New Zealand Conservative

Many years ago, when I was in my early 20's, I became very much taken with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series. I first came across the books when I had just moved to Sydney. Back then, there was far more available in Sydney than would ever grace the bookshops in Wellington, and The Vampire Chronicles were certainly representative on what more was on offer. I had grown up watching vampire movies, as my mother liked watching horrors and for some reason Mum let me stay up to watch many horror movies with her. They weren't as gory back then as the are now, but boy were they bloody scary. I remember one that terrified me so much that I cut out giant paper crosses and stuck then up all over the house to prevent possible attacks by vampires. I was a very imaginative child and even though I knew the chances of there actually being real vampires out there to be very remote, I thought it would be better not to take any chances. So, maybe now in retrospect my attraction ...

Last year, National Leader John Key was accused of being a "me too" man, and National accused of being 'Labour-lite' in terms of policy comparison with the Labour Party. There seems to have been a turn-around on this though with Helen's speech this morning basically mirroring Key's speech yesterday in regards to youth and education. Both leaders appear to be targeting troubled youth, specifically the age groups between 14 and 16. As regards youth violence, I don't think we can be too surprised: I really think it's only going to get worse; the reason? The anti-smacking law. Sweden banned smacking in the 1980s and their rates of youth violence have shot up dramatically. At least two studies in Sweden were initiated in the 1990s because of societal concerns about increasing youth violence. One rationale for one study was that “There is also much evidence that our [Swedish] society has a growing propensity for violence” (Statistics Sweden, 199...

Frog Blog are going on the offensive on behalf of Sue Bradford, and doing a beat-up about the s59 petition. They title the post "The right to beat your child petition". Yep, as commenter Will so accurately said on that thread: " I’m not paranoid enough to imagine that there are 300,000 people in New Zealand who are agitating for the right to beat their children. Most of them just want to be left alone to raise their kids. It’s hard enough to begin with. " Related Link: Frogs abuse 300,000 decent people

We've organised an official on-line protest. To participate, just turn your sound on and yell out the occasional slogan that strikes your fancy. Or boo and hiss. Just be careful people don't think you have finally flipped out and gone insane. Last thing you'd want is to be thought a professional left wing protester. Ah well, that's my lunch time over. I can feel the crack of the whip on my back. Ooh, argg. Ow. Click here for the NZ Conservative Blog Protest Hattip: KiwiBlog Protest March Update: link fixed!

Today's Dominion Post has a full-frontal picture of an idiot in a Borat costume plastered across the top of it. Do the Dom Post editors not think of the children? My 6 year old, who normally ignores the paper unless he sees a cartoon or a sudoku puzzle, immediately wanted to know why the man was wearing something that "just covered his nuts." So, I had to explain to him that there are some pretty disgusting adults out there that don't have a sense of what they shouldn't wear in public. He agreed, and said that the man looked like he was drunk and on drugs. Or maybe he took drugs and then got drunk - he wasn't sure. Whatever happened to putting such pictures on page three?