'Gobhai Mountain Lodge' - Nari Gandhi

This was architect Nari Gandhi's first project after returning to India in 1964, a jewel-like exercise in geometry, siting and simplicity. Featured in this month's 'Friends of Kebyar' magazine, editor Michael Hawker explains, the design responds to specific conditions of the site.

Roof beams are set at 30-degrees while roof panels are perpendicular to the walls, setting up dynamic rhythm inside, while the two geometries themselves develop from the nature of the two distant views, the Rajmachi hilltop Fort and the Valvan Lake below, which the verandahs overlook. The roof on the east face is "pressed down" to redirect the air flow of the prevailing southwest winds.

EFB debate at 'The Standard'

** Against my better judgement, I've just made a substantial contribution to the debate over at 'The Standard.' I'll be interested, though not surprised, to see where the debate goes.

Presidential debates enmired in middle ground

You could take some time and watch the YouTube Republican presidential debates, or you could let bloggers like Myrhaf and Gus van Horn do the heavy lifting for you. Myrhaf for one was "appalled" by the debaters:

The Republican Party is in trouble. The candidates are all mixed economy mediocrities, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, who is out in left field. None had specific, courageous answers about what Thompson called the "entitlement tsunami" headed our way. By all indications, the presidency of any Republican except Paul will be an extension of Bush's policies. [A Paul presidency would be both different and worse. --GvH] Some made general statements about cutting spending, but only Paul gave specifics. The rest are too terrified of offending the legions of Americans who now suck off the federal teat...

The only two candidates who sounded like they had integrity were the libertarian antiwar candidate and the Christian big government candidate. The rest are the kind of middle-of-the-road hacks you would expect among Republican politicians. The candidates are in a welfare state bind: the only way to look principled is to risk angering some pressure groups full of voters; but being controversial is the quickest way to marginalization. It is impossible in today's America to be honest and principled about getting the government out of our lives and remain a serious candidate. I don't think I've ever been so depressed after a debate.

Notes van Horn, Given Myrhaf's previous analysis of what makes Hillary Clinton a weak candidate, the idea of a "Huckabee vibe" -- or other similar superficialities that supposedly inspire voters -- is frightening.

And a note to myself on that same depressing state: It is equally impossible in today's New Zealand to be honest and principled about getting the government out of our lives and remain a serious candidate. As the politically compromised Deborah Coddington observed recently, and just a trifle hyperbolically:

On one side, the state-worshipping collectivists, with thought processes which go something like: state-owned equals good - privately owned equals bad. They apply this same argument to education, health, security, transport, television, radio, and even water for heaven's sake.

On the other side, those vehemently opposed to anything run by the state except for the protection of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, call themselves the Libertarianz Party and look for cupboards in which to hold their annual conferences.

Just for the record it was a cupboard the size of a brewery in which the last conference was held. The point however remains depressingly the same: the middle-of-the-road hacks and the state-worshipping collectivists continue to flourish even as nanny's spending binge continues, her list of useless ministries, departments, agencies and quangoes and her bossiness both increase exponentially, and her infrastructure collapses around us.

Yes, it is depressing sometimes.

UPDATE: The Independent explains the last-man-standing reason the folksy Huckabee even has a "vibe."

How did it come to this? Mainly because all his better-known rivals have defects. Mix Romney's money and managerial acumen, John McCain's honesty and military record, Fred Thompson's southern charm and Rudolph Giuliani's toughness – and you'd have an Identikit candidate to bowl over every Republican in the land. On the other hand, if you blend Romney's Mormonism, McCain's age and support of the Iraq war, Thompson's plodding indolence, and the liberal social views and messy private life of Giuliani, you'd come up with a candidate who might not win a single vote from Christian conservatives, so important a part of the Republican primary electorate.

Enter Minister Mike.

Galt help us.

No welcome

Former father of two murdered children Chris Kahui can't find a welcome either inside prison (he's been in solitary for his own protection) or outside prison. Cactus is suitably sympathetic.

Infinity pools

Mrs Smith has some superbly focussed architectural advice on infinity pools. Go and read it.

