Well, they been gone and done it

Just a couple of hours ago and the muppets in Wellington passed the damned Emissions Trading Scheme bizzo. Only Rodney Perky Hide had the balls to stand up and say they we didn't need any such thing but Pinko Smith just had the numbers and we are now on the fast track to the poor house. And we are on our way there for no reason. We have bought into the biggest scam in human history. And we bought into it during the very week that the whole thing is starting to unravel. But bloody Nick Smith couldn't wait could he? The arrogant little prick is right and the rest of the sensible world is wrong and we have this crap pushed through under sodding 'urgency' on the back of bullshit science that Smith believes so we have to. Well I dont and you have just made me the poorer, you git. We can now walk proudly into the talk fest in Denmark next month to hear the world sniggering at our stupidity. Our embarrassment will only be compounded when the iwi members we are taking with us as part of Pinky Nick's muskets and blankets deal start on the obligatory haka. God, we're a joke.

It is a great shame that I am to become a pauper at my stage of life as I really, really want a DB9. Now thanks to a bunch of idiots, some of whom who got my vote, I have to chose between a loaf of bread and an Aston Martin. I wasn't hungry anyway.

A plague of frogs on the lot of them - especially Nick Pinko Pseudo-Nat Smith. I'm off to rob a bank.

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Normal service has been resumed

A year and a couple of weeks. Well it had to come to an end I suppose but NZ politics has drifted back into its bad old habits over the last couple of days; and it looks like it is going to get worse. We've had a year of the gummint doing stuff I pretty much approved of and then bloody Nick Smith (Doctor of what, pray) comes along and stuffs it up. All the ingredients of a right royal cock up New Zealand style are on display.

Damned Nick Smith is in the wrong party for openers. His behaviour over the last couple of days has been the sort of stuff Labour or the watermelons would be proud of. He is a disgrace to National and has to go. He has brought back the spectre of passing stuff under urgency that is in no way urgent. This stupid Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) is a garbage piece of legislation based on a garbage premise, based on garbage science (more of this later) that will deliver a garbage result - a f. expensive garbage result to boot. Bad enough yet? Wait there is more. To get this piece of unnecessary crap legislation through parliament under ersatz urgency he has sold muskets and blankets to the Maoris. Now I couldn't give a rats arse how much DOC land Smith gives to anybody (they run about 70% of the country so there's heaps to spare) to plant trees on. Who cares? They could do something more useful with it, like put an aluminium smelter on it, but if they want to fill it up with radiata that's fine by me. They can all prance around and pretend they are still in the 1830's amongst the pine trees to their hearts content. I don't care. They can take their snake oil carbon credits and sell them to Burkino Faso and I couldn't give a continental. But what really gets up my nose is that both sides of the deal (the Nats and Maori) are buying and selling policy. The Maori a month or so back wouldn't have a bar of an ETS. A few crates of fire water and a couple of mirrors and they are over it like a rash. The highly principled Nats were above the low life Labourites flogging off policy to anyone who would buy. Or they were until psuedo-Nat Smith gets the keys to the policy box.

And who is letting Nick Smith carry on like this? John Key, that's who. I had hoped that John Key was going to be the one who would at last run around shouting that the emperor has no clothes in the climate change department. I'm sure that at one point in the not too distant past he was agnostic at worst and seem to recall some encouraging signs of scepticism. However he had a private audience with the Gore Monster and came out a changed man. Well he has timed his conversion to the dark side of lunacy very poorly. He is the one who can stop Smith plunging this country into financial ruin for no reason and it doesn't look as though he will do it.

What is the bloody hurry to get this stupid bill passed? The Copenhagen conference next month ain't going to come to a consensus on anything because, as we shall see in a minute, potential fatal cracks are starting to appear in the IPCC. Many former warmists are saying 'Hang on a minute, maybe things aren't as we were led to believe'. Conned to believe, more like. So we don't need to front up in Denmark being the leaders of anything. Key has said that if we don't have a new ETS in place we are obliged to follow Labour's legacy ETS the details of which I have mercifully forgotten. I remember enough to know that it was a fiscal disaster though. Crap. All we have to do is replace Labour's ETS with absolutely nothing. That'll do very nicely - oh and build a couple of fossil fuel fired power stations while you are at it.

