New Zealand Conservative

Carl Olsen looks at what Dr. Theodore Dalrymple has to say about Anders Breivik, the infamous Norweigan who in cold blood killed unarmed teenagers and those who were barely twenties. He draws a parallel between the mind of such a killer and how he perceives himself by comparing him to a man who threw acid in the faces of two of his girlfriends. "Most people," Dr. Dalrymple says, "now have a belief in the inner core of themselves as being good. So that whatever they've done, they'll say, 'That's not the real me.'" He recalls an inmate he once encountered: "I remember one particular chap who'd thrown ammonia at his girlfriend's face because he was jealous. He denied he'd done it. And the evidence was overwhelming that he had done it. So I said, 'Why did you say you didn't do it?'" He delivers the convict's response in a convincing working-class English accent quite different from his own, more refined, spe...

Laos , Vietnam , and China to name a few. In China, it is recognised that rule of law and property rights is not enough sustainable economic growth.  A moral culture that most people follow is also necessary.  But thanks to Marxism, Confucianism has been decimated and no one believes in the Marxist-Maoist alternative which just legitamise existing power arrangements.  So, Beijing is in a quandry. This brings us squarely to the issue of religion. Even someone as militantly anti-Catholic as Voltaire acknowledged Christianity's civilizing effects upon those whom he dismissed as the great-unwashed. And religion is plainly on the rise in China. Five years ago, the English language version of the Communist Party's newspaper, China Daily , reported on the results of studies done by Shanghai University professors which indicated that millions of Chinese -- especially the young and particularly in the special economic zones -- were becoming Christian. Christianity is not reall...

A great opportunity or how empty chatter can rob you blind? An influential British business leader is urging New Zealanders to harness the business opportunities of carbon tax and not just look at its costs. There are real things in this world and phantom things. Cement is a real thing, you can use it to build high rises to house business leaders. And bridges for the trucks that carry their champagne from the warehouse to wine store to pass over. But to make cement you heat limestone (CaCO 3 for all you savy readers out there) and it gives of molecules of a deadly GHG (that would be CO 2 FAYSROT). And thus those greedy people who make cement for personal profit (and to feed their families) must be discouraged from this activity by being forced to buy a new commodity on the market to wit CARBON CREDITS . Each molecule of deadly GHG must be matched with a bought and paid for whatever of Carbon Credit. Carbon Credits are of course phantoms and the producers of them are produc...

Today's Dominion Post Idiotorial on child abuse shows very clearly why editors prefer to hide behind total anonymity. "One idea that should be explored is mandatory reporting...even though there is a risk that good parents are falsely accused...even though there is a risk abusers will not seek medical help for their victims to prevent being caught.." Before we dissect this Orwellian directive let's pause for the obligatory inversion of moral principles: "New Zealanders need to accept that it is better for 10 good parents to come under scrutiny than for one monster to be allowed to continue inflicting the worst cruelty" Aside from the rush to embrace the modern principles of political correctness before justice, the casualness of the use of the word "scrutiny" is the thing to note here. Because "scrutiny" means an army of social workers arriving on the doorstep to accuse good parents of being very good at hiding their presumed ev...

Lucky for her the United Kingdom doesn't have the death penalty for people like her - yet. Instead she has a three month curfew and has to wear the tag to ensure she doesn't break it. If she does she's off to prison. And she thought she'd get away with it. Hah - no chance. Not in modern Britain where the authorities can break into your home and catch you red handed in your criminal activities and haul you before the courts. Imagine that, she had an eighteen year old dog, which she loved and cared for but had become decrepit and she didn't get it put down! Mrs Spoor looks a little the worse for age herself, she is 71 after all. Let's hope for her sake the same authorities don't get ideas - or she might be taking a one way trip to the vets herself.

They are 56 years out of date apparently Same-sex and de-facto couples weren't able to adopt, birth mothers weren't fully informed of their rights and people up to the age of 20 could be adopted without their consent under the current law Yeah yeah "You're dealing with a law that refers to values present in the post war era - 1955 was a different world," he said. "They reflect a time in our history when the parents of a child born out of wedlock were viewed as immoral and their children deemed illegitimate. Well they were. "Bad adoptions have resulted in a lot of pain and suffering to birth mothers, adopted children and people wanting to adopt a child," Ludbrook said. Well no kidding - why do you think society disapproved of children being born out of wedlock Mr Ludlow? Not because back then people were bigots but because bearing children out of wedlock " resulted in a lot of pain and suffering to birth mothers, adopted children ". ...

