The Wing-Friends and Other Books

In Blogger's slideshows images are greatly reduced, so lose much of their impact. And captions added to them in Picasa Albums vanish, so the images shown above are: the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, Earth, Earth with New Zealand circled, New Zealand, Auckland & the Hauraki Gulf, Waiheke Island, some native NZ forest, a Fantail and chicks, various doves, etc.

(If you want to see the first ten images in their original size, they are in a posting made on the 24th of November 2011.)

My book The Wing-Friends is an imaginative tale of a small brave boy, a magical adventure, a magnificent Pegasus and the wonderful Kingdom of the Pegasi. It has been given very good reviews, and virtually every reader on Goodreads has so far awarded it five stars. It is available here. Some of my other writings are available as e-books, such as The Lower Deck, which is an over-the-top take on Waiheke happenings--sort of.

Saturday 8 September 2018

LEFT BEHIND

When those on the 'left' want to claim absolute justification and authority for something, they say
it is a 'right.' And when that is contested by others, they call them the 'right', even the 'far
right' or the 'alt-right', by which they mean that they are far wrong or in some alternative reality
where nothing is right. Right?

Tuesday 24 July 2018

HOW TO END THE GLASS CEILING

Ms Julie Anne Genter, Green MP and Hon Mincer, has railed against the plethora of Boring Old Men on boards and bewailed the lack of Bright Young Women, who should be there instead, making the world a far better place. There are, she says, too many Old Boys, messing up the world with their Old Boys Network.

But obviously she's not quite up with The Plot. Because she's also said, 'Trans Women are Women'.

Aha! That is the solution to the problem of Boring Old Boys on Boards. Because now that we've all
been re-educated into the wunnerful knowledge that gender is not between your legs, it is all in
your head--and that we all have What-If On The Brain, and that all that sex-stuff is fluid, and that we
are whatever we say we are...

So all that needs to be done is for all those Boring Old Board Boys to declare themselves Bright
Young Board Girls (sealing it with shiny new birth-certificates from the Department of Just-Is; see their homepage under Family), and, hey presto! the Glass Ceiling is gone for ever.

Done and dusted. QED. O Frabjous Day!

Oh! The tongue is stuck in the cheek. 'Woe is me, I am undone.. for I dwell amongst a people of ... lips...' (let those who know the reference see the point). In this day and age the mockery of insanity has to be stuck in gear permanently.

Thursday 12 July 2018

IT'S OUTRAGEOUS

I am outraged (that means enraged beyond rage). Why? Well I've joined the herd of the furious and
have chosen to be outraged, and have Therefore dedicated myself to finding something every week to
be outraged about. And this week, this week, this pestiferous week there was NOTHING!

I searched and searched. NOTHING!! Can you believe that? A dedicated seeker after outrage, deprived
of outrageous satisfaction. An addict deprived of his outrageous fix. Aaarrrgghh!!

Last week there was a really good one. I found out that modern tiddlywinks are 0.02 of a gram
lighter than the good old ones. I was outraged for a whole three days about that. Very satisfying.

The previous week  I found that road markings are an inch shorter than they used to be. It took me
four days of outrage to get over that. Very, very satisfying.

Sometimes I get a whole seven days of glorious outrage. That is very, very, very satisfying.

Like the week I found about a secret society that is not deeply in love with marmalade cats whose
stripes go anti-clockwise. I worked up a whole seven days of outrage that such people could exist in
a civilised society, and that their mothers were not spayed at birth. That was one of the best weeks
ever.

But this week, nothing. NOTHING!

That is outrageous. AHA! Something! I can be outraged that there's nothing to be outraged about. O
frabjous day!

Thursday 5 July 2018

MACARONI MADNESS

English is English. One of its excellent features is that it does not have all that mess of diacritical marks: accents, macrons, diaereses, etc.,--all that above-letter clutter that infests European languages.

When the English missionaries to New Zealand did their excellent work of turning stone-age Maori into a written language, they, wisely, developed a form that took care of the pronunciation without that mess. Vowels were to be pronounced as in Italian and consonants as in English. That is simple, very easy to use, and it stood us in good stead for about two hundred years

Until now. Until the insanity of 'political correctness' began its normal tyrannical work and started splashing macrons all over the place. The 'reason'? To make everyone pronounce Maori words as the Maoris do--or did, which means as they were assumed to have done. (And, yes, the plural of Maori is Maoris: that is English, and when speaking English those who are true to it form plurals in the English way; when speaking Maori they should be formed in the Maori way; when speaking Hebrew in the Hebrew way; when speaking Russian in the Russian way; etc.; etc.)

But zillions of English-speaking people are pronouncing Maori words as they pronounce English ones, and the tyrannical PC regime want to change that. And of course they are. Every language when it adopts words from other languages, quite properly, keeps its own culture and ways of pronouncing words. Trying to force people to be faithless to their language and culture is tyranny, it is PC thuggery, which in this case means forcing us to vandalise English with macaroni graffiti.

Even worse, in the case of the Maori macron tyranny, is that macrons very often are not in the fonts that people want to use on their computers, so the operating system replaces letters with a question mark or a blank or something else. The Ugly Sisters cannot force their feet into Cinderella's glass slipper.

English speakers should ignore the thuggery and vandalism of the 'politically correct' (which is never politic and never correct), and refuse to be thuggerised. The word 'Maori'  and all other Maori words being used in English is perfect without that macaroni madness.

Friday 22 June 2018

IF SUPERMARKETS WERE LIKE BUREAUCRACIES

If supermarkets worked like bureaucracies...

