For two weeks we've heard and seen all sorts of fatuous bullshit emanating from the United Nations Building in New York, yet if the bullshit itself wasn't enough to turn your stomach -- much of it emanating from dictators and thugs for whom enslaving their own people is the normal order of their day -- then just this week we've seen why the whole United Nations project is a threat to peace and to the whole western world: because the United Nations talks peace but rewards violence, just as any body replete with the world’s biggest thugs would have to do.

IT’S GETTING HARD TO make a joke these days without some humourless bastard taking it seriously – and it’s getting hard to satirise the statists without giving them new ideas.

The big red gates were swung open today and Auckland’s Queens Wharf was opened to the public – for a few hours anyway -- although by the speeches of the politicians holding the keys you’d have thought they were about to part the Red Sea.

This is the chosen site for Rugby World Cup’s 2011 Party Central, so it’s not just curiosity that sent people through those gates this afternoon:

"He was a bright, affirming flame in the midst of a sea of despair then prevailing."
- M.S. Swaminathan, known as the "Father of the Green Revolution in India"

"Some credit him with saving more human lives than any other person in history."
- Bruce Alberts, President, National Academy of Sciences, U.S.

When I read that a pile of rubbish by “artist” Dane Mitchell was awarded Waikato’s biggest art prize, my mind went back several years ago when I was at architecture school (and I can tell you now that those weren’t the days).  The students were always gathered together on the first day back for the new year to receive news, advice and the usual karakia.  And they were warned: don’t leave your work out in the studio overnight unlabelled, because the cleaners will think it’s rubbish and throw it out.

So even back then in the mists of time, rubbish was being confused for art.

From the 1984/Big Brother files comes the tale of two former bastions of freedom:

Here's a new 'reality' TV that someone might like to pitch to Julie Christie. Or perhaps an idea for some good research for a keen statistician. Time for a top-rating prime-time TV show to answer the question: “Who’s the country's biggest beneficiary?

Over the weekend The Herald reported the abject failure of state-sponsored early childhood education.

Many 5-year-olds are starting school unable to count or complete the alphabet, despite years of pre-school education. . .

Seems to me the only people more annoying than the moochers who ask for more and more while doing less and less are those lemon-sucking wowsers who are more and more vocal in insisting we enjoy ourselves less and less.

The age of Nanny is not dead. Her latest incarnation rode in yesterday on Geoffrey Palmer's horse, and has already been taken out for a trial canter this morning by Simon Power. It's a horse that needs to be shot.

Let’s get some thoughts going on the “right to privacy.” Here are a few to start you off.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” They were the words with which Charles Dickens began his novel of the French Revolution – the Revolution celebrated today on the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille.

It was the best of times – the Revolution overthrew feudalism. It was the worst of times – it instituted dictatorship. It was the best of times – it proclaimed liberty. It was the worst of times – it enforced equality. It was both thrilling and blood-chilling – like the anthem of blood lust to which it gave birth, and which it still so well reflects.

The government has cancelled the Enviroschools programme, for which they earn my belated congratulations.

It’s a first step in beating back the forces of darkness, and if my saying that sounds like hyperbole then just listen right up.

The local Borders is running a poll on "The 100 favourite books of all time," and they want your vote -- an ideal time to gain 'Atlas Shrugged' a prominent place on the Borders's shelves and on the reading list of several thousand readers.

Here’s what we have for you in the very latest Free Radical magazine, going to press as we speak . . .  and you won’t believe the calibre of the writers in this line up!

As the government’s Select Committee inquiry kicks off with all manner of fabricated non-science presented to it, The Free Radical is thrilled to be publishing an Open Letter letter from one of the world’s leading climate ‘skeptics’ to the world’s newest Prime Minister on the very subjects the Select Committee says it is considering.

Expect to hear the name “Professor Stephen Schneider” used
frequently around the local warmist traps in days, weeks and months to
come. 

So, the US Federal Reserve Bank’s Ben Bernanke announces he’s going to print money

Hi to you all, and welcome to a ‘Summer Reader’ of the Free Radical.  This is the Crisis Edition, and it’s packed with great reading on the economic crisis; who caused it and how, and what politicians and their servants are doing now that will only make it all worse.

George Reisman, David McGregor, Gene Callahan, Stephen Hicks, Sean Gabb and Jeff Perren make sense out of nonsense, and order out of economic chaos.

On it’s own that’s the price of your copy back right there.  But that’s not all!

SOLO-International Press Release: ‘FREE RADICAL’ EXCLUSIVE: Christopher Monckton’s Open Letter to NZ Prime Minister John Key on Climate Change

Peter Cresswell
December 16, 2008

I’m delighted to be able to give you two very exciting pieces of news.

These were terrorists who make no serious concrete demands.  They’re not after riches.  They don’t genuinely want prisoners released or captured revolutionary leaders handed over. They don’t want to be flown to Cuba.

All they truly want is blood.

Well, that worked, didn't it!  The overnight collapse of world stock markets, led by a seven percent one-day drop in the US Dow Jones index, shows just how well the trillion-dollar bailout worked to arrest economic collapse.

Fresh from his "people I hate" diatribe in last week's Sunday Star, in which "Creators of wealth" and "makers of jobs" come in for particular opprobrium, Christopher Trotter now offers up as an antidote to his hate speech a "things I believe in" column.

These days, you can get a graduate diploma in political science at Victoria University of Wellington by analysing "John Banks and Lindsay Perigo, in their host roles on the Radio Pacific breakfast talk show 'The First Edition,'" in particular their "political-symbolic hate campaign" against Helen Clark which was "crystallised," says research student Lewis Stoddart, "into a characterisation which I describe as ‘communist lesbian dictator’."

The limits to government action are generally measured by the apathy
of the populace.  For too long, New Zealanders have been pushed around

Once again, here's the best half-dozen barbs against barbarism posted at NOT
PC this week, based largely on what got readers stampeding to the site.   If you

[Note from Linz—I've taken the liberty of lifting this post by Oirishman O'Cresswell from the More Accurate Badges thread as it deserves maximum prominence.

Yes, that's the cover of the latest Free Radical that will be going out to shops and subscribers from the end of this week.

Julian Darby has uploaded the four-handed religion debate from Lindsay Perigo's show on Radio Live this morning, which I'm told was brilliant radio. I myself have to take his word for that at this stage since I was sleeping at the time, but you can click here to hear the debate in its full MP3 brilliance.