The story itself, which National have sat on for weeks, is almost too horrible for words, and there is little doubt that there will be a by-election in Northland.
When full details of what has transpired are revealed then there are going to be some serious questions asked of the leadership.
I expect that the “almost too horrible for words” assault allegations are well founded, but I convict Mike Sabin of being a violent prohibitionist by arguing from first principles and his prohibitionist track record.
Mike Sabin wants to lock me (and my friends) in cages for no good reason.
[T]hough “lawmakers” are at the very top of the authoritarian hierarchy, even they do not accept personal responsibility for what “government” does. Even they speak as if “the law” is something other than the commands they issue. For example, it is very unlikely that any politician would feel justified hiring armed thugs to invade his neighbor’s home, and drag his neighbor away and put him in a cage, for the supposed sin of smoking marijuana. Yet many politicians have advocated exactly that, via anti-drug “legislation.” They seem to feel no shame or guilt regarding the fact that their “legislation” has resulted in millions of non-violent people being forcibly taken from their friends and families and made to live in cages for years on end – sometimes for the rest of their lives. When they speak of the acts of violence which they are directly responsible for – and “narcotics laws” are only one example – “legislators” use terms such as “the law of the land,” as if they themselves are mere spectators and “the land” or “the country” or “the people” were the ones who made such violence occur.
What the government does is lock non-violent drug users in cages and Sabin was personally responsible for locking non-violent drug users in cages during his time in government.
The Three Dog Night / Foreigner / Heart Concert in Whitianga last Sunday was AWESOME! … a fact completely wasted on NZ media … with it’s severe lack of coverage of this event… and so I’m writing this post to in some small way REPRESENT the appreciation We Kiwi fans have for the Musical Genius these Folk spread about our Country … a show in Taupo… one up the Coromandal peninsula, and one more due to kick off in Queenstown on the 31st.
During the Show my mind was buzzing…. I had been waiting 30 years to hear Heart and Foreigner… not that I really thought I ever would see them…. And yet there they were!
I was experiencing a very special moment in my life…
I was back in the 80’s … West Auckland…. sitting on the floor…. Back against the wall of my friend Terry’s sleep out… Smoking Bags of Weed… drinking as much of the cheapest nastiest piss as we could afford… Wall to Wall Wasted Wallies head bangin to a scratchy rendition of ‘Cold as Ice’… on the cheapest Crappiest portable turntable ….
Life is Grand!
My Blog tribute may not be the greatest they have ever received, yet I Hope they know just how special this Day was for thousands of people just like me… We were humbled by their presence.
It may have just been just one more show to them… yet for us fans… it’is something we will remember with immense happiness..
During the Gig… several different ideas for a blog post lighted upon me…. Each better than the last…. Yet because I did not bring a pen and paper… they divorced me almost as quickly as they arrived… do you think I can remember any of them now?
Nope!
It was Hot…. and I was Drinking…. A lot…. 🙂
So was everybody else yet the mood was sooo cruizie … peace reigned… the only spoiler was a silly fat bitch sitting beside me who complained that Joy (my wife) was partially blocking her view of the big screen… even though we were sitting in the very best possie available… a mere 70 feet from the stage!
Monster!
I told her to get a life.
That was the only ill spirit that appeared that day… I didn’t even see one Coppa… the crowd were havin a Lazy Sunday…. Well done all!
I got Jiggy.
Three Dog Night were Cool as…. Absolute Maestros…. 15 albums.
They joked with the crowd and told yarns about their Heydays…. How they came to write their songs… what was the stimuli… the expedience.
I leaned over to my friend and expressed my wonder… Gob smacked…. “Never did I ever expect to hear them playing these Classic Famous songs”.
Their spoof ‘modern/ Rap version’ of ‘Mama told me not to come’… had us wetting ourselves with Glee!
FANTASTIC!
Closing encores with their New Release… ‘The Prayers of the Children’ … about the children suffering in War Zones… had us Dumb struck with tears.
Flower Power mixed with the best Harmony…. They just don’t make music like that any more…. unless you are 3 Dog Night!
And that was something I noticed about all three of these Bands… a definite and purposeful spirituality… Even Lead Singer for Foreigner… Kelly Hansen… was calling for ‘Hallelujahs’ from the crowd!
Foreigner Rockin out in Whitianga… Gig Photos by David Wolfe.
And what a Singer Kelly Hansen is!!!!!
BOOM!
He had all the woman fizzing at the bung!
His Voice is like he stepped out of a 70’s Time warp!
Classic Rock vocals worthy of the company of Paul Rogers, Peter Green, … Watch out Chris Cornel!
