From todays Australian Newspaper
Ring any bells
"The Labor apparatus is a superb, slick, clever machine for delivering jobs and patronage to its supporters.
Certain unions exercise disproportionate influence over its deliberations and safe seats are now rotten boroughs doled out to reward faithful apparatchiks.
The branches are moribund and no longer have a genuine say in policy or candidate selection.
No wonder young, energetic idealists and activists of the Left are flooding into the Greens and GetUp!"
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Thanks to the sanest man in Australian Journalism Andrew Bolt
US historian Shelby Steele on the slow death of the West:
One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now.
Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist.
Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on."
Just do not have the bottle to defend the enlightenment
Wonder if they know what living in an unlightened society is like.
US historian Shelby Steele on the slow death of the West:
One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now.
Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist.
Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on."
Just do not have the bottle to defend the enlightenment
Wonder if they know what living in an unlightened society is like.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The ideological world versus the real world
Those who construct their reality from an ideology, like the marxists, or from a religion like say the Greens must occasionally look at the parts of the modern world which they have wrought and wonder at the current tragic consequences of the actions drawn from their unreal ideas.
Why have had such monsterous and evil consequences followed the lofty ideals of the left..
The ideology that sprang form the 60's from the "New" Left and the environmental movement, their projected a reality, has come to pass.
They hold the seats of power in governments, universities and the media.
These institutions have marched in lockstep with their brilliant ideas for a better and more enlightened future for us all. From saving Africa, ending poverty leveling out incomes, to changing the world's thermostat no project was too small for taxpayers money to be hurled in billions into the breach.
We have funded billions and billions of dollars from the public purse for their solutions to conjured threats.
The solutions they promulgated have been taken put in place at enourmous expense.
Why then if the implementation of their ideas has been to their wishes has a grusome reality arrived that is so different from their claimed nivarna.
What has actually come to pass is so different from that promised by the green doomsayers that you have to conclude that to continue to hold the views they do, so far removed from reality, is akin to madness.
In the end though thankfully reality mugs them.
They see a world of windmills, of centrally commanded social mores, of social justice and control by government.
What they cannot ignore is the reality if what is actually there.
The vast number of hard realities that governments can never control, for long anyway.
Two things are certain.
When the ideas of their rulers are so far removed from their reality of life every day people revolt.
That, or the economic system collapses when fixing the imaginary problems takes all the money and meantime the real problems are starved of attention and resources.
Take one example of a Green scare.
The world population explosion is a core left bogey man, a frightener of small children and ill informed politicians.
The worlds population will peak at 2050. It will decline thereafter if present trends are continued.
This is the reality.
It is here already. Take the reality of what the deluded greens perceive of is an "overpopulated" Japan.
"According to a U.S. annual report, Japan’s population peaked in 2005 and will plunge from its current 127 million to 89 million in 2050. That’s a decline of 30%. The median age in Japan today is 43 years old, the highest in the world.
The average age in Japan in 2050 is projected to be 61.
An increasing number of Japanese leaders are looking for an easy way out of the dilemma of rapid societal aging — as evidenced by recommendations by the Japanese Association of Acute Medicine to allow euthanasia for the terminally ill.
On last year’s Children’s Day, the government noted that the number of children in Japan had declined for the 26th consecutive year. Over the past decade, more than 2,000 junior and senior high schools closed due to lack of students to teach. As I recently viewed a report on Japanese television stating that more than 60,000 teachers are unemployed, I couldn’t help but wonder if that teacher I met at the one-student school still had a job. That same program reported that nearly 100 children’s theme parks have closed in recent years and that more and more pediatricians are switching specialties to become geriatricians.
Since the 1920s, when Margaret Sanger traveled to Japan to promote contraception and sterilization, the Japanese have embraced the modern notion of “family planning.”
One recent poll revealed that 70% of young Japanese single women have no intention of getting married because babies are simply “too much trouble.”
http://www.ncregister.com/site/print_article/22739/
So for the reason that babies are too much trouble for these polished young ladies of priveliege the race, culture, social and enttity called Japan will cease to exist in the forseable future.
