Author Archive

1979: the year that the climate changed for me

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:55 am, November 27th, 2013 - 34 comments

On the site we now have a a simple little graphic that shows how much heat has accumulated on our planet. It is expressed as multiples of of the heat energy of Hiroshima sized A-bombs. I’ve picked 1979 as being the start year because that was the year that I became aware of the effects of changing climate. I was a 19 year old student in my second year of a BSc in Earth Sciences, and the topic under discussion was the WMO’s recent World Climate Conference.

Public transport vs private transport. Don’t waste money on fasttracking motorways

Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:08 am, November 26th, 2013 - 99 comments

Ok, I know this image has a lot of issues. It is a 256 color animated gif. Dithered to hell. Bad colour balance, tilt and even a moving focus point. But it certainly makes its point about what kind of road space we’re paying for to inefficiently fill with cars? Have the idiots at NZTA and in this incompetent National government not read their own statistics? Roads aren’t filling up. Public transport does.

Enrol for the referendum by the 21st

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:57 pm, November 19th, 2013 - 41 comments

If you aren’t currently enrolled or are unsure, then you will have to be enrolled in the next few days. We can shove the lie of “mandate” straight back into this National government’s lying face. Maybe when National are deprived of that silly excuse for their theft, they will stop stealing.

New website – “I am someone”

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:49 pm, November 14th, 2013 - 48 comments

Stories of Harassment and Sexual Violence Go Live On Web

Looks like some of my friends are getting serious about making sure that dickheads around like the duo of JT and Willie, prevaricators like John Key and the incredibly slack police response get a better idea about what is at stake…

Perhaps the NZ Police should do their frigging job properly!

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:23 pm, November 7th, 2013 - 282 comments

The police have censored a satirical image of their policy towards juvenile rapists. It suggests that such outstanding citizens might make good police recruits. Based on past experience that may be the case. It has been most of a decade since the Bazley report. Less than a month since they ignored the IPCA about unlawfully breaking a kids neck at a party. Their actions or lack of them are both a subject of satire and intensely political… Stuff them. They need civilian criticism because they sure as hell don’t listen to their oversight bodies.

Take us this day our daily statins

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:53 pm, November 2nd, 2013 - 11 comments

Reflecting on the generational changes of the Labour party membership, it isn’t hard to see why the more elderly have problems with such large changes. But after all not all of the population are dependent on their daily statins like me. Some of them are interested in if their kids will grow up to have jobs and will stay in this country.

The prescient oracle

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:38 am, November 2nd, 2013 - 13 comments

Over the last year or two, our prescient oracle Irishbill has been writing posts on need for the Labour party to make themselves relevant. As the number of regular lurkers on this site are somewhat larger than the number of members of the NZLP, I suspect that he has done more than his share in assisting the doubling of the size of the party.

Labour conference 2013 – day two

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:37 am, November 2nd, 2013 - 30 comments

The social was rather packed last night. Unlike the 2012 conference where I started optimistic and wound up as depressed the following day after an evening where caucus members were chasing voting delegates around a nearly empty social. This was followed by a incredibly silly set of stories from caucus asserting that a vote about how […]

Labour conference 2013 – day one

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:24 am, November 1st, 2013 - 54 comments

Well I made it down to Christchurch to cover the Labour party conference for The Standard. While I’ll probably run out a few posts while I’m here, I figure that I’ll write a post per day for the more general discussion and impressions. Plus do that actual “blogging” of my experiences.

Avoiding the silly wars of the republic

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:27 am, October 30th, 2013 - 60 comments

So the US military/diplomats has decided that we should be friends again after nearly 30 years. Whooptee do! Who really gives a pigs arse? Well I do. The republic in the USA gives all republics a bad name because of their habit of using military force for poorly thought-out ideological and even odd personal reasons. Someone to be wary of following blindly into one of their silly wars.

Cam Slater: politely being called a lying arsehole

Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:28 am, October 22nd, 2013 - 130 comments

I’ve been trying to think of a way of expressing my complete and utter distaste for the arsehole of the local blogs and politics. But someone beat me to it. Hamish Price has been attacked in the usual way by Cameron Slater. Here is his facebook statement in response.

This rings quite true to me from what I know of the people and timelines.

TPPA: Kelsey vs Mapp debate

Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:51 pm, October 18th, 2013 - 21 comments

Last week there was a Fabian debate between Wayne Mapp and Jane Kelsey about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement that New Zealand started originally as a free trade agreement. Bearing in mind the short notice there were a quite credible audience. However to enhance the audience, Lyn Collie was inveigled into filming and editing the debate. Here is the film of the debate..

Operation 8: Te Putatara

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:21 am, October 16th, 2013 - 31 comments

As the resulting court battles die away and the suppression orders lift, the level of sheer dumb stupidity and outright silly paranoia of the police and other agencies involved in Operation 8 becomes clearer. It is time to start examining the officers in the police who brought so much dishonour and disrespect to their force. And where better than Te Putatara who has a post up which details a raid who had a court examination of the validity of the bloated and illegal search warrant to court – while a raid was in progress.

Discourage the pantie sniffers

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:01 pm, October 13th, 2013 - 30 comments

It isn’t that hard to get around the prurient arsehole peekers that populate the NSA and the kiwi puppets – John Key being a prime example. Encrypt, falsify your “metadata”, and send lots of crap purely so they have no idea what to look at. Hell – even the NZ Herald gets it these days as in an anonymously published article in the weekend rag…

Maurice Williamson: a fool speaking without numbers

Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:05 pm, October 11th, 2013 - 12 comments

Maurice Williamson has apparently been proclaiming that the lower than expected population growth in the census (mostly from people fleeing his government and emigrating) means that a revision of Auckland’s infrastructure plans was needed, such as an increase in high-rise apartments and the construction of an inner-city rail loop. Bullshit. Perhaps the idiot minister should look at *where* the growth has been going…

The TPPA removes free trade

Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:52 pm, October 9th, 2013 - 20 comments

Hadyn Green was at the Brunei TPPA talks in August for Consumer NZ and a couple of other groups. His post on Public Address today is an excellent run through many of the points that bother me. For instance a section on intellectual property where the TPPA will restrict the current freedom of trade! Arrgghh!.