Instead of going to the supermarket, choosing your food and beverages from the shelves, going to the
checkout, then home to eat and drink, you would:

1) Fill out a long form on-line or on paper, packed with nosy/silly questions that have
nothing to do with the true matter in hand, written by people whose English falls far short of
first-rate, and/or whose skill at designing and programming on-line forms has yet to be recognised
as skill, on a computer system that took three years to build at a cost of $90 million, which
works out at $2 million a year per programmer.

2) Submit the form.

3) Wait.

4) Wait.

5) Wait.

6) Have the application rejected, because question number 65 was not answered according to rule
E5.2.1 (which asks the impossible, but the bureaucrats love it because it can be used to delay
things
for ever, and to their joy messes up countless lives).

7) Re-submit the form, with, you hope, Rule E5.2.1 satisfied with a letter from an MP or Councillor
or JP (which, in your starving desperation, you may have forged).

8) Wait.

9) Wait.

10) Wait.

11) Have the application rejected, because question 67, which you answered the same way as you did
the first time, is now said not to be compliant with something only vaguely stated, but there is a
question 'around' it. Never on it, just nebulously 'around' it--somewhere circling out near Alpha
Centauri, you assume.

12) Loop round (7) to (10) several more times, and see other nebulous questions imported from
'around' Alpha Centauri and flung at you--as you grow ever thinner.

13) Call the Call Centre in an attempt to clarify 'around' and bring it home to 'on'. Wait for an
interminable length of time while your ear overheats and you are forced to occupy yourself listening
to countless repeats of 'This call is important to us, please wait', interspersed with music chosen
by tone-deaf persons devoid of taste.

14) The Call Centre at last answers, only to put you through to 'Someone Who Can Help You', but has
you find been replaced
by voicemail--but just as you go to leave a message you are cut off.

15) Carry on waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting...

16) Your friends and relatives call the undertaker, because you have starved to death.

Thursday 10 May 2018

THE PROCESS OF OUR RUIN

RUIN BY PROCESS

In every country there is always the to-and-fro battle between the adherents of process and those who love justice and right, between the bureaucrats and the public servants, between those lust to be masters of the State and those who love to serve it, between those who invent and manipulate systems and those who walk the straight path, between the false accusers and the lovers of truth.

The lesson of history is that when the first sort gain the upper hand the State is on an infernal downward path to self-destruction.

It is a dismaying fact that in New Zealand, process is now winning. From the lowliest bureaucrat to the Supreme Court, process rules. Look for example at that Court's rules at legislation.govt.nz to see how many obstacles have been put in the way of getting justice and right--even signed into law by the Chief Justice acting as Administrator in place of the Governor-General (which is like the captain of one cricket team also writing rule-book and acting as umpire). There, the usual process will usually deny plaintiffs a public hearing, and a single judge in a lower court can with a process-ruling make higher appeal impossible. Injustice can thus be hidden, very easily.

The seven great Constitutional Enactments enshrined in Schedule 1 of our Imperial Laws Application Act 1988 are little-known, and are being ignored and trashed wholesale. Yet they are the only protection in law that we the common people have against unjust,wrong-headed process. They were set down for us by wise Royalty centuries ago; all our laws and history rest on them; to evade them, to set them at nought, to trash them is the ultimate corruption.

The fact that those enactments were originally enacted by Royalty may upset the republicans, who want us to be on the track to a Bush and a Trump, but if they had not been enacted none of us would be here. It was on those great laws that England became great, then Great Britain, then the greatest empire the world has ever known, which touched 171 countries, including New Zealand. Whatever people might think of that, that is the history of the world. Billions of people would not exist if those Royal enactments had not been made. And English would not be the world language. For New Zealand, they are the foundation of our history and all our law. If they had never existed Cook would not have set sail in 1769 and claimed this land for the British Crown. Those greate enactments began on June the 15th 1215 in Magna Carta. From that later arose our seven Constitutional Enactments, dated 1275, 1297, 1351, 1354, 1368, 1627 and 1688. The last is the 1688 Bill of Rights Act, and therefore New Zealand has two Bills of Rights Acts, the 1688 one signed by King William III and Queen Mary II, and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990.

Constitutional laws are, by definition, paramount. For the Court of Appeal, now backed by the Supreme Court, to rule them not paramount is outrageous.

It should infuriate every true-born New Zealander that our Constitutional Enactments have been so hubristically destroyed. Our birthright has been taken from us, by iniquitous process, behind closed doors. And, even worse, the worst example of it has been done in our Courts.

It is doubly sad that the Consitutional Enactments are not not being taught in schools. They should be; over and over and over again. Everyone should know our most fundamental rights. The Consitutional Enactments in the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988 should be known far better than the Privacy Act 1993 and the Human Rights Act 1993, and should be held far higher. To trash them is like murdering your parents and all your ancestors, and it puts us on the downward path.

It is particularly corrupt for New Zealand Courts to evade and set at nought the heart of two of our greatest Constitutional Enactments, the Second and the Fifth. Because in the Second there is a great promise made to everyone--'We will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right--and in the Fifth there is a great dictate, that whatever emanates from ‘false accusers’ is 'void in law and holden for error.' To trash that promise is downright evil, and to trash that dictate is to give open slather to the corruption of process and thus a free hand to all those who, as the Fifth says, act for 'singular benefit not for the profit of ... the people'.

The Fifth Constitutional Enactment is very right. Process-and-title is always about 'singular benefit'--about the rank abuse of rank,  rule by and for process and title not by and for justice and right. That corruption cares nothing for those whom Winston Churchill called 'the people who toil and moil.' And in a speech to the Canadian Parliament during the Second World War he said, 'Public men are proud to be servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters.' But the adherents of process, the bureaucrats, the rank abusers of rank, know no shame. In their shameless vanity and arrogant stupidity they are destroying our country, bit by bit.