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notices and features - Date published:
5:30 pm, November 8th, 2021 - 45 comments
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The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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Destiny Church protester gets Covid, and a reminder to re-read his Bible:
Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, chapter 6: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
"Bishop" Tamaki claims he has been tested for Covid and its come back negative. He is refusing to reveal whether he is vaccinated or not. I'll wager a bet he's fully vaccinated!
@ Anne (1.1) … come to think of it, the Apostle Bishop has been out of circulation for a couple of weeks! If he hasn't got/had Covid, then I think we can guarantee he and Mrs T have both been vaccinated!
It was his destiny.
"Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.” – Jedi Master Yoda.
@ observer (1) … hee hee, love it
So here's what voting for the political left and right promises us:
If you continue to vote for the business as usual parties, don't feel guilty. You can't help it if you were born to be
a retardnormal.Hi Dennis
Please forgive me for posting this here when it's a diversion from the topic you've posted on here. I just wanted to increase the chances you'd see this by spotting my reply to your post.
Have you ever seen this brilliant little animated clip of Taranaki Maunga's geological history? I came across it last year (or perhaps it was early this year) and have been sending it on to Taranaki-ites I encounter ever since, becos many of them too find it so fascinating.
I already knew the Egmont Volcano (as I think volcanologists still call it) is considered most unusual for the number of times it has destroyed & rebuilt itself in the place, but to see the process by which Taranaki province has been actually built by explosions & outpourings from the firey depths is awesome, imo.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GljllvKlTac
That's terrific! Thanks Gezza. The museum here has a more sedate version which I saw in my first year back here – you know how tourists push a button nowadays to run the vid for themselves? Didn't have some of the excellent detail in yours.
Incidentally, my prof career was as video editor so I know a good product when I see one due to having made television commercials (in the '70s/'80s) then new & current affairs stories ('90s).
Didn't know about the three collapses of Mt Taranaki, nor how recent the most recent rebuild happened (around the start of the Iron Age). Did you notice the linear trajectory of the total eruption timeline commencing with the Sugar Loaves? West to East. Similar to Hawaii although that is a longer path with a few more eruption centers (all now islands) and heads SE from memory.
Since I did Geology I as part of my physics degree (which included geophysics) I explain this effect via plate tectonics. Magma emerges sporadically from a common origin below the slowly shifting crust, breaks through that at intervals. Thus the linear pattern of volcanoes with oldest at one end and youngest at the other.
Yes Dennis. I’d always climb Paritutu (part of the sugarloaves, I believe) forcthe exercise & the view on every trip back to my turangawaewae & I knew also that the Kaitaki & Puakai ranges are remnants of earlier volcanos.
Although I have done no formal study in the field I’ve had a strong amateur interest in volcanalogy, geology & seismicity ever since I left school.
I’ve done a lot of investigation into Welly’s earthquake history & geology. This place has some layered beach rock formations that are now at right angles to how they were originally laid down as classic sedimentary layers. That’s how much Wellington has been sqeezed & twisted by the awesome forces of nature.
*Pouakai (I thought that looked wrong somehow).
*seismology (not seismicity) – same.
https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/taranaki/places/egmont-national-park/things-to-do/tracks/pouakai-range-tramping-tracks/
The amazing Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust park is in the Pouakais, & is well worth a visit when the rhodos are in full bloom.
Paritutu (part of the sugarloaves, I believe
Indeed it is. Peculiar how the local authorities call it a rock, when it towers over nearby Mt Moturoa, which they call a mountain! Seems double the height.
Reminds me of that other traditional local govt nonsense here: calling Te Henui a stream when anyone can see at a glance that it is actually a river. Colonial imbeciles casting a long shadow…
Certainly a river by the time it gets to town & comes out at East End. The mouth is a 15-20 min brisk walk down the beach from Fitzroy & I often walked there. It’s a very beautiful river in town, too.
My late uncle had a home 2 houses up from the Northgate Bridge & I often walked the Te Henui riverbank there, heading East.
The nearby Lemon Street Cemetery just over the road from his place is very old & I think datescback to the earliest Pākehā settlerment. There’s a colonial soldiers’ plot in it.
My dad once pointed out to me how many of the gravestones were for people who died young, & drowned. He said that was because, in the early days, many people couldn’t swim & were swept away in flooding times fording the many different streams & rivers radiating out in all directions from Mt Taranaki.
We left NP just after my 13th birthday, August '62. Some political memories from childhood in the 1950s: front door of our house slamming with a crash when one set of grandparents exited after a political argument with the other set.