Capital Coast: Not just a die-while-you-wait health system

Following the death of a one-day old baby after her and her mother were released from Wellington hospital just six hours after giving birth, details have now been released under the Official Information Act showing that up to one in eight patients at Wellington's hospitals "is the victim of a medical accident, error or mishap," and up to twenty-three patients of Wellington's Capital Coast Health were either killed or endured serious harm through inattention, incompetence and bungling.

Radio NZ story here. Dom Post story here.

The information describes the standard of care at Capital Coast Health as "a shambles." An independent November audit stated that "crisis management was the normal operating environment at Wellington Hospital." And all while government spending on the government's health system has rocketed. The answer is clearly not more of our money.

The reaction to these revelations suggests the answers won't be forthcoming from the administrators and senior clinicians of Wellington's Capital Coast Health either, nor from apologists for the state's die-while-you-wait health system, all of whom seem to consider this an acceptable level of failure. A "shambles" is apparently all we should expect from state health care.

I agree with them. That is all we can expect.

CCH apologists argue that "these problems occur everywhere," and of course they do: they occur everywhere the state attempts to handle the lion's share of a country's health care.

In Britain, for example, studies suggest these serious or "sentinel" events as they're called regularly affect up to one in ten patients, and that this figure is normal for a bureaucratically driven state-run hospital system. One in ten. Think about what that means for a moment. It's a level of incompetence that is life threatening for one in every ten patients that enter the portals of a government-run hospital.

Think about that next time it's you or a loved one entering that hospital.

Frighteningly, this is a level of failure -- of failure that leads to death -- that state health apologists consider acceptable. Indeed, if the representatives of the Wellington's Health Board are to be believed the very worst part about the release of this information of incompetence, bungling,and inattention being released is that it might "discourage clinicians" being open in remedying future problems.

But there's no evidence that there's ever been any motivation to remedy future problems -- indeed, the more excuses for failure we hear, the more it's clear just how much failure has come to be accepted as normal. The apologies and excuses offer no comfort at all that any motivation even exists to rememdy the bungling that killed twenty-three people, and will go on killing up to one in ten patients who enter state care.

It's not just a die-while you wait system. These figures show there are good odds you'll die if you get there as well.

Perhaps that's why fifty-six percent of New Zealanders surveyed told the Commonwealth Fund International Health Survey that the country's creaking health system needs "fundamental change." This isn't time to sit around and make excuses. It's not time to simply change the administrators and keep the same failed system. It's time for radical action.

Husain: "Moderate muslims" must "end the madness"?

Yesterday's Herald had a piece by Ed Husain, culled from the Observer, that looks at exactly the same recent incidents around the Muslim world I canvassed yesterday -- the floggings, the hangings, the calls for execution -- and takes an almost identical position to the one I took in yesterday's post, except that Husain calls on so called "moderate Muslims" to make a stand against Islamists to "end the madness."

Last year, it was the Danish cartoons. This year it is a teddy bear. What next? And why this repeated madness? For me, it is not about the possible offence taken at perceived negative portrayals of Islamic symbols, but the repeated calls for death, lashings and stoning. The medieval, literalist mindset that fails to comprehend the inhumane nature of these brutal and barbaric acts, often carried out against the defenceless, is the crux of the matter.

And so it is. But where Husain starts well by observing the barbarity, by recognising that "The Western media are right to hold a mirror to educated Muslims by highlighting these outdated practices," by asking "the ubiquitous question ... where is the voice of the Muslim majority?" he still falls some way short. Since he still maintains that there is a moderate Islam with a "benign face" he comes up without any real solution to those Islamists who truly believe that "No one shall live who insults the prophet."

This medieval, literalist mindset is the face of Islam, and I'm certain Husain himself knows that, which leads to him simply hand wringing instead of taking a proper and potentially more productive stand.

"More than ever," he says, "Western Muslims need to stop viewing the world through bipolarised lenses and assert our Western belonging." True, but. The "but" is that Islam itself is built on a barbaric heritage: it was a creed born by force, filled with bloodshed and spread by the sword. It's true that it subsequently enjoyed a golden age of wealthy secularism, but the realisation that the secularism was in no way compatible with the Koran led to a swift and decisive rejection (by Islamic philosophers such as al-Ghazali) of the this-worldly focus that had preserved Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and built the Alhambra in Spain -- the rejection resulted in a thousand-year plunge into the Dark Ages. Islam is still there, and until it can find a philosopher to reverse al-Ghazali's disastrous rejection of reason and this world, so it will remain.

