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Author: richard

Posted on January 20, 2019January 21, 2019

The greatest rock band of all time!

Pink Floyd is the greatest rock band of all time! That’s been my opinion since I was first introduced to the band … sometime in the late 1970s.

The band began in 1965 and ended in 2014. The band’s history is long and complex, but in this post I want to tell a condensed version of their story in a dispensationalist way by rightly dividing their discography.

Wikipedia tells us that their discography

consists of fifteen studio albums, three live albums, nine compilation albums, four box sets, five extended plays, and twenty-seven singles.

That’s a lot of material and it doesn’t include any of the various solo works and side projects of the five band members. I will consider only the band’s 15 studio albums. Plus three solo albums. That’s 18 studio albums and I will consider them three at a time in six dispensations.

1. Barrett-era.
2. The Narrow Way.
3. The Hard Way.
4. Peak Floyd.
5. Waters-era.
6. Gilmour-era.

The first dispensation is Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

The short-lived original line-up consisted of Nick Mason (drums), Roger Waters (bass and vocals), Richard Wright (keyboards and vocals), and Syd Barrett (guitar and lead vocals). Syd Barrett was the band’s front man and Pink Floyd was Syd Barrett’s band.

On their first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn (recorded in 1967), all songs except one are written or co-written by Barrett.

But on their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (recorded in 1967/68), only one song is written by Barrett and he plays on only three tracks. By the time of the album’s release, Barrett was gone from the band, having been replaced by David Gilmour.

So it’s fair to say that only their debut album counts as Barrett-era Pink Floyd. But Barrett subsequently released two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs (recorded in 1968/69) and Barrett (recorded in 1970). Are they rightly considered Pink Floyd albums? They feature David Gilmour, Roger Waters and Rick Wright in some capacity, and, of course, Syd Barrett. So I would say yes.

[under construction]

Posted on August 14, 2018January 21, 2019

God Defend New Zealand

God Defend New Zealand is New Zealand’s national anthem.

(Here’s a couple of fun facts. It’s not New Zealand’s only official national anthem and it’s only been an official national anthem at all since 1977.

With the permission of Queen Elizabeth II, it was gazetted as the country’s second national anthem on 21 November 1977, on equal standing with “God Save the Queen”.

Coincidentally, the Sex Pistols released their song God Save The Queen also in 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

Here’s another couple of fun facts. New Zealand also has two official languages. English isn’t one of them.)

God defend New Zealand. But defend what specifically?

Hear our voices, we entreat,
God defend our free land

It’s our freedom that we ask God to defend. And from what?

From dissension, envy, hate,
And corruption guard our state
…
From dishonour and from shame,
Guard our country’s spotless name

In recent weeks, this country’s alt-right and alt-left have been having conniptions brought on by the visit of two Canadian speakers, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux.

Phil Goff and the Auckland Council, at the behest of Hazim Arafeh of FIANZ, got their scheduled event shut down. The alt-left then succeeded in getting their event shut down a second time. Their stated grounds for doing so were literally to defend New Zealand from “dissension, envy, hate”.

As for the alt-right, what do they want to defend New Zealand from? Muslims. That’s a fair summary of the core message of the two visiting Canadian speakers. They are immigration alarmists. We don’t need them here, if only because we already have our own homegrown immigration alarmists, such as John Ansell and VJM Publishing. The latter succinctly explains how mass immigration leads to the loss of freedom.

Please note that I do not mean to use the term ‘alarmist’ in any pejorative or presumptive sense. Dictionaries define an alarmist as, e.g.

a person who tends to raise alarms, especially without sufficient reason, as by exaggerating dangers or prophesying calamities.

so it might seem dismissive of me to call someone an alarmist, when I might instead have referred to them as a prophet, oracle, harbinger, herald, futurist, forecaster, or risk analyst. But I do so for two reasons. I want to draw a parallel between immigration alarmism and climate change alarmism. And I want to emphasise the fact that sometimes today’s alarmist is tomorrow’s voice we wish we’d listened to.

