"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!
So here's what voting for the political left and right promises us:
So far, the climate pledges that countries have submitted to the United Nations' registry of pledges put the world on track for 2.7-C of warming.
The International Energy Agency said Thursday that new promises announced at the COP26 summit – if implemented – could hold warming to below 1.8C… It remains to be seen whether those promises will translate into real-world action.
Warming of 2.7C would deliver "unliveable heat" for parts of the year across areas of the tropics and subtropics. Biodiversity would be enormously depleted, food security would drop, and extreme weather would exceed most urban infrastructure's capacity to cope, scientists said.
The difference between 1.5C and 2C is critical for Earth's oceans and frozen regions. "At 1.5C, there's a good chance we can prevent most of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheet from collapsing," said climate scientist Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University.
That would help limit sea level rise to a few feet by the end of the century – still a big change that would erode coastlines and inundate some small island states and coastal cities. But blow past 2C and the ice sheets could collapse, Mann said, with sea levels rising up to 10 metres – though how quickly that could happen is uncertain.
Warming of 1.5C would destroy at least 70 percent of coral reefs, but at 2C more than 99 percent would be lost. That would destroy fish habitats and communities that rely on reefs for their food and livelihoods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
How did we come to this? A country that has always prided itself on its ability and willingness to work together has fractured.
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.
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.
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.
There is nowhere in this entire area that the land is not confiscated
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.
My daily news diet is not what it once was.It was the TV news that lost me first. Too infantilising, too breathless, too frustrating.The Herald was next. You could look past the reactionary framing while it was being a decent newspaper of record, but once Shayne Currie began unleashing all ...
Hit the road Jack and don't you come backNo more, no more, no more, no moreHit the road Jack and don't you come back no moreWhat you say?Songwriters: Percy MayfieldMorena,I keep many of my posts, like this one, paywall-free so that everyone can read them.However, please consider supporting me as ...
This might be the longest delay between reading (or in this case re-reading) a work, and actually writing a review of it I have ever managed. Indeed, when I last read these books in December 2022, I was not planning on writing anything about them… but as A Phuulish Fellow ...
Kia Ora,I try to keep most my posts without a paywall for public interest journalism purposes. However, if you can afford to, please consider supporting me as a paid subscriber and/or supporting over at Ko-Fi. That will help me to continue, and to keep spending time on the work. Embarrassingly, ...
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Hi,If you’ve been reading Webworm for a while, you’ll be familiar with Anna Wilding. Between 2020 and 2021 I looked at how the New Zealander had managed to weasel her way into countless news stories over the years, often with very little proof any of it had actually happened. When ...
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This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters and Bob HensonFlames from the Palisades Fire burn a building at Sunset Boulevard amid a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The fast-moving wildfire had destroyed thousands of structures and ...
..Thanks for reading Frankly Speaking ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The Regulatory Standards Bill, as I understand it, seeks to bind parliament to a specific range of law-making.For example, it seems to ensure primacy of individual rights over that of community, environment, te Tiriti ...
Happy New Year!I had a lovely break, thanks very much for asking: friends, family, sunshine, books, podcasts, refreshing swims, barbecues, bike rides. So good to step away from the firehose for a while, to have less Trump and Seymour in your day. Who needs the Luxons in their risible PJs ...
Patrick Reynolds is deputy chair of the Auckland City Centre Advisory Panel and a director of Greater Auckland In 2003, after much argument, including the election of a Mayor in 2001 who ran on stopping it, Britomart train station in downtown Auckland opened. A mere 1km twin track terminating branch ...
For the first time in a decade, a New Zealand Prime Minister is heading to the Middle East. The trip is more than just a courtesy call. New Zealand PMs frequently change planes in Dubai en route to destinations elsewhere. But Christopher Luxon’s visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ...
A listing of 23 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, January 5, 2025 thru Sat, January 11, 2025. This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if ...
The decade between 1952 and the early 1960s was the peak period for the style of music we now call doo wop, after which it got dissolved into soul music, girl groups, and within pop music in general. Basically, doo wop was a form of small group harmonising with a ...
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When National won the New Zealand election in 2023, one of the first to congratulate Luxon was tech-billionaire and entrepreneur extraordinaire Elon Musk.And last year, after Luxon posted a video about a trip to Malaysia, Musk came forward again to heap praise on Christopher:So it was perhaps par for the ...