Headline: 'Brain drain' continues for National Of course anyone with nous and skills will go. My nephews and nieces have all gone as have my two eldest. My oldest is actually back for a visit as I write. She graduated last year applied for four jobs and got four job offers being as she had consistently very high grades (excuse a fathers pride in the achievements of his own) including exactly what she sought on the other side of the Tasman. In any case one night last week the news was on and there was an item about the firemans pay dispute which quoted their hourly rate. She was gobsmacked to put it mildly how low that was . She wont be coming back apart from the occasional holiday. Why would she?

Tanya Tagaq Who looks mighty fine just the way she was made So I'm grumpy today, haunted by my earlier post when I come upon a presser titled "Liggins Institute " Losing the war against obesity ". And in our part of the world obesity is an obsession of the ruling class. Being protected in their nice environs with comfortable incomes they remain oblivious to the reality that most people buy the food they can afford, not the food the ivory tower believes they should be eating and who also believe that they should be controlling by policy and regulation. Anyway this press release is about a paper urging developing nations to tackle their up coming " obesity epidemic ". The authors recognize obesity is multi-factoral but of course there is this Economic transition towards affluence gives many developing countries greater access to refined foods which offer lower nutritional value but are cheaper than high quality fresh foods. At which point I get extrem...

I'm in a pensive mood today, see the post below this one, so I hadn't caught up with the fact that Tony Blair is visiting New Zealand. But he is and these people have spotted it. So they are "going to arrest him" or something .

Seven-month-old Mihag Gedi Farah at an aid camp in Kenya It makes crowing over Phil Goff's miseries and tales of embezzling gay vicars seem so banal. The wretched plight of those in far off lands and our helplessness in ameliorating their sufferings is not something we care to dwell upon for too long. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God Have mercy upon the suffering of East Africa Update : I have changed the first sentence in this post to, hopefully, remove any ambiguity in my intent when first I wrote it. The examples in it mean nothing, they just reflect things I had read while grieving this human tragedy and how hard it is to contemplate.

I'm going to have to think about this one! Sacraments communicate the presence of an intangible person – God – through tangible things. In the same way, our body makes presence an intangible reality greater than our body, namely our full personhood. The encounter of persons seeking not only communication but true communion – that deeper friendship rooted in a shared identity and mission – requires at some level an encounter of bodies, whether it is a smile, a handshake, a conversation or an embrace. But our bodies are limited, and to overcome the distance that separates us we move to other forms of communication, each less corporeal than its predecessor – books, letters, phone calls, emails. "When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body," McLuhan said, speaking about modern communications creating "discarnate bodies." The electronic age is thus fundamentally anti-sacramental. It does not make the intangible present through tangible matter, b...

Source: Lifesite News

My kids are grown now but I must have been a very bad parent because from time to time I bought them happy meals. Funnily enough they haven't ended up morbidly obese, just the converse in fact they are healthy, lithe and thriving. The good thing about McDonalds is that that their restaurants are clean and you can rely upon the fact the food is well prepared and isn't going to give the little ones a tummy bug. In fact that is great part of the McDonalds winning formula. Another good thing about McDonalds is the way it drives authoritarian ninnies into paroxysms of indignation about too much fat, too much sugar, too much salt. The real reason authoritarian ninnies get upset about McDonalds has nothing to do with fat, sugar and salt but visceral hatred of successful business models in a free enterprise society. A bad thing about authoritarian ninnies is that the media give them the time of day and that authoritarian ninny politicians pass laws to control the way business...

It was a given for many years that those who took their own lives should not be buried in hallowed ground. The church has softened its stance in recent times but now Maori Party MP Te Ururoa Flavell says young suicide victims should be denied tangi and buried at the entrance of cemeteries. You can see where he's coming from. I once went to a funeral of a guy who had been killed by being run over. There were exactly two people there, including me but not the celebrant or the undertaker which would make it four. And yet a spectacular death of such a one would bring in every man and his dog to " celebrate his life ". It's a very curious phenomena I have noted from time to time. Source: Condemn suicides: Maori Party MP