That is how the world ends, not with a whimper or a bang, not by fire nor by ice, not even with the babble of a small child.
It ends because girls whose Grandmothers and mothers made the deepest and hardest personal sacrifice two generations before to bring them their spoiled life of luxery, and whose Grandfathers and fathers, raised their Nation from paddy field poverty and serfdom by sacrifice, hard work and enterprise to be the second wealthiest in the world, find shopping and holidays so much more fun that the keeping of a messy husband and the tending of a bothersome child.
The George Monbiot's of this world ponder how to get "rid" of four or five billion people, people like you and me, to avert impending catastrophe. Their ideology misleads them and hides the real reality.
They rest easy, safe.
They live the life of the priveleiged elite.
They have constructed a world from words and ideas.
And it suits them well.
Well 42 years have passed since the genesis of this thinking.
The time of the test has come.
Does the real world match their construct.
Being unable to discern the difference between a world of fantasy and a world of reality is a symtom of madness.
Read that piece about Japan above, that is reality not the phantoms of '1968"
As my hero Deng Jioping said.
We may agree or disagree about ideology, but we must proceed from reality.
Taxpayers should refuse to spend their money on the green madness.
Why have had such monsterous and evil consequences followed the lofty ideals of the left..
The ideology that sprang form the 60's from the "New" Left and the environmental movement, their projected a reality, has come to pass.
They hold the seats of power in governments, universities and the media.
These institutions have marched in lockstep with their brilliant ideas for a better and more enlightened future for us all. From saving Africa, ending poverty leveling out incomes, to changing the world's thermostat no project was too small for taxpayers money to be hurled in billions into the breach.
We have funded billions and billions of dollars from the public purse for their solutions to conjured threats.
The solutions they promulgated have been taken put in place at enourmous expense.
Why then if the implementation of their ideas has been to their wishes has a grusome reality arrived that is so different from their claimed nivarna.
What has actually come to pass is so different from that promised by the green doomsayers that you have to conclude that to continue to hold the views they do, so far removed from reality, is akin to madness.
In the end though thankfully reality mugs them.
They see a world of windmills, of centrally commanded social mores, of social justice and control by government.
What they cannot ignore is the reality if what is actually there.
The vast number of hard realities that governments can never control, for long anyway.
Two things are certain.
When the ideas of their rulers are so far removed from their reality of life every day people revolt.
That, or the economic system collapses when fixing the imaginary problems takes all the money and meantime the real problems are starved of attention and resources.
Take one example of a Green scare.
The world population explosion is a core left bogey man, a frightener of small children and ill informed politicians.
The worlds population will peak at 2050. It will decline thereafter if present trends are continued.
This is the reality.
It is here already. Take the reality of what the deluded greens perceive of is an "overpopulated" Japan.
"According to a U.S. annual report, Japan’s population peaked in 2005 and will plunge from its current 127 million to 89 million in 2050. That’s a decline of 30%. The median age in Japan today is 43 years old, the highest in the world.
The average age in Japan in 2050 is projected to be 61.
An increasing number of Japanese leaders are looking for an easy way out of the dilemma of rapid societal aging — as evidenced by recommendations by the Japanese Association of Acute Medicine to allow euthanasia for the terminally ill.
On last year’s Children’s Day, the government noted that the number of children in Japan had declined for the 26th consecutive year. Over the past decade, more than 2,000 junior and senior high schools closed due to lack of students to teach. As I recently viewed a report on Japanese television stating that more than 60,000 teachers are unemployed, I couldn’t help but wonder if that teacher I met at the one-student school still had a job. That same program reported that nearly 100 children’s theme parks have closed in recent years and that more and more pediatricians are switching specialties to become geriatricians.
Since the 1920s, when Margaret Sanger traveled to Japan to promote contraception and sterilization, the Japanese have embraced the modern notion of “family planning.”