How to pass treaties – could John Key please stop lying?

Written By: lprent - Date published: 7:55 am, October 9th, 2013 - 44 comments

One thing John Key always seems to like to do is to appear to be stupid about his own job. Last week the fool said that parliament had to ratify a TPPA treaty. Either through incompetence at his job or by deliberately lying to the public, he is completely wrong. This is something that a few minutes reading of the MFAT website could have told him.

TPPA: Kelsey vs Mapp debating

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:48 am, October 7th, 2013 - 55 comments

My current view is that the TPPA will provide intergovernmental welfare for Fonterra and farmers while destroying our rapidly expanding technical export industry. It just leaves us as a farm for the world just as we we used to be the farm for the UK. We remain susceptible to policy changes from outside destroying our economy. But maybe this public debate on Wednesday evening in Auckland will provide more information.

Rob Gilchrist on Sunday

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:58 am, October 6th, 2013 - 28 comments

The Sunday programme this evening has Rob Gilchrist, police spy and provocateur, breaking his silence about the decade he spent amongst mostly peaceful activists. He was one amongst the very many sworn officers and informants that the police, spy agencies, and their civilian detective agencies use to monitor and often to disrupt democratic change. At […]

13,000 (and a bit) posts

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:22 pm, October 1st, 2013 - 14 comments

I’ve managed to miss a milestone on this site (again). As you can see, we’ve passed 13,000 published posts over the weekend. That really isn’t bad for a voluntary coop over a 6 year period with no particular publishing schedule beyond “put something up if and when you feel like it”. Looking back, I see […]

IPCC AR5: Thank the oceans

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:53 am, September 28th, 2013 - 101 comments

The levels of agreement in IPCC AR5 preliminary report on oceans are no longer ambiguous. Enough data has (finally) been collected.

Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010, and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971.

Doing what we’re best at

Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:37 pm, September 24th, 2013 - 53 comments

National is a very traditional party. They think that NZ is good at clearing land and raising animals, with a bit of mining on the side. The population is there to service farmers and miners on low wages. That may have been the case in the 1950’s. But as usual they’re hopelessly dated. Sometimes in recent years it has appeared to me that Labour thinks that way as well. But it looks like David Cunliffe is intent on refocusing us back on the burgeoning hi-wage and hi-growth hi-tech sector.

What’s in the friday dump this week?

Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:10 pm, September 20th, 2013 - 18 comments

The spinners in parliament and government are rather predictable. They dump their embarrassments late on a friday, preferably on a long holiday weekend or with a sporting event. I’m picking that today we will see some material dropping off the rear of DOC related to what Nick Smith saw and can no longer remember….

Wendy Brandon: DC’s chief of staff

Written By: lprent - Date published: 6:45 am, September 19th, 2013 - 65 comments

Ok, I’m very pleasantly surprised. David Cunliffe has made a very interesting choice for chief of staff. Based on what I know about the task, she looks like a damn good fit for the role. In fact I’m just surprised that he managed to attract her at all for the thankless task.

I’ve always thought that the Chief of Staff role should be exercised by someone who was more managerial and staff orientated rather than being deeply embedded in the political game.

The Gosman (hypocrisy) ruling and other policy changes

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:09 am, September 17th, 2013 - 134 comments

This may be shades of getting over-Apple’d as they mercilessly flay people on iTunes with their gargantuan pile of boilerplate each time they change a line.

However there are a couple of policy changes on this site that people should be aware of.

Outside the bubble

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:30 am, September 16th, 2013 - 51 comments

For many years there used to be a blog site called The Thordon Bubble that was dedicated to the minutiae of the political scene as seen from a small area in Wellington. I always thought it was a perfect name for the thermocline difference of views between the hunting grounds of the politicians and parliamentary political media, and what happens inside the Labour party. The leadership vote numbers highlight the scale of the event horizon between them.

Open mike – Friday the 13th 2013

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:50 am, September 13th, 2013 - 125 comments

Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose. The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to Policy in the banner). Step right up to the mike… First make sure that the mike doesn’t bite.

My votes

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:22 am, September 12th, 2013 - 100 comments

I voted for Cunliffe, Robertson, and Jones in that order. My reasons are in this post. It is unnecessary for people to speculate on additional motivations.

But if any MP or jonolist wants to try to run a politically based smear on me like they did on Jenny Michie, Mike Williams, and others then I’m perfectly happy to tear them a new rectum through their political credibility over the next decade.

TVNZ / Skycity deal is an asset dump

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:02 am, September 5th, 2013 - 23 comments

If Key and Joyce aren’t simply corrupt, then they are some of the most stupid business people I’ve ever seen. But most likely they’re just politicians trying to cover their arses for making a stupid mistake. It looks to me like they have gutted TVNZ to give a bare land deal to SkyCity, ignoring the value of the building on top or the profitable business that they will destroy in the process.

The least popular weasel wins

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:55 am, August 27th, 2013 - 36 comments

In the odd moments that I have to view and write about politics outside NZ at present, I happened upon a Wall Street Journal article this morning about the election contest in aussie that got me thinking. Australia is leaning toward electing its first conservative government in six years, to be led by a man considered […]