Never thought I’d quote from this source except to express contempt and derision, but if he’s right about the bare facts of this, every Kiwi ought to be very concerned indeed:
‘Two weeks ago, I vented my spleen about a suppression order in a major upcoming criminal case of significant public interest. The suppression order has now been varied, so I am allowed to report on the outcome of the judgement: that the accused in the Urewera “terrorism” case will be denied a jury trial, and tried before a judge alone.
Yes, I’m serious. The defendants in a hugely controversial and political case will be tried by a judge, rather than a jury. No matter what you think of the case, this should be deeply troubling. Juries aren’t just a fundamental protection for the accused, the ultimate check on abuses of state power – they are also the primary signifier of a fair trial in this country…’

source

An ex-Soviet immigrant goes Socratic on his liberal American critics.

Continue reading →

Pascal is running a contest to come up with a better name than RINO for pseudo Republicans. Wabbit can think of a few more four-letter words…..

Thanks to Medusa for pointing us to this.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
– Richard Feynman

‘….The insidious metamorphosis of our nation into a collectivist state seems to go unnoticed and unremarked by the bulk of our younger population which appears to have been indoctrinated into its acceptance of and by a government “education” system controlled by a ruling elite primarily concerned with enjoying the perquisites of power.
The question arises: can the inexorably approaching collapse be averted? It is the view of this writer that the tipping point has already been passed and is apparent in the disregard by both ourselves and our rulers of the restraints placed upon government by the founders of the Republic. The interregnum following the collapse is likely to be bloody and tumultuous with a restoration of the status quo ante as regards liberty, unlikely. Western culture previously endured  nearly a millennium before an awakening and given the most optimistic outcome, those living today are unlikely to experience the next one. These are the views held by one who approaches threescore and fifteen years of observing the descent and he would be overjoyed to be proven overly pessimistic.’

Leonidas at Eternity Road.  Something to Ponder on Boxing Day

Whenever Wabbit opines that a hell of a lot of teenagers aren’t worth the O2 they consume, there’s somebody who responds that “kids are no different now, you’re just old and grumpy”. Well, just one of these incidents would have been headline news when I was a young man. Not any more. An awful lot of teenage males are out of control shitheads who’ve learned that it’s ok to behave like ferals because the consequences never fit the crime.

Sen. Tom Coburn says the U.S. could face 18 percent unemployment and a massive contraction in its economy that would destroy the middle class if it does not get its fiscal house in order — warning U.S must contract spending to avoid ‘apocalyptic pain.’     source

Too late. And too little. Hell, for the bunch of Marxists in this Administration, destroying the middle class is a feature, not a bug.

‘Soaring food prices and less cash to spend
Food is tipped to become up to 10 per cent more expensive than it was a year ago.
…..He believed next year would be even tougher than this year, as households were hit with extra costs from October’s rise in GST, increasing costs of fuel, higher ACC levies and taxes from the emissions trading scheme.’

Hasn’t the Key Gang done well? Hard on the heels of the damage done to NZ by the socialist scum before them, they’ve fixed stuff-all, addressed almost none of the crippling administrative burden carried by taxpayers and they’ve increased taxation. Way to go, you effing clowns!
UPDATE: The tireless National cheerleader Adolf disagrees. But carefully avoids the reality of higher GST and the costs of the ETS scam…

‘The green hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain

By far the biggest story of recent days, of course, has been the astonishing chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row. We all know the disaster stories – thousands of motorists trapped for hours on paralysed motorways, days of misery at Heathrow, rail passengers marooned in unheated carriages for up to 17 hours. But central to all this – as the cry goes up: “Why wasn’t Britain better prepared?” – has been the bizarre role of the Met Office.
……Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a “climate activist”, previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.’