(T)here is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?" Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5 So there is a post rant at open parachute that says in part I am actually intrigued that almost all the local blogs who have in the past promoted the ideas covered by this compendium have been strangely silent on the terror in Norway. There hasn’t (so far) been a squeak of condemnation or comment from the usual list of climate change denier and conservative Christian blogs. It must be embarrassing for them to see such an inhuman terrorist advocating for the same issues they have in the past. Someone in the comment thread points at my post The benefits that multiculturalism brings . A post created almost immediate...

that National's gay Wellingtonian lawyer is white while Labour's gay Wellingtonian lawyer is of Pacific Island ancestry. There is one thing these diverse MP's do have in common though - the hoi poloi never voted them into Parliament, rather both were selected by anonymous committee. Another thing they have in common is that they know probably diddly about the issues facing Bluff Oystermen or those confronting West Coast miners who might just as well be from Mars to those inhabiting the charming drawing rooms of Khandallah.

Election year - phtttt . All the major opposition party can do is let off damp squibs in National's camp. Things that blow back in their face. All the National folks are doing is crowing about how incompetent Labour is. Meanwhile our children are leaving for greener pastures. We are going nowhere fast.

I've not read the Harry Potter series, however my husband has read the first four books to our oldest boy when he was much younger. We still have them on the shelves and our youngest knows not to read them. Given that the last film on Harry Potter has just been released in New Zealand, I was prompted to buy the book on the left, Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture , by my oldest who wanted to know more specifically, what was wrong with the Harry Potter series so that he could answer questions from his friends and their parents in conversations. Now that I'm reading Michael O'Brien's book, I find myself almost succumbing to the temptation to wishing that I'd never allowed the books to be read to my son when he was younger and more impressionable.  The thing is, we can't go back in time, but we can undo some damage once we are aware of it, and O'Brien's book is helpful in that respect. In comparison to Christian writers C.S.Lewis and J.R....

The National Government is now looking at mandatory reporting of child abuse, where professionals such as doctors, teachers and nurses will have to report suspected child abuse to the Government. This is just horrendous. Every bruise, scratch or other injury will now be looked at as if it might be abuse and reported. How to slide into totalitarianism with the best of intentions. She says one of the issues being looked at is how to get the right services into households where there are vulnerable children. "One needs to think about what are other New Zealanders willing to give up so that more resources go into those those sorts of families and into children who need it most. And should we be looking into mandatory reporting of child abuse," she says. Ms Bennett says another question is how do you track at-risk children. Child abuse can never be stopped by Government intervention. Going down the road of mandatory reporting, decreased privacy will only increase Govern...

I just watched Jesus: The Cold Case on TV1. Well you expect distortions about the Christian Faith from the elite media. But finishing a documentary about the "historical Jesus" in the Gas Chamber of Auschwitz and laying that at the feet of "lies" from the Four Evangelists is not only historically inaccurate but also a most egregious libel.

I spent a fortune on ballet lessons for mine. And it was worth every penny to - my eldest in particular moves with such grace its a joy to behold. But they also went to school where they were taught things of ugliness such as the virtue of condoms, how they are to be properly fitted and worse. It makes me sad. This was on my facebook page this morning, it makes me happy.

I see that Prime Minister John Key has met with President Obama over in the US. According to Radio NZ News , apart from talking trade deals, they also exchanged gifts  - Mr Obama has given Mr Key a New Zealand-made gift, a replica of the sword being used in the Hobbit movies, by the character Bilbo Baggins. It was made by the Weta Workshop in Wellington. In return, Mr Key gave Mr Obama a greenstone mere, made by Ngai Tahu. Now, I ask you - isn't this regifting? Why on earth would you give someone something that was made in their own country; and something (Lord of the Rings) that the country is famously known for? And where did he get it from? Is he a regifter? Historically, he hasn't been very good with the gift ideas. He gave the queen an iPod filled with music, and back in 2009 he gave then British PM Gordon Brown a set of 25 DVD movies (which he probably can't watch in the UK because of region encoding). From Newsbusters - For his part, PM Brown gave two...

Oslo July 22 nd 2011 Update: This would appear to be the handiwork of a Christian Nazi and perhaps a Freemason - a somewhat rarer beast than the usual suspects. Update2: Poo-tee-weet

Why are the United States Federal Government going after a small company in Puerto Rico for gender discrimination against males ? A U.S. enforcement agency has filed a federal lawsuit accusing a wholesale jewelry and beauty products company of discriminating against men by hiring only women for its managerial positions. Well someone went boo hoo hooing the the Feds because his career in cosmetic sales didn't turn out as he had hoped. And they have chosen to act . This is how it should have been handled.

