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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__gUjUv1vvw
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…
http://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-04042013/#comment-614007
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.
Some of you might know Gerard Otto (G), and his G News platform. This morning he wrote a letter to Christopher Luxon which I particularly enjoyed, and with his agreement I’m sharing it with you in this guest newsletter.If you’d like to make a contribution to support Gerard’s work you ...
Lindsay Mitchell writes – While there will not be another quarterly release of benefit numbers prior to the election, limited weekly reporting continues and is showing an alarming trend. Because there is a seasonal component to benefit number fluctuations it is crucial to compare like with like. In ...
A close analysis of the Treasury assessment of the Medium Term in its PREFU 2023 suggests the economy may be entering a new phase.Brian Easton writes – Last week I explained that the forecasts in the just published Treasury Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (PREFU 2023) was ...
It’s been a while since we looked at the latest with the City Rail Link and there’s been some fantastic milestones recently. To start with, and most recently, CRL have released an awesome video showing a full fly-through of one of the tunnels. Come fly with us! You asked for ...
We are heading into another period of fast population growth without matching increased home building or infrastructure investment.Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR:Labour and National detailed their house building and migration approaches over the weekend, with both pledging fast population growth policies without enough house building or infrastructure investment ...
Labour leader Chris Hipkins yesterday took the gloves off and laid into National and its leader Christopher Luxon. For many in Labour – and particularly for some at the top of the caucus and the party — it would not have been a moment too soon. POLITIK is aware ...
The leaders have had their go, they’ve told us the “what?” and the “why?” of their promises. Now it’s the turn of the would be Finance Ministers to tell us the “how?”, the “how much?”, and the “when?”A chance for those competing for the second most powerful job in the ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – Over the past 30-odd years it’s become almost an orthodoxy to blame or invoke neoliberalism for the failures of New Zealand society. On the left the usual response goes something like, neoliberalism is the cause of everything that’s gone wrong and the answer ...
A chronological listing of news and opinion articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Sep 17, 2023 thru Sat, Sep 23, 2023. Story of the Week Opinion: Let’s free ourselves from the story of economic growth A relentless focus on economic growth has ushered in ...
Have you been looking out of your window for signs of the apocalypse? Don’t worry, you haven’t been door knocked by a representative of the Brian Tamaki party. They’re probably a bit busy this morning spruiking salvation, or getting ready to march on our parliament, which is closed. No, I’ve ...
Climate Town is the YouTube channel of Rollie Williams and a ragtag team of climate communicators, creatives and comedians. They examine climate change in a way that doesn’t make you want to eat a cyanide pill. Get informed about the climate crisis before the weather does it for you. The latest ...
A close analysis of the Treasury assessment of the Medium Term in its PREFU 2023 suggests the economy may be entering a new phase.Last week I explained that the forecasts in the just published Treasury Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (PREFU 2023) was similar to the May Budget BEFU, ...
Back in June, we learned that Kiri Allan was a Parliamentary bully. And now there's another one: Labour MP Shanan Halbert: The Labour Party was alerted to concerns about [Halbert's] alleged behaviour a year ago but because staffers wanted to remain anonymous, no formal process was undertaken [...] The ...
Its that time in the election season where the status quo parties are busy accusing each other of having fiscal holes in a desperate effort to appear more "responsible" (but not, you understand, by promising to tax wealth or land to give the government the revenue it needs to do ...
JERRY COYNE writes – If you want to see what the government of New Zealand is up to with respect to science education, you can’t do better than listening to this video/slideshow by two exponents of the “we-need-two-knowledge-systems” view. I’ve gotten a lot of scary stuff from Kiwi ...
Buzz from the Beehive First, we were treated to the news (from Finance Minister Grant Robertson) that the economy has turned a corner and New Zealand never was in recession. This was triggered by statistics which showed the economy expanded 0.9 per cent in the June quarter, twice as much as ...
It has taken 17 months to get a comment published pointing out the obvious errors in the Scafetta (2022) paper in GRL. Back in March 2022, Nicola Scafetta published a short paper in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) purporting to show through ‘advanced’ means that ‘all models with ECS > ...
TL;DR: In the middle of a climate emergency and in a city prone to earthquakes, Victoria University of Wellington announced yesterday it would stop teaching geophysics, geographic information science and physical geography to save $22 million a year and repay debt. Climate change damage in Aotearoa this year is already ...
For nearly thirty years the pundits have been telling the minor parties that they must be good little puppies and let the big dogs decide. The parties with a plurality of the votes cast must be allowed to govern – even if that means ignoring the ...
Another poll, another 27 for Labour. It was July the last time one of the reputable TV company polls had Labour's poll percentage starting with a three, so the limbo question is now being asked: how low can you go?It seems such an unlikely question because this doesn't feel like the kind ...
After the trench warfare of Tuesday night, when the two major parties went head to head, last night was the turn of the minor parties. Hosts Newshub termed it “thePowerbrokers' Debate”.Based on the latest polls the four parties taking part - ACT, the Greens, New Zealand First, and Te ...
Hi,You can’t make this stuff up.People involved with Sound of Freedom, the QAnon-infused movie about anti-child trafficker Tim Ballard, are dropping like flies. I won’t ruin your day by describing it here, but Vice reports that footage has emerged of executive producer Paul Hutchinson being inappropriate with a 16-year-old trafficking ...
The trading banks yesterday concluded that though GDP figures released yesterday show the economy is not in recession, it may well soon be. Nevertheless, the fact that GDP has gone up 0.8 per cent in the latest quarter and that StatsNZ revised the previous quarter’s figure to show a ...
