We are the high and mighty Lords of Bizness, therefor if We do anything illegal it is obviously SOMEONE ELSES fault,
The fishing company Sanfords has been fined by the US courts for dumping liquid waste in the sea off the coast of American Samoa,
4 million bucks and a years ban from fishing in US waters seems like a fairly light punishment for dumping liquid waste,including what appears to have been some oil contaminate, and you would think that the fishing company involved would have simply paid the fine and hung it’s head in contrition,
Not likely, on RadioNZ National News at 8.00 this morning there is a Rep from the fishing industry, i didn’t catch his name or whether or not He was attached to Sanfords, laying the blame for the waste dumping at the feet of Government inspectors,
According to the Brainless Prick speaking for the fishing industry if those who inspect such ships on behalf of the Government had of picked up the fact that the waste piping had been altered in such a way as to allow the dumping they,( the inspectors), could have stopped the Sanford ship from leaving port here in New Zealand and the ship wouldn’t have been able to dump it’s s**t off of the coast of American Samoa,
Anyone reading the Standard and not understanding the allusion often made in these pages to the Bizness sector being staffed at the management and board level by a bunch of psycho and sociopaths need only listen to that news item for some enlightening education…
I heard the same piece while milking, which means I wasn’t giving it my full attention. However my impression was that the speaker as not trying in any way to excuse Sandford but was trying to draw attention to the fact that, yet again, Government regulators once again seem to have been captured by the Industy they are supposed to be regulating.
Also I’m not sure it’s fair to see the whole incident as some devious and intricate conspiracy by Sandford management and board of directors to shave a few cents off its operating costs. The charges against the company were that it was ‘vicariously liable’ for the acts of the boat’s crew, and my money would be on this being yet another case of incompetence and carelessness at the top in leaving the detail to others further down the chain who cut corners or adopted a ‘she’ll be all right’ attitude. Certainly the damage to Sandford beside the fine far outweighs any profits this practice might have generated – Shares of Sanford fell 0.3 percent to $3.83 on the NZX and have dropped 6 percent this year. Believe me that plus the international damage to Sandford’s reputation will be of far more importance to the top brass at Sandfords than the details of the plumbing on one of its boats.
So yes, management at Sandfords was slack and incompetent – which makes them pretty typical – as they failed to implement proceedures and appoint the right people to stop people down the chain cutting corners to save themselves a dirty chore. So everything they got they deserved. But if this wasn’t picked up, or worse still was picked up but not followed up, by regulators THAT is the real story.
Why did the regulators let the ship sail if they had picked this up? Did they accept a back-hander from the captain to avoid a delay in sailing any repairs might have entailed? Did they turn a blind eye to it because they have become too pally with the crews they are supposed to check? Is there a revolving door between the industry and the regulators? Did the regulators receive instructions from on high not to look too closely or take too much notice of the minor stuff when compared with basic sea-worthiness, in order to ‘encourage’ the fishing industry to beef up its productivity?
Those are the questions I’d like answers to, and at least someone has raised them on the radio.
I disagree – the real story is firstly that Sanfords as a major fishing company is willing to pollute the very environment that we all (themselves included) rely on to survive and secondly that it incompetence at procedural and inspection levels need to be tightened up.
If you or i saved up all our waste for a month including sewerage and then took it down to the harbour and publicly dumped it off of a wharf all hell would break loose and we would probably end up being thrown in a jail cell,
That is the difference between us and in this instance the Board of Sanfords, everyone agrees that it is the Board which is ultimately responsible for the actions of the Company BUT the Boards of company’s found to be breaking the law are seldom, if ever, held personally responsible for the criminal actions of the company…
Jesus, that’s a long winded advertisement on behalf of the Board of Sanford don’t you think, is it not the Board who is ultimately responsible for the actions of those who conduct the company’s business???,
My opinion is that the Board of Sanford’s must take ultimate responsibility for the dumping of waste whether or not They knew of the practice or not, SO, they got what THEY as a company deserved including the drop in share price which effects the share-holders who in essence appoint the Board,
Please provide ‘the evidence’ that those in Government employment tasked with inspecting the particular ship in question were in any way ‘bribed’ to ignore the particular ship’s ability to illegally dump waste into the sea,AND, ‘the evidence’ that these inspectors actually KNEW the dumping was taking place,
Your denigration of these inspectors borders on the defamatory and is simply a reinforcement of the ‘Bizness model’ of blaming the inspectors for the criminal behaviour of Sanford’s….
PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…
Yes, the Board and management at Sandford’s are ultimately responsible for their ships dumping waste at sea. No-one is disputing that, that I’m aware of.
I’m suggesting they didn’t know it was going on. I’m even suggesting they shouldn’t be expected to know it was going on as this involves operational matters at a very low and specialist level. What they should have done and clearly failed to do was to set up the systems and employ the people who should have known and who should have stopped it. This I say is poor management and incompetence on their part which has now been rightly exposed. You seem to be suggesting that at the very highest levels of management, decisions were taken to save a few dollars in a multi-million dollar operation by tweaking some very obscure plumbing in one of their boats. I say that’s nonsense.
You were the one saying that there are Government inspectors/regulators tasked with inspecting these boats to ensure they can’t/don’t pollute the oceans. IF that’s the case then, as the commentator on the radio pointed out, they clearly failed to do their job. This might have been because:
a) they were incompetent,
b) they were paid not to see it
c) they saw it but didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’
e) they think there’s a good chance they might be looking for work in the Industry as Marine Engineers or whatever sometime soon, or have just come from the Industry and don’t want to draw attention to things they did themselves
f) they’ve been instructed by their own seniors not to worry about ‘minor’ or ‘technical’ breaches of the regulations as some-one above them doesn’t want the Fishing Industy hobbled with ‘trivia’.
g) they were short-staffed and too busy to make a proper inspection.
g) I can’t think of any others but feel free to add any other reasons the ship might have sailed in breach of the regs.
To my mind it is important that we know why a(nother) Government agency failed to do its job properly but if you’re happy to blame all the world’s problems on evil, conniving capitalists I don’t give a damn.
“PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…” Actually ‘the Company’ was found guilty vicariously for the acts of certain of its employees. Neither the ‘management’ nor ‘the Board’ were found guilty or any any way personally liable.
Ha….Ha…Ha…For a lesson in how the capitalists shift the blame that’s just perfect, I am not the one who suggested that there are Government inspectors tasked with doing any such thing,
The dickhead on the news this morning representing the fishing industry is the one suggesting that and then like you attempts to blame those inspectors for the criminal actions of the company,
The piping that allowed the emptying of the ships waste into the sea might for all i (or you) know be perfectly legal, it is the actions of dumping the waste illegally that are in question,
The point you make that the Board did not hire management of sufficient intelligence to stop the dumping of the waste is still the responsibility of the Board, the fact that the Board had not issued specific directives about the dumping of waste simply makes them as culpable as those who thought it a good idea to ditch the waste at sea,
I also belatedly notice that you have abhorently blamed the ‘workers’ aboard the Sanford ship for the waste dumping, claiming, again with the provision of not the slightest scrap of evidence, that it was the workers dumping the waste to avoid having to engage in a ‘dirty chore’ at some later point,
The fact that you make these unfounded allegations simply proves the point that i make and illuminates you personally as a prize wanker…
Oh I agree I don’t know why the waste was dumped. However it seems to me reasonable to assume that separating waste oil for storage on board and then disposing of it ‘responsibly’ at a later stage is a dirty and onerous chore compared with just pumping it overboard.
And I’m afraid I do blame the crew of the boat for dumping the waste, unless you are suggesting that the senior management and Board of Sanfords had themselves helicoptered out to the boat as it worked ‘off the coast of American Samoa” and did this nefarious deed themselves while the crew attended a prayer meeting or something below decks.
As far as I can tell from the press reports none of the crew themselves have been charged with this ‘crime’ – responsibility has been quite rightly sheeted home to their employer for failing to take the proper steps to stop what should not have happened from happening.
The ‘crew’ on a ship such as what Sanford’s use as fishing trawlers DO NOT unilaterally DO ANYTHING that they have not been told to do by a senior officer,
IE, the crew don’t even chip paint unless the order comes from on high, you are in fact saying 2 things at once here,(in other words being a wanker),the crew may have been involved in the physical actions of turning on the taps which dumped the waste,BUT, for this to happen orders must have been given,
This simply begs the question of the ‘practice and why the ship wasn’t put into port when the waste tanks were full which in my mind if i were running such a ship would come down to a simple matter of (a), the cost,and (b), the risk of being caught dumping the waste at sea,
These are NOT equations that are made by the crew, on a ship such as this one there is a large amount of doubt in my mind at least that even the Captain would be making such decisions, such decisions of whether or not the ship stayed at sea fishing would be made via radio communication with the company back in New Zealand and would be based upon the gross amount of catch in the hold,
The company in New Zealand would have weighed up the cost/risk equation against a backdrop of what would be the cost of putting into American Samoa to empty the waste or dump some or all of it in the sea thus allowing the ship to continue fishing until the ships capacity to store fish had been reached,
The alternative, if there were even the facilities in American Samoa, were to put into American Samoa or steam home to New Zealand to discharge the waste,
It is obvious that the company in New Zealand has opted to have the ship stay at sea fishing believing it could ‘get away’ with dumping the waste…
The ‘crew’ on a ship such as what Sanford’s use as fishing trawlers DO NOT unilaterally DO ANYTHING that they have not been told to do by a senior officer,
While I have some sympathy for the crew, I can’t help but wonder where I might have heard that excuse before…
Yeah sure Mac,are you a secret anarchist??? we all follow orders Mac, if your in the employ of someone and you don’t follow orders,(requests to direct your labour),then you don’t stay in that employment for long,
Even if we are not in employment we all follow the orders of society as expressed within the laws and statutes of the society we inhabit, other wise that society has places such as jails and phsychiatric facilities where you are removed to,
I assume you mean the guards excuse for having helped operate the death camps, to have objected and refused would have simply resulted in the guards being subjected to much the same treatment as the detainees in the death camp,
The crew of fishing boats aint Green-Peace activists, perhaps you think that en masse the crew should have refused to dump the waste and joined the unemployed in the ever elongating queue so as the rest of the country could look down upon and denigrate them…
preserve one’s job
everyone does it
Nuremburg defense should have worked
Fishing crews aren’t environmentalists, so it’s not their job.
