New Zealand was supposed to show the world how the pandemic could be halted. The island nation largely avoided the first wave of the outbreak in March on the account of its remoteness and the hasty imposition of border controls. As the novel COVID-19 virus ravaged its way across the vulnerable populations of Asia, Europe, and North America, New Zealand locked down its entire society.

“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous” ~ Edgar Allan Poe, Masque of the Red Death

On March 22, the nation’s government announced a month of sheltering in place. The order came from on high with the stroke of a pen, without legislative deliberation or even the process of law. Enforcement persisted for nine days despite having no legal justification – just an illegal executive decree by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Months would pass before the country’s high court censured this abrogation of democratic governance. It did not matter. Ardern’s actions were “unlawful, but justified” to halt the pandemic, the bold actions of a “hero” who knew better than her own people.

For the next month New Zealand operated under the strictest lockdowns in the world, surpassing even communist China at the peak of its Wuhan region quarantine. The country reached an astounding 96.3 out of 100 points on the Oxford lockdown stringency index.

California leads the way to electricity blackouts, closely followed by South Australia.

They both created this problem by taxing, banning, delaying or demolishing reliable coal, nuclear, gas or hydro generators while subsidising and promoting unreliable electricity from the sickly green twins - solar and wind. All supposed to solve a global warming crisis that exists only in academic computer models.

Energy policy should be driven by proven reliability, efficiency and cost, not by green politics.

It’s a Rat Circus out there

The simmering pot has come to the boil and it is not going to end well for me and you or them and theirs.

Throughout the western world, the pot of Socialism has been simmering away for years. In 2020, someone decided to turn up the heat and the pot has started to boil with such ferocity that, unless someone turns the heat down – or better still – throws it in the bin , it will set the house on fire and there will be nothing left of our previous lives.

The scenes from places like Kenosha in Wisconsin bring to mind scenes from a dystopian Science Fiction Novel  - much like the movie from 1979, Madmax.

Gage Skidmore  is an American photographer  known primarily for photographing American politicians. 

James Carville says Trump is the greatest threat to America since the fall of communism.  

It is easy to laugh away such a declaration, but I think there is an invaluable truth expressed.  Trump is as important in stature as the United States’ most formidable military and political opponent of the twentieth century. 

Trumpism as an ideological force has the mass and acceleration of a Soviet Empire that threatened to conquer the world.  Nobody speaks about the Bush Doctrine in such terms.   Nobody confuses the Obama Doctrine or the Carter Doctrine as projecting that kind of power.  Yet here we are, just three years after the election, and somehow the belittled and mocked hotel owner from Queens has stumbled into creating a movement that matches in strength and potency what took Marx, Lenin, and Stalin over a century to perfect.   Consider the fear that Carville and his ilk must harbor about what is to come.

What does he see that makes him tremble so?  In a word, greatness.

These are very trying times.   The pattern of life has changed , no exciting things to took forward to.   The winter visits we looked forward to  with family and friends visiting from the south  chasing our milder weather.    Driving up with their caravans,   calling in to say hello, catching up on the news .   Of course we miss the everyday  activities we used to  take for granted.   But most of all we miss the  very much looked forward to visit from our sons, daughters  and family .  

Brandon Smith

All over the Western world ever since 9/11 there have been incremental steps towards what many liberty advocates would call a “police state”; a system in which governments are no longer restricted by the boundaries of civil liberties and are given the power to do just about anything they want in the name of public safety. The use of “the law” as a tool for injecting tyranny into a culture is the first tactic of all totalitarians.

The idea is that by simply writing government criminality into the law books, that criminality somehow becomes justified by virtue of legal recognition. It's all very circular. Whenever government abuse of the people is initiated, it's always initiated in the name of what's “best for society as a whole”. To save society, the individuals that make up a society must be sublimated or destroyed. This mentality is the complete opposite of what the Founding Fathers in America fought and died for, but as Thomas Jefferson once said:

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”