Category Archives: Random Grumps & Raves

Politcally Correct Eating in New Zealand

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Filed under Random Grumps & Raves, Rights and Responsibility, Things to Consider
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The weka is a native New Zealand bird.  It s a large, brown flightless bird that has a famously feisty and curious personality. These two qualities traditionally made the bird an easy food source for Māori and early European settlers.  The Europeans called them “wood hens”.  By all accounts, they’re damn good eating.

They have all but disappeared from mainland NZ and are protected.   They now survive mainly on islands, that also are home to other endangered birds.  The problem is, weka eat the eggs and young of other ground-nesting birds.

Currently, the only place where the legal harvest of weka can occur is on the Chatham Islands and on some islands around Stewart Island.  But now, they threaten the survival of other birds on the Open Bay Islands off Haast on the South Island’s West Coast.  So, up to 70 weka on the islands  are to be killed to save other native species.  The Department of Conservation and the trustees of the Maori-owned islands have agreed that the birds will be killed and in some cases ‘culturally harvested’.

It’s OK, guys, to manage the conservation of native birds wisely.  And when culling is necessary, it’s very OK to eat the birds instead of wasting them.  But stop making us puke with your politically correct double-talk.  “Culturally harvested” indeed!

Anthropogenic Global Warming as Organised Religion

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Filed under Global Warming, The Demise of Democracy and Freedom
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The UN, its environmental propaganda unit (the IPCC) and the organisers want us to believe that man-made CO2 and methane emissions are the cause of global warming.  They and their supporters refer to anyone who is skeptical of that claim by the derogatory term “Denier”.  They wish us to feel guilty about the perfectly natural twentieth century warming, and blame ourselves for it.

This is organised religion at work – massive manipulation on a scale not seen since the Dark Ages.  Its purpose is the increase and entrench the power and wealth of the UN.  If it is not constrained it will impoverish us all – while the developing nations continue to develop, financed by our CO2 carbon-credit taxes.  Think about this:

From the time of Constantine until after the Renaissance, the dominant organised religion of the Western world set up the most enduring bureaucracy of all time to build and maintain its power.  It had it all – Fear of mortality, original sin, guilt about sexuality, the seven deadly sins, blessings, indulgences, tithing, the inquisition, the priesthood, cathedrals, the Swiss Guard and more.

It still exists, but its power is but a shadow of what it was in the Dark Ages.  Sadly, nature abhors a vacuum, even a power vacuum.  So, now we have the UN.  It already has many of the infrastructure elements of the old church.  But it has lacked the driving religion that is needed for really comprehensive power.

Until now.  Now, it has Anthropogenic Global Warming.  I have seen the priesthood (the IPCC) and that’s bad enough.  I am not keen to see what the UN will do for an inquisition.

The Key Components of Organised Religion:

Organised religion purports to bring us enlightenment, universal truth, knowledge of God and salvation.  It does nothing of the sort – it’s about control, wealth and power.  It achieves this by feeding us baloney, fostering fear and guilt, positioning itself as the sole path for forgiveness of our sins,  and charging us for that “service”.

It also builds infrastructure to support its aims.  The organisational infrastructure includes bureaucracies to maintain our fear and guilt, punish us when we don’t comply with their rules, collect our payments and recruit us as disciples to promote and enforce their views.  It also always includes a priesthood whose duties include propaganda to promote the baloney that is central to its control.  Some organised religions even maintain military and security organisations.  The physical infrastructure includes imposing cathedrals, churches and temples to which we are required to come for our regular indoctrination sessions and express our gratitude.

A key element of most organised religions is fostering of hatred for non-believers and dissenters.  Those who do not believe are branded as heathens.  Any expression of dissent or disagreement from believers is branded as heresy or blasphemy, and severely punished.

Political Correctness in Sodding Sudbury Bingo

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Filed under Random Grumps & Raves, The Demise of Democracy and Freedom, Things to Consider
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The cancer of Political Correctness is now affecting the popular English game of Bingo – believe it or not!  In the town of Suffolk town of Sudbury, England, the local officials have banned bingo-callers from using the traditional number identifiers “Legs Eleven” (for the number eleven) and “Two fat Ladies” (for the number eighty-eight), on the grounds that they are politically incorrect and may spark lawsuits against the council from outraged portly persons, or from women who might deem them sexist!

Oh, good grumping grief!  Are the Poms going mad?  Bingo calling is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for the players – the rhythm, pitch and cadence of the caller’s voice, the traditional embellishments that globally identify the numbers.  These are as old as the game itself, as instantly recognisable as a market fishmonger’s patter, square-dance calls or a running joke in a sitcom.

The bingo call “Two fat Ladies” is so much a part of the English bingo tradition that it was adopted by two gifted female chefs as the very name of their highly successful television cooking show.  Get this – the two lady chefs were indeed fat, cheerful, entertaining and talented.  And obviously unabashed by being two fat ladies and happy to adopt the term as their own.

If a caller used the platform of the bingo hall to make gratuitous racist or derogatory jokes, then I would expect lawsuits to be a likely consequence.  Not to mention a black eye.  But bingo calls are not gratuitous insults like racist jokes.  They are the traditional fabric of bingo, part of it’s colour and ambiance, giving pleasure to the players.  What court of law would uphold such a lawsuit?  Or are English jurists as bonkers as some English local officials?

P.S. Bingo is a Pommie tradition that has even found its way to some of England’s former colonies.  The harmless group gambling game attracts faithful followers, who revel in the company, the cheerfulness, the excitement, the chance to make some extra cash for the price of an outlay so small that it has no more significance than the cost of a movie ticket.  And given the low quality of the average cinematic pot-boiler, bingo can be more entertaining.

Players each draw bingo cards, that have rows of numbers.  No two are alike.  The players pay a small fee for each game.  The pot of their fees is the jackpot for the game, and the winner takes all.

The game is led by the bingo caller, who has a sheet for each game, for which he calls the numbers in turn.  Players mark off each called number on their own card (if it is on the card).  The first player to have marked off all the numbers calls out “Bingo!” and subject to a quick check by the caller, the game is won.

P.P.S. “Pom” is an antipodean colloquialism for an Englishman.  When used without any other qualifier, it is a fond term, not a derogatory one.