co-founded Paypal, and was an original investor in Xero and Facebook. He’s broadly a libertarian.

Grist reports:

Coal-loving Wyoming legislators are pushing a bill to outlaw wind and solar.
On the first day of the state’s legislative session, nine Republican lawmakers filed legislation that would bar utilities from using electricity produced by large-scale renewable energy projects.

The bill, whose sponsors are primarily from the state’s top coal-producing counties, would require utilities to use only approved energy sources like coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric, and oil. While individual homeowners and small businesses could still use rooftop solar or backyard wind, utilities would face steep fines if they served up clean energy.

Banning wind and solar power is just as nutty as banning coal. Politicians should not dictate what power source is used by utilities.

Where a power source has external costs (such as CO2 emissions from coal), then the correct response is to recognise the external costs through an appropriate mechanism (tax or ETS). But politicians should not dictate what sources of power are acceptable. The Wyoming legislators are just as wrong as Green legislators who try to ban coal.

Hat Tip: No Right Turn

John Armstrong writes:

When it comes to the vexed question of whether the families of the men killed in the Pike River disaster will be granted permission to recover the bodies of their loved ones, you can forget it.

It ain’t going to happen. Not now. Not ever. Full stop.

Yep, despite the ghouls in politics trying to make capital out if it with false promises.

Even were Solid Energy to have a rush of blood to its head and reverse its current intention to seal the mine’s entrance for good and instead allow a recovery operation to be mounted, the company’s managers would find a prohibition order slapped on them by WorkSafe New Zealand, the Crown agency responsible for administering the new and much tougher law now covering occupational health and safety.

Such an order can be imposed if WorkSafe believes something is occurring at a workplace that “involves or will involve” serious risk to the health or safety of a person.

So even if Solid Energy was persuaded, they can be over-ruled by Worksafe.

It needs to be remembered that the rewrite of occupational health and safety law flowed directly from the Pike River Company’s failures to ensure its workers did not come to harm.

To treat the Pike River mine site as suddenly exempt from the very piece of law it engendered is not just utterly mind-blowing. It is delusional.

This is now the official policy of the Labour Party, led by the former head of the miners’ union. They should be ashamed.

John Tierney writes at City Journal:

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left.

I strongly recommend reading the full article. It is lengthy but worth it.

But two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse.

The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices. In a classic study of peer review, 75 psychologists were asked to referee a paper about the mental health of left-wing student activists. Some referees saw a version of the paper showing that the student activists’ mental health was above normal; others saw different data, showing it to be below normal. Sure enough, the more liberal referees were more likely to recommend publishing the paper favorable to the left-wing activists. When the conclusion went the other way, they quickly found problems with its methodology.

Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics. Academics have traditionally leaned left politically, and many fields have essentially become monocultures, especially in the social sciences, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by at least 8 to 1. (In sociology, where the ratio is 44 to 1, a student is much likelier to be taught by a Marxist than by a Republican.)

Peer review means a lot less today than it once did.

And that brings us to the second great threat from the Left: its long tradition of mixing science and politics. To conservatives, the fundamental problem with the Left is what Friedrich Hayek called the fatal conceit: the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society. Conservatives distrust central planners, preferring to rely on traditional institutions that protect individuals’ “natural rights” against the power of the state. Leftists have much more confidence in experts and the state. Engels argued for “scientific socialism,” a redesign of society supposedly based on the scientific method. Communist intellectuals planned to mold the New Soviet Man. Progressives yearned for a society guided by impartial agencies unconstrained by old-fashioned politics and religion. Herbert Croly, founder of the New Republic and a leading light of progressivism, predicted that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover.”

This was all very flattering to scientists, one reason that so many of them leaned left. The Right cited scientific work when useful, but it didn’t enlist science to remake society—it still preferred guidance from traditional moralists and clerics. The Left saw scientists as the new high priests, offering them prestige, money, and power. The power too often corrupted. Over and over, scientists yielded to the temptation to exaggerate their expertise and moral authority, sometimes for horrendous purposes.

Drawing on research into genetics and animal breeding from scientists at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and other leading universities, the eugenics movement of the 1920s made plans for improving the human population. Professors taught eugenics to their students and worked with Croly and other progressives eager to breed a smarter society, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger. Eventually, other scientists—notably, in England—exposed the shoddy research and assumptions of the eugenicists, but not before the involuntary sterilization or castration of more than 35,000 Americans. Even after Hitler used eugenics to justify killing millions, the Left didn’t lose its interest in controlling human breeding.