.Thanks for reading Frankly Speaking ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work..A recent political opinion poll (20 September) on TV1 presented what could only be called bleak news for the Left Bloc:National: 37%, down two points equating to 46 seatsLabour: 27%, down one point (34 ...
Open access notables At our roots Skeptical Science is about cognition of the results of climate science research in the minds of the entire human population. Ideally we'd be perfectly communicating understanding of Earth's climate, and perfectly understood. We can only approximate that, but hopefully converging closer to perfection. With ...
Coming Over The Top: Rory Stewart's memoir, Politics On The Edge, lays bare the dangerous inadequacies of the Western World's current political model.VERY FEW NEW ZEALANDERS will have heard of Rory Stewart. Those with a keen eye for the absurdities of politics may recognise the name as that of the ...
A bit of a narrative has been building that these two guys, your Chris and your Chris, are not so very different.It's true to a point. The bread and butter timidity has been dispiriting to watch, if you have a progressive disposition. It does leave the two of them relatively ...
Richard Prebble writes – There was a knockout winner of the Leaders’ debate. Check for yourself. Recall how they looked. If you cannot remember or missed it, the debate is on TVNZ’s website. Turn off the sound and ask: “Which one looks like a Prime Minister?” ...
Just like National when it was in government, Labour bought nominal GDP growth and momentum by pulling as hard as it could on the population lever. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTLDR:Stats NZ has reported better-than-expected GDP growth in the June quarter, thanks largely to record-high net migration of ...
We already know that the National Party are de facto climate change deniers who want to reverse virtually all climate change policy. So how do they think they'll cut emissions? According to their climate change spokesperson, polluting corporations will do it out of the goodness of their hearts: The ...
Dairy farmers, or at least those who are also shareholders in the Fonterra dairy co-operative would have received a second dose of good news this week, when the dairy giant reported a massive profit jump. This followed news of a better sale at the Fonterra GDT auction this week. Net ...
A longtime New Zealand broadcaster and commentator is taking a theatrical turn in advance of the General Election to draw different kinds of attention to the issues New Zealanders will be voting on in October.In a pre-election event that invites audiences to consider New Zealand politics through a theatrical lens ...
Our busy ministers – desperately busy trying to whip up voters’ support as their poll support sags, among other things – have added just one item of news to the government’s official website over the past 24 hours or so. It’s the news that the Government has accepted the Environment ...
On Monday, we learned that Queenstown, one of the country's largest tourist destinations, suddenly had to boil its water to avoid cryptosporidium. Now, it looks like it will last for months. Why? The usual reason: they'd been keeping rates low: Queenstown could face months of having to boil water ...
This week’s ONE News-Verian poll had the National/ACT coalition teetering on the edge of being able to govern alone while – just as precariously – having its legislative agenda vulnerable to a potential veto by Winston Peters in the House. So close, but so perilous. During the run-up to election ...
National Leader Christopher Luxon likes to bag the way the Resource Management Act worked. Though it has been repealed and replaced by the Labour government, Luxon plans, before Christmas, to repeal the new legislation and, for the foreseeable future, revert to the old Act that he has consistently criticised. ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections On August 16, 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Over a year later, its climate provisions remain a hot topic. The law’s proponents argue that it’s created a boom in domestic manufacturing jobs within the United States while paving ...
New Zealand’s dairy farmers will be relieved that prices rose for the second time this month at the latest Fonterra GDT auction. The encouraging feature of the sale was the activity of Chinese buyers who drove up prices. As a result, the GDT price index rose 4.6%, helped by a 4.6% lift ...
Here is a review of last night’s Democracy McNuggets debate, delivered in the style of last night's Democracy McNuggets debate.McNugget #1This format was very advantageous for the man who speaks in lazy SLAM DUNK.To hark back a few editions: The lazy SLAM DUNK doesn’t bother to make its case. It simply offers ...
Unfortunately I will need to take a bit of time off from this blog. After months of misdiagnoses and a change in GPs, my precious son is in Starship Hospital about to have major surgery. He already has had one … Continue reading → ...
Buzz from the BeehiveSource: ANZ The latest balance of payments statistics – providing a broad measure of what the country earns and spends internationally – gave grist to Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s publicity mill today. The current account deficit narrowed to 7.5 per cent of ...
Can This Be Possible? For nearly thirty years the pundits have been telling the minor parties that they must be good little puppies and let the big dogs decide. The parties with a plurality of the votes cast must be allowed to govern – even if that means ignoring the ...
Since we began worrying about climate change, the market fundamentalists have pushed the idea of "offsets" rather than actual emissions reductions. There's just one atmosphere after all, so in theory it doesn't matter where the reductions are made, so you can just pay someone on the other side of the ...
Ministers are pretending the former PM has simply vanished.Graham Adams writes – Late last week, Tova O’Brien asked Grant Robertson on her Stuff podcast if Jacinda Ardern should be “rolled out” to “galvanise the base” to help save Labour’s faltering campaign. Robertson laughed. ”I’m sure for ...
Owners of property deemed at risk from climate change related floods and rising sea levels will increasingly find their access to affordable insurance shut off. Some may become ‘prisoners’ in their uninsurable and therefore unbankable homes. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR:IAG, which insures more than 60% of homes ...
