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

https://realitycheck.radio/per...

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.

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.

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, Paul Brennan Breakfast, 20/04/23

https://realitycheck.radio/cat...

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

https://realitycheck.radio/rep...

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.

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:

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.

"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.

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."

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

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.