Eugenicist thinking was revived by scientists convinced that the human species had exceeded the “carrying capacity” of its ecosystem. The most prominent was Paul Ehrlich, whose scientific specialty was the study of butterflies. Undeterred by his ignorance of agriculture and economics, he published confident predictions of imminent global famine in The Population Bomb (1968). Agricultural economists dismissed his ideas, but the press reverently quoted Ehrlich and other academics who claimed to have scientifically determined that the Earth was “overpopulated.” In the journal Science, ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” Ehrlich, who, at one point, advocated supplying American helicopters and doctors to a proposed program of compulsory sterilization in India, joined with physicist John Holdren in arguing that the U.S. Constitution would permit population control, including limits on family size and forced abortions. Ehrlich and Holdren calmly analyzed the merits of various technologies, such as adding sterilants to public drinking water, and called for a “planetary regime” to control population and natural resources around the world.

Their ideas went nowhere in the United States, but they inspired one of the worst human rights violations of the twentieth century, in China: the one-child policy, resulting in coerced abortion and female infanticide. China struggles today with a dangerously small number of workers to support its aging population. The intellectual godfathers of this atrocity, had they been conservatives, surely would have been ostracized. But even after his predictions turned out to be wildly wrong, Ehrlich went on collecting honors.

And Ehrlich still insists he was right on pretty much everything, when in fact he has been proven wrong on almost everything. He predicted the death of sea life by 1980, the UK would face starvation by 2000, India could not support more than 200 million people, a billion death toll from starvation etc etc. For being wrong on pretty much everything he has been given no less than 17 honours and awards.

Lord Ashcroft conducted 32 focus groups in seven marginal US states and also did a poll of 30,000 votes. What did he find:

Trump negatives

• No filter
• Offensive remarks
• Bad behaviour
• Little policy detail

Clinton negatives

• A politician
• Embodiment of the establishment
• No change of direction
• Scripted and insincere
• Entitlement: Her turn
• Shady, corrupt or worse

So what were their positives:

Clinton positives

• Experienced
• Well-prepared and articulate

Trump positives

• Change
• Not a politician
• Businessman – does deals, gets things done
• Rich – independent
• Not politically correct

You can see why Trump won, as the mood wanted change.

Stuff reports:

Labour leader Andrew Little has ruled out running in New Plymouth in this year’s election, leaving it wide open for outgoing teacher union president and Taranaki high school teacher, Angela Roberts.

After four years at the helm of the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Roberts is packing up the last of the boxes and clearing her Wellington desk as she prepares to return to her job as an economics teacher at rural Stratford High School.

There has been speculation as Roberts tenure draws to an end that she might be head-hunted to run in New Plymouth, which was the most marginal seat in the country when National MP Jonathan Young won it in 2008.

“I’d consider it – it’s a fabulous electorate and I grew up there,” she said.

Little has spoken with Roberts about running – both New Plymouth and Whanganui, the electorate she lives in, have been thrown up as possibilities.

Labour is desperately short of unionists in its caucus, so of course they need more.

National has just announced the minimum wage will go from $15.25 to $15.75 on 1st of April. Many on the left will say this is miserly and National is a neoliberal oppressive poor hating Government.

So I thought I would point out how the minimum wage has moved from 1 April 2008 to 1 April 2017.

• Hourly rate – from $12.00 to $15.75 – a 31.3% increase
• Gross Annual FT minimum wage – from $25,029 to $32,850 – an increase of $7,821 or 31.3%
• Net (after tax/ACC) Annual FT minimum wage – from $19,798 to 27,684 – an increase of $7,886 or 39.8%
• CPI (inflation) gone from 1044 to 1218 (estimate) – an increase of just 16.7% (includes GST increase)
• Real Net Annual FT minimum wage – from $23,097 to $27,684 – an increase of $4,587 or 19.9%

So a FT worker on the minimum wage has 20% higher spending power than nine years ago. That awful oppressive poor hating National Government.

The Guardian reports:

Benoît Hamon, the staunchly leftwing outsider who wants to introduce a universal basic income, legalise cannabis and tax robots has topped the poll in the first round of the French Socialist primary race to choose a presidential candidate. He will face the pro-business former prime minister Manuel Valls in a final-round clash between the party’s warring leftwing and free-market factions. …

Hamon, 49, a Socialist MP in Yvelines outside Paris, was the youngest and furthest left of the candidates in the Socialist primary. He wants to reduce the working week from 35 to 32 hours, levy a tax on robots and provide a monthly universal basic income for 18 to 25-year-olds which will then be extended to all.