One recent poll revealed that 70% of young Japanese single women have no intention of getting married because babies are simply “too much trouble.”
http://www.ncregister.com/site/print_article/22739/
So for the reason that babies are too much trouble for these polished young ladies of priveliege the race, culture, social and enttity called Japan will cease to exist in the forseable future.
That is how the world ends, not with a whimper or a bang, not by fire nor by ice, not even with the babble of a small child.
It ends because girls whose Grandmothers and mothers made the deepest and hardest personal sacrifice two generations before to bring them their spoiled life of luxery, and whose Grandfathers and fathers, raised their Nation from paddy field poverty and serfdom by sacrifice, hard work and enterprise to be the second wealthiest in the world, find shopping and holidays so much more fun that the keeping of a messy husband and the tending of a bothersome child.
The George Monbiot's of this world ponder how to get "rid" of four or five billion people, people like you and me, to avert impending catastrophe. Their ideology misleads them and hides the real reality.
They rest easy, safe.
They live the life of the priveleiged elite.
They have constructed a world from words and ideas.
And it suits them well.
Well 42 years have passed since the genesis of this thinking.
The time of the test has come.
Does the real world match their construct.
Being unable to discern the difference between a world of fantasy and a world of reality is a symtom of madness.
Read that piece about Japan above, that is reality not the phantoms of '1968"
As my hero Deng Jioping said.
We may agree or disagree about ideology, but we must proceed from reality.
Taxpayers should refuse to spend their money on the green madness.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
In light of business I thought i would post some comments i wrote in my ezine some 13 years ago.
The knowledge society
The knowledge society has arrived and few societies are prepared for it. The last great transition was when the cottage industries and crafts that supplied the humble wants of the rural based population were thrown into the cataclysm of the Industrial Revolution.
In that era if you had two arms could stand upright and had a modest grasp of numeracy and literacy you could get a job, raise a family and pay a mortgage. So numerous were such people that Karl Marx forecast they would rule the world!
We now move into a world where knowledge is currency Agriculture occupies under 5% of the population and manufacturing is falling below 30%. The Internet is a harbinger to the on line revolution and an indication that the transition has begun in earnest. To some the cottage lamps are beckoning again.
But three groups suffer.
Group 1: The ignorant and illiterate school leavers Victims of the sad cult of whole context learning and self construction literacy training. This lunacy has harmed the median learners, not bothered the brightest but left those whose houses are not interested in books with less literacy than their grandparents
Group 2: A large number of young people are well educated but unskilled.. In a knowledge society the most precious commodity is knowledge of the job. Previous experience.
Group Three: the older worker whose knowledge has been superseded and is redundant or who were the easiest to get rid of since they had more resources.
The focus in gaining full employment has been to get these groups onto the bottom rung of the ladder All the schemes which might have worked in the depression of the 1930's have been tried repeatedly and failed.
Why try and cram more unlearned or pseudo skilled entrants onto a crowded bottom rung. of the ladder
Better to move those on the next rungs one step up. Make junior book keepers into accountants, ticket writers into graphic artists. The emphasis should be on giving those in the lower middle ranks a more skilled repertoire.
The unemployable can then train for the first steps on the ladder knowing that there is a place there. While the first steps might be Mc Donald's or data input but the second and third are open for progress.
There are opportunities for a number of players
Universities
instead of sitting in beleaguered backwaters of education bleating about lowered income or touring the foreign student pools could to go to local enterprises and contract for online training in areas in real demand.
Private training consultants instead of offering short term courses could provide substantial qualifications online
Prospective students could judiciously mix both options. . Education Al la carte. A skilled worker is both a capital asset and a public benefit.
Enterprises could offer real educational and qualification packages as part of their enticement package to the advancing cohorts of the future skilled.
The State would invest in upskilling the currently skilled to make room for those unskilled to begin the process. A far better investment than the training of a personal social worker for every unemployed and lifetime dole and social security payments..
Real Philanthropists could endow Internet establishments offering such options as a tangible public benefit.
The option is not only to design online MBA courses for the upper ranks but management courses for receptionists and stock broking for pay clerks.
