QUEEN ELIZABETH II - LYING-IN-STATE

I watched many hours of the Queen's Lying-in-State on BBC/ITV podcasts. It was most moving. People waited for up to 24 hours in what became known simply as The Queue. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people did an extraordinary thing to honour an extraordinary woman. She was rightly called Elizabeth the Great. The outpouring of profoundly grateful sorrow at her Lying-in-State was a fitting farewell to her. And the tears! Tears enough to fill the Thames. Even strong, hulking men had eyes brimming with tears. Men, women, old and young, boys and girls, soldiers, old soldiers, were filing past, pausing to bow, to curtsy, to kneel, to throw a kiss, to salute, to say 'Thank you, Ma'am.' A glorious mix of people coming together in one place, the magnificent Westminster Hall, to give honour to her who gave such long, glorious, honourable service to us.

Thank you, Ma'am.

God save the King!

THE NAME OF THIS COUNTRY IS NEW ZEALAND

The official body that Parliament has put in charge of assigning placenames in New Zealand is the New Zealand Geographic Board, which is governed under Parliament by the New Geographic Board Act 2008. 

Section 8 of that Act says this (emphasis added in subsection 3):

Jurisdiction and powers of Board

8Extent of Board’s jurisdiction

(1)

The Board has jurisdiction to exercise its powers and to carry out its functions and duties under this Act or any other enactment in relation to geographic features and Crown protected areas within—

(a)

the territorial limits of New Zealand; and

(b)

the continental shelf, as defined in section 2(1) of the Continental Shelf Act 1964; and

(c)

the Ross Dependency, as defined in section 7(1) of the Antarctica (Environmental Protection) Act 1994.

(2)

In addition, the Board may exercise its powers and carry out its functions and duties under this Act, as far as they are relevant, in relation to those parts of Antarctica outside the Ross Dependency.

(3)

However, the Board does not have jurisdiction to assign a name to, or alter the name of, New Zealand.

Therefore all the people led by PC activists in the media who are trying to change the name of our country from New Zealand to Aotearoa or to Aotearoa New Zealand are taking to themselves a false power, an unlawful power, a power that Parliament has given no one, and which it has even explicitly denied the Geographic Board.

Aotearoa, 'Land of the Long White Cloud', is not an apt name for the country, unlike New Zealand. Aotearoa is claimed to be the name that Kupe gave the country when he discovered it long ago. But if he had arrived on a cloudless day he would have given it a different name. And how much of the country can be seen from a canoe low in the water? Not much.

But 'New Zealand' is very apt. Perfectly apt. It is James Cook's anglicisation of 'Nova Zeelandia', which Dutch cartographers named it in 1645 after the Dutch province of Zeelandia, in honour of the fact that Abel Tasman was the first European to sight the country in 1642. Other countries still call it Nova Zelandia--such as Bulgaria.

Nothing could be more apt than 'New Zealand.' It was a land new to human discovery, by any race; it rose from the sea tens of millions of years ago; it is surrounded by the sea; everyone who lives here is not far from the sea; and seaside and seaborne activities are embedded deep in New Zealand culture.

Its rhythm fits perfectly the rhythm of English; the emphasis falls on the Zea, the second of its short three syllables. But Aotearoa does not; it has fairly even emphasis on five syllables, which does not fit into English sentences. It fits perfectly the rhythm of Maori, just as Nova Zelandia fits perfectly the rhythm of Bulgarian.

The abbreviation, NZ, cannot be confused with anything else, and is known the world over, as is the three-letter version, NZL.

What could be the abbreviations of Aotearoa? AO? AOT? ATR? AT? ANZ (like the bank)? Forcing that upon the world would be waste of time and money.

The argument is very silly, started by silly dictatorial people who have invented a PC position, who want ram it down everyone's throats, and who choose to be offended by anyone who does not agree with their nonsense.

According to the Department of Statistics 50,000 people of New Zealand's five million population speak Maori. That is one in a hundred. 1% want to dictate to five million and to the 7.5 billion in the world.

