I’ve always been fascinated by the lefts ability to schadenfreude.
It is one of the more distasteful aspects of (some) lefties in all. All “caring” until it’s someone they do not like – then they get great pleasure from it.
There have been studies linking it to envy – and that does not surprise me at all. As I have personally found a lot of the left envious. Jealous and bitter of the success of others.
What? Churlish James muttering defensively about “schaudenfreude”? James and ilk express that sentiment in relation to the ‘culpable poor’ on a daily basis. That’s basically why the big fat kick-ass BBQ is here at all.
I’m sorry if you don’t have friends and or family that can or want to participate in this great kiwi tradition- but that’s your loss not mine.
I love to BBQ – we do it a lot. It’s partly because we love the food (who dosnt like a nice bloody steak?) – but mainly because it’s fun to surrounded yourself with fantastic friends and family.
You should try it – it will give you a brighter outlook on life.
“…I’ve always been fascinated by the lefts ability to schadenfreude…”
That’s because it involves having an imagination, empathy and an entire array of higher order thinking of which you are bereft. I guess it must like looking through a window into a world where you’ll never be able to play.
Schadenfreude has zip to do with envy, Jimmy, and everything to do with the deep, deep satisfaction of seeing someone shooting themselves with one of their very own carefully crafted balls of shit.
Now, revel in your fellow right-wingers schadenfreude, it’s fucking delicious.
Steve Bannon’s spectacular fall from grace in Trump World is a big, salty, delicious bowl of schadenfreude from the political gods in celebration of the new year.
[…]
Now, like two rats in a bag, Trump and Bannon are tearing at one another in a delicious public spat that has every possible bit of drama, except Bannon drunkenly bellowing for a round of fisticuffs with all comers and Trump offering to compare the length of their relative manhoods on live television. They deserve one another in so many ways
And I am bemused by James’s ability to demolition the English language.
Schadenfreude is strictly a noun, James – both in the original German, and in English.
To show you how silly it sounds, I have just misused ‘demolition’ the same way you misused schadenfreude. It seems that some righties need the obvious explained to them…
For one who is so sure of his utter perfection in every way, how about thinking whether you should have written “If you ARE so bemused by my use of the E(cap)nglish language…”
Still haven’t found any reports in the corporate media about the massive storm that hit the country written in the context of climate change…..
But I found this.
‘Living on the Edge: What climate change means for Taranaki ’
The climate change debate has hogged headlines recently but its influence on humanity is undeniable. In the first of a six-part series called Living on the Edge, reporter Deena Coster takes a deeper look at what it means for Taranaki.
The rough and rugged Taranaki coastline will be unrecognisable in 100 years’ time.
Houses once dotted along the coast will be lost, as coastal erosion and rising sea levels steal away the very land they rest on………..’
‘From drought scare to deluge despair: The science of the storm.’
‘ After a period of calm, dry weather for much of the country, in which century old records for dryness were toppled, the furious storm from the north seemed to come out of the blue.
What may at first seem like atmospheric whiplash was actually a case of cause and effect – and may be a taste of things to come…..’
‘With rising sea-levels, as expected under a warming climate, storm surges will get higher and reach further inland – issues already evident in pockets around the country, where homes and infrastructure have been damaged.’
Thanks for raising the “Climate change” issue it was urgently needed to address our worsening climate of severe weather now reaching us all.
As PM Jacinda Ardern said clearly and correctly;-
“Climate change is truly the nuclear issue of our generation’s time”.
But it is so sad that even with the truly ‘extreme’ weather events we all experienced over the last few days, was not responded to properly by all the media!!!!
All the media could do was to “minimalise’ most of the event, and worsening weather events we are now experiencing now.
Question is to all the ‘climate change deniers’ & naysayers is;
“How much is enough to wake them up” ????
Will it need to take many lives lost?
Will it take a dramatic loss of their own food chain so they starve?
Will it take a loss of all forms of transport?
Will it take a loss of our coastal regions up to 50kms inland before they will actually finally put up their hands in surrender to ‘mother nature’ and plead for forgiveness for their folly???????
We certainly hope they will finally wake up now and join us to begin reducing climate change emissions and begin rebuilding secure future.
Stuff/Fairfax have had an epiphany.
There’s even a climate change quiz.
Get people to do it.
These operations work on click bait and it would be good for them to see people are interested in climate change.
“As PM Jacinda Ardern said clearly and correctly;-
“Climate change is truly the nuclear issue of our generation’s time”.”
Yep, but can’t see much action on this from Labour in the RMA and in TPPA (whoever version) or any future planning. Climate change is ignored (apart from various taxation schemes) and not actually looked at what’s gonna happen when parts of the world get uninhabitable in particular those that have huge populations (India looking to get to 50 degree temperature in some places), massive pollution in China or islands that will become are under water and all around the world in particular the west, houses destroyed on mass by flooding and storms. Agricultural land in drought and housing and people galore, but less land in agricultural production or even owed locally by the the country but by offshore individuals and corporations whose aim is profit not social conscience. Or maybe wars start breaking out to control dwindling resources. Japan is obsessed already with doing it’s own thing on fisheries and not cooperating in local efforts to have ecological sanctuaries to keep the fish stocks and biodiversity going. Our fisheries control is laughable in this country and it seems NZ are only too happy to turn a blind eye to slave labour to catch and process it as well as overfishing.
Wilson’s car parking for example in Australia show enormous “costs” leading to small profits on eye watering charges and a very small tax take for Australia. Who knew that you were helping the profits of Hong Kong billionaires when you parked at the local hospital. Clearly this type of carry on is going to get worse and worse – National even wanted to sell off the state houses to the Chinese or Australian corporations. China owns 50% of silver fern farms and Fonterra seems more focused on the 8 million salary of it’s executive than any sort of forward planning in any area from innovation to pollution control. I’m sure big business would love to sell Fonterra off into shares on the sharemarket, but for the moment making do with just selling off the daily farms themselves which will eventually change the control more offshore.
Cheese costs more than the average wage after taxes already in this country, bottled water costs more than soft drink. Not looking good for local Kiwis future, if things start going bad around the world and we find we don’t actually own much of our land and assets anymore and other’s are making the profits from NZ produce, water and housing booms (aka James Hardie types) while the Kiwi taxpayers are paying for the infrastructure and disaster costs but have little export income anymore so can’t afford social welfare. With enough of a change in demographics we might start getting a society that doesn’t believe in ‘wasting money” on social welfare anymore and privatise and plunder everything for a business opportunity.
Still haven’t found any reports in the corporate media about the massive storm that hit the country written in the context of climate change…..
That could be because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and weather is just weather. Here’s NIWA on the effects of La Niña weather on New Zealand.
La Niña events have different impacts on New Zealand’s climate. More north–easterly winds are characteristic, which tend to bring moist, rainy conditions to the north–east of the North Island, and reduced rainfall to the south and south–west of the South Island.
