Amanda is being flown up to Wanganui in the next hour. I will drive up – about three hours – and be there tonight.
Posting will resume tomorrow.
Run the race. Keep the faith.
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Staff at the Intensive Care Unit in Wellington told us this morning that Amanda is to be transferred today to the ICU in Wanganui.
It is clear she is going to require a long period of support to heal, and perhaps permanent care, depending on the extent of spinal injuries and brain damage.
For most of her life, she has been a bright, beautiful, insightful, creative and caring young woman. Somehow twelve years ago her mind took a wrong turn, and she has just never been able to get back. During that time she has persistently self-harmed, and made three major suicide attempts, culminating in this most recent, when she threw herself off the top of a four storey building.
She desperately needs family near. I am the only possibility, and I will stay with her as long as I can. But I cannot stay for more than another few days without income. I have a computer repair shop in Australia. It is only a few months old, and although business was building, it cost a great deal to set up and income is still limited. Unless I am there working it costs me about $400 per week.
If I return to Australia to work for a few weeks Amanda will have no support from family for the coming three or four crucial weeks. She needs this.
I need about $2500 to cover immediate costs, and about $25,000 over the next six weeks to stay with her, and to help her get well enough to move her to Australia where I hope I can care for her and run my shop at the same time.
Can you help?
I have Muslim friends, but am convinced that while there are reasonable and moderate Muslims, there is not and cannot be a reasonable and moderate Islam.
For Muslims, Mohammed is the perfect example of a life well lived. You canot criticise the prophet publicly without risking death. Yet Mohammed, as I have noted before, had sex with a nine year old girl, tortured his enemies, and was a mass murderer who in between killing Arabs who disagreed with him, decapitated several hundred Jews.
Unless Muslims are willing to repudiate Mohammed’s example, and that would mean disowning the prophet – impossible! – an Islam which claims both to follow his example and to be moderate will simply be an impossibility.
Some interesting comments here about the film Islam: What the West Needs to Know.
By the time the twenty-three year old Charles Darwin reached New Zealand he had definitely had enough.
Despite its natural beauty and fascinating birds and insects, Darwin wrote of the Maori people:
“Their persons and houses are filthily dirty and offensive. I should think that a more war-like race of people could not be found in any part of the world than the New Zealanders. We were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place”.
In fact the Maori are a brave and noble people who had complex agriculture and buildings, and were frequently far more generous with European settlers than the settlers deserved.
Via Kathy Shaidle, this story from the Toronto Sun.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission has time to investigate and comment on stories published in national magazines over which it has no jurisdiction. It has time to condemn writers like Mark Steyn because their criticisms of radical Islam makes them Islamophobic (whatever that means – being critical of something doesn’t mean you are irrationally afraid of it).
But investigate and comment on honour killings in a state where they do have jurisdiction and could make a difference?
Sorry, too busy. From the Sun article:
It was her response to Steyn’s criticism of OHRC’s silence on honour killings that shocked me.
“There are thousands of things that happen in the province of Ontario on a daily basis and we don’t comment on all of them,” she said.
But, I spluttered, women are being murdered.
“As I said, we are a small commission.
“There are many problematic things that happen in our community and we have to make choices because we can’t respond to everything,” Hall said.
So honour killings are merely “problematic”?
Hmm…
The people who lit the fires are immediately responsible. But a measure of responsibility also lies with environmental activists who pressured local councils and other governement agencies to reduce or disallow prescribed (that is controlled protective) burning and other clearing of highly flammable scrub from residential areas.
‘The green movement is directly responsible for the severity of these fires through their opposition to prescribed burning,’ said David Packham, former supervising meteorologist for fire weather nationwide at the Bureau of Meteorology.
At a community meeting in Victoria yesterday, Warwick Spooner, whose mother and brother were killed in the fires, told council members ‘We’ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads won’t cut trees down.’
Meanwhile, another family who disobeyed government regulations, cleared bush from around their home, and were fined $50,000 for doing so, said that their home and lives were saved because of the action they had taken – action which is simply reponsible in high fire risk areas.
The argument is that clearing of bush around residential areas reduces bio-diversity and increases the risk of extinctions of native animals through loss of habitat. This is nonsense. The areas cleared in prescribed burning are very small – just enough to prevent fires jumping to buildings. The real risk to native wildlife is massive uncontrolled fires like those which have just occurred.
Via Dissecting Leftism, this article from The American Spectator, saying what I have been saying for the last several weeks. See here and here, for example, that the proposed US economic stimulus package will not and can not work, because it is based on a toxic combination of wishful thinking and economic theory known to have no relationship to anything that happens in the real world.