No. This country is called New Zealand. Period.

LEFT BEHIND

When those on the 'left' want to claim absolute justification and authority for something, they say
it is a 'right.' And when that is contested by others, they call them the 'right', even the 'far
right' or the 'alt-right', by which they mean that they are far wrong or in some alternative reality
where nothing is right. Right?

HOW TO END THE GLASS CEILING

Ms Julie Anne Genter, Green MP and Hon Mincer, has railed against the plethora of Boring Old Men on boards and bewailed the lack of Bright Young Women, who should be there instead, making the world a far better place. There are, she says, too many Old Boys, messing up the world with their Old Boys Network.

But obviously she's not quite up with The Plot. Because she's also said, 'Trans Women are Women'.

Aha! That is the solution to the problem of Boring Old Boys on Boards. Because now that we've all
been re-educated into the wunnerful knowledge that gender is not between your legs, it is all in
your head--and that we all have What-If On The Brain, and that all that sex-stuff is fluid, and that we
are whatever we say we are...

So all that needs to be done is for all those Boring Old Board Boys to declare themselves Bright
Young Board Girls (sealing it with shiny new birth-certificates from the Department of Just-Is; see their homepage under Family), and, hey presto! the Glass Ceiling is gone for ever.

Done and dusted. QED. O Frabjous Day!

Oh! The tongue is stuck in the cheek. 'Woe is me, I am undone.. for I dwell amongst a people of ... lips...' (let those who know the reference see the point). In this day and age the mockery of insanity has to be stuck in gear permanently.

IT'S OUTRAGEOUS

I am outraged (that means enraged beyond rage). Why? Well I've joined the herd of the furious and
have chosen to be outraged, and have Therefore dedicated myself to finding something every week to
be outraged about. And this week, this week, this pestiferous week there was NOTHING!

I searched and searched. NOTHING!! Can you believe that? A dedicated seeker after outrage, deprived
of outrageous satisfaction. An addict deprived of his outrageous fix. Aaarrrgghh!!

Last week there was a really good one. I found out that modern tiddlywinks are 0.02 of a gram
lighter than the good old ones. I was outraged for a whole three days about that. Very satisfying.

The previous week  I found that road markings are an inch shorter than they used to be. It took me
four days of outrage to get over that. Very, very satisfying.

Sometimes I get a whole seven days of glorious outrage. That is very, very, very satisfying.

Like the week I found about a secret society that is not deeply in love with marmalade cats whose
stripes go anti-clockwise. I worked up a whole seven days of outrage that such people could exist in
a civilised society, and that their mothers were not spayed at birth. That was one of the best weeks
ever.

But this week, nothing. NOTHING!

That is outrageous. AHA! Something! I can be outraged that there's nothing to be outraged about. O
frabjous day!

MACARONI MADNESS

English is English. One of its excellent features is that it does not have all that mess of diacritical marks: accents, macrons, diaereses, etc.,--all that above-letter clutter that infests European languages.

When the English missionaries to New Zealand did their excellent work of turning stone-age Maori into a written language, they, wisely, developed a form that took care of the pronunciation without that mess. Vowels were to be pronounced as in Italian and consonants as in English. That is simple, very easy to use, and it stood us in good stead for about two hundred years

Until now. Until the insanity of 'political correctness' began its normal tyrannical work and started splashing macrons all over the place. The 'reason'? To make everyone pronounce Maori words as the Maoris do--or did, which means as they were assumed to have done. (And, yes, the plural of Maori is Maoris: that is English, and when speaking English those who are true to it form plurals in the English way; when speaking Maori they should be formed in the Maori way; when speaking Hebrew in the Hebrew way; when speaking Russian in the Russian way; etc.; etc.)

But zillions of English-speaking people are pronouncing Maori words as they pronounce English ones, and the tyrannical PC regime want to change that. And of course they are. Every language when it adopts words from other languages, quite properly, keeps its own culture and ways of pronouncing words. Trying to force people to be faithless to their language and culture is tyranny, it is PC thuggery, which in this case means forcing us to vandalise English with macaroni graffiti.

