With the death toll at 7, with another 10 injured, after a car is used as a weapon to attack Queen Beatrix, of The Netherlands, who needs guns? A terrible tragedy, terrible for the senseless loss of innocent life, all for a pathetic plan that seemed as likely as succeeding as trying to kill her by spreading Mexican Swine Flu.
Other pathetic plans would have to include Egypt killing all of the country's pigs. Was this to curb the spread of Mexican Swine Flu? Well, looking at the facts, it seems no Mexican pigs had holidayed in the middle east or North Africa for the last 3 years.
It was indeed a dodgy call, particularly when all the pigs are owned by the minority Christian communities, struggling to pay the bills in a Muslim pig-fearing country. It's not religious persecution if it's for health reasons.
In New Zealand, the Bishops of the Catholic Church have declared no more communion on the tongue, and no sharing of the communion wine. It's not religious persecution if it's for health reasons.
Just be pleased Ahmadinejad didn't rename it the "Jew Flu" or they would have killed all the ... media reports coming out of the country.
Speaking of diseased swine, no - I shall not continue my comment on the police's sad attitude to self defence in this country. They are typically top blokes, and this case of foot in mouth disease is hopefully temporary.
Now, they could come out and explain themselves, but that would be hypocritical. By definition, they have to just sit there and take this criticism. Of course, I risk being fined for speaking out, although given I'm using a pseudonym, it's justice policy to write off any infringements they give me.
And what would they do with all the money they collect anyway? According to our Foreign Affairs Minister, Murray McCully, we are going to give it away. The budget for overseas aid is going to rise to 500M, up only slightly from 471M last year. McCully argued that NZ foreign aid to the Pacific had been a failure under Labour.
Given that ex-Prime Minister Helen Clark now has a job overseeing a multi-billion dollar aid budget for the United Nations, that sounds about right. Maybe NZ under National, with less staff and less funds, can still do a bit better than Helen at the UN. If anyone can, a Kiwi can.
Now you might argue that Helen is a Kiwi too. Not so. That option isn't really on the census papers. Senseless, I know. Some may have wondered if Helen filled something else under the category of "other", but that's off topic. Nope, Helen is, under the rules of the games Labour liked playing, some kind of European Pakeha. It's really a Brash idea, a Key Concept as it were, that we all be one under the Long White Cloud - and that one is simply "New Zealander", or affectionately as "Kiwi". So next census tick "Other" and enter "New Zealander" with pride, with certainty, with defiance and with a blue pen.
Have a good week.
Other pathetic plans would have to include Egypt killing all of the country's pigs. Was this to curb the spread of Mexican Swine Flu? Well, looking at the facts, it seems no Mexican pigs had holidayed in the middle east or North Africa for the last 3 years.
It was indeed a dodgy call, particularly when all the pigs are owned by the minority Christian communities, struggling to pay the bills in a Muslim pig-fearing country. It's not religious persecution if it's for health reasons.
In New Zealand, the Bishops of the Catholic Church have declared no more communion on the tongue, and no sharing of the communion wine. It's not religious persecution if it's for health reasons.
Just be pleased Ahmadinejad didn't rename it the "Jew Flu" or they would have killed all the ... media reports coming out of the country.
Speaking of diseased swine, no - I shall not continue my comment on the police's sad attitude to self defence in this country. They are typically top blokes, and this case of foot in mouth disease is hopefully temporary.
Now, they could come out and explain themselves, but that would be hypocritical. By definition, they have to just sit there and take this criticism. Of course, I risk being fined for speaking out, although given I'm using a pseudonym, it's justice policy to write off any infringements they give me.
And what would they do with all the money they collect anyway? According to our Foreign Affairs Minister, Murray McCully, we are going to give it away. The budget for overseas aid is going to rise to 500M, up only slightly from 471M last year. McCully argued that NZ foreign aid to the Pacific had been a failure under Labour.
