An opinion from Owen McShane on the gas leak:

This is the best thing to happen in NZ this year.

People had no idea how dependent we all are on gas and how much benefit it provides.
The only long term answer to this problem, caused by a leak in a single pipeline, is to find several gas wells distributed around the country (most likely to be off shore) and create a gas grid like the electric grid that means every location has alternative supplies of gas.

Gas is the fuel of the future. We are now finding massive wells of gas wells evenly distributed all around the world. They have even found a shale gas well in England of trillions of cubic metres.

The Middle East dominance of fuel supplies is over and Peak Oil is no longer an issue. Gas generates electricity and the electricity can power our cars and buses. GAs is the starting point for a whole new petrochemical industry.

We will need some form of liquid fuels for our aircraft but we would get enough of that as an offshoot from some of the wells.

But a number of Political parties and Green lobbyists and Coastal Iwi say we should ban exploration for gas and oil offshore.

"That is just the way with some people,” says Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s eponymous novel, published in 1885. “They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.” Huck was talking about the Widow Douglas’s disapproval of smoking. But his point applies more generally to the legions of American parents and political activists who have lately sought, with considerable success, to ban or censor Twain’s work.

Huckleberry Finn is not the world’s greatest novel, but it is the most American of the world’s great novels. It follows Huck on a rafting voyage down the Mississippi with Jim, a runaway slave. Along the way, with subtlety, wryness and explosive humour, Twain deflates the ideology of racism as Americans lived it in the 19th century. For US adolescents, the book has been an irreplaceable bridge from juvenile into adult reading. Its page-turning picaresque draws the reader towards deep questions of the human condition. Unfortunately for present-day sensibilities, it does so in the dialect of Missouri in the 1840s. Twain’s characters use the word “nigger” at least 200 times.

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The scale and random nature of the WikiLeaks affair exposes the weakening grip democratic governments have on their secrets, delivers another body blow to American prestige and reveals the vulnerability of databases to individuals with access and expertise.

These leaks will become a milestone in changing the operations of government and diplomacy. The point is they are driven by technological capability. The leaks occur because they can occur, not because of any political cause such as exposing corruption, ending the Vietnam War, fighting human rights abuses or bringing democracy to China.

As usual, the US occupies the forefront of change. But this is a double-edged status. The control functions of the US state are being undermined by a small, elusive and hi-tech WikiLeaks outfit headed by an Australian, Julian Assange, whose narcissism is barely disguised by his polemical recruitment of the ideology of free speech, the great American virtue.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared at an Oct. 16 meeting of young members of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, that multiculturalism, or Multikulti, as the Germans put it, “has failed totally.” Horst Seehofer, minister-president of Bavaria and the chairman of a sister party to the Christian Democrats, said at the same meeting that the two parties were “committed to a dominant German culture and opposed to a multicultural one.” Merkel also said that the flood of immigrants is holding back the German economy, although Germany does need more highly trained specialists, as opposed to the laborers who have sought economic advantages in Germany.

The statements were striking in their bluntness and their willingness to speak of a dominant German culture, a concept that for obvious reasons Germans have been sensitive about asserting since World War II. The statement should be taken with utmost seriousness and considered for its social and geopolitical implications. It should also be considered in the broader context of Europe’s response to immigration, not to Germany’s response alone.

It is “financial jihad,” explained Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia compass — and the man Feisal Rauf, the brains behind the proposed Ground Zero mosque, admires as “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.” It was 2002 and Qaradawi, who endorses suicide bombing and the targeting of American personnel operating in Islamic countries, was giving a lecture on the need to use the international financial system to support Islamist goals — like Hamas’s war to destroy Israel.

The financial jihad has now achieved its greatest coup so far: It has co-opted the U.S. government as a partner. In fact, if you would like to see a contributor to the jihad, have a look in the mirror. Thanks to the Obama administration, every one of us is complicit. The bailout bonanza made each of us an owner of American Insurance Group (AIG). Under the stewardship of its real CEO, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, AIG proudly runs the world’s most lavishly funded sharia-compliant insurance business — and it is desperately trying to convince a federal court in Michigan that no one should have a problem with that.