It will take more than a simple assertion of "Western belonging" to reverse that, more than just the intention to "build a home together" -- it will take the realisation levelled at Husain by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and which he notes as a challenge to himself: That the very essence of Islam is barbaric, and must be rejected; that to make of Islam a religion of peace will entail excising the very essence of Islam, and rejecting what the Koran maintains is God's law; that thinking must be liberated from its role in the Muslim world as the handmaiden of theology, and focussed instead on this life, and this world.

The extent of what is needed can be judged by the nature of al-Ghazali's rejection (on behalf of Islam) of thought itself, and his embrace of the Koran as the Muslim's sole source of knowledge. "If it's already in the Koran we don't need it," al-Ghazali proclaimed. "And if it's not in the Koran, we don't want it."

It would of course need a new Enlightenment, and leave behind it a religion that was nothing but empty ritual and saintly noise -- something like modern Anglicanism, but with better hymns. That's hard. Harder than Husain seems to realise, or even recognise that this is what his call of necessity entails.

Husain had the courage to put a career as an Islamic fundamentalist behind him. He still has some way to travel -- and so too do his mainstream moderate Muslims. Let us hope he and those few others like him have the courage to continue speaking their mind.

UPDATE: Wafa Sultan explains the barbarism that inspired her to begin her fight Islam, here at YouTube [hat tip Sandi]. "Islam has never been misunderstood," she says. It is "a brainwashing machine... [it is] exactly what the prophet did and said."

Ludeken's House - Jack Hillmer

The 1952 Ludeken House by San Francisco architect Jack Hillmer,which has since been "marred by unsympathetic renovations." (These photos by Ezra Stoller supplement the post I made of the house a few months back.)

A profile of Hillmer in SFGate tells you a bit about the man:

Hillmer's use of natural materials helped define the Bay Region Style in the years after World War II... Hillmer also earned a reputation as a perfectionist, and by 1960 Architectural Forum summarized his career as "20 years of practice (that) have produced few buildings but very expressive ones." All told, Hillmer produced fewer than 10 finished homes -- but they have had an inordinate influence because of their purity and beauty, even spirituality.

"My approach to architecture was as an art," he says. "The approach of most other architects is as a business. I never really thought about how much money I was getting."

Note his ingenious use of light and and of raw, natural materials, even down to the delightful wooden basins ...

Giz a job

I wood lyke to applie for the job as minister of ejukayshun az, eye undastand here Chris karters job might be up for grabs' coz he kant spell proper like me

eye have a good guvamint skool ejukayshun an passed all my exams an left skool last week.

i am 25 yearz old.

Something in the wind on the Electoral Finance Bill?

Remember how the National Party opposed Sue Bradford's Anti-Smacking Bill, and how National Party MPs stood up on the steps of Parliament and told protestors against the Bill how vehemently they opposed it? Do you remember what happened just a week later, when John Key did a deal and those same MPs crossed the floor to vote for the Bradford/Key Anti-Smacking Compromise?

We had demonstrated to us as plainly as its possible to have something demonstrated that these people had no spine and are not to be trusted. I'm talking about National Socialist sell-outs like Bob Clarkson and Chester Borrows and Shane Ardern and Tau Henare and Maurice Wimpianson and Judith Bloody Collins who stood there on the steps of Parliament and told an audience passionately opposed to the Bill that they were too ... and who then showed with their pathetic acquiescence that their assurances and their promises are one-hundred percent worthless. As they are. As is their spineless, deal-making leader.

Guess what?

It could be happening again with the Electoral Finance Bill as the Government offers 11th hour talks on Electoral Finance Bill. I hope I'm wrong, I do hope I'm wrong, but keep your eyes peeled for signs of tongues becoming forked once again.