If the receptionist leaves the chair 3pm to online in a conference room would it break the bank to have a part time trainee from Group 2. For the day that she is a real earner.
Group three have opportunities in the training and organisation of such systems, going on line themselves to become contract educators.
Group 1, well its back to square one to achieve what was done in tin shed in small schools houses in the thirties. By rote learning through the screens teach them to read and write
The wider challenge is to remove the notion that education is an activity conducted at specific geographical location to a specific age group at a specific time.
The knowledge society
The knowledge society has arrived and few societies are prepared for it. The last great transition was when the cottage industries and crafts that supplied the humble wants of the rural based population were thrown into the cataclysm of the Industrial Revolution.
In that era if you had two arms could stand upright and had a modest grasp of numeracy and literacy you could get a job, raise a family and pay a mortgage. So numerous were such people that Karl Marx forecast they would rule the world!
We now move into a world where knowledge is currency Agriculture occupies under 5% of the population and manufacturing is falling below 30%. The Internet is a harbinger to the on line revolution and an indication that the transition has begun in earnest. To some the cottage lamps are beckoning again.
But three groups suffer.
Group 1: The ignorant and illiterate school leavers Victims of the sad cult of whole context learning and self construction literacy training. This lunacy has harmed the median learners, not bothered the brightest but left those whose houses are not interested in books with less literacy than their grandparents
Group 2: A large number of young people are well educated but unskilled.. In a knowledge society the most precious commodity is knowledge of the job. Previous experience.
Group Three: the older worker whose knowledge has been superseded and is redundant or who were the easiest to get rid of since they had more resources.
The focus in gaining full employment has been to get these groups onto the bottom rung of the ladder All the schemes which might have worked in the depression of the 1930's have been tried repeatedly and failed.
Why try and cram more unlearned or pseudo skilled entrants onto a crowded bottom rung. of the ladder
Better to move those on the next rungs one step up. Make junior book keepers into accountants, ticket writers into graphic artists. The emphasis should be on giving those in the lower middle ranks a more skilled repertoire.
The unemployable can then train for the first steps on the ladder knowing that there is a place there. While the first steps might be Mc Donald's or data input but the second and third are open for progress.
There are opportunities for a number of players
Universities
instead of sitting in beleaguered backwaters of education bleating about lowered income or touring the foreign student pools could to go to local enterprises and contract for online training in areas in real demand.
Private training consultants instead of offering short term courses could provide substantial qualifications online
Prospective students could judiciously mix both options. . Education Al la carte. A skilled worker is both a capital asset and a public benefit.
Enterprises could offer real educational and qualification packages as part of their enticement package to the advancing cohorts of the future skilled.
The State would invest in upskilling the currently skilled to make room for those unskilled to begin the process. A far better investment than the training of a personal social worker for every unemployed and lifetime dole and social security payments..
Real Philanthropists could endow Internet establishments offering such options as a tangible public benefit.
The option is not only to design online MBA courses for the upper ranks but management courses for receptionists and stock broking for pay clerks.
If the receptionist leaves the chair 3pm to online in a conference room would it break the bank to have a part time trainee from Group 2. For the day that she is a real earner.
Group three have opportunities in the training and organisation of such systems, going on line themselves to become contract educators.
Group 1, well its back to square one to achieve what was done in tin shed in small schools houses in the thirties. By rote learning through the screens teach them to read and write
The wider challenge is to remove the notion that education is an activity conducted at specific geographical location to a specific age group at a specific time.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Fraser Colman Neil MacKay The Criterion
I started long ago to put a lot of trust in handshakes.
I think the first time I put some thought into the matter was when Fraser Colman the Minister of something other in the Kirk Government shook my hand in the Criterion pub in Onehunga.
The Cri as it was called in Onehunga had tiles half way up the wall so if you threw up it was easy to clean and the carpets, and there were carpets, oozed their age, decrepitude and tiredness.
Mostly you were allowed to stand against high tables and the ashtrays were old corn beef tins.
