The Herald is now beginning to list the Prime Minister’s memory lapses. I think we should assist its reporters with a few others. Lord Ashcroft’s visit for starters.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10875266
Here’s their list Quote
Key’s memory lapses
* Forgot how many Tranz Rail shares he owned.
* Unsure if and when he was briefed by GCSB on Kim Dotcom.
* Forgot how he voted on drinking age.
* Could not recall whether he was for or against the 1981 Springbok Tour.
* Could not remember who was aboard mystery CIA jet parked at Wellington airport.
* Forgot he phoned future director of GCSB urging him to apply for the job.
Unquote
I doubt that it is a simply case of cronyism. Copyright was obviously at the center of the DotCom affair, and the copyright industry’s approach to “moral rights” should give one pause. Industry affiliates were involved in distributing file sharing software and promoted the sharing of copyrighted material. The RIAA then pushed for legislation against piracy which resulted in awards of up to 150,000 US dollars per track of digital audio. Ian Fletcher worked for the UK Intellectual Property Office for about three years.
The industry’s approach to “moral rights” involves ignoring ethical sharing of copyrighted works consistent with fair use, and the industry labels all sharing of copyrighted material as theft regardless of the innocence of such fair use. The term “intellectual property” is an oxymoron because intellectual works in society do not have the quality of exclusive possession essential to all property.
Copyright enforcement can be used as a cover for internet espionage. Microsoft spent considerable effort implementing DRM (digital rights management) into Windows Vista. The implementation of DRM and other security features into Vista caused so many technical problems that many users abandoned Vista and returned to Windows XP. Microsoft has long been suspected of collaborating with the NSA after an encryption key called _NSAKEY was discovered in Windows NT.
In which Mark Ames goes Hunteresque, on the occasion of Andrew Breitbart’s aniversary, with regard to claims that Breitbart was anything other than a carnival barker with a legacy of, well, ‘shit’ pretty much covers it:
Big steel framed highrise building (highest high rise over there) engulfed completely in flames in Grozny, Chechnya. Guess that one will collapse into the path of most resistance in freefall speed soon too. It happened after all three times on 9/11.
To free fall symmetrically and straight downwards on to its own footprint, the building requires not just a one sided fire, it also needs to be unevenly hit from just one side by a jet plane!
So why do either of you think the building is of the same construction type as WTC?
Please respond with some substantiation of the claim that these buildings are of the same construction type as WTC. I’d really prefer not to have to conclude you really are bullshit artists.
You don’t consider your gut to be a sense organ? ***Guffaw*** Shit dude you better do a bit more research.
that’s why I asked for something verifiable.
Nah, you’ve set your view in place. You believe that its quite possible that highly assymetrical damage to a structure can cause that structure to fail instantaneously in a highly symmetrical way.
And that it happened 3 times within 12 hours at the same location.
Shit, is there even a need for controlled demolitions work any more? Just set a random fire in a skyscraper, crash a jet into one side, and straight down she goes, safe and sound on to its own building footprint, barely touching anything else around.
So I ask for verification that these buildings are like the WTC, and in response; Strawman arguments.
Typical, but sad that you’d rather talk about anything else than the question I asked.
Why’s that? Mind made up is it?
Do.Not.Question.The.Truther.Narrative.
Feel free to prove me wrong by saying that yeah, building structure is relevant to the comparison, and that no you didn’t bother to check it out and that yes you’ll do better next time.
“So why do either of you think the building is of the same construction type as WTC?”
PB, even the 911 Commission didn’t bother with silly facts like how the buildings were constructed. Hell with WTC 1 & WTC 2 they decided 94 boxsteel columns, each 110 stories high did not even exist.
Forget for a minute about what happened on September 11 2001 and instead sit watch learn think on how they are constructed and how the visual proof of their construction completely contradicts all official explanations of the Towers’ demise.
PB but you are the one who believes that highly assymetrical damage to a building can cause that building to fail in a completely symmetrical way.
3x in 12 hours.
The same exact failure effect in two completely different building types, but where only one of which suffered damage from aviation fuel and airliners.
Tall buildings are not solid blocks of wood or corn-flake packs that topple over if you push them. They’re amazing strong in some ways, fragile in others and they behave counter to the intuition bred by observing small solid objects.
The WTC centre towers were steel truss construction, which is light and efficient, but has its , um, problems… I don’t know if the Grozny building is truss or girder construction. That would make a difference.
Buildings are designed to resist horizontal forces due to wind and earthquake, which can be quite substantial (for example, going through the sums on construction and engineering for buildings in Wellington, as an undergrad, I was quite surprised to discover that due to wind-generated lift, much structure is generally devoted to keeping a roof down rather than up.)
Moreover, an airliner, while somewhat heavy (but built as light as possible in order to fly) is quite fragile and certainly not designed to resist being flown into a building, so its structure crumples and is shredded immediately as it impacts. The real problem is all the burning aviation fuel.
Now, steel building usually have what is called intumescent foam protecting the structure. This is an insulation that swells up when heated, protecting the steel structure. Under “normal” fire conditions, it will do just that, but the explosion of a plane exploding can suddenly strip off the intumescent foam normally protecting the steel truss structure used in the WTC buildings. Burning aviation fuel then continues to burn, heating the steel which loses much of its structural strength well below its melting point.
The truss then catastrophically gives way, unable to support the floor. The weight of the whole building above that floor suddenly slams down on the floor below… and you can guess the rest. Rather than this being a path of “most resistance”, a vertical piledriver effect is inevitable and unstoppable.
The energy used to destroy the building is in fact not the initial impact, but all the gravitational potential energy devoted to lifting its entire mass into the sky in the first place when it was constructed.
The truss then catastrophically gives way, unable to support the floor. The weight of the whole building above that floor suddenly slams down on the floor below
That’s the mental model they proposed in the official report.
Of course we should also consider that the weight of those top floors was already being supported by the structure underneath, it was not new weight which came from nowhere.
Also – did you notice that big huge reinforced concrete floors didn’t slam downwards at all – a large amount of that mass somehow pulverised into dust and ejected out sideways from the collapsing building.
Mass (weight) times velocity equals momentum. This is kinetic energy – a lot, a delivered in an instant.
Take a egg. You can gently rest the head of a hammer on the egg. Now drop the hammer on the egg.
Actually, the floors were not big huge reinforced slabs. They were comparatively light slabs pored over metal deck, supported, as I said, by a truss system.
Understood. I’ll buy the momentum theory IF the majority of the mass part of the equation was not lost as pulverised material as the fall took place.
Because if a lot of mass was lost during the free fall (ejected out the sides of the building) the strongest floors in the bottom half of the building, should have easily survived.
It doesn’t Matter if something is pulverized it still has the same mass and momentum drop a feather or rock in still air they will land at the same time gravity is constant.
yes and even Commander David Scott proved gravity is a constant in the Universe we have thus experienced, but don’t you want to know how the concrete became pulverized? I would love to know how the concrete at and above the point of collapse got pulverized but especially would like to know how it became pulverized at the moment of initial collapse.
mostly i want to know how can gravity throw steel girders hundreds of feet laterally to be embedded in other buildings. ( including some girders that were identified as originating from near and even above the point of ‘collapse’)
The collapse was obviously not a polite, neat retraction but a more complex affair, with forces transmitted not through the ether but through complexly branching structural members, concentrating at the nodes. Elements will buckle, bend and then fail suddenly – and catastrophically, ith all the pent-up energy suddenly released.
Take a delicate structure (and a skyscraper is delicate at its scale) and crush it and inevitably some parts will be flung sideways.
at and above the point of collapse
Gravity leads down. The kinetic force of an impact propagates in all directions.
Of course, the other point is that one truther argues that the towers fell vertically into their own footprint, while another argues steel girders were throw hundreds of feet laterally.
If only there was some sort of consistent, logical methodology by which one can create mathematical models of reality and then test the resulting hypotheses in the real world. Rather than starting from a conclusion and inventing elaborate, untestable theories that need to be evaluated more by faith than reason.
… so one should never think about engineering with the heart, gut or the pancreas or whatever.
The most common and most reflexive and hardest to overcome mental habit is to think that large structures behave like small solid objects – ie., toppling over over when nudged.
There’s a catalogue here of things that feel “right” but are utterly wrong:
Momentum is simple Newtonian physics, it’s not something one has a choice about “buying”.
OK, the mass. First, a cloud of dust and debris seen expanding from the side of a building is impressive, but minor in terms of mass. When concrete shatters, it breaks into a range of larger and smaller pieces right down to dust size. The dust particles, being of lower mass, can be thrown further sideways as they fall down. The larger chunks remain within.
Most of the structure is steel, however, and steel is ductile, meaning that it stretches, bends and tears, but essentially stays together as large clumps.
In addition to the trusses, we have office equipment – desks, chairs, couches, heavy wood conference tables, computers, whiteboards, TVs, stereos, feather dusters, toilets and sinks, files in cabinets and shelves, (paper is very heavy – archives and libraries have to have specially strengthened floors), paintings, bronze sculptures, carpet, plumbing and air-conditioning systems, vending machines, catering equipment and food, refrigerators, bottled drinks, water reservoirs, cables, glass, potted plants, aquaria, partitions, suspended ceilings, paperweights, packed lunches, burgers and fries, people… etc etc.
Not very much ends up as dust and there’s not so much forcing that mass sideways anyway. Everything, even the dust, is heading down.
<strongest floors in the bottom half of the building, should have easily survived
Nope. Not “even if”. Nothing is infinitely strong. Consider the thought experiment of a 100-storey building. Floor 99 has the mass of floor 100 above it. Floor 98 has the weight of floors 99 and 100… and so on. If floor 99 cannot resist the strike of Floor 100 hitting it, then in order for Floor 1 to survive, the force hitting it must be less than that of 100 striking 99, meaning that over 99% of the total mass of the building met be made to disappear.
This is impossible.
And that is without accounting for the acceleration of the falling mass. On earth, an object in free fall accelerates at 9.8 metres per second per second. I couldn’t calculate the effect of deceleration caused by crumpling, but I think that you should get my point.
The “thingies” are structural cores and elevator shafts. All part of the same. Partly, in their case, they get dragged down in some cases as the floors are welded and bolted to them.
Again, no material is infinitely strong and large structures an aircraft are designed to be slightly better than they need to be under expected conditions, otherwise they would not be economical or useable and wouldn’t be built in the first place.
Slightly better If things go outside expected conditions, then Murphy’s Second Law comes into force – anything that has gone wrong will get worse (and fast).
the thingies are the box steel columns that support the structure that houses your cores and elevator shafts. and yes they were attached to the floor trusses, more accurately the floor trusses were attached to the Columns. Otherwise tall buildings have a bad case of not standing up. They are ‘attached’ with thousands of welded steel rivets and bolts. Thermodynamics has some pretty constant cause and effect scenarios and disspation of heat along a connected steel body is pretty well understood.
All these people that regurgitate the ‘heat brought down the towers’ lie must find it terrifying as the world witnesses a constant stream of steel structures being destroyed by fire. What fortitude they express every time they light the woodburner at home, cook a meal on the stove, drive a car or engage that most dangerous piece of technology known to man, a gas fired barbeque. The horror the horror
Go on then, let’s see you consider it. Tick tock tick tock, twelve years, no evidence, and not one piece of checkable engineering calculations. Well, apart from all these. that is, which you have not the tools nor the experience, but crucially, not the inclination nor scepticism nor the honesty to consider, preferring instead to defame the authors and throw red herrings around.
No evidence? The issue is that the current official evidence and analysis was limited in scope and does not match up to what was observed.
You may call it “sad” or whatever adjectives you might like, but nothing in the NIST documents detailed events satisfactorily explains the perfectly symmetrical collapse of those 3 buildings of two completely different types.
I’ll add that what Architects and Engineers for 9/11 are asking for is a complete widescope official inquiry. You seem to think its time to move on, all done and dusted. As it were.
It is done and dusted, CV. This thread is proof of that; it’s the first bit of 9/11 truth denialism on TS for months. It used to be a regular feature of open mike, but with the passage of time, the fantasy loses its relevence.
Much as the ‘Elvis is alive’ thing only lasted a few years, 911 delusions will fade fast. Particularly so after the failure of that conference in Toronto to provide any actual evidence. Without credible proof of an alternative, sensible, rational people will stick with the blindingly obvious truth. Which is that the US was sucker punched by a small team of committed fanatics who succesfully did the unthinkable.
Actually it was HARRP, using thermite-laden chemtrails, that perpetrated 9/11.
What fools like you don’t realise is that all the buildings are still there. The whole thing is the biggest mass hallucination since Buzz Aldrin single-handedly faked the moon landings.
Is this comment part of your social experiment, muzza, or are you being deliberately dim? It really was the guys in the cave, that much we know. The attack was carried out by brainwashed wannabees on behalf of the guys in the caves. This we also know. There is no evidence of an alternative conspiracy after 12 years of right wing blathering. Fact.
So, bloke, P’s B and the rest of us rational thinkers aren’t scared, we’re just well grounded and capableof making sensible conclusions based on the known facts. Any time you can provide evidence that contradicts the known facts, let us know. But, I won’t hold my breath, because after twelve long years, there still isn’t a skerrick of proof that anyone else did it.
So, bloke, P’s B and the rest of us rational thinkers aren’t scared, we’re just well grounded and capableof making sensible conclusions based on the known facts
Here’s another reason I’m emotionally invested in this. The adults would like to be able to have a sensible discussion of US foreign policy, which is pretty much a terrorism factory so far as I can tell, but every time anyone raises it we have to listen to the dimwit chorous insisting we watch this video.
What is my emotional investment? Ethics: specifically. your complete lack of any: your whole argument is based on a premise of fraud perpetrated by individuals you’ve never met, but you think nothing of smearing them and effectively accusing them of being accessories to mass murder.
Your right wing behaviour is disgusting, so I’ll continue to show my contempt and disgust,.
whole argument is based on a premise of fraud perpetrated by individuals you’ve never met, but you think nothing of smearing them and effectively accusing them of being accessories to mass murder.
You dont see the irony in your comment do you!
Lets walk it through:
Fraud perpetuated by individuals you have never met – Yet you defend the *official conspiracy theory*, produced by people you have never met, with agendas you claim don’t exist, yet have been rolled out in broad daylight since 2001! Forget about the missing 2.3T Rumsfeld was on the hook for !
smearing them – Yet the smearing has been primarily and agressively against the islamic religion, and people of arabic ethnicity as a whole, while being rather ad hoc in the applications of which group is being smeared, and for which purpose, ever since!
effectively accusing them of being accessories to mass murder – But your belief/support of the *official conspiracy theory* indicates you are comfortable that an entire religion/ethnic peoples are layed waste around the ME/Africa, under the same pretence of being, *accessories to murder*.
The USA sows a bunch of dragon’s teeth; they multiply, as dragon’s teeth will.
My respect for Physics and Engineering says absolutely nothing about my opinion of US foreign policy, or Islam, or politics, or any combination thereof.
So stop putting words in my mouth, you tiresome cretin.
My respect for Physics and Engineering says absolutely nothing about my opinion of US foreign policy,
And there it is again – Its not respect of physics, engineering or any such thing, its the fear you have built up through your attachment to *believing you know whats going on, and having the theoretical answers to it rationalise it all*. Fear of what is left of you, if you actually didn’t have the answers…
Do you remember the little chat we had about confirmation bias Muzza? You remember how I said it’s inescapable by definition. Whether or not you believe this to be true, I certainly do, so:
Remind me how that gells with the notion that I believe I know what’s going on, you tiresome cretin.
I work for the CIA. And I take my instructions from the alien who remote-piloted the drone into the Pentagon. And I mutilate cows from my black helicopter, just for fun.
so just checking, how many times did NIST change not only the modelling but the very theory of how it all eventuated? Exactly how far did they stretch [fabricate] the data to fit a hypothesis that is unknown in the history of steel framed construction? On WTC7 for example they changed their mind three times and then created a whole new physical risk for steel framed buildings, all hail Thermal Expansion. Putting WTC 1&2 aside as there is no plane involvement, and just looking at WTC7, then according to NIST that building in Russia should have collapsed hours ago. Same with many large buildings of various construction that have had major fires this past decade. Only on September 11 2001 did three steel framed buildings collapse due to fire. Never before and never since.
and there was something else too . .. oh yeah
NIST might love to mention the horiziontal methods used in the Towers’ construction but have you ever noticed they do not like to mention the Columns that held the Towers upright ? They even go so far as to say that the central cavity where the lifts were housed were empty space. Every animation has zero columns. You go on about data, why can you not see past the rhetoric and look at the inconsistency in the data. Not just the specifics but the big picture.
“do not like to mention” is more than a little different from “do not mention” which you are not so subtley implying that i said.
When it comes to the official explanation for the physical events that occured the columns are barely referenced and in much of the modelling they are sidelined or removed completely so as to be insignificant to the result. NIST have all but admitted this themselves, along with the extremes they had to go to to make any of their floor collapse models actually work let alone produce the desired result. A result which people far more qualified then I have shown to be seriously flawed in its methodology.
I do love that deniers try to make out the 9/11 Truth movement is a ragtag bunch of a half dozen loons sitting in front of a video desk making shit up and posting it on Youtube. Youtube is a source of videos that people have collated and edited, yes, even disinfo has had its place amongst it all. (and many youtube vids are highly educational, there’s this one with a banana and a rubber band . . )
But, and this is a big but, the movement also has produced numerous technical papers and regularly laid out simple and direct questions for the relevant authorities to answer. Silence is the most common response. Remember many many things went on that day in many different places and none of it has been adequately answered, yet the World got turned on its head because of the events on September 11 2001.
Many of the questions and the cases they refer to are presented at great expense by the families of the victims. They are regularly subjected to delays and obfuscation and all too often sketchy legal processes have been employed that flat out deny the due process under reasons of National Secruity amongst others.
What you can choose to ignore if you so wish is the simple Truth, this movement is a global network of professionals and laymen who have co-ordinated their limited resources to attempt the accurate and honest discovery of the events of that terrible day. So yes they charge $18 USD for a book, (current on Amazon) because they did not have access to the millions of tax dollars that funded the official story. By the way, the Official 911 Commission volume still costs $8 USD (current on Amazon) yet it was paid for entirely by taxpayers. On the funding note, AE911truth are currently asking for donations for a co-ordinated global Ad campaign to raise 9/11 Truth awareness. Just suckers for punishment I guess.
The vast resources of numerous Governments and associated Agencies continue to this day to work against the wishes of the victims’ families and the first responders that have survived. Sadly, the number of survivors is dwindling and just a few weeks ago further cuts were made to the support offered to these heroes. So perhaps the scale of the discussion is the thing that so aggravates you, or the fact it is growing and not dissolving into nothingness as so many hoped it would. We are not going anywhere. We will not be silenced, but as far as 9/11 talk on the Standard goes I stated back in 2011 that regular dialogues were achieving little and causing unhelpful aggression. Today shows that little has changed. The Standard juggles enough already and I prefer the one on one in real life now. I like the human element as it allows for more of an honest Q&A that actually produces tactile results as lines of enquiry can be dutifully followed and the point scoring that fascinates so many is thankfully absent. Today, as mentioned , was a passing prod at the sleeping bear. Next time, like so many recent opportunities, I will probably not pick up the stick.
one thing more, I don’t recall you standing up in front of Richard Gage on his NZ visit and calling him a right wing moron.
nice to know you care though, holding hands is another of life’s good things
WTC7 is clearly seen on a video clip to have sustained substantial structural damage from very large segments of falling debris from the North Tower. Gashes go through several floors in the back at the middle and southwest corner. It can also be clearly seen in the same video that fiery debris has ignited fires on nearly all floors and those burned for hours. Its collapse in total is not at freefall speed but consistent with structural failure. The collapse is initiated at the Southwest corner and progresses suddenly as each floor impacts the next with fire-weakened steel unable to resist the weight and velocity. The building did not collapse into its own footprint as some claim, it can can be seen in pictures and video to have fallen backwards – its different coloured debris is atop the North Tower debris. The 9/11 building demolition conspiracy isn’t gaining ground because its debunked in so many places.
Its ok Arfamo, you tell yoursrlf what you like, then take it up with the demolition experts, who commented specifically on WTC7.
Forget the fact the building housed all the financial transactiosn data, which only days earlier, existed, and would have meant that Donald Rumsfeld would have had a tough time wishing away the $2.3T of *lost funds* through the pentagon, which had been front page news, and was not going away,
How convenient that all was, not to mention the building housed the data store for huge amounts of fiancial entities, which vansished, never to be talked of again!
Nothing in it though, just all coincidence!
Edit – I work with an american, senior guy, former DoD employee for 8 years. His position is that all 3 buildings were blown up. Not a good look for your point of view, if you get to speak with people such as him. I had that conversation just last week, it was interesting to hear an american who worked for such entities, having that view, and talking about it!
the passages you are no doubt referring to
“Many of the questions and the cases they refer to are presented at great expense by the families of the victims. ” and “The vast resources of numerous Governments and associated Agencies continue to this day to work against the wishes of the victims’ families and the first responders that have survived. ”
Neither of these state all the families or all the victims and it is a fifty fifty call how you got there i suppose. Though as we sit here, the many lives involved which unacknowledged illnesses and needless tragedies continue to diminish, should not have to suffer the indignity of being so easily dismissed.