UPDATE 1: The Clark Government has just tabled a whopping 150 amendments to the Electoral Finance Bill -- an unprecedented sign of contempt for what is fundamental constitutional law! Says David Farrar:

Do you remember Helen claiming the Bill was great now it is out of select committee? So great, it needs 150 amendments. Could you imagine the outcry in most countries if suddenly one has 150 amendments to the constitution, a couple of hours before they get voted on? Mickey Mouse is too generous a term for it. I’ll blog the substance of some of the changes as I work through them.

UPDATE 2: David's started this morning looking at the deluge of amendments and what they might mean. Here's his first post.

UPDATE 3: From the 'I Damn Well Hope He Means It' files, here's John Key last night in the Electoral Finance Bill debate [hat tip Whale Oil]:

The rights of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who want to participate no longer count...

New Zealanders are sick of being told what to do. They are sick of having Labour control every part of their life and they are sick of being told whether they can participate in an election or not.

I say to Labour Party members, pick up the New Zealand Herald, read the editorial, for once in your lives recognise that you are not bigger than the people of New Zealand.

I make this promise to New Zealanders: when Labour is gone at the end of 2008 the first thing National will do is repeal this legislation. It's gone.

Don't save rail

There's talk that after buying back the rail track some years back for the princely sum of one dollar -- yes Virginia, excluding salvage value that was all the country's extensive network of steel tracks were worth -- the Government might now also buy back the whole operation from rail operator Toll Holdings. Herald story here.

The threat to buy comes about through negotiations over the "track access fee" -- that's the toll Toll pays to use the Government's track -- and in what looks like a backroom bid to have the whole operation renationalised, the Government has been playing hardball. They want to charge more; Toll wants its subsidy increased.

Whether the operation is nationalised or not, the taxpayer loses either way. We're already paying to subsidise a failing operation, renationalising it won't stop it losing money. Renationalising rail will make the socialists in cabinet feel good, but it won't change for a second the transparent fact that, as Liberty Scott points out, "it's a dud investment. Something socialists are good at finding."

There's a point to make here that should by now be obvious to all but the most braindead socialist, but which even supporters of privatisation seem to have overlooked. The argument used when the NZ Rail dinosaur was hocked off was that private business would run rail more efficiently. This was given as the justification at the time for all the morally necessary privatisations done in the late eighties and early nineties, but in truth efficiency was only ever one part of the economic story; only one of the strings in the privatisation bow.

The full economic argument included the urgent necessity to find out what these industries were really worth -- something only able to be established by private ownership in an open market. In the case of rail, the real value of the rail network was found to be abut a dollar. Without the ongoing subsidy courtesy of the taxpayer (ie., money down the drain), looks like the rail operations might be worth about the same. Hardly what you'd call "vital infrastructure" -- more an expensive, arthritic and completely futile waste of precious resources.

Liberty Scott has more analyis here. And No Right Turn keeps the red flag flying.

World chucking record

Normally here at Not PC I like to celebrate achievement; I like to praise heroes. So in the normal course of events when a bloke knocks off Shane Warne's record-breaking achievements to take the record for the number of batsmen dismissed in world cricket, a record that's unlikely to be challenged any time soon, that should be a chance to praise the world's most successful bowler -- a guy South Africa's Daryl Cullinan says, "was the only bowler I faced where you felt he could get you out every single ball."

Except he's not, is he. That is to say, he's not really a bowler. As English fans like to sing when he steps up to deliver the ball: "Throw, throw, throw the ball, gently down the seam, Murali, Murali, Murali, Murali chucks it like a dream." For the non-cricket readers, what this means is that in cricket the bowler is required to use a straight arm in his delivery of the ball, whereas what Murali does is ... something different.

That said, Warne himself is on record as saying Murali's not a chucker. Case closed?

Don't send stupidity to college

Very pleased to hear that Auckland University is taking what's been reported to be the unusual step of applying entrance standards to the people wishing to enter their hallowed portals to study arts, education, science, theology and first-year law. It's not exactly applying a standard of excellence to run the rule over entrants before they rock up and start filling your lecture halls, but it might at least be the beginning of a move towards one.

I'm sure many people were surprised to hear that few practical standards have been applied up to now in selecting entrants for these courses -- that "open entry" is considered the norm. I'm sure however that many people won't have been surprised to hear the bleating that has accompanied this announcement.

