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notices and features - Date published:
5:30 pm, August 27th, 2021 - 24 comments
Categories: Daily review -
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Wow, an emerging story this evening with sketchy details that we have abandoned Afghanistan and not rescued a single one of the 36 interpreters Minster Faafoi declined to give a visa to in July.
Lets hope against hope this isn’t true and that yet another Labour minister hasn’t made a monumental cock-up
[I don’t like it when people spread lies, innuendo, and disinformation on this site, especially when it appears to be blatant political point scoring.
Back up your claims [plural] with facts or face a ban – Incognito]
We have no idea if these people were even able to make contact let alone get to the airport safely. I have no idea how we can get these people out safely now while still keeping our team alive.
David, the relish with which you pounce upon the topic makes me strongly doubt the sincerity of your 'Let us hope against hope' spin.
Hopefully they're among the 276 evacuated or the other group evacuated by our partners.
I'm sure you'd prefer our people to have been caught up in the bombings though so you could label the PM a murderer.
harsh but true
See my Moderation note @ 5:40 pm.
Thank you, David. However, it doesn’t change your spreading of innuendo and political point scoring. You left out important detail and info, which had already been available hours before you posted your ill-fated comment. You’ll have to do much much better if you want me to lift your ban; don’t forget all your inane trolling of late. It’s not the end of the world if you cannot comment here for a few weeks; there’s more to life than this site, I’ve been told.
All the best to the Greens and their partnership with the Scottish National Party.
Will be a tough ride.
Co-leader Lorna Slater was/is? one of the sushi on the rocks crew.
😁
https://twitter.com/srhastraea/status/1431130088259473413?s=21
Shattering!
Ha! What an egg. Shows the negative big mouths in print on radio in the opposition parties are really not being taken seriously. This is who they're catering to.
Oh boy… the right wing a*******s are getting really venal with their jealousy and hatred towards the NZ PM:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/covid-19-coronavirus-delta-outbreak-right-wing-host-mocks-nzs-response/PPZSXTOPV5PUPA7P5EJLIR5YFM/
A reckoning for cheap speculation from the Newsroom. Looking forward to level 2.8.
From the link – a very pertinent point:
Anne, yes, jealousy is what riles them it seems. A woman, young, attractive, vibrant and popular. How dare she have regular press conferences to keep the country informed. How dare she have worldwide attention. How dare she even be PM. There would not in my memory be any PM who has had to deal with so many unexpected major events and she rises to the occasion every time. She is a born leader.
Not just young, attractive, and sincere, but a better communicator than practically every wretched hack that pretends to be a journalist in the country.
She is eating their lunch.
Yes it's an affront to democracy that she's so good. Perhaps she'll be first woman UN Secretary General one day to rub their noses in it, they'll want to be her friend then!!
It has been National Poetry Day today. Stay safe people.
FOLLOWER
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
Seamus Heaney
INVERSNAID
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844-89
Thanks for those, JO. What language and what words we have lost- 'twindle', 'degged', 'heathpacks', 'beadbonny'.
My father's first job was as a ploughman. I took him to a display of tack in the local museum and he knew what every piece of gear was. Once in Christchurch he came to pick me up from a Yaldhurst road corner and standing on the street corner he had this long time looking over the road at the new housing there. A little alarmed at his long and focussed silence, I asked and was told that land was where he ploughed for the first time in the late Twenties. The poem reminds me of my father and also of the skills, the life and times of the ploughman.
Then. in the Twenties, was when New Zealand changed from being a rural to an urban society.
By then it changed also from a weed and wilderness society to one of manicured lawns, pollarded trees and manufactured utility. Did we lose some values when we became 'bereft of the wilderness and the wet", when technology changed the pace and the productivity of rural living?
A furlong was a measurement of how far a horse could pull a plough before resting, a furrow long. A ploughman trod every foot of that 220 yard strip and became acquainted with the very soil.
A mile was a measurement of the number of paces taken to get somewhere, not just a number ticking over on an odometer.
An acre was the amount of land that could be ploughed by a man and an ox in a day.
Have we lost more than the meaning of how we measured our land and lives?
Mac your prose is just as poetic as the above. We have lost the simplicity of earlier times.
Jo much appreciated. Tapadh leat.
And thanks, Patricia. Mac1 can now say thank you informally and formally- Tapadh leibh.