…
Warmer than normal temperatures typically occur over much of the country during La Niña, although there are regional and seasonal exceptions.
So, it’s been a lot warmer than usual and the north-east is copping it from storms – classic La Niña weather. If journalists aren’t rushing to blame local weather conditions on climate change, good on them.
This is climate change, not weather.
Some of you will only wake up to it when the flood is at your own doorstep.
And the world can’t wait for you.
‘Those warm, dry, and settled conditions contributed to an unusual phenomena: a marine heat wave, in which sea temperatures around New Zealand were about 2 degrees Celsius warmer than average.
Off the west coast, in the Tasman Sea, temperatures were as much as 6C above normal – at the time, it was the largest sea temperature anomaly in the world.’
Insurers warn climate change will hit policy prices and make some properties uninsurable
Bryce Davies, general manager corporate relations for insurance giant IAG, says the shift towards evaluating properties for their individual climate-change risk has already began, meaning homeowners with properties in flood plains and beachfronts could expect increases.
Ans in stuff today
How climate change could send your insurance costs soaring
Climate change is not only set to transform our environment, it’s also likely to cause insurance costs to skyrocket.
The Insurance Council of New Zealand has warned that our country is one of the most vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters for an economy of our size.
Council chief executive Tim Grafton says New Zealand can expect to face, on average, annual costs of $1.6 billion (just under 1 per cent of its GDP) from natural disasters, based on data going back to 1900
Organisations with money in the situation clearly realise climate change is happening fast. Exxon Mobil knew about CC in the 70s ( and hid their findings as it would impact their profits)
But to some misguided fellows, like Trump and PM, it’s just weather.
Humankind and other species on this planet can’t wait for such dilettantes and deniers.
In 1959 Edward Teller warned the industry about the consequences of burning fossil fuel.
The pricks have known for sixty years.
It was a typical November day in New York City. The year: 1959. Robert Dunlop, 50 years old and photographed later as clean-shaven, hair carefully parted, his earnest face donning horn-rimmed glasses, passed under the Ionian columns of Columbia University’s iconic Low Library. He was a guest of honor for a grand occasion: the centennial of the American oil industry.
[…]
Four others joined Dunlop at the podium that day, one of whom had made the journey from California – and Hungary before that. The nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller had, by 1959, become ostracized by the scientific community for betraying his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he retained the embrace of industry and government. Teller’s task that November fourth was to address the crowd on “energy patterns of the future,” and his words carried an unexpected warning:
Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would […] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [….] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [….] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [….] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
Yeah, but Teller was beating his own project plowshare – nuclear fracking (happened) and using three hydrogen bombs to make a large harbour on aussie west coast (politely declined).
Insurance companies as part of the financial industry have underwritten some primary causes of planetary pollution and destruction since, day one…and will continue to do so…
The ‘institutions have profited heavily playing a part in creating the circumstances, and they will attempt to continue the plunder…
Swiss Re and out major players in the Global Insurance industry have been warning of the financial effects of Climate Change for years. In 2010 Swiss RE wrote this:
Adaptation through adequate sea defences and the management of the residual risk is essential. While the insurance industry is an important contributor to the absorption of volatile risk, it cannot address the challenges of climate change alone: To tackle this, a public-private partnership will be indispensable. Beyond traditional insurance, Swiss Re can contribute through alternative forms of risk transfer to absorb highly volatile losses.
My bold http://www.swissre.com/rethinking/the_effects_of_climate_change.html
Their assessments were based on the IPPC projections then of a 0.37m rise in sea level. The fact that those projections have now increased by around a factor of 10, exacerbates the problem dramatically.
No reason why not have a govt srvice. Nationally-based rates system collected via TLAs to fund the building insurance, EQC, and fire levies, separate assessments for contents.
Weather is weather. You’re wanting journalists to report storms as climate change, something which would only encourage people with functioning cognitive faculties to ridicule the journalists, and worse, might encourage people to believe climate change is bullshit. Worse yet, it encourages other people to mistake weather for climate, resulting in even more imbecilic “Frosty again – so much for global warming!” comments by right-wingers.
By all means expect news reports to mention that storms can be expected to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change, but an individual storm remains just a storm.
Yes I am expecting journalists to use context for a story.
That’s a basic of the job.
Reporting Brexit without the context of the deindustrialisation of parts of the UK makes no sense.
Reporting Trump without the context of the deindustrialisation of parts of the US makes no sense.
Reporting the war in Syria without the context of climate change and the desertification of parts of Syria makes no sense.
Reporting the changing weather patterns in New Zealand without the context of climate change makes no sense.
Reporting the events in Gaza without the context of 1917, 1948, 1967 and other key historical dates makes no sense.
To be fair, the main Stuff article about the recent storms does put it in the context of climate change: “With rising sea-levels, as expected under a warming climate, storm surges will get higher and reach further inland – issues already evident in pockets around the country, where homes and infrastructure have been damaged.”
It sure is. And the context of a weather event is weather patterns – La Niña, for instance. Storms have been causing floods in New Zealand since before there were humans here – linking any individual storm to climate change would be as stupid as claiming global warming doesn’t exist because there was an early snowfall.
Is saying someone is stupid the same, as might be stupid, or showing stupid tendencies or ideas, better, worse or just different than saying someone has a psychopathic mentality? And is that the same as saying someone is a psychopath? And can hard critical words never be used against anyone here? Questions that run through my head but then I am borderline crazy these days.
Well, to be accurate they should be reporting storms in relation to climate change and how one affects the other. They shouldn’t be ignoring it just because it’s weather.
Actually Psycho attribution of Climate Change to Extreme weather events is a developing science. The 2003 European Heatwave that had a not insignificant effect on the Syrian situation, has been assessed for instance to have been more likely to have occurred as a result of AGW. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03089
However,
According to last year’s National Academy of Sciences report, “An indication of the developing interest in event attribution is highlighted by the fact that in 4 years (2012-2015), the number of papers increased from 6 to 32.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-can-now-blame-individual-natural-disasters-on-climate-change/
As you say – you just can’t look at an extreme weather event and say “that’s climate change” but what is becoming more possible with improving climate modelling is to say the AGW has contributed significantly to the possibility of that event occurring.
Furthermore take for instance the major damage done to my favourite piece of roadway, the coastal road north from Thames over the weekend. (it truly is a delight to pass along especially at christmas with the pohutakawas all in full bloom and the sea and little bays alongside). https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/100346389/evacuation-warnings-and-rocks-on-the-road-in-firth-of-thames
But this road SH25 is under severe threat from rising sea levels, the direct result of AGW. With a king tide and storm surge the destruction caused is inevitable. I’m not sure just how this vital link to the Peninsula will be maintained into the future.
Yes I’m well aware of the work of both Denis and Thomas (referred to in the first link). I too have submitted to the TCDC on the matter wrt to the district plan, and my daughter is a Community Board member so we are all on to the problem.