I’m not going to get into a semantic argument about it.
I just think the bigger indignity is being the obsessive hobby of nutjobs around the world.
I get some of the victims clutching at straws in grief. But most truthers? Pffft.
I just think the bigger indignity is being the obsessive hobby of nutjobs around the world.
I get some of the victims clutching at straws in grief. But most truthers? Pffft.
A variation of the usual liar line – honour the dead by not asking too many questions.
Nope. But if it really was pretty much just hijackers + plane+towers=thousands dead, it makes your average truther half a world away look like a bit of a dick.
Like I say, grieving relatives is one thing.
But hobbyists who can’t get their stories straight are in grave danger of being dicks.
Yeah I guess being afraid to look like dicks should be a real consideration. Just try to remember that most of the people who died because of 9/11 didn’t die on that day.
Frankly, I’m don’t think a lot of truthers give as much of a damn about the dead as they do about believing in their own superior knowledge about nefarious global conspiracies and how much better the world would be if everyone were intellectual giants like them.
What you can choose to ignore if you so wish is the simple Truth, this movement is a global network of professionals and laymen who have co-ordinated their limited resources to attempt the accurate and honest discovery of the events of that terrible day. So yes they charge $18 USD for a book, (current on Amazon) because they did not have access to the millions of tax dollars that funded the official story.
😆 so they can uncover the biggest most pernicious conspiracy in history, but not leverage that into wealth and power without my $20? And why is everyone laughing at them? You. Whichever.
“heating the steel which loses much of its structural strength well below its melting point.”
Absolutely true hot steel can bend. It cannot however cause thousands of welded rivets on every floor to consistently and simultaneously fail, which is required for the collapse theory to work. Also, if you have a minute, could you be so kind as to explain where the vast quantity of extreme heat came from to form the pools of molten metal that were still being discovered weeks after the Towers’ collapse? Then again why bother . . .
There are literally thousands and thousands of points that a tit for tat truth game fail to adequately cover. As entertaining as it can be, it is also a waste of resources as very few supporters of the Official Story who engage in Truth discussions on-line, ever do it honestly and with an open mind.
In my little life, one on one dialogue has proven to be the only reliable method of 911 discussion that actually stands a chance of combating the ignorance that stubbornly refuses to follow the facts. 911 Truth is more complex than a single event and the back and forth of a chatbox cannot come close to the soul crunching reality of having to lie to another’s face when the Truth finally busts the door in on your psyche. It is perhaps one of the most difficult re-adjustments a person will ever make in their life. Knowing the world is a big evil place blah blah blah is one thing, Accepting the totality of the lie that was sold to the world takes guts and has broken people. Only you can decide how much truth you are willing to sweep under the carpet, only you have to live with the lumpy rug of your life.
Actually I can, but I never start such an analyses without understanding different alternative big pictures which might come into play. You’ve already decided however.
CV, what a load of bollocks. If NIST’s maths are wrong, all you need is a blackboard and some chalk.
What was it that helped me decide? For one thing, the fact that instead of blackboards and chalk (or even, god forbid, some actual engineering software), all you’ve got is a series of breathless talking heads on Youtube and a bunch of defamatory false allegations against NIST employees.
I don’t like your right wing bullshit any more than I like John Key’s
CV being right wing now too? That seems to be your only response these days. I believe it was CV who had to back out for a while because he upset the Labour leadership and he wanted to stay with the “left wing” party.
“As entertaining as it can be, it is also a waste of resources as very few supporters of the Official Story who engage in Truth discussions on-line, ever do it honestly and with an open mind.”
One Tāne Huna, I have been impressed in the past when you state that people need to open their mind to the real history of this Nation. You regularly berate others who don’t take off their blinkers regarding the Government’s position on numerous issues in Aotearoa especially when touching on historical innaccuracies that we live with, then you go and parrot US led propoganda designed to promote War and Poverty and Greed.
I for one get a little confused about what you actually want from this life.
The 911 debacle is, heh, a slow burner, it is not going away. My partner had an immediate “what the…” reaction watching some of the available videos particularly building 7 that was not even hit by an airplane. She is into architecture and such and no calculations were required for her to smell a rodent.
I think it will be revealed as a ‘black op’ in future decades. People on forums like this have only limited license to demand this or that from other commenters. The ongoing ferocity of the debate about 911 imo is due to people’s world view and belief systems being challenged.
Me, I am well aware of the track record of the US military/spooks and crooked offshoots. I mean they turned the ‘attack on Iraq’ into a corporate feeding frenzy.
Granada, Cuba etc anyone?
Freedom, what “propaganda”? Is the National Institute of Standards & Technology a CIA front on your planet?
Perhaps the reason I’m insisting on Physics and Engineering is the same reason I insist on a similarly skeptical approach to right wing drivel wherever it can be found. Ya think?
It cannot however cause thousands of welded rivets on every floor to consistently and simultaneously fail, which is required for the collapse theory to work.
Three rivets. One fails. The remaining two now have half again as much stress, instantly. One more fails, and now the remaining rivet’s stress has increased threefold, nearly instantly.
Also, if you have a minute, could you be so kind as to explain where the vast quantity of extreme heat came from to form the pools of molten metal that were still being discovered weeks after the Towers’ collapse?
Once the aviation fuel has ignited the fire, everything burns. That produces a hell of a lot of heat.
Heat can be lost by radiation or conduction. Surrounding materials and debris can be effective insulators, reducing conduction while blocking radiation. Radiation itself is a very slow process. Moreover, molten steel has an enormous amount of thermal energy tied up in it and takes a very long time to lose.
Never been in a steel mill?
Then again why bother . . .
The rest is sarcasm and metaphysics and is consequently of no interest.
so that’s a no to explaining anything then,
you are sticking with jet fuel and office supplies, good to know i can move on.
I can forsee a large hole resembling the shape of my forehead in the nearest wall so I am not even going to touch on the timespan required for your progressive rivet failure theory.
I thought for half a minute you might have had some logic to go with your ‘911 for parrots’ quotes but sadly the only interesting thing about your comment is your avatar and how it relates to the whole world of conspiracy theories
Given that a couple of universities have seen fit to give me a dgree in industrial design and a couple more in architecture and that their accreditation is overseen by the professions that are very cognisant of liability and that I’m now hired to teach architecture students on the integration of structure and design, I would guess that someone thinks that I do.
By the way, I don’t use Youtube in my architecture classes.
Rhinocrates,
As a suitably qualified person you would no doubt have sought out the best information and there is no more technically proficient group of Truthers than Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth. You obviously contest the statements from the 1700+ Architects and Engineers who have assigned their professional reputations to the topic of 9/11 Truth. They also have lots of hard earned letters after their name. Could you please show us where they are mistaken? The coolest thing about life, more knowledge is always welcome.
My qualifications have also been declared meaningless, so some might say you’re in good company. I have no specialised knowledge of engineering or architecture, but your explanations make a lot of sense and are consistent with what engineers have told me. I even know people who work at NIST, although they weren’t part of the inquiry.
This obviously means that I support US foreign policy and think that every statement that comes out of Washington is gospel truth, so I suppose I’ll just have to live with that.
I have also never used youtube in a lecture. How my students must be deprived!!
OK, in good faith, here goes… and I’m sorry, it’s late and I have a lot of work to do tonight, so my statements are going to read like bullet points.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of anyone involved when it comes to their fundamental beliefs.
“1700” looks like a big number, but it isn’t compared to the whole range of professions – in fact, it’s a tiny minority. Still, for s single, limited human being, sifting through 1699 and missing one to have the 1700th thrown at me is not something I care enough about. So, no, I’m not going to pick on any one individual so that 1699 can be thrown at me.
Here is the difference between lawyers (and conspiracy theorists) and scientists:
A lawyer and a conspiracy theorist thinks that truth is like a house of cards – take just one card away and the entire house collapses.
A scientist knows that truth is like a jigsaw puzzle, an old one that’s been in the attic a long time. Pieces are missing, and it’s going to be hard work to fit the rest together, but if you have enough, then you have a best guess – because any other guess has far fewer pieces, because in reality, we’ll never know everything.
Yes, I will admit that Grey alien reptiod Bilderbergers from Zeta Reticuli working in concert with the Freemasons caused the dosai I ate last night to be overcooked, but I really don’t think that that was the most probable explanation by a long shot.
1 percent of uncertainty does not trump 99 percent certainty.
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If the claims made by the 911 Truthers require violations of the fundamental laws of physics, which have been proven for centuries now, then they had better front up – and they haven’t. In fact, the arguments that they produce require in themselves require violations of fundamental physics.
Could the US government, under George W Bush do evil things? Oh yes, of course I know that they did – but while Jack the Ripper did evil things, I still don’t think that he killed Marilyn Monroe.
FWIW, I do agree that a full and open inquiry will reveal a great deal of complicity with the Bin Laden family, and a lot of arse-covering by intelligence agencies who were incompetent or at least not omniscient, and people will do at least as much to cover up incompetence as they will to cover up complicity. So yeah, there’s cover-ups that haven’t been revealed in inquiries and won’t be.
The thing about conspiracy theories that provokes my scepticism is their assumption that the conspirators are competent.
Everything that we know about them tells us otherwise.
FWIW, I do agree that a full and open inquiry will reveal a great deal of complicity with the Bin Laden family, and a lot of arse-covering by intelligence agencies who were incompetent or at least not omniscient, and people will do at least as much to cover up incompetence as they will to cover up complicity. So yeah, there’s cover-ups that haven’t been revealed in inquiries and won’t be.
Cover ups – Check!
The thing about conspiracy theories that provokes my scepticism is their assumption that the conspirators are competent
Conspiracy Theory – Check
Cover up = Conspiracy!.
Without transparency, openess etc, there is little to no chance of gaining a clear understanding of the why/how/who, which leaves people to draw their own conclusions, using various methods and means.
Until such time as it comes into full light (unlikely), the *official narrative* must be treated as part of any conspiracy, that’s simply the consequence of a *cover up* , on any size or scale!
Maybe you could explain Newton’s Laws to us? You seem very keen on stating that none of us understand them, between your bouts of roflolling. Please enlighten us.
Once you’ve done that, I personally would be keen to have Lord Kelvin’s contributions explained as well.
“The energy used to destroy the building is in fact not the initial impact, but all the gravitational potential energy devoted to lifting its entire mass into the sky in the first place when it was constructed.”
Stupid demolition people using all that dynamite to blow up buildings while all the while those buildings really would behave like knitwork: All you need is to find a way to unleash all that potential energy devoted to keeping all that knitwork together! Find the right stitch and voila Bob’s your uncle. Same with buildings, all you need is the right bolt to break due to heat (like in building 7 apparently according to NIST) and the building will come down in freefall speed into it’s own footprint.
In the mean time the building covered in another oil product called plastic it seems which burned nicely and long unlike the Kerosene of the planes in a few initial minutes, was destroyed but did not collapse into it’s own footprint in free fall speed.
I see a lot of concrete, but haven’t identified any steel trusses that have been stripped of fire insulation (applied by a New York construction crew in the era of the five families) by the mechanism of a large plane flying into the building.
You’ll find that real demolition work is done on that principle, actually: you don’t “blow the building up”, you use the weight of the building to do most of the demolition for you.
You say National can’t be trusted for various reasons (who knows you may even be right)
Labour can’t be trusted to run the country for various reasons and they can’t even run their own party
The Greens just say any old thing and hope no one checks (bit like National and Labour I suppose)
So what options are there for people to vote for or is it a case of the lesser of two (three) evils?
The Greens just say any old thing and hope no one checks (bit like National and Labour I suppose)
Well, if you had actually bothered to check you would have found that the Green Party had been consistent with what’s on their webpage and they back up what they say. This is unlike, say, National.
I’m not saying they don’t stay on message, I’m saying theres a lot of bullcrap in the message and nobody (especially the media) seems keen on calling them on it.
You seriously think similar pieces couldn’t be written about national party graphics? Obviously not by DPF, but really?
The only way to not vote for the ‘least worst party’ is to vote for yourself. Otherwise, everyone is making a compromise decision, and that means ‘least worse’.
“You seriously think similar pieces couldn’t be written about national party graphics?”
Well no thats why I said at the start: “You say National can’t be trusted for various reasons (who knows you may even be right)”
“Otherwise, everyone is making a compromise decision, and that means ‘least worse’.
– I dunno, just doesn’t seem the best way to get things done, how you could change it though is beyond me…
its well and truly beyond you c73!
Adding to the fog of war
Nactional can not be trusted they continually lie!
Stick to you your cup of tea and leave it at that!
Any party leader who forgets he’s got a million dollars or so in a off shore bank account shouldn’t be allowed within kilometres of the levers of power.
It’s National by default.
Actually, I’m more concerned with people who forget the shares that they have despite the fact that they’re professional traders and will be looking at those shares and what the price is doing on a day to day basis.
When you’re worth 50+ million, what a few shares, easy to forget about, especially Tranz Rail ones, toilet paper had more value than those shares.
David Shearer though, very suspicious.
How can the chap from the UN forget he has a million dollars lying around in a offshore bank account, what’s he hiding?, any reporter worth their salt would be all over this.
“Yeah, especially when you’re also trying to sell them to a business in Texas via your government contacts for more than you bought them for.”
Yeah, and in case anyone (BM) has forgotten, Key’s dishonesty in this instance went WAAAAY beyond just lying 2 or 3 times directly into the camera and changing his story several times as it became obvious that the journo had more info than he first thought.
No the real sin here was that repeatedly Key was using parliament to ask questions designed to procure financial information about the company for his won personal use.
“But since Shearer won’t tell any one, all we can do is make shit up.
FIFY
“Seen a few numbers thrown about.”
Yeah I’ve seen Slater make a few up, and then BM says he “read it somewhere”, and then he increases it by 50%, and then a few other nutjobs repeat it around the blogs, and then Slater says he “heard somewhere” that it was twice as much, and then BM says he heard that too etc etc.
If it’s just speculation, $50 million is a more prumstrial number. Do you have any idea how many shares Cunliffe has in Monsanto and Petrobras? Maybe we could speculate that Norman Russell has a few million in Rio Tinto? Be asprishnul and ambishush, don’t stop with Shearer.
Sick buckets at the ready for a war criminal’s perverted feminism….
Learn to Speak Up
by CONDOLEEZZA RICE • April 1, 2013
There have been many times in my career when I was the only woman in the room; if I didn’t speak up, it was often noticed. I found speaking up took practice, but over time it became an important source of growth in my career.
One moment occurred during my freshman year of college. I was 16 years old and taking my first government class. Midway through the lecture, the professor introduced a bizarre theory as if it was a matter of course: Black people are born with lower IQs than white people. Everyone – including the black students – just sat there, accepting his theory as fact. Meanwhile, I was a 16-year-old black woman in college who spoke two languages and could play Beethoven and Bach on the piano. I was stunned, not only by this absurd statement, but by the lack of reaction from the other students. So I raised my hand.
The professor was stunned that I chose to speak up, and seemed even more amazed when I showed up the next day to argue the point. After that day, he realized his mistake and attempted to befriend me. I went on to excel in the course, despite the obstacles. I also learned a valuable lesson: If you find something uncomfortable or wrong, speak up. If you don’t challenge people, you aren’t doing your job.
In 1984, another situation arose that challenged me to speak up once again. I attended a seminar at Stanford featuring the then-National Security Advisor, who spoke on a commission I felt very strongly about. His mealy-mouthed answers caused my blood pressure to rise; yet no one pressed him for further information. So I raised my hand and shared my perspective. He seemed surprised, yet also impressed. Later he approached me and we talked. He noted my willingness to speak up and praised my thought process. That moment led to a life-long relationship, with him acting as an early mentor.
As my career evolved, so did my desire and need to speak up. Early on in my role as the National Security Advisor, I often had the opportunity to present options, but rarely did I ever voice a strong opinion in front of the President.
One afternoon, I found myself in a heated debate over President Bush giving a speech on the situation in the Middle East. It was a violent time, and there was concern that the President’s speech would only exacerbate the situation. I knew the President wanted to give the speech, so I decided to speak up. I said, “Mr. President, sometimes the only person who can make an impact is the President of the United States. You have to do this.” I waited for his response, nervous that I had overstepped. Instead, he smiled and agreed. He gave the speech and it was a rousing success.
It would be easy to say I have always spoken up at the right times….
I met a Chemistry Professor from the university she’d been in charge of (Stanford?). He considered her extremely mediocre intellectually and said her main achievement was to make university administration meetings confidential. He’d withdrawn from a committee rather than sign a confidentiality agreement, so she certainly didn’t think speaking up was an admirable quality in her subordinates.
I thought the dateline for this item was significant, but it appears that it really was written, in a tone of high seriousness, by Condoleezza Rice herself.
As well as the intellectual mediocrity you mention, it is clear she also lacks a sense of irony.
Prof Savage said: “It is striking that we have been able to discern a distinctive elite, whose sheer economic advantage sets it apart from other classes.
“At the opposite extreme, we have discerned the existence of a sizeable group – 15% of the population – which is marked by the lack of any significant amount of economic, cultural or social capital.
“The recognition of the existence of this group, along with the elite, is a powerful reminder that our conventional approaches to class have hindered our recognition of these two extremes, which occupy a very distinctive place in British society.”
It seems rather disturbing that the professor seems surprised that the rich exist and that they have advantages over everyone else.
Try taking the test on bbcnews.com! Simply by making one addition on a second pass, I seemed to jump from ‘traditional working class’ to ‘established middle class’ in no time at all. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973
Still, there have been people that tell me I’m a round peg in a square’s hole :p
And there was me thinking you had no class at all 😆
Elite – the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth. This group has the highest levels of all three capitals
Established middle class – the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals. The largest and most gregarious group, scoring second highest for cultural capital
Technical middle class – a small, distinctive new class group which is prosperous but scores low for social and cultural capital. Distinguished by its social isolation and cultural apathy
New affluent workers – a young class group which is socially and culturally active, with middling levels of economic capital
Traditional working class – scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived. Its members have reasonably high house values, explained by this group having the oldest average age at 66
Emergent service workers – a new, young, urban group which is relatively poor but has high social and cultural capital
Precariat, or precarious proletariat – the poorest, most deprived class, scoring low for social and cultural capital
Thanks for the link. Interesting survey. I actually don’t think the Prof was surprised that this group exists. More that he hadn’t expected it would show up so clearly in a major survey. He indicates it’s something that social scientists knew, but haven’t had substantial enough evidence to really go with it. He says:
“The recognition of the existence of this group, along with the elite, is a powerful reminder that our conventional approaches to class have hindered our recognition of these two extremes, which occupy a very distinctive place in British society.”
I guess it indicates more that long held major paradigms are hard to shift in social sciences, without substantial, sound research-based evidence.
It also give’s significant reinforcement of the term “precariat” which is getting increasing currency in left wing politics.
The categories they identify at the extremes are the most significant and useful. There’s been various attempts to categorise classes showing more gradations than the Marxist working vs capitalist classes, taking into account social status, cultural capital etc – there’s so many relevant factors it’s always difficult to pin down clear class bands.
“It also give’s significant reinforcement of the term “precariat” which is getting increasing currency in left wing politics”.
And especially so in countries whose gubbamints are still wedded to the neo-liberal dogma.
Progressive taxation is regularly attacked in the media. Higher tax rates restrains the richest – well if they didn’t pay lobbyists to create loopholes.
There is to be a law change in the air concerning ‘incitement to commit suicide’. I wonder if it is aimed at people who help others with euthanasia. I am hoping that the politicians will actually pass a law that sets out procedures to facilitate this in an organised and legal way that respects the wishes of the person and protects them against pressure from others.
Any laws passed that bear on euthanasia should be directed to making this a human and humane process carried out effectively by members of the family who can face the decision to die and last ceremony. The last thing that should happen is for law makers, medical or bureaucratic personnel to become arbiters of people’s lives so they are forced to exist beyond their wishes.
Sir Peter comments that he is particularly concerned by the trend for the complex nature of science to be ignored or misunderstood in societal debates, leading to the argument that you can find a scientist to support any given position. This, he says, totally misinterprets the way that scientific consensus is achieved and can engender serious mistrust in the scientific enterprise. Society will be better served when science is used appropriately
@PB ….. it doesn’t surprise me. I suspect Key, in all his arrogance, appointed Gluckman because he thought he could be a useful ally rather than because of his acumen.
Society uses science; good science simple ways to understand how to act in concert to produce the best outcome. Take roading science, where the simple practice of all on the left (or right) makes it possible to quickly get to where you need to be. As Einstein pointed out, keep it simple but no simpler. The problem with Gluckman take on matters is its a generalization, good public science requires that the problem being discuss is referenced, then understanding of the
problem is displayed, then and only then should we accord the speaker with any integrity, if they then do not allow themselves a forum to be question in, or respond in put downs and other poor debating tactics. Gluckman is merely a talking head for Key to see being scientific minded.
