Broadcast on Reality Check Radio, Thurs, June 8, 2023

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, cites an alternative set of Ten Commandments by an atheist blogger, beginning with, "Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you," and ending with, "Question everything." Dawkins adds an eleventh of his own: "Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business."

I say, Amen to that!

Broadcast on Paul Brennan Breakfast, Reality Check Radio, Thurs June 1, 2023

I hear Rodney Hide is flirting with Catholicism. I understand. Catholicism has the best music, the best drag and the best cathedrals, with the arguable exception of Eastern Orthodox.

And Catholicism says the devil is real.

That's very easy to believe nowadays. You need only behold such specimens as Soros, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, Occasional Cortex and Jacinda Jackboot to note that they fair reek of the evil they practise. It seems plausible that there's a force for evil greater than the sum of its parts, of which these entities partake and which oozes palpably from them. Who could forget this odious moment from Jackboot?

Originally broadcast on Paul Brennan Breakfast, Reality Check Radio, Thurs May 25, 2023

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In his masterly poem, If, Rudyard Kipling stipulates a number of prerequisites for achieving the status of manhood:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

Keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs is an especially exacting challenge in this age of Mass Formation Psychosis, when the spreading of hysteria by evil totalitarian politicians seems to be the easiest thing in the world to pull off.

First broadcast on Paul Brennan Breakfast, Reality Check Radio, Thurs May 18, 2023

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Sense of Life!

Mark Hubbard
Cross-posted from https://markhubbard1965.substa...

[I still can't figure put photos here I can insert them, but they come out as postage stamp sized. But I can cross-post the entries that don't need photos.]

Writer Catherine Chidgey won New Zealand’s Ockham book prize of the year this week with her novel The Axeman’s Carnival. Congratulations to Ms Chidgey, getting a novel to publishing stage is a Herculean task, let alone then be published and taking out New Zealand’s premiere literary prize. As I read the Ockham winner every year it goes onto the buy list.

But that is not what this post is about. The morning after the awards, Ockham themselves posted of Chidgey’s success with a link to this review of her book by Jane Stafford, Professor of English at Victoria University. The opening sentence of that review is this:

“It is difficult for Pākehā writers to do the spiritual, although they have often felt the need to.”

It’s sad the academic framing and dare I say, critical evaluation, of our literature has come down to politicised de-constructed polemic rot like this, given how important a literature is to society. Albeit one of literature’s heavy loads is to show ourselves who we are, and I guess it does that.

Broadcast on Paul Brennan Breakfast, Reality Check Radio, May 11, 2023

It used to be the case that adulterers could be stoned ... and not in any nice sense of the term.

Now it is the case that adulterers can be enthroned. Have, indeed, just been enthroned. And it all couldn't have been any nicer.

That, I submit, is an advance. Nooky between or among consenting adults in private should always be a private matter and not an occasion to unleash a mob of jealous, zealous stone-throwers consumed by the fact that they're not getting any.

The Coronation ceremony was undoubtedly a high point in the entire history of the world. Unavoidably, it showcased the best there has ever been: in architecture, in art, in music, in speech, in oratory, in pageantry, in decorum, in the embracing of the values that make human life human. It was a salute to Western Civilisation: the best Civilisation there has ever been.

Originally broadcast on Paul Brennan Breakfast, Reality Check Radio, Thursday May 4, 2023

Last week I said I'd have more to say this week about the abrupt firing of Tucker Carlson from Fox News. I thought we'd know more by now about the reason for it.

Actually, we're none the wiser about what specifically triggered the termination, but what Tucker subsequently said on Twitter reminded us that we had to know it was going to happen well before it did.

Here's what he said:

First broadcast on Reality Check Radio, 27/04/23

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered have I been this past week. Not to mention befuddled because it seemed as if we were having two Easter weeks in a row and this old chap didn't know whether he was Arthur or Martha.

Bewitched by the reaffirmations of yesteryear and a pervasive decency that can still be manifest when the occasion demands.

First broadcast on Reality Check Radio, Paul Brennan Breakfast, 20/04/23

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I visit Faecesbook as seldom as possible. If ever one wants to know what John Keats meant by the "inhuman dearth of noble natures" one need only spend time on Faecesbook or Twit-Witter to be numbed by the inhuman surfeit of ignoble banality and asinine prattle that silly little Narcissists clutter up the platform with.

The other night someone sent me a link to a Faecesbook video by the ACT Party. Against my better judgement I clicked on it. It amused me. It purported to show that Winston Peters was not to be trusted. Well, that was news! Walls are perpendicular! Bears defecate in the woods!

Broadcast on Reality Check Radio, 13/04/23

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Percy Bysshe Shelley said, "Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay."

A consummation devoutly to be wished, to invoke another great writer. Shelley, a fetching, uppity young tyke whom you would wish to take everywhere but couldn't take anywhere, also said:

Broadcast on Paul Brennan's breakfast show, Reality Check Radio, April 6, 2023

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Easter is upon us ... and I'm glad.