Foreigner songs are like a Male strip show… Provocatively Stud-ly… not just any wannabe can sing them with credibility…. Yet no problem for this showman!
He had a great rapport with the crowd.
My Girlfriends all tell me that Foreigner were the highlight of the Day… and I agree.
They Banged out Hit, after Hit, …
I was there especially to see Heart.
BOOM! Nancy Wilson walks on stage… Sun Glasses, Guitar… and Luscious Golden Blonde hair!!!
Stunning!
She’s only 60.
Heart Rocks Whitianga New Zealand 25-1-15 (Photo by Wolfy… David Wolfe)
Hearing their songs… ‘What about Love’….. ‘Crazy on you’… brought tears to my eyes.
Stealing Lyrics from Foreigner “I’ve been waiting for you” Heart for 30 years… and now there you are… performing for me…. Thank you… thank you…. I love you! 🙂
Just fantastic.
The reason I give the day to Foreigner, and not Heart was because of the extra effort Kelly made to connect with the crowd… the fact that Heart didn’t even bother putting up any Backdrop… and that they finished off on Led Zep covers… which were bloody awesome… yet I would have rather herd more of their own stuff.
Unlike poor old Meatloaf… All these Old Rockers still have it!
They baked themselves for us… the stage facing the direct Sun.
We were blessed with a slight breeze which took some of the Heat Bite away, yet Anne Wilson was dressed in Black lace…
Caught the Ferry across to the other side and within an hour we were back at my friends Bungalow… more music… more booze….
EPIC DAY!
Thank you Heart!
Thank you Foreigner.
Thank you Three Dog Night…. For taking the trouble to come all the way down to the bottom of the world to share your awesome Art…. And your awesome souls… with us Kiwis.
YOU ROCK!
Well done Greenstone Entertainment!
Very well organised events… very reasonable price!
Thanks for bringing these legends of Rock to God’s Own country.
I love Ayn Rand’s essay, Racism. Here are some excerpts.
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control… Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stockfarm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another)—the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another)—the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law—the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history—all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”
The theory that holds “good blood” or “bad blood” as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.
Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of the greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race—is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.
Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
Even if it were proved—which it is not—that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.
These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own inferiority.
Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).
To ascribe one’s virtues to one’s racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem” by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.
Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to “society,” to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.
There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.
Racism was first published in the September 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter. Click here to read the essay in its entirety.
98% of terrorist attacks in the European Union are atheistically motivated.
That’s the direct implication of the latest stats released by Europol, although of course the MSM don’t phrase it like that, for fear of offending the godless community.
The murdering spree by two gunmen on the offices of a French satirical magazine have incited horror across the world. That’s completely justified. But what’s been lost in the mass outpourings of solidarity and condemnations of barbarity is the fact that so few of the terrorist attacks carried out in European Union countries are related to Islamist militancy. In fact, in the last five year, less than 2 percent of all terrorist attacks in the E.U. have been “religiously motivated.”
It really shouldn’t come as any surprise that this century we are seeing a continuation of the heathen holocaust of the last. The 20th century’s three worst mass murderers—Hitler, Stalin and Mao—were all atheists.
Moderate atheists like Richard Dawkins notoriously try to deflect responsibility for the brutality of their brothers in unbelief, saying that militant atheists are not representative of so-called secularism. I beg to differ. Atheism itself is the anathema we must face up to and face down or Europe will soon succumb to the secularist swarm.
Believe it or not, atheist apologists go so far even as to claim that Hitler was a Christian on the strength of Hitler’s own words! Do they also seriously believe that Hitler never intended to invade Poland, but unexpectedly changed his mind after promising Chamberlain “peace for our time”?
Check out this example of brazen blame-shifting from atheist apologist Michael Sherlock.
“Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.” ~Adolf Hitler
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out” ~Adolf Hitler
Hitler was a Christian. This undeniable fact couldn’t be made any clearer than by his own confessions.
Sherlock’s claim, that Hitler was a Christian, simply beggars belief. But it’s easily and swiftly dealt with. Hitler himself refutes the claim in his mendacious Mein Kampf manifesto. He writes that “faith is the sole foundation of a moral attitude.” Hitler had no moral attitude—as the murder of 17 million people by his Nazi regime amply attests—and therefore no faith. Also, Jesus was a Jew. (Hitler was an anti-Semite.)
Godlessness killed 118 million in atheist atrocities last century and with the untold dead already unreported by a collusional MSM those who absent themselves from belief in God today are well on their way to a way worse tally in the next.
Dakta Green, Gizella van Trigt and Taranaki Blaze are jointly charged with cannabis offences. These are the charges arising from the raid that closed The Daktory in June 2012.
