The EU has saved bacon!

mmmn a sexy photo of bacon...

After many years of utterly ridiculous and awful legislation directed towards the UK from the dreadful European Union we have finally something small to rejoice about. The EU have tabled legislation to ensure that bacon that is sold to consumers can consist of no more than 5% water before it has to be labelled as “bacon with water”. Currently almost all bacon being sold in our supermarkets in the UK has closer to 10% added water. This water makes the bacon artificially bigger and allows it to be stretched longer, not to mention when you try and fry it you can see it boil in your frying pan in water.

Supermarkets and retailers are of course against this as they have been adding water to all meats forever to increase the size and to increase their margins by selling inferior meat to consumers. They are arguing that British consumers are used to high water content in their bacon and will not enjoy purer, stronger tasting bacon. They even had the stupidity to say that the bacon without all the extra water in it will mean bacon will be drier and less succulent… isn’t that what having fat on bacon is all about? Not water.

Bacon purists and bacon producers who sell their products from their own farms are celebrating for obvious reasons – and as a confessed foodie, so am I. I look forward to the measures making chicken and beef less watery although I admit I buy much of my meat from a butcher and support locally sourced produce. There are some amazing food producers in this country, it’s such a pity the supermarkets and unscrupulous stores keep selling substandard food and pass it off as top quality.

So that means the EU has done one good thing to date… I won’t hold my breath for the next one!

Good grief

I said it before and I will say it again, NZ Conservative contributor Lucia Marie is batshit crazy.

Sick of warning us about the dangers of homosexuality and her fear that her sons will suffer "gender confusion" because they will play netball at PE... she writes a dire warning about the evils of Harry Potter and how to counter the damage it will do to children...

Good grief is all I can say about this. I was right in my original post referring to her, hardly the type of person you'd like as a next door neighbour.

Thankfully everything I was going to say was neatly summed up by Medusa who commented first on this post:



Hear hear.

Back from holidays...

Mexico was nice, was great to return back there and indulge in some long awaited summer time.. posting will resume soon.

Quite Possibly the Coolest Music Video Of All Time

Prisencolinensinainciusol! Allright!

The Embarrassment of Being a Freedom-Lover from Venezealand

It's a sad day when you find yourself agreeing with something that Hone Harawira said about the ACT Party. But today is that day:

"Your attempts to boost Act in the polls by riding on the xenophobic fears of Joe Bloggs in the street will not work this time round."

And he is dead right. It's a dumb strategy and it won't work. There is no way to describe ACT's latest newspaper ad other than INSANELY FUCKING STUPID. I haven't even read it. I don't care to. I don't even care if I agree with what it says or not. It's still an INSANELY FUCKING STUPID ad. The economy is in the toilet, and ACT are running ads race-baiting? Why?!

Here's what I think happened. I think this is John Ansell's baby - he thought it up and wanted to do it, and he convinced the powers that be that it was a good idea, because John did the 2005 National Party billboards and everyone thinks he is some sort of God among men because of it. But one good campaign does not make you a genius with every brain fart you have. Even the best campaigners have bad days and bad ideas, which is why you always have the politician whose arse is on the line make the calls and commission the ideas. You don't let your staff decide what your campaign is going to be. Especially not John Ansell, who is a part of the excreable Coastal Coalition and wants to push that whole race-baiting paranoid son-of-John-Birch agenda where property rights are okay for white people, but not for brown ones. Unfortunately, they now seem to have a toehold in ACT and this is what they want to push, rather than the sound economic policy and liberality of ACT's founding.

If ACT's brand was in the gutter before, it is digging half way to Spain now. I wouldn't even put money on Banks winning Epsom - if National select Aaron Bhatnagar, he will romp in and ACT will be dead. And on current form, it will be a good thing too.

The effect of ACT, and MMP on New Zealand political discourse has been devastating. It is no coincidence that 1994, the year of ACT's foundation, was the last time we had a decent right wing government in New Zealand that truly progressed freedom. ACT took good political ideas from both Labour and National, stuck them in a ghetto with 5% of the vote, and that is where those ideas have stayed ever since. There's been a few good things that wouldn't have happened without ACT - time-limited Treaty claims, ACC competition, three strikes, and (hopefully soon) voluntary student unions, but the big stuff - the idea that government should be small, the idea that people should be trusted as adults to do as they please if they are not harming others, the idea that taxes should be flat and low, the idea that welfare should get people off their arse and into work... all have stayed in an intellectual ghetto of ACT's own making.