That’s a fairly morally bankrupt list.
Should the crews go to prison? Nope, probably not. But they are still responsible for their own actions, just as you or I am. We choose which orders we obey, and why.
The bigger worry is: how much of the same is going on and the culprits are never caught? Dumping rubbish seem to be common practice – why else is it that the North Pacific and Atlantic have large “islands” of waste, mostly plastic floating just beneath the water surface? What does this do to the ecosystem in regards to weather, oxygen exchange, sea creatures and plankton etc. Seems that a lot of lip service is going on but not much else.
PS, of course my comment above is me being nice to the Sanfords, we might all learn some time in the future that the dumping of waste products by the company is ‘normal practice’ in New Zealand waters,
If we do learn this at some future point in time i for one will not be surprised in the least…
Halides (what you find in our treated water) are scientifically shown to cause hardening of the arteries. We NEVER hear about this in the news.
A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.
Moral of the story? Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
“A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.”
Which would be rather contra-indicated by the massive increase in life expectancy and improvement in quality of life for those over 70 that have come about in the last 20-30 years.
Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
Absolute Bullshit.
The amount of chlorine added to water in this country is very minimal, typically at about 0.7 ppm at the treatment plant and usually less than 0.3 ppm by the time it gets to your tap. That’s almost nothing.
This is quite different to the practise overseas (often the USA) where much higher levels ( 1.5 -2.5 ppm) are commonplace AND the levels of organics in the water are neither measured nor removed. This creates a problem where the chlorine and the organics can react to create trihalomethanes which are potentially carcinogenic. In this country the plant operators monitor and control for organics and chlorine dosing very tightly. The NZ Drinking Water Standard is very advanced when compared to much of the rest of the world.
Fluoride is also added at very low levels, also 0.7 ppm. This is not actually all that higher than what is typically found in the natural sources:
Fluoride is usually found naturally in low concentration in drinking water and foods. The concentration in seawater averages 1.3 parts per million (ppm). Fresh water supplies generally contain between 0.01–0.3 ppm, whereas the ocean contains between 1.2 and 1.5 ppm.
The treatment process actually reduces the amount of fluoride that was in the raw water to almost zero; the fluoride dosing after treatment merely returns what was taken out and then increases it to a standardised level somewhat above that. Again the level is pretty low and realistically does not represent a risk all that much higher than the natural background.
You might also want to consider that there are water supplies in New Zealand that have been non-fluoridated for a very long time now and there has been zero evidence that this has made any difference whatsoever. People who have lived on tank water all their lives … still get heart-attacks.
As for home filters. These have to be changed on a regular basis, otherwise they become a very real and definite health risk in themselves. If the municipal water treatment operators allowed their filter systems to operate for months or years without backwashing (the equivalent of changing your home filter) there would be a huge health risk, and prosecutions would result.
But somehow when people at home do exactly the same thing with filters they leave in place unchanged for ages … blissfully delude themselves that they’re doing the ‘right thing’ for their health.
Oh I don’t know so much joe … Dwight Lundell may have been struck off for defying the conventional wisdom … but he’s far from being alone on this topic. One for instance:
Indeed. Attacking the messenger is a tactic we should be wary of.
You can’t get much more mainstream than the US CDC and even they are looking into this. Here they discuss a theory of general inflammation caused by contemporary lifestyle factors (“metaflammation”), which might lead to the development of modern chronic diseases – like heart disease.
Gary Taubes (award winning science journalist), and Effe Ravnskov (medical researcher) are also among the reputable people who challenge the fat hypothesis. Taube’s book Good Calories, Bad Calories has a fascinating few chapters on the history of medical research and why we ended up with the wrong public health advice about fat, cholesterol and heart disease.
My own circumstance RL where weight was never a worry the stubbornly high cholesterol level which familial comparisons indicated was unlikely to be hereditary was a concern. The first remedy was a close watch on my diet, the second was a dairy/protein watch and the third was a carbohydrate watch and still the high levels persisted. So I tried a mostly vegetarian and then for 20 or so weeks a vegan diet and apart from being perpetually hungry and a return to the fighting weight of my youth nothing really changed.
So I’m back to eating what gandma ate and statins it is.
VV, ae. Recently through a Whāngai connection I’ve been involved with organising accommodation for some people who, while they’re hardly destitute, are struggling financially quite simply because of the lack of education and skills and paralleled with those factors is a deep seated suspicion of the establishment.
But it’s not the distrust of the services, police etc, that’s the worry, fuck, in the most I agree with them, it’s the anti-fluoride, anti-vaccination attitudes with a couple of world government references thrown in that are. The where and who these attitudes came from concerns me greatly.
I think we might be one of two or three countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise in magazines and on tv.
The bloke who set the theory on cholesterol that the heart foundations around the world have endorsed for too long now was a ‘marine biologist’. Ancel Keys was the same man that put cigarettes into the US Army’s “K-rations” (long time before anyone admitted that smoking was a causal effect of heart disease)
Statin studies have been showing little effect except on men under 20 or some such age (i read these in “Sweet Poison” David Gillespie, 2010). A man (lawyer) motivated by the truth.
Dwight Lundell may be a poor financial whizz and not a surgeon of a gold standard, but he is brave enough to go against the BIG pharmaceuticals and food manufacturers (this is dangerous or mutiny for many health workers) and point out that our bodies are treating our food like ‘foreign particles’ cos thats exactly what our ‘food’ is these days. This is besides ‘experts’ trying to sell books or trendy ideas.
People who struggle financially are more likely to eat food that is cheaper and less likely to be real food and more likely to have added sugar to make it taste like food.
Yep. And the more one reads up about how the American “Food Pyramid” was actually constructed by industry interests, how their recommendations for sugar consumption were reached, etc. the more cynical one becomes.
@Joe, The drug cartels are making billions of dollars off heart medications.
An american doctor i visited was astonished that nz’ers with heart problems were
given asprin to thin the blood.
Weight doesn’t go hand in hand with a high
cholestarol either,my mother was a tiny lady
and had high cholestarol.
A really good trick is to lower the guidelines for what counts as an “acceptable” cholesterol level bu just a smidgeon, and voila out of thin air, millions of new statin customers world wide are created, each one worth hundreds of dollars to the pharmaceutical companies.
Quote: “Some loansharks even require clients to sign power of attorney, allowing lenders to make all kinds of financial decisions on a borrower’s behalf.”
Pretty shocking for me to read that this is occuring. Something has to be done asap.
Charles Chauvel bless him, had some legislation he was trying to get through regarding loan sharks – not sure if it has anything about this in it but I’m picking it won’t.
The Agent under a Power of Attorney is REQUIRED to act in the principal’s best interest. The agent MUST always follow the principal’s directions and holds a fiduciary duty which requires him to always act with the HIGHEST DEGREE OF GOOD FAITH in behalf of their principals.
A Power of Attorney is revocable at any time and no reason is necessary. A simple written revocation suffices – no legalese is specified as long is intent (and capacity) are apparent.
The Agent cannot profit by any transaction where he represents the principal’s interests,
nor make a gift or otherwise transfer any of the principal’s money, personal property or real estate to himself unless the power of attorney explicitly states he can do so.
A court will declare a power of attorney invalid if the court finds that the principal lacked mental competency when the power of attorney was executed, or that the principal was the victim of fraud or UNDUE INFLUENCE.
Given the above I would have thought that a Power of Attorney would be of very little use to a loanshark, particularly as a court declaring a PoA invalid could make the agent personally liable to the principal for any sums improperly disbursed.
Of course this depends upon the debtor having sufficient access legal help to undo the damage but that’s going to be the case whatever arm-twisting methods the loanshark employs and whatever remedies Parliament might in its glacial wisdom enact into New Zealand law.
Really??? has the plum in your mouth migrated to your brain thus stifling your ability to think beyond the point of ‘self interest’,
Yes, you are quite correct in the ‘facts’ of what you say about ‘powers of attorney’, BUT, you only have to think for 1 or 2 seconds about the decile of people that ‘use’ the services of such loan sharks,
Many do not have English as a first language, have very limited knowledge of the law, and, are obviously fucking broke and desperate, the former indicating that they would have no ability to hire a lawyer to get such matter into a courtroom in the first place even if they had the understanding of the laws that we do…
PS, from anecdotal evidence the power of attorney gained by the loan-shark is used at the loan recipient’s bank to advance the automatic payment of the loan ahead of any other automatic payments that might be paid from that account…
Time for for the Green Party to publicly promote anti-climate change legislation that will challenge Australians to demand the same?
Or time for grubby public and backroom haggling over cabinet positions?
As the Ausralian heatwave disaster continues to roll on.
Blaming the citizenry for lack of action over climate change and ridiculous sanctimonious demands to use composting toilets and cycle to work won’t cut it. Central government regulatory initiative is urgently required. Instead of down playing climate change for electoral advantage, the Green Party should be actively calling for such action to be taken.
Why won’t they do it?
Are they corrupted?
Are they cowards?
Are they stupid?
“Today’s report warns that heat waves will become hotter longer and more frequent.” ABC News.
The climate commission was set up two years ago to inform Australians about climate change.
Professor David Karoly is the author of that report and he joins me now from Melbourne….
Louise Criely For ABC TV News
Sitting here in New Zealand it may be hard to guage the psychological effect on those suffering through this heatwave, and now being informed by their climate scientists, that future heatwaves will be twice, too three times, more extreme. In my opinion Australians would be very interrested in any serious actions being promoted in New Zealand to halt climate change.
Australia’s average temperature has increased by 0.9 of a degree since 1910, and the report says small changes in average temperature can have a significant impact on the frequency and nature of extreme weather events.
Professor Karoly says, based on current projections of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the long-term outlook is even more dire.
“We are expecting in the next 50 years for two to three degrees more warming,” he said.
“In other words two or three times the warming we’ve seen already leading to much greater increases in heatwaves and extreme fire danger days.
Watch the following interview, though the camera doesn’t spend much time on her, notice the body language of Louise Criely as she begins to look increasingly uncomfortable as the interview continues, struggling not to bite her lip and shifting in her chair.
Professor Karoly: What we have been trying to do is look at these longer term trends in the context of what we have seen in the last week or so….
We have set a new record for;
The hottest temperature,
The hottest average temperature, over Australia.
We have had more extensive heat over Australia.
A dome of hot air has been located over Australia for the most of last week.
We have had a longer lasting heatwave.