Even worse, in the case of the Maori macron tyranny, is that macrons very often are not in the fonts that people want to use on their computers, so the operating system replaces letters with a question mark or a blank or something else. The Ugly Sisters cannot force their feet into Cinderella's glass slipper.

English speakers should ignore the thuggery and vandalism of the 'politically correct' (which is never politic and never correct), and refuse to be thuggerised. The word 'Maori'  and all other Maori words being used in English is perfect without that macaroni madness.

IF SUPERMARKETS WERE LIKE BUREAUCRACIES

If supermarkets worked like bureaucracies...

Instead of going to the supermarket, choosing your food and beverages from the shelves, going to the
checkout, then home to eat and drink, you would:

1) Fill out a long form on-line or on paper, packed with nosy/silly questions that have
nothing to do with the true matter in hand, written by people whose English falls far short of
first-rate, and/or whose skill at designing and programming on-line forms has yet to be recognised
as skill, on a computer system that took three years to build at a cost of $90 million, which
works out at $2 million a year per programmer.

2) Submit the form.

3) Wait.

4) Wait.

5) Wait.

6) Have the application rejected, because question number 65 was not answered according to rule
E5.2.1 (which asks the impossible, but the bureaucrats love it because it can be used to delay
things
for ever, and to their joy messes up countless lives).

7) Re-submit the form, with, you hope, Rule E5.2.1 satisfied with a letter from an MP or Councillor
or JP (which, in your starving desperation, you may have forged).

8) Wait.

9) Wait.

10) Wait.

11) Have the application rejected, because question 67, which you answered the same way as you did
the first time, is now said not to be compliant with something only vaguely stated, but there is a
question 'around' it. Never on it, just nebulously 'around' it--somewhere circling out near Alpha
Centauri, you assume.

12) Loop round (7) to (10) several more times, and see other nebulous questions imported from
'around' Alpha Centauri and flung at you--as you grow ever thinner.

13) Call the Call Centre in an attempt to clarify 'around' and bring it home to 'on'. Wait for an
interminable length of time while your ear overheats and you are forced to occupy yourself listening
to countless repeats of 'This call is important to us, please wait', interspersed with music chosen
by tone-deaf persons devoid of taste.

14) The Call Centre at last answers, only to put you through to 'Someone Who Can Help You', but has
you find been replaced
by voicemail--but just as you go to leave a message you are cut off.

15) Carry on waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting...

16) Your friends and relatives call the undertaker, because you have starved to death.

THE PROCESS OF OUR RUIN

RUIN BY PROCESS

In every country there is always the to-and-fro battle between the adherents of process and those who love justice and right, between the bureaucrats and the public servants, between those lust to be masters of the State and those who love to serve it, between those who invent and manipulate systems and those who walk the straight path, between the false accusers and the lovers of truth.

The lesson of history is that when the first sort gain the upper hand the State is on an infernal downward path to self-destruction.

It is a dismaying fact that in New Zealand, process is now winning. From the lowliest bureaucrat to the Supreme Court, process rules. Look for example at that Court's rules at legislation.govt.nz to see how many obstacles have been put in the way of getting justice and right--even signed into law by the Chief Justice acting as Administrator in place of the Governor-General (which is like the captain of one cricket team also writing rule-book and acting as umpire). There, the usual process will usually deny plaintiffs a public hearing, and a single judge in a lower court can with a process-ruling make higher appeal impossible. Injustice can thus be hidden, very easily.

The seven great Constitutional Enactments enshrined in Schedule 1 of our Imperial Laws Application Act 1988 are little-known, and are being ignored and trashed wholesale. Yet they are the only protection in law that we the common people have against unjust,wrong-headed process. They were set down for us by wise Royalty centuries ago; all our laws and history rest on them; to evade them, to set them at nought, to trash them is the ultimate corruption.