So it’s kind of obligatory to start with the boxing analogy…In the red corner, you’ll know him from his red hair and his red heart, the champion of achievable socialism, weighing in when given the opportunity - it’s Chris.And fighting out of the blue corner, you’ll know him from his ...
Last night’s TVOne debate may well reinforce the idea that the minor parties will determine this election. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and National leader Christopher Luxon ended their one-and-a-half hours with Luxon probably slightly ahead, though a stalemate might be a more realistic assessment. But there was nothing of ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
Aliens landed in the seaside village this morning. Just like every other cruise tourist who gets carted over here by Fullers and dumped at the bus stop, they had that bewildered look that said, How do you have fun here?I took them by their goey rubbery arms and said, Come ...
The 2023 general election campaign must be the most hollow in living memory. There really isn’t much that is positive or attractive about the electoral options on offer. This is an election without inspiration. An angry mood for change There is a definite cyncism amongst the public right now – ...
As New Zealand confronts a near-record current account deficit few, if any, of the country’s politicians are talking about it or the underlying problems. NZ’s external deficit is expected to continue narrowing, but at a slower pace than forecast a few months ago. Data out this week is expected ...
Fighting Mad: That which Twenty-First Century progressives most feared, Twenty-First Century progressivism has become. No one old enough to have experienced the emancipatory power of true progressivism: in the factory or on the streets; in the university quad or in the “old school” newsroom; could possibly vote for the parties ...
Buzz from the Beehive Hurrah. Someone in the Beehive has posted a ministerial announcement, the first since Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta last Thursday announced New Zealand will provide humanitarian support to those affected by last week’s earthquake in Morocco. It is somewhat stale news, dated 15 September 2023. It was ...
More investors are eyeing up the market, and first home buyers are feeling the FOMO again. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Landlords are gearing up to jump back into the housing market as soon as a National-ACT Government is elected, expecting a swathe of repeals to tax rules that ...
* Michael Bassett writes – If Labour ministers and our left-leaning media knew more about New Zealand’s political history they would stop giving so much publicity to National’s tax-cut plans, ill-advised though they might be. The attacks are only increasing the likelihood that National will be elected. In one ...
Debate time: In contrast to most debates, political debates aren’t simply about winning on points of logic, but are also about looking likeable on television – which is why good political debaters often have to pull their punches on TV, lest they seem unkind to dumb animals. Chris Hipkins is ...
Before New Zealand changed to MMP in 1996 there was a lot more interest in certain local contests. First past the post elections were won and lost in key marginal electorate battles, rendering the votes of those in safe seats largely obsolete.These days local contests have little impact on the ...
Both National and ACT are starting to back off some of their hardline positions on tax and spending. And finally, National leader Christopher Luxon has softened his stance on doing a deal with Winston Peters and NZ First. Their moves are subtle and wrapped up in sound-byte-friendly media standup ...
In Art, we find meaning.From Art, we draw deeper understanding of what the hell it’s all about.Kindly now mute your cellphones and please remain behind the velvet ropes as we move through the gallery.She might be contemplating a secret, she might be enjoying a private joke. Perhaps she is simply ...
In Art, we find meaning.From Art, we draw deeper understanding of what the hell it’s all about.Kindly now mute your cellphones and please remain behind the velvet ropes as we move through the gallery.She might be contemplating a secret, she might be enjoying a private joke. Perhaps she is simply ...
The right has a problem with brainwormed conspiracy theorists. They've thoroughly infiltrated NZFirst and ACT, and now it seems they've infiltrated National as well: The National Party candidate favoured to win the Hamilton East electorate held views directly opposed to the party's leader on fluoridation of water and vaccine ...
Pushed by the need for votes, Act’s leader, David Seymour, like Richard Prebble before him, has reached out to the dark side of the New Zealand electorate. Much as he would prefer to pull in support on the strength of Act’s sunny libertarianism, there just ain’t enough Eighteenth Century liberals ...
Buzz from the BeehiveAgain, no news has been posted on the government’s official website over the past 24 hours. Indeed, no news has been posted since Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta last Thursday announced New Zealand would be providing $1 million humanitarian support to Morocco to those affected by ...
Despite the headlines, things are not much worse than at the time of the 2023 budget, but fiscal management is always difficult.Brian Easton writes- The Treasury is required by law to publish a Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (PREFU) a few weeks before a general election, ...
It’s a bit bigger than that: the gap between National’s forecast of lost tax revenues from changes to tax rules for landlords and what Treasury predicts is significant, and adds to the $500 million a year predicted shortfall from its foreign buyers tax . File Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The ...
Once upon a time, manifestos were a key feature of the election period, arriving in letterboxes in solid printed form, and full of details of what each party proposed to do and why. These days, we get a little pledge card with a few bullet points on it. So it’s interesting ...
Change is coming. A shakeup of the ministers responsible for New Zealand’s international relations seems almost guaranteed, irrespective of the country’s election result on October 14. Coalition politics are likely to play a key role in appointments related to foreign affairs. On current opinion polling, a government led by the ...
ACT leader David Seymour has declared war on the public service with his promise to sack 15,000 of them. This is probably four times more than National want given the boot under its promise to cut all budgets by 6.5 per cent. But Seymour may have got a foretaste ...
It has been a while since I engaged in meaty Tolkien analysis, so I deem it time to delve into one of the most pressing issues of our age. Namely, the vexed property law issues governing the One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I was prompted to offer some ...
We, the public, are making a hiring decision. That’s what this is. As silly as it is to have things like those utterly infernal “Most preferred Prime Minister” polls, largely an outcome of the “presidential style” of politics that has no basis in our system because we simply do ...