We’ve six days where the average maximum temperature has been hotter than 39 degrees celcius. The previous record was only three days where the average maximum temperature was hotter than that.
Louise Criely: So what’s your outlook now for Australian summers?
Professor Karoly: Not every summer will be hotter than the one before. In fact this year is markedly hotter than the last couple of years when we had relatively milder and wetter conditions.
But what we are going to find on average is more of the hot extremes and faster increases in the future, over the next 10 and 30 years, that we have seen over the last 30 years – more hot extremes, more heatwaves and more extreme fire conditions.
Professor Karoly: Climate scientists have been talking about these increases for more than 20 years in Australia. We are now seeing exactly what was predicted more than 20 years ago
Louise Criely: So what action should policy makers take from the report?
Professor Karoly: We know that climate change is getting worse due to increasing green house gases in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
So if we want to slow down climate change we need to reduce the emissions of green house gases into the atmosphere. We can do that by changing our energy sources….
It actually is capitalist societies that promote buying over renting. It benefits the bankers, and those at the top of the housing ladder.
Yes, have money in the bank and I can tell you this, banks all want to meet with you not to thank you for your money, but to get you in to debt with property so the bank actually can make money off you. Getting people into debt politically makes them slaves to voting for policies to keep interest rates lower and property valuations up. Then they pay the debt off when older and want the opposite. I do not agree with the incentives of encouraging people to get into debt who cannot afford or want it yet it is a vote winner. And in business, most entrepreneurs will tell you, never do with your own money what the bank or others will give to you and you can profit from.
Cactus also correctly asks when NZ is going to benefit once more from true political debate of issues. Debate from actually different points of view on the political continuum, instead of this perennial tepid crowding into the political economic “centre”.
Except for the Romans, and the Jews were allowed to charge non-Jews interest (Deuteronomy 23:20 – “Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.”. And even Muslim banks have a form of interest that gets around their Koranic restrictions. While individuals may have preached against usury in various ancient culture, it has tended not to be observed in the breech.
well, I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain, In the desert, you can remember your name…la,la,la la la la…
was walking down the street early this morning…And I swear I heard the voices singing to me…
I was approached by a boy (16 years old ) and his younger friend to buy some “K2” for them from the Adult Shop (it was Closed) freakin Asparagrass.
It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, if you’ve done it once then you’ll do it again, it’s a fine fine line between pleasure and pain!
As people shift from place to place, as they construct more pliable, less rooted patterns of life, what was once solid melts into air, to recall a comment of Marx.
Rod Oram’s article today on Stuff is well worth a read, and I’d be interested in comments on it from those more knowledgeable about economics than me. he begins:
This will be the make or break year for the Key Government’s economic strategy. If it fails to deliver reasonable growth to businesses and consumers the Government will have to defend a poor economic record in next year’s election.
He is pretty pessimistic:
Our dollar will remain high and our exports lacklustre so our current account deficit will increase from 4.5 per cent of GDP in the March 2012 year to 6.5 per cent in 2017; and New Zealand’s net international investment position (ie, what we owe the rest of the world) worsens from 71.9 per cent of GDP to 83.6 per cent. We will remain one of the most indebted of developed countries….
The real reason for our poor performance lies at home. The economy is stuck in its long-standing dependence on low value commodities. Worse, the volume of commodities grows only slowly because of constraints on land, labour, capital and science.
Then does a run-down on significant areas of the economy: export markets (government has hopes for TPP, but resistance is rising internationally), skills and safe workplaces (mixed outlook based on this government’s past record), natural resources (government may do many dodgy things that’ll upset a lot of voters), infrastructure (more RONS, resistance to Auckland rail loop).
Oram concludes:
The Government has taken far too long to get even this far with them; it co-ordinates, sells and executes these policies badly; there are merits in many of the policies but they are not bold enough to shift the economy to a higher growth track; and public resistance to many of the policies is rising.
not wanting to rain on the “optimists” parade, however, from that Guardian article the other day (muchas gracias);
looming on the global Horizon,
-systematic financial crisis
-water supply challenges
-fiscal imbalances (oh look, Above)
-food shortages
-WMD proliferation
-information breakdown
-chronic disease in developing countries (and some developed country not a million miles from Here)
-asset price collapse
-retrenchment from globalization
-pandemics / anti-biotic resistance
-and last, yet not least ( I “Like” this one) Digital / Social Media provocation of social breakdown ;(
However, large-scale migration and immersion in the societal melting-pot has disrupted the mimetic element.
Alienation, and the turn to rigid forms of faith will be coloured by the particularities of religion and historical circumstances.
In a “witty and profound” book, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Perry describes how, as the scientific description of the universe dominates, and because it asserts to be “objective”, it distances people from engagement with the world around them, promoting further existential angst. Furthermore, modern media such as the internet (and tele-evangelism) can serve the Fundamentalist very well. The internet propagates words, and Fundamentalists tend to put great stock in the power of words. Little wonder that they have shown themselves to be early adopters and swift masters of communication online. In addition, there has been in recent decades an emergence of what may be referred to as a militant form of atheism, wherby individuals are as emotionally committed to to science as the sole form of truth as fundamentalists might be to the documents of their faith (Dawk ins) and it seems important to such atheists to dispatch any alternatives to their world-view.
Julian Baggini (an atheist philosopher ) aspires to values of open-mindedness and in his discussion of militant atheists in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, concludes “Hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with an inflexible conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs is antithetical to such values.
All in All, religious fundamentalism and contemporary scientism are cultural cousins.:)
magic books like peer reviewed journals. And of course you need the circles of old wisemen/old wisewomen who each have their own collections of scrolls, and who pass the final judgements on what is good magic and what is not.
Getting paranoid about peer reviewed journals is ridiculous as the findings are always presented in such a way as any scientist with the resources can recreate the experiment. Expressions like “scientism” is a poisonous bye-blow of trying to apply postmodern semiotics to the scientific method.
CV, how I have missed your paranoia. The system has worked well so far, and short of the need for a Large Hadron Collider or something equally hard to come by, there are very few experiments that can’t be independently verified, or at least immediately understood, by competing scientists, companies, or even rival nations. It is impossible to argue with the process of scientific method, nor is there any need to.
“What is clear is that the forms of peer review are protean. Probably the systems of every journal and every grant giving body are different in at least some detail; and some systems are very different. There may even be some journals using the following classic system. The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper. If the reviewers disagree the editor sends it to a third reviewer and does whatever he or she advises. This pastiche—which is not far from systems I have seen used—is little better than tossing a coin, because the level of agreement between reviewers on whether a paper should be published is little better than you’d expect by chance.
That is why Robbie Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked `publish’ and `reject’. He also joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. When I was editor of the BMJ I was challenged by two of the cleverest researchers in Britain to publish an issue of the journal comprised only of papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. I wrote back `How do you know I haven’t already done it?'”
“CONCLUSION
So peer review is a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative, and scientists and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.”
It’s a human system. But still light years ahead of religion or nutbars who think that surfing equally delusional and pseudo-scientific web pages deserves the term “autodidactic”.
Interesting link CV. Cheers. Being a cynic, my first thought was “Well, the capitalists will love it because it preserves the idea of inbuilt obsolescence.” And my second thought was to do with ‘dis-assembly’. It’s one thing to (chemically?) deconstruct carpet square fibres and bases (melting), but a computer? How does that work without the immense amounts of toxic waste that process currently entails? I’m suspicious that there’s a silver lining being promoted here while a great big black cloud is being ignored. So, I’ll away and read up on it a bit further… no democracy I notice
The Ardern Government’s chickens came home to roost yesterday with the news that the country is short of natural gas. In 2018, Labour banned offshore petroleum exploration, and industry executives say that the attendant loss of confidence by the industry impacted overall investment in onshore gas fields. Energy Resources Minister ...
Hi,If you’ve been digging through the newly launched Webworm store (orders are being dispatched worldwide as I type!) you’ll have noticed the best model we had was Calvin.This is Calvin.Calvin.Calvin is 7, and is the son of my producer over on Flightless Bird, Rob — aka “Wobby Wob”. Rob also ...
This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). Climate change is everywhere. And when something's everywhere it can feel like it's nowhere. So how do we get our heads ...
Its a law like gravity: whenever a right-wing government is elected, they start attacking democracy. And now, after talking to their Republican and Tory and Fidesz chums at the International Democracy Union forum in Wellington, National is doing it here, announcing plans to remove election-day enrolment. Or, to put it ...
Yesterday Winston Peters focussed his attention on the important matter at hand. Tweeting. Like the former, and quite possibly next, orange POTUS, from whom he takes much of his political strategy, Winston is an avid X’er.His message didn’t resemble an historic address this time. In fact it was more reminiscent ...
Buzz from the Beehive A significant decline in natural gas production has given Resources Minister Shane Jones an opportunity to reiterate his enthusiasm for the mining and burning of coal. For good measure, he has praised an announcement from Genesis Energy that it will resume importing coal. He and Energy ...
“Follow the money” is the classic directive to journalists trying to understand where power and influence lie in society. In terms of uncovering who influences various New Zealand political parties and governments, it therefore pays to look at who is funding them. The political parties are legally obliged to make ...
Rob MacCullough writes – Here is my subjective ranking on a “most-left” to “most-right” scale of most of our major NZ Universities, with some anecdotal (and at times amusing) evidence to back up the claim.Extreme Left Auckland University of TechnologyEvidenceThe ...
Eric Crampton writes – I hadn’t thought about this one until a helpful email showed up in my inbox.It’s pretty obvious that income tax thresholds should automatically index with inflation – whether to anchor the thresholds in percentiles of the income distribution, or to anchor against a real ...
Jacqui Van Der Kaay writes – Parliament’s speaker had no option but to refer Green MP Julie Anne Genter to the Privileges Committee for her behaviour in the House last Wednesday evening. The incident, in which she crossed the floor to wave a book and yell at National ...
Gary Judd writes – The Dean of the law school at the Auckland University of Technology is someone called Khylee Quince. I have been sent her social media posting in which she has, over the LawNews headline “Senior King’s Counsel files complaint about compulsory tikanga Maori studies for ...
Cleo Paskal writes – WASHINGTON, D.C.: ‘Many of us have received phone calls from [the opposing camp] telling them if they join the camp they will be given projects for their wards and $300,000 [around US$35,000] each’, says former Malaita Premier Daniel Suidani. The elections in Solomon Islands aren’t ...