The developers however are only concerned in making a quick buck and will find any piece of nonsense to hide behind. This piece of nonsense from Gloria Humphries is typical:
Asked about its sea level planning, Hopper Developments sent Newsroom an email pointing to an engineering design feature of the project’s canal walls, which “allow for overflow on certain spring tides”.
“Interestingly some of our walls at Pauanui [the first of Hopper Development’s two coastal canal projects] were constructed 25 years ago and anecdotal evidence would suggest that the sea level rise (if any) is closer to the 1.6mm pa rate rather than the rates many are citing in the media at present.”
Gloria Humphries recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Hauraki Herald, published on November 17, in which she put forward a case against sea level rise. “I’m just a lay person without the appropriate background to challenge the so called experts, but I consider myself to be widely read on all points of view, and have come to the conclusion that ‘man-made’ global warming is the biggest con that has been foisted on mankind in modern times for reasons that have very little to do with our climate …” she wrote.
The 1.6mm pa SLR she refers to above is the long term average over the past century. ie there has been around 17cm of SLR over the past 100 years. This, of course, completely ignores the increasing rate of SLR from melting ice shelves, that has been increasingly rapid over the past couple of decades. But if she can get away with it, and sell off a few more properties, and pass the buck on to Council – well who cares?
SH 25 being a State Highway is of course maintained by Govt. – Just how and what the level of funding will be or what the long term solution is has yet to be determined. But SH 25 is repeatedly closed due to slips and subsidence. Even though it is a very attractive piece of NZ – I wouldn’t consider living up the coast – my doc lives up that way and on one occasion the slip was in place for days. He would ride his bike to the slip, clamber over the rocks, and then pick up his car to drive the rest of the way into work each day. This is becoming a regular occurrence for those people living up that way.
As for the fate of the sea side residences – this is a problem over the whole of NZ but TCDC is unique in that it has one of the longest coastlines of any regional council in the country and only around 30,000 rate payers. It is also unique in that in 1931 during the Depression and the closure of the gold mines Thames, which had borrowed heavily for a number of large projects, was unable to pay its way with a high unemployment and rate payers now unable to pay their bills. The incoming Mayor went to the govt and the town was promptly placed in Administration and remained so until 1947. You can still se the results of this in the rather sad civil works – monsoon drains rather than modern guttering etc – around the town even to this day.
Thank you for sharing your detailed historical knowledge of the area.
Why in your opinion we’re all those developments on the waterways permitted?
Corruption?
Naivety?
Ignorance?
Slackness?
Or something else?
Like all councils TCDC tends to be the governance of the privileged for the privileged. The past Mayor’s family is in the civil construction business – so naturally is generally supportive of “development” in all its forms. The geology of the area is also not conducive to large urban areas, being in essence a string of extinct volcanos. There is constant pressure from the three major cities Auckland Hamilton and Tauranga – all within 2 hours drive from Coromandel for further development as people retire, and wish to move to be by the sea. So if a developer proposes a new subdivision – it will be looked at favourably. Having said that the fact is that these developments were reviewed under the guidelines of what was then the available knowledge of projected SLR. The T & T report referred to the IPPC report and the Whitianga development as you see was constructed with that scenario in mind.
However, it was always understood that the IPPC is conservative in its assessments as it is an international body and the report has to be agreed by a large variety of people and nations.
The sad fact however is that the last government (ie Nick Smith) sat on the latest SLR assessment and these were not made public or given any credence until James Shaw released them on taking office. Had these figures been available at the time it is probable that the developments would not have been given the green light.
Another troll like James .
I suspected so after your climate denial.
I shall be exiting the conversation.
There is nothing to be gained from encouraging the nonsense you lot spout.
Are you all one and the same?
Ed, if that is the level of your thinking and the tactics you continue to employ, it is no surprise that Paul was banned….
The posts you put up about various and many subjects, lack fundamental awareness and thought when you upload them…
Does that mean that you are ‘wrong’ in what you upload….maybe/maybe not….but the tactics are not going to attract people to take your links and then perhaps do some further reading of their own into [subject]
1. Post links with statements in absolutes [financial crash coming et al]
2. When another commentator questions/queries, refutes or proposes another angle….
3. Accuse the commentator of tr*lling…
In no way are such tactics likely to encourage others to read further …
Surely that is why you post comments with links here…..to encourage others to investigate further and thus having greater numbers of people becoming engaged?
If the above is not why you post the subject links, then I would suggest taking some time to assess internally, why it is you are doing so….
100% of the weather is affected by climate change. 100% of the weather occurs on a planet which has warmer oceans and surface temperatures and more water vapour in the atmosphere and therefore, more energy.
The degree to which this affects individual weather events is asking the wrong question. It’s of academic interest only. From a practical perspective resilience and planning are far more important than attribution.
I walk my dog most days on this beach and the situation is worsening by the day. The council dumped a few loads of rock, but the huge seas and recent king tide have swept over and around the rocks. A proper sea wall is needed but the Grey District Council apparently can’t afford it.
At the moment layers of barely composed rubbish is visible complete with black rubbish sacks. Apparently there’s all sorts of toxic goodies in there including radioactive waste from the local hospital.
There you go I told you all that all our internet devices could be hacked.
But it is not just the internet devices it is all the smart devices in OUR world.
Some good intelligent person alerts US to the back door Entrance into our passwords on these chips and the chip manufacturers put a sticky tape cover of a lie on this subject and say O we new about this a while ago we are finding a patch we just did not want to ALARM the public . What a load of bullshit these back door entrances are not a design flaw they have been forced to put these BDE into our chips so the Governments of the west can control us most likely the USA FBI CIA . Why do you think China has invested billions in to making there own chips and a laser beam communication satellite so they have safe secure COMS . I no all my coms are hacked my childrens com to . The neo liberal 1% want total control they have been deliberately suppressing our Ladys Mana to over the centuries because they know they will get there asses kicked by OUR strong intelligent humane caring LADYS . There is a doco on wonderwoman DC comics started this comic to lift our ladys mana at the time the 1% were ok with that because they wanted to motivate our ladys to go to work and what was the work well making crap for the world wars and when the war was over they stopped using her to lift ladys mana and got wander woman to act like a dutiful submissive house wife .
These wankers like interfering in every aspect of OUR lives and don t want to cede power they don t give a shit that they are stuffing up our WORLDS SOCIETY and motherearth and all her wonderfull beings . ECO Maori knows that US the 99% will put a stop to this way of life of shitting in ones own back yard and we will create a beautiful caring equal world society for all whom are on Papatuanuku.
Ka kite ano
“Serious security flaws that could let attackers steal sensitive data, including passwords and banking information, have been found in processors designed by Intel, AMD and ARM.”
A damning description of MCaw and other well paid All Blacks
‘The tragedy for Fuimaono-Sapolu is that he has been grievously unsupported by players in New Zealand and Australia who all seem under the corporate yoke. Where is today’s Anton Oliver? Richie McCaw sits on a panel that absurdly makes Beauden Barrett the World Rugby Player of the Year again, not a title that a player is ever likely to win in a Samoan shirt – Beauden, blondish poster boy, good for business.