Now the media often reworks, highly manufactures the work of science in order to sell newspapers, this is entirely different from the need of society for simple science that helps us act in concert to achieve results that we value. i.e. Media sluts. Science isn’t found in the media much, its found in legislation, and its noted Gluckman has little to say about legislative ends of science.
like for example, have too few mine inspectors, when you don’t measure you can’t avoid, a simple scientific practice that any chief scientist should be aware of. But you see the Human Rights Commission deals with Human rights practices of government, so you’d think that the chief science advisor would also deal to the practice of public science that legislation creates, or ministers ignore.
Like Climate change predicting globally more flash flooding, more droughts, and so when they appear, ADVISING Joyce not to make a dick of himself by arguing against climate change and
its effects on our economy, our diary output, our water use, our clean green branding.
She’s gotta keep all those private prison stats up after all! It’ll be justification for another one coming to an area near you. Perhaps there’ll be a smelter site ripe for conversion before too long. Shove a few partitions and a roof on those pot lines, and Bob’s your uncle.
Ticks all the boxes – it’s a win-win situation – regional development, tough on crime, etc. etc
(I am thinking NAct type strategic planning)
And this is why we will see our power bills rise after the Mighty River sale:
Mighty River Power’s directors are getting hefty increases in fees ahead of the company’s float, State Owned Enterprises Minister Tony Ryall has announced.
The Government announced that the annual fees for directors would increase by 73 per cent to $85,000 a year.
Chairwoman Joan Withers will see her fees increase by more than 50 per cent, to $150,000 a year.
Ryall said the move was to ”adjust the level of fees MRP directors are paid to bring them more into line with comparable listed companies”.
“Fees need to be at a level that will attract and retain directors who have the required governance skills to operate effectively in a listed company environment,” Ryall said.
As well as the pay increase, the Government will allow the company an $85,000 pool ”for committee work” to be distributed by the board.
Parasites go on a feeding frenzy for some unknown reason once ‘mum and dad’ take over. This is sick and unjustified but I’m sure the directors will turn it down ha fucking ha.
meanwhile in other parts of the world the mining and exploitation companies continue to abuse and destroy indigenous peoples and their lives – our situation here is interconnected with all struggles especially underreported ones.
The Shuar stepped up their efforts to defend their culture and way of life against the impending threat of the 25,000 acre Mirador mining Project. They initiated a legal action alongside Environmental and human rights using Articles 71-73 on Rights of Nature in the Ecuadorian Constitution. In their case, the plaintiffs have asked the courts to stop the Mirador Project using the precautionary principle. If the project is allowed to go ahead, it would have a severe impact on the Shuar’s culture, their sacred sites, and the very water and land they depend on.
The Havasupai Nation, meanwhile, teamed up with three conservation groups to sue the U.S. Forest Service over its decision to allow Energy Fuels Resources, Inc. to begin operating a uranium mine near Grand Canyon National Park without initiating or completing formal tribal consultations and without updating an outdated 1986 federal environmental review. The Canyon Mine threatens cultural values, wildlife and endangered species and increases the risk of pollution and depletion of groundwater feeding springs and wells in and around the Grand Canyon.
Traditional owners in Arnhem Land, Australia, issued a petition to Darwin and Canberra calling on the Northern Territory and Federal governments not to allow their country to be fracked. More than 80 per cent of the Northern Territory is now under application for the unconventional oil and gas exploration, including most of Arnhem Land. As a public demonstration, Traditional owners also burnt a letter from Paltar Petroleum who was responding to their objections. As they burnt the document the men called out in unison: “Paltar this is what you wrote to us, and we say no!”
I urge everyone interested to go to Intercontinental Cry and read further.
Minister for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith, one of the many millionaires in the UK Cabinet, has provoked outrage by saying he could live on £53 a week benefits.
It reminds one of the story about Tony Blair when on the speaking circuit, going into his bank and asking if he could have the amount he could withdraw from the bank’s ATMs increased.
“Let’s see,” said the cashier, “Do you earn more than £25,000?”
“It depends,” replied Tony. “Some days I do, some days I don’t.”
The British man called Mick Philpott with his wife and his drug-mate has been tried for setting fire to his house where his children were.
The plan was for Philpott to rescue his children and for Willis (a previous lover who had left him) to be prosecuted for arson, the court heard. But it went horribly wrong when the blaze took hold fast. The adults escaped the house but the six children died as they slept. (We hope.)
But in 1978 –
Philpott launched a savage attack on 17-year-old Kim Hill – before turning the knife on her mother.
He was convicted of attempted murder and GBH with intent and jailed for seven years.
Jurors in Philpott’s latest trial were not told about his previous conviction after judge Mrs Justice Thirlwall refused to allow the shocking incident to be used in evidence
Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4870695/Revealed-Mick-Philpott-stabbed-ex-girlfriend.html#ixzz2PRuHSSuf
* He has been in trouble for vicious attacks – these went back to 1978.
* He was a 21 year old soldier at that time.
* Some years later he pinned another girlfriend down and held a knife at her throat.
* Now in his mature age he, and his mates, set fire to his house and six of his children died as a
result.
* If such a person was kept in jail for his whole life from the first attacks that showed a
thoroughly dangerous and degenerate man who was unlikely to be habilitated, others
wouldn’t have had to go through hell because of him.
* He wouldn’t be able to breed a family of 17 children who would have a screwed up life as a
result of their parents being bad role models.
* He sounds as if he has the mindset of Wilson of Blenheim, an ugly and aggressive man
about to be released after all sorts of appeals.
And some are using the case to hit welfare – ‘Anyone convicted of any welfare fraud should receive a lifetime ban on ..’ It is obvious that there should be shorter sentences for welfare fraud, and longer ones for being a vicious, violent, abusive person who is a danger to society.
And lastly when trying these people, the law makes certain they get a ‘fair trial’ by not revealing that they are degenerate criminals to the jury. No mention of any past wrongdoing is told to them. They should be told at the end of the trial so that they have the whole picture of the person they are deciding on.
I felt great saddness when I saw the photo of the six children who died. It has been reported that Philpott tried to chat up a police woman and he was joking/laughing when down at the police station just after the fire.
To be charged with manslaughter and not murder is not right either.
I know that there are thousands on the East half of Washington DC who do seem to live like that. Not sure about the snow-coffee though. Sometimes information like that comes out of North Korea but the camera doesn’t lie – does it?
Interesting thanks chris73
A guy called Alun Hill did it as a joke, he admits he does not speak Korean, then it got picked up by some online news crew who mistakenly ran with it thinking it legit
as spoof it has some great lines despite the daily struggle of the reality the pictures expose
Kind of says it all really and of course South Korea has some big friends they can call on, not sure China would think its worth going to war over North Korea, in fact they’re probably hoping the USA and South Korea does deal to them and take them over, it’d mean more stability in the region which would = bigger profits and they wouldn’t have to prop up North Korea…
One Tāne Huna said
“The adults would like to be able to have a sensible discussion of US foreign policy, which is pretty much a terrorism factory so far as I can tell, but every time anyone raises it we have to listen to the dimwit chorus insisting we watch this video.”
complete horsepuckey
These days it is a rare day when 911 issues, specifically the physical events of the day, get mentioned on The Standard.
Today was an obvious tease, poking a sleeping bear with a stick so to speak, due to the events in Russia, (still hasn’t collapsed btw)
It is not a ‘conspiracy theory’ to reference 911 when discussing the Neo-Imperial aspirations of the USA into the Middle East and other Asian regions and how the events of that day were used as justification for the slaughter of hundreds and thousands of people and the instigation of a global war against largely manufactured enemies.
It is not a ‘conspiracy theory’ to reference 911 when discussing the acquisition by the DHS for hundreds of armoured personal carriers or thousands of drones or the millions of rounds of ammunition or the establishment of the TSA or the removal of an ever growing list of civil liberties throughout America. All of which are a direct and very real result of the events of September 11 2001.
It is not a ‘conspiracy theory’ to reference 911 when discussing how all US foreign policy from that day forth has been based on a litany of misinformation and hyperbole, most of which over the past decade has been proven false. Facts that to this day are openly ignored by the Administration itself.
It is a ‘conspiracy theory’ to blather on about a very complex set of engineering calculations without being able to write them down, let alone do the Maths.
It is a ‘conspiracy theory’ when it requires thousands of individuals to be in on it.
Two women were rescued from being burned alive earlier this week in Papua New Guinea.
An angry mob accused the two elderly women of being sorcerers who killed an 8-year-old girl in the city of Mount Hagen.
Those two were lucky.
Mount Hagen is the same city where a 20-year-old mother actually was burned at the stake last week.
And before we get too uppity about ourselves in the West:
Is today’s war on women in the western world so different from these events in Papua New Guinea, or the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries?
For example: we learned recently that the Irish government has admitted that, for more than seven decades, it was in collusion with the so-called Magdalene laundries operated by religious congregations that kept generations of women and girls (as young as 12) in virtual enslavement.
Other instances of the ongoing war on women: Republican legislators in Iowa think it’s a good idea to put rape victims in jail. In Virginia, women are being forced to have ultrasounds before they can have an abortion. The state’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, has signed into law Virginia’s mandatory ultrasound law, making the state the eighth to require such a procedure.
As I see it, misogyny continues to be alive and well worldwide.
Yeah, we’ve got a long way to go before we call ourselves civilised.
I wonder how strong the fundamentalist churches are in Papua New Guinea. I don’t know whether fundamentalist and evangelising means the same outcome. The evangelising spirit in some churches alone, prompts a quick response to previously little known areas that are probably still versed in aminism or whatever has been traditional. Mix the ultimate truths of such christianity (with a small c) and the traditional responses to wrong-doing and that might be an explanation for this savage witch-hunting.
Seen this?
____________________________________________________________________________
Shut The Smelter!
LET THE “TOO BIG TO FAIL” SMELTER FAIL
“Too big to fail” was the mantra of the robber banks and other transnational financial sharks during the Global Financial Crisis, which remains ongoing. This left the victims to pay for the costs of the crime, while the corporate criminals walked away scotfree and kept their loot. The people of Cyprus are the latest to experience firsthand just how this works.
In this country, Rio Tinto’s Bluff smelter was decades ahead of the fashion. Every time that Rio Tinto feels that its charmed existence in New Zealand is going to become less cushy, it threatens to pull the plug, close the smelter and walk away. It does so in the knowledge that it has always been deemed “too big to fail” by the succession of Governments, both National and Labour, that it has effortlessly outmanoeuvred for more than 40 years. This time it is trying it on as a tactic to try to pressure Meridian over its power price contract, on which the ink is barely dry and which only took effect in January.
Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) calls Rio Tinto’s bluff (pun intended). Stop crying wolf, stop using your New Zealand workers as disposable pawns in your cynical game, stop holding Southland and the country to ransom. Go ahead and close the smelter and bugger off. See if we care, the country will be much better off without you. The smelter is the country’s single biggest user of electricity, consuming one sixth of the total, 24/7 for more than 40 years. It pays a top secret super cheap price that is not available for any other user and all it does is export electricity from NZ in the form of alumina, while being subsidised by all other electricity users. The smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand. It is the biggest bludger in the country.
How ironic that Rio Tinto has rejected the Government’s offer of a short term subsidy. It wants a long term one, preferably indefinitely. Presumably, this is in addition to the massive taxpayer subsidy it has been receiving continuously for more than 40 years, in the form of the Manapouri power station built with public money for its exclusive use (and let’s never forget that men died building that); and the cheapest and most secret power price rate in the country bar none. Not good enough apparently, it still wants more.
Rio Tinto won the 2011 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating In Aotearoa/New Zealand (and was runner up in both 2009 and 08). It was nominated for lobbying two Governments “over several years to secure excessive allocations of free emissions units under the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme”.
The Roger Award judges agreed, concluding: “It appears therefore, that the New Zealand taxpayer is subsidising a transnational corporate rort of the emissions trading scheme… The significance of this stance cannot be underestimated; a major transnational player within New Zealand materially benefits from its non-compliance with a strategy to reduce global climate change and its ecological effects”.
The Judges’ Report concludes that the company has a 50 year history of “suborning, blackmailing and conning successive New Zealand governments into paying massive subsidies on the smelter’s electricity; dodging tax, and running a brilliantly effective PR machine to present a friendly, socially responsible and thoroughly greenwashed face to the media and the public. Its milking of the Emissions Trading Scheme is entirely in character”.
The extremely detailed Financial Analysis reveals that the smelter’s claimed benefits to NZ, namely annual export earnings of “around $1 billion” are, in fact, overstated by four fifths.
In short, it is a liability to New Zealand, not an asset.
What about the people who work for the smelter, directly or indirectly? Indisputably, the smelter closing would have a negative impact on Invercargill and Southland. But let’s keep a sense of proportion – in disaster terms it doesn’t compete with Christchurch having lost 185 lives, 50,000 jobs, and sustained $30 billion worth of damage in a matter of seconds on February 22, 2011. If Christchurch can get back in the saddle after that, Invercargill should be able to handle the smelter closure and its attendant job losses. As a plus, the city will be able to shake off its unhealthily dependent situation as a company town with its local government at the beck and call of this transnational bludger.
The tobacco industry used to employ a lot of people here, but that was deemed to be no longer in the public interest. Lacing lollywater with booze and selling it to kids supports a lot of jobs too but there’s plenty of public demand to get rid of that particular industry as well. The P industry provides an income for thousands of people too, but we don’t hear any demand for that insidious trade to be kept going to keep them in a job. History is full of examples of horrible industries that kept people in jobs (such as the slave trade) but which were banned and/or abolished for the greater good.
This smelter constitutes a crime against the people of New Zealand and has done for its entire existence.
In the national interest, it must be closed and the sooner the better.
It would be a great bonus to have 15% of the country’s electricity suddenly available and no longer committed to one smelter. There would no excuse for the moneygrabbing power companies not to cut their prices (we’ve been falsely promised lower power prices since the “electricity reforms” of the 1990s). And, we’re told, it would drive down Meridian’s attractiveness to would be buyers as part of the Government’s assets sale process. How ironic that the selfishness and ruthlessness of one transnational corporation could bugger up the plans to flog off more of our public assets to transnational corporations.
Thanks for that, Penny. Murray Horton is one of this country’s most engaging and entertaining speakers. He always has lots of interesting things to say, and he says them forthrightly and stylishly. Yet he has never appeared on National Radio’s The Panel.
It can’t be because he is from Christchurch; after all, his fellow Christchurch identity Barry Corbett seems to be on the programme half a dozen times a year at least.
A naming project is starting up to expose government officials, businesses, individuals and families using British Virgin Islands and other offshore tax havens to avoid tax in their own countries. With 200 gigabytes of data from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a fair few people will be keeping their accountants quite busy right now.
The naming project may be extremely damaging for confidence among the world’s wealthiest people, no longer certain that the size of their fortunes remains hidden from governments and from their neighbours.
ICIJ’s collaborating journalists from 46 countries constituted one of the largest groups ever to have worked together on a data project. Marina Walker Guevara, Michael Hudson, Nicky Hager and Stefan Candea worked from the US, New Zealand and Romania. Others who contributed across the world included Mar Cabra, Kimberley Porteous, Frederic Zalac, Alex Shprintsen, Prangtip Daorueng, Roel Landingin, Francois Pilet, Emilia Díaz-Struck, Roman Shleynov, Harry Karanikas, Sebastian Mondial and Emily Menkes.
there’s a bit of added interest in the list of journalists.
Below is the list of gender-critical material which appeared on Redline from July 31, 2019 to September 30, 2019. Sports categories must be by sex, not gender identity Queer theory glossary Woke misogyny and homophobia: a gay critique of trans ideology Another unfortunate experiment? New Zealand’s transgender health policy and ...
Smart Energy Europe: A Plan to provide 100% of ALL ENERGY using Renewable Energy to EuropeIntroductionAll Energy renewable energy systems are often commented on here at Skeptical Science. Many comments suggest that it will be difficult, expensive or impossible to use renewable energy to power the world. To ...
The government released its Action for Healthy Waterways package today, ostensibly with the goal of cleaning up our rivers and making them swimmable within a generation. Doing that, of course, requires confronting the cow in the room: the dairy industry which causes most of the pollution. But while they've imposed ...
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nzI would like to know if New Zealand’s carbon emissions ...
Remember KiwiBuild? Previously the government's flagship policy, it was supposed to build thousands of new homes every year for kiwi families. But instead of flooding the market, we've got a pathetic dribble: The Government's former flagship housing policy is so far behind schedule it will take more than 400 years ...
Don Franks Now Covid-19 restrictions allow gatherings of a hundred, an urgent hui needs calling. A special conference of the Council of Trade Unions. Today, workers face the greatest attack on employment, pay and conditions since the depression, we need a strong united union voice. As it stands now, organised ...
George Henderson New Zealand schools have introduced a climate change resource that suggests children “eat less meat and dairy”, even though teachers will not know how much meat or dairy any child in their care has eaten. Opinion pieces in the papers have called for the reduction of meat and ...
Questioning the number of district health boards in New Zealand has got to the extent that “too many DHBs” has become a perceived truth requiring no further elaboration. It is rarely challenged by policy advisers, academics, and journalists. But when one drills down further it becomes clear that the number ...
The emergence of a new National party leader, seemingly out of nowhere, has – not surprisingly – raised a number of questions as to who Todd Mulller actually is and what makes him tick. He has been an MP for some time but seems to have hidden his light under ...
Costa Rica has become the first country in Central America to recognise same-sex marriage: The first same-sex weddings have taken place in Costa Rica, the first Central American country to equalise its marriage legislation. A lesbian couple became the first to tie the knot in a ceremony that took ...
There's a new twist in the Winston Peters secret donation story. It appears that a significant chunk of NZ First's secret laundered donations goes straight into the pockets of the people administering the scheme: Tens of thousands in donor's funds given to the New Zealand First Foundation were spent paying ...
Is Todd Muller the Ned Flanders of the National Party? This is how he’s been characterised by political commentator Gordon Campbell, who suggests the change in leadership is, in Simpsons terms, akin to swapping the scary and cruel Monty Burns for Homer Simpson’s compassionate but conservative neighbour. There’s almost a ...
We all know that many so-called journalists and political commentators in New Zealand work directly or indirectly for political parties or for certain political factions. This was obviously the case when pundit for hire Matthew Hooton launched a campaign against then National Party leader, Simon Bridges, over their numerous polling ...
Let's Roll! The easy victory over a Bridges-led National Party which the Left had every cause to anticipate just a few days ago is no longer in the offing. Our enemy’s position has changed. His numbers are swelling. A rapid thrust to the left, followed by an audacious outflanking manoeuvre ...
New National Party leader Todd Muller has been interviewed about his policies, and has promised to restart offshore fossil fuel exploration if elected: The Bay of Plenty MP rolled former leader Simon Bridges last week, but says the party has not changed its stance on previous promises. "That is ...
Anyone who keeps an eye on evidence around cannabis and public health will be familiar with the Christchurch Health and Development Study. It's one of two local longitudinal studies frequently cited with respect to cannabis and youth development. But in a new article in the New Zealand Medical Journal, it is ...
In the age of covid we are Jacinda’s team of five million, except for some. There has rarely been a more blatant case of discrimination against beneficiaries than Grant Robertson’s announcement yesterday that people who have lost their jobs because of the coronavirus will receive weekly payments of $490 per week for 12 weeks and $250 per week for part time ...
It was 75 years ago this month that Germany surrendered and the Allies celebrated VE (Victory in Europe) Day. Millions of people around the world had been killed and many more injured or captured. It was an end to war not just for Europeans, but their allies too, in countries across Africa. But its impact is ...
Well, we are out of lockdown, essentially. I did end up getting the wage subsidy while we were on levels 3 and 4 but I would have been fine if we didn’t. The first day of level 2, the Thursday, the office opened again for the people who weren’t able ...
Watching Todd Muller make his first speech as the newly minted Leader of the Opposition after Simon Bridges’ defenestration on Friday brought to mind a headmaster addressing a school assembly. He showed no particular desire to ingratiate himself with his audience although the occasional flash of self-deprecating humour indicated a ...
The government has announced another income support scheme for people affected by the economic aftershocks of the pandemic: a $490 a week tax-free payment for the newly unemployed, which you can get even if you have a working partner. Which is great, because its supporting people who need help, but ...
The Greens have released their party list, and it contains a few surprises. The one that's getting all the news is that the membership are clearly fans of Chlöe Swarbrick, and she has worked hard to earn that. But they've also favoured incumbent protection over new blood, and in the ...
age credit:Science and Politics – Skeptically.org It seems impossible to keep politics out of science. It’s a pity because politics can end up forcing science to produce the results desired by ...
Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Matthew Parry, Dr Ayesha Verrall, Prof Michael Baker, Prof Martin Eichner (author details*)This blog details a recent modelling study we conducted. In it we estimated that it would take between 27 and 33 days of no new detected cases of COVID-19 for there to be ...
The 2015 Schol Bio paper included a question about a group of birds known as honeycreepers, specifically, the 56 species endemic to the Hawaiian islands. (Or, were endemic: 18, or perhaps 19, are still living; the others are extinct.) Students who’ve already had a look at this paper as part of ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Climate Feedback Article Review... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... What a Week’s Disasters Tell Us About Climate and the PandemicExtreme weather presents an even bigger threat ...
