Thursday, 21 November 2024

THE HIKOI BOLLOCKS

I have deliberately not done any posts about the hikoi bollocks in New Zealand, but I will just do one post to make my opinion clear - Winston Peters, despite his dubious history, is one of the only politicians in NZ with the balls to say what many of us are thinking:

 
"The hikoi wasn’t grassroots – it was a Māori Party astroturf.
What most in the mainstream media are not reporting is that the organiser of the hikoi is the son of the current sitting Māori Party MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, is employed by the Māori Party, and stood as a candidate for the Māori Party.
The company that fundraised and coordinated the hikoi called “Toitu Te Tiriti” was incorporated in September by the wife of Rawiri Waititi and the daughter of the Māori Party president John Tamahere.
Driving and flying to parliament in their Car-koi was nothing but a recruitment and fundraising tool for the Māori Party – and the Labour Party ignorantly joined in.
The Māori Party just used and manipulated thousands of Māori yesterday for their own pointless political stunt. They staged a protest against a piece of legislation that they already knew is not going to pass into law.
The faux outrage is obvious for all who see it for what it was. Their aim was to gather anyone and everyone no matter what their cause - including patched gang members.
It’s the same reason they conducted a sham haka in the House last week. It was a disgraceful pre-planned and coordinated stunt that served only to intimidate and undermine the running of the House and grab as many headlines as they could.
They are a bunch of extremists and middle New Zealand has had enough.
New Zealand is a democracy whether the Māori Party like it or not. And using ‘Māori culture’ as an excuse for their disgraceful behaviour is an insult to Māoridom.
No ordinary kiwi, Māori or non-Māori, should accept the behaviour and intent of this Party of Extremists.
They don’t want democracy, they want anarchy.
They don’t want one country, one people, one law - they want separatism, division, and laws based on race. They state it specifically.
And the Labour Party have fallen over themselves to try and join them in their race to the bottom.
There are some more conservative Labour MPs who know they are coming close to a point of no return.
Their Party has already left middle New Zealand a long time ago, and their Party is going to leave them hanging in the wind soon too.
They must wake up at night in cold sweats thinking about how much Labour is now fighting for the space on the woke far-left instead of fighting for middle New Zealand.
Since 1867 Māori have been elected to Parliament with just four winning a general seat until the introduction of MMP when we saw the exponential growth of the number of Māori MPs.
Right now, we have the record number of Māori in Cabinet of any government - more than all the Māori Party MPs combined.
All the Party of Extremists want to do is act with utter contempt and ignorance at the progress that has been accomplished.
They are trying to tear that all down for their own ignorant misguided political gain.
They are trying to tear down our country along with them.
We are not going to concede or yield to these separatists, these people who spew an anthem of hate against other people.
We will not be bullied by these cultural elitist extremists."


 

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

DO DRUGS GO WITH THAT BICYCLE?

BACK IN THE 90’S WE WERE A BIT MORE HARDCORE

When a friend said she remembered Cuba Street, Wellington as being “bohemian” in 97, and I laughed and said that by 97 it had already become a safe space for office dwellers to visit and pretend they were living dangerously.

And then I dug out my “Cuba Street 92” calendar from my treasure trove – all of these photos are from that and were taken in 91. When we opened our bike shop “Cycle Services” in 1991, Cuba Street was not just where you went for a grunty coffee or some second hand stuff, it was also the first place to go to for drugs and prostitutes.

Now I’ll go on about drugs a bit here. I was new to all this scene, and to me “drugs” basically meant smoking some pot or maybe spotting some oil.

As a cyclist I was pretty familiar with ephedrine which was actually still legal in NZ in 91 and was very popular, used as a sort of everyday speed. When it was outlawed it just went underground like all the other drugs.

Most people use coffee for the same purpose now. And coffee in Cuba St was said to be some of the strongest in the world.

The first time I walked in on a drug deal my eyes nearly popped out of my head. A respectable looking man in a suit with a large brief case had it open and was discussing bulk pricing with a couple of our bike shop customers on the huge range of drugs that he had samples of.

Apart from pot, the popular one in Wellington in those days was acid. But you could buy anything you wanted really, including heroin. I was told the cocaine was a rip off in NZ, and that was why nobody here was much into it.

What Wellington was infamous for in 91 was glue sniffers. And sometimes Cuba St was like zombie dawn of the dead. Bloody glue sniffers everywhere, staggering about, holding their plastic bags and drooling.

Some of the people on the street were fairly tough, and just up the road was the BP’s (Black Power) who ran a tinny house ($20 foil wrapped servings of pretty average pot). But you didn’t take photos of the BP’s, you casually crossed the road when you saw them coming, so there are no photos of them here!

