Leighton Smith

Here is the audio from yesterday’s Newstalk ZB show with Leighton Smith and John Pagani.

Thu, Nov 3 10.00 trn-newstalk-zb-akl-Pagani-Slater by whaleoil

I’m on Leighton Smith’s NewstalkZB show this morning from 10:35 along with John Pagani talking about election issues.

We will be on each Thursday until the election and then a wrap up the Monday after the election.

Warming: Vanity post

I was on NewstalkZB this morning with Leighton Smith chatting about Labour’s poll disaster. the rise of the Greens and capital gains tax.

Mon, Jul 18 Newstalkzb Whaleoil-Leighton Smith by whaleoil

Wallace Chapman nails the whole Paul Henry issue in a very good post on the back Benches Website.

Now before all you pinko bleaters get all angry about his post, think that Wallace is actually a kaiviti, from Fiji, like me.

On my Facebook page I have only one quote. There will always be just this one quote. For me it is the ‘Rosetta stone’ of thinking, the golden crucible of thought that dates back to 18th Century Enlightenment thinking. It is the DNA of a free society. And it’s a quote that I’ve lived my life according to, since I was in my early 20′s. It is penned by the one of the most quoted people, not just in our time, but in any time  – alongside Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible. The quote is by U.S. academic Noam Avram Chomsky, and here it goes:

“If freedom of speech doesn’t apply to those that we despise, than the term has no meaning at all.”

Freedom of speech means hate-speech, love-speech, speeches we adore and speeches that fill us with contempt. It applies to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rants at the UN, as much as it applies to Bill O Reilly’s violent outbursts on Fox TV (The Dixie Chicks need to shut up and be slapped around). As Chomsky points out, even Himmler and Goebbels in Nazi Germany were in favour of “free speech”. As long as you agreed with them. Stalin was in favour of free speech that was inoffensive to the State.

Wallace is right on the money. It is a pity the left wing don’t believe in free speech like their hero Noam Chomsky.

Interestingly, Chomsky himself has been at the brunt end of much sustained verbal abuse and vicious personal attacks and open slander. And yet he has never, over 50 years, sued for libel, preferring to write letters in an open forum, refuting and rebutting the attacks. The Jewish-American professor even defended the right of a neo-Nazi to stand up in a community hall in Battersea and say his piece while the rest of the crowd booed.

The United States, according to Chomsky, has set an extremely high bar in regards to freedom of speech since the 1960′s. Violent acts are not protected, but the Supreme Court has even upheld the principle of freedom of speech for Ku Klux Klan members.  In a revealing paragraph Chomsky states:

“In the US, freedom of speech is protected to an extent that I think is unheard of in any other country. This is quite a recent change. Since the 1960s the Supreme Court has set very high standards for freedom of speech, in keeping with a basic principle established by the 18th century Enlightenment. The court upholds the principle of free speech, the only limitation being participation in a criminal act. If I walk into a shop to commit a robbery with an accomplice holding a gun and I say “Shoot”, my words are not protected by the constitution. Otherwise there has to be a really serious motive to call into question freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has even upheld this principle for the benefit of members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

And this is exactly where we are at with Paul Henry, there was no criminal act and yet he has been effectively sacked for little more than having thoughts that differ from a vocal rabid mob out to get him.

I thought about all this in light of Paul Henry’s general broadcasting style. Personally I don’t find Henry funny but I don’t hate it. I just don’t give enough of a shit to turn on morning television so I never watch. But doing live unedited television and making it entertaining is an absolute skill, which is why all the fill-ins have come up short. And Paul Henry is a star at it. It’s a fairly predictable show often with a dog whistle to bullies, but it can also be funny in the way that ‘Beavis and Butthead’ can be funny. Or in the way that someone will fart in a lecture and everyone will split their sides. But more often I grimace and pretend to crack up when a friend tells me about a little Breakfast moment. The ‘retard’ routine wasn’t funny, nor the fake fan email at the awards, nor the moustache routine. The Dikshit name-calling was so unfunny I just felt sad. I felt sad for him, sad for me watching it, and sad for the huge community of Indian and Fiji-Indians in our country.

Do I defend the right to say what comes out of Paul Henry’s mouth? Do I defend the ugly humourless little tirades of Michael Laws? Do I defend the right for David Garrett to suggest, with a straight face, the sterilisation of women on the DPB? Do I defend what comes out of Lindsay Perigo’s mouth or Leighton Smith’s mouth or Hone Harawira’s mouth? Absolutely. As vigorously as I’ll defend the right to say what comes out of mine.

The principle of free speech is very simple: we either defend opinions that we find hateful, or we do not defend them at all. Public broadcasting or private.

Wallace Chapman has provided us with the most significant commentary on the whole sad sorry Paul Henry affair so far. He clearly says he doesn’t like what paul Henry said, yet he clearly says that Paul Henry had the right to say it.