The fact that those enactments were originally enacted by Royalty may upset the republicans, who want us to be on the track to a Bush and a Trump, but if they had not been enacted none of us would be here. It was on those great laws that England became great, then Great Britain, then the greatest empire the world has ever known, which touched 171 countries, including New Zealand. Whatever people might think of that, that is the history of the world. Billions of people would not exist if those Royal enactments had not been made. And English would not be the world language. For New Zealand, they are the foundation of our history and all our law. If they had never existed Cook would not have set sail in 1769 and claimed this land for the British Crown. Those greate enactments began on June the 15th 1215 in Magna Carta. From that later arose our seven Constitutional Enactments, dated 1275, 1297, 1351, 1354, 1368, 1627 and 1688. The last is the 1688 Bill of Rights Act, and therefore New Zealand has two Bills of Rights Acts, the 1688 one signed by King William III and Queen Mary II, and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990.

Constitutional laws are, by definition, paramount. For the Court of Appeal, now backed by the Supreme Court, to rule them not paramount is outrageous.

It should infuriate every true-born New Zealander that our Constitutional Enactments have been so hubristically destroyed. Our birthright has been taken from us, by iniquitous process, behind closed doors. And, even worse, the worst example of it has been done in our Courts.

It is doubly sad that the Consitutional Enactments are not not being taught in schools. They should be; over and over and over again. Everyone should know our most fundamental rights. The Consitutional Enactments in the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988 should be known far better than the Privacy Act 1993 and the Human Rights Act 1993, and should be held far higher. To trash them is like murdering your parents and all your ancestors, and it puts us on the downward path.

It is particularly corrupt for New Zealand Courts to evade and set at nought the heart of two of our greatest Constitutional Enactments, the Second and the Fifth. Because in the Second there is a great promise made to everyone--'We will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right--and in the Fifth there is a great dictate, that whatever emanates from ‘false accusers’ is 'void in law and holden for error.' To trash that promise is downright evil, and to trash that dictate is to give open slather to the corruption of process and thus a free hand to all those who, as the Fifth says, act for 'singular benefit not for the profit of ... the people'.

The Fifth Constitutional Enactment is very right. Process-and-title is always about 'singular benefit'--about the rank abuse of rank,  rule by and for process and title not by and for justice and right. That corruption cares nothing for those whom Winston Churchill called 'the people who toil and moil.' And in a speech to the Canadian Parliament during the Second World War he said, 'Public men are proud to be servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters.' But the adherents of process, the bureaucrats, the rank abusers of rank, know no shame. In their shameless vanity and arrogant stupidity they are destroying our country, bit by bit.

HOUSING INFLATION IS INSANE

We all know that the increase in the price of houses is insane, but I have just checked the current capital value of the house I bought in 1978 for $34,500. It is now listed by the Council at $540,000.

The Reserve Bank's inflation-calculator says that $34,500 is now $213,555, which is less than half $540,000, so the price of that house has rocketed far ahead of inflation. $540,000 is 2.52 times $213.555. $540,000 is 15.65 times $34,500.

The house was new, three bedrooms, in a good neighbourhood in Birkenhead, in a cul-de-sac off a cul-de-sac off a cul-de-sac so it was quiet. Lots of bush, close to schools and a supermarket. I got it on a deposit of $5000.

Crazy, indeed!

KEEP THE MONARCHY!

A poll has just been published which appears to say that New Zealanders want to ditch the monarchy

God forbid! We would get someone like our damned politicians. Better to have someone born to the job, trained for it, not political in the slightest degree, someone with a broad world view and experience of all matters, and remote enough to be independent and seen to be independent. Someone in the job for life, not someone voted in at enormous expense of money and argy-bargy every few years. Someone not in the least open to even a hint of political interference or bias. All that is the black blot on America's ridiculous system of so-called government.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

But as the article shows, the 'poll' was loaded, the question put was not neutral, and the figures were jiggered to give the republican outfit that paid for it the answer it wanted.

And to say that the Queen is a British Monarch, although true, is also a lie, because she is a citizen of every country in which she is monarch, which includes New Zealand. She is British, Canadian, Australian, a New Zealander, etc., etc. That underlines how loaded the question was. It was, to put it bluntly, a lie looking for a lie in answer.