Of course the women primarily contributed ineffectual attempts at peacemaking. The roosters escalated it into a yelling match each time. My mother's father was a hardline Labour Englishman, had the gift of the gab & could run verbal rings around anyone. My father's father was a pillar of the colonial infrastructure, a hardline National supporter. He ran the railways for the entire province of Taranaki in the 1960s but the prior decade of arguments he was merely station master at NP.
Dear Lord Dennis that reminds me of my Christmas's in the past as a wee one. My grandparents were much the same, Dad's side were "business" and Tory through and through, my mother's were poms who came out in steerage and were dirt poor all their lives. Granddad was a master gardener and kept homesteads in pristine condition, Grandma was always the cook. In service it was called and it reigned here just fine through the early part of the 20th C.
On the day we had to separate them, one set in the front room room and the other in the back room. The two Grandma's weren't too bad and would tuck into the sherry and swop notes but it would truly get out of hand if we didn't subdue the two couples. Oh it was happy days for us kids.
Nice to hear Kate. Yeah my two sets did manage to steer clear of the controversy some visits, and uneasy truce prevailed.
Smiling as I remember it, but my dear paternal granddad, Pop, a retired Taranaki country village police sergeant, and a dyed in the wool Labour supporter, once threw one of my visiting maternal uncles – a priest – out of his house for making some remark or other supportive of the National government of the time.
Can’t now remember if it was during Holyoake’s or Muldoon’s administrations. Whatever his offence was I was a very young teenager & it was over my head. I’d never ever before seen him so angry.
Mum eventually smoothed thing over & harmony between the two families was restored, but those two never discussed politics with each other again.
That was smart of them. Peaceful coexistence can be achieved via evasion of controversy like that. I always seem to prefer catharsis instead! Either I lance the boil with precision, and everyone reacts by floundering around because it never occurred to them such a thing was possible, or I provoke a godalmighty clash so everyone is forced to thrash the thing out & dispose of it.
I was always very dark-haired & very tanned in Summer, spending as much time as I could outside walking the Tasman-pounded beach or playing or exploring along the nearby Waiwhakaiho river.
So my family nickname (as was dad’s, in his boyhood) was Rangi.
Pop always greeted me when I walked in with “Tena koe, Rangi”. (I just heard it as “Tenarkway” before I knew anything about te reo. Māori wasn’t spoken much when & where I grew up.
Was years before I realised that, as a Taranaki country cop, Pop was used to interacting with local Māori & had much respect for their culture.
🙄 *Here’s the missing close bracket ) for para 3
Hate it when I do that. 😠
Proof-reading is a reflex for me now. Rangi = sky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangi_and_Papa
Really interesting Gezza. I went to a series of lectures by Jim Healy in Rotorua on Taupo in 1973 and this brought back memories. He would have loved the video lol we used an overhead projector.
I trained & got a certificate in operating a variety of 16 mm film projectors, Patricia.
They were finicky things compared to videos & players today or even a decade ago.
They used a constantly moving mechanical ratchet claw to drag several frames past the projector light; used to surprise me how smooth the projected images were in motion.
Oh. Just realised I didn’t your comment properly.
An overhead projector? How dull, in comparison 😕. Big ups to video animations.
👍🏼 😀
🙄 😠 *read your comment properly.
“If you continue to vote for the business as usual parties, don’t feel guilty. You can’t help it if you were born to be [a retard] normal.”
……………………………………………….
I’ve tried very hard to follow & understand the arguments of climate change skeptics because there’s always the danger in the scientific world of group think & govt funding turning conclusions the funding provider wants to see.
But I’ve given up that endeavour now, because, imo, there’s just far too much visible evidence that inexorable global warming is happening & producing all sorts of weird & damaging climatic & weather events, often on some very large scales, that don’t seem to happened with anything like the frequency we are seeing all over the globe now.
But – who to vote for? Arrrghh! The Greens? I dunno. Too many purists, perhaps, & we really need to see some thinking & new technologies advanced asap as well as reestablishing some older less damaging practices for humans’ daily living.
I did read a bunch of books by climate sceptics about a decade back, own several. Made a few good points. Eventually realised weight of evidence invalidated their overall stance. Re Greens, two problems. First, they're shackled by the system (democracy); second, they've allowed identity politics and political positioning to become severe handicaps.
All three factors working together stop folks seeing them as the solution. I've voted Green for 11 successive general elections but currently they just irritate me. I was an office holder for a few of the earliest years but tribal identification has become tenuous!
Too many purists, perhaps, & we really need to see some thinking & new technologies advanced asap as well as reestablishing some older less damaging practices for humans’ daily living.
Yes. That's pretty much my vision too. We will muddle through making some terrible mistakes and then stumble into magnificence almost by accident.
Right now it's the hated capitalists who're busy doing the actual de-carbonising, while the purity point collectors here sit about moralising to their keyboards.