Our country is poorer for the way Paul Henry has been effectively sacked from television by a bunch of rowdies being offended on someone else’s behalf.

“It’s difficult to educate them [fleeing drivers] because, frankly, they’re … utter morons, and they leave this utter devastation in their wake.”

A-Frame for punishment in Malaysia

Judith Collins is right on the money. Of course there will be the hand-wringers out there saying that we should show compassion but frankly it is compassion in our society that has got us into the parlous law and order state we have.

We simply have had politicians and others in society too scared to call things as they are. At least with Judith Collins you get the unadulterated truth no matter how un-palatable that may seem to the listener, it is still the truth.

Leighton Smith was so angered by the state of affairs on Friday that he was making the case for a benevolent dictatorship, at least them he said, you could pass laws like making it mandatory 10 years in prison and 6 strokes of the rotan for fleeing police in a vehicle.

Frankly the time for social liberalism when it comes to crime is over, there has been plenty enough time to see that the experiment hasn’t worked. We need to go back to basics. Simple things like removing sentence concurrency and changing maximum sentences into minimum sentences and removing judicial leeway when when it comes to sentencing.

We should no longer have to read about a judge expressing his opinion that offending “was at the light end of the scale”. There isn’t a scale, there should be offending or not offending, then if guilty of offending a stipulated punishment.

The hand-wringers of course will say that is too brutal, but then i would point them to the strewn corpses of their victims and ask if that is not brutal too? Brutal crimes deserve brutal punishment.

I think it is time for me to explain why I blog. I do it for fun. It sure as hell isn’t for any money.

When I a kid I would watch the news and spend my time wondering why repeaters didn’t ask the hard questions. Back in those days to engage in politics was to belong to a party, join a committee, go to meetings. The internet changed that forever, much to the chagrin of professional spinners who now have to contend with people like me who have a lifetime of political experience, are opinionated and have a rude and loud voice.

I don’t care if people don’t like the blog, it matter not a jot. I also don’t care if they don’t like me, trust me the feeling is probably mutual, and highly likely as there are very few people I genuinely like. Those who know me, know which category they are in, and yes there are some pinkos, deluded though they are, that I like and enjoy discourse with. Would I drink with them….maybe just one, would we be friends, i doubt it.

Which then comes to haters. These are the people who demonise a person because of their politics. They don’t argue the point or consider the debate. They are the ones who send me emails or post suggestions like get a job, lose weight you fat bastard or other similarly sand-pit type insults. Occasionally I post them so people can see just exactly what I have to put up with. The insults about depression or my business failure don’t hurt either, i have never hidden them and have always maintained an open book about my failings.

Speaking of failings, there is my academic record, Just in case my old English teacher reads this, which I doubt as he was the head of PPTA branch at my school, he once wrote on my report “A splendid exam result, achieved with little obvious effort”, which was his pinko, soft cock, back-handed way of saying I was a lazy student. I on the other hand took this as a compliment, that despite his monotonously boring teaching style and complete lack of enthusiasm for the subject I still managed to beat the next best student by 20 per cent and score 95% which necessitated scaling me down and him up so he could beat me. Both the other guy and I knew I was better at English but the fool ass teacher had to be right just that once. The problem was at school and later when I attended university to eat my lunch was that I prefer to do than read in order to learn. So according to academia I am a failure.

My schooling is, to quote Blackadder, “…a degree from the University of Life, a diploma from the school of hard knocks, and 3 gold stars from the kindergarten of getting the shit kicked out of me”.

So how do you, in this case I, handle haters. Well, Mashable had a post about exactly this. I will adapt it for me.

1. It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.

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Ferriss explains. “The 10 million that don’t get it don’t matter.” This is the point that Barry “Blue Pill” Soper misses when he attacks bloggers like he did on Leighton Smith’s programme today. He is the epitome of the 10 million who don’t get it. He thinks that the MSM are powerful because “people drive past the corner dairy and see the headline and then go in and buy the paper”. The logic of that statement today is laughable. The longer the MSM has this mentality the better bloggers will be able to infiltrate the news with stories. It isn’t about how many people who read blogs, it is about WHO reads them.

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2. 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it.

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Being a child brought up in a political household I learned this lesson very early on. I was attacked, punched, kicked, annoyed, spat on insulted by teachers just because my father held a prominent position in the National party. It hardened my attitude to unionists, it solidified my belief in individual responsibility and gave me a shield to brush off criticism. I know that you can’t have everyone like you, nor do I care, and I don’t pretend that I can. Some of our politicians would do well to remember that you can’t win 100% of the vote, unless you live in a dictatorship.

