Yes. And what's the betting that more than 75% of voters would happily entrench any law banning bottled water exports? Too hard with all the different FT agreements? How would NZ be punished? Which of the usual earnest performers would trumpet specious ...
Totally and absolutely superbly encouraging and entertaining on a sunny Sunday. Great thoughtful writing, thank you!
It might depend on where they are and how people choose to look at things. Have you seen the Haunui turbines on the crest of Wakapuni hill on the road from Martinborough to Tora? They went in years ago and have the effect of a gigantic, graceful, kinetic ...
Through the centuries since some chaps translated the Word they thought the god they'd made in their own image had mysteriously said, and bequeathed unto us what later chaps referred to as The Old Testament, we have been labelled in the 'Christian' world ...
Three taut true sentences
Trump's 'rhetoric of inversion' as Luke Mogelson describes it, is playing out in our theatre of disinformation as well. If this review is worth a read, his book will be even more interesting. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/07/the-storm-is-here...
This is how I felt when Robert Muldoon offered to send a frigate to the Falklands to help the grocer's daughter win her next election. My mother was shocked when I told her he would never have my two sons.
A great, upsetting, unsurprising article, dense with shocking detail. Here's another about two men who set out to solve the crimes on the Windrush River and embarrassed the big water companies mightily, not that they cared to admit it - it's long, dense ...
'so Jacinda can see them and prepare herself to counter Luxon's advances.' Gah! She's more than well prepared for that sort of carry on.
no one called for the overthrow of the state. So did I manage to misread: 'GOVERNMENT MUST GO!' flaring forth on last night's news from Wellington's version of impromptu street theatre? In the second clip: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/07/23/brian-tamaki-...
Eden before us
Could being female be a white elephant in some wombs?
"The world is moving on….." From politicians that is usually another way of saying "I don't care (about some particular issue) anymore. More than that, I think that can also be a way of saying 'This issue isn't producing enough political mileage now, ...
A little digging can uncover interesting remnants of what was. As exhALANt wrote in his latest blog post (see sidebar): Tony Ryall once proclaimed at a Health Conference this blogger attended (as part of the job with RNZCGP) “Primary care is not our ...
Perfect definition of 'Progress' and 'Growth'. Here's the second line: We're all trapped on a bus, the night is dark.
Those interests always run true to form with hole picking. They'll manage to shred their own arguments if they're not careful.
Get real. If all your points were somehow squeezed into the three brief minutes allotted to the PM for her speech, she'd have had to talk as breathlessly fast as the current leader of the Opposition does every time he sees a microphone.
Indeed. Considering how many amendments the US Constitution has accumulated since it was ratified about 230 years ago in 1788, it's amazing to learn that most of the current cabal of SCOTUS 'judges' have relatively recently discovered a need to take the ...
Also much favoured by certain radio 'hosts' who seem to believe that the faster they speak and the more ground they cover, the more people will give up and agree - the Gish Gallop could go with the Goebbels Gavotte - say an awful lot often and fast on as ...
The ways in which the machinery of government supplies that 'higher level of accuracy' to ministers always seem invisible to busy fault-finders. Sometimes it's worth lifting a corner of the rug to see if something has quietly been brushed under it, who ...
Here you go Ross, looking at the date of an article can help. Chester Borrows saw his hopeful bill passed 13 years ago. Borrows, who introduced the bill to allow Whanganui District Council to ban gang patches in the region, agreed it “was very difficult to...
The disingenuous finesse of your selection from that report is impressive. Who'd have known without reading it that brave Gerry Brownlie has accused the Minister of not doing her job, and there's a handy parrot quote from Winston Peters. They have both ...
Here is something good for a gloomy Tuesday full of fractious arguments. Reading this essay reminds me of the way a determined government and almost all the rest of us could harness our own 'immense power of citizenry' when the pandemic first hit us in ...
Have you never been to Te Papa or Wellington Hospital and stopped to put your hand on the great pounamu boulder in one or other of those foyers? Or been moved to tears in front of Roimata Pounamu, Tears on Greenstone, the largest jade (nephrite) structure ...
Regard our cute replica placentas! Flaunting our blood tie without needing to admit it? And why do you mutter about Georgia O'Keefe, who's that? Anyway, how very dare you question our ineffable bravery - who do you think you are, our mothers?
Luxon admitted his lack of experience, and said "I will learn." Hmmm, sounds faintly like somebody who decides to be an opera singer after hearing Pavarotti on a foreign trip. In spite of a tin ear, with a useful inheritance he has booked a few lessons ...
This might interest you aj, if you aren't already aware of it. The inspiration for this film was Jeff Sharlet's 2008 book The Family - The secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power. The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist ...
Read this for a powerful sense of history happening since time began while we're not paying attention: Tolstoy’s path to pacifism No writer captures warfare in Russia more poignantly than Tolstoy, a former soldier turned Russia’s most famous pacifist. In ...
Nice taut retort. This might fit in here, given the relentless demands for certainty from 'business' as if that's ever possible in this life. In the pandemic we have had to live with Volatility, Uncertainty, Conflict and Ambiguity. If a friend's ...
To the point as ever mac1. Your 'and at the end, large tombs' shows the fantasies buried under that list perfectly. History lurches with such turning points, in which systemic corruption, or the reaction against it, changed the course of world events. This...
Woods chose it with great precision, That being the case, why has everybody assumed he meant people – isn't it more likely that his carefully chosen words referred to ideas? There is a river of violence and menace There is a river of anti-Semitism There is...
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