Posts by Tom Beard
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I can't understand for the life of me who watches Breakfast...the last thing I want to do that early in the morning is watch that trainwreck of soft 'news' bollocks. I'd rather, I dunno...get on with my day?
Same here. Radio seems much more suited to multi-tasking: you can get updated on the day's news while going about your ablutions, making breakfast etc. But perhaps a family environment is different? Would people have time to kill while waiting for other family members to get ready? I dunno: it's so long since I had anything to do with family life.
I think the pokes at Key for not doing something about it live are unfair. If that had been me I probably would have laughed weakly and tried to move on. You just don't expect that sort of crap and you're on national TV and you're not used to making a scene. Ten minutes later as I was leaving I'd be pissed as hell and going over in my head what I should have said.
Well, most of us would have been dumbfounded and struggled to find the right words. But Key's a professional politician for chrissakes! If he can handle question time (big "If") and campaigning, surely he'd have the savoir faire to say something. Even something as bland as "You know, Paul, NZers come in all shapes and colours, so Sir Anand looks like a NZer to me" would do, though someone with more integrity could be expected to say something like "Do you realise what an outrageously racist statement that is?"
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@Graeme:
Are you seriously suggesting that "people who think like me, and talk like me, and agree with me" have greater claim on being a New Zealander than people who don't? Why can't Paul Henry be every bit the New Zealander that Anand Satyanand, Matthew Reid, and Graeme Edgeler are? How do any of our views on anything change this?
I suppose Matthew is suggesting that tolerance and inclusiveness are fundamental qualities of New Zealanders. We may like to think so, though if anything the "defining" characteristic is a sense of "fair go" that all too easily translates into a kind of white male entitlement. When it comes down to it, it's fairly easy to define what it takes to be a New Zealander: permanent residence.
Certainly I expect Paul Henry to be a cock*.
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*this term carefully selected for Craig Ranapia, who chastised me earlier for using "twat."To keep things balanced, let's call Paul Henry a twatcock.
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The trouble with reducing the tax on "healthy food" is that different people can have very different dietary requirements so what is a healthy food for me may be a bad choice for my elderly father or your toddler.
True, but while the nutritional benefits of fruit & veg may be disputed to some extent, they're all food and none of it is bad for you (unless you count things like rhubarb leaves, which preumably aren't sold as food). Whereas bread, dairy and meat may all be healthy parts of a balanced diet, they can all cause problems in excess. What's more, each is part of a continuum:
- wholegrain bread, through white bread to chelsea buns
- trim milk, through double cream to OMG triple-cream brie
- omega-3-rich fish, through lean chicken to lamb flaps (sorry Megan!)So, if you want to expand it to other foods, there are whole new cans of worms (which are processed & thus bad) to deal with, whereas if you stick with something as simple as "fresh fruit & veg" then you may miss out on some healthy food but you wouldn't be able to argue with anything included under that.
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What about mushrooms? Fungi are neither animal nor vegetable, and pose a significant zombie threat.
On the other hand, if this makes the price of fresh truffles come down, I'm all for it.
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I would happily vote for a party that removed taxes on all fruit, grains and vegetables that have been processed, as long as that processing involved fermentation and preferably distillation.
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I'm generally ambivalent about Dawkins, because as much as I share his atheism (though I tend to call myself a "sceptical agnostic") I just can't be bothered fighting religion much of the time. It's just an irrelevance to me, and unless the religious attempt to force religious beliefs into secular laws I'm generally accepting of people's faith. If your belief in a supreme being gives you personal consolation or joy, then good luck to you. But if you use that belief to tell people what they can see or who they can love, then I will fight that.
However, there's one passage from that speech that got to me:
Original sin means that, from the moment we are born, we are wicked, corrupt, damned. Unless we believe in their God. Or unless we fall for the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. That, ladies and gentleman, is the disgusting theory that leads them to presume that it was godlessness that made Hitler and Stalin the monsters that they were. We are all monsters unless redeemed by Jesus. What a vile, depraved, inhuman theory to base your life on.
(from Dawkins' original speech notes )
Of course, that extreme conception of "original sin" is not one to which many of the people I know, even those who express some religious beliefs, would subscribe. But if this sort of theology continues to be taught to children, and is done so in state-funded schools, then that is something that should concern even the most tolerant atheists amongst us.
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@Robyn I see that lightning has cut power near your workplace. Perhaps your negative energy was on the same frequency as the storm?
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the circle towards the end
Priceless! Though to be fair, Stephen Fry does indeed seem to be a higher power.
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I suppose one should cut Ms Thrake some slack, since one presumes that English is not her first language. In any case, criticising her prose is like shooting New Age fish in a barrel: lots of messy fun, but not particularly enlightening.
The astonishing thing is how many influential, powerful and apparently credible people appear to have bought in to this preposterous, unintelligible and potentially dangerous twaddle. My knowledge of "The Secret" has been hitherto restricted to one episode of The Simpsons, but the discourse is scarily redolent of Landmark, NLP and other cultoid fads so beloved of the New Age "personal power" Right.
If The Secret teaches that natural disasters strike people "on the same frequency as the event", and an obvious disciple of that ludicrous twaddle is apparently taken seriously by government departments and business leaders, then such thinking could be even more dangerous to Canterbury than Lord Brownlee. That may be a bit hyperbolic, but the "power of positive thinking" philosophy meshes cosily with the victim-blaming ideology of this government. In that case, it's not the spelling mistakes in her "faciliating consultnming" that we have to worry about so much as its content, and the "Social Responsibility" and "New Humanity" that she preaches may not be just harmless waffle.
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Graziella's transformative journey via The Secret
at the age of 14 I started to mediate, not really knowing how powerful working on my energy could be.
I wonder whether that was Transcendental Mediation?
When The Secret was shown to me by a friend, I slept through the whole thing
Possibly the wisest thing she has ever done.
I have begun to license internationally and have met amazing people just sitting beside me on planes.
Oh, those lucky, lucky people!
The gift of The Secret is it goes on.
Much like her prose.