Please somebody stop this package. It will deepen and prolong the recession. This will be painful for the US. But because the US is the economic lead dog, and what happens there is maginified in its effects on smaller economies, the effect on smaller, more vulnerable economies will be devastating.
Common sense from Qando:
It’s pretty silly to think you can solve a problem created by too much borrowing and spending by doing a lot more borrowing and spending.
If everyone followed that logic in everyday life, imagine the results:
“Gosh, I’m forty pounds overweight now. I better start eating more.”
“Honey, you’re getting too many speeding tickets.” “Well, then, I better start driving faster.”
“That girl says I irritate her, but I really like her. I guess I should start being more obnoxious.”
“Oh, dear, the roof is leaking again. I better make the hole bigger.”
Amanda has been a lot more responsive yesterday and today, and was able to mouth the word ‘Wellington’ when I asked her if she knew where she was.
So co-ordination is returning, and higher brain function is OK, though it is still too early to tell how OK.
We are hoping she will be able to breathe independently by tomorrow. She will then be transferred to an orthopedic ward, and from there, we hope, to Auckland.
We won the battle with ICU staff over her psych medication after her own psychiatrist intervened. So things are looking more hopeful now than they have since her accident.
As if it wasn’t obvious. This article is a year old, but still gives a good summary of why you be crazy to buy a Mac.
Macs are fine for children and public servants, but in the real world they just don’t cut it.
Via Andrew Bolt, this story of the banning of Geert Wilders from Britain.
‘It seems that in Britain the public debate has already been smothered to the extent that a democratically elected politician from another EU country is not allowed to come to Britain to adress a private meeting with British politicians in the Palace of Westminster.’
Wilders is not a violent man, and has never even remotely encouraged violence.
He is sometimes over the top (see my earlier post) but many of his criticisms of the Koran, Mohammed and violent Islamism are right on target. This is probably exactly what makes his views so offensive to some.
No one expects Geert to do anything wrong. The fear is that his presence will cause violent protests, and possibly attempts to kidnap or kill him.
When you are faced with a violent rabble, it is much easier to blame and restrain the victim than the mob. And this strengthens the mob by reinforcing that threats of violence are an effective way to get what they want, including the stifling of debate.
But this could be better. An app to enable you to read e-books on your smartphone.
The positives are that if you have a smartphone you don’t need another device – saving space in your pocket as well as money.
Not quite as many launch titles as the Kindle, but the list still looks pretty good. It doesn’t have some of the advanced features of the Kindle, and obviously the screen is smaller – but that’s the trade-off for the fact that a smartphone fits easily in your pocket.
This may the motivating factor to move up to a PDA type phone. I will watch the titles list with interest.
For an idiotic comparison of the division between Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas, who spend their spare time killing one another, stealing aid (largely given by Israel) and plotting against the ‘Zionist entity’, and different parties in Israeli politics, whose members are often personal friends despite their political differences, and whose differences are talked over in a civilised way in a fully democratic society.
‘Israeli Divisions’ are not what is making peace-making harder, but Hamas’ determination, repeatedly expressed in both words and actions, to kill Jews and destroy Israel.
Even though Victoria has cooled a little, there are still about twenty fires still out of control.
A fifth of the residents of the town of Maryville may be dead. Many bodies are still in burnt homes. Many of the fires are thought to have been deliberately lit. That means some of those homes are crime scenes. Investigations will take time, which adds to the pain for families.
But the investigations have to be done. Lighting fires in the Australian bush when there are high fuel loads and hot windy conditions is something any rational person would know is likely to cause widespread destruction and or death. The people who did these terrible things must not be allowed to get away with them.
I can understand this guy being annoyed: along the trails through his property used by illegal immigrants are piles of litter including human faeces, diapers, chewing gum and drug wrappers. Immigrants have destroyed fences, killed cattle, and stolen property.
Over the last ten years he has handed over 12,000 illegal immigrants to authorities. That’s 1200 per year, over three every day, and that’s just the ones he’s caught. He put a tap (faucet) in a tank so that trespassers could access water without damaging his property. None have been injured while in his care. Now he’s being sued because some of them felt threatened.
I can’t help wondering how the lawyers behind this litigation would feel if a constant stream of trespassers wandered through their home, leaving filth and litter behind them, destroying property as they went.
I think the guy is a hero.
And don’t let the truth get in the way.
Via Michelle Malkin, this story of Ashley Judd’s appearance in a Widlife Action Fund video, complaining about the culling of wolves in Alaska.
The video portrays Sarah Palin as bloodthirsty and unconcerned about the environment. But this is exactly the opposite of the truth. The culling operation is designed to protect other widlife such as moose and caribou in areas where there are high wolf populations.
Qohel Blog Author Peter Wales