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3. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.” (Colin Powell)

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I don’t want everyone to like me, lord no, I can’t think of anything worse. One of the reasons I will never stand for public office is my personal dislike for most of the people I would have to be nice to to get in to office int he first place. I don’t care that Bill English or Murray McCully don’t like me, I don’t much like them either. I care even less that Labour politicians loathe me. That is a feather in my cap that they actually have to acknowledge that they don’t like me, it means that I get to them, and it annoys them enough to comment on it. The best day blogging I have ever had was when The Mangrove whined to the Sunday News about me. As I said to the National party meddlers on the weekend, I’ll stop telling the truth when politicians stop lying.

I put hits on, I’m bloody good at it, and I will keep doing it. If the pollies and the crims and the corrupt don’t like it, then tough. There is no point in being second at anything and that means blogging. I don’t want anyone to ever say that they hit harder than me.

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4. “If you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.” (Scott Boras)

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This is what keeps me going. The more pinko apparatchiks in the backrooms of the media/political parties try to spike me and abuse me, and call me names, and comment about my credibility the more effective I think I am. In short I feed on criticism, it fires me to hit harder, hit smarter, and to take out the humps in my way.

I said to Kevin Taylor on the weekend that either he was going to be part of the solution or become part of the problem, either way I was coming through and he could stand in the headlights as I ran him down or side-step out of the way. He chose the headlines and I ran him down. Let that be a lesson to him and others, I drive a truck in the blogging world and I prefer over rather than round.

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5. “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” (Epictetus)

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“Another way to phrase this is through a more recent quote from Elbert Hubbard,” Ferriss says. “‘To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

This now appears to be the philosophy of the National Party. It isn’t a philosophy I subscribe to. It is the most major reason why I will focus on blogging and steer clear of party involvement from now on. I know enough about Peter Goodfellow to know that eventually I will be proved right and that is it as far as I am concerned. I no longer about the party organisation, if they was mediocrity, then so be it.

“Cato, who Seneca believed to be the perfect stoic, practiced this by wearing darker robes than was customary and by wearing no tunic. He expected to be ridiculed and he was, he did this to train himself to only be ashamed of those things that are truly worth being ashamed of. To do anything remotely interesting you need to train yourself to be effective at dealing with, responding to, even enjoying criticism… In fact, I would take the quote a step further and encourage people to actively pursue being thought foolish and stupid.”

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6. “Living well is the best revenge.” (George Herbert)

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“The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you,” Ferriss advises. “That, and [show] how much fun you’re having!” Ferriss goes on to say that the best revenge is letting haters continue to live with their own resentment and anger, which most of the time has nothing to do with you in particular.

I don’t get angry (much), and I definitely do get even (eventually) — But I do try focus on living well and that will eat at the hater much more than anything I can do. Every time I appear on TV or give an interview on radio, I know it burns the pinkos in their belly.

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7. Keep calm and carry on.

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The slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” was originally produced by the British government during the Second World War as a propaganda message to comfort people in the face of Nazi invasion.

Calm is something I do well under pressure. As my company was systematically raped and pillaged by my business partner, as I had to contend with him listening in on phone calls, double dealing behind my back, I maintained a calm exterior and maneuvered myself to the position of leaving with my dignity intact and him bankrupt.

The cost to me was physical and mental, but calm did prevail. Once I get through any initial anger to any issue, I always get into a cold calm and resolve and start to carry on and plan for my revenge. When I go quiet my enemies should fear me. Fidelity Life should be very, very afraid. I have never forgotten what they did to me, and I never will. A cold fury now drives me to destroy as much wealth of theirs in the same proportion to the wealth of my family that they destroyed. But it is with calmness now that I pursue them. They will pay, even if it takes me 50 years.

Listen to this and wonder why our media aren’t running with this story yet.

Author Ian Wishart talks with Newstalk ZB host Leighton Smith about climate change.

ALL members of parliament need to listen to this interview with Ian Wishart about the hacking of the CRU global warmers emails. The hacking leaking is true and the emails are true. Ian Wishart phoned Prof. Phil Jones Director of the CRU and he confirmed that the hacked leaked emails are true.

Lies about Climate Change have been told by those who believe in anthropogenic global warming. What does NZ do now? The ETS must not be rushed through parliament.

The truth about why Climate Change is happening now has to be thoroughly, and scientifically, researched. The peer-reviewed liars have been caught. If they have told one lie how many others? What is the truth?

The ETS should be parked and the science verified, at a very minimum, how ever long that takes. There is no rush, if necessary abolish the existing ETC legislation that is due to come into force in January, but end this farce now.

The one thing we can say for sure now is that the science is most definitely NOT settled, it is probably made up, misconstrued or doctored but it isn’t settled.

Copeland and Lewis to lead pan-Christian party – Richard Lewis and Gordon Copeland have announced they will be co-leaders of a new Christian-based political party following a disorganised set of press conferences today.
Lewis, formerly the leader of Destiny Church's political… [NZ Politics]

Hopefully Copeland can get these guys to 5%, Otherwise a complete waste of time.