With hindsight, it was inevitable that (a) Hamas would agree to the ceasefire deal brokered by Egypt and Qatar and that ( b) Israel would then immediately launch attacks on Rafah, regardless. We might have hoped the concessions made by Hamas would cause Israel to desist from slaughtering thousands more ...
Placards and mourners outside the Kilbirnie Mosque following the Christchurch terror attack: MSD has terminated the Kaiwhakaoranga service, which has been used by 415 families since the attacks. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: The Government’s pledge to only cut ‘back office’ staff rather than ‘frontline’ services is on increasingly shaky ground, with ...
There’s been a few smaller public transport announcements over the last week or so that I thought I’d cover in a single post. Fareshare I’ve long called for Auckland Transport to offer a way to enable employer-subsidised public transport options. The need for this took on even more importance ...
Parliament’s speaker had no option but to refer Green MP Julie Anne Genter to the Privileges Committee for her behaviour in the House last Wednesday evening. The incident, in which she crossed the floor to wave a book and yell at National Minister Matt Doocey, reflects poorly on Genter and ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
Who likes being sneered at? Nobody. Worse yet, when the sneerer has their facts all wrong, and might well be an idiot.The sneer in question is The adults are in charge now, and it is a sneer offered in retort to criticism of this new Government, no matter how well ...
When in government, Labour pushed to extend the Parliamentary term to four years, to reduce accountability and our ability to vote out a bad government. And now, they're trying to do it through the member's ballot, with a Four-Year Parliamentary Term Legislation Bill. The bill at least requires a referendum ...
A ballot for a single Member's Bill was held today, and the following bill was drawn: Public Works (Prohibition of Compulsory Acquisition of Māori Land) Amendment Bill (Hūhana Lyndon) The bill would prevent the government from stealing Māori land in breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It ...
Simeon Brown, alongside Wayne Brown, is favouring a political figleaf now in exchange for loading up tens of millions in extra interest costs on Auckland ratepayers. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s is pushing back hard at suggestions from Local Government Minister Simeon Brown and Mayor Wayne Brown ...
Buzz from the Beehive One headline-grabber from the Beehive yesterday was the OECD’s advice that the government must bring the Budget deficit under control or face higher interest rates. Another was the announcement of a $1.9 billion “investment” in Corrections over the next four years. In the best interests of ...
Chris Trotter writes – Had Zheng He’s fleet sailed east, not west, in the early Fifteenth Century, how different our world would be. There is little reason to suppose that the sea-going junks of the Ming Dynasty, among the largest and most sophisticated sailing vessels ever constructed, would have failed ...
David Farrar writes – Two articles give a useful contrast in balance. Both seek to be neutral explainer articles. This one in the Herald on Social Investment covers the pros and cons nicely. It links to critical pieces and talks about aspects that failed and aspects that are more ...
The tikanga regulations will compel law students to be taught that a system which does not conform with the rule of law is nevertheless law which should be observed and applied…Gary Judd KC writes – I have made a complaint to Parliament’s Regulation ...
The future of Te Huia, the train between Hamilton and Auckland, has been getting a lot of attention recently as current funding for it is only in place till the end of June. The government initially agreed to a five year trial, through to April 2026, but that was subject ...
TL;DR: Hamas has just agreed to Israel’s ceasefire plan. Nelson hospital’s rebuild has been cut back to save money. The OECD suggests New Zealand break up network monopolies, including in electricity. PM Christopher Luxon’s news conference on a prison expansion announcement last night was his messiest yet.Here’s my top six ...
A homicide in Ponsonby, a manhunt with a killer on the run. The nation’s leader stands before a press conference reassuring a frightened nation that he’ll sort it out, he’ll keep them safe, he’ll build some new prison spaces.Sorry what? There’s a scary dude on the run with a gun ...
Hi,I know it’s been awhile since there’s been any Webworm merch — and today that all changes!Over the last four months, I’ve been working with New Zealand artist Jess Johnson to create a series of t-shirts, caps and stickers that are infused with Webworm DNA — and as of right ...
The OECD’s chief economist yesterday laid it on the line for the new Government: bring the deficit under control or face higher Reserve Bank interest rates for longer. And to bring the deficit under control, she meant not borrowing for tax cuts. But there was more. Without policy changes—introducing a ...
After a hiatus of over four months Selwyn Manning and I finally got it together to re-start the “A View from Afar” podcast series. We shall see how we go but aim to do 2 episodes per month if possible. … Continue reading → ...
In 2008, the UK Parliament passed the Climate Change Act 2008. The law established a system of targets, budgets, and plans, with inbuilt accountability mechanisms; the aim was to break the cycle of empty promises and replace it with actual progress towards emissions reduction. The law was passed with near-universal ...
Buzz from the Beehive Local Water Done Well – let’s be blunt – is a silly name, but the first big initiative to put it into practice has gone done well. This success is reflected in the headline on an RNZ report:District mayors welcome Auckland’s new water deal with ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate ConnectionsA farmworker cleans the solar panels of a solar water pump in the village of Jagadhri, Haryana Country, India. (Photo credit: Prashanth Vishwanathan/ IWMI) Decisions made in India over the next few years will play a key role in global ...
Lindsay Mitchell writes – The Children’s Minister, Karen Chhour, intends to repeal Section 7AA from the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 because it creates conflict between claimed Crown Treaty obligations and the child’s best interests. In her words, “Oranga Tamariki’s governing principles and its act should be colour ...
Geoffrey Miller writes – The gloves are off. That might seem to be the undertone of surprisingly tough talk from New Zealand’s foreign and trade ministers. Winston Peters, the foreign minister, may be facing legal action after making allegations about former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr on Radio New Zealand. ...
Brian Easton writes – This is about the time that the Treasury will be locking up its economic forecasts to be published in the 2024 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) on budget day, 30 May. I am not privy to what they will be (I will report on them ...
TL;DR:Winston Peters is reported to have won a budget increase for MFAT. David Seymour wanted his Ministry of Regulation to be three times bigger than the Productivity Commission. Simeon Brown is appointing a Crown Monitor to Watercare to protect the Claytons Crown Guarantee he had to give ratings agencies ...
The gloves are off. That might seem to be the undertone of surprisingly tough talk from New Zealand’s foreign and trade ministers. Winston Peters, the foreign minister, may be facing legal action after making allegations about former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr on Radio New Zealand. Carr had made highly ...
I could be a florist'Round the corner from Rye LaneI'll be giving daisies to craziesBut, baby, I'll wrap you up real safe Oh, I can give you flowers At the end of every dayFor the center of your table, a rainbowIn case you have people 'round to stay Depending on ...
TL;DR: The six key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to May 12 include:PM Christopher Luxon is scheduled to hold a post-Cabinet news conference at 4 pm today. Finance Minister Nicola Willis will give a pre-budget speech on Thursday.Parliament sits from Question Time at 2pm on ...
The price of the foreign affairs “reset” is now becoming apparent, with Defence set to get a funding boost in the Budget. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has confirmed that it will be one of the few votes, apart from Health and Education and possibly Police, which will get an increase ...
A listing of 26 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 28, 2024 thru Sat, May 4, 2024. Story of the week "It’s straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. In fact, research by John Cook and his colleagues ...
Yesterday I received come lovely feedback following my Star Wars themed newsletter. A few people mentioned they’d enjoyed reading the personal part at the beginning.I often begin newsletters with some memories, or general thoughts, before commencing the main topic. This hopefully sets the mood and provides some context in which ...
April 30 was going to be the day we’d be calling Mum from London to wish her a happy birthday. Then it became the day we would be going to St. Paul's at Evensong to remember her. The aim of the cathedral builders was to find a way to make their ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – Can’t remember the last book by a Kiwi author you read? Think the NZ government should spend less on the arts in favor of helping the homeless? If so, as far as Newsroom is concerned, you probably deserve to be called a cultural ignoramus ...
Eric Crampton writes – Grudges are bad. Better to move on. But it can be fun to keep a couple of really trivial ones, so you’re not tempted to have other ones. For example, because of the rootkit fiasco of 2005, no Sony products in our household. ...
A new report warns an estimated third of the adult population have unmet need for health care.Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāHere’s the six key things I learned about Aotaroa’s political economy this week around housing, climate and poverty:Politics - Three opinion polls confirmed support for PM Christopher Luxon ...
Today is May the fourth. Which was just a regular day when my mother took me to see the newly released Star Wars at the Odeon in Rotorua. The queue was right around the corner. Some years later this day became known as Star Wars Day, the date being a ...
Buzz from the Beehive Much more media attention is being paid to something Winston Peters said about former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr than to a speech he delivered to the New Zealand China Council. One word is missing from the speech: AUKUS. But AUKUS loomed large in his considerations ...
Is the economy in another long stagnation? If so, why?This is about the time that the Treasury will be locking up its economic forecasts to be published in the 2024 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) on budget day, 30 May. I am not privy to what they will be ...
The annual list of who's been bribing our politicians is out, and journalists will no doubt be poring over it to find the juiciest and dirtiest bribes. The government's fast-track invite list is likely to be a particular focus, and we already know of one company on the list which ...
In the weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Southern Israel I wrote about the possible 2nd, 3rd and even 4th order effects of the conflict. These included new fronts being opened in the West Bank (with Hamas), Golan … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – It is one of the oldest truisms that there is never a good time for MPs to get a pay rise. This week’s announcement of pay raises of around 2.8% backdated to last October could hardly have come at a worse time, with the ...
David Farrar writes – Newshub reports: Newshub can reveal a fresh allegation of intimidation against Green MP Julie-Anne Genter. Genter is subject to a disciplinary process for aggressively waving a book in the face of National Minister Matt Doocey in the House – but it’s not the first time ...
The Treasury has published a paper today on the global productivity slowdown and how it is playing out in New Zealand: The productivity slowdown: implications for the Treasury’s forecasts and projections. The Treasury Paper examines recent trends in productivity and the potential drivers of the slowdown. Productivity for the whole economy ...
Winston Peters’ comments about former Australian foreign minister look set to be an ongoing headache for both him and Luxon. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for subscribers features co-hosts and , along with regular guests on Gaza and ...
These puppet strings don't pull themselvesYou're thinking thoughts from someone elseHow much time do you think you have?Are you prepared for what comes next?The debating chamber can be a trying place for an opposition MP. What with the person in charge, the speaker, typically being an MP from the governing ...