The reason I lived in New Zealand was to some degree the lack of ceremony of such a place, but there are pubs all over the world where people don’t stand on ceremony.
No what made New Zealand truly unique was the fact you could meet a Minister of the Crown in such a pub, with the chauffeur waiting round the corner and that you would meet and have few beers and spend an afternoon talking, all equals.
That was what was so different about New Zealand and it was the rarest thing in the world.
I had of course been shaking hands for years and was well aware of some pointers.
I had spent a few years with shearers, wharfies, building workers, sailors freezer hands and even shook hands all round at the Taneatua pub.
You shake hands after a fight to agree its over and will be forgotten.
You shake hands to seal a bargain and to tell someone who you are.
If you know the right shake either in an American ghetto or the Triangle in Onehunga you can do the special shake with out losing face and getting it wrong.
It does not do to get it wrong.
If you don’t trust the person you put your index finger up their cuff along their wrist.
No wharfie or hard case drunk can crush your hand if you do that.
It lets them know that you know this.
It also lets them know that you don’t trust them.
But that’s a better risk than having some muscled hoon crushing your knuckles to a pulp.
For if they do the protocol is that you just take it.
If you whinge and whelp you will termed a wanker and be drinking somewhere else.
You take it because you’re not a crybaby and because you didn’t put your index finger out as a sensible man might do.
The Cri was a great pub on a Saturday afternoon.
It was where you could meet Neil MacKay.
Neil was Scotsman and the cleverest man I ever met, and I have met a few clever men.
He liked a drink. The Criterion was one place you could see Neil’s practical genius at work
He had a biggish section up in Grey Street and instead of being an idiot and getting a lawn mower and wasting a good Saturday’s drinking time slaving over the business of a big section he bought a goat.
So Neil was in the pub while the goat was dealing with a big dose of kikuyua.
I know a bit about goats and was there when he announced quietly that he had solved the bloody kikuyua problem,
Neil hated Kikuyua with a passion and when he went gardening, he did a spot of contract, gardening he poisoned it with diesel, a slower death, having been careful to charge the client a fortune for roundup.
As I said I know a bit about goats so I knew he had half an acre and I knew about to the week, to the day when the goat would have eaten ever living thing about the place and MacKay smart as he was would have one of life’s intractable problems.
What to do with a hungry goat who was going to get meaner hungrier and more cantankerous as the days go by?
I was planning to, as you do the get the upper hand in a conversation; casually ask about the week after the goat got hungry, "hows the goat going Neil?"
Anyway as usual I forgot but what did start to happen some weeks later was every now an again these Maori blokes would come up to Neil with a double whiskey.
They would have a yarn and then wander off saying “good as gold” Neil.
Well I eventually asked, eventually because MacKay’s affairs were complicated and involved and sometimes it would be embarrassing to ask and not get an answer why they were buying him whiskey?
Oh, the boys, says Neil, to the Irish anyone in the pub is one of the boys and Neil knew the term, oh he says “I rented the goat to the boys. “
“It’s going good.”
It was going good all right what they call a win win win situation these days.
Happy Maoris, they weren’t wasting drinking time mowing lawns either and the Local Authority, and the really local authority, the missus, wern’t getting on their goat about the long grass.
And yes the goat.
Every few weeks the goat faced new frontiers of happiness, blackberry and delicious tucker of every kind as he made a circuit of the whanau.
Every time Neil came into the Cri all sorts of Maori jokers would come up and instead of digging a dollar or two out of Neil for the meat raffle they would buy him a whiskey.
I reckon that goat went as far as Kaikohe and might have even crossed tribal boundaries and went south occasionally.
Occasionally Neil would mention that it would be good if the goat could do a tour of Grey Street and sure enough some evening the goat would be dropped off the back of a Ute and settle into home pastures contented as you please.
Anyway what surprised me about Fraser Colman’s handshake was that he nearly crushed my hand to a pulp.
I just looked him in the eye, all the while suffering eye watering pain.
There was little you could do.
If he was a plain civilian you could do two things.