Given that ex-Prime Minister Helen Clark now has a job overseeing a multi-billion dollar aid budget for the United Nations, that sounds about right. Maybe NZ under National, with less staff and less funds, can still do a bit better than Helen at the UN. If anyone can, a Kiwi can.
Now you might argue that Helen is a Kiwi too. Not so. That option isn't really on the census papers. Senseless, I know. Some may have wondered if Helen filled something else under the category of "other", but that's off topic. Nope, Helen is, under the rules of the games Labour liked playing, some kind of European Pakeha. It's really a Brash idea, a Key Concept as it were, that we all be one under the Long White Cloud - and that one is simply "New Zealander", or affectionately as "Kiwi". So next census tick "Other" and enter "New Zealander" with pride, with certainty, with defiance and with a blue pen.
Have a good week.
Yeah, i'm waiting for the stupid gun grabbers to demand that cars be banned now. It's only logical, cars have killed so many. For @#$@sakes how many more do the cars have to kill before you wake up!
ReplyDeleteAn excerpt from the Census Paper Article:
ReplyDeleteWe "New Zealanders" have really rattled the census takers.
At the 2006 Census, 429,429 (11.12 per cent) of us refused to play their ethnic game and called ourselves "New Zealander".
Anyway, the statisticians are worried that if this rebellious behaviour grows, we might stuff up all their carefully designed record keeping.
It's also upsetting the social scientists and back-room operatives who pore over the numbers while preparing new social policy initiatives.
It seems that the 78,000 (2.4 per cent) troublemakers who entered "Kiwi" or "New Zealander" in the 2001 Census were an irritant that could be tolerated.
But now things are starting to get out of control. In their just-released discussion paper, the people-counters growl that if the write-in New Zealander campaign is too successful, "the ethnicity results could have been rendered unusable".
This week, Statistics New Zealand issued a discussion paper on the issue and called for public feedback. But the paper makes it plain that the "experts" consulted want no change in the system. Specifically, the paper is against adding a new ethnicity tick box, "New Zealander".
Until now, most self-identifying "New Zealanders" have been Pakeha who don't regard themselves as European and have said so by registering in the "other" category. The experts fear that if this is simplified by adding a tick box in the next census, the flood gates will be opened as people of all sort of ethnicities join the rebellion.
This "risks undermining the count of other ethnic populations such as Maori, Pacific peoples and Asian".
Boiling it down to its basics, the experts want to be able to count Maori and Pacific peoples accurately so they can compare them with the rest of the population and then design policies in education and health and other social areas, which bring the under-performing Maori and Pacific groups up to New Zealand European mainstream.
"Maori and other ethnic community service providers rely on official ethnicity statistics for planning and engaging with government agencies."
In 1946, the bureaucrats kept it simple, categorising people as European, Maori or "race alien". Until 1986, ethnicity was measured on "a race concept". Since then, the debunked concept of race has been replaced with a concept of ethnicity based on what the statisticians call "cultural affiliation".
But this seems equally flawed. The census merrily reports results under such meaningless categories as Asian and best of all, MELAA. This was a new category, introduced in 2006 for people from the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. I guess the one cultural trait they had in common was that there weren't many of them.
Then there are broad categories like Chinese or Indian. This includes people originating from the two most populous countries on earth and is equally meaningless. It doesn't differentiate between the third or fourth-generation descendant of an Otago gold miner, a migrant from Malaysia or a wealthy Hong Kong businessman recently given citizenship thanks to the money he brought with him.
New Zealand European is equally vague, except for creating a majority "race-based" category that everyone else can be compared to. It means nothing, lumping in the super-rich jet-setters of Remuera with - well, the rest of Pakeha New Zealand. It includes everyone descended from a Laplander on the Arctic Circle to a Sicilian born on the shores of the Mediterranean. Like the Chinese and Asian categories, it's meaningless.
Just because they've done it for 150 years doesn't mean the statisticians have to keep trying to poke us into racial pigeon holes. In 2006, 429,429 New Zealanders took the trouble to protest. What further consultation is needed?