Around the Blogs

8 May

The Libertarianz Party issued a press release, offering their condolences to the family of Constable Len Snee who was shot dead in the line of duty during the Napier

"The death of police officer Senior Constable Len Snee, who paid the ultimate price yesterday while fighting the government's War on Drugs™, is a tragedy," said Libertarianz Drugs Spokesman, Luke Howison. "No doubt the gunman responsible for his death will be justly punished," says Howison," but those in government who authorise and continually escalate the War on Drugs™, and those who voted them in, must also shoulder some measure of blame for Constable Snee's death...

10 May

Scrubone at the Half Done blog posts a quote from C.H. Spurgeon,

Because God will never leave nor forsake us, we may well be content with such things as we have. Since the Lord is ours, we cannot be left without a friend, a treasure, and a dwelling place. This assurance may make us feel quite independent of men. Under such high patronage we do not feel tempted to cringe before our fellowmen and ask of them permission to call our lives our own; but what we say we boldly say and defy contradiction...

11 May

Samuel Dennis also comments on the death of Constable Len Snee,

Anything is a weapon. I have been working on the farm today, and as I write this am wearing a sheath knife on my belt. That is highly lethal (I kill sheep with it), but I can buy that wherever I like with no licence at all. And if I couldn’t buy it, I could easily make one with a chunk of steel and an angle grinder.

You can kill a lot more people with a car than a gun, and you don’t even need a driver’s licence to buy a car. Or you could use an axe, a machete, a kitchen knife, a chainsaw – the average home is a formidable arsenal of lethal weapons...

Meanwhile, the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary - Albert Mohler appears to be slaughtering a sacred cow in his post entitled Why Mother's Day is a Bad Idea. However be sure to read the full article for the twist at the end...

Sentiment drives Mother's Day as a gargantuan observance. We Americans feel better about ourselves when we honor motherhood -- or when we spend a few dollars on overpriced greeting cards, flowers, and food and convince ourselves that this is honoring our mothers.

There is nothing wrong about sentiment in itself, but there is something pornographic about the bathos of sentimentalism that this observance produces -- a sentimentalism so often devoid of content...

12 May

Dave at Big News sheds light on some shoddy research on smacking in NZ,

The project - funded by a well-known anti smacking organisation that gets 40% of its income from the taxpayer - looked at the submissions to the select committee on the Section 59 legislation. Researchers examined two particular contrasting social viewpoints of children - children as "human beings" and as "human becomings" - and whether these two viewpoints were implicated in people's views on the use of physical punishment...
...Just who do researchers think they are? It looked like the "conclusions" to the report were written before the hypotheses. Perhaps that is why the hypotheses weren't even tested in a way that provides reliability and validity throughout the wider population...

And David Farrar draws attention to Colin Espiner's tantrum over Christine Rankin's appointment as a Families Commissioner,

...What the hell is Colin Espiner on?... Bad enough to focus on her marriages, as if never being divorced is a pre-requisite. But what the hell does the death of the former wife of her husband have to do with it, except to almost imply she was responsible for the death.