Both climate change alarmists and immigration alarmists make predictions. That they do so makes their claims scientific, which is fortunate. Alarmists must make testable predictions if they are to be taken at all seriously. So how do the predictions of immigration alarmists and climate change alarmists pan out?

Not well in the case of the climate change alarmists. Al Gore’s doom-mongering is especially notorious!

But let’s be fair. Al Gore and his cronies—most of the climate alarmists mentioned here—are politicians, and failed predictions from politicians are no more remarkable than broken election promises. Really, we should look at scientific predictions from actual climate scientists. But there’s a problem.

It’s pretty clear that scientists aren’t any good yet at making global climate forecasts. Current temperatures are at or below the low range of all of the climate models. Nobody predicted the recent 17-year-long temperature plateau. And while they can come up with ad hoc explanations after the fact for why the data don’t match their models, the whole point of a forecast is to be able to get the right answer before the data comes in.

Given the abysmal record of climate forecasting, we should tell the warmists to go back and make a new set of predictions, then come back to us in 20 or 30 years and tell us how these predictions panned out. Then we’ll talk.

The couple of paragraphs above are excerpted from Robert Tracinski’s article What It Would Take to Prove Global Warming. But, of course, there’s a response to Robert Tracinski’s article. This points to another problem. While the experts (and self-proclaimed experts) themselves are arguing back and forth, it is hard for anyone else to get a handle on where the truth lies.

But at least there’s this.

No scientist that I know of claims that CO2 causes ‘runaway’ warming.

That’s a relief. We don’t have to worry about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Or do we?

Now let’s turn to the predictions of the immigration alarmists. Is mass Muslim immigration going to cause widespread chaos, crime, social disruption, and loss of freedoms in host nation states? The immigration alarmist’s affirmative hand waving response, “Look at Europe,” is too non-specific. We need to drill down to some detailed predictions, so let’s have a look at Islam in Sweden.

In 1930, there were 15 Muslims in Sweden.

A 2017 Pew Research report documents Muslim population at 8.1% of the total population of Sweden of 10 million (approximately 810,000).

That’s a major demographic shift. (Whereas the Swedish government puts the number at 140,000 Muslims, approx. 1.5% of the population. See here and here.)

Immigration alarmists might predict an increasing crime rate. Donald Trump, for example, insisted during his March 2017 visit to Sweden that immigration had created a spike in crime.

But data from the National Council for Crime Prevention for 2017 does not substantiate this – the rise in violent crime has been minimal – there were 113 murders last year [2017], 106 in 2016 and 112 in 2015.

In fact, while the number of cases in 2017 marks the highest level of confirmed cases of lethal violence in a decade or more, the rate of 1.12 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants trails NZ’s homicide rate by a good margin. Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that Sweden is in a bit of a mess.

Immigration alarmists might predict gains for the “far-right” nationalist Sweden Democrats party in next month’s general election. This is a better bet. It’s probably safe to say that the balances that resulted in the Brexit yes vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as president in the US were tipped by voters’ immigration concerns. And last night’s wave of arsons in Swedish cities will surely only serve to fan the flames of rising nationalist sentiment. Now is the time for immigration alarmists to make somewhat specific predictions. Let’s wait and see what happens.

Meanwhile, from the safe vantage point of New Zealand, far from Europe and several metres above sea level, I remain somewhat skeptical of the claims of both climate change alarmists and immigration alarmists.

As we have seen, both climate change alarmists and immigration alarmists make dire predictions. As dire as catastrophic anthropogenic global warming in the case of the climate change alarmists. Methane release from melting permafrost could trigger dangerous global warming. The latest IPCC report states that “a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’—analogous to Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities”—which is good news—nonetheless, global warming of up to 20°C is conceivable, which would make most of the planet uninhabitable. But this worst-case scenario is highly unlikely.