Hi,Webworm was birthed over three years ago, as New Zealand went into its first Covid lockdown. Back then I wrote a lot about the conspiratorial madness that erupted from the sewers, the world very quickly becoming infected with brain worms. I have all those Webworms archived here, for anyone interested.As ...
Labour is supercharging its plan to solve the public housing shortfall created by National, promising another 6,000 homes on top of what has already been committed says Labour Housing spokesperson Dr Megan Woods. ...
Labour will back migrant working families by introducing a 10-year multiple-entry parents’ and grandparents’ Super Visa, and make good on the Dawn Raids apology by providing a one-off visa for overstayers who have been in the country ten years or more, Labour’s Immigration Spokesperson Andrew Little says. ...
The Green Party is today welcoming Labour coming to the table to ensure an amnesty for overstayers, but only the Greens will ensure immigration settings actually reflect the reality of people who have been failed by our immigration system. ...
The Green Party is calling on Auckland Council to do more to protect urban trees and housing developer Aedifice Property Group to restore and replant the native forest it cleared, and protect all the remaining trees on Ngahere Road in Pukekohe after a significant number of native trees were cut ...
Latest Police data shows monthly ram raids have hit a two-year low, laying waste to Christopher Luxon’s false claim that there are two ram raids a day says Labour’s Police Spokesperson Ginny Andersen. ...
Free and healthy school lunches will be here to stay if Labour is re-elected, guaranteeing food for our kids who need it most and significant cost saving for parents. ...
The next Labour Government will build a new hospital in Hawke’s Bay, Labour leader Chris Hipkins and Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall announced. ...
The Green Party will keep up the fight to support exploited migrant workers, including pushing to end single employer visas, after the government picked up Green recommendations to improve immigration settings. ...
Green Party co leader James Shaw visited a home in Auckland today that has been upgraded with a wide range of energy improvements, similar to those that would be supported through the Green Party’s Clean Power Payment. ...
The Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s presence in New York today at the United Nations General Assembly is a contempt of New Zealand’s “caretaker government” convention. Despite the long-standing caretaker convention, Minister Mahuta is today at the UN to sign a highly contentious “Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement”, delivering a ...
The Pre-Election Fiscal Update Changes EverythingWithin an hour of this speech there is going to be a debate between the political parties that the media, under MMP, still think are the only parties that matter in this campaign. Both of those parties are riddled with inexperience, as evidenced by ...
National and ACT's tax plans don't add up, and that means deep cuts to the public services New Zealanders rely on, says Labour Campaign Chair Megan Woods. ...
Thank you for your invitation to speak with you this afternoon about New Zealand Foreign Policy. After offering one or two general thoughts about the nature of foreign policy, the focus today will be the Pacific Reset and why its goals remain even more important today as when they were ...
National’s plan to cut policies that are reducing New Zealand’s climate emissions will result in a huge gap in the country’s emissions budgets and could see Kiwis paying significantly more at the petrol pump as a result of Christopher Luxon hiking the ETS price. ...
Labour’s plan to support rooftop solar is a step in the right direction, but falls short of what could be achieved through the Green Party’s Clean Power Payment. ...
Labour will double the number of houses with rooftop solar in New Zealand, lowering household power bills, reducing emissions and boosting renewable electricity generation. ...
A re-elected Labour Government will continue its proud tradition of advancing women’s health, employment, and legal rights Spokesperson for Women Jan Tinetti said. ...
Speaking at the E Tū Election Launch in Auckland today, Green Party co leader Marama Davidson outlined the Green Party’s manifesto commitment to ensure everyone has five weeks of annual leave. ...
A re-elected Labour Government will protect hard-fought workers’ rights and keep the momentum on wage growth to lift incomes for all New Zealanders, leader Chris Hipkins announced today. ...
New Zealand First is proud to announce the Party List for the upcoming 2023 General Election. We have had a great number of applicants and potential candidates moving through the selection process over the past few months. Our final selection for our list proves we have a wide range ...
Massive cuts to public service are on the cards as Nicola Willis has promised to resign if she doesn’t deliver tax cuts but is refusing to make the same commitment if she doesn’t raise enough income from her bungled foreign buyer’s tax. ...
Labour will help more victims of crime achieve justice faster by introducing a formal class-action regime, modernising consent laws and increasing the use of technology to speed up hearings. ...
Labour will deliver the largest ever increase to the number of doctors trained each year, adding an additional 335 doctors a year to our health workforce from 2027, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins has announced. ...
Today’s PREFU has some alarming statistics showing an economy deteriorating and the cost of unaffordable government expenditure, mainly in the 2022 and 2023 budgets. Despite this alarming economic and fiscal picture, political parties are making unaffordable promises, talking about a surplus by 2027, or four years time, all of which ...
If re-elected Labour will make cervical screening services free to all women and people with a cervix aged 25 – 69 years, delivering better cancer care for over 1.4 million New Zealanders. ...
Labour is running a positive, forward-looking campaign that's focused on fixing the cost of living, keeping people and communities safe and investing in education, health and housing. ...
Statements from David Seymour and Winston Peters have called into question whether National would be able to lead a functional government if they were in a position to do so after the election. ...
The Green Party will protect 30% of the ocean by 2030, create an independent Ocean Commission to advise the government, and put a Green Minister for Oceans and Fisheries in charge of making it happen. ...
