Media useless in protecting our freedoms - Big Sister Kiro

So finally the mainstream press reports on Cindy Kiro's Orwellian plan to save "our" children, collectivising families under a Big Brother state which spies on every family, all those which are happy, healthy and fairly well balanced, to capture the small number which are dysfunctional, abusive and negligent.

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I reported on this atrocious proposal in October LAST YEAR. It's not NEWs, it's just that the standards of journalism in NZ are often shockingly low.

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and what's the headline in the Dominion Post? "$5m-a-year to save our our children" (sic). I don't care if it is $5 million, $50 million, $5 billion or $50 - THAT isn't the story Keri Welham.

The headline should be "Shades of Orwell in plan to cut child abuse" or the like.

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Think about it, all "caregivers" (not parents, no we must have a euphemism that places everyone on the same footing) must nominate a Nazi/Stasi agent - I don't use the term lightly - because it is someone to essentially spy on their parenting, or face being reported to the authorities. In other words, it doesn't matter how good a parent you really are, you must nominate some busybody to intrude.

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It will allegedly save five children a year - I don't doubt that a strategy of targeting the perpetrators - the scalpel rather than the sledgehammer - could easily achieve much of the same. However, we could easily reduce crime by having a Police state, squads could march around the streets, detaining people without charges, threatening, going into the houses of suspicious people - after all, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear - expect THAT phrase from anyone wanting to interfere with your privacy.

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I recall the tale of one victim of Ceaucescu's Romania that what people didn't have in those abominations of Stalinism was privacy - your job, your home, your day to day life, you couldn't get on with your life without the state intruding into everything - requiring you to report, go to meetings, to prove that you were not to be a suspect. It is the world of the Police State, and Cindy Kiro - not a fool by an stretch of the imagination - is either bereft of any understanding of philosophy and history, or is herself a Stalinist who sees the states involvement in people's lives as positive and embracing, not the gloved fist with the authority to give, take and regulate what you do. Nazi Germany is alien to her, perhaps the history of totalitarian societies was not part of her education, perhaps the experience of the world is not seen as important as understanding the Tangata Whenua. Who knows? All I know is that this proposal should be resisted at all counts.

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Kiro should be given a strongly worded "f... off" by any parents who love and care for their children. She wants to take away the privacy of your family for the sake of an underclass of virtually useless people who are at best parents in absentia, at worst undiscovered criminal abusers. Her strategy to deal with child abuse is about as sensible as putting tv cameras in all homes to spy on people who might do illegal things, with the right of the Police to randomly switch them on to catch you doing something "wrong".

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and if you want an answer as to how to stop the vermin who damage, torture and kill children? Start by prohibiting those convicted of serious violent and sexual offences (I mean grievous assault and rape, not just a punch in a pub or the 16yo boy with the 15yo consenting girl) from being able to live in the same home as a child. This includes prohibiting any men or women with such convictions from having custody of their own children. In addition, how about denying those who have abused children the right to any state welfare whatsoever.

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So go on Rodney Hide, John Key - say something...

Death

Dead – what a word, how final, empty and completely awful. I never understood people who said death is a part of life. It is like saying war is a part of peace, or bankruptcy is a part of property ownership. It is cold comfort that it is, currently, inevitable. I say currently because I don’t doubt that as long as humanity proceeds on a path whereby science and reason can continue to make significant advances, that the onset of death will continue to be delayed. One need only look at comparisons in life expectancy. In 1800 in London it was 28, today living to your 60s is the norm, and averages now tend to lie in the late 70s and early 80s.

I don’t think there is anything beautiful or wonderful about death, the only comfort I ever think there can be is when it is the alternative to excruciating agony. Those who consciously choose euthanasia for themselves are to be respected in that light. Beyond that though, death of those you love is a loss, a waste. It isn’t a “fact of life” or anything beyond what must be accepted, it is a cruel devastating removal of someone that is valued and loved.

The loss is noticed because you can’t talk to the person anymore, can’t hear their thoughts, share laughter, stories and experiences. That is irreplaceable because people are individuals, and the pain is only real because you have loved and lost.

You can avoid grief rather easily, be a hermit. You’ll never get close to anyone, never enjoy who they are, their mind and their sense of life, and you’ll never attend a funeral. However I don’t want that, and I value what time I’ve had with those who I have lost recently. That time is precious, and so easily wasted and frittered away on nonsense.

One point is to value memories, and to have memories to value you have to create them, live them and as you get older you can share them, smile and look back upon all those years.