Eh? London was failing in its pledge to create the healthiest Olympics ever, health groups said, after McDonald's fast-food chain said it was to build its biggest and busiest restaurant in the world to serve the 2012 Games. How do you " create the healthiest Olympics ever "? And how does building a place where the punters can get a bite to eat before watching the women's 400 meter hurdles semi finals impact upon this noble goal? Source: Super-size McDonald's upsets health groups

Strong stuff in this AP story . The Vatican encouraged Catholic bishops not to tell police about suspected paedophile priests and flouted Irish law, Ireland's lawmakers declared Wednesday in an unprecedented denunciation of the Holy See's influence in this predominantly Catholic country. Anti Catholic spin of course. What these people don't get or pretend not to get is the sacred seal of the confessional. Once a Priest puts that stole on, he cannot and must not repeat what he hears. And the Irish Government is seeking to make a law which would oblige a priest to break it. But the desire of the profane secular to break the seal of the confessional, for whatever noble purpose they proclaim, is not what this is really about. This is about loosening the authority of the Church, weakening its power to lead people from darkness, so that the power of secular authority may increase. And that they may lead everybody - at best down the garden path and at worst into the pit o...

and you might end up looking really stupid as in this clip of an earnest MSNBC interviewer and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL).

There's a study just been published in Elsevier's Evolution and Human Behaviour Journal that shows this good-looking and more manly men are better in bed and more likely to get their partners pregnant. However some remain unconvinced Sex Therapy New Zealand director Robyn Salisbury said she was surprised by the findings, which ran the risk of affirming sexual myths and adding to the arrogance of good-looking people. Sniff Update: Looks like a man might be able to sire more babies if he eats more mangoes and apricots according to research from Australia. Who pays for all this stuff? And why?

Indeed isn't the concept of applying penalties for antisocial behavior an attempt to deter people from committing the offense in the first place. Thus if I were to collect images of children being raped I run the risk of my friends, neighbours, colleagues and family thinking I am a sleazy scumbag, a correct assessment I'd posit. And not something I'd would relish happening at all and something that might make me think twice before doing it. Now I don't need that deterrence factor of course, I am sickened to the core by the very thought that someone could actually rape a baby for their sexual gratification or be sexually gratified by viewing images of the same. But clearly there are those who need to be deterred. But our judiciary in it's wisdom doesn't think justice would be served by us knowing who they are .

This would be Diana and I have a sneaking suspicion that if she were a New Zealander she would not be an avid fan of Phil Goff or the New Zealand Labour Party. But she's Russian and she is a fan of you know who. And she and her friends are going to take their clothes off as a gesture of support for Mr Putin and to express their hope that he will run again for the presidency in 2012. And they are urging other like minded young women to do the same . You never know, for the New Zealand Labour party desperate times might call for desperate remedies but this is probably not an idea that they they can use to revive their flagging fortunes.

Come clean over Israeli suspicions - Goff Whatever the truth of the matter this will play well to the base, how much mileage can the paranoid left can extract from it, do you suppose? Whether or not this story has legs remains to be seen. Update: Well it looks like Mr Key has come clean . Wont stop conspiracy theorists speculating though.

No use whining about National's selection for their candidate for Epsom - which is not your concern anyway being as you are neither a member of the National Party nor do you reside in Epsom. May I call to your attention of the Member for Wigram, the Honorable Jim Anderton, who although not a Labour MP is in fact one in everything but name and who does not count when allocating Labour list seats. And although the glory days of his Progressive party have past he did indeed in days of yore " coat-tail " MPs into a Labour led Coalition Government. Sauce for the goose as they say. Postscript: Here's a radical idea for you. Seeing as Labour has yet to select a candidate for Epsom why don't you see if you can find someone who will give the gentlemen you accuse of being part of a "stitch-up" a run for their money. Big ask I know but that is the way it is supposed to work. Update: Well I'll be darned, David Parker for Epsom huh ? How'd ...

It cost's a lot of money to send a kid off to secondary school. The uniform alone aint small change and that's no lie. And then there's the sundries besides which in this day and age may include an IPAD . I must be getting old, in my day we used slide rules and even then not all kids had them.