When did McCaw ever speak out on behalf of anything? No wonder he was a school prefect. But as Fuimaono-Sapolu says: “If Richie McCaw said anything about the GCSB, the whole of New Zealand would be up in arms against it.”
They key words…..
‘players in New Zealand and Australia who all seem under the corporate yoke.’
MCaw pimps for Fonterra and supports a company destroying our rivers and environment.
Some All Blacks….
Rich
Entitled
Coke sniffers
Wife beaters
Booze addled
Young men.
Don’t worry about your device(s) getting hacked. Instead, be more concerned about your brain being manipulated & changed by and through those devices. The content, delivery, and interaction/consumption of ‘information’ through those devices are having major impact on us and (our) society. What happens when you ‘lose’ (control of) your smart phone is nothing compared to when you ‘lose’ (control of) your mind – they seem to go hand-in-hand and maybe that’s not coincidental either …
That is some of the more salient points, Incognito…
The lack of awareness about the impacts of technology related mental health, is increasingly well documented, but not widely understood at the ‘consumer end’…
The way that the one-way is being pushed on us is amazing. Everyone is brainwashed about wonderful technology, you need to be immersed in it up to your nose to get anywhere, a job, connect with anybody. Kids are learning to type rather than write. Why not, it is so much easier to interface with machines and soon some people will have chips put in so their brains can connect directly with the communications port – cut out the middleman.
I wanted to speak to someone, phoned up and went through the numbers game, then got message that it was so easy to go on-line, this while I was on the phone already. Finally I did get service without waiting too long but the process of ‘disruption’ embedded in business practice now means that nothing you value now can be guaranteed to remain available, all must be subject to eternal, infernal change and churn.
Be nice to the people at call centres, they may be replaced with machines, as we all may be until some sort of saturation point is reached.
A recent contact did not want to accept my landline number though there was no particular reason not to, and I have an answerphone attached.
My choices are being taken away, yet this was part of the mantra of free markets, neo lib economics etc. I don’t believe any of the upbeat future-is-great drum-beaters any more. They are either stool pigeons, or specialise in living in the ‘now’, or are too young to be trusted to understand or be interested in the context of what they are speiling.
Thanks for correcting that fake statement made by a troll saying ‘AMD chips are just fine.’
We have enough mis-information around now without more fake statements made to fool us all to believe some systems are safe or ‘fine’.
We all need to be given free upgades for them to block these flaws and rid ‘stealing of our sensitive data, including passwords and banking information’.
If the manufacturer caused these flaws in these IC chips then they must pay to fix them too. “consumers have rights too.”
Like automobile ‘recalls’ we should have the same rights to repairs.
Same applies with whoever caused our destructive “climate change” it is the companies who marketed the products who must be held responsible for the repair of our climate again too.
Someone got analytical about the timing and relationship between Fox and Friends and the terracotta turdface eruptions on twitter. And yep, he’s basically just live-tweeting F&F.
A Sugar tax is well overdue here.
We should not follow the UK – instead we should tax sugar at the cost it has to our society and it’s health. Tax at $5 per litre and make sugary drinks expensive items.
And stop all advertising.
And limit points of sale.
Here is the timid approach of the UK.
‘Coca-Cola to sell smaller bottles at higher prices in response to sugar tax.
‘…..The sugar tax – designed to help combat child obesity – was announced by then chancellor George Osborne in 2016 and he gave drinks-makers time to change their recipes if they wished to escape the levy. From April soft drinks manufacturers will be taxed at 18p per litre on drinks containing 5g of sugar or more per 100ml, or 24p per litre if the drink has 8g of sugar or more per 100ml. The tax will apply to one in five drinks sold in the UK…….’
Yeah, and we should have a special car tax for those cars that in the wrong hands kill the users. Or a sun tax cos melanoma. Or an internet tax because some people write silly things on blogs.
Or we could start banning people who can’t sensibly and safely use the products that the vast majority have no problems with.
We already have petrol taxes to cover the roading and other infrastructure, and ACC levies on registration and fuel to cover the health and income costs of accidents.
A fat tax is well overdue here.
We should not follow the UK – instead we should tax fat pricks at the cost they have to our society and vote health. Tax at $5 per kilo over normal bodyweight as determined by the Ministry of body normality
Well Coke with what, nine teaspoons of sugar per 330ml, sure. Three or four not so much. Regulate a steadily decreasing maximum and neither manufacturer nor customer is penalized.
Ed that sounds like what a troll would come up with. Illegal causes more problems and creates black markets etc. if there is some demand for the product then it encourages people on the make to encourage others to use more. Instead of discouraging. This is already known. A facetious comment on your part, but it’s the first thought to the minds of the brainless.
I recommend we approach sugar and alcohol the same way we tackled tobacco.
Gradual and significant price increases.
Stop advertising.
Make health campaigns to explain bad health outcomes.
Limit places it can be sold.
Make it lose its glamour.
Programmes at school to edit the young.
Alcohol free and sugar free places.
In 20-30 years, Coca Cola and Heineken would be on the run, like Philip Morris are now.
[I think you’ve been warned about this before. The only reason you’re not getting a ban is I don’t have time to look, but if I see you doing that shit again I will ban you.
Seeing your comment to Paul below as well, I suggest having a think about how you want to be here too, because the whole nasty shit coming from you since the election is getting tedious. Your history of contributions here will only get you so far if moderators have to keep putting time into this. – weka]
“we should tax sugar at the cost it has to our society and it’s health. Tax at $5 per litre and make sugary drinks expensive items”.
I trust you can provide a link to some analysis that the cost is $5.00/litre?
It does seem such a suspiciously round number doesn’t it?
Exactly $5.00/litre. I’m sure you didn’t just pull it out of thin air.
You remind me of when then Mayor Ken Livingston brought in a Congestion Charge in London. He claimed that it was merely to cover the costs that traffic congestion was causing. It just happened to be five pounds a time.
Pure coincidence of course that it was such a round figure.
Now, where do you get $5.00/litre as being the cost to society of sugary drinks?
Cigarettes now cost $30 a pack. The tax on them must be over $20 a pack.
My $5 is an arbitrary number to deter the purchase of debilitating sugary drinks and mitigate their devastating impact on people, society and the country.
It could just as easily be $10 tax per litre .
Personally, I’d copy some South American countries and boot companies like Coca-Cola and McDonalds out of the country.
Cigarettes now cost $30 a pack. The tax on them must be over $20 a pack.
Yep. The government’s raised taxes on cigarettes so high that they’ve created a black market for them and people are robbing dairies to supply that black market. Three cheers for good governance!
Given the above, I’m surprised that anyone thinks it would be a great idea to do something similar for sugar. Public health activists are a very unusual breed.
They are paid to be single-minded when you need to be triple-minded to get around the combination of sugar carving, advertising promotion and profit.