Eventually technology will allow more transplants, the growth of replacement components for the body, and may even allow consciousness to remain forever intact. The desirability of this will be the subject of much debate, who wants to be conscious without a body, and who wants to be forever patched up in old age. This sets aside the typical debates about the sustainability of perpetual life and breeding. However, as lives extend it will continue to become more interesting, until, of course, I am dead.

I don’t have religion for comfort, as easy as it would be and in some moments I did wonder if those I lost could hear and see me. However, I don’t feel they are in a better place, there are no place, they are no more, as romantic as alternatives may seem (and frankly as pleasant as that seems at first). The most recent loss has also hit me about my own mortality, dying at 56 of a blood clot to the brain from a varicose vein, with cancer also spreading. She was a fit, slim, non-smoker.

I’ll do what I can to delay it all, but it is only when a parent dies young that the truth of ones own mortality is clear. Realism strikes hard, and I have to live, frittering away time is over. It is not a time to be reckless, but a time to embrace life and those who you love – for some of them will die before you, and then your time will come, and if in the moments beforehand you can reflect, then reflect upon what you had – and remember every day from now until then is all you have.

Carpe Diem has never felt so true.

It's not the fault of the child torturer because

structural issues have made them do it.

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Consider why most people who survived the Killing Fields, or the Holocaust, or the Cultural Revolution didn't, perhaps the revolutionary experience of being part of a new society that had nothing to do with evil capitalism meant the trauma of their family, friends and neighbours being executed helped.

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I wonder in a world of feminist post-modernist jurisprudence whether rapists could claim that they are so broken by the structural issues of society that it makes them rape women? "Sorry I raped that woman judge, I've been unemployed for three years, can't afford a Nintendo Wii, my favourite food and don't have a girlfriend to beat up to resolve my structural disadvantage because of capitalism - will you join me in revolution against these capitalist scum, or lock me up like the capitalism scum you are because I want to rape women like we proletariat are raped by the capitalist exploiters?"

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You see my problem is that I am part of this "It's part of a bigger project to blame people in poverty for making bad choices on an individual level"

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I'm so damned stupid, poor people don't make bad choices - they were put there. When you look at their lifestyles most of them work just as hard as everyone else, and they are just as intelligent and skilled, none of them did anything stupid or self destructive, and they are all supportive of one another in bettering themselves. I'm astounded at how brilliant they are at breeding without having the means to support themselves and the kids, abusing substances, gambling and other habits that aren't THEIR choices. They are legally insane or forced to do those things, or maybe another species. Self-destructiveness is never your fault is it? It is "society's".

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By and large most people are dealt a hand in life in terms of opportunities, some have far more than others and waste them (a man was recently in a major UK paper for having been a millionaire a couple of years ago and is now homeless living off charity), other have next to nothing and make something of them. Those who choose to evade this fact are either stupid or simply beholden to an angry agenda of violence, like most Marxist Leninists.

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but you've seriously lost touch with the real world when you think that people torture children for "structural reasons", and those who believe that will only be challenged to rethink if it happens to their children. Explaining child abuse as anything beyond something the abusers are responsible for is the last bastion of the lunatic. You can understand why it happens, but it does not mean it is not a choice. Only the insane do not choose, and perhaps only they don't believe you can choose.

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Notice John Minto (the man who couldn't give a flying fuck about his mate Mugabe halving life expectancy in Zimbabwe or his mate Kim Jong Il's gulags in North Korea) is part of this "blame capitalism for torturing kids" brigade. He doesn't look at other times of economic hardship or other cultures and see kids being tortured because the family is poor. Chris Trotter even more disgustingly says WE pay a toll for our comfortable lives somehow linking those of us who don't abuse our kids being to blame for those who do. The culture and philosophy of Marxists has always been to play the card of historical inevitability, as if our lives are not ours to control, but we are cogs in wheels being manipulated. It is a complete disconnect from reality.

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Go on Chris, go to the poverty stricken communities you care about, go rescue this kids, go give a damn - or maybe you can ask why so many low income families would never ever abuse their kids, and why you would excuse them if they did, but not richer families?

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New Zealand has the lowest unemployment rate in over 30 years, but until the likes of Minto, Trotter and Maia see blood spilt in wealthy homes they wont be happy - whereas deep down I wonder if they are glad when the see the blood spilt by the poor, because it allows them to blame anyone but them for it.