This helps explain why the Socialist Party is currently in 5th place in the polls.

The Dom Post editorial:

Today is Wellington Anniversary Day, when we celebrate the arrival of the first settler ship in New Zealand. Probably not many Wellingtonians actually know that this is the occasion for their day off. And thereby hangs a tale and a political argument.

The Aurora landed at Wellington Harbour (then called Port Nicholson) with 148 emigrants and 21 crew aboard on 22 January 1840. Nowadays Wellington Anniversary Day is celebrated on the Monday nearest to 29 January. We’re not entirely sure why.

The point is that this is an arbitrary sort of anniversary which remains obscure to most of the people who observe it. In a way it comes as a bit of a nuisance as well: it arrives just when most of us are starting to get used to being back at work after the summer break. …

There is no national public holiday between Queen’s Birthday (June 5) and Labour Day (23 October).

So we don’t get a national holiday during most of the long dark winter months. We have to wait till well into spring for a break.

What we need is a holiday in the depths of winter, when everyone is fed up and needs an excuse for a knees-up. We should have, in other words, a holiday somewhere about the end of July.

By then we are cold and sick of everything.

The best way of making the reform would be simply to abolish all those meaningless anniversary days and switch them to, say, July 26. Wellington would give away its nice-but-unnecessary summer holiday in exchange for a desperately-needed feast in the dark time of the year.

Sounds a good plan to me.

Rodney Hide writes:

Former Clerk of the House David McGee is recommending that resigning list MPs not be replaced by the next willing candidate on their party list.

He is suggesting the change to discourage MPs slipping in and out of Parliament outside of an election.

With trepidation I suggest McGee is wrong. I hesitate because McGee knows the rules and ins-and-outs of Parliament better than anyone. His experience is second to none. In the past, whenever I have thought he was wrong, he wasn’t.

But the change he is recommending is a big one that I think would have an unfortunate consequence – a consequence concerning less the rules of Parliament and more how politics actually works.

As it stands, if a list MP resigns from Parliament, the next willing candidate on the party’s list slips into Parliament. The balance of votes in Parliament is maintained.

To discourage list MPs bailing early McGee suggests a simple rule change: “Any vacancy occasioned by resignation should not be filled.”

His purpose is to “largely eliminate list resignations as they are almost always promoted by the parties themselves”. …

Now imagine if disgruntled MPs could resign and drop their party’s parliamentary vote by one. That has the potential to change a government and certainly to derail a government’s policy programme.

The result would be altogether too much power in the hands of wayward MPs. They wouldn’t have to resign but only threaten to resign to cause political chaos.

A sacked minister could bring a government down just by resigning Parliament. Party leaders would become beholden to the least loyal members of their team.

MMP would then be concentrating power into the party hierarchy and also into the hands of the maddest and baddest MPs.

McGee is the perfect gentleman. The shame of it is that our politicians are not so much.

Rodney is right that it would make the most lowly List MP very powerful as if they resigned the Government could fall.

If we don’t end neoliberalism we’ll see more of what happened in the last 25 years, warns Oxfam. pic.twitter.com/i1CH3dswFY

— Johan Norberg (@johanknorberg) January 17, 2017

Oxfam once used to be a charity that helped poor people. Now it seems to be a lobby group that hates well off people.

A friend just brought to my attention, this blog post which I made in 2011, during National’s first term:

And if National does manage to win a second and third term, then I do think that John Key could do what no other Prime Minister in NZ’s history has done – and get out while on top. I don’t think he wants to set a record for longest serving PM in power as Clark did. I think he will feel that 7.5 to 8 years as PM and 9 – 10 years as National Leader is a pretty good run, and he’ll let new leadership emerge for that elusive chase of the 4th term.

I knew I had talked generally about Key wanting to go out on top, but had forgotten I had been so specific as to timing.

538 has a cool feature showing how views have changed on various issues over the eight years Obama was President.

The changes:

• Abortion should be legal from 45% to 58%
• Opposition to death penalty from 29% to 42%
• Approve of Obama performance in Iraq from 65% to 38%
• Believe cannabis should be legal from 38% to 58%
• Believe race relations are good from 73% to 32%
• Believe same sex marriage should be legal from 40% to 62%
• Approve of Obama’s handling of terrorism from 59% to 42%
• Approve of Obama performance in Afghanistan from 68% to 39%

Stuff reports:

Wellington Deputy Mayor Paul Eagle has confirmed he will put his name forward to contest for a seat in Parliament.

Eagle said earlier that he was considering running on the Labour ticket in the Rongotai seat, which will be vacated by long-serving Labour MP Annette King, who will run only on the party list in the general election later this year.