The land around Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep once stood, in a hood, on the Cobb, is falling into the sea.MerylThe land around Lyme Regis, around the Cobb that made it rich, has always been falling slowly but surely into the sea. Read more ...
Photo by Jari Hytönen on UnsplashIt’s that new day of the week (Thursday rather than Friday) when and I co-host our ‘hoon’ webinar with paying subscribers to The Kākā for an hour at 5 pm. Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream for our chat about the week’s news ...
Buzz from the Beehive Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters was bound to win headlines when he set out his thinking about AUKUS in his speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. The headlines became bigger when – during an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report today – he criticised ...
The Post reports on how the government is refusing to release its advice on its corrupt Muldoonist fast-track law, instead using the "soon to be publicly available" refusal ground to hide it until after select committee submissions on the bill have closed. Fast-track Minister Chris Bishop's excuse? “It's not ...
As pressure on it grows, the livestock industry’s approach to the transition to Net Zero is increasingly being compared to that of fossil fuel interests. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / Getty ImagesTL;DR: Here’s the top five news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above ...
The New Zealand Herald reports – Stats NZ has offered a voluntary redundancy scheme to all of its workers as a way to give staff some control over their “future” amidst widespread job losses in the public sector. In an update to staff this morning, seen by the Herald, Statistics New Zealand ...
On Werewolf/Scoop, I usually do two long form political columns a week. From now on, there will be an extra column each week about music and movies. But first, some late-breaking political events:The rise in unemployment numbers for the March quarter was bigger than expected – and especially sharp ...
The Green Party is welcoming the announcement by the Minister Responsible for RMA Reform Chris Bishop to approve most of the Wellington City Council’s District Plan recommendations. ...
David Seymour has failed to get the sweeping cuts he wanted to the free and healthy school lunch programme, Labour education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said. ...
Hon Willie Jackson has been invited by the Oxford Union to debate the motion “This House Believes British Museums are not Very British’ on May 23rd. ...
Green Party MP Hūhana Lyndon says her Public Works (Prohibition of Compulsory Acquisition of Māori Land) Amendment Bill is an opportunity to right some past wrongs around the alienation of Māori land. ...
A senior, highly respected King’s Counsel with decades of experience in our law courts, Gary Judd KC, has filed a complaint about compulsory tikanga Māori studies for law students - highlighting the utter depths of absurdity this woke cultural madness has taken our society. The tikanga regulations will compel law ...
The Government needs to be clear with the people of the Nelson Marlborough region about the changes it is considering for the Nelson Hospital rebuild, Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall said. ...
Ministers must front up about which projects it will push through under its Fast Track Approvals legislation, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
The Government is again adding to New Zealand’s growing unemployment, this time cutting jobs at the agencies responsible for urban development and growing much needed housing stock. ...
With Minister Karen Chhour indicating in the House today that she either doesn’t know or care about the frontline cuts she’s making to Oranga Tamariki, we risk seeing more and more of our children falling through the cracks. ...
The Labour Party is saddened to learn of the death of Sir Robert Martin, a globally renowned disability advocate who led the way for disability rights both in New Zealand and internationally. ...
Labour is calling for the Government to urgently rethink its coalition commitment to restart live animal exports, Labour animal welfare spokesperson Rachel Boyack said. ...
Today’s Financial Stability Report has once again highlighted that poverty and deep inequality are political choices - and this Government is choosing to make them worse. ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to do more for our households in most need as unemployment rises and the cost of living crisis endures. ...
Unemployment is on the rise and it’s only going to get worse under this Government, Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said. Stats NZ figures show the unemployment rate grew to 4.3 percent in the March quarter from 4 percent in the December quarter. “This is the second rise in unemployment ...
The New Zealand Labour Party welcomes the entering into force of the European Union and New Zealand free trade agreement. This agreement opens the door for a huge increase in trade opportunities with a market of 450 million people who are high value discerning consumers of New Zealand goods and ...
The National-led Government continues its fiscal jiggery pokery with its Pharmac announcement today, Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall says. “The government has increased Pharmac funding but conceded it will only make minimal increases in access to medicine”, said Ayesha Verrall “This is far from the bold promises made to fund ...
This afternoon’s interim Waitangi Tribunal report must be taken seriously as it affects our most vulnerable children, Labour children’s spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime. ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
Your Excellency Ambassador Meredith, Members of the Diplomatic Corps and Ambassadors from European Union Member States, Ministerial colleagues, Members of Parliament, and other distinguished guests, Thank you everyone for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen - In diplomacy, we often speak of ‘close’ and ‘long-standing’ relations. ...
The Therapeutic Products Act (TPA) will be repealed this year so that a better regime can be put in place to provide New Zealanders safe and timely access to medicines, medical devices and health products, Associate Health Minister Casey Costello announced today. “The medicines and products we are talking about ...
The Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop, today released his decision on twenty recommendations referred to him by the Wellington City Council relating to its Intensification Planning Instrument, after the Council rejected those recommendations of the Independent Hearings Panel and made alternative recommendations. “Wellington notified its District Plan on ...
Rape Awareness Week (6-10 May) is an important opportunity to acknowledge the continued effort required by government and communities to ensure that all New Zealanders can live free from violence, say Ministers Karen Chhour and Louise Upston. “With 1 in 3 women and 1 in 8 men experiencing sexual violence ...
Associate Education Minister David Seymour has today announced that the Government will be delivering a more efficient Healthy School Lunches Programme, saving taxpayers approximately $107 million a year compared to how Labour funded it, by embracing innovation and commercial expertise. “We are delivering on our commitment to treat taxpayers’ money ...
New research on the impacts of extreme weather on coastal marine habitats in Tairāwhiti and Hawke’s Bay will help fishery managers plan for and respond to any future events, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. A report released today on research by Niwa on behalf of Fisheries New Zealand ...
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Winston Peters will lead a broad political delegation on a five-stop Pacific tour next week to strengthen New Zealand’s engagement with the region. The delegation will visit Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Tuvalu. “New Zealand has deep and ...
There has been a material decline in gas production according to figures released today by the Gas Industry Co. Figures released by the Gas Industry Company show that there was a 12.5 per cent reduction in gas production during 2023, and a 27.8 per cent reduction in gas production in the ...
Defence Minister Judith Collins tonight announced the recipients of the Minister of Defence Awards of Excellence for Industry, saying they all contribute to New Zealanders’ security and wellbeing. “Congratulations to this year’s recipients, whose innovative products and services play a critical role in the delivery of New Zealand’s defence capabilities, ...
Welcome to you all - it is a pleasure to be here this evening.I would like to start by thanking Greg Lowe, Chair of the New Zealand Defence Industry Advisory Council, for co-hosting this reception with me. This evening is about recognising businesses from across New Zealand and overseas who in ...
It is a pleasure to be speaking to you as the Minister for Digitising Government. I would like to thank Akolade for the invitation to address this Summit, and to acknowledge the great effort you are making to grow New Zealand’s digital future. Today, we stand at the cusp of ...
New Zealand is urging both Israel and Hamas to agree to an immediate ceasefire to avoid the further humanitarian catastrophe that military action in Rafah would unleash, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. “The immense suffering in Gaza cannot be allowed to worsen further. Both sides have a responsibility to ...
A new online data dashboard released today as part of the Government’s school attendance action plan makes more timely daily attendance data available to the public and parents, says Associate Education Minister David Seymour. The interactive dashboard will be updated once a week to show a national average of how ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced Rosemary Banks will be New Zealand’s next Ambassador to the United States of America. “Our relationship with the United States is crucial for New Zealand in strategic, security and economic terms,” Mr Peters says. “New Zealand and the United States have a ...
The Government is considering creating a new tier of minerals permitting that will make it easier for hobby miners to prospect for gold. “New Zealand was built on gold, it’s in our DNA. Our gold deposits, particularly in regions such as Otago and the West Coast have always attracted fortune-hunters. ...
Minister for Trade Todd McClay today announced that New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will commence negotiations on a free trade agreement (FTA). Minister McClay met with his counterpart UAE Trade Minister Dr Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi in Dubai, where they announced the launch of negotiations on a ...
New Zealand Sign Language Week is an excellent opportunity for all Kiwis to give the language a go, Disabilities Issues Minister Louise Upston says. This week (May 6 to 12) is New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) Week. The theme is “an Aotearoa where anyone can sign anywhere” and aims to ...
Six tertiary students have been selected to work on NASA projects in the US through a New Zealand Space Scholarship, Space Minister Judith Collins announced today. “This is a fantastic opportunity for these talented students. They will undertake internships at NASA’s Ames Research Center or its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where ...
New Zealanders will be safer because of a $1.9 billion investment in more frontline Corrections officers, more support for offenders to turn away from crime, and more prison capacity, Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell says. “Our Government said we would crack down on crime. We promised to restore law and order, ...
The OECD’s latest report on New Zealand reinforces the importance of bringing Government spending under control, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The OECD conducts country surveys every two years to review its members’ economic policies. The 2024 New Zealand survey was presented in Wellington today by OECD Chief Economist Clare Lombardelli. ...
The Government has delivered on its election promise to provide a financially sustainable model for Auckland under its Local Water Done Well plan. The plan, which has been unanimously endorsed by Auckland Council’s Governing Body, will see Aucklanders avoid the previously projected 25.8 per cent water rates increases while retaining ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters discussed the need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and enhanced cooperation in the Pacific with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during her first official visit to New Zealand today. "New Zealand and Germany enjoy shared interests and values, including the rule of law, democracy, respect for the international system ...
The Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop today released his decision on four recommendations referred to him by the Western Bay of Plenty District Council, opening the door to housing growth in the area. The Council’s Plan Change 92 allows more homes to be built in existing and new ...
Thank you, John McKinnon and the New Zealand China Council for the invitation to speak to you today. Thank you too, all members of the China Council. Your effort has played an essential role in helping to build, shape, and grow a balanced and resilient relationship between our two ...
The Government is modernising insurance law to better protect Kiwis and provide security in the event of a disaster, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly announced today. “These reforms are long overdue. New Zealand’s insurance law is complicated and dated, some of which is more than 100 years old. ...
The coalition Government is refreshing its approach to supporting pay equity claims as time-limited funding for the Pay Equity Taskforce comes to an end, Public Service Minister Nicola Willis says. “Three years ago, the then-government introduced changes to the Equal Pay Act to support pay equity bargaining. The changes were ...