2007 will forever be in my memory

In 1970 a young woman from South Canterbury gave birth in Kenepuru Hospital north of Wellington. She went there following the placing of an ad in the three daily newspapers of Auckland Wellington and Christchurch some months before - she did that because she was pregnant, unmarried and it was 1970 in South Canterbury.

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She wanted to give birth to this child and adopt him out because of the shame attached at the time to unwed mothers. I had only been a fling with a young man who was a boarder at the time, a bottle of wine and a romantic evening for a couple of teenagers produced the unplanned result. She informed the young man, who fled and was never heard of again. She then did what she could to resolve this little problem growing inside her. She tried a number of options, but decided on temporarily moving away in order to spend the last few months of pregnancy outside of public gaze and judgment. She had arranged this when her mother found her crying, she told all, and both her parents lovingly supported her during this pressing time.

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So it happened, and as was the custom of the time after giving birth, she had to ask to see the baby, but was not allowed to touch. She was, after all, a sinner in the eyes of the state.

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She would not touch that baby again for 28 years. Following a change in the law, some research and support from loved ones, he wrote to her at that time, placing a delicate toe in the water to say hello. What followed were more letters, an admission to almost her entire family about her past. After an initial shock, especially from her husband - they accepted and welcomed the new family member.

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He had been brought up by two very hard working and loving Glaswegians who always treated him as their own. They supported him during this process, met his birth mum and then followed nine years of visits, phone calls, cards and presents.

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She was diagnosed with bowel cancer late last year, went through extensive surgery to remove the tumours, and chemotherapy. She was diagnosed clear of cancer only two months ago, although further surgery was required.

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Last weekend she collapsed and in minutes had passed away in her own bed, at the tender age of 56.

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Life is too fucking short at times. Blogging will be light... again.

New Zealand to be friendly to murderers

Will Winston bring up the gulags? or will he do what almost all diplomats do, simper and say nothing - like they did in the 1930s when dealing with Germany or Japan?

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Or does Winston think it is more important to worry about who owns an airport than the enslavement, torture and execution of children?

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Well the Greens care far more about the airport, they have introduced a fucking Bill. These sanctimonious self-serving self-styled defenders of peace and justice are anything but.

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He is reported saying "I want to see for myself how New Zealand might contribute to international efforts to assist development in North Korea."

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It's called do nothing until the gulags are all opened and the people set free or given asylum outside North Korea (and China). North Korea makes apartheid look like a holiday, and it speaks volumes than virtually nobody who fought apartheid gives a moth's droppings about the Korean gulag archipelago.

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If New Zealand has an independent foreign policy that means anything (and you leftwing lot out there think that being anti-nuclear is so bloody moral) then Winston go to North Korea, demand that the gulags be opened, and that North Korea at the very least stops imprisoning children along with their parents for political crimes. You might then guarantee you wont be reported in the North Korean media as another patsy coming to pay homage to Kim Jong Il et al, and you might show that your not simply an opportunistic bauble seeking lazy populist.

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So come on Winston, show you have some spine, ignore the wimpering MFAT advisors who will want a "success" which will no doubt be reported in North Korea as another victory against the Japanese/US imperialist forces as North Korea makes new friends. Ask your new friends about Camp 22. Yes it will embarrass, but frankly FUCK that - would you be embarrassed telling Nazis you found the Holocaust unacceptable, preferring to negotiate a peaceful way of coexisting?

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and the Greens? Your belief in human rights and what is important in the world isn't worth pissing on. I guess North Korea's carbon footprint is so low, and they've said they'll dismantle their nuclear facilities so they are probably better than the USA aren't they? Arseholes. There is NO fucking excuse for this.

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Why am I angry? Well it's another day and 5 people probably died in Camp 22 today of starvation or violence, some of them children.

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Go watch this Winston, see who you're new friends are, and tell me you can be "tough on crime" and be concerned about child abuse in New Zealand, when you cozy up to a regime that abuses children directly on a daily basis. 200,000 people in gulags in North Korea, thousands of them children down to the age of infants.

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So come on Winston, Keith Locke and all you others who pretend to give a fuck... this is more important that who the fuck owns Auckland airport!

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oh and it might be nice if Rodney Hide and John Key said something to, so go on.

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and frankly if this doesn't get any NZ politicians agitated then the lot of them are so fucking useless they deserve to get the abuse hurled at them. It is nothing compared to what the children of Camp 22 put up with every single day - and every single day there is appeasement, they stay there.