I'm not a Christian; I'm an atheist. But I'm still glad Easter continues to be celebrated, given the palpable desire of sundry totalitarians to close Christianity down, and the palpable desire of its own clergy to alter it beyond recognition. Easter celebrations reassure us that totalitarians and revisionist clergy have not yet succeeded completely in implementing their diabolical agenda.

By Olivia Pierson
www.oliviapierson.org/blog/lib...

If there’s a topic that bores me more than any other it’s the battle of the sexes.

I don’t do feminism, girl-power, sisterhoods, women’s groups or any such thing where only women play leading roles. The flavour is simply not my tea-cup.

I've added 1984 to the books I'm currently reading or, as in this case, re-reading. I'm astonished anew at how prescient it was. (Also refreshing, after Dostoevsky and Hugo, to encounter a writer who just gets on with it.) I assume everyone here is acquainted with it, so every day will just add a direct quote without commentary. This one is apposite in light of today's demonstrations by mindless leftist thugs:

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely; were to to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream; I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism and return to the Hellenic ideal ... to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.

The only thing extraordinarily ordinary about the extraordinarily extraordinary new CD from Sepia is the title: The Immortal Voice of Mario Lanza—A Centennial Celebration. The rapturous musical fare served up here is far better suited to the Wine, Women and Song title I long ago urged upon the master-mind of Sepia's Lanza CDs, Derek McGovern. I acknowledge, however, that in 2021 such nomenclature might well "trigger" the Church of Woke and cause the CD to be "cancelled," so perhaps something innocuously prosaic is indeed called for. In any event, this CD, hands down, wins the prize for the cleverest Mario Lanza compendium ever: a position occupied for decades by RCA's You Do Something to Me LP/CD which Dr McGovern and Team Sepia—Richard Tay, Robin Cherry, Ray Leaning, Vincent di Placido, Carmel Parisi and Armando Cesari—have now decisively knocked off its perch. This is easily the most intelligent and imaginative Lanza compilation to date, by Sepia, RCA/Sony or anyone—not, as one might fear with a commemorative release, a parochial, predictable re-hash (yet again) of "greatest hits"; not Be My Love for the millionth time; rather, a uniquely loving, thoughtful (and thought-provoking) selection of rare and precious jewels, four of which have never before been commercially released.

It's time to de-fund the New Zealand School of Music. This Woke-Fascist, taxpayer-funded travesty has just announced its support for Black Lives Matter—the Marxist terrorist sub-humans who, along with Profa, are currently looting, rioting, vandalising, burning and killing all across America. "If this country doesn't give us what we want," one of its spokes-specimens has just said, "we will burn down the system."

"What we want" includes de-funding the police.

Now this, from the latest NZSM newsletter:

"The emotion involved in art is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term. It is experienced more as a 'sense' or a 'feel,' but it has two characteristics pertaining to emotions: it is automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it.

Last Monday, Stuff published what purported to be a review of fresh-hatched Wellington Opera's Don Giovanni which had opened two nights earlier at the Opera House.

Headed "Wellington Opera brings the #metoo movement to the stage with Mozart's Don Giovanni," it was not so much a review as a grim, humourless scold, typical of Wellington Woke-Witches, labouring the point that "These days the ladies would call Don Giovanni (Christian Thurston) a jerk or perhaps a sexual predator, rather than an irresistible, irresponsible yet lovable cad, but hey! This is how things rolled in the 17th century." (I think she meant the 18th.)

Charlie Hebdo has courageously published those cartoons again, to mark the beginning of the trial in Paris this week of suspected accomplices and enablers of the main perpetrators of the atrocities who, mercifully, no longer pollute the planet. Astonishingly, the normally Wet Woke Macron has defended Charlie's right to do so. Would that New Zealand Woke-Fascists, hell-bent on criminalising criticism of Islam, emulated Macron instead:

"It's never the place of a president of the Republic to pass judgment on the editorial choice of a journalist or newsroom, never. Because we have freedom of the press. There is in France a freedom to blaspheme which is attached to the freedom of conscience. I am here to protect all these freedoms. In France, one can criticize a president, governors, blaspheme. We will all have a thought for the women and men who were cowardly shot because they drew, wrote, corrected, were there to help, to deliver."

1) My Credentials, by Dr. Greta Thunberg

2) Proof that Climate Change Is Person-Made, by E. C. Onatsi

3) Grappling Group-Think, by The [anti]-NZ Herald

My speech to Free Speech rally at Parliament, Wellington, New Zealand, July 14, 2018

New (Kindle *and* Paperback!) Edition of Linz's 'The One Tenor: A Salute to Mario Lanza'

I've just posted the following item about Linz's updated edition of The One Tenor on my website, Mario Lanza, Tenor (http://www.mariolanzatenor.com...):

You who read this represent the greatest danger to America.

No matter what the outcome of the war in Europe may be, Totalitarianism has already won a complete victory in many American minds and conquered all of our intellectual life. You have helped it to win.