Structured literacy will change the way New Zealand children learn to read - improving achievement and setting students up for success, Education Minister Erica Stanford says. “Being able to read and write is a fundamental life skill that too many young people are missing out on. Recent data shows that ...
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Good evening – Before discussing the challenges and opportunities facing New Zealand’s foreign policy, we’d like to first acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. You have contributed to debates about New Zealand foreign policy over a long period of time, and we thank you for hosting us. ...
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In the gloom following director-general Al Morrison’s job cuts in 2013, the Department of Conservation restructured its operations arm. Eleven conservancy districts were whittled into six new “conservation delivery” regions, under which the Rēkohu/Wharekauri/Chatham Islands area, comprising 40 scattered islands more than 800km east of Christchurch, was tethered to the ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The Albanese government is talking up the crucial role of gas as a transition fuel “through to 2050 and beyond”. In a gas strategy to be released on Thursday, the government envisages the fuel’s ...
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A long-term project that will set out an alternative vision for Aotearoa that looks beyond the narrow confines of the policy straight jacket adopted by successive governments. ...
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The Minister Responsible for GCSB and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security have been notified of this review, and have been provided a finalised Terms of Reference. ...
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Opinion: ‘Reference-class forecasting’ is at the heart of improving pricing a project and identifying the expected timeframe but it doesn’t appear to be in use here The post ‘Think fast and act slowly’ is failing big projects appeared first on Newsroom. ...
What do a sombrero in Argentina and cognitive driving tests have in common? Don’t worry, we’re not setting up a bad joke. Hinengaro Clinic dementia clinician Gregory Winkelman has the answer on today’s episode of The Detail. “We ask a patient’s spouse or son or daughter: If you went to ...
It appears that the White House is not planning on building the Death Star any time soon. Tea Party followers will be relieved …
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20997144
“in a playful response, a senior US government official said the Obama administration “does not support blowing up planets”.
Let’s hope that now he’s won his re-election, he can go that bit further and have a go at trying to save one.
We are the high and mighty Lords of Bizness, therefor if We do anything illegal it is obviously SOMEONE ELSES fault,
The fishing company Sanfords has been fined by the US courts for dumping liquid waste in the sea off the coast of American Samoa,
4 million bucks and a years ban from fishing in US waters seems like a fairly light punishment for dumping liquid waste,including what appears to have been some oil contaminate, and you would think that the fishing company involved would have simply paid the fine and hung it’s head in contrition,
Not likely, on RadioNZ National News at 8.00 this morning there is a Rep from the fishing industry, i didn’t catch his name or whether or not He was attached to Sanfords, laying the blame for the waste dumping at the feet of Government inspectors,
According to the Brainless Prick speaking for the fishing industry if those who inspect such ships on behalf of the Government had of picked up the fact that the waste piping had been altered in such a way as to allow the dumping they,( the inspectors), could have stopped the Sanford ship from leaving port here in New Zealand and the ship wouldn’t have been able to dump it’s s**t off of the coast of American Samoa,
Anyone reading the Standard and not understanding the allusion often made in these pages to the Bizness sector being staffed at the management and board level by a bunch of psycho and sociopaths need only listen to that news item for some enlightening education…
I heard the same piece while milking, which means I wasn’t giving it my full attention. However my impression was that the speaker as not trying in any way to excuse Sandford but was trying to draw attention to the fact that, yet again, Government regulators once again seem to have been captured by the Industy they are supposed to be regulating.
Also I’m not sure it’s fair to see the whole incident as some devious and intricate conspiracy by Sandford management and board of directors to shave a few cents off its operating costs. The charges against the company were that it was ‘vicariously liable’ for the acts of the boat’s crew, and my money would be on this being yet another case of incompetence and carelessness at the top in leaving the detail to others further down the chain who cut corners or adopted a ‘she’ll be all right’ attitude. Certainly the damage to Sandford beside the fine far outweighs any profits this practice might have generated – Shares of Sanford fell 0.3 percent to $3.83 on the NZX and have dropped 6 percent this year. Believe me that plus the international damage to Sandford’s reputation will be of far more importance to the top brass at Sandfords than the details of the plumbing on one of its boats.
So yes, management at Sandfords was slack and incompetent – which makes them pretty typical – as they failed to implement proceedures and appoint the right people to stop people down the chain cutting corners to save themselves a dirty chore. So everything they got they deserved. But if this wasn’t picked up, or worse still was picked up but not followed up, by regulators THAT is the real story.
Why did the regulators let the ship sail if they had picked this up? Did they accept a back-hander from the captain to avoid a delay in sailing any repairs might have entailed? Did they turn a blind eye to it because they have become too pally with the crews they are supposed to check? Is there a revolving door between the industry and the regulators? Did the regulators receive instructions from on high not to look too closely or take too much notice of the minor stuff when compared with basic sea-worthiness, in order to ‘encourage’ the fishing industry to beef up its productivity?
Those are the questions I’d like answers to, and at least someone has raised them on the radio.
I disagree – the real story is firstly that Sanfords as a major fishing company is willing to pollute the very environment that we all (themselves included) rely on to survive and secondly that it incompetence at procedural and inspection levels need to be tightened up.
If you or i saved up all our waste for a month including sewerage and then took it down to the harbour and publicly dumped it off of a wharf all hell would break loose and we would probably end up being thrown in a jail cell,
That is the difference between us and in this instance the Board of Sanfords, everyone agrees that it is the Board which is ultimately responsible for the actions of the Company BUT the Boards of company’s found to be breaking the law are seldom, if ever, held personally responsible for the criminal actions of the company…
Jesus, that’s a long winded advertisement on behalf of the Board of Sanford don’t you think, is it not the Board who is ultimately responsible for the actions of those who conduct the company’s business???,
My opinion is that the Board of Sanford’s must take ultimate responsibility for the dumping of waste whether or not They knew of the practice or not, SO, they got what THEY as a company deserved including the drop in share price which effects the share-holders who in essence appoint the Board,
Please provide ‘the evidence’ that those in Government employment tasked with inspecting the particular ship in question were in any way ‘bribed’ to ignore the particular ship’s ability to illegally dump waste into the sea,AND, ‘the evidence’ that these inspectors actually KNEW the dumping was taking place,
Your denigration of these inspectors borders on the defamatory and is simply a reinforcement of the ‘Bizness model’ of blaming the inspectors for the criminal behaviour of Sanford’s….
PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…
Drop in share price makes them more buyable for a foreign company – Chinese or Korean.
Lower the share price the cheaper to buy.
Yes, the Board and management at Sandford’s are ultimately responsible for their ships dumping waste at sea. No-one is disputing that, that I’m aware of.
I’m suggesting they didn’t know it was going on. I’m even suggesting they shouldn’t be expected to know it was going on as this involves operational matters at a very low and specialist level. What they should have done and clearly failed to do was to set up the systems and employ the people who should have known and who should have stopped it. This I say is poor management and incompetence on their part which has now been rightly exposed. You seem to be suggesting that at the very highest levels of management, decisions were taken to save a few dollars in a multi-million dollar operation by tweaking some very obscure plumbing in one of their boats. I say that’s nonsense.
You were the one saying that there are Government inspectors/regulators tasked with inspecting these boats to ensure they can’t/don’t pollute the oceans. IF that’s the case then, as the commentator on the radio pointed out, they clearly failed to do their job. This might have been because:
a) they were incompetent,
b) they were paid not to see it
c) they saw it but didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’
e) they think there’s a good chance they might be looking for work in the Industry as Marine Engineers or whatever sometime soon, or have just come from the Industry and don’t want to draw attention to things they did themselves
f) they’ve been instructed by their own seniors not to worry about ‘minor’ or ‘technical’ breaches of the regulations as some-one above them doesn’t want the Fishing Industy hobbled with ‘trivia’.
g) they were short-staffed and too busy to make a proper inspection.
g) I can’t think of any others but feel free to add any other reasons the ship might have sailed in breach of the regs.
To my mind it is important that we know why a(nother) Government agency failed to do its job properly but if you’re happy to blame all the world’s problems on evil, conniving capitalists I don’t give a damn.
“PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…” Actually ‘the Company’ was found guilty vicariously for the acts of certain of its employees. Neither the ‘management’ nor ‘the Board’ were found guilty or any any way personally liable.
Ha….Ha…Ha…For a lesson in how the capitalists shift the blame that’s just perfect, I am not the one who suggested that there are Government inspectors tasked with doing any such thing,
The dickhead on the news this morning representing the fishing industry is the one suggesting that and then like you attempts to blame those inspectors for the criminal actions of the company,
The piping that allowed the emptying of the ships waste into the sea might for all i (or you) know be perfectly legal, it is the actions of dumping the waste illegally that are in question,
The point you make that the Board did not hire management of sufficient intelligence to stop the dumping of the waste is still the responsibility of the Board, the fact that the Board had not issued specific directives about the dumping of waste simply makes them as culpable as those who thought it a good idea to ditch the waste at sea,
But hell i tend to agree it was all my fault…
I also belatedly notice that you have abhorently blamed the ‘workers’ aboard the Sanford ship for the waste dumping, claiming, again with the provision of not the slightest scrap of evidence, that it was the workers dumping the waste to avoid having to engage in a ‘dirty chore’ at some later point,
The fact that you make these unfounded allegations simply proves the point that i make and illuminates you personally as a prize wanker…
Oh I agree I don’t know why the waste was dumped. However it seems to me reasonable to assume that separating waste oil for storage on board and then disposing of it ‘responsibly’ at a later stage is a dirty and onerous chore compared with just pumping it overboard.
And I’m afraid I do blame the crew of the boat for dumping the waste, unless you are suggesting that the senior management and Board of Sanfords had themselves helicoptered out to the boat as it worked ‘off the coast of American Samoa” and did this nefarious deed themselves while the crew attended a prayer meeting or something below decks.
As far as I can tell from the press reports none of the crew themselves have been charged with this ‘crime’ – responsibility has been quite rightly sheeted home to their employer for failing to take the proper steps to stop what should not have happened from happening.