National's shaky tax scheme has received a further blow after it’s been revealed that John Key received advice when he was Prime Minister that the scheme being proposed by National couldn’t be done, Labour Finance Spokesperson Grant Robertson says. ...
The National Party’s housing policy is vacant; with no new funding and no timelines attached to its delivery says Labour Housing Spokesperson Megan Woods. ...
Judicial warrant process for out-of-hours compliance visits 2023/24 Recognised Seasonal Employer cap increased by 500 Additional roles for Construction and Infrastructure Sector Agreement More roles added to Green List Three-month extension for onshore Recovery Visa holders The Government has confirmed a number of updates to immigration settings as part of ...
Tangi ngunguru ana ngā tai ki te wahapū o Hokianga Whakapau Karakia. Tārehu ana ngā pae maunga ki Te Puna o te Ao Marama. Korihi tangi ana ngā manu, kua hinga he kauri nui ki te Wao Nui o Tāne. He Toa. He Pou. He Ahorangi. E papaki tū ana ...
The lifting of COVID-19 isolation and mask mandates in August has resulted in a return of almost $50m in savings and recovered contingencies, Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall announced today. Following the revocation of mandates and isolation, specialised COVID-19 telehealth and alternative isolation accommodation are among the operational elements ...
Susie Houghton of Auckland has been appointed as a new District Court Judge, to serve on the Family Court, Attorney-General David Parker said today. Judge Houghton has acted as a lawyer for child for more than 20 years. She has acted on matters relating to the Hague Convention, an international ...
The Government has today confirmed $2.5 million to fund a replace and upgrade a stopbank to protect the Waipawa Drinking Water Treatment Plant. “As a result of Cyclone Gabrielle, the original stopbank protecting the Waipawa Drinking Water Treatment Plant was destroyed. The plant was operational within 6 weeks of the ...
Another $2.1 million to boost capacity to deal with waste left in Cyclone Gabrielle’s wake. Funds for Hastings District Council, Phoenix Contracting and Hog Fuel NZ to increase local waste-processing infrastructure. The Government is beefing up Hawke’s Bay’s Cyclone Gabrielle clean-up capacity with more support dealing with the massive amount ...
The future of Supercars events in New Zealand has been secured with new Government support. The Government is getting engines started through the Major Events Fund, a special fund to support high profile events in New Zealand that provide long-term economic, social and cultural benefits. “The Repco Supercars Championship is ...
The economy has turned a corner with confirmation today New Zealand never was in recession and stronger than expected growth in the June quarter, Finance Minister Grant Robertson said. “The New Zealand economy is doing better than expected,” Grant Robertson said. “It’s continuing to grow, with the latest figures showing ...
The Government has accepted the Environment Court’s recommendation to give special legal protection to New Zealand’s largest freshwater springs, Te Waikoropupū Springs (also known as Pupū Springs), Environment Minister David Parker announced today. “Te Waikoropupū Springs, near Takaka in Golden Bay, have the second clearest water in New Zealand after ...
Temporary package of funding for accommodation and essential living support for victims of migrant exploitation Exploited migrant workers able to apply for a further Migrant Exploitation Protection Visa (MEPV), giving people more time to find a job Free job search assistance to get people back into work Use of 90-day ...
An export boost is supporting New Zealand’s economy to grow, adding to signs that the economy has turned a corner and is on a stronger footing as we rebuild from Cyclone Gabrielle and lock in the benefits of multiple new trade deals, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. “The economy is ...
The Government has approved $15 million to raise about 200 homes at risk of future flooding. More than half of this is expected to be spent in the Tairāwhiti settlement of Te Karaka, lifting about 100 homes there. “Te Karaka was badly hit during Cyclone Gabrielle when the Waipāoa River ...
The Government is helping businesses recover from Cyclone Gabrielle and attract more people back into their regions. “Cyclone Gabrielle has caused considerable damage across North Island regions with impacts continuing to be felt by businesses and communities,” Economic Development Minister Barbara Edmonds said. “Building on our earlier business support, this ...
Defence Minister Andrew Little has turned the first sod to start construction of a new Maintenance Support Facility (MSF) at Burnham Military Camp today. “This new state-of-art facility replaces Second World War-era buildings and will enable our Defence Force to better maintain and repair equipment,” Andrew Little said. “This Government ...
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta will represent New Zealand at the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York this week, before visiting Washington DC for further Pacific focussed meetings. Nanaia Mahuta will be in New York from Wednesday 20 September, and will participate in UNGA leaders ...
Around 1,700 Te Whatu Ora employed midwives and maternity care assistants will soon vote on a proposed pay equity settlement agreed by Te Whatu Ora, the Midwifery Employee Representation and Advisory Service (MERAS) and New Zealand Nurses Association (NZNO), Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall announced today. “Addressing historical pay ...
Aotearoa New Zealand will provide humanitarian support to those affected by last week’s earthquake in Morocco, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced today. “We are making a contribution of $1 million to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) to help meet humanitarian needs,” Nanaia Mahuta said. ...
The Government is investing over $22 million across 18 projects to improve the resilience of roads in the West Coast that have been affected by recent extreme weather, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed today. A dedicated Transport Resilience Fund has been established for early preventative works to protect the state ...
The Government has today confirmed a $2 million grant towards the regeneration of Greymouth’s CBD with construction of a new two-level commercial and public facility. “It will include a visitor facility centred around a new library. Additionally, it will include retail outlets on the ground floor, and both outdoor and ...