Timing is everything. All this climate change politicking is in the very week when all the leaked emails from the climate doom merchants have come to light. The litany of deception, lying, massaging of data, main stream media manipulation, crippling of the scientific peer review process - the list is endless - make any remaining science the IPPC and the sable hued minions of satan cling to like a shit soiled security blanket totally worthless. Even if any of the science was any good it is now so tainted as to make it totally worthless.

I trust we are all up to speed on the stuff from the Norfolk Broads. What appears to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals

But do we hear of this? Do we buggery. The bloody media are shielding even this from us. A few lines that there might have been a few naughty emails around but move along nothing to see here and please look at this footage of the Antarctic ice shelf getting smaller. There was actually a bit of this on the news tonight as a background to comments from a weird beard wearing an ethnic motive shirt. This makes me feel ill and it is cruel and unnatural punishment to show me this bollocks when I am trying to eat my dinner. The aforementioned current most evil man in the country, Nick Smith, was confronted by the collapse of the science his political chicanery is based on and he just laughed it off. His reply was typical of the left wing bigot that he obviously is. 'It doesn't coincide with my opinion or what I want to think and it is therefore wrong'.

I'm not happy. I had a year of not having to worry about what happened in Wellington but it has all come back again. But look on the bright side. That bloody woman is still in New York. I'm afraid even that doesn't cheer me up that much.

I know. I wonder if I can arrange for John Key to have a private audience with Lord Monckton before Friday.

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One trick ponies

Why is Dire Straits not regarded as one of the best rock bands ever? I reckon it is because Mark Knopfler is a one trick pony. Once you've heard 'Sultans of Swing' you've heard 'Tunnel of Love' and also 'Brothers in Arms' which has the same guitar solos as 'Romeo and Juliet'. Eric Clapton or David Gilmour could do many fings with a guitar and thus Pink Floyd, Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, Blind Faith still have 5 star ratings in the iTunes Playlists whereas poor old Mark never climbs out of the 4 star morass. It is very easy to be good at one thing but to have lasting impact in more than, say, being able to fit four golf balls in your mouth you have to be good at lots of things. The world long driving champion ain't never going to make it on the PGA tour. Nor for that matter is the World Putting Champion (there is such a beast). In fact in the latter tourney there is a bloke who consistently finishes in the top ten who putts in bare feet - with his feet. Woods T. however is the all round package. He is O for awesome at everything wot a round of golf throws at you including, and indeed especially, thinking.

I have recognised before that when this blog was spitting out five posts a week that it was a one trick pony. Poor scorn and vitriol on anything left wing, touchy feely (politically correct if you must) and the bollocks that is anthropogenic global warming and there you go, another five hundred words. I bored of it and I reached that point bout a year ago. This coincided with the change in government so all was good. The wastrels that were wrecking our country didn't need daily outpourings of my opprobrium any more. I was happy to retreat into occasional comments on large fish, lawn mowers and the decline of country that coloured the global map pink.

It therefore gave me great pleasure to read in yesterday's Sunday paper that I am not alone in thinking that one of the global success stories of TV is a one trick pony. I watch Top Gear every week but I am tiring of it. I have bought two of Jeremy Clarkson's books. Both at airports (I mean where else would you do this - hardly the stuff to read anywhere else but on a long plane journey) and I didn't finish the second. Read Clarkson on anything and you've read him on everything. Don't get me wrong he is amusing and some of his lines are very funny. The idea of a Roller having a wood burning stove and a chimney as a heater is droll in the extreme. But that is about it. Thus it is with his TV show. The challenges are getting more contrived and are boring. I am fed up with watching Clarkson putting three years tyre wear on Italian sports cars in ten minutes. The Hamster is a (small) meaningless distraction. James May can still amuse but even he is getting a bit ho hum.

It was therefore with a sense of duty that I sat down to watch Top Gear last night. A sense of relief, perhaps that this was to be the last of the series. I can do something more productive with my Sunday evenings for the rest of the summer (if it ever arrives). Same old, same old. Jay Leno was a bit different from a lead singer in a boy band I suppose and I knew he owned loadsa cars, but 150?

