New Zealand is great. The folk is broad-minded and the nation is not arrogant like a lot of other peoples in the world. They know their roots and they are happy with the stuff they have. But something disturbs me in this country: The military forces. There is a proudness about something this islands are really not need. Noone wants to attack or take over New Zealand. There are no foes at all. Even in the Second World War the Japanese Forces are far away to conquer this sheep breeding nation. There is no strategical use and there is nothing to steal. So why waste money for military?
Maybe New Zealand is showing the world the future army: State owned mercenaries. Cheap because the soldiers want to fight and not to spend money and gainfully for the government which is earning less money because it sold all their silverware and the people are taking more than they give back. Governments all over the world are getting more and more obsolete in the daily life. For the people the economic part of the newspapers are much more important than the politics. Security is done by private companies not by the state owned police. The health insurance and the hospitals are more and more private owned. Someone who wants well educated children is sending them to a private school.
The space for the government is getting smaller and smaller. Its fight for survival has begun and why not use the own army (one of the last state owned "companies") to earn money.
This evulation shows a trend to some kind of anarchy. Not the one propageted by the big A in the circle. Some kind of modern anarchy. For ten fifteen years I was a big fan of the cyperpunk. This science fiction literature style described a very interesting future. Often it was described with pictures out of the famous Bladerunner movie (which is not really fitting because the book on which Bladerunner based - Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep from Philip K. Dick - was not Cyberpunk). What we can see today in the cinema when we watch Matrix is a visualized form of famous books like Neuromancer or Snowcrash. The latter one described the future role of governments as very isolated apparatus in which noone was really interested. It looks like that this is not really a unfitting prediction for the more and more ridiculous governments all over the planet.

Sometimes it is really a pain in the ass: Nice weather was promissed for today and the chances were really high for a nice flight over the mighty Tasman Glacier. The first flight (a reconnaissance flight) showed a high possibility for a glacier landing but when we arrived the sky was heavily clouded again. No comparison to the desastrous attempt to reach the Ball shelter a day before (we were wet till the bones) but again the weather made it impossible to enjoy the funny New Zealand inventions. The best thing is, that for tomorrow the forecast promissed a perfect cloudless sky around Aoraki (Mount Cook). But now we are back in Christchurch. And with us the rain.