Todd Muller has made a good start to his leadership, though it would obviously be pretty stupid to extrapolate too much from the first couple of days. Nevertheless, as a matter of speculation, it is interesting to think what success on his part might say about the preferences of the ...
A guest post by Hamish Price.“A leader is a dealer in hope.”— Napoléon BonaparteCatholics have a name for potential successors to a dead pope. Papabile. The small coterie of distinguished cardinals who have what it takes to step up. Todd Muller has always been one.I first met Muller at a National ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, May 17 through Sat, May 23, 2020Editor's ChoiceMore than 80 killed in India and Bangladesh as Cyclone Amphan heaps misery on coronavirus-hit areasA man salvages items from ...
Two poor political polls within the same week had seen National for the first time in over a decade dropping major support in the face of a competent and assured COVID-19 health response from the Coalition government. Step forward the relatively unknown Todd Muller, who by Friday afternoon had secured ...
SUNDAY MAY 24The Luminaries (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). There are an awful lot of indeterminate accents in The Luminaries; even lead Eve Hewson seems undecided about being Irish, and she is Irish. Fair play, accents can go badly wrong, so perhaps not over-egging was a consideration. Marton Csokas, always impeccable, and Himesh Patel ...
Let’s be honest; Simon Bridges was a disaster of a political leader. If he wasn’t attempting to criticise the Government’s perfectly good policy initiatives that the public generally supported, he was fudging his lines after getting caught out in yet another lie. When Jami-Lee Ross said Bridges “is a flawed individual ...
The media treat budgets as bit of a circus: lots of theatre and soon forgotten. For a serious economist they show how a team of economists is thinking about the wider economy. The 2020 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) was the most difficult forecasting exercise in the history of ...
Air NZ shed 1,300 workers, Fletchers about to sack 1000. Economists Strateg.Ease predict over 12,400 jobs gone by March next year in central Auckland alone. Here’s Don Franks during the 2008 election campaign when he stood for the Workers Party. He’s talking about fightback strategies, ideas that he believes are ...
One of these MPs is the new leader of the National party. Can you pick which? (Source: Office of the Clerk/Parliamentary Service) National has chosen its new leader, and as expected, it is an old bald white man. Totally representative of modern New Zealand, then. But its not ...
Five years ago, Know Your Stuff didn't have a name. They were just a group of people from the festival community who began testing party drugs onsite because they'd seen the consequences of people taking substances they couldn't identify or didn't understand. They didn't want to see people in their ...
Last week, an article on Newsroom made it clear how the funder / provider split - a core part of our public service - was used to enable underfunding. The government holds the purse strings, but dumps responsibility for its decisions on providers, so they get the blame for poor ...
Dr Jaijus Pallippadan-Johny1, Dr John McDermott2, Rodney Jones1 and Michael Duddin1 (1 Wigram Capital Advisors, Auckland; 2Motu Economic and Policy Research, Wellington)In this blog, we introduce our modelling approach to estimating the transmissibility of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate the usefulness of ...
The Illusions Of Power: Does Jacinda Ardern, like Abraham Lincoln, wake in the dark watches of the night still enveloped in the terrors of life-and-death decision-making? Maybe – maybe not. She’s a twenty-first century prime minister, not so susceptible, perhaps, to the deep religious feeling and romanticism that was such ...
Well, that seals it. The supposedly more National sympathetic One News-Colmar Brunton poll has tonight delivered Simon Bridges’ National Party a worst result than the Newshub-Reid Research three days agoi.On tonight’s numbers Labour sits at an “unprecedented” 59 percent, while National has slumped 17 percent to 29 percent. Anything in ...
The National Party are quite simply a party out of time…Literally, insofar as the 2020 Election is concerned, and certainly in terms of their ideological positioning which has grown far more trenchantly extreme in the last few years in particular, under the leadership of both Simon Bridges, and Paula ...
If tonight’s 1News-Colmar Brunton poll result is anywhere near the 31% recorded in Monday’s Newshub-Reid Research poll, Simon Bridges will surely be dog tucker when his caucus colleagues meet tomorrow to vote on the National Party leadership. The momentum is with newcomer Todd Muller, who seems likely to be installed ...
At last year's Splore festival Listening Lounge sessions, one of the most popular discussions was the one on psychedelic therapy. So for this year's festival, I brought back two of the participants from that panel – Dr Will Evans and Amadeus Diamond – and was delighted to be able to ...
The government is reportedly looking at "helicopter money" - giving cash directly to people to spend - as a way of stimulating the economy in the wake of the pandemic. But its not just central government: Palmerston North City Council is looking at the same thing, though on a much ...
Mahmoud Elkhodr, CQUniversity AustraliaNew Zealanders finally have access to the government’s new tracing app to help people monitor their movements as lockdown continues to ease. As businesses can now open, the NZ COVID Tracer app allows people to keep a register of the places they visit. This “digital diary” ...
Eyes Left! On the face of it, the election of Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye is a no-brainer. New Zealanders are clearly in no mood for a “dirty little street-fighter” and, if the polls are any indication, resent strongly Bridges’ implication that they are. To be at all competitive with ...
Tahu Kukutai, University of Waikato; Helen Moewaka Barnes, Massey University; Tim McCreanor, Massey University, and Tracey McintoshAs schools and businesses reopen and attention shifts to the longer-term repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical that Māori be involved in decision making more equitably than has so far happened. ...
Dane Giraud from The Free Speech Coalition talks with Redline writer and editor Daphna Whitmore on cancel culture, gender ideology, postmodernism and irrationalism. They look at the free speech implications of issues like the Twitter mob, the Government’s proposed emergency police powers, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Free Speech interview ...
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nzAlmost every threat to modern humanity can be traced simply ...
The Finance and Expenditure Committee is holding an inquiry into the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 which was rushed through Parliament last week, and has called for submissions. Submissions are due by Sunday, 28 June 2020. You can either submit online through the form above, or by posting dead ...
While the world is currently struggling with the pandemic, we have another crisis to deal with as well: climate change. Fortunately, not everyone has forgotten about it, with Spain announcing ambitious plans to go net-zero by 2050: Under the law, which still needs to be approved by Parliament, the government ...
Children used in this study were from Lintingkou town (a normal-fluoride/control area) and Dakoutun town (a high-fluoride area) in Baodi district of Tianjin, China. The towns are 25 km apart. Anti-fluoridation activists on ...
When we see how the pandemic is being handled in the rest of the world, we can thank our lucky stars that we live here, in New Zealand, and under our current government, led by Jacinda Ardern. The latest polls suggest that this is exactly how Kiwis feel. But the ...
Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Sophie Febery, Dr Ling Chan, Dr Jennifer Summers, Prof Michael BakerThe concepts of an Alert Level system, household “bubbles”, and social event size limits are all valuable pandemic control measures. Nevertheless, better “source control” of COVID-19 at various Alert Levels by requiring masks in ...
This is a repost from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund blog, by CSLDF Executive Director Lauren Kurtz The COVID-19 pandemic illuminates the crucial role scientists at university, state, and local laboratories in the United States and abroad play in protecting public health and safety—and shows that global research must be done ...
Arguments by religious folk that they are being discriminated against under the Level 2 pandemic restrictions in NZ, which limit church services to ten people or less when schools, restaurants, malls and other service outlets are allowed to host many more people under voluntary self-distancing protocols, got me to think ...
Now that the initial wave has passed, and we are (hopefully) safe in our national bubble, the government is thinking about how to keep the economy ticking over, and how to salvage the bits (like tourism) that are now useless. And for that particular industry, she has mentioned a great ...
There’s been a lot of conjecture concerning the reasons behind the National Party’s fall to 30% in the latest Newshub-Reid Research poll. Some commentators have correctly ascertained that the current leader, Simon Bridges, has been consistently getting his tone wrong! Others believe that the shift in support is all about ...
It probably was too good to last. The blessed peace on the roads that I wrote about here began eroding even before we left Level 4 of the Covid-19 restrictions – and on day one of Level 3, with the tradies rushing to catch upon their work, the double-cab utes ...
Missing From The Electoral Action: The radical Left's last forlorn hope, the "Missing Million", is generally despised by mainstream New Zealand and mistrusted by the respectable members of their own communities. They have moved well beyond the reach of conventional electoral politics.TO SAY the Left’s reaction to Grant Robertson’s “Recovery ...
by Don Franks As we face new unknowns against Covid 19, there’s something reassuring about level 2’s basic rules. “Physical distancing- keep your distance when out and about. Two metres in public and in retail stores, like supermarkets. One metre in most other environments like workplaces, cafes, restaurants, and gyms.” ...
Richard Shaw, Massey UniversityOnce upon a very different time, British cabinet minister Michael Gove sneered that “people have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” But that was then and this is now. One or two ...
From its name, you would think the Environmental protection Authority was there to protect the environment. But we've had another reminder that nothing could be further from the truth, with its decision to allow a toxic, burned-out Korean fishing boat to be dumped at sea: The ship's owner, Dong Won ...
Story of the Week... El Niño/La Niña Update... Toon of the Week... Graphic of the Week... Climate Feedback Article Review... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... The Largest Arctic Science Expedition in History Finds Itself on Increasingly ...
It was just a month ago that the chief executive of Rotorua Lakes Council, Geoff Williams, described suggestions his executive team should consider taking pay cuts as “immoral”. Williams told the NZ Herald: “I am very fortunate to have around me an extremely committed, dedicated and hardworking executive team who ...
“Every day, we see the powers that promulgate laws that oblige one to take certain routes and [those] that do not follow these indications or do not want them to be part of their legislation, are accused and politely persecuted” – Pope Francis What does the Government’s decision to limit ...
In a previous post I noted that futures thinking usually tries to identify what people think will change and what they think needs to change. As lockdown constraints ease, we are seeing a lot of opinions about both. There is no shortage of shovel ready points of view ...
The Green Party says major freshwater reforms announced today provide the strongest ever protections of our waterways, to help ensure the next generation can swim in the rivers of Aotearoa. ...
The Green Party has begun the process for a Select Committee inquiry into student accommodation, which has been exposed during COVID-19 as an under-regulated sector that straddles students with unfair debt. ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Hon Megan Woods, Minister of Research, Science and Innovation Hon Dr David Clark, Minister of Health Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods, and Health Minister David Clark today announced a COVID-19 vaccine strategy, ...
Budget 2020 is about rebuilding together, supporting jobs, getting business moving and the books back into the black. It’s an integral part of our COVID-19 economic response, and our plan to grow our economy and get New Zealand moving again.Here’s a quick look at the five top things you ...
The Coalition Government has approved $206 million in essential upgrades at Ōhakea Air Base. Defence Minister Ron Mark said the money would be spent on improving old infrastructure. He said safety issues would be addressed, as well as upgrades to taxiways, accommodation and fresh, storm and waste water systems. "This ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First “I am not persisting with this case just for myself, but for all people who have had their privacy breached. Privacy of information is a cornerstone of our country’s democracy. Without it our society truly faces a bleak future. We now ...
Forestry Minister Shane Jones has introduced a Bill to Parliament that he says will "force more transparency, integrity and respect" for the domestic wood-processing sector through the registration of log traders and practice standards. The Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill had its first reading in ...
Green MP Golriz Ghahraman is joining over 300 lawmakers from around the world in calling on the big banks and the IMF to forgive the debt of developing countries, in the wake of the COVID crisis. ...
Forestry Minister Shane Jones says concerns that carbon foresters are planting pine trees that will never be harvested are the result of "misinformation". "The billion tree strategy is an excellent idea, unfortunately from time to time it's tainted by misinformation spread by the National Party or their grandees, hiding in scattered ...
The Green Party welcomes funding in the budget to reunite more refugees with their families, ensuring they have the best chance at a new life in Aotearoa New Zealand. ...
This year’s Budget is about rebuilding New Zealand together in the face of COVID-19. Jobs are central to how we’re going to do that.There’s a lot of targeted investment for employment in this year’s Budget, with announcements on creating new jobs, training people for the jobs we have, and supporting ...
Speaking to Stuff's Coronavirus NZ podcast, Foreign Minister Winston Peters revealed China tried to dissuade New Zealand from going into lockdown.“Without speaking out of turn, they wanted a discussion as to why we were doing it, because they thought it was an overreaction,” Mr Peters told Stuff’s Coronavirus NZ podcast.He also ...
The Coalition Government is making changes to the Overseas Investment Act to ensure New Zealand assets don't fall into the hands of foreign ownership in the economic aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Associate Minister of Finance David Parker announced the Act will be amended to bring forward a national interest ...
A quick start to a trans-Tasman bubble could see the tourism industry make a swift recovery, according to Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters. "I believe tourism will turn around dramatically faster than people think," Mr Peters told reporters after Thursday's Budget. "Why? Because I think the Tasman bubble is [going ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First Please check against deliveryhttps://vimeo.com/418303651 Budget 2020: Jobs, Business and Balance Introduction Acknowledgements to all Cabinet colleagues, and party ministers Tracey Martin, Shane Jones and Ron Mark, Under-Secretary Fletcher Tabuteau and to caucus colleagues. Thank you for your support, your ...
The 2020 Budget includes significant support to stabilise New Zealand’s family violence services, whose work has been shown to be so essential throughout the COVID-19 lockdown. ...
The Green Party says huge new investment in public and transitional housing will get thousands more families into the warm, safe homes they deserve. ...
The Green Party says the $1.1 billion environmental investment in this year’s budget to create thousands of green jobs will help jump start a sustainable recovery from the COVID crisis. ...
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters said today the Coalition Government told foreigners at the start of the Covid-19 crisis that if their circumstances had changed dramatically, they should go home. "And 50,000 did," Mr Peters said. Official advice to Cabinet revealed there is potentially 380,000 foreigners and migrant workers in ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First New Zealand First welcomes the decision today to go to Alert Level 2 from midnight Wednesday, says Leader Rt Hon Winston Peters. Alert Level 2 will mean a return to work for the vast majority of New Zealand’s businesses. A return ...
Nurses now look set to get more protection from violence at work, under a proposed new law.This after NZ First MP Darroch Ball's "Protection for First Responders Bill", which introduces a six-month minimum sentence for assaults on first responders, will now also cover emergency department healthcare workers. The ...
Darroch Ball MP, New Zealand First Law and Order Spokesperson An amendment to the ‘Protection of First Responders Bill’ is being tabled which will see emergency department healthcare workers included in the legislation. “During this COVID-19 crisis we have seen reports of violence and specifically increased incidents of spitting towards ...
Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones is breathing new life into the proposal to move Auckland's port to Whangārei to help in the economic recovery post Covid-19 pandemic.If New ZealandFirst was returned in the September general election, Minister Jones said a priority would be development of an "economic haven" at Northport, ...
The law setting out New Zealanders’ basic civil and human rights is today one step towards being strengthened following the first reading of a Bill that requires Parliament to take action if a court says a statute undermines those rights. At present, a senior court can issue a ‘declaration of ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters today reiterated the deep concern of the New Zealand Government following confirmation by China’s National People’s Congress of national security legislation relating to Hong Kong. “New Zealand shares the international community’s significant and long-standing stake in Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability,” Mr Peters said. “New Zealand ...
Thousands of artists and creatives at hundreds of cultural and heritage organisations have been given much-needed support to recover from the impact of COVID-19, Prime Minister and Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Jacinda Ardern announced today. “The cultural sector was amongst the worst hit by the global pandemic,” Jacinda ...
Key New Zealand assets will be better protected from being sold to overseas owners in a way contrary to the national interest, with the passage of the Overseas Investment (Urgent Measures) Bill. The Bill, which passed its third reading in Parliament today, also cuts unnecessary red tape to help attract ...
Setting higher health standards at swimming spots Requiring urban waterways to be cleaned up and new protections for urban streams Putting controls on higher-risk farm practices such as winter grazing and feed lots Setting stricter controls on nitrogen pollution and new bottom lines on other measures of waterway health Ensuring ...
The Government is on the verge of reaching its target of state sector boards and committees made up of at least 50 percent women, says Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter and Minister for Ethnic Communities Jenny Salesa. For the first time, the Government stocktake measures the number of Māori, ...
The Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister and Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Minister, Kris Faafoi, has today announced the appointment of Tristan Gilbertson as the new Telecommunications Commissioner and member of the Commerce Commission. “Mr Gilbertson has considerable experience in the telecommunications industry and a strong reputation amongst his peers,” ...
The Ministry of Education and NZEI Te Riu Roa have agreed to settle the pay equity claim for teacher aides, Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced today. This will see more than 22,000 teacher aides, mostly women, being valued and paid fairly for the work they do. “Teacher aides are frontline ...
Subcontractors will have greater certainty, more cashflow support and job security with new changes to retention payments under the Construction Contracts Act says Minister for Building and Construction, Jenny Salesa. A recent review of the retentions money regime showed that most of the building and construction sector is complying with ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong have marked the first anniversary of the New Zealand-Singapore Enhanced Partnership with a virtual Leaders’ Meeting today. The Enhanced Partnership, signed on 17 May 2019, provides the framework for cooperation across the four main areas of trade, defence and ...
On 17 May 2019, New Zealand and Singapore established an Enhanced Partnership to elevate our relations. The Enhanced Partnership – based on the four pillars of trade and economics, security and defence, science, technology and innovation, and people-to-people links – has seen the long-standing relationship between our countries strengthen over the ...
State-Owned Enterprises Minister Winston Peters has welcomed KiwiRail’s announcement that it is seeking a preferred shipyard to build two new rail-enabled ferries for the Cook Strait crossing. “This Government is committed to restoring rail to its rightful place in New Zealand. Bigger, better ships, with new technology are yet another ...
Better protection for seabirds is being put in place with a new National Plan of Action to reduce fishing-related captures, Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash and Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage announced today. The National Plan of Action for Seabirds 2020 outlines our commitment to reduce fishing-related captures and associated seabird ...
Almost $1 billion in interest-free loans for small businesses More than 55,000 businesses have applied; 95% approved Average loan approx. $17,300 90% of applications from firms with ten or fewer staff A wide cross-section of businesses have applied, the most common are the construction industry, accommodation providers, professional firms, and ...
Thousands of children will have healthier lungs after the Government’s ban on smoking in cars with kids becomes law, says Associate Minister of Health Jenny Salesa. This comes after the third reading of Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill earlier today. “This law makes it ...
The special Epidemic Response Committee (ERC) has successfully concluded its role, Leader of the House Chris Hipkins said today. The committee was set up on 25 March by the agreement of Parliament to scrutinise the Government and its actions while keeping people safe during levels 4 and 3 of lockdown. ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters today announced four diplomatic appointments: New Zealand’s Ambassador to Belgium, High Commissioners to Nauru and Niue, and Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism. “As the world seeks to manage and then recover from COVID-19, our diplomatic and trade networks are more important than ever,” Mr Peters said. “The ...
New Zealanders will be better protected from online harm through a Bill introduced to Parliament today, says Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin. “The internet brings many benefits to society but can also be used as a weapon to spread harmful and illegal content and that is what this legislation targets,” ...
New Zealand’s world-first plan to eradicate the cattle disease Mycoplasma bovis is on track the latest technical data shows, says Agriculture and Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor. “Two years ago the Government, DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb New Zealand and industry partners made a bold decision to go hard and commit ...
Further support for New Zealanders affected by 1-in-100 year global economic shock 12-week payment will support people searching for new work or retraining Work programme on employment insurance to support workers and businesses The Government today announced a new temporary payment to support New Zealanders who lose their jobs due ...
The Provincial Growth Fund will play a vital role in New Zealand’s post-COVID-19 recovery by creating jobs in shorter timeframes through at least $600 million being refocused on projects with more immediate economic benefits, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones has announced. The funding is comprised of repurposed Provincial Growth ...
Government exempts some home improvements from costly consents Homeowners, builders and DIYers will soon have an easier time making basic home improvements as the Government scraps the need for consents for low-risk building work such as sleep-outs, sheds and carports – allowing the construction sector to fire back up quicker ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters says the New Zealand Government has reacted with concern at the introduction of legislation in China’s National People’s Congress relating to national security in Hong Kong. “We have a strong interest in seeing confidence maintained in the ‘one country, two systems’ principle under which Hong ...
The Minister for Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio, says the theme for the 2020 Samoa Language Week is a perfect fit for helping our Pacific communities cope with the unfolding COVID-19 crisis, and to prepare now for the journey ahead as New Zealand focuses on recovery plans and rebuilding New ...
A nearly 40-year programme to protect one of New Zealand’s most critically endangered birds is paying off, with a record number of adult kakī/black stilt recently recorded living in the wild, the Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage announced today. “Thanks to the team effort involved in the Department of Conservation’s ...
The story of the Waikato-Tainui Treaty process and its enduring impact on the community is being told with a five-part web story launched today on the 25th anniversary of settlement, announced Associate Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Carmel Sepuloni. “I am grateful to Waikato-Tainui for allowing us to help capture ...
Taita College in the Hutt Valley will be redeveloped to upgrade its ageing classrooms and leaky roofs, Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced today. “The work is long overdue and will make a lasting difference to the school for generations to come,” Chris Hipkins said. “Too many of our schools are ...
The Government is allocating $36.72 million to projects in regions hard hit economically by COVID-19 to keep people working, Economic Development Minister Phil Twyford and Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. Projects in Hawke’s Bay, Northland, Rotorua and Queenstown will be funded from the Government’s $100 million worker ...
