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Resolutions and Revolutions

Welcome to 2011. All of those out shopping for white ware and electronics last week who signed up to the "nothing to pay until 2011" must be feeling a bit ill about now. No worries though. If your repayment period extends out past Dec 2012, you'll save money due to the end of the world(TM) kicking in before your final payments.

I wonder why the Mayan Calendar running out in 12.12.12. Gregorian time is any different than getting to the end of a regular calendar though? Surely, it was just a case of a bulk buy with an expiry date. Archaeologists have been feverishly working to decipher the cryptic sentence at the very end of the Mayan Calendar. Does it detail the nature of the cataclysm? No, it's just the re-order code to get your next 10,000 year ziggurat. In any event, I think civilisation is safe from Mayan doom, because during the period of Wayeb, the last 5 days of the calendar, portals between the mortal realm and the Underworld are said to dissolve, opening the way for evil interference. However, to ward off these evil spirits, the Mayan solution was to avoid leaving their houses and not to wash or comb their hair. Have you seen the modern teenager? Of course not, they remain in their houses affixed to the xbox and PS3, long hair unkempt and unwashed. We are saved.

I haven't got around to making any resolutions. I must be getting more laid back, content to spend my few weeks holiday musing on the priorities I wish to prioritize for 2011. Who was is that said "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."? Well, I know who it was, it was the guy who also said: "You won't get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it." and then I wrote a post about one of his Imaginings, which I will get back to. That's not a promise, but a resolution.

Meanwhile, a quick flick through today's paper left me ambivalent about making any great pronouncements about what 2011 holds in the NZ Political scene. We have an election this year, do we not? Has it been three years of National already? Are they a Mayan prophecy in action? Far too melodramatic. Modern democracy is to slow boil our freedoms to death. It's warm, pleasant and barely noticeable. If we are all simmering together in a tasty soup, carrot chunks take on a certain significance. They are the vegetable of foreshadowing. I saw carrots after the anti-smacking referendum's 88% result simply saw a little more salt being added (not to rub in wounds, but for taste, you understand). Let's see where the MMP referendum gets us. Corn pieces anyone?

Other than death by Mayan Calendar and slow, seasoned death by Western-Style Democratic Soup there are other ways to consider the sunset of the world on the dawn of the new year.

In the 1970's it was mass starvation with a hint of ice-age, and now its GW with a capital A, with the Apes responsible for redefining C02 as a pollutant. Although the science is settled (Praise Allah and PBUH), with only the weather record confusing the conclusion, the taxation system to cure the problem is still up for discussion.

It seems if we pay an ETS and tack on ETC (as in pay more taxes et cetera) and funnel the taxes through the UN who will help end poverty, war, famine and strife like it has for the last 66 years, we will be able to hold our heads high, all the better to see the UN ships arriving with rice and tinned baked beans to keep us alive. Oh, if only NZ could produce large expanses of tundra, our verdant forests and relatively pure wilderness failing to balance the pollution caused by the likes of our manufacturing base, even though they now manufacture in India and China. Oh, if only NZ could turn the clock back 100 years to be seen as a developing third world country exempt from Kyoto obligations. Oh hang on, between the FSSB and Treaty Claims and lack of economic growth, we may just achieve the Green party Nirvana of pre-industrial society owned by one race.

But all of that seems frivolous compared to the continual bad news building up around North Korea. They represent the ticking time bomb, as surely does the events in the middle east. And with one eye on each, we surely have failed to respond well to the threat within. It's not multi-culturalism when there is no true integration.

But enough of the bad news, I loved the front page story - three fisherman found alive, one after swimming 9 hours against fickle currents and high swells to make it to shore to call for help. A good news story on the front page - may that set the tone for 2011.

Happy New Year readers. I hope the year is prosperous and enriching for you all, and that you get to spread a little of that around to others.

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