New Zealand Conservative

BE WARNED. THIS REVIEW HAS MAJOR SPOILERS AFTER THE FOLD. SO DO NOT CLICK IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE

Peasant kissing a soldier of the "Army of Liberation" on a Soviet propaganda poster issued after the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. A while back I tweeted the link below as a means to have a way of storing and sharing important pieces of information. After tweeting for a while, I've found that Twitter is not a good way of accessing stored information, that the blog does this far better. So here is Russia is a Lie , by Boris Schumatsky. It's important to keep what you read in mind whenever Russia says anything. So many people whom I thought would have known better have been taken in by Putin because they trust what they are reading. The greatest difficulty in dealing with Russia is this: Russia lies. This blanket assertion sounds like a slogan from the Cold War, and yet it's the only one that does justice to reality. ... Today not only do I write that the country of my birth has become an empire of lies, but that Russia itself is a lie . ...onl...

I've just watched Airport Donetsk, the short documentary film above. It's basically interviews with Russian separatists (Russian military) and with surviving Ukrainian armed forces who battled each other at the airport, with the Russians ultimately winning. There are some gruesome scenes of injured and/or dead bodies, and one particularly awful scene of Russian soldiers forcing captured Ukrainian soldiers to eat their Ukrainian flags cut off their uniforms. One can only imagine what happened next to those soldiers. I'm left feeling quite numb after watching it.

It's finally out, the Dutch investigation into the MH-17 passenger plane crash in Ukraine last year, the crash that many believe was a deliberate targeting of the flight by pro-Russian rebels.  Not that they believed they were aiming for a plane full of civilians when they fired, but that they thought the plane was a Ukrainian military plane of the type they had shot down before.  It was only when the debris came to earth that they realised their terrible error. Anyway, the Dutch report does not conclusively say who and why, but only what, in that it was a Russian-made surface to air missile, a BUK, that took down the plane and killed everyone on board, fired from rebel controlled territory in Ukraine. What's even more interesting is how persons unknown made efforts to cover up causes of disaster: The report by the Dutch safety board said that more than 120 objects, “mostly metal fragments”, were found in the body of the first officer, who had sustained “multiple fra...

The four flag choices. Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that we here in New Zealand are having a referendum early next year on whether to change our national flag - that is, of course,  after a separate referendum to decide on what the design of the new flag should actually be.   In other words, it's being done backwards, as though the decision for change had already been made. And I think that was the intent. Otherwise, why not ask first if people want a change, before wasting time and effort asking for design submissions and whittling them down to a final four? Perhaps they know damn well that when people are asked straight up, as they have been in the past, they don't want a new flag. If it must be done in this order, why not just have the one referendum (saving time and expense), and include the current flag as the fifth option? Will they, at some stage, perhaps decide not to have the second referendum regarding the choice between the new ...