There is no care of humanity in business. If you want to buy they rarely twist your arm, they just play on your mind starting with tv ads when you are a baby, and if you buy good, and if you get sick, then they will charge you for some treatment that will get you on your feet and buying again. And we buy into this sweet and vicious circle.
I don’t have the slightest problem with the statement about it being an arbitrary figure that is simply intended to make the drinks expensive.
What I object to is the oft-used claim that some level of tax is, in your own words, “tax sugar at the cost it has to our society and it’s health”.
It is done far to often when there is no actual justification for the setting of the tax at a particular level. If people would simply say that they want to make something expensive they are being honest. When they claim that it is to meet the costs of the vice they are not.
As far as smoking goes smokers are probably the only group who pay enough for their vice to pay for the health treatment they incur. When you include the fact that they are likely to collect superannuation for fewer years they may actually be doing the taxpayer a favour.
The tax collected is about $2 billion per year. That is a pretty good chunk of the Health budget. As long ago as 2012 Treasury said that smokers do pay for their costs. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10809145
I don’t mind these taxes being charged. It helped persuade me to give up smoking cigars, a habit I greatly enjoyed. I just object to the idea of increasing the taxes because “you cost us taxpayers money”
Perhaps they do Ed, but you are missing the point.
If you are going to tax the sales of Sugary drinks in order to recover the costs to Society from consuming the drinks then you have to work out, at least to a reasonable approximation, what that cost is. Then you can charge a tax that will recover that amount.
If you are going to apply a punitive tax in order to discourage people consuming those items then you should have the courage of your convictions. Say that is what you are doing. Don’t pretend it is only to save the poor taxpayer from having to pay.
You appear to be following the punitive approach. Well admit it.
You appear to be following the punitive approach. Well admit it.
Fine by me.
The whole point of high taxation for cigarettes and other bad for you stuff is to stop people from using them.
The cost of both their medical costs and the premature death is far too high. The amount cannot be accurately measured in monetary terms as a lot of it is emotional which causes a lot of flow on effects.
Oh, suck my balls. My odds of premature death are my business. You’re just as bad as Ed railing about a vegan lifestyle, which might make me live longer and it’ll sure as shit feel like it.
I’ll go to hell in my own damned way, thankyou very much. If there were mandatory workplace air quality standards rather than arbitrary bans on stinky things, I wouldn’t take anyone with me, either.
Because tobacco smoke isn’t the only bad thing in the air. And decent ventilation and filtration to address those other things would make most bans unnecessary.
Well, yes it does work that way. Because air from outside comes inside, glycol smoke machines in gigs have their own issues, and packing a few hundred people into a nightclub with barely adequate ventilation becomes a nightmare of mutual-contamination. I have literally had ceiling condensate drip on me.
But the classic example is aircraft – recirculate the air as much as possible for a random collection of dozens or hundreds of people, and keep them exposed for hours.
I recall a Washington Post article from years ago saying a Dutch study found smokers actually end up costing the health system less than non-smokers, because they tend to die of things that kill you quickly (eg heart attacks, lung cancer) rather than spending decades deteriorating in old age with successive expensive health issues. If our primary concern were costs to health system, we should subsidise smoking instead of penalising it.
Well, good, because no public health departments of publicly-funded universities would fund research that might return such politically-unsatisfactory results.
Conclusions: Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.
Another study (two authors in common with above study) published in 2014 is also freely available/accessible (Open Access):
Disease Prevention: Saving Lives or Reducing Health Care Costs?
[NB The contributions of author Pieter van Baal were supported by the Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement (NETSPAR http://www.netspar.nl) as part of the project “Rising life expectancy: causes and consequences in the Netherlands”. NETSPAR is a think tank and knowledge network established in 2005. The Foundation’s activities are pursued through the Netspar Center, an operational unit of Tilburg University.]
Conclusions: The stronger the negative impact of a disease on longevity, the higher health care costs would be after elimination. Successful treatment of fatal diseases leaves less room for longevity gains due to effective prevention but more room for health care savings.
The third study (different authors altogether) published in 1998 is also freely available/accessible and was funded by the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Cultural Affairs, the Netherlands:
Preventing fatal diseases increases healthcare costs: cause elimination life table approach
Conclusions: The aim of prevention is to spare people from avoidable misery and death not to save money on the healthcare system. In countries with low mortality, elimination of fatal diseases by successful prevention increases healthcare spending because of the medical expenses during added life years.
You’ll notice that neither study focused solely on smoking and they, in fact, covered a very wide range of life-threatening diseases.
There have been plenty more studies published and I reject any suggestion that they all were biased through ‘inducements’ from ‘invested interests’.
I’ve seen quite a lot of them over the years.
Usually done by University economists who smoke.
They get sick of the other academics who complain that the smokers are being supported by their wowser compatriots.
It is quite easy to justify the claim that smokers pay in full for their habit.
They never get published of course. It would be fatal for your professional reputational to publish such a thing. Rather like questioning any of the left wing shibboleths. The same thing was true in 1930s Germany when you were sacked for claiming that “Jewish” Physics, ie Relativity and Quantum Theory were correct.
I wish they would start a subsidy scheme..
Oh to be able to afford the occasional Romeo y Julieta Churchill again.
A 7 inch Cuban cigar with a 47 ring size. Bliss for an hour.
As Rudyard Kipling is reputed to have said.
“A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke”.
I’ll bet he never said it in his wife’s hearing though.
They were fucking awesome. Sitting in the garden on a summer’s evening, quietly smoking as the birds and insects lived their lives – some of the most peaceful moments of my life.
In New Zealand with a superannuation that’s not means or asset tested, that’s particularly true as every year early that someone dies from smoking-related causes is a significant saving in super that doesn’t have to be paid.
However, personally I’d rather people didn’t smoke and lived longer, so I’m OK with trying to convince people to stop smoking.
Yep. There’s “trying to convince,” and there’s “let’s tax these things so much that fuckwits find it worth bashing a shop assistant to get them.”
My university’s currently trying to implement an extortion/ostracism plan for making the entire campus smoke-free, in which we managers are supposedly going to accost and note down identifying details of non-compliant smokers – “supposedly” because, well, like fuck that’s going to happen. My favourite part of the proceedings was when the public-health academics got into a scrap with the OSH people over whether designated smoking booths should be open or not – if they’re open, the deadly toxic fumes might be breathed in by innocent victims, but if they’re enclosed, that’s a breach of OSH regulations re smoking in an enclosed area in a workplace. Ah, good times…
Every so often I pull out the line that complete exclusion is discrimination on the grounds of having a medical condition, specifically addiction. If there’s nowhere for you to smoke, there’s nowhere for you to treat your addiction, therefore the place is not accessible to you because of your condition. Like stairs with no wheelchair access.
That’s why the ostracism is needed – so nobody looks at it logically.