More tragic than this is the people who have stuck with ACT and will go down with it. Talented folk like David Seymour and Cathy Odgers will presumably stand for ACT as candidates this year, when they really should be in one of the major parties where the real decisions are made. Instead they will stand in this election - the party will disintegrate, and they will spend another ten years fluffing around trying to get somewhere in National, which they will inevitably join because if they want to do anything in politics they will have no other choice. And nobody in National will respect them for it.

None of this gives me any pleasure. And there are bloggers out there who whinge about me being a toy-chucker and a party-hopper, but I've been consistent in what I believe and consistently the canary in this mine, and none of my critics have anything to show for their lame-arsed silence themselves, with the possible exception of Bhatnagar if he wins the Epsom nomination. The truth is that we on the Right have blown it, and blown it big time. It will take another generation for us to get back on our feet in New Zealand, and even then only if we learn from our mistakes over the last 17 years.

Let's stop flogging the dead horse of ACT, stop digging up the political cemetery for candidates, start up some think-tanks, get a Tea Party movement together, join National, and get some decent candidates nominated for seats. That's how we win. It'll take us twenty years, but for God's sake, lets stop fucking around with this third party MMP crap and start now!

Radio1 - who is going to be honest about its failure?

The usual gnashing of teeth has erupted from my old University in regards to recommendations that Radio1 be sold as it is financially unviable for Otago University Students Association (OUSA) in the voluntary membership era.

This is a radio station that is funded and subsidised by all students attending the University of Otago no matter if they listen to it or not. Student’s money allows all residents of Dunedin to listen to it as well, although I am not too sure what its range is beyond Dunedin. At present, Radio1 is losing money and has needed subsidies to keep it running every year – and all students HAVE to fund this station if they wish to get a degree at Otago University.

The Voluntary Student (union) Membership (VSM) bill has almost passed and OUSA have realised that running a loss making radio station cannot be sustained if they have to continue the day to day running of a student union. In my opinion they could have dealt with this a lot better than to blame VSM which is a lame cop out. OUSA has had well over a decade to create within itself profitable or break-even services and buried their heads in the sand and now with only a few months left to go before the VSM bill passes they have only just woken up to the certainty that they will not have over 1 million dollars of students money coming to them anymore.

Compulsory membership of OUSA meant that this organisation never needed to be accountable to its members nor run services that mattered as their income was guaranteed. Radio1 has been allowed to run at a loss until now because there was no incentive for it to be valuable to students. As OUSA levies increased over the years, there was more money available for OUSA to continue bailing it out to a point where Radio1 is now incapable of running without a student subsidy.

You might think this is crazy. We all know that if you make a loss in business you need to remedy this quickly or face going under. Students at Otago University may or may not have been aware that their fees were propping this failing business up – so surely they have a right to choose whether or not to do so. VSM allows the students to have this choice.

It’s so lazy for Labour, Greens and the various Socialist groups on campus to point the finger at supposed uncaring politicians in Wellington for not allowing them to continue the free ride they have had for so long, but I am not buying it. The Facebook group has just hit 2000 members – all who are outraged about Radio1 being sold – and yet not one has advocated that they could run it to break even. In fact I suggested they all chip in to subsidise the loss themselves and I got told by the group admin that I was offering a far right solution to this. If Radio1 want to at least pretend that they are important to all students – they should probably engage students from both sides of the political spectrum equally if they wish to be taken seriously. Otherwise this is yet another clear cut example to why student unions have been captured by left wing interest groups who only care about looking after themselves and not the vast majority of students who they are very happy to fleece every year to fund their union and “services”.

If OUSA and the “fans” of Radio1 were serious about protecting their services they would have done something about this a long time ago instead of blaming “right wing politicians” for what is essentially their own fault. OUSA themselves have admitted that Radio1 is one of their least valued services, according to their student survey, so you have to really question whether or not it should be funded by subsidies or make an honest attempt to at least break even every year. It seems very clear that students don’t value it nor does it attract financial support to keep it going. Dunedin is a student city and Radio1 could dominate due to the financial cash cow that students bring to Dunedin so for it to fail as badly as it has means that something very wrong is going on there.

Will they admit to failing? Will they heck! They continue to point the finger at everybody but themselves and are in complete and utter denial. PAST OUSA executives have failed Radio1 as well. VSM is going to throw off the shackles of this stupidity and give students the freedom that they deserve, not just freedom of association, but the freedom to NOT be forced to fund dodgy businesses in order to get a degree.