A $35m boost to financial capability service providers funded by MSD will help New Zealanders manage their money better both day to day and through periods of financial difficulty, announced Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni. “It’s always been our position to increase support to key groups experiencing or at risk ...
Dunedin barrister Melinda Broek has been appointed as a District Court Judge with Family Court jurisdiction to be based in Rotorua, Attorney-General David Parker announced today. Ms Broek has iwi affiliations to Ngai Tai. She commenced her employment in 1996 with Scholefield Cockroft Lloyd in Invercargill specialising in family and ...
The Coalition Government has approved a business case for $206 million in upgrades to critical infrastructure at Royal New Zealand Air Force Base Ohakea, with the first phase starting later this year, Defence Minister Ron Mark announced today. The investment will be made in three phases over five years, and ...
Transport Minister Phil Twyford today released the Ministry of Transport’s review of the organisational culture at the Civil Aviation Authority. Phil Twyford says all employees are entitled to a safe work environment. “I commissioned this independent review due to the concerns I had about the culture within the CAA, and ...
Ensuring that Stats NZ’s direction and strategy best supports government policy decisions will be a key focus for a new Governance Advisory Board announced today by the Minister for Statistics, James Shaw. The new Governance Advisory Board will provide strategic advice to Stats NZ to ensure it is meeting New ...
Environment Judge David Kirkpatrick of Auckland has been appointed as the Principal Environment Judge, Attorney-General David Parker announced today. Judge Kirkpatrick was appointed an Environment Judge in February 2014. From December 2013 to July 2016 he was Chair of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel. Prior to appointment he ...
A programme to connect marae around the country to the internet has received $1.4 million to expand to include urban marae in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Minister Kris Faafoi and Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. The funding for the Marae Connectivity Programme ...
The Government will provide $500,000 to the Hawke’s Bay Mayoral Drought Relief Fund to help farmers facing one of the worst droughts in living memory, says Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor. “Yesterday afternoon I received a letter from Hawke's Bay's five local Government leaders asking me to contribute to the Fund. ...
Budget 2020 provides a major investment in New Zealand’s documentary heritage sector, with a commitment to leasing a new Archives Wellington facility and an increase in funding for Archives and National Library work. “Last year I released plans for a new Archives Wellington building – a purpose-built facility physically connected ...
Government Ministers are asking significant private enterprises to adopt prompt payment practices in line with the state sector, as a way to improve cashflow for small businesses. The Ministers of Finance, Small Business, Commerce and Consumer Affairs have written to more than 40 significant enterprises and banking industry representatives to ...
Maori Arts and Crafts will continue to underpin the heart of the tourism sector says Minister for Maori Development Nanaia Mahuta. “That’s why we are making a core investment of $7.6 million to Te Puia New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute, over two years, as part of the Government’s ...
The Government is funding more pathways to jobs through training and education programmes in regional New Zealand to support the provinces’ recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones and Employment Minister Willie Jackson have announced. “New Zealand’s economic recovery will be largely driven by ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra It was Greg Combet, one-time ACTU secretary and former Labor minister, who got Christian Porter and Sally McManus together in the early days of the pandemic. Recalling what happened, Porter told the Australian Financial Review ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristy Hess, Associate Professor (Communication), Deakin University With swift and savage force, the COVID-19 pandemic has inadvertently attacked Australia’s local news media ecology, which was already battling a weakened immune system. As a researcher working on Australia’s largest academic study into the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael (Mike) Joy, Senior Researcher; Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand’s government has been praised for listening to health experts in its pandemic response, but when it comes to dealing with pollution ...
Rod Oram spoke to the leaders of 16 Kiwi businesses over seven weeks, during which they and their businesses rose to meet unprecedented demands. Here's what he learned. ...
Tenants in the commercial property market continue to wait for Covid-19 relief while government coalition partners Labour and New Zealand First hammer out a deal. ...
They call themselves the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, but they’re not a church, and the treatment they sell is called Miracle Mineral Supplement – but it’s chlorine dioxide, commonly known as bleach. Susan Strongman reports for RNZ.A New Zealand website is advising people with symptoms of coronavirus ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Keith Rankin. On Project Syndicate – and in other places in recent months – orthodox US economist Kenneth Rogoff has presented the case for deeply negative interest rates. Another financial sacred cow falls; yes, interest rates can be negative, even substantially negative. It can take ...
The Government is cracking down on nitrogen fertiliser use and asking councils to speed up their planning processes in order to clean up the country's waterways, Marc Daalder reports One in five farmers will have to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertiliser they are using under a new rule announced ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to New Zealand investor and business advisor David Bell. As a university professor ...
The calls for public health specialists for more taxpayer funding could be taken more seriously if they stopped wasting money on pointless public relations campaigns under the guise of public health, says the New Zealand Taxpayers' Union . Union Executive ...
The New Zealand College of Midwives is calling on the Government to release details of the funding allocated to maternity services in this year’s budget, and is supporting their GP colleagues in asking the Minister of Health to immediately release Heather ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics, University of South Australia Australia’s chief medical officer Brendan Murphy told a senate inquiry earlier this week our COVID-19 public health response had avoided about 14,000 deaths. This is in contrast to his deputy Paul Kelly, who ...
By Sri Krishnamurthi, contributing editor Pacific Media Watch Homegrown Australian television shows to the tune of $17.1 million will be broadcast in the Pacific in a bid believed intended to stymie China’s diplomatic and media rise in the region. Shows such as The Voice, Border Security, Neighbours and are to ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nik Thompson, Senior Lecturer, Curtin University Data is the new oil, and online platforms will siphon it off at any opportunity. Platforms increasingly demand our personal information in exchange for a service. Avoiding online services altogether can limit your participation in society, ...
By RNZ News New Zealand has reported no new cases of covid-19 coronavirus today, but the death toll has risen to 22 to include a woman who died after recovering from the disease. Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said there were only eight active cases in the country and ...
Fisheries New Zealand is seeking public feedback on a draft Pāua Fisheries Plan and a proposed subdivision of the pāua fishery along the Kaikōura and Canterbury coasts, known as the PAU3 quota management area. “Splitting the quota management ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jarrod Haar, Professor of Human Resource Management, Auckland University of Technology When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said recently, “I’ve heard lots of people suggesting we should have a four-day week”, she inevitably ignited debate. Ardern was not, as some critics ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Bricknell, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Health, CQUniversity Australia Now we have fewer cases of COVID-19, and restrictions are lifting, many of us are thinking of rejuvenating our social lives by heading to our local cafe or favourite restaurant. What can we ...
Former Race Relations Commissioner, Gregory Fortuin says he agrees with Judith Collins that no one should be superficially judge on skin colour and ethnicity . Fortuin was responding to Collins’ reported outburst about "sick of being demonised" ...
The government says it allowed the Avatar film crew back into New Zealand in spite of the current border closures because the making of the film offers “significant economic value” to our country. But this criterion is being applied unevenly. What ...
New Zealand Defence Force bases in Auckland are attacking their water use as the region battles one of the worst droughts in recent history. The taps are being turned off at Devonport Naval Base, RNZAF Base Auckland at Whenuapai, Papakura Military ...
The Kahui Wai Maori Advisory group welcomed the announcement made by the Hon David Parker, Minister for the Environment today of the new rules designed to clean up our waterways. At the heart of the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management ...
Water New Zealand says the Government’s Action for Healthy Waterways package provides a sensible and realistic way forward and will result in much-needed improvements in freshwater quality. Acting CEO John Mackie says it’s vital that there is no ...
When Claire Freeman became a wheelchair user at age 17, the questions she had about how she might enjoy sex were dismissed and she was made to feel like that part of her life was over. Here she flips the script with some advice on how to find pleasure on ...
As companies in New Zealand’s property development and building sectors digest opportunities presented by the Budget, what they need most urgently to move forwards is Resource Management Act and policy reform in order to rebuild together, says the ...
“We are pleased to see that the Government’s freshwater reforms announced today respond to some of the issues raised, and recommendations made, by the irrigation sector,” says Elizabeth Soal, Chief Executive of IrrigationNZ. “But there is ...
The government is imposing tough rules on water quality despite over 17,000 submissions, many of them complaining the move would impose a huge financial burden. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Dickinson, Professor, Public Service Research, UNSW COVID-19 has had a significant impact on all Australians, but there are very good reasons why the impact might be more keenly felt by people with disability and their carers. Our new research on behalf ...
Freshwater campaigners are frustrated the Government has delayed a crucial decision on nitrogen pollution for a further 12 months until after the election. “We have urged the Government many times to put in place clear and unequivocal limits for ...
The government has just announced a whole lot of new rules and policies for freshwater with the aim of urgently stopping degradation and cleaning up rivers over the long term.What’s all this then? A massive package of work on freshwater quality has just been announced in an attempt to halt further ...
The Environmental Defence Society (EDS) has welcomed the announcement by Ministers David Parker, Damien O’Connor and James Shaw this morning of the much-awaited freshwater reforms. “This package of changes to the present regulatory settings largely delivers ...
Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) has welcomed the Government’s announcement of a set of targeted tools to improve the quality of freshwater. LGNZ is the peak body representing New Zealand’s 78 local councils, providing a unified voice for ...
Many families facing newfound financial hardship due to COVID-19 may not be seeking help – believing they should be able to manage on their own or unaware they qualify for support, according to Good Shepherd NZ. The charitable organisation provides ...
Changes to central government Essential Freshwater regulations reflect farmer feedback, Federated Farmers says. "While we’re still working through the detail, the high level policy decisions indicate the government has heeded some of the rural ...
The Council of Trade Unions is congratulating teacher aides in achieving an historic pay equity offer from the government to settle their long standing concerns. "What this offer from the government does is acknowledge the historic under valuation of ...
Freshwater reforms a significant step forward The Government's policy announced today is a significant step forward in reducing pollution in our rural and our urban waterways caused by intensive farming and through council's neglect. However, there ...
Thursday, 28th May: Greenpeace is today welcoming the Government’s move to place a cap on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, but says more controls are needed to protect freshwater. The fertiliser cap was announced today as part of the Government’s ...
Following today’s announcements on the government’s response to the future of freshwater, it appears that despite the chorus of calls for a change in how the post-COVID future of Aotearoa is shaped - and following many months of engagement, consultation ...
Horticulture New Zealand says the Government’s decisions around freshwater recognise the importance of growing fresh fruit and vegetables in this country. ‘We applaud the Government for the pragmatic approach it is taking to meeting the long-term freshwater ...
NZ’s primary exports held up well in April, again proving the country’s farming industries are sustaining the economy despite many sectors being stricken by the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost coincidentally, a UMR probe of public opinion about farming revealed a sharp swing in perception. Instead of the negativity that had been ...
In a world where players have unfettered access to fans through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it raises the question of whether traditional media still has a role to play. But as Scotty Stevenson explains, a player-driven model powered by social media can only go so far. Among the many weird and ...
Two statements from the Beehive yesterday were enlightening for taxpayers trying to keep tabs on the burgeoning billions being spent on facilitating the economic recovery. One statement told us how much is being handed out to small businesses. Correction. One statement told us how much is being loaned to small ...
Emily Writes celebrates wholesome shows and the rise of cosy television.The world is frightening right now. From Covid-19 to climate change, just watching the news can be overwhelming let alone going outside. This horror is the perfect environment for what I call Soft TV to flourish. Wholesome reality TV isn’t ...
While many areas of the workforce have been shaken by the effects of Covid-19, a Ngāi Tahu futures lab has been working to give rangatahi Māori the opportunity to decide their own futures.Futurists have thought up myriad strategies for how the world should look post-Covid. For all its hurt, the ...
Pacific Media Centre The dramatic daily increase of covid-19 coronavirus cases in West Papua poses a “great threat” to Papua New Guinea, says the country’s deputy emergency chief. State of Emergency Deputy Controller and Acting Secretary for Health Dr Paison Dakulala said the Indonesian-ruled Papua region had seen an increase ...
Recent public opinion polls are revealing some very interesting, if somewhat contradictory, insights into New Zealanders’ current thinking about the Covid19 crisis and the national response. The most recent 1News Colmar Brunton poll reported that 92% of ...
Trucking companies have missed out on the Government’s Covid-19 money lolly scramble and this will mean increased costs across the already damaged economy, Road Transport Forum (RTF) chief executive Nick Leggett says. "Despite working through the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania Since last summer’s bushfire crisis, there’s been a quantum shift in public awareness of Aboriginal fire management. It’s now more widely understood that Aboriginal people used landscape burning to sustain biodiversity ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, University of Adelaide A return to face to face teaching at universities and technical colleges “where possible” is one of the goals of the Morrison government’s three step framework for a COVIDsafe Australia. A look at ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hazel Easthope, Scientia Associate Professor, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW We’re building a lot of apartments in Australia. High-density precincts are being developed across our major cities. But these buildings and neighbourhoods are often not designed and managed in ways that meet ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Kaine, Associate Professor UTS Centre for Business and Social Innovation, University of Technology Sydney Workers everywhere are feeling the impact of COVID-19 and the restrictions necessitated by COVID-19. In Australia, retail and hospitality workers have been particularly hard hit. In other ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Forsyth, Professor of Workplace Law, RMIT University Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week proposed a new deal in industrial relations, bringing together the government, employers and unions to agree on reforms to create jobs and lift the economy in the post-CIVD-19 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ray Markey, Emeritus Professor, Macquarie University In a bid to repair the economy, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced an industrial relations overhaul. Business groups and unions will be brought together to try to change a system that Morrison says is “not ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathon Hutchinson, Senior Lecturer Online Communication and Media, University of Sydney The constraints of coronavirus isolation have closed down most recreational activities, but some creative industries are responding in innovative ways. I have been researching “digital first personalities” – content producers who ...
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level two – read The Spinoff’s giant explainer about what that means here. For official government advice, see here.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this ...
Mainfreight's revenues have risen since April 1 despite Covid-19 as it reports higher annual profit and stable dividend, and repays $10.6m wage subsidy. NZX 50 back to March 9 level ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Lamb, Associate Professor in Geophysics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Back in the 1970s, scientists came up with a revolutionary idea about how Earth’s deep interior works. They proposed it is slowly churning like a lava lamp, with ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Kiwibuild buyers left facing years of delays, calls for relaxation of alert levels and travel, and new details emerge in NZ First Foundation saga.Despite a reset of the policy last year, Kiwibuild is still proving to be problematic. A disastrous new ...
Dr Emily Henderson Last night, the Labour Party named Whangarei Family Court lawyer, Dr Emily Henderson, as its candidate to contest the Whangarei seat in the September general election. Emily has lived in Whangarei since she was seven years old, attending ...
Lockdown shut down an overseas couple's bid to walk the length of the country. When freed again, they returned from Auckland to the deep south to complete the task. Dressed in handmade ninja turtle costumes, hikers Becca Rolon and Diarmuid McInerney finally reached Bluff - finishing a 3000km walk the length ...
Quarantine-free travel between NZ and Pacific Islands should be our priority, ahead of plans to extend our bubble to include Australia, writes the University of Auckland's Dr Collin Tukuitonga Much has been made of the desirability of a ‘trans-Tasman’ bubble with quarantine-free air travel as a priority. There are compelling reasons ...
We can't decouple growth from its adverse effects and it's becoming clear that the same economic thinking that got us here won't get us out. A cultural shift to ‘enoughness’ and non-consumptive means of happiness could be the way forward after Covid-19, argues Lucie Greenwood. Talk of economic transition in a post-Covid-19 world ...
The return of intra-coalition dissent, on the speed of New Zealand’s move out of lockdown and freshwater policy measures, is a useful reminder that National is not the only party with political headaches, Sam Sachdeva writes For a politician who often trumpets the importance of due process when he wants ...
With the Black Ferns Sevens back in camp after lockdown, long-time star Kelly Brazier returns as a new mum, with a new rugby plan. Kelly Brazier is used to having crowds cheer her on in stadiums around the world. But with countries shutting down, sport being cancelled and ...
An essay by Martin Edmond in response to the monumental second volume by Peter Simpson on artist Colin McCahon.I. Bro Aspect I first met Peter Simpson at Sally and Alan’s place in Coromandel Street, Newtown, Wellington, 1988. Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell, the founders of Red Mole. They ...
Open mike 04/04/2013 
Below is the list of gender-critical material which appeared on Redline from July 31, 2019 to September 30, 2019. Sports categories must be by sex, not gender identity Queer theory glossary Woke misogyny and homophobia: a gay critique of trans ideology Another unfortunate experiment? New Zealand’s transgender health policy and ...2 hours ago
Smart Energy Europe: A Plan to provide 100% of ALL ENERGY using Renewable Energy to Europe Introduction All Energy renewable energy systems are often commented on here at Skeptical Science. Many comments suggest that it will be difficult, expensive or impossible to use renewable energy to power the world. To ...8 hours ago
The government released its Action for Healthy Waterways package today, ostensibly with the goal of cleaning up our rivers and making them swimmable within a generation. Doing that, of course, requires confronting the cow in the room: the dairy industry which causes most of the pollution. But while they've imposed ...12 hours ago
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz I would like to know if New Zealand’s carbon emissions ...13 hours ago
Don Franks Now Covid-19 restrictions allow gatherings of a hundred, an urgent hui needs calling. A special conference of the Council of Trade Unions. Today, workers face the greatest attack on employment, pay and conditions since the depression, we need a strong united union voice. As it stands now, organised ...18 hours ago
Questioning the number of district health boards in New Zealand has got to the extent that “too many DHBs” has become a perceived truth requiring no further elaboration. It is rarely challenged by policy advisers, academics, and journalists. But when one drills down further it becomes clear that the number ...1 day ago
The emergence of a new National party leader, seemingly out of nowhere, has – not surprisingly – raised a number of questions as to who Todd Mulller actually is and what makes him tick. He has been an MP for some time but seems to have hidden his light under ...1 day ago
We all know that many so-called journalists and political commentators in New Zealand work directly or indirectly for political parties or for certain political factions. This was obviously the case when pundit for hire Matthew Hooton launched a campaign against then National Party leader, Simon Bridges, over their numerous polling ...2 days ago
3 days ago
Anyone who keeps an eye on evidence around cannabis and public health will be familiar with the Christchurch Health and Development Study. It's one of two local longitudinal studies frequently cited with respect to cannabis and youth development. But in a new article in the New Zealand Medical Journal, it is ...3 days ago
In the age of covid we are Jacinda’s team of five million, except for some. There has rarely been a more blatant case of discrimination against beneficiaries than Grant Robertson’s announcement yesterday that people who have lost their jobs because of the coronavirus will receive weekly payments of $490 per week for 12 weeks and $250 per week for part time ...3 days ago
Well, we are out of lockdown, essentially. I did end up getting the wage subsidy while we were on levels 3 and 4 but I would have been fine if we didn’t. The first day of level 2, the Thursday, the office opened again for the people who weren’t able ...3 days ago
age credit: Science and Politics – Skeptically.org It seems impossible to keep politics out of science. It’s a pity because politics can end up forcing science to produce the results desired by ... 4 days ago
The National Party are quite simply a party out of time… Literally, insofar as the 2020 Election is concerned, and certainly in terms of their ideological positioning which has grown far more trenchantly extreme in the last few years in particular, under the leadership of both Simon Bridges, and Paula ...1 week ago
Children used in this study were from Lintingkou town (a normal-fluoride/control area) and Dakoutun town (a high-fluoride area) in Baodi district of Tianjin, China. The towns are 25 km apart. Anti-fluoridation activists on ... 1 week ago
Arguments by religious folk that they are being discriminated against under the Level 2 pandemic restrictions in NZ, which limit church services to ten people or less when schools, restaurants, malls and other service outlets are allowed to host many more people under voluntary self-distancing protocols, got me to think ...1 week ago
The Green Party says major freshwater reforms announced today provide the strongest ever protections of our waterways, to help ensure the next generation can swim in the rivers of Aotearoa. ...13 hours ago
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Hon Megan Woods, Minister of Research, Science and Innovation Hon Dr David Clark, Minister of Health Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods, and Health Minister David Clark today announced a COVID-19 vaccine strategy, ...3 days ago
Budget 2020 is about rebuilding together, supporting jobs, getting business moving and the books back into the black. It’s an integral part of our COVID-19 economic response, and our plan to grow our economy and get New Zealand moving again. Here’s a quick look at the five top things you ...3 days ago
The law setting out New Zealanders’ basic civil and human rights is today one step towards being strengthened following the first reading of a Bill that requires Parliament to take action if a court says a statute undermines those rights. At present, a senior court can issue a ‘declaration of ...4 hours ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra It was Greg Combet, one-time ACTU secretary and former Labor minister, who got Christian Porter and Sally McManus together in the early days of the pandemic. Recalling what happened, Porter told the Australian Financial Review ...4 hours ago
September could be a "realistic" time frame for New Zealand's borders to open up to Australia, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says. ...7 hours ago
Rod Oram spoke to the leaders of 16 Kiwi businesses over seven weeks, during which they and their businesses rose to meet unprecedented demands. Here's what he learned. ...8 hours ago
...8 hours ago
They call themselves the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, but they’re not a church, and the treatment they sell is called Miracle Mineral Supplement – but it’s chlorine dioxide, commonly known as bleach. Susan Strongman reports for RNZ.A New Zealand website is advising people with symptoms of coronavirus ...9 hours ago
The Government is cracking down on nitrogen fertiliser use and asking councils to speed up their planning processes in order to clean up the country's waterways, Marc Daalder reports One in five farmers will have to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertiliser they are using under a new rule announced ...9 hours ago
NZ’s primary exports held up well in April, again proving the country’s farming industries are sustaining the economy despite many sectors being stricken by the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost coincidentally, a UMR probe of public opinion about farming revealed a sharp swing in perception. Instead of the negativity that had been ...15 hours ago
Two statements from the Beehive yesterday were enlightening for taxpayers trying to keep tabs on the burgeoning billions being spent on facilitating the economic recovery. One statement told us how much is being handed out to small businesses. Correction. One statement told us how much is being loaned to small ...16 hours ago
Mainfreight's revenues have risen since April 1 despite Covid-19 as it reports higher annual profit and stable dividend, and repays $10.6m wage subsidy. NZX 50 back to March 9 level ...19 hours ago
Immigration 'mayhem' is building as migrants travel to and from Coronavirus-afflicted countries to bring their partners home. ...20 hours ago
Lockdown shut down an overseas couple's bid to walk the length of the country. When freed again, they returned from Auckland to the deep south to complete the task. Dressed in handmade ninja turtle costumes, hikers Becca Rolon and Diarmuid McInerney finally reached Bluff - finishing a 3000km walk the length ...20 hours ago
Quarantine-free travel between NZ and Pacific Islands should be our priority, ahead of plans to extend our bubble to include Australia, writes the University of Auckland's Dr Collin Tukuitonga Much has been made of the desirability of a ‘trans-Tasman’ bubble with quarantine-free air travel as a priority. There are compelling reasons ...21 hours ago
We can't decouple growth from its adverse effects and it's becoming clear that the same economic thinking that got us here won't get us out. A cultural shift to ‘enoughness’ and non-consumptive means of happiness could be the way forward after Covid-19, argues Lucie Greenwood. Talk of economic transition in a post-Covid-19 world ...21 hours ago
The return of intra-coalition dissent, on the speed of New Zealand’s move out of lockdown and freshwater policy measures, is a useful reminder that National is not the only party with political headaches, Sam Sachdeva writes For a politician who often trumpets the importance of due process when he wants ...21 hours ago
With the Black Ferns Sevens back in camp after lockdown, long-time star Kelly Brazier returns as a new mum, with a new rugby plan. Kelly Brazier is used to having crowds cheer her on in stadiums around the world. But with countries shutting down, sport being cancelled and ...21 hours ago
An essay by Martin Edmond in response to the monumental second volume by Peter Simpson on artist Colin McCahon. I. Bro Aspect I first met Peter Simpson at Sally and Alan’s place in Coromandel Street, Newtown, Wellington, 1988. Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell, the founders of Red Mole. They ...21 hours ago
The Herald is now beginning to list the Prime Minister’s memory lapses. I think we should assist its reporters with a few others. Lord Ashcroft’s visit for starters.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10875266
Here’s their list Quote
Key’s memory lapses
* Forgot how many Tranz Rail shares he owned.