In the case of the immigration alarmists, the worst-case scenario is a global Islamic caliphate. But how likely is that? More likely than you might think.

Nick Bostrom is the world’s leading existential risk analyst. His paper on existential risks rates nuclear war, biowar, and artificial intelligence (AI) as risks worth worrying about. Although climate change and a global Islamic caliphate (under the heading totalitarian world government) both rate a mention.

[under construction]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/five-biggest-threats-human-existence/

Posted on July 21, 2018July 21, 2018

Just say Molyneux

Stefan Molyneux is a Canadian political pundit and internet celebrity. In 2005, Molyneux began a podcast called Freedomain Radio (FDR) and in 2006 he started a YouTube channel. Today he has a large cult following. As of July 2018 his YouTube channel has 798,445 subscribers and has had 247,260,366 views.

By now many Kiwis will have heard of Stefan Molyneux, thanks to protesters—including Auckland’s mayor Phil Goff, the Auckland Peace Action group, and Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand (FIANZ) president Hazim Arafeh—trying to shut down an event at which Molyneux was booked to speak. At this stage it’s unclear whether or not the event will go ahead as scheduled. What is clear is that these days Molyneux is both full of himself and full of the proverbial.

But Molyneux used to be all right.

Molyneux used to be all right. Now he’s alt-right.

Molyneux used to be a fresh and fervid anarchist. Now he’s lapsed back into full-blown statism.

It’s all very sad, but it’s worth remembering that back in 2010 Molyneux published this wee gem.

The Story of Your Enslavement

This is the story of your enslavement—how it came to be—and how you can finally be free.

Show full transcript

Like all animals, human beings want to dominate and exploit the resources around them. At first, we mostly hunted and fished and ate off the land—but then something magical and terrible happened to our minds.

We became, alone among the animals, afraid of death, and of future loss. And this was the start of a great tragedy, and an even greater possibility.

You see, when we become afraid of death, of injury and imprisonment, we becoame controllable—and so valuable—in a way that no other resource could ever be.

The greatest resource for any human being to control is not natural resources, or tools, or animals or land—but other human beings.

You can frighten an animal, because animals are afraid of pain in the moment, but you cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, with torture or imprisonment in the future, because animals have very little sense of tomorrow.

You cannot threaten a cow with torture, or a sheep with death. You cannot swing a sword at a tree and scream at it to produce more fruit, or hold a burning torch to a field and demand more wheat.

You cannot get more eggs by threatening a hen—but you can get a man to give you his eggs by threatening him.

This human farming has been the most profitable—and destructive—occupation throughout history and it is now reaching its destructive climax.

Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock.

Some people get confused because governments provide healthcare and water and education and roads, and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work.

Nothing could be further from the reality.

Farmers provide healthcare and irrigation and training to their livestock.

Some people get confused because we are allowed certain liberties, and thus imagine that our governments protect our freedoms.

But farmers plant their crops a certain distance apart to increase their yields—and will allow certain animals larger stalls or fields if it means they will produce more meat and milk.

In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms not because he cares about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits.

Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?

There have been four major phases of human farming.

The first phase, in ancient Egypt, was direct and brutal human compulsion. Human bodies were controlled, but the creative productivity of the human mind remained beyond the reach of the whip and the brand and the shackles. Slaves remained woefully under-productive, and required enormous resources to control.

The second phase was the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted some capacity for freedom, ingenuity and creativity, which raised their productivity. This increased the wealth of Rome, and thus the tax income of the Roman government—and with this additional wealth, Rome became an empire, destroying the economic freedoms that fed its power, and collapsed.

I’m sure that this does not seem entirely unfamiliar.