What on earth do they teach in journalism school? Exhibit Study: Eating disorders increases risk of death . I've got some bad news for the nong who wrote this headline and the story which repeats the assertion quantifying the risk to fivefold of that of those without such disorders, your risk of death is neither increased nor decreased by having an eating disorder, it being a certainty that you will die. What an eating disorder may do is bring forward the date at which this occurs. Of course we are more often told we are too fat rather than too thin and this to is likely to bring forward the time of our demise. Caught between a rock and a hard place, with nothing certain but death and taxes as old Ben Franklin once wryly observed, building upon an observation of Danial Defoe's. Now mix this in the sad fact that many in the so called "fashion industry" are in fact gay males who go for models with, shall we say boyish figures 1 , rather than fully fleshed f...

This is just disgusting what these parents have been through at the hands of the State. It's very easy to think the anti-smacking law is no big deal if you are not being targetted. But as this You-Tube clip shows, any parents could be the victim of the State, have their children taken away and be dragged through the courts. It's just a matter of whether or not you attract the attention of the authorities. Everything we were afraid of from has come to pass. John Key and the New Zealand Parliament should be ashamed. In the next election, do not vote National, Labour or Green.

Unbelievable. Someone who saw a 15 second TV commercial of a mother and her daughter in the back seat of a yellow cab saw fit to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority that they weren't belted in. And instead of treating said complaint according to its merit, i.e. with derision, the ASA actually found that it breached the advertising industry's code of ethics, because it shows "an illegal practice and a disregard for safety" . It did no good that the company behind this ad pointed out that it was filmed overseas in a jurisdiction that doesn't require seatbelts to be worn by backseat passengers or that the vehicle used for filming was an older vehicle and did not have the appropriate belts fitted. They are still in the wrong. Next they will be airbrushing Captain Haddock's pipe out of Tintin books so as not to encourage pipe smoking in vulnerable children. er what's that you say? You're telling me they're doing that already...

A recent poll in New Zealand asked if same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. Most (60%) answered yes. Strictly speaking, I might answer yes as well - but if I were allowed to clarify, I would say that any man or woman ought to be able to marry as long as we're talking normal definitions where man marries a woman and vice-versa, otherwise it's not marriage. However, if the question included the words "each other", I'd then have to say no instead, as the question would then become oxymoronic rather than just ambiguous. Marriage is not marriage unless it is made up of a man and a woman, so two men or two women could never marry each other, because then it's not marriage So now we get into major difficulty.  In order for marriage to occur between two people of the same-sex, marriage as we know it would have to be abolished and replaced with something different, such as maybe just a union of romantic partners. I wonder how many people would have said...

The photograph at the top was taken in North Ossetia just shy of two years ago. The picture below it is more recent, it was taken in Amsterdam a couple of months ago. What they have in common is that they are both pictures of contemporary soldiers, Russian soldiers at the top and Dutch soldiers below. The top are peacekeepers deployed to South Ossetia, the bottom are participating in a Gay Pride parade. There was a little tizz a while ago during the hearings into repealing "Don't ask don't tell". Retired General and ex Nato Commander General John Sheehan was called upon to testify and to comment upon his experience with military forces who have integrated gays into their forces. He testified about reduced combat effectiveness in such forces hiss and reminded the congress about the Dutch experience at Srebrenica. Meltdown and outrage followed, the typical liberal response to being given unpalatable truths from real world examples. The Dutch were not re...

" You have been warned ", thunders today's headline on the front page of the Dominion Post. Monstrous storms, extreme droughts, devastating floods - evidence for climage change is now undeniable, say scientists. These scientists could have just as easily said that evidence for Almighty God being extremely displeased with humanity is now undeniable. In fact, if they had said that instead, they would be more correct. The ultimate punishment is war. Related link: Climate change evidence 'undeniable' More reading: The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima Fatima and Miracles of Conversion Living the Fatima Message

Before I believed in the Holy Trinity and the Church, I used to believe that we made our own reality. That reality conformed to how we thought it should be. Now I realise that this way of thinking, as unique as it seemed at the time, is an age old temptation that at it's heart (if it had one) is one the devil's weapons against our search for truth and pull towards God. We would be like gods ... Now George Weigel, in his opinion piece on the attempted redefinition of marriage in the States, ties in this temptation to redefine reality into totallitarian systems, thus showing his readers that what I thought was a unique way of thinking is infecting many in governance. ...modern totalitarian systems were, at bottom, attempts to remake reality by redefining reality and remaking human beings in the process. Coercive state power was essential to this process, because reality doesn’t yield easily to remaking, and neither do people. In the lands Communism tried to remake, the hum...