I mean, you can break down the appeal into things like the ritual, the diverse aromas, the variation between aroma and flavour, the art of storing and preparation, the breath control, and the generally calming and almost meditative practise, but (like poetry criticism and frog dissection) the experience is in the whole, not the sum of the parts.
It’s either something you go for, or something you don’t. Again, like poetry or frog dissection.
I have only just noticed this line of comments and this question.
I guess on this one I have to go along with McFlock.
It is the whole experience. I suppose the most pleasant part is sitting outside on a fine evening taking the occasional puff on the cigar and watching the smoke gently rise. Pure peace.
I really isn’t something that is subject to “analysis”
Perhaps Oscar Wilde put it best though
“If I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand”.
I never thought a simple comment about a cigar would have caused so many comments though.
The tornado/ tsunami/ flood has to actually hit them for it to become an important issue.
And then they’ll complain that a) the government isn’t doing enough and b) that the government should have acted sooner completely ignoring that it was them that prevented the government from acting as needed.
John Roughan takes his shit with a ‘healthy’ dose of salt.
This is very possibly a piss take…I’m hoping…
“We are probably going to need bags of the stuff over the next few years. We are still enjoying good times economically and long may they last, but human society has to have something to worry about, or at least talk about, and in good times these days we fret about the environment. We had an election last year in which we were urged to worry that it was no longer safe to swim in rivers.
Takapuna is a long beach, the suspected effluent was entering the water between the flags. So move the flags well away…
This is obviously the type of person who will get caught in the rip just off the beach and need to be rescued because he’s not swimming between the flags. The type of person who doesn’t understand that the flags are placed where swimming is safest. That moving the flags will make swimming less safe both for the swimmers and the lifeguards.
What on earth has happened to common sense?
Good question? Why doesn’t he have any?
Whatever happened to “she’ll be right”?
It was never right and has caused major problems. Please keep up to date with the real world.
Takapuna’s discharge turned out not to be sewage, just filthy road water after the rain. But before that became known on Tuesday, when the don’t swim signs were still on the beach, some people were reported to be in the water regardless. I salute them, I cheer them.
That’s because you and them are really bloody stupid. Please note that if any of them had ended up in the hospital it would have been on our dime paying for their stupidity and then you would have been complaining about that.
“Swimmable” was just a water quality measure of course, probably an excessive one for rivers such as the Waikato from a practical point of view but politically it worked.
One that would have ensured that the river would die. And we actually do need the environment to be healthy else we die as well.
We’re not separate from the environment but a part of it and we need it to live.
Why have we let joyless puritans dominate public thinking on so many subjects these days.
There’s a lot more joy provided by protecting the environment so that we can all survive than by trashing it to make a few rich and killing us all off.
In Tuesday’s sunshine, when the news from Takapuna was in the paper, just about all the beaches were red-flagged. On Wednesday just about all of them had a nice green tick.
Oh god, he even thinks that things stay the same all the bloody time. What a fucken moron.
Someone’s leaking details about the Downer – Papadopoulos meeting.
What followed was the now infamous May 2016 conversation over many glasses of wine at the swanky Kensington Wine Rooms, during which the 28-year-old Papadopoulos spilled to Downer that he knew of a Russian dirt file on the rival Clinton campaign consisting of thousands of hacked emails.
That night was a key moment that helped spark the FBI probe – since taken over by respected former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel – into possible Trump campaign collusion with the Kremlin, including its hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
Maybe someone should speak with Mifsud (the London based professor who apparently doesn’t speak Russian, but who has claimed to have contact with Putin and what-not.) and who the Austalian guy says Papadopoulos said told him there was a tranch of emails held by the Russian government.
Hmm.
Mifsud told the Telegraph that he knew nothing about emails containing “dirt” on Clinton, calling the allegations upsetting
I guess we’ll have to wait until Downer’s referred to the DOJ for making false statements to find out whether or not there’s fire.
/
.@SenWhitehouse: “I cannot understand why it would be necessary for members of Congress to make a criminal referral to the FBI concerning information we know the FBI already has." https://t.co/6Bl8xyhaER— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 5, 2018
Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham on Friday issued a criminal referral to the Justice Department, urging it to examine whether the former British spy Christopher Steele made false statements to the FBI “about the distribution of claims” contained in a dossier he wrote about alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The Fusion GPS op-ed earlier this week called for the release of the transcripts of their committee testimony. Grassley and Graham are shit scared of what might be revealed so they’ve come up with a reason to hold up any release – Steele and his report are subject to an investigation.
So, *cough*, any move to shut down the Downer story says they’re shit scared of any further information that may come to light.
So can Assange and Murray’s. Neither of them know where the hacked/leaked email’s they were provided with came from. Murray can only repeat what he was told by the intermediary.
That doesn’t stop people from treating their hearsay as evidence.
This “key moment that helped spark” the FBI investigation. From the description it was one of the factors involved – it “helped”.
These days of course, we can take Jared Kushner’s word for it that he thought he was going to collude with Moscow to get the emails.
I thought Assange stated the wikileaks release got passed to them by a “Washington insider” (or some such) but wouldn’t reveal the source. And Murray said something similar, no?
In other words, they say they know who provided the info.
I guess it’s possible that the Russian government (or an agency of) had emails that they obtained via the net and decided to put them on some hardware that they gave to someone else, who then passed said hardware and the info it held on to Wikileaks.
I’d have thought there were more direct and less fraught ways to get info up through Wikileaks mind. But hey…
Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.
And it’s what Kushner and the other Trump grunts thought that matters anyway. It wasn’t Assange offering to collude with them.
…these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
yeah and I wonder why Papadopolous wasn’t hauled in then and there for a thorough questioning. The Trump dossier has become such a liability that it cant be what prompted the FBI to surveil the Trump campaign. Now it has to be some earlier bullshit trigger
Meanwhile, on Earth, it’s likely that the FBI had a variety of reasons to start their investigation.
I can imagine why you would think there’d be just one though.
PS: the reason they don’t just “haul people in for questioning right then and there” is because from an investigator’s point of view, it’s nice to know the answers to the questions you’re putting to potential perps before you ask them.
It takes as long as it takes. These are, as Michael Shermer says, “extraordinary claims”: “an extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger context to see how it fits.”
I have some real problems with this – leaving aside how much of a creep Downer is.
Drunken conversations are generally full of overblown bs and bluster at the best of times. To have a Yank boast when they are drunk is somthing I’ve encountered many a time in my work and socially. To much hot air, and no substance. This looks like it may all turn to custard and everyone will walk free, again.
That said, if the right wing wanna stab each other in the back, who am I to stop them.
We’re kidding ourselves and the world is rapidly working that out.
We’re a selfish, squalid, polluting and corrupt nation that has succumbed to the worst extremes of neoliberalism and suffer from its worst outcomes.
‘China is refusing to take the world’s rubbish any longer, including New Zealand plastic. This move once again casts doubts on New Zealand’s claim to be a clean and green country. It also highlights the fact that recycling isn’t always a sign of ecological virtue……’
‘…..New Zealand’s “100 per cent pure” reputation takes another knock when we realise we are using other countries to dump our rubbish. But it also raises doubts about our own integrity as “green” householders. In fact, recycling seems even to have encouraged us to become more wasteful consumers than before…….’