* Unsure if and when he was briefed by GCSB on Kim Dotcom.
* Forgot how he voted on drinking age.
* Could not recall whether he was for or against the 1981 Springbok Tour.
* Could not remember who was aboard mystery CIA jet parked at Wellington airport.
* Forgot he phoned future director of GCSB urging him to apply for the job.
Unquote
I doubt that it is a simply case of cronyism. Copyright was obviously at the center of the DotCom affair, and the copyright industry’s approach to “moral rights” should give one pause. Industry affiliates were involved in distributing file sharing software and promoted the sharing of copyrighted material. The RIAA then pushed for legislation against piracy which resulted in awards of up to 150,000 US dollars per track of digital audio. Ian Fletcher worked for the UK Intellectual Property Office for about three years.
The industry’s approach to “moral rights” involves ignoring ethical sharing of copyrighted works consistent with fair use, and the industry labels all sharing of copyrighted material as theft regardless of the innocence of such fair use. The term “intellectual property” is an oxymoron because intellectual works in society do not have the quality of exclusive possession essential to all property.
Copyright enforcement can be used as a cover for internet espionage. Microsoft spent considerable effort implementing DRM (digital rights management) into Windows Vista. The implementation of DRM and other security features into Vista caused so many technical problems that many users abandoned Vista and returned to Windows XP. Microsoft has long been suspected of collaborating with the NSA after an encryption key called _NSAKEY was discovered in Windows NT.
In which Mark Ames goes Hunteresque, on the occasion of Andrew Breitbart’s aniversary, with regard to claims that Breitbart was anything other than a carnival barker with a legacy of, well, ‘shit’ pretty much covers it:
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/breitbart/0e8f1e346505f331287a2b46c86b21b35db47718/
Ta PB, marvellous.
Big steel framed highrise building (highest high rise over there) engulfed completely in flames in Grozny, Chechnya. Guess that one will collapse into the path of most resistance in freefall speed soon too. It happened after all three times on 9/11.
Silly travellerev!
To free fall symmetrically and straight downwards on to its own footprint, the building requires not just a one sided fire, it also needs to be unevenly hit from just one side by a jet plane!
Everyone knows this is how physics works!
So why do either of you think the building is of the same construction type as WTC?
Please respond with some substantiation of the claim that these buildings are of the same construction type as WTC. I’d really prefer not to have to conclude you really are bullshit artists.
Yes PB because somehow perfectly symmetrical failure of these buildings can be caused by highly assymetrical fires and structural damage.
BTW two quite different types of steel framed skyscrapers fell on 9/11, so it’s not just related to the Twin Towers design.
So no substantiation at all then? 🙁
Turn off all your senses buddy, you’re doing well without them.
I don’t consider my gut to be a sense organ, that’s why I asked for something verifiable.
You don’t consider your gut to be a sense organ? ***Guffaw*** Shit dude you better do a bit more research.
Nah, you’ve set your view in place. You believe that its quite possible that highly assymetrical damage to a structure can cause that structure to fail instantaneously in a highly symmetrical way.
And that it happened 3 times within 12 hours at the same location.
Shit, is there even a need for controlled demolitions work any more? Just set a random fire in a skyscraper, crash a jet into one side, and straight down she goes, safe and sound on to its own building footprint, barely touching anything else around.
So I ask for verification that these buildings are like the WTC, and in response; Strawman arguments.
Typical, but sad that you’d rather talk about anything else than the question I asked.
Why’s that? Mind made up is it?
Do.Not.Question.The.Truther.Narrative.
Feel free to prove me wrong by saying that yeah, building structure is relevant to the comparison, and that no you didn’t bother to check it out and that yes you’ll do better next time.
“So why do either of you think the building is of the same construction type as WTC?”
PB, even the 911 Commission didn’t bother with silly facts like how the buildings were constructed. Hell with WTC 1 & WTC 2 they decided 94 boxsteel columns, each 110 stories high did not even exist.
Forget for a minute about what happened on September 11 2001 and instead sit watch learn think on how they are constructed and how the visual proof of their construction completely contradicts all official explanations of the Towers’ demise.
So you got nothing either then freedom?
So far its 0:3 for the TruthSquad 🙁
PB but you are the one who believes that highly assymetrical damage to a building can cause that building to fail in a completely symmetrical way.
3x in 12 hours.
The same exact failure effect in two completely different building types, but where only one of which suffered damage from aviation fuel and airliners.
PB you’re the kind of person who says the sun can’t have come up because the correct paperwork wasn’t completed.
And this is relevant to my Question, how?
Fairly simple mate.
Tall buildings are not solid blocks of wood or corn-flake packs that topple over if you push them. They’re amazing strong in some ways, fragile in others and they behave counter to the intuition bred by observing small solid objects.
The WTC centre towers were steel truss construction, which is light and efficient, but has its , um, problems… I don’t know if the Grozny building is truss or girder construction. That would make a difference.
Buildings are designed to resist horizontal forces due to wind and earthquake, which can be quite substantial (for example, going through the sums on construction and engineering for buildings in Wellington, as an undergrad, I was quite surprised to discover that due to wind-generated lift, much structure is generally devoted to keeping a roof down rather than up.)
Moreover, an airliner, while somewhat heavy (but built as light as possible in order to fly) is quite fragile and certainly not designed to resist being flown into a building, so its structure crumples and is shredded immediately as it impacts. The real problem is all the burning aviation fuel.
Now, steel building usually have what is called intumescent foam protecting the structure. This is an insulation that swells up when heated, protecting the steel structure. Under “normal” fire conditions, it will do just that, but the explosion of a plane exploding can suddenly strip off the intumescent foam normally protecting the steel truss structure used in the WTC buildings. Burning aviation fuel then continues to burn, heating the steel which loses much of its structural strength well below its melting point.
The truss then catastrophically gives way, unable to support the floor. The weight of the whole building above that floor suddenly slams down on the floor below… and you can guess the rest. Rather than this being a path of “most resistance”, a vertical piledriver effect is inevitable and unstoppable.
The energy used to destroy the building is in fact not the initial impact, but all the gravitational potential energy devoted to lifting its entire mass into the sky in the first place when it was constructed.
That’s the mental model they proposed in the official report.
Of course we should also consider that the weight of those top floors was already being supported by the structure underneath, it was not new weight which came from nowhere.
Also – did you notice that big huge reinforced concrete floors didn’t slam downwards at all – a large amount of that mass somehow pulverised into dust and ejected out sideways from the collapsing building.
it was not new weight which came from nowhere.
Mass (weight) times velocity equals momentum. This is kinetic energy – a lot, a delivered in an instant.
Take a egg. You can gently rest the head of a hammer on the egg. Now drop the hammer on the egg.
Actually, the floors were not big huge reinforced slabs. They were comparatively light slabs pored over metal deck, supported, as I said, by a truss system.
This may help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wtc_floor_truss_system.png
Understood. I’ll buy the momentum theory IF the majority of the mass part of the equation was not lost as pulverised material as the fall took place.
Because if a lot of mass was lost during the free fall (ejected out the sides of the building) the strongest floors in the bottom half of the building, should have easily survived.
Show me your calculations. Show me how they debunk NIST. What’s that? You can’t? Then what the fuck are you wasting everyone’s time with?
You’ve got nothing emotional invested in this, right? I mean, please don’t use the reply button if you think it’s a waste of time.
As for some of the problems with the NIST analyses, AE911 describes one of them.
because new sets of calculations will somehow retroactively change the inconsistencies?
It doesn’t Matter if something is pulverized it still has the same mass and momentum drop a feather or rock in still air they will land at the same time gravity is constant.
yes and even Commander David Scott proved gravity is a constant in the Universe we have thus experienced, but don’t you want to know how the concrete became pulverized? I would love to know how the concrete at and above the point of collapse got pulverized but especially would like to know how it became pulverized at the moment of initial collapse.
mostly i want to know how can gravity throw steel girders hundreds of feet laterally to be embedded in other buildings. ( including some girders that were identified as originating from near and even above the point of ‘collapse’)
hundreds of feet laterally
Buckling.
The collapse was obviously not a polite, neat retraction but a more complex affair, with forces transmitted not through the ether but through complexly branching structural members, concentrating at the nodes. Elements will buckle, bend and then fail suddenly – and catastrophically, ith all the pent-up energy suddenly released.
Take a delicate structure (and a skyscraper is delicate at its scale) and crush it and inevitably some parts will be flung sideways.
at and above the point of collapse
Gravity leads down. The kinetic force of an impact propagates in all directions.
Of course, the other point is that one truther argues that the towers fell vertically into their own footprint, while another argues steel girders were throw hundreds of feet laterally.
If only there was some sort of consistent, logical methodology by which one can create mathematical models of reality and then test the resulting hypotheses in the real world. Rather than starting from a conclusion and inventing elaborate, untestable theories that need to be evaluated more by faith than reason.
Crudely, sitting on a burger will cause mayonaise and ketchup and the odd gherkin to squirt out the sides while the burger itself is flattened.
To be fair, though, engineering is counter-intuitive,
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic
… so one should never think about engineering with the heart, gut or the pancreas or whatever.
The most common and most reflexive and hardest to overcome mental habit is to think that large structures behave like small solid objects – ie., toppling over over when nudged.
There’s a catalogue here of things that feel “right” but are utterly wrong:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HollywoodScience
>>a feather or rock in still air they will land at the same time gravity is constant.
NO.
Air friction will cause light objects to fall slower. Remover the air friction and the statement is true.
Challenge for more points. How can you show a rock and a feather will fall at the same rate in your living room.
I’ll buy the momentum theory
Momentum is simple Newtonian physics, it’s not something one has a choice about “buying”.
OK, the mass. First, a cloud of dust and debris seen expanding from the side of a building is impressive, but minor in terms of mass. When concrete shatters, it breaks into a range of larger and smaller pieces right down to dust size. The dust particles, being of lower mass, can be thrown further sideways as they fall down. The larger chunks remain within.
Most of the structure is steel, however, and steel is ductile, meaning that it stretches, bends and tears, but essentially stays together as large clumps.
In addition to the trusses, we have office equipment – desks, chairs, couches, heavy wood conference tables, computers, whiteboards, TVs, stereos, feather dusters, toilets and sinks, files in cabinets and shelves, (paper is very heavy – archives and libraries have to have specially strengthened floors), paintings, bronze sculptures, carpet, plumbing and air-conditioning systems, vending machines, catering equipment and food, refrigerators, bottled drinks, water reservoirs, cables, glass, potted plants, aquaria, partitions, suspended ceilings, paperweights, packed lunches, burgers and fries, people… etc etc.
Not very much ends up as dust and there’s not so much forcing that mass sideways anyway. Everything, even the dust, is heading down.
<strongest floors in the bottom half of the building, should have easily survived
Nope. Not “even if”. Nothing is infinitely strong. Consider the thought experiment of a 100-storey building. Floor 99 has the mass of floor 100 above it. Floor 98 has the weight of floors 99 and 100… and so on. If floor 99 cannot resist the strike of Floor 100 hitting it, then in order for Floor 1 to survive, the force hitting it must be less than that of 100 striking 99, meaning that over 99% of the total mass of the building met be made to disappear.
This is impossible.
And that is without accounting for the acceleration of the falling mass. On earth, an object in free fall accelerates at 9.8 metres per second per second. I couldn’t calculate the effect of deceleration caused by crumpling, but I think that you should get my point.
It wasn’t. Just need to watch the videos to be sure of that.
Wasn’t part of your argument that it all fell in its own footprint, yet now its being ejected out the sides?
Signed
Zionist CIA agent
you also need to watch this
see those big upright thingies all massed together in the middle of the Towers?
where are they in your floor collapse theory ?
The “thingies” are structural cores and elevator shafts. All part of the same. Partly, in their case, they get dragged down in some cases as the floors are welded and bolted to them.
Again, no material is infinitely strong and large structures an aircraft are designed to be slightly better than they need to be under expected conditions, otherwise they would not be economical or useable and wouldn’t be built in the first place.
Slightly better If things go outside expected conditions, then Murphy’s Second Law comes into force – anything that has gone wrong will get worse (and fast).
the thingies are the box steel columns that support the structure that houses your cores and elevator shafts. and yes they were attached to the floor trusses, more accurately the floor trusses were attached to the Columns. Otherwise tall buildings have a bad case of not standing up. They are ‘attached’ with thousands of welded steel rivets and bolts. Thermodynamics has some pretty constant cause and effect scenarios and disspation of heat along a connected steel body is pretty well understood.
All these people that regurgitate the ‘heat brought down the towers’ lie must find it terrifying as the world witnesses a constant stream of steel structures being destroyed by fire. What fortitude they express every time they light the woodburner at home, cook a meal on the stove, drive a car or engage that most dangerous piece of technology known to man, a gas fired barbeque. The horror the horror
pretty well understood
Good idea to use the passive voice impersonal. Active voice first person would have been a mistake.
fortitude they express every time they light the woodburner
If they are as ignorant of fundamental physics, engineering and the role of magnitude as yourself, I imagine they would be.
to save your energy I suggest you find a different tack,
personal insults won’t get a bite
logic and reality don’t get a response, either.
Then why have you used personal insults?
“…we should also consider…”
Go on then, let’s see you consider it. Tick tock tick tock, twelve years, no evidence, and not one piece of checkable engineering calculations. Well, apart from all these. that is, which you have not the tools nor the experience, but crucially, not the inclination nor scepticism nor the honesty to consider, preferring instead to defame the authors and throw red herrings around.
Sad.
No evidence? The issue is that the current official evidence and analysis was limited in scope and does not match up to what was observed.
You may call it “sad” or whatever adjectives you might like, but nothing in the NIST documents detailed events satisfactorily explains the perfectly symmetrical collapse of those 3 buildings of two completely different types.
I’ll add that what Architects and Engineers for 9/11 are asking for is a complete widescope official inquiry. You seem to think its time to move on, all done and dusted. As it were.
Don’t put words in my mouth, wingnut.
It is done and dusted, CV. This thread is proof of that; it’s the first bit of 9/11 truth denialism on TS for months. It used to be a regular feature of open mike, but with the passage of time, the fantasy loses its relevence.
Much as the ‘Elvis is alive’ thing only lasted a few years, 911 delusions will fade fast. Particularly so after the failure of that conference in Toronto to provide any actual evidence. Without credible proof of an alternative, sensible, rational people will stick with the blindingly obvious truth. Which is that the US was sucker punched by a small team of committed fanatics who succesfully did the unthinkable.
Oh, without a doubt.
http://torontohearings.org/
if i could i would buy you all a copy, but i suspect most of you can afford it 😉
Not psychologically we can’t
So let’s see now: NIST’s evidence: freely and publicly available. Truther propaganda: that’ll be $20 please. Ka-ching!
It’s clear to see that there’s a conspiracy to part dimwits from their cash.
Yeah it was the guys in the caves!
No evidence /snort , no evidence of a NIST whitewash either I guess eh!
Ok, you and OAB/Ps B just take your scared selves and run along then, you don’t need to keep defending your position eh bro!
Actually it was HARRP, using thermite-laden chemtrails, that perpetrated 9/11.
What fools like you don’t realise is that all the buildings are still there. The whole thing is the biggest mass hallucination since Buzz Aldrin single-handedly faked the moon landings.
Is this comment part of your social experiment, muzza, or are you being deliberately dim? It really was the guys in the cave, that much we know. The attack was carried out by brainwashed wannabees on behalf of the guys in the caves. This we also know. There is no evidence of an alternative conspiracy after 12 years of right wing blathering. Fact.
So, bloke, P’s B and the rest of us rational thinkers aren’t scared, we’re just well grounded and capableof making sensible conclusions based on the known facts. Any time you can provide evidence that contradicts the known facts, let us know. But, I won’t hold my breath, because after twelve long years, there still isn’t a skerrick of proof that anyone else did it.
KNOWN FACTS
TRP – Joke comment of the year!
BRAVO chap, that is hilarious!
🙄
Here’s another reason I’m emotionally invested in this. The adults would like to be able to have a sensible discussion of US foreign policy, which is pretty much a terrorism factory so far as I can tell, but every time anyone raises it we have to listen to the dimwit chorous insisting we watch this video.
The Moncktons of the left.
“Perfectly symmetrical collapse”. Apart from the fact that it wasn’t. Is all your bullshit so transparently dishonest?
No need to get so angry mate, what have you got emotionally invested in this?
internal reality conflict i reckon
when the heart knows what the brain continues to deny
very unhealthy way to live
Hearts are mostly muscle fibre and contain few neurons. Guts contain E coli and faeces and perhaps the odd tapeworm.
What is my emotional investment? Ethics: specifically. your complete lack of any: your whole argument is based on a premise of fraud perpetrated by individuals you’ve never met, but you think nothing of smearing them and effectively accusing them of being accessories to mass murder.
Your right wing behaviour is disgusting, so I’ll continue to show my contempt and disgust,.
You dont see the irony in your comment do you!
Lets walk it through:
Fraud perpetuated by individuals you have never met – Yet you defend the *official conspiracy theory*, produced by people you have never met, with agendas you claim don’t exist, yet have been rolled out in broad daylight since 2001! Forget about the missing 2.3T Rumsfeld was on the hook for !
smearing them – Yet the smearing has been primarily and agressively against the islamic religion, and people of arabic ethnicity as a whole, while being rather ad hoc in the applications of which group is being smeared, and for which purpose, ever since!
effectively accusing them of being accessories to mass murder – But your belief/support of the *official conspiracy theory* indicates you are comfortable that an entire religion/ethnic peoples are layed waste around the ME/Africa, under the same pretence of being, *accessories to murder*.
End.
No. Wrong. Bzzt!
The USA sows a bunch of dragon’s teeth; they multiply, as dragon’s teeth will.
My respect for Physics and Engineering says absolutely nothing about my opinion of US foreign policy, or Islam, or politics, or any combination thereof.
So stop putting words in my mouth, you tiresome cretin.
And there it is again – Its not respect of physics, engineering or any such thing, its the fear you have built up through your attachment to *believing you know whats going on, and having the theoretical answers to it rationalise it all*. Fear of what is left of you, if you actually didn’t have the answers…
You don’t have them, and you don’t want them!
