The great ‘Awokening’ is upon us. The mania for seeking racial justice by toppling statues of dead white men has spread to New Zealand. Gisborne’s statue of Captain James Cook was targeted on Friday with swastikas and inane sloganeering. Pure idiocy. The dropkicks who advocate this rubbish aren’t
It should have been routine. A police caution for a broken tail light. A ‘get off the road and get it fixed’ situation. Until something went very wrong. The I-phone 11 didn’t appear and start filming until Lee Ropata was on the ground bleeding from a blow to the
“The more restrictions and prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be.” Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu “Never f**K with another man’s rice bowl” A lesser, unknown Chinese Philosopher When future historians describe what happened to the New Zealand economy in 2020 they will no doubt lay the
…at table tennis, squash and chess. Context, as the above illustrates, is everything. Isolate facts (or words) and they can suffer distorted interpretations to fit an agenda. This is a banal observation to most thinking adults. Unfortunately, non-thinking adulthood appears to be in the ascendant at present. Two examples, one
Richard Dawkins, Greta Thunberg, President Trump, Jacinda Ardern, Martin Luther King, the Beatles. What does the disparate group above have in common? They are Christians, all. Everyone born in the West inherits and in most cases embraces moral and ethical precepts that are unquestionably Christian in origin. They are so
Steeped as I am in Anglo-Saxon reserve, I sometimes find myself at serious odds with the times allotted me for my four score and ten. Not for me the incessant sharing of amateur self-portraiture, the eavesdropping on private moments and the social ‘connectedness’ of Facebook, Twitter and the others. I’
In 1346 the Mongolian army brought the Black Plague to Europe. Laying siege to the Crimean port of Caffa, Jani Beg the leader of ‘the Golden Horde’ decided to catapult the infected corpses of his comrades over the city walls. Those citizens who escaped took the bacterium Yersinia Pestis back
It’s been a year since an act of a madman shocked the country. Fifty-one souls lost to a psychopath on an autumn afternoon in Christchurch. Our worst act of peacetime violence shouldn’t be an easy thing to forget. And yet, only a year on, those of a left-wing
It may be a bit of a dirge. It may sorely lack (in my humble musical opinion) a Keith Richardsesque guitar riff and a Keith Moon drum break. It may contain archaic language (‘thee’, ‘thy’, ‘entreat’) and be acknowledged as the work of a second rate poet set to a
You can understand the temptation. There they are, natural show-offs, suddenly with a live audience of millions and a rare chance to benefit us poor non-showbiz types with their superior wisdom. That special wisdom not gained by serious study or lived experience but by, ahem…playing dress-ups. For, in most
If you are looking for evidence of new media eclipsing the old look no further than The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Two weeks ago when Bill Maher wanted to promote a new series of his TV show Real Time he didn’t sit down with the New York Times or
Burn, Hollywood, Burn A regular review by John Black Last month Martin Scorsese drew the ire of millennials with a condemnation of Marvel movies, as mere ‘theme parks’ and ‘not cinema’. If anyone has earnt the right to opine on the art of film its Scorsese. He has made a
Burn, Hollywood, Burn A regular review by John Black Here’s a pub question worth a beery rumination: Who did the most for the cause of human freedom in the twentieth century? Sir Winston Churchill? Martin Luther King? Ronald Reagan? An eccentric choice but not one without a sound argument
Burn, Hollywood, Burn A regular review by John Black Dr Sleep, the long awaited, much belated sequel to the classic horror The Shining is a bonfire of lost opportunities. The original Stephen King novel of an alcoholic writer, Jack Torrance and his wife and psychic child stranded in the Overlook
Burn, Hollywood, Burn A regular review by John Black So let’s get the plot of the Terminator saga straight: Big bad Arnold Swarze-wish-I-could-spell-his-name was sent from a future of sentient machines to our past to kill the mother of a future leader of a human rebellion against the machines.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn A regular review by John Black Jojo Rabbit, the new film by Taika Waititi, isn’t as brave or as clever as many critics, and no doubt the filmmaker himself, seem to think. Remember this is the same gentleman who proclaimed his homeland ‘Racist as F*#K’