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta will attend the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, in Suva, Fiji alongside New Zealand’s regional counterparts. “Aotearoa New Zealand is deeply committed to working with our pacific whanau to strengthen our cooperation, and share ways to combat the challenges facing the Blue Pacific Continent,” ...
Economy to grow 2.6 percent on average over forecast period Treasury not forecasting a recession Inflation to return to the 1-3 percent target band next year Wages set to grow 4.8 percent a year over forecast period Unemployment to peak below the long-term average Fiscal Rules met - Net debt ...
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall proudly opened the Canterbury Cancer Centre in Christchurch today. The new facility is the first of its kind and was built with $6.5 million of funding from the Government’s Infrastructure Reference Group scheme for shovel-ready projects allocated in 2020. ...
$12 million to improve the resilience of roads in the Nelson, Marlborough and Tasman regions Hope Bypass earmarked in draft Government Policy Statement on land transport $127 million invested in the top of the south’s roads since flooding in 2021 and 2022 The Government is investing over $12 million to ...
Ko tēnei te wiki e whakanui ana i tō tātou reo rangatira. Ko te wā tuku reo Māori, e whakanuia tahitia ai te reo ahakoa kei hea ake tēnā me tēnā o tātou, ka tū ā te Rātū te 14 o Mahuru, ā te 12 o ngā hāora i te ahiahi. ...
The 70-year-old Wildlife Act will be replaced with modern, fit-for-purpose legislation to better protect native species and improve biodiversity, Minister of Conservation Willow-Jean Prime has announced. “New species legislation is urgently needed to address New Zealand’s biodiversity crisis,” Willow-Jean Prime said. “More than 4,000 of our native species are currently ...
Central and Local Government are today announcing a range of new measures to tackle low-level crime and anti-social behaviour in the Auckland CBD to complement Police scaling up their presence in the area. “Police have an important role to play in preventing and responding to crime, but there is more ...
The Government has confirmed $73.7 million over the next four years and a further $40.5m in outyears to continue to transform the disability support system, Minister for Disability Issues Priyanca Radhakrishnan has announced. “The Enabling Good Lives (EGL) approach is a framework which guides positive change for disabled people, ...
Standard and Poor’s is the latest independent credit rating agency to endorse the Government’s economic management in the face of a deteriorating global economy. S&P affirmed New Zealand’s long term local currency rating at AAA and foreign currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook. It follows Fitch affirming New ...
Christchurch barrister Kelvin Reid has been appointed as a Judge of the Environment Court and the District Court, Attorney-General David Parker announced today. Mr Reid has extensive experience in Resource Management Act issues, including water quality throughout the South Island. He was appointed to the Technical Advisory Group advising the ...
New Zealand is on track to have greener steel as soon as 2026 with New Zealand Steel’s electric arc furnace project reaching a major milestone today. The Government announced a conditional partnership with New Zealand Steel in May to deliver the country’s largest emissions reduction project to date. Half of ...
Pokia ana te tihi Taiarahia e Hine-Pūkohu-rangi Hotu kau ana te manawa! Horahia ana te whārua o Ruātoki e te kapua pouri Tikaro rawahia ko te whatumanawa! Rere whakamuri kau ana te awa o Hinemataroa Ki te kawe i te rongo ki te mātāpuna i nga pōngaihu Maungapōhatu, tuohu ...
Police Minister Ginny Andersen has today congratulated Police in their efforts to crack down on gangs, after laying 50,000 charges against gang members and their associates through the hugely successful Operation Cobalt. As at 31 August, Police have: Laid 50,396 criminal charges against gang members and their associates Issued 64,524 ...
The Government has confirmed details of the tax changes to the bright-line test for cyclone-damaged properties, with the release of the required legislative amendments. Revenue Minister Barbara Edmonds has released a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) to be considered by the Finance and Expenditure Committee in the next Parliament, as it ...
Minister for Trade and Export Growth Damien O’Connor has welcomed the CPTPP Panel’s ruling in favour of New Zealand in our dispute against Canada, a significant win for our primary sector exporters. The Panel found that Canada’s dairy quota administration is inconsistent with its obligations under the Comprehensive and Progressive ...
The next phase of the Government’s response to youth crime is underway, with an intensive programme for the country’s most prolific young offenders launched today in Auckland, Minister for Children Kelvin Davis said. The programme, announced by Prime Minister Chris Hipkins in July, will see up to 60 recidivist young ...
The Government has agreed to a request from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 for extra three months to deliver its final report. The Royal Commission was established in 2022 to strengthen New Zealand’s preparedness for any future pandemics. It was originally due to conclude mid-2024. “The Commission has ...
The Wainuiomata High School redevelopment is making great progress, with two more classroom blocks set to be complete by the end of the month, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced today. The Prime Minister visited today to see first-hand the progress of the redevelopment which is continuing at pace and is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia Fish oil, which contains omega-3 fatty acids, is promoted for a number of health benefits – from boosting our heart health, protecting our brain from dementia, ...
The 11th-hour decision to rule in Winston Peters if necessary leaves the National leader looking slow and expedient. When Chris Hipkins declared last week that National’s polling was beyond its peak, it seemed born more of hope than data. It is hard to avoid concluding, however, that Christopher Luxon has ...
A 17-year-old shares their reality living with the ‘doubting disease’. A version of this essay was first published on Emily Writes’ Substack. Every day I return to my house, gently closing the door behind me. Each time I unpack my bag, wash my lunch box and water bottle, place my ...