Tsk tsk more nanny statism. Even most ACT MPs supported it , it would seem All but three ACT MPs voted for the Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill. Well not quite. There only being five ACT MPs by a small majority most of them didn't. The fact that two did is indeed a reason why the ACT brand is so tarnished these days - what you might think was a core principle of the party (i.e. slowing the growth of nanny state and the attendant bureaucracy that goes along with it) isn't a core principle at all. I wasn't going to vote for them anyway.

At least he actually won the seat in Parliament that he has yet to take up because of his ridiculous antics . It may be an apartheid seat, an issue in itself worthy of further discussion. Ed: That'll be the day, those seats are a sacred cows and anybody putting that on the table does so on their own and at extreme personal peril. Nevertheless more voters ticked his box than that of any other candidate. Which is more than can be said for the time serving waste of space list MPs who owe their exalted position at the table not from their mana with the voters but rather their influence with the shadowy committees in smoke filled smokefree backrooms where the goodies are dispensed to loyal hacks on the basis of criteria known only to themselves.

You can count on Keith Locke to be on the wrong side of just about any issue. And to be a jackass in process. So he had a go in Parliament yesterday over these Sri Lankan Boat people - We should just take them in no questions asked would be his position. But he got way out of line, he bought the Prime Minister's mother into the debate, I guess to imply hypocrisy in Mr Key's position. "This was odd because John Key's own mother was an asylum seeker who fled from Nazi Germany to Britain in 1939," he told Parliament. "For Jewish refugees like her there was no queue to join, they simply took their chances and fled." It would have been Trevor Mallard who pulled him up on this. Labour MP Trevor Mallard interrupted Keith Locke's speech, reminding him that MPs don't usually refer to family members of politicians in debates .

Conversation in my car as we drove over the hill just after 5pm this evening. Little T: " last day of school tomorrow. " Your humble narrator: " But I thought the school holidays begin on Monday? " Little T: " They do. " Your humble narrator: " So why no school on Friday? " Little T: " It's a teacher's only day. " Your humble narrator: " Hmmmmm "

The Retirement Commissioner, Diana Crossan, has thrown the Government a curveball with her suggestion that the retirement age be raised to reduce the expenditure on pensions as the population ages. John Key, like every other politician in living memory as reacted by kicking the issue into touch. Which displeases Diana Crossan . The real problem is of course the declining fertility of the New Zealand female. Whereas the women of New Zealand raised large families in the years immediately following World War 2, their offspring and their offspring's offspring have not. And the generation born in the aftermath of World War two are now retiring creating a large liability upon those still in their productive years. A situation predicted many years ago now and kicked into touch then as now. Of course while in a theoretical sense Diana Crossan is 100% correct that raising the retirement age will address this, in the real world it will just shift the problem. You see in the ivory...

This mornings outpourings from the good doctor seem to suggest he believes tokenism in candidate selection by the party he now leads might be the solution to its woes. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

And I've got to drive 14 kilometers over the hill to collect little T from school in a couple of hours. Oh joy. Remind me again why we are paying this characters ridiculous carbon indulgences.

An issue of great concern - the way the younger generation use the word "gay" in everyday speech. A man on a mission to stamp it out is Warren Bowers. He is a highly qualified primary school teacher. He has a masters degree on homosexuality in education. Homosexuality in education? Why not a masters degree with subject matter pertaining to things like raising literacy and numeracy in our young folk. Why do we need political agendas introduced in primary schools? Well we all know why. And Orwellian control of the English language continues apace. Source: Teacher out to ban pupils' use of 'gay' Postscript As an aside "gay" was Victorian slang for a prostitute that has long since fallen into disuse.

OK start with the boilerplate, a boy is killed by a police car and the boy's mother wants the you know whats of policeman who was driving the car on a plate. The mother of an intoxicated teen who died after being struck by a police car has condemned the independent police watchdog's ruling over his death. The actions of 16-year-old Rawiri Riro Wilson contributed to the 2009 tragedy, the Independent Police Conduct Authority has ruled. Wilson's mother, Sharlene Wilson, told TV3: "It really shocked me for someone like that to take a life and then find they had got away with it. She didn't get them so she's angry. Here's where it gets odd. We are told it was a dark foggy night on an unlit stretch of highway. The boy and his friends were drunk and stoned and according to witness accounts goofing off. Indeed other drivers testified that they had had to take evasive action to avoid these boys . Sounds like an accident waiting to happen to me. But the po...