The ‘crew’ on a ship such as what Sanford’s use as fishing trawlers DO NOT unilaterally DO ANYTHING that they have not been told to do by a senior officer,
IE, the crew don’t even chip paint unless the order comes from on high, you are in fact saying 2 things at once here,(in other words being a wanker),the crew may have been involved in the physical actions of turning on the taps which dumped the waste,BUT, for this to happen orders must have been given,
This simply begs the question of the ‘practice and why the ship wasn’t put into port when the waste tanks were full which in my mind if i were running such a ship would come down to a simple matter of (a), the cost,and (b), the risk of being caught dumping the waste at sea,
These are NOT equations that are made by the crew, on a ship such as this one there is a large amount of doubt in my mind at least that even the Captain would be making such decisions, such decisions of whether or not the ship stayed at sea fishing would be made via radio communication with the company back in New Zealand and would be based upon the gross amount of catch in the hold,
The company in New Zealand would have weighed up the cost/risk equation against a backdrop of what would be the cost of putting into American Samoa to empty the waste or dump some or all of it in the sea thus allowing the ship to continue fishing until the ships capacity to store fish had been reached,
The alternative, if there were even the facilities in American Samoa, were to put into American Samoa or steam home to New Zealand to discharge the waste,
It is obvious that the company in New Zealand has opted to have the ship stay at sea fishing believing it could ‘get away’ with dumping the waste…
While I have some sympathy for the crew, I can’t help but wonder where I might have heard that excuse before…
Yeah sure Mac,are you a secret anarchist??? we all follow orders Mac, if your in the employ of someone and you don’t follow orders,(requests to direct your labour),then you don’t stay in that employment for long,
Even if we are not in employment we all follow the orders of society as expressed within the laws and statutes of the society we inhabit, other wise that society has places such as jails and phsychiatric facilities where you are removed to,
I assume you mean the guards excuse for having helped operate the death camps, to have objected and refused would have simply resulted in the guards being subjected to much the same treatment as the detainees in the death camp,
The crew of fishing boats aint Green-Peace activists, perhaps you think that en masse the crew should have refused to dump the waste and joined the unemployed in the ever elongating queue so as the rest of the country could look down upon and denigrate them…
Let’s see, the excuse list:
preserve one’s job
everyone does it
Nuremburg defense should have worked
Fishing crews aren’t environmentalists, so it’s not their job.
That’s a fairly morally bankrupt list.
Should the crews go to prison? Nope, probably not. But they are still responsible for their own actions, just as you or I am. We choose which orders we obey, and why.
Yeah sure Mac, it’s easy for you to sit in judgement, let us all know wont you when you stand up for the ecology and lose your job as a consequence,
I wont hold my breath waiting for that to happen tho…
Actually, I said I had some sympathy for the crew.
But they’re still responsible for their actions. As am I.
The bigger worry is: how much of the same is going on and the culprits are never caught? Dumping rubbish seem to be common practice – why else is it that the North Pacific and Atlantic have large “islands” of waste, mostly plastic floating just beneath the water surface? What does this do to the ecosystem in regards to weather, oxygen exchange, sea creatures and plankton etc. Seems that a lot of lip service is going on but not much else.
PS, of course my comment above is me being nice to the Sanfords, we might all learn some time in the future that the dumping of waste products by the company is ‘normal practice’ in New Zealand waters,
If we do learn this at some future point in time i for one will not be surprised in the least…
A link so that we can hear the offending track would be nice. Please.
For those of you and to all the rest of the good people in Aotearoa who are concerned about the rise in cost of prescriptions, ask yourself or your doctor – “do I really need these pills?”. Check out this link http://myscienceacademy.org/2012/08/19/world-renown-heart-surgeon-speaks-out-on-what-really-causes-heart-disease/
Halides (what you find in our treated water) are scientifically shown to cause hardening of the arteries. We NEVER hear about this in the news.
A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.
Moral of the story? Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
“A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.”
Which would be rather contra-indicated by the massive increase in life expectancy and improvement in quality of life for those over 70 that have come about in the last 20-30 years.
Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
Absolute Bullshit.
The amount of chlorine added to water in this country is very minimal, typically at about 0.7 ppm at the treatment plant and usually less than 0.3 ppm by the time it gets to your tap. That’s almost nothing.
This is quite different to the practise overseas (often the USA) where much higher levels ( 1.5 -2.5 ppm) are commonplace AND the levels of organics in the water are neither measured nor removed. This creates a problem where the chlorine and the organics can react to create trihalomethanes which are potentially carcinogenic. In this country the plant operators monitor and control for organics and chlorine dosing very tightly. The NZ Drinking Water Standard is very advanced when compared to much of the rest of the world.
Fluoride is also added at very low levels, also 0.7 ppm. This is not actually all that higher than what is typically found in the natural sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride
The treatment process actually reduces the amount of fluoride that was in the raw water to almost zero; the fluoride dosing after treatment merely returns what was taken out and then increases it to a standardised level somewhat above that. Again the level is pretty low and realistically does not represent a risk all that much higher than the natural background.
You might also want to consider that there are water supplies in New Zealand that have been non-fluoridated for a very long time now and there has been zero evidence that this has made any difference whatsoever. People who have lived on tank water all their lives … still get heart-attacks.
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/fluoride.pdf
As for home filters. These have to be changed on a regular basis, otherwise they become a very real and definite health risk in themselves. If the municipal water treatment operators allowed their filter systems to operate for months or years without backwashing (the equivalent of changing your home filter) there would be a huge health risk, and prosecutions would result.
But somehow when people at home do exactly the same thing with filters they leave in place unchanged for ages … blissfully delude themselves that they’re doing the ‘right thing’ for their health.
Thank you for the great read Lou, having heart disease i was interested in what the
article was about, very informative.cheers.
Oh look,
Dr.Dwight Lundell has his own page.http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/lundell.html
@ Joe, Just goes to show you shouldn’t believe everything you read or hear (:
Oh I don’t know so much joe … Dwight Lundell may have been struck off for defying the conventional wisdom … but he’s far from being alone on this topic. One for instance:
http://eatingacademy.com/category/cholesterol-2
Indeed. Attacking the messenger is a tactic we should be wary of.
You can’t get much more mainstream than the US CDC and even they are looking into this. Here they discuss a theory of general inflammation caused by contemporary lifestyle factors (“metaflammation”), which might lead to the development of modern chronic diseases – like heart disease.
http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2012/11_0301.htm
Gary Taubes (award winning science journalist), and Effe Ravnskov (medical researcher) are also among the reputable people who challenge the fat hypothesis. Taube’s book Good Calories, Bad Calories has a fascinating few chapters on the history of medical research and why we ended up with the wrong public health advice about fat, cholesterol and heart disease.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm
http://www.ravnskov.nu/uffe.htm
My own circumstance RL where weight was never a worry the stubbornly high cholesterol level which familial comparisons indicated was unlikely to be hereditary was a concern. The first remedy was a close watch on my diet, the second was a dairy/protein watch and the third was a carbohydrate watch and still the high levels persisted. So I tried a mostly vegetarian and then for 20 or so weeks a vegan diet and apart from being perpetually hungry and a return to the fighting weight of my youth nothing really changed.
So I’m back to eating what gandma ate and statins it is.
VV, ae. Recently through a Whāngai connection I’ve been involved with organising accommodation for some people who, while they’re hardly destitute, are struggling financially quite simply because of the lack of education and skills and paralleled with those factors is a deep seated suspicion of the establishment.
But it’s not the distrust of the services, police etc, that’s the worry, fuck, in the most I agree with them, it’s the anti-fluoride, anti-vaccination attitudes with a couple of world government references thrown in that are. The where and who these attitudes came from concerns me greatly.
I think we might be one of two or three countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise in magazines and on tv.
The bloke who set the theory on cholesterol that the heart foundations around the world have endorsed for too long now was a ‘marine biologist’. Ancel Keys was the same man that put cigarettes into the US Army’s “K-rations” (long time before anyone admitted that smoking was a causal effect of heart disease)
Statin studies have been showing little effect except on men under 20 or some such age (i read these in “Sweet Poison” David Gillespie, 2010). A man (lawyer) motivated by the truth.
Dwight Lundell may be a poor financial whizz and not a surgeon of a gold standard, but he is brave enough to go against the BIG pharmaceuticals and food manufacturers (this is dangerous or mutiny for many health workers) and point out that our bodies are treating our food like ‘foreign particles’ cos thats exactly what our ‘food’ is these days. This is besides ‘experts’ trying to sell books or trendy ideas.
People who struggle financially are more likely to eat food that is cheaper and less likely to be real food and more likely to have added sugar to make it taste like food.
Yep. And the more one reads up about how the American “Food Pyramid” was actually constructed by industry interests, how their recommendations for sugar consumption were reached, etc. the more cynical one becomes.
@Joe, The drug cartels are making billions of dollars off heart medications.
An american doctor i visited was astonished that nz’ers with heart problems were
given asprin to thin the blood.
Weight doesn’t go hand in hand with a high
cholestarol either,my mother was a tiny lady
and had high cholestarol.
A really good trick is to lower the guidelines for what counts as an “acceptable” cholesterol level bu just a smidgeon, and voila out of thin air, millions of new statin customers world wide are created, each one worth hundreds of dollars to the pharmaceutical companies.
THATS MY GIRL! (I knew you had it in you, you procrastinator you’re not!)
(up for a little “scrabble” later;mwaaahaahaa) 🙂
Worrying article in the Herald, “DESPERATE BORROWERS SIGN AWAY PRIVACY”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10858785
Quote: “Some loansharks even require clients to sign power of attorney, allowing lenders to make all kinds of financial decisions on a borrower’s behalf.”
Pretty shocking for me to read that this is occuring. Something has to be done asap.
Charles Chauvel bless him, had some legislation he was trying to get through regarding loan sharks – not sure if it has anything about this in it but I’m picking it won’t.
FWIW:
The Agent under a Power of Attorney is REQUIRED to act in the principal’s best interest. The agent MUST always follow the principal’s directions and holds a fiduciary duty which requires him to always act with the HIGHEST DEGREE OF GOOD FAITH in behalf of their principals.
A Power of Attorney is revocable at any time and no reason is necessary. A simple written revocation suffices – no legalese is specified as long is intent (and capacity) are apparent.
The Agent cannot profit by any transaction where he represents the principal’s interests,
nor make a gift or otherwise transfer any of the principal’s money, personal property or real estate to himself unless the power of attorney explicitly states he can do so.
A court will declare a power of attorney invalid if the court finds that the principal lacked mental competency when the power of attorney was executed, or that the principal was the victim of fraud or UNDUE INFLUENCE.