The first was curl your other hand into fist and with your less useful hand try and smash him in the mouth.
The second was that you could raise your knee and pull him towards you and crush his solar plexus on the point of it, or crush something lower.
The first was for idiots who should have better sense than to go crushing your hand and the second was for lunatics who had no sense and more importantly no mates either.
There was certain etiquette about starting a fight, you usually simmered over an insult and then after you had drunk your beer, you didn’t start a fight on a full glass, you would turn the glass upside-down.
That was the equivalent of a touching slap with a velvet glove.
Anyway you invited the culprit outside.
It might seem a league of gentleman, it wasn’t, some people went outside and were thumped with a pick handle.
But there were hardly any fights in the Criterion. Everyone had agreed that long ago and while occasionally fools might ruin the arrangement they were rare.
The Tri, The Triangle down the road was another matter; people went there assured of a good stoush most nights.
But Ministers of the Crown were another business altogether.
I was with a mate of mine a young street wise MP called Mike Moore and he and Fraser were so to speak workmates.
The crushing of Fraser's powerful hand was getting me and I was going to thump him Minister or not, mate of Moores or not. And he let go
Anyway I let the matter pass and we had a drink.
Fraser was a decent bloke, just didn’t know his strength it seemed.
I often wondered if Fraser was just seeing if I was one of the boys or a soft handed well soft handed.
Because the other thing about Labour Ministers of the Crown, was that they had calluses on their hands, thick calluses.
Oh some had gone soft but the traces were there. And you could tell a lot from a handshake.
It’s a very intimate thing a handshake.
Of course the world I am talking of was long ago.
The Criterion if its still there doesn’t have corn beef tin ashtrays, the boys if they are still there have to crouch along the wall if they want a smoke.
And the tax on beer has gone so high it and only be afforded by people who drink fancy foreign stuff at insane prices well out of the reach of the workers.
And anyway the mob that drank at the Cri have all been shuffled out on to welfare.
And the best deal they can get is a $50 dollars bag of weed from the boys in the bush.
And the boys in the bush supply the weed and with the money from their retail sales to the pakeha buy a stack of cans, a few bottles of spirits and every one gets totally rotten in all meanings of the word at long parties lasting days, at home, on their own.
And the Labour Ministers raise the taxes on beer, drive the scarcity of weed sky high and bitch endlessly about the lowered morals of the poor and never put their foot in a poor district where if they did and if the poor could afford the beer taxes they would tell them a thing or two.
There were few joys better than an afternoon at the Cri or the Kiwi when a beer was affordable by anyone and the boys had a few good jobs to do during the week.
And everyone shook hands in the most ordinary way.
As a sign of friendship
I think the first time I put some thought into the matter was when Fraser Colman the Minister of something other in the Kirk Government shook my hand in the Criterion pub in Onehunga.
The Cri as it was called in Onehunga had tiles half way up the wall so if you threw up it was easy to clean and the carpets, and there were carpets, oozed their age, decrepitude and tiredness.
Mostly you were allowed to stand against high tables and the ashtrays were old corn beef tins.
The reason I lived in New Zealand was to some degree the lack of ceremony of such a place, but there are pubs all over the world where people don’t stand on ceremony.
No what made New Zealand truly unique was the fact you could meet a Minister of the Crown in such a pub, with the chauffeur waiting round the corner and that you would meet and have few beers and spend an afternoon talking, all equals.
That was what was so different about New Zealand and it was the rarest thing in the world.
I had of course been shaking hands for years and was well aware of some pointers.
I had spent a few years with shearers, wharfies, building workers, sailors freezer hands and even shook hands all round at the Taneatua pub.
You shake hands after a fight to agree its over and will be forgotten.
You shake hands to seal a bargain and to tell someone who you are.
If you know the right shake either in an American ghetto or the Triangle in Onehunga you can do the special shake with out losing face and getting it wrong.
It does not do to get it wrong.
If you don’t trust the person you put your index finger up their cuff along their wrist.