"We are shutting the door on the potential students and achievers of the future," said Auckland University Student Association education vice-president David Do, for example, demonstrating in a stroke why entrance criteria need to be raised to exclude those like Mr Do without even the brains they were born with: It is obviously beyond the wit of Mr Do to realise that those who fail to achieve the bare minimum necessary to enter a university are unlikely to be sort of material from which potential students and achievers of the future are made -- not at least in an academic environment -- or to notice that graduates with theology degrees are hardly likely to be setting the world on fire in any case (this is perhaps one course where entrance standards could be set so high as to exclude all entrants. But I digress.)

And John Minto illustrates PJ O'Rourke's point that earnestness is just stupidity sent to college, demonstrating in one short self-contradictory press statement that entrance standards excluding the stupid should have been applied more rigorously in Minto's day: the whole country and Minto himself would surely have been better off if the man had become a panel beater.

Libertarianz Education Spokesman Phil Howison summarises the position perfectly:

"The sad fact is that with lower standards and a general 'dumbing down' of academia, degrees are worth much less than they used to. Higher entrance standards will benefit all Auckland University students, by improving the reputation of the institution," Mr. Howison pointed out. "The role of the NCEA should also be mentioned. It is this assessment system which often leaves tertiary institutions and employers befuddled when attempting to assess a candidate's ability."

I look forward to this more rational admissions policy taking hold in other groves of academe throughout the country.

UPDATE: Oops. Looks like the mandarins at Auckland University are already running scared at being tarred as, gulp, "elitists"! Deputy Vice-Chancellor for the Braindead Professor Dalziel this morning rejected the suggestion that the proposal could "risk a slide to elitism" -- an unfortunate metaphor, really, since it would be the only slide in Christendom with a trajectory pointing upwards. In any case, the Braindead Vice-Chancellor confirmed that "special entry schemes" for the braindead, the retarded and those with IQs approaching those of Mr Minto's and Mr Do's already run in courses with restricted entry and "it was envisaged similar arrangements would be used."

So there you go. Standards schmandards, says Uni. If you really want standards, then perhaps panel beating school would be better.

November site stats

Some site stats for November. Top ten posts for the month:

1. Beer O'Clock: Good News, Bad News.
2. Comrade Trottersky exposes the real EFB issue.
3. Raise your voice against democracy rationing.
4. Amazing inventions.
5. "Very disturbing activities" in the Dom.
6. Tax is theft.
7. PUBLIC NOTICE: Stop democracy rationing.
8. The litmust test for "social justice."
9. No property rights, thanks, we're National.
10. Elliot Tower - Gordon Moller.

Top six search terms being Googled and landing here:

1. broadacre city
2. "nanny state has gone berserk"
3. early book history online
4. "they're valuable and longterm supporters of ours"
5. russell watkins
6. breakup songs

And (Google/Yahoo aside), here are the top six sites referring readers here. Thanks everyone. Cheques are in the post.

1. Kiwiblog
2. The Libz site
3. SOLO
4. Whale Oil
   
5. Tumeke!
6. Crusader Rabbit
   

'Metro Shoes' Bungalow - Nira Gandhi

A house nicknamed the 'Metro Shoes' Bungalow after the trade name of its owners - masterfully designed and built by Nira Gandhi in Tungarli, Lonavia, Maharashtra, India, in 1990-93.

In the dock

Mallard goes where all MPs should be: in the dock.

Story here. [Pic courtesy Kiwiblog]

Quote of the Day, from Rowan Atkinson

The casual ease which some people move from finding something offensive to wishing to declare it criminal - and are then able to find factions within government to aid their ambitions - is truly depressing.

Story here [hat tip Eric Olthwaite].

"No one lives who insults the prophet."

Peaceful Muslims are out on the streets again observes the New York Daily News:

Like the avengers who vowed death to novelist Salman Rushdie for his affront to Islam, like those who slew Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for his, like the mobs who ran mindless riot across Europe in protest of cartoons they deemed offensive to their prophet, now tens of thousands of Sudanese Muslims are demanding the execution by firing squad of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who made the mistake of letting her 7-year-old charges name a teddy bear Muhammed.

