‘There appears to be a growing undercurrent of disillusionment with New Zealand’s system of representative democracy. Some are saying our elected members of parliament are turning their backs on voters who put them into office. Instead of representing the public’s views, they are displaying an appalling arrogance by belittling those who dare to voice a contrary opinion.

Unfortunately, this arrogant disregard of the public view is becoming all too common. The ban on smacking, Labour’s passing of the Electoral Finance Act to stop anti-government campaigning in the lead up to the 2008 general election, and National’s introduction of the unpopular, unaffordable and pointless emissions trading scheme were all were enacted against the wishes of the wider public. And now it’s happening with the Marine and Coastal Area Bill. Submissions and polls show the public are overwhelmingly opposed to the new law, but through a shabby deal, National, the Maori Party and Peter Dunne appear determined to force it through.

That National wants to pass this racist bill in spite of the Prime Minister’s promise that he would not change the law if the public were opposed, is an affront to democracy. It represents an intolerable abuse of the parliamentary process and demonstrates that when a government goes off the rails, our democratic system is completely lacking in checks and balances to protect the public interest…’
The rest HERE. And it’s a sane voice that’s desperately needed in NZ politics today.

Since America, Britain and France have gone to war on behalf of the UN against the Libyan dictator, a few questions seem to be in order.
If Libya then why not China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, Saudi Arabia, to name a few? And if Libya, then at some future date will the UN decide that a particular faction in France or Britain or America deserves the same level of support?
Russian and Chinese warplanes taking out government forces in those countries–at the behest of the UN–would, after all, be merely following the precedent set by Western leaders….
In other words, foreign policy and sovereignty is being subordinated to the UN and the West is already at that point which the “progressives” desire–an unelected (largely Marxist) body has effectively been handed the means to impose a world government on people who have had no say whatsoever in the matter. Handed that power by our own politicians.
A few more questions:
How many UN agreements, treaties, protocols and so forth are the Australian people subject to?
What are they?
How many of those did Australians get to vote on before being bound by them?

see: ‘Impeach Obama For Sending The US to War Without Congressional Approval’

‘A $10 million Department of Energy study from 1991 examined 10 years of epidemiological research by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on 700,000 shipyard workers, some of whom had been exposed to 10 times more radiation than the others from their work on the ships’ nuclear reactors. The workers exposed to excess radiation had a 24 percent lower death rate and a 25 percent lower cancer mortality than the non-irradiated workers….
In 1983, a series of apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally constructed with massive amounts of cobalt 60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years, the buildings’ 10,000 occupants developed only five cases of cancer. The cancer rate for the same age group in the general Taiwanese population over that time period predicted 170 cancers.
The people in those buildings had been exposed to radiation nearly five times the maximum “safe” level according to the U.S. government. But they ended up with a cancer rate 96 percent lower than the general population.
Bernard L. Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, compared radon exposure and lung cancer rates in 1,729 counties covering 90 percent of the U.S. population. His study in the 1990s found far fewer cases of lung cancer in those counties with the highest amounts of radon—a correlation that could not be explained by smoking rates…’                      Andrew Bolt

Membership in the United Nations does not grant the Security Council the authority to order U.S. forces into action, and being the President does not permit Obama to violate the Constitution and the Law, to commit an act of war without the authorization of the People, through their Congress.

American Thinker

David Thompson on more of those academic…er…conference papers and lecture titles:
Binary Poetics and Ecology in Battlestar Galactica.
The Support Belt Fetish: An Example of Psychoanalysis.
Antagonistic Corpo-Real-ities.
Turtle Times: The Cross-Generational Cult Text of Turtles Forever and Gendered Readings.
The True History of His Beard: Joaquin Phoenix and the Boundaries of Cinéma Vérité.

Exemplarity – The Real: Some Problems of a Realist Exemplarity Exposed through the Channel of an Aesthetic Autopoeisis.

Alan Ball’s True Blood Antics: Queering the Southern Vampire…?

There ya go–now you know why these people are so superior to mere peasants such as engineers and research chemists and plumbers and oil rig workers. None of those would understand the titles, even! Better they just cough up the tax money and leave the real serious work to academia.

‘Donna Laframbois on the bizarre career of Sari Kovats, selected to be a lead author of the powerful Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so influential in persuading governments to slash emissions to “save” the world from global warming:
In 1994, Kovats was one of only 21 people in the entire world selected to work on the first IPCC chapter that examined how climate change might affect human health. She was 25 years old. Her first academic paper wouldn’t be published for another three years. It would be six years before she’d even begin her doctoral studies and 16 years before she’d graduate….’  Andrew Bolt

who says: “We’re told the IPCC is a serious and rigorous body. We’re told its reports are the gold-standard and that it is comprised of the world’s top experts. We’re told we should trust the IPCC’s conclusions because of these facts. And then we discover that a woman who still hadn’t earned her own doctorate was recruited by the IPCC to write guidelines for other authors…”
Apparently, that’s good enough for John Key’s “science advisor” and the the rest of his unprincipled gang. So when you’re paying more for fuel and food and just about everything else, Kiwis remember this: The ETS is simply an excuse for a new tax, the biggest con-job ever to be perpetrated against productive New Zealanders.

‘..Although Christmas Island is just south of Indonesia, and is only 300 miles away from Jakarta as the crow flies, it is actually part of Australia. In recent years the island has become the preferred destination for immigrants from South Asia and Africa who want to gain entry into Australia and take advantage of the country’s generous asylum laws.

A favorite technique, particularly among Afghans, is to send an unaccompanied minor child on one of the boats to Christmas Island. The culture enrichers know that the law requires the expedited processing of underage refugees. Once the kid is in, he can contact the rest of his family, who will then be brought in under the “family reunification” rules. Everyone — Dad, Mum 1, Mum 2, eleventy children, Grandma, Grandpa — can then expect to be fed and housed at the expense of the Australian taxpayer…..’         the rest is at Gates of Vienna

‘The abuse of science to assert certainty on contentious issues,  and to shut down important discussions, is an increasing problem in public debate.
Peter Hitchens

‘ Trawling through some US newspapers, I found this interesting reflection in an article in the Chicago Sun Times (22nd October 2005), by Dennis Constant( Director of the Illinois Taxpayer Education Foundation): ‘According to Michael Fumento, writing in Health Care News, in 2003 professors James Enstrom of UCLA and Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York reported in the British Medical Journal that their 39-year study of 35,561 Californians who had never smoked showed no causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality..

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‘Ten years on: never worked, on a pension, imported drugs, needs interpreter
Alkhafaji’s lawyer, Christopher Farrington, said he was a qualified hairdresser who arrived illegally in Australia 10 years ago as a refugee, but had never worked and survived on a disability support pension…’
Andrew Bolt

Ah, but he’s an exception, you see, the lefty multicultoids will tell you. An exception, along with rioting illegal immigrants in custody, along with the Lebanese muslim gang rapists and carjackers, along with the genital mutilations and the hate preachers of Lakemba mosque.
All exceptions.