We’re about the only place in the world where 1080 is a useful poison for wide-spread pest control.
Pretty much every where else in the world has ground-feeding native mammals they want to protect. New Zealand doesn’t. So the fact that 1080 is particularly effective on mammals and can be easily laid in baits on the ground means it has a low risk of killing species we want to protect here, so we use a lot. Almost all other places in the world, the risk of killing ground-feeding mammal species they want to protect is too high for them to use 1080.
The oligarchs the likes of Fletchers, Fay Richwhite, Alan Gibbs etc etc have done particularly well here in NZ since the introduction of neoliberalism in the 1980’s, according to Roger Douglas neoliberalism was going to be the best thing for New Zealand since the invention of sliced bread ?
Did we get suckered or did we not ?
MSM still keep telling us how well we are doing as a country ?
The sandflys are that scared of eco maori they are around were ever I go they think that they are going to break ecos wairua but no they are just adding to my mana ka pai sandflys you will never break ecos wairua Ana to kai .
I say that all the photos of shonky key on Ngati Porou web site should be deleted he was just stealing OUR mana. Kia kaha
‘Iceland has long been deemed the best place in the world to be a woman. For the past nine years, the country has topped the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index.
In Iceland men get at least three months’ paternity leave, and 90% of them take it. This gives them time to become comfortable with child-rearing, encouraging them to share the workload with their partners. Women in Iceland are highly educated, a high percentage hold managerial positions and they don’t give up their careers to have children: they do both – like the country’s new prime minister. At the end of 2017 Iceland got its second female prime minister, a 41-year-old with three young sons.
Many in Iceland see the women’s strike of 1975 as a defining moment in the gender equality struggle. On the “women’s day off”, as it’s known, 90% of women stopped work and refused to do any household chores. Schools and nurseries were closed. Many shops, factories and theatres had to close their doors. Fathers were left with no choice but to bring their kids to work, stocking up on sweets and colouring pencils to keep them occupied. On the radio, children could be heard playing in the background while the newsreaders read the news. After work, the children needed to be fed and the whole thing ended up as the day the men of Iceland ran out of sausages…..’
I find it intriguing that things that eco is interested in can no longer be found on the net
the first was that website dedicated to the corruption on NZ police after I told IPCA about it next was the photo of Waiomatatini marae Porourangi showing the white tekoteko on the marae 2 days ago the photo came up on the first search google photos not now and the books that Colonel William Porter one in particle is East Coast Maori myths and legends ???? why are they hiding this book what are the sandflys scared of it well eco knows you will have to find William Porters book to find out the one I found was on a Australian website. Ka kite ano
How Wolff got access: a bit of sucking up and a few friendly pieces early on. So it seems no Trumpies ever thought to check out any of his earlier work before letting him into the adult daycare playroom.
I think giving the sandflys the pukana and letting everyone know the truth about the way they think and operate is nothing compared to what they are saying about me I know what they are saying and the tactics they are using on me would break most people so I think my intimidation is justified by there actions they best get a mirror .
Ana to kai
I can already see the sandflys next lines of malicious attacks to my character .
I will stop referring to eco as a second being as this is there next line of attack that they will try and lock me up on false charges.
I can see the line they are taking with the words there trolls on this site are trying to use against me .The difference here is a lot of good people know that what I write about ie the harassment the intimerdation the suppression the damage to my character these sandflys are trying to do are true. If they try and lock me up with there false charges everyone will be very upset .I am happy that I have thestandard website to defend my good character with PS they really don t like a MAORI with Mana do they .
Ka kite ano
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Since scientists started studying climate change, they have warned that it will reduce food production. And now, its happening:The climate crisis is damaging the ability of the land to sustain humanity, with cascading risks becoming increasingly severe as global temperatures rise, according to a landmark UN report compiled by some ...
The Abortion Legislation Bill just passed its first reading, 94-23. Its a far bigger margin than I expected, even allowing for the Winston factor, and it reflects the overwhelming support there is in this country for reform. but that support isn't a new thing - it has existed for literally ...
The Justice Committee has called for submissions on the Referendums Framework Bill. The Bill does what it says on the label - establishes a framework for referenda. Things you may want to address in your submission: Whether the bill should apply only at the 2020 election, or whether it should ...
The Thompson and Clark / MBIE spying scandal continues to result in fallout, this time in the form of a report on the implementation of MBIE's "Operation Exploration", its internal operation to enforce the infamous Anadarko Amendment which criminalised protests against the oil industry. MBIE's enforcement operation was tainted by ...
So, Winston Peters is defending his last-minute demand for a referendum on abortion by claiming he was "blindsided" by the bill. Really? The bill is a government bill. It has been working through the cabinet approval process since December last year. As part of that process, NZ First was consulted, ...
The Green Part has been accused of lack of transparency in two recent situations. The first was the claimed media lockdown during Green's annual conference and the second was Julie Ann Genter's refusal to release a letter she had sent to Phil Twyford.I do get frustrated when journalist's succumb to ...
The Green Part has been accused of lack of transparency in two recent situations. The first was the claimed media lockdown during Green's annual conference and the second was Julie Ann Genter's refusal to release a letter she had sent to Phil Twyford.I do get frustrated when journalist's succumb to ...
Last week, the ongoing democracy protests in Hong Kong saw a pro-Hong Kong student assaulted at the University of Auckland. The Chinese consulate in Auckland followed this up with a press release "express[ing] its appreciation to the students for their spontaneous patriotism" - effectively condoning the assault and inciting further ...
Only those who close their eyes and minds to the evidence can still be in any doubt that we are facing a climate change crisis. The evidence is conclusive that the world is not only getting inexorably hotter, but also that the rising temperatures are creating a number of other ...
Rural communities are wailing about forestry conversions "taking land out of production" and putting it into locking up carbon. Its driven purely by economics: there's more money and lower costs in carbon than in sheep or beef, and if carbon prices rise, there'll be more net money than dairy even. ...
This week, the government introduced its (underwhelming) Abortion Legislation Bill. And despite having negotiated the text of the bill through the coalition process, Winston Peters is now suggesting that he will demand a referendum on it:NZ First leader Winston Peters has hinted that his party may only support the Government's ...
Blowing-Up The House: Is Winston Peters planning to put himself at the head of all those New Zealanders who refuse to countenance the Coalition Government caving-in to the Ihumatao protesters? The most effective way of doing this would be to issue Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with an ultimatum. If she ...
Last night the police dramatically incresed their numbers at Ihumātao, shoving over protestors and threatening them with arrest. Despite police talk about the need to maintain "public order" and prevent a "breach of the peace", there appeared to be absolutely no justification for this: the protest camp is, was, and ...
