Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The Dave Pellowe Case - What Exactly Is It About?

I refused to do a Welcome to Country at my Christian conferences. Now I'm being taken to the Human Rights Commission.

A conservative Christian minister claims he is being persecuted for refusing to include a 'Welcome to Country' ceremony at the start of his religious conferences - and that he is prepared to go to jail to defend his rights.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: School science – where we’ve gone wrong and what we need to do to get it right

It was one fine day in 1963 and Mrs Morgan, the teacher of my Standard 3 class, was in a particularly foul mood. She was an expert at wielding the strap and required little enough reason to do so at the best of times, and we were filled with trepidation. She told us with an angry leer that the education authorities had decreed that ‘science’ was to be taught from now on, and shared with us her considered professional opinion that this was ‘nonsense’. She ordered us to copy and memorise (the ‘or else’ needed no voicing) a passage she wrote on the blackboard. I remember it to this day – it was about the solar system and she underlined the new words such as ‘orbit’ and ‘axis’ (without explanations as to their meaning – indeed she told us not to ask questions).

A few days later she informed us triumphantly that there would be no more of this ‘science nonsense’ and that she would forget about testing us on that passage, which was just as well as none of us could make heads or tails of it. And that, dear reader, is a true and accurate record of my primary school exposure to science.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The pot calling the kettle black – the ‘State of Emergency’ for LGBTQ+ in the US

Today, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) - the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) civil rights organization - officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time in its more than 40-year history, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.
- Press release, Human Rights Campaign, 6 June 2023

The report goes on to list the three areas into which these ‘legislative assaults’ fall: transgender sports bans, gender-affirming care bans, and bathroom bans.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Human rights – the gift of pale but not stale males to humankind

 Some of the pale non-stale males who drafted the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen

Human rights are rights we have simply because we exist as human beings - they are not granted by any state. These universal rights are inherent to us all, regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, color [sic], religion, language, or any other status. They range from the most fundamental - the right to life - to those that make life worth living, such as the rights to food, education, work, health, and liberty. 
-  UNHR Office of the High Commissioner

The expression ‘human rights’ has mantra status, but what exactly does it refer to?

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Navigating by the stars isn’t science

Plotting  celestial bodies and using them to find one’s way about is no more ‘science’ than is using a road map – and can lead to constructs that are far from ‘scientific’

A great deal has been made by various commentators of the forebears of the Maori having navigated by the stars and that this is an instance of science. Not so.

The word ‘science’ is a bit of a problem. Until the late 19th century, the term as widely used by the educated classes referred to any systematic body of knowledge. It still does in French, hence we see names of university departments containing monikers such as ‘sciences historiques’ which strike someone steeped in modern English as oxymoronic.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The NZ science curriculum welcomes back the ‘vital force’

The Vital Force is a paranormal concept that was abandoned by science in the 19^th century. It remains prominent in various systems of metaphysics which is where it belongs, not in the science lab!

Vitalism – The philosophical doctrine that the phenomena of life cannot be explained in purely mechanical terms because there is something immaterial which distinguishes living from inanimate matter. - Collins online dictionary

Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. – Ernst Mayr 1988

It’s official – the doctrine of vitalism, the belief that there is a paranormal force present in living things that makes them living, is back in science. At least that is what the NCEA Chem & Bio Glossary appears to be asserting in relation to the Maori concept of mauri which it defines as, “The vital essence, life force of everything”.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Happy Australia Day!

Australia Day is held on January 26, the date on which the first British settlers arrived to colonize the country in 1788. It's a painful anniversary for hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Australians, marking the start of years of killings and dispossession, and many refer to it instead as Invasion Day. – Google (original emphasis)

Historical revisionism, while often associated with the ultra-right, is actually one of the few things the ultra-left excels at. They constantly tell us that there was an ‘invasion’ of indigenous nations, that the European powers engaged in systematic genocide against the indigenous people, and that 21st-century inhabitants of European descent of a once colonised land have something to ‘apologise’ for and be ‘forgiven’ for.

I reject these claims out of hand.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Research needed on poltergeists, nightmares and black cats in Aotearoa!

The Battersea Poltergeist of 1956 was taken deadly seriously

Two Māori scholars want to take taniwha out of the realm of fairy tales. 

Kirsty Dunn and Madi Williams from the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha have received a grant from the Marsden Fund to write biographies of up to 15 taniwha............... 