No wharfie or hard case drunk can crush your hand if you do that.
It lets them know that you know this.
It also lets them know that you don’t trust them.
But that’s a better risk than having some muscled hoon crushing your knuckles to a pulp.
For if they do the protocol is that you just take it.
If you whinge and whelp you will termed a wanker and be drinking somewhere else.
You take it because you’re not a crybaby and because you didn’t put your index finger out as a sensible man might do.
The Cri was a great pub on a Saturday afternoon.
It was where you could meet Neil MacKay.
Neil was Scotsman and the cleverest man I ever met, and I have met a few clever men.
He liked a drink. The Criterion was one place you could see Neil’s practical genius at work
He had a biggish section up in Grey Street and instead of being an idiot and getting a lawn mower and wasting a good Saturday’s drinking time slaving over the business of a big section he bought a goat.
So Neil was in the pub while the goat was dealing with a big dose of kikuyua.
I know a bit about goats and was there when he announced quietly that he had solved the bloody kikuyua problem,
Neil hated Kikuyua with a passion and when he went gardening, he did a spot of contract, gardening he poisoned it with diesel, a slower death, having been careful to charge the client a fortune for roundup.
As I said I know a bit about goats so I knew he had half an acre and I knew about to the week, to the day when the goat would have eaten ever living thing about the place and MacKay smart as he was would have one of life’s intractable problems.
What to do with a hungry goat who was going to get meaner hungrier and more cantankerous as the days go by?
I was planning to, as you do the get the upper hand in a conversation; casually ask about the week after the goat got hungry, "hows the goat going Neil?"
Anyway as usual I forgot but what did start to happen some weeks later was every now an again these Maori blokes would come up to Neil with a double whiskey.
They would have a yarn and then wander off saying “good as gold” Neil.
Well I eventually asked, eventually because MacKay’s affairs were complicated and involved and sometimes it would be embarrassing to ask and not get an answer why they were buying him whiskey?
Oh, the boys, says Neil, to the Irish anyone in the pub is one of the boys and Neil knew the term, oh he says “I rented the goat to the boys. “
“It’s going good.”
It was going good all right what they call a win win win situation these days.
Happy Maoris, they weren’t wasting drinking time mowing lawns either and the Local Authority, and the really local authority, the missus, wern’t getting on their goat about the long grass.
And yes the goat.
Every few weeks the goat faced new frontiers of happiness, blackberry and delicious tucker of every kind as he made a circuit of the whanau.
Every time Neil came into the Cri all sorts of Maori jokers would come up and instead of digging a dollar or two out of Neil for the meat raffle they would buy him a whiskey.
I reckon that goat went as far as Kaikohe and might have even crossed tribal boundaries and went south occasionally.
Occasionally Neil would mention that it would be good if the goat could do a tour of Grey Street and sure enough some evening the goat would be dropped off the back of a Ute and settle into home pastures contented as you please.
Anyway what surprised me about Fraser Colman’s handshake was that he nearly crushed my hand to a pulp.
I just looked him in the eye, all the while suffering eye watering pain.
There was little you could do.
If he was a plain civilian you could do two things.
The first was curl your other hand into fist and with your less useful hand try and smash him in the mouth.
The second was that you could raise your knee and pull him towards you and crush his solar plexus on the point of it, or crush something lower.
The first was for idiots who should have better sense than to go crushing your hand and the second was for lunatics who had no sense and more importantly no mates either.
There was certain etiquette about starting a fight, you usually simmered over an insult and then after you had drunk your beer, you didn’t start a fight on a full glass, you would turn the glass upside-down.
That was the equivalent of a touching slap with a velvet glove.
Anyway you invited the culprit outside.
It might seem a league of gentleman, it wasn’t, some people went outside and were thumped with a pick handle.
But there were hardly any fights in the Criterion. Everyone had agreed that long ago and while occasionally fools might ruin the arrangement they were rare.
The Tri, The Triangle down the road was another matter; people went there assured of a good stoush most nights.
But Ministers of the Crown were another business altogether.