Hi,Today’s Webworm features a new short film from documentary maker Giorgio Angelini. It’s about Luigi Mangione — but it’s also, really, about everything in America right now.Bear with me.Shortly after I sent out my last missive from the fires on Wednesday, one broke out a little too close to home ...
So soon just after you've goneMy senses sharpenBut it always takes so damn longBefore I feel how much my eyes have darkenedFear hangs in a plane of gun smokeDrifting in our roomSo easy to disturb, with a thought, with a whisperWith a careless memorySongwriters: Andy Taylor / John Taylor / ...
Can we trust the Trump cabinet to act in the public interest?Nine of Trump’s closest advisers are billionaires. Their total net worth is in excess of $US375b (providing there is not a share-market crash). In contrast, the total net worth of Trump’s first Cabinet was about $6b. (Joe Biden’s Cabinet ...
Welcome back to our weekly roundup. We hope you had a good break (if you had one). Here’s a few of the stories that caught our attention over the last few weeks. This holiday period on Greater Auckland Since our last roundup we’ve: Taken a look back at ...
Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partnerSometimes I feel like my only friendIs the city I live in, The City of AngelsLonely as I am together we crySong: Anthony Kiedis, Chad Smith, Flea, John Frusciante.A home is engulfed in flames during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area. ...
Open access notablesLarge emissions of CO2 and CH4 due to active-layer warming in Arctic tundra, Torn et al., Nature Communications:Climate warming may accelerate decomposition of Arctic soil carbon, but few controlled experiments have manipulated the entire active layer. To determine surface-atmosphere fluxes of carbon dioxide and ...
It's election year for Wellington City Council and for the Regional Council. What have the progressive councillors achieved over the last couple of years. What were the blocks and failures? What's with the targeting of the mayor and city council by the Post and by central government? Why does the ...
Over the holidays, there was a rising tide of calls for people to submit on National's repulsive, white supremacist Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, along with a wave of advice and examples of what to say. And it looks like people rose to the occasion, with over 300,000 ...
The lie is my expenseThe scope of my desireThe Party blessed me with its futureAnd I protect it with fireI am the Nina The Pinta The Santa MariaThe noose and the rapistAnd the fields overseerThe agents of orangeThe priests of HiroshimaThe cost of my desire…Sleep now in the fireSongwriters: Brad ...
This is a re-post from the Climate BrinkGlobal surface temperatures have risen around 1.3C since the preindustrial (1850-1900) period as a result of human activity.1 However, this aggregate number masks a lot of underlying factors that contribute to global surface temperature changes over time.These include CO2, which is the primary ...
There are times when movement around us seems to slow down. And the faster things get, the slower it all appears.And so it is with the whirlwind of early year political activity.They are harbingers for what is to come:Video: Wayne Wright Jnr, funder of Sean Plunket, talk growing power and ...
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2024 was a tough year for working Kiwis. But together we’ve been able to fight back for a just and fair New Zealand and in 2025 we need to keep standing up for what’s right and having our voices heard. That starts with our Mood of the Workforce Survey. It’s your ...
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..I/We wish to make the following comments:I oppose the Treaty Principles Bill."5. Act binds the CrownThis Act binds the Crown."How does this Act "bind the Crown" when Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which the Act refers to, has been violated by the Crown on numerous occassions, resulting in massive loss of ...
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Welcome to 2025. After wrapping up 2024, here’s a look at some of the things we can expect to see this year along with a few predictions. Council and Elections Elections One of the biggest things this year will be local body elections in October. Will Mayor Wayne Brown ...
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Submissions on National's racist, white supremacist Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill are due tomorrow! So today, after a good long holiday from all that bullshit, I finally got my shit together to submit on it. As I noted here, people should write their own submissions in their own ...
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Hi,The thing that stood out at me while shopping for Christmas presents in New Zealand was how hard it was to avoid Zuru products. Toy manufacturer Zuru is a bit like Netflix, in that it has so much data on what people want they can flood the market with so ...
And when a child is born into this worldIt has no conceptOf the tone of skin it's living inAnd there's a million voicesAnd there's a million voicesTo tell you what you should be thinkingSong by Neneh Cherry and Youssou N'Dour.The moment you see that face, you can hear her voice; ...
While we may not always have quality political leadership, a couple of recently published autobiographies indicate sometimes we strike it lucky. When ranking our prime ministers, retired professor of history Erik Olssen commented that ‘neither Holland nor Nash was especially effective as prime minister – even his private secretary thought ...
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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.