After the collapse of Rome, the feudal model introduced the concept of livestock ownership and taxation. Instead of being directly owned, peasants farmed land that they could retain as long as they paid off the local warlords. This model eventually broke down due to the continual subdivision of productive land, and was destroyed during the Enclosure movement, when land was consolidated and hundreds of thousands of peasants were kicked off their ancestral lands, because new farming techniques made larger farms more productive with fewer people.

The increased productivity of the later Middle Ages created the excess food required for the expansion of towns and cities, which in turn gave rise to the modern democratic model of human ownership.

As displaced peasants flooded into the cities, a huge stock of cheap human capital became available to the rising industrialists—and the ruling class of human farmers quickly realized that they could make more money by letting their livestock choose their own occupations.

Under the democratic model, direct slave ownership has been replaced by the Mafia model. The Mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends thugs around once a month to steal from the business owners.

You are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity—and thus the taxes you can pay to your masters.

Your few freedoms are preserved because they are profitable to your owners.

The great challenge of the democratic model is that increases in wealth and freedom threaten the farmers. The ruling classes initially profit from a relatively free market in capital and labor, but as their human livestock become more used to their freedoms and growing wealth, they begin to question why they need rulers at all.

Ah well. Nobody ever said that human farming was easy.

Keeping the tax livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes is a three phase process.

The first is to indoctrinate the young through government “education”. As the wealth of democratic countries grew, government schools were universally inflicted in order to control the thoughts and souls of the livestock.

The second phase is to turn citizens against each other through the creation of dependent livestock.

It is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force—and where it can be achieved, it remains cripplingly under-productive, as can be seen in North Korea. Human beings do not breed well or produce efficiently in direct captivity.

But if human beings believe that they are free, then they will produce much more for their farmers.

The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on the payroll of the farmer.

Those cows that become dependent on the existing hierarchy will then attack any other cows who point out the violence, hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership.

Freedom is slavery, and slavery is freedom.

If you can get the cows to attack each other whenever anybody brings up the reality of their situation, then you don’t have to spend nearly as much controlling them directly.

Those cows who become dependent upon the stolen largesse of the farmer will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership—and the intellectual and artistic classes, always and forever dependent upon the farmers—will say, to anyone who demands freedom from human ownership: “You will harm your fellow cows.”

The livestock are thus kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility for the destructiveness of a violent system to those who demand real freedom.

The third phase is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened livestock cling to the “protection” of the human farmers.

This system of human farming is now nearing its end.

The terrible tragedies of modern Western economic systems has occurred not in spite of, but because of, past economic freedoms.

The massive increases in Western wealth throughout the 19th century resulted from economic freedom—and it was this very increase in wealth that fed the size and power of the state.

Whenever the livestock become exponentially more productive, you get a corresponding increase in the number of farmers and their dependents.

The growth of the state is always proportional to the preceding economic freedoms.

Economic freedoms create wealth, and the wealth attracts more thieves and political parasites, whose greed then destroys the economic freedoms.

In other words, freedom metastasizes the cancer of the state.

The government that starts off the smallest will always end up the largest.

This is why there can be no viable and sustainable alternative to a truly free and peaceful society.

A society without political rulers, without human ownership, without the violence of taxation and statism.

To be truly free is both very easy, and very hard.

We avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is so painful to see it directly.

We dance around the endless violence of our dying system because we fear the attacks of our fellow livestock.

But we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see.

Wake up.

To see the farm is to leave it.

SOURCE: FreedomainRadio.com

I’m not your dad or anything, but it’s worth watching the video presentation or reading the transcript. Even though it’s somewhat offensive to many, including creationists and vegans, and riddled with alternative facts and flawed logic. There’s a discussion of its various shortcomings in the comment section here if that’s what you want to focus on.

Here’s the gist of it anyway.

Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock.

Some people get confused because governments provide healthcare and water and education and roads, and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work.

Nothing could be further from the reality.

Farmers provide healthcare and irrigation and training to their livestock.

Some people get confused because we are allowed certain liberties, and thus imagine that our governments protect our freedoms.

