David showed us some pretty impressive parking skills yesterday.

This is a prime example of the perils of going too far to the left.

I wonder of the Moldovan dancer called Schettino “a maestro“.

Fabiola Russo, whose husband Francesco Schettino who faces charges of manslaughter and abandoning ship over the crash that led to the loss of at least 16 lives, said his portrayal as ‘Captain Coward’ was grossly unfair.

“Those at sea navigate, while those on land judge,” she told Oggi, an Italian weekly magazine.

She also said that she and her husband spent a good deal of time praying for the victims of the disaster, which happened when the Concordia cruise liner hit rocks off the island of Giglio earlier this month and capsized.

“I pray, also for the victims because we know very well what pain is. Francesco prays too – our faith is one of the things we have in common,” she said, insisting that her husband was a brilliant navigator and regarded by his crew as “a maestro”.

Proverbs 28

⁴ To reject the law is to praise the wicked;
to obey the law is to fight them.

There is a search on for for people over the age of 16 with specific Hobbit-like features.

Dirty, smelly, hippy Penny Bright says she is prepared to be jailed to defend lawful rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. She has put out a press release to that effect.

I’m in favor of this and think we should grant her wish and jail her.

Chris Trotter writes that Labour is yet to have it’s “Kodachrome Moment”:

My friend, the photographer and artist, Barry Thomas, reckons the manufacturers of Kodachrome and the New Zealand Labour Party have a lot in common. Both were once at the cutting edge. Both had something to sell which masses of people were happy to buy. And both, by failing to keep pace with a rapidly changing world, have seen the power of their “brand” dwindle and fade.

Ouch, Trotter isn’t holding back:

Mention Labour in 2012 and most New Zealanders will struggle to conjure-up any images at all, apart from a succession of vaguely recognisable faces and a sorry string of embarrassing headlines.

The Labour Party Opposition should be in the business of displaying courage, thinking the unthinkable, searching for the root causes of the nation’s problems and coming up with solutions that require the voters to discard their prejudices, step away from past failures, and take the risk of committing themselves to something new.

A successful Opposition doesn’t waste time attacking the Government, it devotes itself to enlisting the electorate in a great adventure.

If a vote for Labour is anything less than a decision to join that great adventure then the party will share the fate of Eastman-Kodak. It neglected its core business: preserving people’s memories. Labour’s core business, in 2012, must be stimulating New Zealanders’ imagination.

Using digital, colour, and, if necessary, black-and-white.

This small kid is lucky to be alive:

Gnarley is his name, and he certainly lived up to it yesterday, “surfing” a vehicle down Golden Bay’s Takaka Hill.

The parents of the adventurous Takaka Hill toddler turned stowaway are relieved to have him back safe and sound.

Two-year-old Gnarley Maguire hitched a ride in his grandfather’s trailer for 20 kilometres, from the hill’s summit to Motueka.

A truck driver spotted him in the trailer with a 1.2-metre-high cage, winding its way down the steep Takaka Hill road, and followed him to Motueka.

He asked Gnarley’s grandfather, who had stopped at the town’s Placemakers store, if he knew he had a child in his trailer.

He didn’t.

All those Labour MPs who went round saying their policy prescription in 2011 was the ducks nuts are going to have some serious humble pie to eat. I doubt they will though because butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. David Shearer certainly appears to be rolling back Goff’s “game changer” policies:

“We still think a capital gains tax is something that’s good for New Zealand but I’m not so sure about some of the others,” he said.

And this guy went out all guns blazing today claiming the Government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Sheesh.

Maurice Williamson has done the right thing and approved the sale of the Crafar Farms to the Shanghai Pengxin bid. The creditors of Alan Crafar have got the best deal that they can rather than the discounted attempt by Michael Fay to screw the scrum in his favour.

Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson and Associate Minister of Finance Dr Jonathan Coleman this morning said they had accepted the recommendation of the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) to grant consent to Milk New Zealand Holding, a subsidiary of Shanghai Pengxin Group, to acquire the 16 Crafar farms.

“It is clear that all criteria under sections 16 and 18 of the Overseas Investment Act 2005 have been met, therefore we accept the recommendation of the OIO to grant consent,” Williamson said.

“We are satisfied that Milk New Zealand’s application for consent meets the criteria set out in the Act,” Coleman said.

A condition of the sale is that a joint venture company to be owned 50/50 by the Chinese and Landcorp would develop and manage the farms.

The majority of the planning, budgeting and reporting relating to the farms would take place within the joint venture company and Landcorp would operate the farms, providing operational services and advice.

David Farrar posts about the Crafar Farms, compared with Labour’s record on land sales.

The small circle represents the size of the Crafar farms at 8,000 hectares. The large circle represents the amount of land sold to foreign owners under the last Labour Government at 650,000 hectares.

Under Labour, the equivalent of the Crafar farms were sold each and every month they were in office.