This was in the days before digital cameras, and mobile phones had only just come out. They cost $3000 and were the size of a brick. This next photo was taken in front of the second hand book shop next door to us (note our Cycles Peloton sign in the top left). And the poor guy in the photo was stabbed to death a few months later…

Our neighbours on the other side were Midnight Espresso, the legendary coffee shop, and this is a young Geoff Marsland (Havana Coffee Works) in our doorway

Although I did have a camera, I didn’t take many photos because buying film and developing it was expensive. Part of why I started taking thousands of photos when I got my first digital camera a decade later is because I knew just what I had missed getting photos of back in the early 90’s. And some of them would have been quite something.

I guess this is all looks like a window back to an old forgotten time now, but as a young and impressionable goober, this was the environment that shaped me. And even now I’m partly still a guy from old time Cuba St, rather than an over the hill computer addict.

When I hear millennials getting offended by lame bullshit I wish I could push a button and transplant them to Cuba Street in 91. It was an amazing place, but some of them might just have gotten their whingeing faggy heads smacked in…

Those were awesome times back in the days before computers.

And getting “offended” wasn’t that viable an option

All photos taken by Barry Thomas

Monday, 18 November 2024

WAS DAVID BOWIE AN INVERT?

I don't think David Bowie was actually an invert. "He" was definitely a psyop, creating gender confusion, and I also think "he" is still alive but his gender is hard to pick.
 
 
Check out this photo of David Bowie with Dutch transgender actor Romy Haag in Paris in 1976, if you ignore the initial first impression and transvestigate this photo - Adam's apple, big hands, jawline, brow ridge, skull size - they both look quite similar.


 

Saturday, 16 November 2024

TIME TRAVEL

 If you could time travel which year would you choose to live in? We can’t impartially assess this present time (2024), but it all feels like a massive psyop to me – I wouldn’t rather live in 1914, but I sometimes think I’d rather live in 1994. Yet we have no benefit of hindsight, & things may yet turn out OK.

Friday, 15 November 2024

COURTNEY PLACE WELLINGTON

 Three historic photos of Courtney Place Wellington NZ

 Courtney Place circa 1915
 
 
Courtney Place 1958


 
Courtney Place 1980

Thursday, 14 November 2024

THE MARTIAN ANAL DIVISION

In times gone by, we used to read fiction to explore imaginary realities. Now we live in a reality so bizarre even Philip K Dick probably would have needed to up his drug intake to deal with it...

I once read a short story by Philip K Dick. It was called “The Martian Anal Division”, and it was about a parallel version of our world in which everything was run by and for the benefit of small but cunning Martian invaders.

“They live in tiny spaceships which they insert into their subjects anal passages. From deep within human anuses they emit their instructions, which their followers hear as a voice in their anus telling them what to do. These people are known as the Martian Anal Division (MAD).

One of the key symptoms of people who are controlled by Martians up their arses is that they not only want to do what the Martians tell them to, but that they also want to force everyone else to do it as well. They often revert to the phrase “for the greater good”, and want to bring in “laws” in the hope that they can force other people to “conform” to the wishes of the voices in their arses.

In an attempt to get a better handle on controlling the non-MAD population, they introduce social engineering such as water fluoridation (make the population sick and obedient), vaccinations (make them sick and infertile), fear of “terrorism” (submit to more laws and surveillance), fear of viruses, fear of various “global apocalypses” (submit to more restrictions and taxes), and wars (the ultimate control system)

They also direct everyone with an anal implant to watch more TV, where they can obsess over misinformation called “news”, listen to angry black men making guttural rhyming noises about hoes, yos, and bros, become jealous over the size of the breast implants of women who sing the things that the voices in their arses are saying, and enjoy watching stocky men in tight shorts battling each other over leather balls.

Luckily, for all their cunning, the Martians have some serious flaws in their evil plan. When they insert their micro spacecraft into their victim’s anal passages, it tends to block their elimination of waste matter. So their victims slowly fill up with shit.

Already pressurized to bursting point, when they are confronted by people who refuse to conform, they start to turn purple and run around in circles making squawking noises like a chicken having an epileptic fit. Sometimes the backed up gasses start to escape from their arse like a loud rumbling fart, while sometimes they just blow up like an American false flag terrorists bomb”



Wednesday, 13 November 2024

I'VE ADDED AN ABOUT PAGE TO THIS BLOG

 And it even includes a contact email!

ABOUT

 Using the internet while displaying any sort of real identity online is a bit like walking down the street stark naked. I'd rather be completely anon, but I've been online for more than a quarter of a century and have revealed more than I can ever really take back now. But that is not to say I have to make things easy for "them" (the "government", or the deep state, or spammers, or stalkers) to track me down.