A Muslim woman interviewed by the Sunday Star Times compares the veil covering a woman's face with the veil worn by a nun. "When we look at a nun, who is all covered, we see peace and tranquility and we give it that respect. But when we see a Muslim woman who is covered – it is associated with terrorism and oppression. We see peace and tranquility when we look at a nun because of who the nun is.  She is a bride of Christ.  She acts in the world to make Jesus more present.  She may teach children or work in a hospital or work with the poor, all as part of her vocation for basically no pay. All of this is implicit when we look at a nun, who is considered a force for good in the world. "My sister wears it and she wears it completely by her own choice. So why should it be judged that she is being forced to wear it, but a nun is not?" Women don't wake up one day and decide that they will dress like a nun. They go through a long process of vocation discernment a...

Cutting edge stuff in the peoples paradise of Massachusetts where the city fathers personhoods of Cambridge have decided that city employees married to someone of the same gender as themselves should receive higher remuneration than those who are single or married to someone of opposite gender. The justification for this is an additional federal tax burden place upon these employees arising from health benefits received for "spouses" and the lack of recognition by the Federal Government of same gender marriage. Of course entirely lost on these modern age equality warriors is the subtle fact that the reason why benefits where bestowed upon the married in the first place was a recognition of the value of marriage to the community in that it provided for the nurture and sustenance of the next generation and this was an economic activity to be encouraged and supported. Yes, yes, I know Lesbians can and have produced turkey baster babies.

For democracy to work we need an opposition, a credible opposition. With MMP we have a plethora of political parties who could take up that role but despite National being entirely lackluster they only thing that any of the non National parties seem to be able to achieve is to make National look good. As an exhibit the latest botch-up from ACT .

My little T is going to a school formal next Saturday. She's very excited about it. If you have daughters you may know the routine,about what to wear and the investment in new dresses and shoes along with the negotiations and compromises made between mother and daughter over what can be afforded and what can not. Its really quite lovely. Of course what we are really seeing is a relic of a bygone age, one where the fundamental importance of the new generation pairing off for the purpose of procreation was still understood. And formal mechanisms developed to create well er um dare I say breeding pairs. Of course for much of human history and still today in places this pairing of people was regarded as too important to be left up to the young themselves and they were paired by parents, sometimes at an early age. Funnily enough it may have been Christianity, which nominally at least, has always required that marriage be entered into freely by both partners, which bought abou...

The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen on the Mother of God - Mary. In part one, after a few jokes, he first talks about Mary being a dream in God's mind before He created her. Part two is heavily theological, on the Wedding at Cana and the Cross. Part three explains why women cannot be priests, and alot more. For the atheists amoung us, if you watch nothing else, watch Part 4 , which has a couple of amazing stories of the conversion of atheists - their souls won with suffering of others on their behalf.

Envy politics from Dr Russel Norman Rich people benefit disproportionately from not having to pay a capital gains tax, Green co-leader Russel Norman says. Question: Do poor people benefit in anyway, shape or form by the Government finding new and novel ways to soak the rich? Does anybody benefit apart perhaps from a few office drones who would have to be employed to process the bits of paper needed to administer such a scheme? Read it and weep: 'Rich gain most' from no capital tax Update : Actually thinking about it I'm probably wrong about who would benefit the most from such a scheme. The biggest beneficiaries would most likely be high income, lawyers and accountants who would find new opportunities in developing novel instruments to avoid or a least minimize the amount that would be required to be paid in tax under such a regime.

Chat time!

Lack of gay-parenting books concerns researcher Wellington schools are reinforcing the image of traditional families by not stocking books about gay parents, a Victoria University reseacher says. .snip Introducing inclusion and diversity at an early age could have a profound impact on all children. Showing the similarities between families with gay and straight parents would help combat homophobia I've just been listening to NewsTalkZB (Wellington) talkback this morning, and the callers were overwhelmingly against any sort of social engineering countering this apparent problem being introduced into schools. Not that what the general population wants is considered the final word on such a matter, as the situation in California recently shows, where it is now going to be mandatory to teach gay and lesbian history. Supporters are hailing the bill as a way to counter the invisibility of the LGBT community in many textbooks and classrooms. They also say it’s an important step...