🙄
Do you remember the little chat we had about confirmation bias Muzza? You remember how I said it’s inescapable by definition. Whether or not you believe this to be true, I certainly do, so:
Remind me how that gells with the notion that I believe I know what’s going on, you tiresome cretin.
Careful OTH – next CV will adopt his usual tactic of accusing anyone who disagrees with him as working for the CIA
I work for the CIA. And I take my instructions from the alien who remote-piloted the drone into the Pentagon. And I mutilate cows from my black helicopter, just for fun.
“And I take my instructions from the alien”
And one day soon, they all will. Muahahaha
But seriously, I didn’t fly a drone into anything… Unless someone can prove it, in which time I’ll shrug it off and claim brain fade.
lol I thought you were Allen with a 1 just because – but there you go…
Aka Al1 and HLM the Humanoid logic machine, but Betty when you call me, you can call me Al 😆
yeth marthter…
etc.
I’ve done that before! Ha! I noticed at least one of them collapsed after being set on fire lol
so just checking, how many times did NIST change not only the modelling but the very theory of how it all eventuated? Exactly how far did they stretch [fabricate] the data to fit a hypothesis that is unknown in the history of steel framed construction? On WTC7 for example they changed their mind three times and then created a whole new physical risk for steel framed buildings, all hail Thermal Expansion. Putting WTC 1&2 aside as there is no plane involvement, and just looking at WTC7, then according to NIST that building in Russia should have collapsed hours ago. Same with many large buildings of various construction that have had major fires this past decade. Only on September 11 2001 did three steel framed buildings collapse due to fire. Never before and never since.
and there was something else too . .. oh yeah
NIST might love to mention the horiziontal methods used in the Towers’ construction but have you ever noticed they do not like to mention the Columns that held the Towers upright ? They even go so far as to say that the central cavity where the lifts were housed were empty space. Every animation has zero columns. You go on about data, why can you not see past the rhetoric and look at the inconsistency in the data. Not just the specifics but the big picture.
“they do not like to mention the Columns”
Really, are you sure? Make sure you like, y’know check their reports for the word “column” first though, aye.
Care to revisit that assertion? Or do I need to hold your hand?
“do not like to mention” is more than a little different from “do not mention” which you are not so subtley implying that i said.
When it comes to the official explanation for the physical events that occured the columns are barely referenced and in much of the modelling they are sidelined or removed completely so as to be insignificant to the result. NIST have all but admitted this themselves, along with the extremes they had to go to to make any of their floor collapse models actually work let alone produce the desired result. A result which people far more qualified then I have shown to be seriously flawed in its methodology.
I do love that deniers try to make out the 9/11 Truth movement is a ragtag bunch of a half dozen loons sitting in front of a video desk making shit up and posting it on Youtube. Youtube is a source of videos that people have collated and edited, yes, even disinfo has had its place amongst it all. (and many youtube vids are highly educational, there’s this one with a banana and a rubber band . . )
But, and this is a big but, the movement also has produced numerous technical papers and regularly laid out simple and direct questions for the relevant authorities to answer. Silence is the most common response. Remember many many things went on that day in many different places and none of it has been adequately answered, yet the World got turned on its head because of the events on September 11 2001.
Many of the questions and the cases they refer to are presented at great expense by the families of the victims. They are regularly subjected to delays and obfuscation and all too often sketchy legal processes have been employed that flat out deny the due process under reasons of National Secruity amongst others.
What you can choose to ignore if you so wish is the simple Truth, this movement is a global network of professionals and laymen who have co-ordinated their limited resources to attempt the accurate and honest discovery of the events of that terrible day. So yes they charge $18 USD for a book, (current on Amazon) because they did not have access to the millions of tax dollars that funded the official story. By the way, the Official 911 Commission volume still costs $8 USD (current on Amazon) yet it was paid for entirely by taxpayers. On the funding note, AE911truth are currently asking for donations for a co-ordinated global Ad campaign to raise 9/11 Truth awareness. Just suckers for punishment I guess.
The vast resources of numerous Governments and associated Agencies continue to this day to work against the wishes of the victims’ families and the first responders that have survived. Sadly, the number of survivors is dwindling and just a few weeks ago further cuts were made to the support offered to these heroes. So perhaps the scale of the discussion is the thing that so aggravates you, or the fact it is growing and not dissolving into nothingness as so many hoped it would. We are not going anywhere. We will not be silenced, but as far as 9/11 talk on the Standard goes I stated back in 2011 that regular dialogues were achieving little and causing unhelpful aggression. Today shows that little has changed. The Standard juggles enough already and I prefer the one on one in real life now. I like the human element as it allows for more of an honest Q&A that actually produces tactile results as lines of enquiry can be dutifully followed and the point scoring that fascinates so many is thankfully absent. Today, as mentioned , was a passing prod at the sleeping bear. Next time, like so many recent opportunities, I will probably not pick up the stick.
one thing more, I don’t recall you standing up in front of Richard Gage on his NZ visit and calling him a right wing moron.
nice to know you care though, holding hands is another of life’s good things
WTC7 is clearly seen on a video clip to have sustained substantial structural damage from very large segments of falling debris from the North Tower. Gashes go through several floors in the back at the middle and southwest corner. It can also be clearly seen in the same video that fiery debris has ignited fires on nearly all floors and those burned for hours. Its collapse in total is not at freefall speed but consistent with structural failure. The collapse is initiated at the Southwest corner and progresses suddenly as each floor impacts the next with fire-weakened steel unable to resist the weight and velocity. The building did not collapse into its own footprint as some claim, it can can be seen in pictures and video to have fallen backwards – its different coloured debris is atop the North Tower debris. The 9/11 building demolition conspiracy isn’t gaining ground because its debunked in so many places.
Its ok Arfamo, you tell yoursrlf what you like, then take it up with the demolition experts, who commented specifically on WTC7.
Forget the fact the building housed all the financial transactiosn data, which only days earlier, existed, and would have meant that Donald Rumsfeld would have had a tough time wishing away the $2.3T of *lost funds* through the pentagon, which had been front page news, and was not going away,
How convenient that all was, not to mention the building housed the data store for huge amounts of fiancial entities, which vansished, never to be talked of again!
Nothing in it though, just all coincidence!
Edit – I work with an american, senior guy, former DoD employee for 8 years. His position is that all 3 buildings were blown up. Not a good look for your point of view, if you get to speak with people such as him. I had that conversation just last week, it was interesting to hear an american who worked for such entities, having that view, and talking about it!
They work against the wishes of all responders and all families of victims?
Yeah, right.
the passages you are no doubt referring to
“Many of the questions and the cases they refer to are presented at great expense by the families of the victims. ” and “The vast resources of numerous Governments and associated Agencies continue to this day to work against the wishes of the victims’ families and the first responders that have survived. ”
Neither of these state all the families or all the victims and it is a fifty fifty call how you got there i suppose. Though as we sit here, the many lives involved which unacknowledged illnesses and needless tragedies continue to diminish, should not have to suffer the indignity of being so easily dismissed.
I’m not going to get into a semantic argument about it.
I just think the bigger indignity is being the obsessive hobby of nutjobs around the world.
I get some of the victims clutching at straws in grief. But most truthers? Pffft.
A variation of the usual liar line – honour the dead by not asking too many questions.
Nope. But if it really was pretty much just hijackers + plane+towers=thousands dead, it makes your average truther half a world away look like a bit of a dick.
Like I say, grieving relatives is one thing.
But hobbyists who can’t get their stories straight are in grave danger of being dicks.
Yeah I guess being afraid to look like dicks should be a real consideration. Just try to remember that most of the people who died because of 9/11 didn’t die on that day.
Frankly, I’m don’t think a lot of truthers give as much of a damn about the dead as they do about believing in their own superior knowledge about nefarious global conspiracies and how much better the world would be if everyone were intellectual giants like them.
😆 so they can uncover the biggest most pernicious conspiracy in history, but not leverage that into wealth and power without my $20? And why is everyone laughing at them? You. Whichever.
That’s some mighty fine truthiness.
“heating the steel which loses much of its structural strength well below its melting point.”
Absolutely true hot steel can bend. It cannot however cause thousands of welded rivets on every floor to consistently and simultaneously fail, which is required for the collapse theory to work. Also, if you have a minute, could you be so kind as to explain where the vast quantity of extreme heat came from to form the pools of molten metal that were still being discovered weeks after the Towers’ collapse? Then again why bother . . .
There are literally thousands and thousands of points that a tit for tat truth game fail to adequately cover. As entertaining as it can be, it is also a waste of resources as very few supporters of the Official Story who engage in Truth discussions on-line, ever do it honestly and with an open mind.
In my little life, one on one dialogue has proven to be the only reliable method of 911 discussion that actually stands a chance of combating the ignorance that stubbornly refuses to follow the facts. 911 Truth is more complex than a single event and the back and forth of a chatbox cannot come close to the soul crunching reality of having to lie to another’s face when the Truth finally busts the door in on your psyche. It is perhaps one of the most difficult re-adjustments a person will ever make in their life. Knowing the world is a big evil place blah blah blah is one thing, Accepting the totality of the lie that was sold to the world takes guts and has broken people. Only you can decide how much truth you are willing to sweep under the carpet, only you have to live with the lumpy rug of your life.
Better to live a happy sheltered life without looking too hard or too far afield. Possibly.
Better to generate witless delusions than admit you can’t verify engineering calculations to save your life.
Actually I can, but I never start such an analyses without understanding different alternative big pictures which might come into play. You’ve already decided however.
your mind was so open your faculty of reasoning fell out.
CV, what a load of bollocks. If NIST’s maths are wrong, all you need is a blackboard and some chalk.
What was it that helped me decide? For one thing, the fact that instead of blackboards and chalk (or even, god forbid, some actual engineering software), all you’ve got is a series of breathless talking heads on Youtube and a bunch of defamatory false allegations against NIST employees.
I don’t like your right wing bullshit any more than I like John Key’s
CV being right wing now too? That seems to be your only response these days. I believe it was CV who had to back out for a while because he upset the Labour leadership and he wanted to stay with the “left wing” party.
Believing bullshit in the face of all available evidence is a right wing trait.
“As entertaining as it can be, it is also a waste of resources as very few supporters of the Official Story who engage in Truth discussions on-line, ever do it honestly and with an open mind.”
One Tāne Huna, I have been impressed in the past when you state that people need to open their mind to the real history of this Nation. You regularly berate others who don’t take off their blinkers regarding the Government’s position on numerous issues in Aotearoa especially when touching on historical innaccuracies that we live with, then you go and parrot US led propoganda designed to promote War and Poverty and Greed.
I for one get a little confused about what you actually want from this life.
The 911 debacle is, heh, a slow burner, it is not going away. My partner had an immediate “what the…” reaction watching some of the available videos particularly building 7 that was not even hit by an airplane. She is into architecture and such and no calculations were required for her to smell a rodent.
I think it will be revealed as a ‘black op’ in future decades. People on forums like this have only limited license to demand this or that from other commenters. The ongoing ferocity of the debate about 911 imo is due to people’s world view and belief systems being challenged.
Me, I am well aware of the track record of the US military/spooks and crooked offshoots. I mean they turned the ‘attack on Iraq’ into a corporate feeding frenzy.
Granada, Cuba etc anyone?
Freedom, what “propaganda”? Is the National Institute of Standards & Technology a CIA front on your planet?
Perhaps the reason I’m insisting on Physics and Engineering is the same reason I insist on a similarly skeptical approach to right wing drivel wherever it can be found. Ya think?
It cannot however cause thousands of welded rivets on every floor to consistently and simultaneously fail, which is required for the collapse theory to work.
Three rivets. One fails. The remaining two now have half again as much stress, instantly. One more fails, and now the remaining rivet’s stress has increased threefold, nearly instantly.
Also, if you have a minute, could you be so kind as to explain where the vast quantity of extreme heat came from to form the pools of molten metal that were still being discovered weeks after the Towers’ collapse?
Once the aviation fuel has ignited the fire, everything burns. That produces a hell of a lot of heat.
Heat can be lost by radiation or conduction. Surrounding materials and debris can be effective insulators, reducing conduction while blocking radiation. Radiation itself is a very slow process. Moreover, molten steel has an enormous amount of thermal energy tied up in it and takes a very long time to lose.
Never been in a steel mill?
Then again why bother . . .
The rest is sarcasm and metaphysics and is consequently of no interest.
so that’s a no to explaining anything then,
you are sticking with jet fuel and office supplies, good to know i can move on.
I can forsee a large hole resembling the shape of my forehead in the nearest wall so I am not even going to touch on the timespan required for your progressive rivet failure theory.
I thought for half a minute you might have had some logic to go with your ‘911 for parrots’ quotes but sadly the only interesting thing about your comment is your avatar and how it relates to the whole world of conspiracy theories
I’m sticking with physics. Take it up with Newton and Kelvin if you like.
We did and you know what? Turns out you haven’t got a clue about Newton’s laws of Physics
Given that a couple of universities have seen fit to give me a dgree in industrial design and a couple more in architecture and that their accreditation is overseen by the professions that are very cognisant of liability and that I’m now hired to teach architecture students on the integration of structure and design, I would guess that someone thinks that I do.
By the way, I don’t use Youtube in my architecture classes.
Rhinocrates,
As a suitably qualified person you would no doubt have sought out the best information and there is no more technically proficient group of Truthers than Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth. You obviously contest the statements from the 1700+ Architects and Engineers who have assigned their professional reputations to the topic of 9/11 Truth. They also have lots of hard earned letters after their name. Could you please show us where they are mistaken? The coolest thing about life, more knowledge is always welcome.
http://www.ae911truth.org/en/home.html
My qualifications have also been declared meaningless, so some might say you’re in good company. I have no specialised knowledge of engineering or architecture, but your explanations make a lot of sense and are consistent with what engineers have told me. I even know people who work at NIST, although they weren’t part of the inquiry.
This obviously means that I support US foreign policy and think that every statement that comes out of Washington is gospel truth, so I suppose I’ll just have to live with that.
I have also never used youtube in a lecture. How my students must be deprived!!
One of my lecturers showed us youtube videos of cats. That was fun. Maybe you should do that.
Lanthanide, well, actually I do show videos of cats, such as this real-life Owl and the Pussycat:
Could you please…
OK, in good faith, here goes… and I’m sorry, it’s late and I have a lot of work to do tonight, so my statements are going to read like bullet points.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of anyone involved when it comes to their fundamental beliefs.
“1700” looks like a big number, but it isn’t compared to the whole range of professions – in fact, it’s a tiny minority. Still, for s single, limited human being, sifting through 1699 and missing one to have the 1700th thrown at me is not something I care enough about. So, no, I’m not going to pick on any one individual so that 1699 can be thrown at me.
Here is the difference between lawyers (and conspiracy theorists) and scientists:
A lawyer and a conspiracy theorist thinks that truth is like a house of cards – take just one card away and the entire house collapses.
A scientist knows that truth is like a jigsaw puzzle, an old one that’s been in the attic a long time. Pieces are missing, and it’s going to be hard work to fit the rest together, but if you have enough, then you have a best guess – because any other guess has far fewer pieces, because in reality, we’ll never know everything.
Yes, I will admit that Grey alien reptiod Bilderbergers from Zeta Reticuli working in concert with the Freemasons caused the dosai I ate last night to be overcooked, but I really don’t think that that was the most probable explanation by a long shot.
1 percent of uncertainty does not trump 99 percent certainty.
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If the claims made by the 911 Truthers require violations of the fundamental laws of physics, which have been proven for centuries now, then they had better front up – and they haven’t. In fact, the arguments that they produce require in themselves require violations of fundamental physics.
Could the US government, under George W Bush do evil things? Oh yes, of course I know that they did – but while Jack the Ripper did evil things, I still don’t think that he killed Marilyn Monroe.
FWIW, I do agree that a full and open inquiry will reveal a great deal of complicity with the Bin Laden family, and a lot of arse-covering by intelligence agencies who were incompetent or at least not omniscient, and people will do at least as much to cover up incompetence as they will to cover up complicity. So yeah, there’s cover-ups that haven’t been revealed in inquiries and won’t be.
The thing about conspiracy theories that provokes my scepticism is their assumption that the conspirators are competent.
Everything that we know about them tells us otherwise.
Cover ups – Check!
Conspiracy Theory – Check
Cover up = Conspiracy!.
Without transparency, openess etc, there is little to no chance of gaining a clear understanding of the why/how/who, which leaves people to draw their own conclusions, using various methods and means.
Until such time as it comes into full light (unlikely), the *official narrative* must be treated as part of any conspiracy, that’s simply the consequence of a *cover up* , on any size or scale!
By their actions, you shall know them!
The official theory is that it happened while GWB was president and that “Muzza” had nothing to do with it.
Maybe you could explain Newton’s Laws to us? You seem very keen on stating that none of us understand them, between your bouts of roflolling. Please enlighten us.
Once you’ve done that, I personally would be keen to have Lord Kelvin’s contributions explained as well.
Heh, thinking of “Roflroflrofl”, I can only refer to
Roflroflrofl!!!
“The energy used to destroy the building is in fact not the initial impact, but all the gravitational potential energy devoted to lifting its entire mass into the sky in the first place when it was constructed.”
Stupid demolition people using all that dynamite to blow up buildings while all the while those buildings really would behave like knitwork: All you need is to find a way to unleash all that potential energy devoted to keeping all that knitwork together! Find the right stitch and voila Bob’s your uncle. Same with buildings, all you need is the right bolt to break due to heat (like in building 7 apparently according to NIST) and the building will come down in freefall speed into it’s own footprint.
In the mean time the building covered in another oil product called plastic it seems which burned nicely and long unlike the Kerosene of the planes in a few initial minutes, was destroyed but did not collapse into it’s own footprint in free fall speed.
which leaves the real question . .
Did Gerard Depardieu burn the soufflé ?
Hi eve, there’s a photo in this thread of the building under construction. Notice anything?
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1100661&page=2
I see a lot of concrete, but haven’t identified any steel trusses that have been stripped of fire insulation (applied by a New York construction crew in the era of the five families) by the mechanism of a large plane flying into the building.
You’ll find that real demolition work is done on that principle, actually: you don’t “blow the building up”, you use the weight of the building to do most of the demolition for you.
So heres the problem:
You say National can’t be trusted for various reasons (who knows you may even be right)
Labour can’t be trusted to run the country for various reasons and they can’t even run their own party
The Greens just say any old thing and hope no one checks (bit like National and Labour I suppose)
So what options are there for people to vote for or is it a case of the lesser of two (three) evils?
Not keen on NZFirst just to keep a foot in either coalition possibility?
Its not looking good
Yeah, may as well stick with the devil you know eh? Vote National.
Well, if you had actually bothered to check you would have found that the Green Party had been consistent with what’s on their webpage and they back up what they say. This is unlike, say, National.
I’m not saying they don’t stay on message, I’m saying theres a lot of bullcrap in the message and nobody (especially the media) seems keen on calling them on it.
As an example: http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2013/04/greens.html
But this is not specifically about the greens, its about how we’ve all gotten to the stage where we all vote for the lest worst party
You seriously think similar pieces couldn’t be written about national party graphics? Obviously not by DPF, but really?
The only way to not vote for the ‘least worst party’ is to vote for yourself. Otherwise, everyone is making a compromise decision, and that means ‘least worse’.
So don’t be such a big baby. 🙂
“You seriously think similar pieces couldn’t be written about national party graphics?”
Well no thats why I said at the start: “You say National can’t be trusted for various reasons (who knows you may even be right)”
“Otherwise, everyone is making a compromise decision, and that means ‘least worse’.
– I dunno, just doesn’t seem the best way to get things done, how you could change it though is beyond me…
its well and truly beyond you c73!
Adding to the fog of war
Nactional can not be trusted they continually lie!
Stick to you your cup of tea and leave it at that!
Any party leader who forgets he’s got a million dollars or so in a off shore bank account shouldn’t be allowed within kilometres of the levers of power.
It’s National by default.
Actually, I’m more concerned with people who forget the shares that they have despite the fact that they’re professional traders and will be looking at those shares and what the price is doing on a day to day basis.
When you’re worth 50+ million, what a few shares, easy to forget about, especially Tranz Rail ones, toilet paper had more value than those shares.
David Shearer though, very suspicious.
How can the chap from the UN forget he has a million dollars lying around in a offshore bank account, what’s he hiding?, any reporter worth their salt would be all over this.
Yeah, especially when you’re also trying to sell them to a business in Texas via your government contacts for more than you bought them for.
“Yeah, especially when you’re also trying to sell them to a business in Texas via your government contacts for more than you bought them for.”
Yeah, and in case anyone (BM) has forgotten, Key’s dishonesty in this instance went WAAAAY beyond just lying 2 or 3 times directly into the camera and changing his story several times as it became obvious that the journo had more info than he first thought.
No the real sin here was that repeatedly Key was using parliament to ask questions designed to procure financial information about the company for his won personal use.
Where does the million dollar figure come from? You wouldn’t just be making stuff up, would you? Seems to be the done thing in this thread.
Seen a few numbers thrown about.
But since Shearer won’t tell any one, all we can do is speculate.