The uninformed people who want to dump the monarchy do not understand its fundamental importance. In New Zealand law, for example, one of the most important statutes is the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988, which sets into modern New Zealand law the great laws enacted by royalty, stretching all the way back to the update in 1297 by King Edward I of Magna Carta. And section 29 of that update, which is the section enshrined in the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988, is a great promise: 'we shall defer or deny to no man either justice or right.' It is the right of all those in New Zealand to claim that promise when confronted by official wrongdoing.

Section 29 in full is the fundamental of all the rights and freedom we enjoy in New Zealand, and in all countries where Queen Elizabeth II is head of state: 'NO freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.' [disseised means deprived of, have taken away]

We owe a great debt to monarchy, a debt of centuries of rights and freedoms, and a debt to a system that serves us superbly well. Ditching it out of ignorance and replacing it system riddled and raddled with politics would be grossly stupid.

UPGRADE TO WINDOWS 10 WORTH IT

For a long time I put off upgrading from my desktop PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10, despite the fact that it was free, partly because I was busy with other things and thought it would take a lot of painful hours, and partly it does not impresss me that the blurb that said it combined the best of 7 and 8. Windows 8 was one to be avoided, and what Microsoft called 'the best' made me apprehensive.

I am also chary of upgrades, because so often they mess up your machine by taking it into their software heads to do things that you neither wanted nor asked for. In short, I never expect a smooth ride.

But when I saw that the free offer of Windows 10 was going to expire on the 29th of July 2016 I decided to bite the bullet, first with a nibble by upgrading my backup machine, and if that went well, carry on.

To my delight it did go well. Very well. And not only did my machine look pretty much the same as it had in Windows 7, but I was able to make some judicious tweaks to make to look and behave even better. That included taking this advice to make the colour-scheme more pleasant. The palette of colours in the standard offer is a bit limited. But using Run and Control Color enables very fine tuning (note the American spelling, because it does not accept English).

Do I like Windows 10? YES. Do I like it better than 7? YES. Would I uninstall and go back to 7? NO. It does seem to run a bit slower in some things, in some a bit quicker, but overall about the same, and it is nicer to use, it has some nice features.

The revamped Start Menu has been done very well. You have to prune out of it the stuff that Microsoft wants you to have there and pin to it what you want, but that is easy to do quickly. And it is very configurable. For example it is easy to resize the icons so that they do not shout at you, and to get rid of that silly, distracting transparency, but it is very nice.

At first I missed the Windows Classic look that I had been using for years, but 10's look and feel very soon became familiar and preferred.

The upgrade went easily. A download of about 2GB then a small number of hours chugging away, and it was all done.

The only thing to watch is that near the end of the process it asks you if you want the Express Installation, which invites you to use a big button down on the right, but in small print down on the left it says Customise. If you select express you get a heap of Microsoft applications hurled at you. It is a sell.  I chose Customise, unticked everything, and carried on using the applications that I had been using, which were mainly not Microsoft offerings.

I think the one to avoid is Photos, because it organises all the photos in your machine in way that is not what anyone sensible would want. But some who like what it does. I ignored it all created a Desktop shortcut to my main photos folder, to make it most accessible, because it opens exactly what opens when I Pictures is clicked on in a system menu.

The only little annoyance in 10 is that although the weather in the Start Menu is brilliant–truly 10 out of 10–and can be set to Celsius for temperatures, it insists on reporting the wind-speed in mph and there is nowhere it can be set to km/h or kph. That is silly enough, but even sillier is the fact the the weather button in the Start Menu can somehow show kph, sometimes, but when you click on it the full display still shows mph. That is fine if you live in one of those backward countries that have yet to go metric, but a pain in most the world.

There is a bugbear if you are using Chrome, in the area where you manage passwords, and which you go to if you have forgotten one and want to change it from hidden to show it. Windows 10 annoys by insisting, every single time, that you enter your Microsoft Account password before it will show it.

But, those points aside, Windows 10 is superb. Well done, Microsoft!