and if you’re not concerned after reading it, you’re a hopeless optimist:
‘These are the good times, the summer of ’29, the last cotillion before the butcher’s bill arrives. With a debt-to-GDP ratio of 350% and zero return, look for the US bond market to be the first debacle, if the EU doesn’t self-destruct first. The real faceplant comes when the bulk of savers and investors understand their paper for the sinkhole it is. The rush for the exits will be unstoppable, finance will implode—days at most and perhaps in hours, and take the whole interdependent tangle with it, meaning bank accounts, retirement benefits, insurance, entitlements, credit scores, Paypal, Bitcoin, money market funds, corporate bonds, stock market shares—eviscerated like an October hog, their real value revealed at last….’              Woodpile Report

‘..When you see your homeland, which was what Greenacre was, turned into a minefield, or a battlefield, or a refuge of drug dealers, criminals, drive-by shooters and terror – you find yourself in a quandary. It’s all part and parcel of the greater good, of the New Australia, of the emergence of alternative cultures – it’s just a settling-in process.
…Soon Greenacre/Lakemba will be an enclave of little Lebanon, with all the worst features transported from a failed country to a new one, one still proud of its tolerance. I am told time and again that tolerance is not weakness. A bit like saying appeasement is not weakness. But I’m growing more sceptical…’
and:
‘We now give asylum to adulterers’
Update:  ‘A gang calling itself The United Brotherhood terrorised a number of Sydney residents with meat cleavers before hacking a man to death in his own home, a murder trial has been told.
Two victims of separate 2010 home invasions told the Supreme Court on Tuesday how they were threatened by armed men, with one victim describing how his arm was “hanging off” after he was slashed with a machete.
They were giving evidence in the trial of Mahdi Mir, 22, Mohammad Karimi, 25, and John Khoury, 32, who have pleaded not guilty to several crimes, including murdering Kesley Burgess…’

‘..Savages speak only one language: the language of deadly force. If you want to police the world, you have to be ready to use it, without hesitation and at the magnitude the situation demands. Failing that, stay home, guard the borders well, and let the wolves eat one another.’   The rest of it  (and much more fine reading besides)
Damn right–the only reason for Western countries to use military force should be to protect their interests. “Nation building” and enforcing “democracy” (something we could use ourselves) is an unconscionable burden on the taxpayer. And a dead-end. Civilization cannot be grafted on to third-world shit-holes that don’t want it, aren’t ready for it and which all too often embrace islam, an ideology adamantly opposed to civilized values.
Leave social work to social workers. It’s not worth one soldier’s life.

‘A man who has dedicated nearly 30 years to building and living off of his 500-acre farm is facing having his entire way of life shut down by the state government.
Eustace Conway, 51, who has been called ‘The Last Great American Man’ for his rustic way of living, could lose his camp in the Appalachian Mountains, his home for the past three decades.
The Watauga County Planning Department in North Carolina has found several health and sanitary violations in his encampment and has threatened to condemn the buildings…’

Boehner: I ‘Absolutely’ Trust Obama
Anybody who can say that–given Obama’s history and track record as President– is not fit to hold office.

Australia:   ‘THE carbon tax is contributing to a record number of firms going to the wall with thousands of employees being laid off and companies forced to close factories that have stood for generations.
Soaring energy bills caused by the Government’s climate change scheme have been called the “straw that broke the camel’s back” by company executives and corporate rescue doctors who are trying to save ailing firms…’
“There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead” Juliar (union bicycle) Gillard.

Time for a beer or two.

“Politicians working with complicit big banks need no rule of law; no parliament debates to close in on the bank accounts of average people.”
‘Get your money out of the banks.Due to an “emergency deal reached today in Brussels”, a one-time 9.9% tax is to be levied on Cypriot bank deposits of more than 100,000 euros effective Tuesday, March 19. Virtually overnight and with no warning of any kind, the emergency tax deal was imposed on the people of Cyprus without vote or debate. People ran to ATM machines today only to discover that the taxed amount of their cash had already been frozen…’
source

the story HERE

click for larger version (Time cover dated 1977)

UPDATE:  This just in, regarding NZ’s little drought:
‘James Renwick, Associate professor of physical geography at Victoria University, said global warming was the only explanation for the current drought, which he described as “an exceptional event”…’
Droughts ARE BY DEFINITION EXCEPTIONAL EVENTS, you wanker. (otherwise NZ would look something like the Sahara, no?) And if global warming is the “only explanation” (very scientific, that) then how come there have been droughts in NZ and Australia long, long  before the white man and his magic Co2 heaters arrived?
This clown is either too thick to tie his own shoelaces, pushing an agenda in order to preserve the taxpayer’s money funding stream, or simply desperate for attention.

‘SWAT officer attracts ridicule after he’s pictured with his rifle sight on backwards’
He’s got a big magazine, though–so he’s bound to hit something sooner or later. Just hope it’s the perp and not granny, out shopping…..