“But since Shearer won’t tell any one, all we can do is make shit up.
FIFY
“Seen a few numbers thrown about.”
Yeah I’ve seen Slater make a few up, and then BM says he “read it somewhere”, and then he increases it by 50%, and then a few other nutjobs repeat it around the blogs, and then Slater says he “heard somewhere” that it was twice as much, and then BM says he heard that too etc etc.
I heard it was just over 9000 dollars.
Not that you’d let facts get in the way if he had.
If it’s just speculation, $50 million is a more prumstrial number. Do you have any idea how many shares Cunliffe has in Monsanto and Petrobras? Maybe we could speculate that Norman Russell has a few million in Rio Tinto? Be asprishnul and ambishush, don’t stop with Shearer.
I heard it was Saddam’s WMD, until he swapped that for tonnes of naz1 gold.
Sick buckets at the ready for a war criminal’s perverted feminism….
Learn to Speak Up
by CONDOLEEZZA RICE • April 1, 2013
There have been many times in my career when I was the only woman in the room; if I didn’t speak up, it was often noticed. I found speaking up took practice, but over time it became an important source of growth in my career.
One moment occurred during my freshman year of college. I was 16 years old and taking my first government class. Midway through the lecture, the professor introduced a bizarre theory as if it was a matter of course: Black people are born with lower IQs than white people. Everyone – including the black students – just sat there, accepting his theory as fact. Meanwhile, I was a 16-year-old black woman in college who spoke two languages and could play Beethoven and Bach on the piano. I was stunned, not only by this absurd statement, but by the lack of reaction from the other students. So I raised my hand.
The professor was stunned that I chose to speak up, and seemed even more amazed when I showed up the next day to argue the point. After that day, he realized his mistake and attempted to befriend me. I went on to excel in the course, despite the obstacles. I also learned a valuable lesson: If you find something uncomfortable or wrong, speak up. If you don’t challenge people, you aren’t doing your job.
In 1984, another situation arose that challenged me to speak up once again. I attended a seminar at Stanford featuring the then-National Security Advisor, who spoke on a commission I felt very strongly about. His mealy-mouthed answers caused my blood pressure to rise; yet no one pressed him for further information. So I raised my hand and shared my perspective. He seemed surprised, yet also impressed. Later he approached me and we talked. He noted my willingness to speak up and praised my thought process. That moment led to a life-long relationship, with him acting as an early mentor.
As my career evolved, so did my desire and need to speak up. Early on in my role as the National Security Advisor, I often had the opportunity to present options, but rarely did I ever voice a strong opinion in front of the President.
One afternoon, I found myself in a heated debate over President Bush giving a speech on the situation in the Middle East. It was a violent time, and there was concern that the President’s speech would only exacerbate the situation. I knew the President wanted to give the speech, so I decided to speak up. I said, “Mr. President, sometimes the only person who can make an impact is the President of the United States. You have to do this.” I waited for his response, nervous that I had overstepped. Instead, he smiled and agreed. He gave the speech and it was a rousing success.
It would be easy to say I have always spoken up at the right times….
If you have the stomach for it, you can read the rest of this ghastly woman’s hypocrisy HERE….
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1364979668.html
I met a Chemistry Professor from the university she’d been in charge of (Stanford?). He considered her extremely mediocre intellectually and said her main achievement was to make university administration meetings confidential. He’d withdrawn from a committee rather than sign a confidentiality agreement, so she certainly didn’t think speaking up was an admirable quality in her subordinates.
I thought the dateline for this item was significant, but it appears that it really was written, in a tone of high seriousness, by Condoleezza Rice herself.
As well as the intellectual mediocrity you mention, it is clear she also lacks a sense of irony.
UK Split Into Seven Social Classes, From The ‘Elite’ To The ‘Precariat’
It seems rather disturbing that the professor seems surprised that the rich exist and that they have advantages over everyone else.
Try taking the test on bbcnews.com! Simply by making one addition on a second pass, I seemed to jump from ‘traditional working class’ to ‘established middle class’ in no time at all.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973
Still, there have been people that tell me I’m a round peg in a square’s hole :p
And there was me thinking you had no class at all 😆
Elite – the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth. This group has the highest levels of all three capitals
Established middle class – the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals. The largest and most gregarious group, scoring second highest for cultural capital
Technical middle class – a small, distinctive new class group which is prosperous but scores low for social and cultural capital. Distinguished by its social isolation and cultural apathy
New affluent workers – a young class group which is socially and culturally active, with middling levels of economic capital
Traditional working class – scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived. Its members have reasonably high house values, explained by this group having the oldest average age at 66
Emergent service workers – a new, young, urban group which is relatively poor but has high social and cultural capital
Precariat, or precarious proletariat – the poorest, most deprived class, scoring low for social and cultural capital
Well, according to the BBC, this 60+ year old is an emergent service worker, characterised by:
Thanks for the link. Interesting survey. I actually don’t think the Prof was surprised that this group exists. More that he hadn’t expected it would show up so clearly in a major survey. He indicates it’s something that social scientists knew, but haven’t had substantial enough evidence to really go with it. He says:
I guess it indicates more that long held major paradigms are hard to shift in social sciences, without substantial, sound research-based evidence.
It also give’s significant reinforcement of the term “precariat” which is getting increasing currency in left wing politics.
The categories they identify at the extremes are the most significant and useful. There’s been various attempts to categorise classes showing more gradations than the Marxist working vs capitalist classes, taking into account social status, cultural capital etc – there’s so many relevant factors it’s always difficult to pin down clear class bands.
“It also give’s significant reinforcement of the term “precariat” which is getting increasing currency in left wing politics”.
And especially so in countries whose gubbamints are still wedded to the neo-liberal dogma.
Interesting link, Draco. Thanks
Progressive taxation is regularly attacked in the media. Higher tax rates restrains the richest – well if they didn’t pay lobbyists to create loopholes.
There is to be a law change in the air concerning ‘incitement to commit suicide’. I wonder if it is aimed at people who help others with euthanasia. I am hoping that the politicians will actually pass a law that sets out procedures to facilitate this in an organised and legal way that respects the wishes of the person and protects them against pressure from others.
Any laws passed that bear on euthanasia should be directed to making this a human and humane process carried out effectively by members of the family who can face the decision to die and last ceremony. The last thing that should happen is for law makers, medical or bureaucratic personnel to become arbiters of people’s lives so they are forced to exist beyond their wishes.
Wanna know who thinks the PM’s a dick?
The PM’s Chief Science Advisor that’s who:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC1304/S00009/gluckman-interpreting-science.htm
Gosh, whatever could he mean by that?
@PB ….. it doesn’t surprise me. I suspect Key, in all his arrogance, appointed Gluckman because he thought he could be a useful ally rather than because of his acumen.
Gluckman has authored a discussion paper on the issue.
Society uses science; good science simple ways to understand how to act in concert to produce the best outcome. Take roading science, where the simple practice of all on the left (or right) makes it possible to quickly get to where you need to be. As Einstein pointed out, keep it simple but no simpler. The problem with Gluckman take on matters is its a generalization, good public science requires that the problem being discuss is referenced, then understanding of the
problem is displayed, then and only then should we accord the speaker with any integrity, if they then do not allow themselves a forum to be question in, or respond in put downs and other poor debating tactics. Gluckman is merely a talking head for Key to see being scientific minded.
Now the media often reworks, highly manufactures the work of science in order to sell newspapers, this is entirely different from the need of society for simple science that helps us act in concert to achieve results that we value. i.e. Media sluts. Science isn’t found in the media much, its found in legislation, and its noted Gluckman has little to say about legislative ends of science.
like for example, have too few mine inspectors, when you don’t measure you can’t avoid, a simple scientific practice that any chief scientist should be aware of. But you see the Human Rights Commission deals with Human rights practices of government, so you’d think that the chief science advisor would also deal to the practice of public science that legislation creates, or ministers ignore.
Like Climate change predicting globally more flash flooding, more droughts, and so when they appear, ADVISING Joyce not to make a dick of himself by arguing against climate change and
its effects on our economy, our diary output, our water use, our clean green branding.
The irony. Mistress Collins is concerned about bullying.
She’s gotta keep all those private prison stats up after all! It’ll be justification for another one coming to an area near you. Perhaps there’ll be a smelter site ripe for conversion before too long. Shove a few partitions and a roof on those pot lines, and Bob’s your uncle.
Ticks all the boxes – it’s a win-win situation – regional development, tough on crime, etc. etc
(I am thinking NAct type strategic planning)
And this is why we will see our power bills rise after the Mighty River sale:
Parasites!
Solid Energy is their template obviously Karol
Parasites!
+1
Parasites go on a feeding frenzy for some unknown reason once ‘mum and dad’ take over. This is sick and unjustified but I’m sure the directors will turn it down ha fucking ha.
meanwhile in other parts of the world the mining and exploitation companies continue to abuse and destroy indigenous peoples and their lives – our situation here is interconnected with all struggles especially underreported ones.
I urge everyone interested to go to Intercontinental Cry and read further.
http://intercontinentalcry.org/underreported-struggles-72-march-2013/
Lets play “Guess the employer!” My money’s on Novopay
http://www.seek.co.nz/job/24274408?tracking=JMC-000034
aka No Pay
lol
I hope they’re paying a premium rate for stress. Could be any payroll company that sells vapour ware, but yeah Novopay.
Minister for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith, one of the many millionaires in the UK Cabinet, has provoked outrage by saying he could live on £53 a week benefits.
It reminds one of the story about Tony Blair when on the speaking circuit, going into his bank and asking if he could have the amount he could withdraw from the bank’s ATMs increased.
“Let’s see,” said the cashier, “Do you earn more than £25,000?”
“It depends,” replied Tony. “Some days I do, some days I don’t.”
The British man called Mick Philpott with his wife and his drug-mate has been tried for setting fire to his house where his children were.
The plan was for Philpott to rescue his children and for Willis (a previous lover who had left him) to be prosecuted for arson, the court heard. But it went horribly wrong when the blaze took hold fast. The adults escaped the house but the six children died as they slept. (We hope.)
But in 1978 –
Philpott launched a savage attack on 17-year-old Kim Hill – before turning the knife on her mother.
He was convicted of attempted murder and GBH with intent and jailed for seven years.
Jurors in Philpott’s latest trial were not told about his previous conviction after judge Mrs Justice Thirlwall refused to allow the shocking incident to be used in evidence
Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4870695/Revealed-Mick-Philpott-stabbed-ex-girlfriend.html#ixzz2PRuHSSuf
* He has been in trouble for vicious attacks – these went back to 1978.
* He was a 21 year old soldier at that time.
* Some years later he pinned another girlfriend down and held a knife at her throat.
* Now in his mature age he, and his mates, set fire to his house and six of his children died as a
result.
* If such a person was kept in jail for his whole life from the first attacks that showed a
thoroughly dangerous and degenerate man who was unlikely to be habilitated, others
wouldn’t have had to go through hell because of him.
* He wouldn’t be able to breed a family of 17 children who would have a screwed up life as a
result of their parents being bad role models.
* He sounds as if he has the mindset of Wilson of Blenheim, an ugly and aggressive man
about to be released after all sorts of appeals.
And some are using the case to hit welfare – ‘Anyone convicted of any welfare fraud should receive a lifetime ban on ..’ It is obvious that there should be shorter sentences for welfare fraud, and longer ones for being a vicious, violent, abusive person who is a danger to society.
And lastly when trying these people, the law makes certain they get a ‘fair trial’ by not revealing that they are degenerate criminals to the jury. No mention of any past wrongdoing is told to them. They should be told at the end of the trial so that they have the whole picture of the person they are deciding on.
I felt great saddness when I saw the photo of the six children who died. It has been reported that Philpott tried to chat up a police woman and he was joking/laughing when down at the police station just after the fire.
To be charged with manslaughter and not murder is not right either.
Don’t know if the translation quite fits whats being said but its amusing
I know that there are thousands on the East half of Washington DC who do seem to live like that. Not sure about the snow-coffee though. Sometimes information like that comes out of North Korea but the camera doesn’t lie – does it?
Interesting thanks chris73
I go to american prepping websites a fair bit, quite interesting some of the stuff they post about. North Korea has certainly got their attention.
A guy called Alun Hill did it as a joke, he admits he does not speak Korean, then it got picked up by some online news crew who mistakenly ran with it thinking it legit
as spoof it has some great lines despite the daily struggle of the reality the pictures expose
North v South.
Kind of says it all really and of course South Korea has some big friends they can call on, not sure China would think its worth going to war over North Korea, in fact they’re probably hoping the USA and South Korea does deal to them and take them over, it’d mean more stability in the region which would = bigger profits and they wouldn’t have to prop up North Korea…
Sounds like a CONSPIRACY THEORY
And the hits just keep on coming…
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-crisis-hits-the-netherlands-a-891919.html
How will the Netherlands react to another potential German takeover?
Yep, that’s what happens when private banks are allowed to print money and are incentivised to do so by being allowed to charge interest on it.
Fuck:
http://www.sfx.co.uk/2013/04/03/a-personal-statement-from-ian-m-banks/
🙁
very sad – one of my favorite authors
One Tāne Huna said
“The adults would like to be able to have a sensible discussion of US foreign policy, which is pretty much a terrorism factory so far as I can tell, but every time anyone raises it we have to listen to the dimwit chorus insisting we watch this video.”
complete horsepuckey
These days it is a rare day when 911 issues, specifically the physical events of the day, get mentioned on The Standard.
Today was an obvious tease, poking a sleeping bear with a stick so to speak, due to the events in Russia, (still hasn’t collapsed btw)
It is not a ‘conspiracy theory’ to reference 911 when discussing the Neo-Imperial aspirations of the USA into the Middle East and other Asian regions and how the events of that day were used as justification for the slaughter of hundreds and thousands of people and the instigation of a global war against largely manufactured enemies.
It is not a ‘conspiracy theory’ to reference 911 when discussing the acquisition by the DHS for hundreds of armoured personal carriers or thousands of drones or the millions of rounds of ammunition or the establishment of the TSA or the removal of an ever growing list of civil liberties throughout America. All of which are a direct and very real result of the events of September 11 2001.
It is not a ‘conspiracy theory’ to reference 911 when discussing how all US foreign policy from that day forth has been based on a litany of misinformation and hyperbole, most of which over the past decade has been proven false. Facts that to this day are openly ignored by the Administration itself.
It is a ‘conspiracy theory’ to blather on about a very complex set of engineering calculations without being able to write them down, let alone do the Maths.
It is a ‘conspiracy theory’ when it requires thousands of individuals to be in on it.
It is a ‘conspiracy theory’ when all rational rebuttal is rejected.
Woman Burned Alive For Sorcery: Is Being Female A Death Sentence?
Those two were lucky.
And before we get too uppity about ourselves in the West:
Yeah, we’ve got a long way to go before we call ourselves civilised.
I wonder how strong the fundamentalist churches are in Papua New Guinea. I don’t know whether fundamentalist and evangelising means the same outcome. The evangelising spirit in some churches alone, prompts a quick response to previously little known areas that are probably still versed in aminism or whatever has been traditional. Mix the ultimate truths of such christianity (with a small c) and the traditional responses to wrong-doing and that might be an explanation for this savage witch-hunting.
Seen this?
____________________________________________________________________________
Shut The Smelter!
LET THE “TOO BIG TO FAIL” SMELTER FAIL
“Too big to fail” was the mantra of the robber banks and other transnational financial sharks during the Global Financial Crisis, which remains ongoing. This left the victims to pay for the costs of the crime, while the corporate criminals walked away scotfree and kept their loot. The people of Cyprus are the latest to experience firsthand just how this works.
In this country, Rio Tinto’s Bluff smelter was decades ahead of the fashion. Every time that Rio Tinto feels that its charmed existence in New Zealand is going to become less cushy, it threatens to pull the plug, close the smelter and walk away. It does so in the knowledge that it has always been deemed “too big to fail” by the succession of Governments, both National and Labour, that it has effortlessly outmanoeuvred for more than 40 years. This time it is trying it on as a tactic to try to pressure Meridian over its power price contract, on which the ink is barely dry and which only took effect in January.
Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) calls Rio Tinto’s bluff (pun intended). Stop crying wolf, stop using your New Zealand workers as disposable pawns in your cynical game, stop holding Southland and the country to ransom. Go ahead and close the smelter and bugger off. See if we care, the country will be much better off without you. The smelter is the country’s single biggest user of electricity, consuming one sixth of the total, 24/7 for more than 40 years. It pays a top secret super cheap price that is not available for any other user and all it does is export electricity from NZ in the form of alumina, while being subsidised by all other electricity users. The smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand. It is the biggest bludger in the country.
How ironic that Rio Tinto has rejected the Government’s offer of a short term subsidy. It wants a long term one, preferably indefinitely. Presumably, this is in addition to the massive taxpayer subsidy it has been receiving continuously for more than 40 years, in the form of the Manapouri power station built with public money for its exclusive use (and let’s never forget that men died building that); and the cheapest and most secret power price rate in the country bar none. Not good enough apparently, it still wants more.
Rio Tinto won the 2011 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating In Aotearoa/New Zealand (and was runner up in both 2009 and 08). It was nominated for lobbying two Governments “over several years to secure excessive allocations of free emissions units under the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme”.
The Roger Award judges agreed, concluding: “It appears therefore, that the New Zealand taxpayer is subsidising a transnational corporate rort of the emissions trading scheme… The significance of this stance cannot be underestimated; a major transnational player within New Zealand materially benefits from its non-compliance with a strategy to reduce global climate change and its ecological effects”.
The Judges’ Report concludes that the company has a 50 year history of “suborning, blackmailing and conning successive New Zealand governments into paying massive subsidies on the smelter’s electricity; dodging tax, and running a brilliantly effective PR machine to present a friendly, socially responsible and thoroughly greenwashed face to the media and the public. Its milking of the Emissions Trading Scheme is entirely in character”.
The extremely detailed Financial Analysis reveals that the smelter’s claimed benefits to NZ, namely annual export earnings of “around $1 billion” are, in fact, overstated by four fifths.
The full, damning, 2011 Roger Award Judges’ Report can be read at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/Roger2011.pdf
Rio Tinto is, once again, a finalist in the 2012 Roger Award, the winner of which will be announced in Wellington on May 1 (http://www.watchblogaotearoa.blogspot.co.nz/)
In short, it is a liability to New Zealand, not an asset.
What about the people who work for the smelter, directly or indirectly? Indisputably, the smelter closing would have a negative impact on Invercargill and Southland. But let’s keep a sense of proportion – in disaster terms it doesn’t compete with Christchurch having lost 185 lives, 50,000 jobs, and sustained $30 billion worth of damage in a matter of seconds on February 22, 2011. If Christchurch can get back in the saddle after that, Invercargill should be able to handle the smelter closure and its attendant job losses. As a plus, the city will be able to shake off its unhealthily dependent situation as a company town with its local government at the beck and call of this transnational bludger.
The tobacco industry used to employ a lot of people here, but that was deemed to be no longer in the public interest. Lacing lollywater with booze and selling it to kids supports a lot of jobs too but there’s plenty of public demand to get rid of that particular industry as well. The P industry provides an income for thousands of people too, but we don’t hear any demand for that insidious trade to be kept going to keep them in a job. History is full of examples of horrible industries that kept people in jobs (such as the slave trade) but which were banned and/or abolished for the greater good.
This smelter constitutes a crime against the people of New Zealand and has done for its entire existence.
In the national interest, it must be closed and the sooner the better.
It would be a great bonus to have 15% of the country’s electricity suddenly available and no longer committed to one smelter. There would no excuse for the moneygrabbing power companies not to cut their prices (we’ve been falsely promised lower power prices since the “electricity reforms” of the 1990s). And, we’re told, it would drive down Meridian’s attractiveness to would be buyers as part of the Government’s assets sale process. How ironic that the selfishness and ruthlessness of one transnational corporation could bugger up the plans to flog off more of our public assets to transnational corporations.
Murray Horton
Secretary/Organiser
CAFCA
Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa
Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand
cafca@chch.planet.org.nz
http://www.cafca.org.nz
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=117427631610589&ref=ts
http://www.watchblogaotearoa.blogspot.com/
https://twitter.com/#!/NZN4S
canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz
Thanks for that, Penny. Murray Horton is one of this country’s most engaging and entertaining speakers. He always has lots of interesting things to say, and he says them forthrightly and stylishly. Yet he has never appeared on National Radio’s The Panel.
It can’t be because he is from Christchurch; after all, his fellow Christchurch identity Barry Corbett seems to be on the programme half a dozen times a year at least.
Gr8 post Penny
In the could be a little bit interesting file:
Leaks of records from offshore tax havens
A naming project is starting up to expose government officials, businesses, individuals and families using British Virgin Islands and other offshore tax havens to avoid tax in their own countries. With 200 gigabytes of data from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a fair few people will be keeping their accountants quite busy right now.
And… When looking at how they analysed the data
there’s a bit of added interest in the list of journalists.
You mean the Mike Williams H-bomb that had the Herald journos already working on it in Melbourne when Mike got there?
[lprent: FFS – learn to use the reply button like everyone else. Shifting this to OpenMike as it is out of context for the post. ]