“We want to ask who are taniwha rather than what are taniwha? What are the connections between our taniwha narratives and what kind of knowledge is embedded in these narratives as well as looking at how they can help us understand and navigate our current challenges we face in Aotearoa as well as the wider globe as well,” she says.  

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Coming to grips with the real culprit in climate change

Leafy greens are leading culprits in climate change through their excessive production of the principal greenhouse gas water vapour and should be banned 

Water vapour is Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas. It's responsible for about half of Earth's greenhouse effect — the process that occurs when gases in Earth's atmosphere trap the Sun's heat.   – Google (original emphasis)

All this prattle about carbon dioxide and methane is just a distraction. Google goes on to state that water vapour can make up 4% of the atmosphere. That’s 100X the concentration of CO₂!

If we are going to get serious about the threat of climate change, we must take firm measures to prevent water vapour from entering the atmosphere.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Updating the streaming debate

When it comes to education, one size does not fit all. Nobody can be in any doubt about the fact that young people differ with respect to their aptitudes and attitudes and accordingly benefit from different teaching/learning approaches. But streaming is a blunt-edged tool with which to deliver school education that suits every learner. It uses a ranking system based on averaged-out measures of ability. This works quite well for kids who are simply good at everything (gifted) or who are pretty hopeless at everything for whatever reason (often a matter of attitude rather than aptitude). It does not work so well for kids who are very good at some things (talented) but not at others. To make streaming really work, you would have to stream classes for each subject separately. So a kid might be in Year 7A for one subject, 7D for another, and 7F for yet another. This just isn’t practical.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The desecularisation of NZ government

The first New Zealand Parliament … in 1854 separated church and state more sharply than in the Australian colonies. In rejecting a state church, New Zealand was more secular than its parent societies. 
-  Te Ara, The Encyclopedia of New Zealand (original emphasis)

Addressing Rurawhe as "Mr Speaker elect" the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern recited a phrase in Te Reo Māori. "Translated it means, 'may the mouthpiece of e hoa, the temple of Rātana support and guide the mouthpiece of the house'."
– 1News 24 August

Well, I for one hope that ‘e hoa’ – or any temple for that matter – doesn’t do anything of the sort.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Housing in NZ – forward to the past

Homeownership [sic] allows households to accumulate wealth and social status, and is the basis for a number of positive social, economic, family and civic outcomes….. Homeownership boosts the educational performance of children, induces higher participation in civic and volunteering activity, improves health care outcomes, lowers crime rates and lessens welfare dependency….. [P]ublic policy makers would be wise to consider the immense social benefits of homeownership for families, local communities and the nation. - National Association of Realtors, 2016

Hello everyone. This is your favourite Middle Eastern correspondent – well, ex-Middle Eastern correspondent, having left Lebanon last June and then spending almost 6 months in Turkey waiting for MIQ slots.

We stopped smoking several days before flying out not for any health-related reasons but because there is no way I am paying over a hundred bucks for a pouch of Port Royal. In Turkey I was rolling an excellent local blend for about NZD3 a pouch. Has it been hard stopping smoking after 55 and 47 years respectively? No, it’s been surprisingly easy – every time we get the craving we think of handing all that money over to this Government and that is a lot more unsettling than a few withdrawal symptoms.

What has been truly unsettling has been engaging with the housing market. One thing that got me badly off-side straight away is the practice of inviting bids over a certain amount rather than simply telling potential purchasers how much a place costs. I’m old-fashioned; you tell me how much it costs and I’ll decide whether to buy it or not; either that or conduct an auction – none of this surreptitious ‘blind auction’ crap. That simply further inflates what are already insanely high prices. So here we are in what I call our $350,000 birdcage – a 2-br home unit in rural Canterbury.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Science is a process rather than a product

The tools used by astrologers appear daunting to the uninitiated – all those tables with weird symbols all over the place, the intricate calculations, the dazzling horoscopes with all their esoteric paraphernalia; this surely is science at work.

In some ways, it is. Ephemeris data have been lifted from NASA databanks. Spheroidal geometry underpins the Tables of Houses. The stuff of science is certainly there. Indeed there was a time when astrology provided an overarching conceptual framework for much of what was then science. Chaucer tells us that the 14^th century physician ‘kept his patients from the pall through horoscopes and magick natural’ (modernised paraphrase). So what changed?

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The ‘Incitement of Hatred and Discrimination’ law change proposal - Humpty Dumpty let loose

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

- Lewis Carroll in ‘Through the Looking Glass’

The Government’s proposals regarding the changes to the law governing incitement and discrimination are so loaded I decided to not complete the ‘consultation’ form.