Oh well another series of Top Gear over. And then the last five minutes. Disregard all the above. I can forgive Clarkson's bullying of everyone around him. I can forgive his belittling James May at every turn. All his oafishness is nothing if he can give me the last five minutes of last night's show. Him driving the V12 Vantage around Scotland with virtually no commentary was just sensational. 'You put 510hp in Aston Martin's smallest body shell. Well what do you expect'. The softly delivered (for a change) lament on the predicted demise of automotive excess was right on the money. Absolutely fabulous.

However even if similarly engined and equipped with ceramic brakes as standard it is still not as pretty as a proper Aston

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The other side of Albany Hill cont.

Those of you who were waiting with bated breath for news of the profligate waste of my money that was happening in deepest darkest Rodney need wait no longer. There has been movement.

You may recall (or more likely will not) that about a kilometre of bloody expensive road had been neutered with ten buck's worth of paint. A perfectly good passing lane around an uphill bend had been roused in one night by a road gang with a pot of road marking. This was presumably on the grounds of 'safety' but in fact forced all traffic much closer to the oncoming traffic stream as it closed the left side of the road. This insanity was compounded several weeks ago when the road graffiti was enhanced by a line of those fluorescent red and white stick jobs planted to stop people (me for instance) ignoring the white lines and cutting the corner anyway. The sticks lasted about three days before some public spirited bloke knocked most of them over.

Then it all gets a bit odd. The sticks were not replaced. Good. Then three nights ago all the sticks were removed and the road was repainted. The previous one kilometre of road circumcision has been reduce to about one hundred and fifty metres. This is the bit before the road returns to two lanes of tarmac anyway and is probably justified.

A superficial look at this would say that some sanity has prevailed. However it would have been much better and cheaper to the tune of gallons of paint and dozens of red and white posts if it hadn't started in the first place. And who will lose their job over this insane waste of my money?

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Lets get serious with the power tools, shall we?

I'm not talking cordless drills here. Nor yet are we going to be looking at bench grinders or lathes. Regular visitors to these ramblings will be well aware that we relocated to the country eighteen months ago and this opened many new areas where I could use the internal combustion engine to look after the property and wreck the planet all in one go.

I have written before about the joys of lawn mowing and the various beasts I had assembled around me for this very pleasurable pastime. Cutting the lawn is a pain in the bum with one of these:

I really cannot imagine why anyone would part with money to buy such a stupid bit of kit to even mow a lawn the size of a snooker table. But if you get some serious power assist things are really quite fun. My lawn mowing has changed a bit recently. Until a couple of weeks back my high end machine was this:

Shibaura SE4000 orchadised tractor running a three rotor 500 series Fieldmaster park mower. All very nice in a 42 horsepower sort of a way. But not really ideal for my property. On reflection I only cut grass like this because I had a tractor. It was beautifully noisy, very slow and had a turning circle of about a hundred yards. For reasons we needn't go into but involve inappropriate metal fatigue I decided to get rid of this and get something much more fun.

I now mow with one of these:

A Walker Super Bee with a 27 HP Kohler motor running a 60" deck. Faster than the tractor and parkmower, gives a better finish than the park mower and really is a 'zero turn ' machine. You can mow around a matchstick. It's not very noisy though.

However mowing is not the point of this post. If you glance back at the picture of the tractor you will see a very ragged and somewhat thinning shelterbelt in the background. Our property was once an orchard (kiwifruit) and although the vines were ripped out about four years ago we are left with the shleterbelts. And very nice they are as well. They really do shelter and give us a lot of privacy. However these things grow (trees do that, I read it in a book) and they need trimming as is evident from the picture above - and that was taken three months ago. I reckon I have about a kilometre of shelter belt that needs trimming (both sides and top) and I was not about to do that with a standard hedge trimmer was I? In fact I wasn't going to do it at all. After a lot of searching I found the shelterbelt trimmer man. He came and gave a quote and said he would arrive on Wednesday and he did.