I was with a mate of mine a young street wise MP called Mike Moore and he and Fraser were so to speak workmates.
The crushing of Fraser's powerful hand was getting me and I was going to thump him Minister or not, mate of Moores or not. And he let go
Anyway I let the matter pass and we had a drink.
Fraser was a decent bloke, just didn’t know his strength it seemed.
I often wondered if Fraser was just seeing if I was one of the boys or a soft handed well soft handed.
Because the other thing about Labour Ministers of the Crown, was that they had calluses on their hands, thick calluses.
Oh some had gone soft but the traces were there. And you could tell a lot from a handshake.
It’s a very intimate thing a handshake.
Of course the world I am talking of was long ago.
The Criterion if its still there doesn’t have corn beef tin ashtrays, the boys if they are still there have to crouch along the wall if they want a smoke.
And the tax on beer has gone so high it and only be afforded by people who drink fancy foreign stuff at insane prices well out of the reach of the workers.
And anyway the mob that drank at the Cri have all been shuffled out on to welfare.
And the best deal they can get is a $50 dollars bag of weed from the boys in the bush.
And the boys in the bush supply the weed and with the money from their retail sales to the pakeha buy a stack of cans, a few bottles of spirits and every one gets totally rotten in all meanings of the word at long parties lasting days, at home, on their own.
And the Labour Ministers raise the taxes on beer, drive the scarcity of weed sky high and bitch endlessly about the lowered morals of the poor and never put their foot in a poor district where if they did and if the poor could afford the beer taxes they would tell them a thing or two.
There were few joys better than an afternoon at the Cri or the Kiwi when a beer was affordable by anyone and the boys had a few good jobs to do during the week.
And everyone shook hands in the most ordinary way.
As a sign of friendship
Thursday, June 4, 2009
American Presidents and Ancient Dan
A friend has extended the bait of commenting on Reagan as Pesident and I am rising to it.
But you can’t do that without comparing him with the others who have struggled to make a fist of the hardest job in the world
Good guys,bad guys
What sort of people were they personally
Did they do any good?
Were their policies sensible and to the taste of Ancient Dan?
This rendition is a totally personal view and is interspersed with the then personal history of Ancient Dan in his travels and learnings in matters politic which may or may not explain some of the idiosyncratic conclusions made
No apologies will be made for any statement
Nor will Ancient Dan be easily persuaded to another point of view.
Ancient Dan has the privileges of age.
I am entering my well-earned and deserved curmudgeonly stage of life where I really can’t be bothered changing opinions unless it means cash in the mail or better tasting beer.
Anyways sometimes I was there and you were not.
Well Ancient I am and my memory of presidents goes way back.
Much Much more
But you can’t do that without comparing him with the others who have struggled to make a fist of the hardest job in the world
Good guys,bad guys
What sort of people were they personally
Did they do any good?
Were their policies sensible and to the taste of Ancient Dan?
This rendition is a totally personal view and is interspersed with the then personal history of Ancient Dan in his travels and learnings in matters politic which may or may not explain some of the idiosyncratic conclusions made
No apologies will be made for any statement
Nor will Ancient Dan be easily persuaded to another point of view.
Ancient Dan has the privileges of age.
I am entering my well-earned and deserved curmudgeonly stage of life where I really can’t be bothered changing opinions unless it means cash in the mail or better tasting beer.
Anyways sometimes I was there and you were not.
Well Ancient I am and my memory of presidents goes way back.
Much Much more
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Ryanair
You've got to love O'Leary.
He is brash and bombastic and the airlines is no fun but 58 million people got to where
they wanted to go at a price they wanted to pay because he drives Ryan air.
Mind you there will be a few less sales of Guinness in the Airport lounges if that toilet charge comes in.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25580623-643,00.html
He is brash and bombastic and the airlines is no fun but 58 million people got to where
they wanted to go at a price they wanted to pay because he drives Ryan air.
Mind you there will be a few less sales of Guinness in the Airport lounges if that toilet charge comes in.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25580623-643,00.html
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