He plans to step down from his deputy mayor position only if he wins the seat, which covers Wellington’s eastern and southern suburbs.

Eagle will win the nomination and the seat. He should be a good MP.

This will mean Wellington City will need a new Deputy Mayor later this year. Who will Lester pick? The Councillors who have done more than two terms are:

• Andy Foster
• Simon Marsh
• Iona Pannett

Stuff reports:

Assistant commissioner Dave Cliff said some drivers were running the risk of speeding because they knew the fines were “very, very low”.

“If you’re speeding 10kmh or less it’s just a $30 fine which is less than a parking fine. That’s a worry for us because we really want to deter people from speeding,” he said.

And how many accidents are caused by vehicles going 5 km/hr over the limit? Almost zero. But the Police want more money out of them.

While Cliff did not name what type of price he would like to see, he said it was worth considering the example of Victoria, where fines started at $194 for speeding at 10kmh or less, or New South Wales, where the minimum fine was $114.

So Cliff wants the fine for 5 km/hr over the limit to increase 600%.

“They’re obviously dramatically higher. But if you were to test it with the general populace, if you’re travelling 10kmh over the limit past a school what do you think the fine should be?

What has that got to do with someone doing 105 km/hr on a motorway?

If there is a problem with people speeding past schools (is there?), then you can have special fines for that.

Clive Matthew-Wilson, a road safety campaigner and editor of The Dog and Lemon Guide, said vehicle-activated signs displaying speeds would be “far more effective and far cheaper than speed cameras”.

Yep, I find those great. But of course they don’t bring in revenue.

He said the police had an “obsession” with small breaches of the speeding laws, which had not lowered the road toll but had alienated many otherwise law-abiding motorists.

“It’s created the impression that the cameras are solely there for revenue gathering.”

The reality is the average speed has reduced. The 85th percentile open road speed has reduced from 111 km/hr in 2000 to 102 km/hr today.

Lower Hutt Cr Chris Milne writes:

Total disaster for Wellington region ratepayers. As with the very successful Port of Tauranga, this facility should have been sold to investors who were prepared to take the commercial risks. Instead, ratepayers are lumbered with multi-million dollar losses. We are unlikely to ever learn the extent of the losses due to finances being hidden from view within a CCO.

The commercial building assets also lie empty and may have to be demolished. Another whopping loss, and GWRC were warned about these risks at the time they proposed building office space in competition with private landlords. They chose to ignore the warnings.

Some time ago GWRC exited its pine plantations. It is strongly believed that these were mismanaged, again with huge losses for ratepayers.

The bottom line is that councils should not be in business. That should be left to the private sector.

This is about this article reporting that Centreport is effectively inoperative and will remain so for many months.

A guest post by David Mahoney:

Last week the CEO of news platform Medium (and former Twitter cofounder) Evan Williams announced they were laying off 80 employees, closing their New York and Washington DC offices, and declared their ad-funded business model broken.

This is an economic reality that has been brewing for a while for the publishing industry, and it’s the latest signal that the era of free news is coming to an end.

Here’s why the ad-funded news model is broken, what needs to be done to fix it, and how we’ll all be better off.

The main reason the ad model is broken is that people don’t like online ads, especially the ads that make decent money.

To their credit, publishers have been very creative at trying to make free content with ad revenue work economically, but online ad formats and concepts have pretty much all been exhausted, and 80-90% have failed.

They have failed because for an ad format to work, all three parties need to win: the publisher needs to make money, the advertiser needs to get promotional benefit, and the user can’t be annoyed by it. It only takes one of these parties to lose and the format dies.

For example, advertisers and publishers love big ad formats that take over the entire page because they’re eye-catching and lucrative. But users get very annoyed by them so now they’re basically non-existent.

As for the smaller size ads, eye tracking has shown that people routinely ignore them, a concept known as ‘banner blindness’. And they only click on them about once every 5,000 times they appear.

As a result, advertisers will generally pay a pitiful $20 for those 5,000 appearances.

To add insult to injury, 198 million people now use ad blockers, further reducing already low online revenue. And print revenue, which still generates over 70% of newspapers’ income, has halved since 2005.

The final hope for publishers is native advertising, also known as sponsored posts or branded content. But although reasonably effective advertising, readers gradually feel misled and click on them less over time.

The conclusion of this sad situation is pretty clear. The economics of digital advertising is so bad that essentially no general news publication can be profitable giving their content away for free.

Some business news publications have valuable enough audiences to be profitable with ad-only revenue. But they are a small minority.