A shock horror story the Dominion Post has kept alive for two days now involves a " Public service high flier " who is on " sick leave ". Very few facts but according to the Dominion the proximate cause of Ms Bach's sudden indisposition that sees her unable to perform her duties as Chief Executive of the Housing and Building Department is that Ms Bach was involved in an altercation with employee Jaime Rawlings in front of several other staffers. It is understood she swore at and manhandled Ms Rawlings. Aside: aren't we being told by another extremely well remunerated female public employee that women don't get Chief Executive roles because of " unfairness at work " or something. Everything is a illness these days it seems, like the malady I'd not come across before, maskophobia , which struck down a couple of Auckland bus drivers the other day . Luckily maskophobia is simply cured by attending a diversity awareness course and vi...

Tomorrow marks the end of an era. After a thirty year program the very last space shuttle mission will be flown. And no surprise the end is here - after thirty years the shuttles have grown a bit tired. Two have been lost of course. So fine what are American Astronauts going to use to get into space now, for missions to the International Space Station for example? A jolly good question with a very interesting answer. They will hitch a ride with the Russians on their Soyuz craft. Have the Americans got a replacement system lined up? No - not even on the drawing board. Not even the germ of an idea of where to from here. Guess who has a monopoly on manned spaceflight? So who has won the space race ? A sad day.

Sometimes it's a little freaky living by the beach. Every time there is a tsunami warning, I'm mentally checking what I might need to grab if we had to leave home in a hurry, and what the best route to take is so that we don't get over taken by a tsunami. This latest warning after the 7.8 7.6 earthquake this morning at the Kermadec Islands got me a little concerned as I was getting up for the day, but apparently, no biggie down here, not to worry, it's all ok. Well, to the afternoon and my youngest son's swimming lesson, which is right by the beach. We arrived to find driftwood and mud in the carpark, as if the tide had come right up and washed over everything. And then right next to the carpark, this is what the mouth of the Wharemauku stream looked like as water poured both into it from the sea and out of the river itself, which was already high due to the rain. I've never seen the entire area covered in water like that before. After the swimming ...

Posting this will probably be a waste of time since reading it will require the engagement of brain cells and it is going to point out things that people steadfastly don't want to know or perhaps don't want you to know. T'aint going to be a snappy little number. Unless you live in a cave you will no that there has been a lot said about an alleged gender gap in what women earn compared to men. Now one statement that has appeared in the media was In New Zealand new female graduates are paid on average $5000 less than male graduates and as they progress the gap can increase. In the public relations industry there is a $41,539 variance between men and women with 15 to 19 years in the profession. I already discussed the first part of that statement here . Take a look at the second, it's quite revealing. The Public %&*$%#$ Relations industry - gosh? So tonight some little girl in Tuatapere is going to go to bed happily dreaming of her future career in Public Re...

I was really struck by this comment on Kiwiblog by Sarkozygroupie yesterday: As a green-eyed, blonde western woman and having had the very dubious pleasure of having to abide by Islamic dress codes in several Islamic countries I can attest that after a very short while, the psychological efffects of having to cover up from head to toe continuously, and to be constantly aware of the need to make sure the veil is fixed in place lest (at the very least) great offence be caused to men forcing them to lose control (and at the worst) being taken away by the police (as actually happens), takes its toll. Very quickly I became fixated on MY responsibility not to offend any men around me, not to be seen to be anything but subservient and malleable. In the end I didn’t want to take off my veil and resisted until the last moment because it gave me a sense of security which comfortably replaced the sense of independence I had lost. Even in the privacy of my own hotel room I had to be fully vei...

It was inevitable I suppose. From the moment poor old Alisdair uttered his unfortunate truth in the debate over the supposed gender gap in pay rates he was doomed. He should have avoided talking biology and just spouted pre-prepared, vapid talking points the way the empty headed chattering class do.

It never rains but it pours LONDON (Reuters) - Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulfur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared , a U.S. study said on Monday. The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution. World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show. Maybe the whole theory of man made global warming is on its last legs, it's been a great money spinner though so whatever it takes to keep the gravy train rolling is worthwhile I suppose. source: Asia pollution blamed for halt in warming: study