Now I knew these blokes had cool bits of kit, but not this cool. He fronts up with one of these:

Four sodding great circular saws on a stick. In fact my bloke had five. 200HP tractor, clutch in the PTO and its all on for young and old. Noisy as all hell and and he's driving around with about thirty feet of mobile whirring death and destruction at his beck and call. I was scared fifty metres away from it. Once it gets up to its target it is just controlled arboreal mayhem. Fan-bloody-tastic. Branches the size of your thigh scythed off like bum fluff on a fifteen year old's chin. Branches and leaves flying through the air but mainly just lying compliantly on the ground at the foot of the hedge. Bits of conifer lying all over the shop - I've found trimmings thirty metres from the hedge. This wondrous Israeli bit of genius had all my trimming done in four hours. I have never seen anything like it. Trimming man then takes the cutting head off the tractor and puts a huge mulching mower on and reduces that which was hedge but half an hour ago into so much compost. At day's end he gives you an invoice and then drives off taking all his tree murdering kit with him with a cheery wave of the hand and 'I'll see you in two years'. Most fun couple of grand I've spent in ages.

Now he's gone it looks as though a marauding horde of Visigoths have been here for the afternoon - the place is a mess. But no matter, I reckon half a day wandering round with my weedy 6HP chipper and an air broom will have the place looking all ship shape again.

The Lotto people have an advert running along the lines of 'What would you do if you won this weekend?' Trips to Disney Land, buy a house for mum, leave work - all the usual suspects. Forget it, I know what I would do. I would have my shelterbets trimmed every week.

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Cake and eat it

As the more observant may have noticed this blog has moved away from its origins of late. Those origins were a daily commentary on Auckland's newspaper, The (Royal) New Zealand Herald on a fishing website, http://www.fishing.net.nz, and this inevitably led to shedloads of comment on then current New Zealand politics.I will openly admit that this was very easy as the then incumbent government were not of my liking (very much not of my liking) and negative, derisive commentary is an easy game to play.

Mercifully a year ago this coming weekend the nightmare finished and bloody Clark was given the bums rush and Cullen had the country's cheque book wrested from his hands before the Nigerian scammers got his email address. I wrote at the time that I thought commenting on NZ politics would maybe become a lot harder and would definitely become less fun. And so it has proved to be. I generally approve of the way things are being done by the current mob.

I reckon they are missing a few opportunities though. Their current popularity is around the 60% approval level. They ain't going to stay there for long and when it starts to decline they won't get it back. Now is the time to be bold and push through a few things that are a bit out there. You know the sort of stuff; cut the benefits for people who are a waste of space and are rorting the system, issuing overpowered, exceedingly expensive, British sports cars (a DB9 will do, thanks) to deserving semi retired doctors living just north of Auckland - that sort of thing.

Speaking of which they have a golden opportunity to really get revved up with the ACC stuff. The stupid and ineffective Goof typified the complete antithesis of what they should be doing at the weekend. There was a rally by 'victims' of the proposed massive and entirely justified increase in ACC contributions for motor bicyclists. I really can't see what their beef is. They use up a disproportionate amount of the ACC hand outs 'cos they get in accidents and break themselves and want me to subsidise their premiums. Well they can get some sexual gratification as they leave the building. This is how insurance works. If you are an old lady of 75 and drive your Morrie Minor to church on a Sunday your car insurance premium will be 4/6. If you are a sixteen year old yoof who drives a twin turbo Imprezza (if there is such a beast) and have had five accidents this week your premium is going to be $1,000,000. You don't, as the yoof, go up to AMI and say 'My premium of $1,000,000 is unfair, Granny is only paying 4/6 and she should pay her share of my premium.'

The Goof couldn't resist all this. It fits in with his 'two plus two equals about threeish' grasp of economics. He howls that the Government is dastardly in wanting to cut ACC entitlements - I am so over entitlements - but is double dastardly in wanting to put up premiums. Doh. To make the picture even more hideous he tells the nation he has been a biker forever and turns up on his newly acquired Triumph (never saw him ride it, just shots of him standing next to it with the motor not running) wearing a pair of jeans and a leather jacket. Pathetic.

But not nearly as pathetic as the images of Annette King at the same rally. If The Goof claiming to be a biker is stretching the imagination then King on a Harley only happens in Roswell. But as she is from the past gummint she aped her heroine who pumps gas wearing a safety jacket and was standing on the side of the road clad in fluoro yellow.

60% of the polls give you the mandate, Nick Smith, to tell the bikers to get nicked and then add another 10% to what you had proposed as their increase for insolence. Then start on scything the ACC counselling budget.

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