An ambitious initiative in Sāmoan early childhood centres is improving the health and wellbeing of children, families and teachers across Auckland – with aspirations to extend nationwide.The Seugagogo Aoga Amata Pre-School had humble beginnings. Situated close to the town centre of Auckland’s Ōtāhuhu and founded as a playgroup ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s election live updates for Monday, September 25. I’m Stewart Sowman-Lund: on deck today from the mighty Manawatū. Get in touch with me on [email protected]Find out more about the political parties at Policy.nz The agenda Christopher Luxon has confirmed he would work with Winston ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jared Mondschein, Director of Research, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney The US Congress has had no shortage of viral moments in recent months. Senator Dianne Feinstein seemingly became confused over how to vote. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell experienced two extended ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Ginns, Associate Professor in Educational Psychology, University of Sydney Oleksandr P/Pexels Around Australia, Year 12 students are heading into the final stretch of study before exams start in early term 4. This is typically seen as a very intense ...
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A beloved community group is shifting transport habits in this Manukau suburb.As I biked down Coronation Road in Māngere, a driver beeped and yelled, “Get off the road and onto the footpath!” When I didn’t get out of their way, they yelled again, telling me it was for my ...
Newshub’s next poll will be revealed at 6pm tonight, teased by political editor Jenna Lynch as one that shows the face of the election is “changing in more ways than one”. Is that a reference to New Zealand First, especially given National’s decision to commit to working with them (if ...
Andrea Vance has been on a tear of late, publishing a series of fired up columns about the dire state of political discourse as we head towards the election. This week’s Sunday Star-Times column (paywalled) is on the “stonking great elephant in the room” that none of the party leaders want to ...
The finance chiefs’ Q&A debate was some of the most compelling TV of the election season so far, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. Tempers flare in the TVNZ studios Grant ...
“ACT and National are on the same page about a future coalition Government, with both parties working together in a strong coalition to overcome the significant challenges New Zealand faces,” says ACT Leader David Seymour. “Christopher Luxon confirmed ...
Pike River family members Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse have called on political leaders to agree to introduce a corporate manslaughter law following charges for Whakaari deaths being dropped. Anna Osborne, who lost her husband Milton in the Pike ...
“We need to get the politics and bureaucracy out of New Zealand’s education system, bring high standards for attendance and learning in, and treat the profession with respect. While Labour is responsible for lowering the bar and leaving kids even ...
After months of speculation and countless questions from journalists, Christopher Luxon has confirmed he would work with Winston Peters – if required to. In a video posted to social media, Luxon made it clear that his preference was for “strong and stable” two-party coalition between National and Act. “I believe ...
“Think before you speak” urges Ethnic and Faith Leaders to election candidates. The national network of ethnic and faith leaders of the Chinese, Indian, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish and African communities has urged civility and respect by politicians during ...
National and Labour are both promising to front up with their full fiscal plans this week, their rhetoric over the economy growing increasingly feisty. ...
National and Labour are both promising to front up with their full fiscal plans this week, their rhetoric over the economy growing increasingly feisty. ...
New Zealand has a massive deficit in state housing, but is that all National’s fault? Max Rashbrooke runs the numbers. It has become a truth universally acknowledged, at least on the left, that the last time National was in power, its only interest in state houses lay in selling them ...
Chlöe Swarbrick’s victory was one of the biggest surprises of the 2020 election, but in the past three years she’s made the seat her own. Can the high-profile Green hold on to Auckland Central, or will it flip to a National or Labour newbie?Read the other battleground electorate profiles ...
The risk of protesters and unwanted guests has spoiled the election campaign. Over back-to-back days in Auckland with the two Chrises, political editor Jo Moir observed increased security and vetting, and safe party-faithful crowds.Analysis: At Auckland’s Viaduct on Friday afternoon Luxon bounced from one restaurant to another chatting with ...
Tiny home living is cheap, good for the environment and encourages a simpler life. Getting there, however, can be a bureaucratic horror show and involve a huge financial leap of faith. You've probably seen the videos where you're walked through a picture-perfect tiny home on an idyllic section. The incredibly ...
Missing out on the Commonwealth Games gave Tiana Metuarau the fire to work even harder for her Silver Ferns dream. She's back from an abrupt World Cup call-up and ready to keep growing. Tiana Metuarau lay shaking uncontrollably in her Cape Town bed, unsure what was happening to her. She'd ...
First edition masterpieces are up for grabs this week at an antiquarian book auction Three extremely rare first edition Jane Austen novels will be auctioned on Wednesday, with the top bid estimated at around $80,000. Jane Austen – one of the greats, so great that she is hardly ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The government will commit $41 million for technical and further education and “higher apprenticeships” when it releases its white paper on employment on Monday. Of this, $31 million will be for new TAFE “centres ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The government will commit $41 million for technical and further education and “higher apprenticeships” when it releases its white paper on employment on Monday. Of this, $31 million will be for new TAFE “centres ...
SPECIAL REPORT:By Yamin Kogoya Prominent West Papuan independence activist Victor Yeimo was yesterday released from prison in Jayapura, Indonesia’s occupied capital of West Papua, sparking a massive celebration among thousands of Papuans. His release has ignited a spirit of unity among Papuans in their fight against what they refer ...
COMMENTARY:By John Mitchell in Suva On Thursday, the whole world celebrated the International Day of Peace. Although the UN day is not as famous as others, like World Press Freedom Day, International Women’s Day or World Teacher’s Day, it is important nevertheless. The UN General Assembly has set aside ...
