Just a couple of items of interest. Firstly, Sandra Day O'Connor, a recently retired judge appointed to the US Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, is warning that right-wing attacks on the judiciary could edge the US towards dictatorship.

It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

One culprit? Tom DeLay who called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case. O'Connor says such attacks are a direct threat to Consitutional freedoms.

Secondly, I was cleaning out our blogroll (gee a lot of blogs have fallen by the wayside) and came across this interesting item on Whangamata from Jimi Kumara, who gets a bundle of food out of what the pro development group are calling a "salt marsh".

It’s a great place and remarkably undisturbed. There are usually very few people there, even in the middle of summer. We were there once with some Asians and they were SOOO excited that you could get free food.

The field of kaimoana is miraculously large, and I have long wondered how hard it is for a field of that sort to be established. It seems to suit the people who support the
development to call the area a “salt marsh” which sounds like something completely useless, somewhere Colonel Klink would have to go to in Hogan’s Heroes when he f**ked up.