But farmers plant their crops a certain distance apart to increase their yields—and will allow certain animals larger stalls or fields if it means they will produce more meat and milk.

In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms not because he cares about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits.

Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?

Molyneux then goes on to describe how the illusion of freedom is maintained.

Keeping the tax livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes is a three phase process.

The first is to indoctrinate the young through government “education”.

And so on. There’s nothing particularly original in Molyneux’s claims. For example, the idea that we’re slaves who think we’re free was suggested by Aldous Huxley. It’s pretty much a variation on pānem et circēnsēs (“bread and circuses”) which goes back to the satirical Roman poet Juvenal circa 100 AD.

But is Molyneux right or are we living in a free world? In an important sense it’s a matter of perspective, and a matter of personal preference. Even in an ideal state of affairs—Molyneux’s “truly free and peaceful” society, a society “without political rulers, without human ownership, without the violence of taxation and statism”—people would voluntarily trade some of their absolute freedoms for security, and call the residual freedoms “liberty”. The nature of “the cage you were born into” is one that suits some people, who are relatively more free in virtue of the fact that they have no desire to leave.

What does Molyneux in 2010 tell us about Molyneux’s predicament now?

Molyneux is a free-range slave, the property of Canada’s ruling class. But he seems to have forgotten this. He’s bought back into the illusion that the government is the servant of the people.

Ask not what your slave-owner can do for you—ask what you can do for your slave owner.

Molyneux has reversed this paraphrase of JFK’s dictum.

Ask not what you can do for your slave owner—ask what your slave-owner can do for you.

And what is Molyneux asking? He’s asking his owners’ friends (NZ’s ruling class) to let him cross into and speak in their slave pen, and at the same time asking his owners (Canada’s ruling class) and their friends (Western governments) to keep Muslims out! The irony is rich. Molyneux requires permission to leave Canada and permission to enter New Zealand, and he’s only been given permission at the last minute and he’s only allowed to be here in Aotearoa for 10 days.

Stefan Molyneux will be allowed into the country for 10 days, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway announced on Friday morning.

Today’s Molyneux is an immigration alarmist. I predict he’ll have about as much success stopping Muslim immigration as climate change alarmists will have stopping anthropogenic global warming. None at all. And this is for the simple reason that setting immigration policies is not up to Molyneux or to any of his fan base. Immigration policies are set, not by human cattle, but by human farmers. And they stand to profit from mass immigration just as much as they do from burning fossil fuels.

Posted on March 28, 2018January 21, 2019

Kāpiti Island

[Show slideshow]
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Posted on February 4, 2018January 21, 2019

I have always looked out from behind these eyes

Now playing at the Cartesian theatre. One long circular argument.

[under construction]

Posted on January 24, 2018February 4, 2018

The hard problem is hard

[under construction]

Posted on December 25, 2017January 17, 2018

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a mandatory Christian virtue.

Jesus makes this very clear in several places in the Gospels, for example in the Sermon on the Mount.

For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

But Jesus makes it most clear of all in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And having begun to settle accounts, one debtor was brought before him who owed ten thousand talents. But because he had nothing to pay the debt, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made.

The servant fell down, and bowed before him, saying, “Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” The lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt.

But that servant went out, and found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred denarii, and he grabbed him, and took him by the throat, saying, “Pay me what you owe!”

His fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.”

But he would not, and went and cast him into prison, until he would pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were greatly distressed, and went and told their lord all that had happened.

Then his lord called him, and said to him, “Wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt, because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have dealt kindly with your fellow servant, as I dealt kindly with you?” And in anger his lord delivered him to the tormentors, until he would pay all that was owing to him.

“So also my heavenly Father will do to you, if each of you does not forgive your brother from your heart.”

When we say the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that our heavenly Father will

Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.

In other words, we pray that God will deliver us to the tormentors, if we do not forgive others from the heart! It helps to remember this.

[under construction]

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