Al Jazeera reports that hundreds of protesters marched through the Sudanese capital Khartoum demanding death for the British school teacher "convicted of insulting Islam," chanting "No one lives who insults the prophet." Said one of those demonstrating in support of his stinking sub-human superstition, "It is a premeditated action, and this unbeliever thinks that she can fool us? What she did requires her life to be taken."

This is of course just a fortnight after a Saudi woman was sentenced to 90 lashes for the "crime" of being gang raped (and a further 110 lashes for complaining), and just weeks after Iranian officials confirmed that their Islamic state upholds the death penalty for homosexuals.

All hail this religion of peace.

And can't you just feel the silence from the liberal left ... it's a silence that's almost palpable.

UPDATE: Elan Journo argues that this attitude of half-arsed appeasement of evil is the very reason Pakistan is now in turmoil -- Washington blinded itself to the "creeping Talibanization of Pakistan" he says, all the while insisting that "we needed Pakistan as an ally, and that the alternatives to Gen. Musharraf's military dictatorship were far worse."

If the administration was right about that (which is doubtful), we could have had an alliance with Pakistan under only one condition--treating this supposedly lesser of two evils as, indeed, evil.

As with all such appeasement, the result is the strengthening of the enemy and an increased danger to the freer world, potentially leaving the Islamists with, as Journo points out, "a new staging area in Pakistan from which to plot attacks on us (perhaps, one day, with Pakistani nukes)."

It doesn't get much more frightening than that. Read Journo's complete piece here.

Nash not for Napier

The oily Stuart Nash has been beaten out for Labour's Napier nomination, and says he will now go for a place on Labour's list. [Some history here.] He's the sort of chap who would prefer a free ride anyway, I suspect. A perfect MP.

Gagging justice

The Attorney General's threat to gag Herald reports on earlier details of the man accused of murdering Emma Agnew highlights again the disturbing trend to hide what's going on in our courts, just as it was highlighted in the orders for name suppression and evidence suppression in the recent 'Urewera 16' bail hearings.

In recent years New Zealand's courts have admitted TV cameras, but at the same time have more and more frequently enforced orders suppressing information about what's going on inside those courts. We can see pictures, but we're not allowed to know who's on trial, and what the evidence against them is. Picture but no sound. We're being treated like children, and there's little justification for it.

Name suppression, evidence suppression -- these recent high profile cases in which the media have been gagged from reporting details that would help we the people ( in whose name the courts are operating) to judge for ourselves whether justice is being done have highlighted this unfortunate predilection for gagging orders.

I've argued before that "It's unfortunate that our courts seem to have forgotten the crucial principle that underpins their work: that justice must not only be done must must be seen to be done. When justice is kept under wraps, all sorts of nonsense appears in the vacuum... Why do the courts consider us so immature that we can't handle hearing the evidence for ourselves in media reports, instead of hearing only the nonsense that its absence has generated?"

Stephen Franks blogs a robust discussion of this "recent fad to elevate privacy and possible embarassment over substantive justice" that's worth considering:

The Attorney General is telling the Herald to suppress its old stories on the man accused of murdering Emma Agnew. I hope the Herald tells the Attorney General to stand up for a change for freedom of speech and open justice.

The law around pre-trial contempt of court (and sub judice) is based on the theory that the risk of biasing judges and juries outweighs freedom of speech, including open disclosure of what is known and obtainable by insiders, or those determined to find out.

I am not aware of any balance of evidence to support [this] fear... Indeed the attempt to treat juries like computers, cleansed of any pre-knowledge, and sheltered by evidence exclusion rules from anything a judge patronisingly considers prejudicial, turns upside down the original justification for a jury of your peers.

When justice comes with gagging orders, then justice is neither being done, nor seen to be done. It's time to reconsider their popularity.

CD launch

I enjoyed a delightful evening last night at the launch of a CD of Wagner's piano music by New Zealand musical legend Terence Dennis, a chap who's accompanied every major New Zealand vocalist from Kiri Te Kanawa to Donald McIntyre to Simon O'Neill, and for whom this is his first commercial recording.