So because users have resisted ads so much, most publishers have two realistic choices: charge for their content online or shut down.

However the problem with this new paid content era will not be the cost – it will be the equivalent of two coffees or a pint of beer per month.

The real problem will be the friction. Buying subscriptions is a hassle, and so is accessing them.

Imagine every time you walked into a bar you had to either fill in a registration form or provide a username and password. That is what online news sites will be asking people to do. Most readers won’t bother and publishers will conclude that people don’t want to pay for news.

But publishers only need to look at companies like Amazon, Uber and Seamless (an American food delivery platform) to realise that if you make things super easy for people, they will pay.

The Washington Post has just become profitable partly because people can subscribe with a couple of clicks via Amazon.

So publishers should be doing whatever they can to allow people to buy news with minimal effort (whether it’s a subscription or an individual article) rather than forcing them to fill in a registration and billing page each time.

That same friction experience applies to accessing content too. Currently subscribers need to enter a username and password to get access, but people easily forget these, especially for business publications.

Instead, access authentication should be governed by device. This approach would give readers access on maybe three or four chosen devices password-free. And it would prevent login sharing as well.

And these buying and access issues don’t just apply to news. Such headaches extend to the entire growing list of subscription content bought online, including print news, music and TV streaming, business software and even subscription boxes.

The good news is that news quality will improve. Free content has degraded news quality by forcing fewer journalists to write more while getting paid less. And when advertising is your only source of online revenue, publishers prioritise what gets the most clicks – usually gossip and sensationalist articles.

With paying subscribers (each forking out roughly about $5-20 per month, much cheaper than before the internet), publishers will be able to invest more money into quality news, including more fact-checking and investigative journalism.

Content owners need to remind themselves that good content is worth paying for: history has repeatedly shown this, even in the internet era. But the pain-points around accessing and paying for it need to be solved. Otherwise publishers will simply be replacing one industry problem with another.

David Mahony is CEO of Auckland-based startup Gosub, and has spent 10 years working in digital advertising and publishing in Auckland, London and New York.

The Herald reports:

Businessman Sir Bob Jones wants begging made illegal, saying homeless people are mostly fat and a disgrace to society.

“They’re a bloody disgrace, they’re an eyesore, it’s a disgrace in a modern society that fat people – that fat Maoris as they mostly are – are lying on our streets of our city begging.” he told Chris Lynch  on NewstalkZB.

He said begging should be made illegal.

“I was in the city yesterday, in Wellington, and one bugger was standing there, he had a message, this Maori bloke, ‘I’m not on welfare’ – and this apparently was an achievement – ‘so give me money.”

“It baffles me when people say, ‘Oh leave them alone’.  They should be ashamed of people begging on the streets… I’m ashamed of these people. They’re a disgrace to the human race.”

“If they want to degrade themselves, let them do it in private. We shouldn’t be subject to that.”

He said New Zealand has a welfare system and there’s a shortage in the country’s workforce so there’s no need for people to beg.

We have one of the most generous welfare systems in the world. No one needs to beg. They choose to do so, or have mental health or dependency issues.

It is early days, but Trump’s narcissism looks like it is going to dominate his presidency, and this flaw may undermine everything else he did.

In two days, three prime examples:

1. His inauguration speech where he basically proclaimed that everything will be wonderful now he is President and the people now rule the nation. He stated that he will eradicate Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth. Sure, it is that easy. He also said that with patriotism there is no prejudice. The entire history of the world says the opposite.
2. His speech at CIA HQ where he barely mentioned the dead officers (he was in front of their memorial) but just claimed that everyone in the audience probably voted for him, and the intelligence community love him. He claimed he had no beef with the CIA despite comparing them to Nazi Germany a few days earlier. He seems unable to understand the difference between a campaign speech, and a speech as President to government officials. In his speech he boasted about how many Time Magazine covers he has been on. Cringeworthy.
3. Sending Sean Spicer out to berate the media for (correctly) reporting that fewer people attended his inauguration. Again it shows his narcissism and how everything is about him. Even after he has won and been sworn in, his main focus is well him.

I’d like to think that a Republican President, Senate and House could pass some laws and policies that would be good for America. The rumoured cuts to the federal bureaucracy is something that many say is long overdue. But I see his personality flaws as so massive, that I think it is just going to be embarrassing.

Maybe I’ll be wrong, but my God he is off to a horrible start. Not so much the inauguration speech or the Spicer press conference but his speech to CIA staff was so inappropriate and narcissistic that it is hard to resist the conclusion that he can’t change.