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ admission that he agrees with National’s policies on speed limits, but claims he can’t to do anything about them, shows how ineffective the Labour Government is, National’s Transport spokesperson Simeon Brown says. ...
Halfway through the campaign period and with Labour still falling in the polls, Chris Hipkins has debuted a new and more aggressive approach at a rally in Wellington, Marc Daalder reportsAnalysis: In front of a crowd of around 80 supporters in a small room on Wellington's waterfront on Sunday, Chris ...
It was a far cry from the campaign rallies the Labour Party threw in Wellington at the last two elections, held in the St James Theatre and the Michael Fowler Centre, but Chris Hipkins nevertheless summoned an old-school energy at a central city conference room before 250 supporters this afternoon. ...
Speed limit reductions designed to make roads safer will be reversed under a National government, with state highways that had moved to 80km/h reverting to 100km/h and “many local roads” returning to 50km/h from 30km/h.“Under the guise of safety, Labour has let rip with its anti-car ideology,” said Christopher ...
Labour’s spending promises will see government debt skyrocket even further, with no funding set aside for $51 billion of policy commitments like Light Rail and Lake Onslow, National’s Finance spokesperson Nicola Willis says. “Labour’s economic ...
A National government will undo Labour’s blanket speed limit reductions, returning many state highways to 100 km/h from 80, and many local roads to 50 km/h from 30, while designing new highways for 110 km/h, National’s Transport spokesperson Simeon ...
Assessing Grant Robertson and Nicola Willis’s prickly finance debate, conducted in the narrow realm of what their leaders made possible.Q+A devoted its full hour to a debate between Labour’s finance minister Grant Robertson and National finance spokesperson Nicola Willis, one which featured moments of lucidity and contrasting visions presented, ...
This weekend, politicians and party faithful are continuing their charm offensive throughout the country, venturing out to strategic spots for speaking opportunities, hand shaking and photo opportunities. ...
It’s whitebait season, but there’s a lot more to these unique native fish than what you see on your plate. In spring, when the tide is high, a miracle happens. Underneath the water, clinging onto grasses and rushes, small beads burst open, and larvae wiggle out. As the tide drains, ...
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Bard Billot on the Fair Lady Jessica Too Mutch is not enough The Grand Duel is to take place At High Noon before the Palace Gates. King Chipkins and Baron Luxon Will engage in mortal combat for the honour And hand of the Fair Lady Jessica. A bored-looking ...
And what kind of coalition would he like to form with National: one with clear borders, or a merger approach?If David Seymour were sent to a desert island and could take just one TV show based on politics, what would it be? House of Cards perhaps? The Thick of ...
My trauma doesn’t come with warnings. It attacks me out of nowhere when I least expect it.The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.Illustrations by Devon Smith.This essay contains descriptions of sexual assault. Please take care.The night is a write ...
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Pacific Media Watch The International Press Institute (IPI) has condemned the arrest and interrogation of French journalist Ariane Lavrilleux and demanded her immediate release. She was released after 39 hours in custody. IPI has also called on French law enforcement authorities to ensure full respect for international media freedom standards ...
By Meri Radinibaravi in Suva A recent investigation by The Fiji Times has found that former attorney-general and FijiFirst party (FF) general-secretary Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum did not declare the value of shares he owns in two companies, as per the asset declarations filed with the Fijian Elections Office since 2017. Section ...
“ACT is welcoming National and Labour’s support for our policy to reverse the ineffective ban on effective cold and flu medicines. This is just one of many unnecessary regulations that will be on the chopping block with ACT in Government,” says ACT ...
Papers released to National under the OIA show that Labour’s proposed income insurance scheme will not only hit Kiwi households and businesses in the back pocket, it will also hit the Government’s books with a bill of more than $800 million, National’s ...
National will make it easier for parents and grandparents of migrants to visit their family in New Zealand, National’s Immigration spokesperson Erica Stanford says. “Currently, parents and grandparents of migrants who are New Zealand permanent ...
By Grace Salmang in Port Moresby Reconstruction and renovation work for dormitories, laboratories, mess and tutorial rooms is currently underway at the University of Papua New Guinea’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. This is following a sit-in protest a week ago by students led by Student’s Representative Council (SRC) ...
By Iliesa Tora, RNZ Pacific sports journalist in Saint-Étienne, France Argentinian winger Emiliano Boffelli scored all his team’s points as they defeated Manu Samoa 19-10 at the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in Saint-Étienne, France, yesterday in a Rugby World Cup pool D match. That gave the Pumas their first win at the ...
This essay by Emma Ng is from the book Present Tense: Wāhine Toi Aotearoa – A Paper Record, edited by Catherine Griffiths. It’s part of a wider project of posters which aim to ‘record the current landscape of women in design and give visibility to the unsung diversity of Aotearoa design’. ...
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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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__gUjUv1vvw
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGMvnwjUizY
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__gUjUv1vvw
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/
http://www.amazon.com/The-9-11-Toronto-Report/dp/1478369205/
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…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxkBHqz9-d4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H89XFB4u94w
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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hrpiwtJdJY
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaqC5FnvAEc
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Kq78G2nxA
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.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/GYr-700uQUQ
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
http://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-04042013/#comment-614007
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
[email protected]
http://www.cafca.org.nz
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=117427631610589&ref=ts
http://www.watchblogaotearoa.blogspot.com/
https://twitter.com/#!/NZN4S
http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/Roger2011.pdf
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. ]