Given the above I would have thought that a Power of Attorney would be of very little use to a loanshark, particularly as a court declaring a PoA invalid could make the agent personally liable to the principal for any sums improperly disbursed.
Of course this depends upon the debtor having sufficient access legal help to undo the damage but that’s going to be the case whatever arm-twisting methods the loanshark employs and whatever remedies Parliament might in its glacial wisdom enact into New Zealand law.
Really??? has the plum in your mouth migrated to your brain thus stifling your ability to think beyond the point of ‘self interest’,
Yes, you are quite correct in the ‘facts’ of what you say about ‘powers of attorney’, BUT, you only have to think for 1 or 2 seconds about the decile of people that ‘use’ the services of such loan sharks,
Many do not have English as a first language, have very limited knowledge of the law, and, are obviously fucking broke and desperate, the former indicating that they would have no ability to hire a lawyer to get such matter into a courtroom in the first place even if they had the understanding of the laws that we do…
PS, from anecdotal evidence the power of attorney gained by the loan-shark is used at the loan recipient’s bank to advance the automatic payment of the loan ahead of any other automatic payments that might be paid from that account…
Which is exctly why I said what I said in my final paragraph.
Time for for the Green Party to publicly promote anti-climate change legislation that will challenge Australians to demand the same?
Or time for grubby public and backroom haggling over cabinet positions?
As the Ausralian heatwave disaster continues to roll on.
Blaming the citizenry for lack of action over climate change and ridiculous sanctimonious demands to use composting toilets and cycle to work won’t cut it. Central government regulatory initiative is urgently required. Instead of down playing climate change for electoral advantage, the Green Party should be actively calling for such action to be taken.
Why won’t they do it?
Are they corrupted?
Are they cowards?
Are they stupid?
“Today’s report warns that heat waves will become hotter longer and more frequent.” ABC News.
Sitting here in New Zealand it may be hard to guage the psychological effect on those suffering through this heatwave, and now being informed by their climate scientists, that future heatwaves will be twice, too three times, more extreme. In my opinion Australians would be very interrested in any serious actions being promoted in New Zealand to halt climate change.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-12/heat-waves-exacerbated-by-climate-change/4462014
Watch the following interview, though the camera doesn’t spend much time on her, notice the body language of Louise Criely as she begins to look increasingly uncomfortable as the interview continues, struggling not to bite her lip and shifting in her chair.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-12/climate-commission-predicts-more-heatwaves-bushfires/4461960
Cactus Kate has a strong take on Hpusing policies generally.
A good read.
http://asianinvasion2006.blogspot.co.nz/2013/01/labour-struggles-with-its-direction.html?m=1
It actually is capitalist societies that promote buying over renting. It benefits the bankers, and those at the top of the housing ladder.
Yes, have money in the bank and I can tell you this, banks all want to meet with you not to thank you for your money, but to get you in to debt with property so the bank actually can make money off you. Getting people into debt politically makes them slaves to voting for policies to keep interest rates lower and property valuations up. Then they pay the debt off when older and want the opposite. I do not agree with the incentives of encouraging people to get into debt who cannot afford or want it yet it is a vote winner. And in business, most entrepreneurs will tell you, never do with your own money what the bank or others will give to you and you can profit from.
Cactus also correctly asks when NZ is going to benefit once more from true political debate of issues. Debate from actually different points of view on the political continuum, instead of this perennial tepid crowding into the political economic “centre”.
KV
From time immemorial a banker’s job has always been to lend money.
often at no interest I might add, because many ancient societies rejected usury.
lol
Except for the Romans, and the Jews were allowed to charge non-Jews interest (Deuteronomy 23:20 – “Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.”. And even Muslim banks have a form of interest that gets around their Koranic restrictions. While individuals may have preached against usury in various ancient culture, it has tended not to be observed in the breech.
A banker’s job has always been to MAKE money.
well, I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain, In the desert, you can remember your name…la,la,la la la la…
was walking down the street early this morning…And I swear I heard the voices singing to me…
I was approached by a boy (16 years old ) and his younger friend to buy some “K2” for them from the Adult Shop (it was Closed) freakin Asparagrass.
It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, if you’ve done it once then you’ll do it again, it’s a fine fine line between pleasure and pain!
As people shift from place to place, as they construct more pliable, less rooted patterns of life, what was once solid melts into air, to recall a comment of Marx.
-Sister ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxgGVIrDqY )
(Blinded By The Light) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-GqYkwjTM. M.A.N
‘
Australian Government Official Climate Commission Report on the Heatwave:
http://climatecommission.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/CC_Jan_2013_Heatwave4.pdf
Home:
http://climatecommission.gov.au/
Anybody got any idea why for the last 2 days posts from The Standard are not showing up in Google Reader?
Huh. I only just noticed this because you pointed it out.
Rod Oram’s article today on Stuff is well worth a read, and I’d be interested in comments on it from those more knowledgeable about economics than me. he begins:
He is pretty pessimistic:
Then does a run-down on significant areas of the economy: export markets (government has hopes for TPP, but resistance is rising internationally), skills and safe workplaces (mixed outlook based on this government’s past record), natural resources (government may do many dodgy things that’ll upset a lot of voters), infrastructure (more RONS, resistance to Auckland rail loop).
Oram concludes:
not wanting to rain on the “optimists” parade, however, from that Guardian article the other day (muchas gracias);
looming on the global Horizon,
-systematic financial crisis
-water supply challenges
-fiscal imbalances (oh look, Above)
-food shortages
-WMD proliferation
-information breakdown
-chronic disease in developing countries (and some developed country not a million miles from Here)
-asset price collapse
-retrenchment from globalization
-pandemics / anti-biotic resistance
-and last, yet not least ( I “Like” this one) Digital / Social Media provocation of social breakdown ;(
anyway, back to the Fundamentalists
previously, the inhabiting of a dual tradition that included both an intellectual engagement with texts and practical tradition learnt by a process of mimesis, for example,
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo3760020.html
http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm
However, large-scale migration and immersion in the societal melting-pot has disrupted the mimetic element.
Alienation, and the turn to rigid forms of faith will be coloured by the particularities of religion and historical circumstances.
In a “witty and profound” book, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Perry describes how, as the scientific description of the universe dominates, and because it asserts to be “objective”, it distances people from engagement with the world around them, promoting further existential angst. Furthermore, modern media such as the internet (and tele-evangelism) can serve the Fundamentalist very well. The internet propagates words, and Fundamentalists tend to put great stock in the power of words. Little wonder that they have shown themselves to be early adopters and swift masters of communication online. In addition, there has been in recent decades an emergence of what may be referred to as a militant form of atheism, wherby individuals are as emotionally committed to to science as the sole form of truth as fundamentalists might be to the documents of their faith (Dawk ins) and it seems important to such atheists to dispatch any alternatives to their world-view.
Julian Baggini (an atheist philosopher ) aspires to values of open-mindedness and in his discussion of militant atheists in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, concludes “Hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with an inflexible conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs is antithetical to such values.
All in All, religious fundamentalism and contemporary scientism are cultural cousins.:)
Indeed.
except one generally relies on magic books, and the other insists on verifiable evidence.
magic books like peer reviewed journals. And of course you need the circles of old wisemen/old wisewomen who each have their own collections of scrolls, and who pass the final judgements on what is good magic and what is not.
The authors of peer reviewed journals don’t normally claim to have written the infallible word of god.
Hey Flockie, sure gettin’ interestin “down on the farm” (free thought good, two legs bad )
Having an open mind is fine up until the point you brain falls out.
what are you implying Pop?
Getting paranoid about peer reviewed journals is ridiculous as the findings are always presented in such a way as any scientist with the resources can recreate the experiment. Expressions like “scientism” is a poisonous bye-blow of trying to apply postmodern semiotics to the scientific method.
Exactly.
CV, how I have missed your paranoia. The system has worked well so far, and short of the need for a Large Hadron Collider or something equally hard to come by, there are very few experiments that can’t be independently verified, or at least immediately understood, by competing scientists, companies, or even rival nations. It is impossible to argue with the process of scientific method, nor is there any need to.
Those are two completely different things and quite different from your original assertion
which isn’t always true any way.
This is a statement quite suitable for the protector of a religion, or exponent of dogma.
I can’t be bothered arguing semantics with someone who apparently doesn’t know how to read a peer-reviewed paper.
Only the priesthood appropriately trained in interpreting scripture may approach the temple.
“What is clear is that the forms of peer review are protean. Probably the systems of every journal and every grant giving body are different in at least some detail; and some systems are very different. There may even be some journals using the following classic system. The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper. If the reviewers disagree the editor sends it to a third reviewer and does whatever he or she advises. This pastiche—which is not far from systems I have seen used—is little better than tossing a coin, because the level of agreement between reviewers on whether a paper should be published is little better than you’d expect by chance.
That is why Robbie Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked `publish’ and `reject’. He also joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. When I was editor of the BMJ I was challenged by two of the cleverest researchers in Britain to publish an issue of the journal comprised only of papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. I wrote back `How do you know I haven’t already done it?'”
“CONCLUSION
So peer review is a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative, and scientists and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.”
http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/4/178.full
The whole thing is worth the read. CV is just pointing out the Emperor is nekkid.
It’s a human system. But still light years ahead of religion or nutbars who think that surfing equally delusional and pseudo-scientific web pages deserves the term “autodidactic”.
Ellen MacArthur – Redesigning the whole system to create an inspirational Circular Economy
Interesting link CV. Cheers. Being a cynic, my first thought was “Well, the capitalists will love it because it preserves the idea of inbuilt obsolescence.” And my second thought was to do with ‘dis-assembly’. It’s one thing to (chemically?) deconstruct carpet square fibres and bases (melting), but a computer? How does that work without the immense amounts of toxic waste that process currently entails? I’m suspicious that there’s a silver lining being promoted here while a great big black cloud is being ignored. So, I’ll away and read up on it a bit further… no democracy I notice
testing smiley 🙂
I found smiley testing, too.
🙁
A rather long read for those so inclined.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/rough-transcript-stimulus-or-stymied-the-macroeconomics-of-recessions.html
some words
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/407801_592499697442758_137233956_n.jpg
some Swiss Cheese
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/9797668/Swiss-move-towards-barring-Eurozone-refugees.html
cannot see those bicycles above Beijing
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/science/earth/beijing-air-pollution-off-the-charts.html?_r=0