Until last week this blog has never had any sort of contact details on it, and I was going to leave it that way. But one of the other blogs I follow had added a link to my old www.frot.co.nz blog, which didn't work because of a typo. Being a bit of a completionist I wanted to let them know, but it was difficult to find a contact email on their blog. Eventually I did find a contact and emailed them.

Engagement used to be a big part of blogging, and back when I was posting on blockchains like Steemit, Hive (PeakD), Blurt, Flote, and Bastyon, I used to sometimes get hundreds of comments and I tried to reply to most of them.  These days I have all comments turned off and pretty much just ignore everyone. But the experience of trying to find a contact email on someone elses's blog made me grudgingly admit that it might be a good thing to include a one on this blog.

I've had a lot of problems with spam in the past so don't want to include an actual link, but I figure if I just put an image of an email address that comes to me (but not my daily driver) that should do the job. So here it is - just type out the address in this image:

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

A GOOD BLENDER

 A good blender can do wonders for your health, with a daily smoothie being transformative!

Monday, 11 November 2024

SESSION vs SIGNAL

 
Signal is a popular messaging app that is widely regarded as being private, and compared to Messenger it is, but the big issue, the main reason it can never really be a privacy app, is that it requires a phone number to set up an account.
 
An alternative to Signal is Session, which is in many ways very similar to Signal, in fact it nearly looks identical because it's an open source hard fork based on the Signal code. But the big difference is that it doesn't require a phone number, so a Session account can actually be anonymous.
 
Session is not as popular as Signal yet because it's fairly new and not many people have heard of it. But it's easier to set up an account on Session than it is on Signal.  It doesn't require a phone number, and it doesn't ask anything about you. 
 
A new account can be rapidly set up not just on a phone, but also using a Laptop, a PC, or a tablet, running Windows, Android, Mac, or Linux operating systems.

To install it you can get it from any of the app stores, but better yet go directly to the Session website. This is preferable because by not logging into an app store you remain anonymous - https://getsession.org/
 
Initially Session had several drawbacks, but these have now been addressed.
 
It previously had a size limit of 10 on encrypted groups, but that has now been increased to 100 which is hopefully enough for most groups. 
 
It was originally set up in Australia which is considered a major security risk (as is NZ) but they have now moved to Switzerland - https://getsession.org/blog/introducing-the-session-technology-foundation 
 
And Session also had a reputation for being buggy in 2023 when it was new, but it seems to have really improved in the past six months. I have had no problems with it so far, and in fact have found it works better for me than Signal, because I can be logged in with multiple Android devices with no account conflicts. 
 
The only issue I've had is that it won't install on Windows 7, which is only an issue for around 3% of desktop users these days, and I was expecting that to be the case anyway because it's based on Signal and Signal won't install on Win 7 either. But I've found it works really well on both Linux and Android.

 
YOUR ACCOUNT ID
 
There is really only one new thing to keep in mind when using Session - because unlike Signal it is not using your phone number or the phone numbers of your contacts, to set up the initial link you have to exchange your account ID for the first contact. This is the minor inconvenience that allows the whole platform to be totally private.
 
The account ID is a 72 character code that will look similar to this one (this is not an actual code but just an example):
  06b2451d1bc973a57021bf76f353306c7sfc7ec891eb29ef4997bd82473300e00b
 
Your account ID is not high security and it's OK to give that out to everyone you want to contact. You also get a recovery code which is a random generated series of 13 words, and that on the other hand needs to be kept private. Keep that code secure and don't share it with anyone.


 
Who is behind Session?

Session is part of the Loki Foundation, a non-profit organization without a permanent seat. The CEO is Simon Harman. Even though the project is not profit-oriented, he wants to monetize Session. Parts of the infrastructure are based on a block-chain network that mines its own currency, $LOKI.

The network provides important infrastructure for anonymizing its users, including an onion router to hide your IP address. Neither your counterpart nor the Loki Foundation can determine your location.

So if a state were to obtain a court order to inspect the session servers, investigators would find nothing but meaningless session IDs and TOR-IP addresses. None of this information would allow us to draw clear conclusions about the identity of the messenger app's users.


Privacy features of Session

    Users can generate a Session ID with a private key to start an account
    Session doesn’t require phone numbers.
 
    The chat platform doesn’t collect any data, and therefore a data breach is impossible.
 
    Messages go through an onion routing network, removing traceability.
    Session is an open-source program, so you can verify everything.
 
    It’s censorship resistant thanks to its decentralized network, therefore also harder to shut down
 
REVIEWS
 
Here is a good review of Session on the Restore Privacy website. It answers a lot of questions, but keep in mind that it was written in April 2024, and  the concerns about Australian privacy are no longer an issue - https://restoreprivacy.com/secure-encrypted-messaging-apps/session/
 

 
I have found Rob Braxman's Youtube channel really helpful for learning about privacy. Here is his video about Session, which he recommends highly.