Yay, technology will save us all, just like the American cavalry. sarc.
Saved us for about 250,000 years.
Right on, brother. 👍🏼
Will be part of the solution this time too. It’s inevitable, imo.
Bryan Gould asks (in full):
Bill Ralston in yesterday’s Herald proclaimed that the country has been divided by the delta outbreak, and he might seem therefore to have been making my point for me. But he is referring to the various and differential ways in which the pandemic and its consequences have impacted on us – geographically, for example, and in our readiness or otherwise to get vaccinated.
I am talking about a different phenomenon – the increasingly obvious tendency in some parts of society to allow political convictions to dictate attitudes to the pandemic in a very particular way.
The people I have in mind are those who do not merely allow their political preferences to determine their approval or otherwise of the government’s response to the pandemic (though that is all too obviously true in many cases).
No, I am drawing attention to something more unexpected and, for that reason, noteworthy. There has, sadly, emerged a body of opinion which – asked to choose whether they would wish to see the government succeed in its attempt to bring the pandemic under control – would rather see the delta variant continue to prosper amongst us.
Surely not, you may say. Surely everyone would have as a top priority that the pandemic should stop wreaking its havoc amongst us. Surely, we would wish to see the vulnerable protected, and life return to normal.
For the people I have in mind, however, such a normally desirable outcome would be bought at too high a price, if the consequence was that the government should earn some kudos. They would, it seems, prefer that the pandemic should proceed unchecked, rather than that the government should be able to claim that it has navigated a way through the crisis.
Some of those people would go even further. They would actively try to frustrate the government’s efforts by, for example, refusing vaccination or the wearing of masks or scanning. These attitudes, and the priority accorded to political goals rather than the general welfare, demonstrate just how extreme are the views of this part of society. How sad that the government is having to fight not just the virus but some of our own fellow-citizens as well.
Bryan Gould
8 November 2021
https://bryangould.com/how-did-we-come-to-this-2/
[link added. It would help enormously if when you cut and paste, you also copy across the URL (not a difficult thing to do), thanks – weka]
I agree that it's remarkable for Gould (a typical mainstreamer) to marvel when he suddenly becomes aware that partisans exist. They have been amongst us all our lives, Bryan, so how come you only just discovered this part of reality??
One would think that a successful political career within the British Labour Party would have alerted him to the fact much earlier in life.
Chris Bishop…..d'oh.
Clearly Gould has not been reading The Standard.
DF, partisan? A strong supporter of a cause or a person. contrarian more like. A person who rejects or goes against public opinion.
Rude, implying that someone should have known about a situation prior to it happening as you did with Brian.
Discussion point. Why this is happening after the earlier successes?
Robert posted this for us to discuss the content. Many of us knew there were contrarians out there, but not the number or the depth of malice which is fracturing society. Do you know why this has increased? Personally I think people have been brainwashed by rubbish on the internet, or in their social circle. It is serious, as families split and take sides over health mandates to the point of destroying our progress.
I agree, Patricia, and have little sympathy with DF's sneering comment. It seems to me that we may have been divided and conquered …
I mean, I kinda agree. It sure looks like some people are eager to sabotage the pandemic response, for a variety of reasons.
But where's this a cut&paste from?
Bryan Gould's blog feed – just look over on the bottom right of this page.
link added.
mod note for you Robert.
From Mokau to Maxwell.
Parihaka (on the north island of Aotearoa/New Zealand) is seen by many nationally and internationally as a symbol of non-violent resistance, and a Maori struggle for contemporary and historical justice . Speaking of the history of Parihaka and Taranaki through stories of key events in the struggle to retain Maori lands and culture, Te Miringa Hohaia (Taranaki iwi – Kaitiaki of the Te Paepae o Te Raukura meeting house and marae at Parihaka Paa) chronicles the early period of the British invasion, settlement, and series of attacks upon Parihaka and the resistance to these colonizing efforts. Many conflicts are repelled led by the likes of Riwha Titokowaru, (1823-1888), and through the Parihaka leadership of Te Whiti o Rongomai (1815-1907), and Tohu Kākahi, (1828-1907), the struggle is transformed into a non-violent resistance movement peppered with sophisticated armed resistance when necessary. Some of the systematic, oppressive techniques used by the proto-nationalist government forces and subsequently the New Zealand government to wrest control of the land and the attempts to disenfranchise the Maori people are illustrated. This general history is made specific and personal and then woven back to reflect the imperatives of agency, of resisting, and of carrying constructive actions forward into peace.
See a second student tests positive for Covid at Auckland Grammar and the principal has closed the college for the year.
Too risky if Hipkins reopens schools for new entrant to year 10 this year.
The government are having to make some really hard decisions on a daily basis.
Mt Albert Grammar.