There are 15 witnesses for the prosecution. All police officers. This includes the main witness for the prosecution, Sargeant Lawes. The same Sargeant who committed perjury during their pretrial. We look forward to his testimony. The Daktory won a previous case and your support now will help win another!
Please show your support at the Auckland District Court, 65/69 Albert Street, this Monday at 9:00 AM.
INVITE ALL YOUR FRIENDS! Lets make this HUGE! See Facebook groups here and here.
Edible indicas, smokeable sativas
Never ending potency
Cannabis club house, comfy chairs and couches
We create the Daktory
Living like it’s legal
Mary Jane has found me
Cannot stop the Daktory
Ending prohibition
Turns into obsession
Cannot kill the Daktory
Cannot stop the Daktas
Daktory is found in me
Daktory! DAKTORY!
Failed confiscation, return of Dakta Vendor
Cops are ripped and blown away
Now is the hour, taking back the power
Daktory is here to stay
Living like it’s legal
Mary Jane has found me
Cannot stop the Daktory
Ending prohibition
Turns into obsession
Cannot kill the Daktory
Where are the moderate Muslim voices condemning the violence?
That’s what the likes of Fox News ask whenever masked terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar” fire shots with automatic weapons killing swathes of innocent Westerners before departing the scene shouting, “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed,” as happened in the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris.
Fox’s own Monica Crowley, for example, said that Muslims “should be condemning” the attack and that she hadn’t “heard any condemnation… from any groups.” Fox News’ America’s Newsroom guest Steve Emerson complained, “you don’t see denunciations of radical Islam, by name, by mainstream Islamic groups.” Bob Beckel, a host of Fox News’ The Five host said Muslims were “being quiet” about the shooting and accused the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of keeping “their mouth shut when things happen.”
Wait, what? Only 46 examples? A good many of the cited condemnations of the violence are tweets from individuals on Twitter. There are a handful from the foreign ministers of Muslim countries. Only a dozen or so statements are from representatives of large Islamic organisations. But there are between 1.5 and 2 billion Muslims in the world, depending on who’s counting. 46 out of billions isn’t very many. It’s near silence from the so-called moderate Muslim majority over this outrage!
Or so it might seem to someone predisposed to blame Islam, rather than Islamic extremism, for the all-too-frequent acts of Islam-related terrorism in today’s world. But the sad truth of the matter is that we simply don’t know how many moderate Muslims condemn durka durka Mohammed jihad. And we don’t know whether they’d be reported doing so by the MSM if they did.
I posted a couple of pictures of moderate Muslims demonstrating for peace before. Clearly one of them is photoshopped, but which one? (Perhaps they both are. I forget.)
Will the real Islam please stand up? Are the masked homicidal gunmen who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo the true representatives of Islam? Or is the hard-working and law-abiding Muslim family who own and run your corner store the true faces of the religion of peace?
Seriously, folks. Can’t you see that there’s an epistemic problem here? Is Islam the root cause of the problem? Or something else? I don’t really know and, may I respectively suggest, neither do you.
Credit where it’s due says blogger Brendan McNeill, upon whom I rely to keep tabs on what Mohammed’s followers are up to.
I have previously reflected that nothing short of a reformation of Islam will ever allow its followers to co-exist peacefully with other faith communities. It seems the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is himself a Muslim, agrees and is apparently unafraid to say so.
Speaking before Al-Azhar and the Awqaf Ministry on New Year’s Day, 2015, and in connection to Prophet Muhammad’s upcoming birthday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a vocal supporter for a renewed vision of Islam, made what must be his most forceful and impassioned plea to date on the subject.
McNeill then quotes from al-Sisi’s speech in which the Egyptian President declares that Islam “is in need of a religious revolution,” before concluding
President Sisi is a brave man. Normally, to utter these words would be an automatic death sentence. It may still prove to be.
Is al-Sisi’s speech a reason for optimism? Perhaps, but there’s a bigger problem than that which already makes al-Sisi’s future assassination a very real possibility. A further epistemic problem to exacerbate the one we already have.
Now here’s Wikipedia to say a few words about taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances—primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority.
In Shi’a Islam, taqiyya (تقیةtaqiyyah/taqīyah) is a form of religious dissimulation, or a legal dispensation whereby a believing individual can deny his faith or commit otherwise illegal or blasphemous acts while they are in fear or at risk of significant persecution. The corresponding concept in Sunni Islam is known as idtirar (إضطرار) “coercion”. A related concept is known as kitman “concealment; dissimulation by omission”. Also related is the concept of ḥiyal, legalistic deception practiced not necessarily in a religious context but to gain political or legalistic advantage.