Terence played a huge role in mentoring Simon O'Neill and a whole generation of NZ singers, and Simon was on hand last night to pay tribute and then pin us to the wall with a thunderous rendition of Siegmund's 'Ein Schwert werhiess mir der Vater' from Wagner's Die Walkure, before rushing off to catch a plane to New York to take the starring role of Siegmund in the Met's new Ring Cycle. The boy is in demand at all the world's opera houses, and it's easy to hear why!

Terence's CD is playing now on my stereo, and is on sale now at Marbeck's. [NB: Marbeck's picture shows the wrong CD, but fear not, their excellent staff will ship you the right one.]

More pics of anti-EFB march

More pics here of Saturday's march for democracy and free speech, including a surveillance photo of the plotting beginning at the aftermatch...







UPDATE 1: Whether or not you made it on Saturday, if you want your voice heard -- if you want to speak up in protest at this clampdown on free speech while it's still legal to do so -- then the single best thing you can do is write to every MP who's considering voting for this Bill. This week! That means every MP from United, NZ First, the Greens and Hard Labour. Here's a list of their email addresses, and here their mailing addresses [pdf].

Tell them that free speech is too important to gag one year in three. Tell them that this is not what our soldiers died for. Tell them, if you voted for them, that you did not vote them in to dismantle free speech. Tell them that, as Bernard Darnton says, that just because "Labour seems to have concluded that political speech is so important that no one else should be allowed to have any," that doesn't mean we should all roll over and accept being muzzled. Darnton explains how important this is:

If it became illegal to criticise the government during an election campaign, for this is clearly the aim, surely we could no longer consider New Zealand a free country.

The Clark government is not nibbling at the edges of free speech; they are not proposing legislation with other goals that has an incidental impact on free speech; they are engaged in both direct frontal assault and deliberate flanking attacks on free speech. All governments have a natural tendency to regulate and to censor. To maintain an open society the rules need to be deliberately tilted in favour of free expression. Political speech must be especially protected because it is in the political arena that all other freedoms must be protected. The Clark government’s assaults on free political expression must be resisted because if we fail to withstand these assaults it may be illegal to resist the next.

UPDATE 2: Labour brown-nose James Sleep says he is sickened - "sickened"! -- at the number of kids "that were pulled into [the] anti-EFB protest... To put it into perspective," he says reflectively, "making all those kids march reminds me of Hitler Youth!" Master Sleep is fifteen, by the way, and still too young to vote. Or to think.

Pictures from Auckland's free speech march

Momentum is building. Yesterday, five thousand of us took to the streets in Auckland to protest the Clark/Peters/Fitzsimons/Dunne Electoral Finance Bill: protesting the speech rationing, democracy rationing and electoral corruption that this Bill entails: protesting now while it's still legal...



Keep sending me pictures.

UPDATE: More pictures and story at Infonews, No Minister, and at Whale Oil's - who was out with his video camera, so keep checking back at his site for more.

TV3 report here. "Strong message sent to Government" says TVNZ.

UPDATE 2: John Boscawen thanks supporters.

UPDATE 3: More pics and commentary at MikeE's, including this pic above and the accompanying potent observation:

The above photo shows that freedom of speech and the EFB is no longer a beltway issue. Today we had conservatives and liberals, left and right, maori and pakeha, anarchists and statists marching side by side in disgust at the EFB. Some might claim that this is a National and ACT thing. It wasn't, I spotted: National, Act, Labour, [Libertarianz,] Socialist Workers, Free Palestine, Maori Sovereignty movement, Tuhoe Anti-Terror Bill protestors, war veterans, mothers, accountants, lawyers, students, anarchists, businessmen and women all marching against this disgusting piece of legislation. They will not stop, this bill will will be the end of those politically who support it.

He's dead right, and more mongrel MPs should be listening. As a few free-speech-supporting green friends have said to me, a few of whom marched yesterday, "We didn't vote Green for this!"

UPDATE 4: More pics here of Saturday's march for democracy and free speech, including a surveillance photo of the plotting beginning at the aftermatch...

POSTER: Nanny State has gone berserk

Sick of Nanny getting on your back, in your face, and hip deep into your life? Then this free poster courtesy of The Free Radical magazine is for you.

Click on the pic to enlarge, or here for an A3 PDF file [1MB] -- and tell Nanny to go to hell.