Can we trust any of the moderate Muslims condemning violent jihad? Can we even trust al-Sisi? A friend on Facebook thinks we can’t. He says
be in no doubt it was a very brave thing for Sisi to say unless of course he is practicing Taquiyya which is the islamic doctrine of being able to lie or decieve to protect or further islam.
I don’t know if we can trust al-Sisi or not. How could I know? (He’s a politician, after all.)
Christianity does not permit lying. Not even white lies. We are called to worship God in spirit and in truth. The fact that Islam does permit lying in certain circumstances and even has a name for the practice is of the utmost concern.
Not least because it gives anti-Islamic factions in Western society a free pass to practise a modern-day form of medieval witch dunking, also known as ordeal by water.
Ordeal by water was associated with the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries: an accused who sank was considered innocent, while floating indicated witchcraft.
Innocent accused who sank drowned. Guilty accused who floated were executed for witchcraft. So the accused was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. (See also the Biblical test for an unfaithful wife.)
Muslims who don’t protest the violence of their extremist co-religionists are accused of condoning terrorism by not speaking out. Muslims who do protest are accused of committing taqiyya. Thus, in the eyes of many, there are no moderate Muslims, just as there were none left living among those women of medieval times accused, rightly or wrongly, of witchcraft.
(Point illustrated. In fact, with respect to dunking, “the notion that the ordeal was flatly devised as a situation without any possibility of live acquittal, even if the outcome was ‘innocent’, is a modern elaboration.”)
Lying is wrong. And the fate of all habitual liars is that eventually no one believes them. That Muslims are so widely regarded with suspicion is a fate that Islam has wrought upon itself.
It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Christian, who attended church daily and was responsible for bringing fellow author C.S. Lewis to faith.
What is less well known are the vast parallels between The Hobbit and The Bible, particularly the Old Testament.
While the Hobbits were based on English people and Elves speak a Celtic language, the Dwarves resemble the Jewish people. “The Dwarves… wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic,” Tolkien said in a 1971 interview.
In The Hobbit the company of Thorin Oakenshield travel to the Lonely Mountain of Erebor to reclaim their homeland and its vast gold reserves from the dragon Smaug. The Lonely Mountain shares many similarities to Mt Zion in Jerusalem, otherwise known as the Temple Mount.
The Dwarves had been driven out of their homeland and forced to “wander the wilderness” following Smaug’s capture of the mountain. The Jewish people were also forced into exile from their holy land.
The Dwarves lived in a grand cavern where their king’s throne was located while Mt Zion became the site of King David’s palace. His son Solomon build the temple there, which was the throne room of God.
Erebor is full of vast treasures particularly massive amounts of gold, just as the Jewish temple was full of gold ornaments.
The most precious treasure of the Dwarves was the Arkenstone, known as the King’s Jewel which was kept above the throne. The holy of holies in the Jewish temple was the site of the Ark of the Covenant. Inside the Ark were two sapphire stone tablets with the ten commandments written on them.
“He prepared the inner sanctuary within the temple to set the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord there.” – 1 Kings 6:19.
“Solomon covered the inside of the temple with pure gold, and he extended gold chains across the front of the inner sanctuary, which was overlaid with gold. So he overlaid the whole interior with gold. He also overlaid with gold the altar that belonged to the inner sanctuary.” – 1 Kings 6:21-22.
The Lonely Mountain and other dwarf kingdoms feature huge mines where the precious stones and metals were mined, while King Solomon also commissioned massive mines, known as King Solomon’s mines.
The vast wealth of the mountain corrupted the Dwarvish kings just as Jewish kings also became corrupted following the establishment of monarchy.
Five armies surround Erebor just as armies have often surrounded Jerusalem to try and capture the Temple Mount.
When the dragon drove the Dwarves out he become king under the mountain. In The Bible Satan is described as a dragon. Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Islamic empires have all conquered Jerusalem and are represented in the bible as beasts.
Babylon captured vast amounts of the gold in the Jewish temple and took it for itself until it was returned by the King of Persia, who allowed the destroyed temple to be rebuilt.
The Hobbit is an epic battle between the forces of good and evil involving many armies. It is apparent that an epic battle has also been raging for millennia to control Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. That battle continues right up until the present day, with Islamic groups such as ISIL and Hamas determined to make it the capital of their Islamic Caliphate. While Zionists are equally determined to rebuild Solomon’s Temple on the same site and solidify Jewish control of the Old City.
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” (NIV)
Jesus makes it abundantly clear that salvation is by works.