A Cult, that many actors, politicians, and those with a low IQ are joining is sweeping across civilisation, with one main intention – ending humans reign on Earth. Starting as a well meaning though deeply flawed theory, that the Earth was warming due to mankind emitting greenhouse gasses, it was ...
Today's abortion reform announcement is just the latest in a long line of disappointing decisions or outright failures from the Labour government. The 90-day law. KiwiBuild. A capital gains tax. Climate change. Every time they make one of those decisions, we hope for better next time. No repeal of the ...
The Greens used their party conference over the weekend to push for a rent-to-own scheme, where people would be able to work towards home ownership by renting from the government. Its a sensible policy, and one which could make a real difference to home ownership rates. But its also basicly ...
by Daphna Whitmore Over the past fortnight, thousands of people have come to the Ihumātao land protest in South Auckland. On 23 July police prepared to evict a few dozen people who had maintained the encampment at Ihumātao for the past three years. As hundreds of supporters arrived the ...
The following article is translated from an article in Lutte de Classe (Class Struggle), the magazine of the French revolutionary workers’ organisation Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle). The United States’ blacklisting of the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, which took shape in Google’s ban on Huawei using its systems on its phones, marks a ...
There is a military phrase: “Full spectrum dominance”. It refers to the all-encompassing policy to dominate across all spheres of war. Lately, that has come to include the internet – in other words, cyberwarfare initiatives. That is in addition to land, sea, air and the like. Now, if ...
The IMF issued a Report on the state of the Economy as it is at present. Some of it points out significant issues that certainly warrant attention, but that we know already exist. Some of it is very much tied to the very obvious context of global concerns, that everyone ...
I'm glad to see the Lib Dems won.I had a moment of terror yesterday thinking that the Conservatives might cling on, due to a combination of Johnson's elevation to the premiership, the apparent uselessness of the Lib Dem candidate (who had failed to be elected in other constituencies) and the ...
. . Current Leader of the National Party, Simon Bridges gave the usual rah-rah speech to the Loyal & Faithful in Christchurch today (27 July). With National’s party polling and his own personal popularity sliding steadily in the polls, Mr Bridges has not much left to reverse his fortunes. ...
Those concerned for Langridge’s wellbeing say they hope he’ll change his mind when he sees the ocean coming. The protester who has vowed to stand outside Parliament every day until the Government announces a climate emergency says he accepts that his quest will most likely end in drowning. Ollie Langridge, ...
What will climate change do to our capital city? The Wellington City Council has updated its projections, ditching its optimistic 0.6m estimate for sea-level rise in favour of a more realistic 1.5m. And the result is devastating:Wellington City Council has unofficially ditched an optimistic sea-level rise scenario in favour of ...
Image Credit: How To Start a Blog – Beginner’s Guide for 2019 I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the blog format is altered. ...
More complaints have been aired about the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCICh) into the Christchurch terrorist attacks. These have centred on the perception that the RBICh has not paid enough attention to the Muslim community who were the targets of the attacks and the sole victims of them. Even though ...
Opportunities to dodge tax are shrinking with the completion of a new tax agreement with Switzerland, Revenue Minister Stuart Nash announced today. Mr Nash and the Swiss Ambassador David Vogelsanger have today signed documents to update the double tax agreement (DTA). The previous DTA was signed in 1980. “Double tax ...
Small Business Minister Stuart Nash says the report of the Small Business Council will help maintain the momentum for innovation and improvements in the sector. Mr Nash has thanked the members of the Small Business Council (SBC) who this week handed over their report, Empowering small businesses to aspire, succeed ...
Extra Police officers are being deployed from Northland to Southland with the graduation of a new wing of recruits from the Royal New Zealand Police College. “The graduation of 78 constables today means that 1524 new constables have been deployed since the government took office,” says Police Minister Stuart Nash. ...
Almost $600 million has been paid into taxpayers’ bank accounts in the past two months, after the first season of automatic tax assessments. Revenue Minister Stuart Nash says the completion of this year’s tax refund season is a significant milestone. “The ability of Inland Revenue to run auto calculations for ...
The Government’s proposed rescue plan must be strengthened because it is the last chance to save Māui dolphins from extinction and secure the future for Hector’s dolphins, Forest & Bird says. ...
Simon Shepherd: Roads, schools, hospitals, prisons, the building blocks that keep society functioning. And we don't have enough. It's called the infrastructure deficit and will be the focus of a major conference this coming week. The man charged with ...
New Zealand has been issued a stark challenge from Pacific leaders to dramatically upscale its action to address climate breakdown, Oxfam says, after a clear rallying cry from nations at this week’s Pacific Islands Forum. ...
Support for Recreational Dope Going ‘Up in Smoke’ Family First NZ is welcoming yet another poll showing plummeting support for legalising cannabis in New Zealand. The Horizon Research poll shows support for legalising has plummeted from 60% last ...
The prospect of ending wider cannabis prohibition looks increasingly unlikely. Over the last nine months, the percentage of New Zealanders who would vote for legalising the personal use of cannabis has declined at a near linear rate of around 10% per ...
“It’s disappointing that news out of the United States of hospitalisations linked to illegal street drugs is somehow seen as relevant to the New Zealand vaping scene,” says Ben Pryor, Director of Alt New Zealand – the largest Kiwi-owned vaping company. ...
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) welcomes the successful passing of Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill through parliament, by the New Zealand Government. ...
Today’s news from the Electoral Commission has provided the party with the clarity it was seeking around use of the word “Coalition” being used as the brand name of the party. ...
A recently released Otago University study has provided further evidence that low-quality housing is a significant problem in Aotearoa. This has prompted the Chief Executive of the Association of Consulting Engineers (ACENZ) Paul Evans to question “why ...
With the BNZ-Business NZ PMI signaling manufacturing is contracting , the Government needs to seriously consider tax relief, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union . ...
The New Zealand Maori Council has called for an overhaul of the Public Services executive ranks as the Corrections debacle shows mis-management and incompetence at the highest level. Matthew Tukaki, Executive Director of the New Zealand Maori Council has said ...
Findings from the 2018 New Zealand Consumer Survey have been released and the results are in; 48 per cent of respondents consider their purchases based on how ethically employees are treated. ...
The responsibility for the fact that Westland Milk Products is now in the hands of an overseas conglomerate 25% owned by the Chinese government can be laid fair and square at our government's doorstep. ...
As Fonterra is projecting multi million dollar losses for the second year in a row, it is clear the writing is on the wall for dairy as more and more Kiwis turn to plant milks. 22nd August is International Plant Milk Day and there is now a different plant ...
The $65,000 granted to Interislander so it can install electric vehicle chargers on its ferries is the most absurd waste of money yet to be delivered by the “Low Emissions” vehicle fund, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. ...
Wellingtonians will have the chance to hear international child rights experts from Ireland, Scotland and Samoa speak at the Making Child Rights Real in Aotearoa New Zealand seminar to be held in the city on Wednesday 21 August. ...
Paul Evans, Chief Executive of the Association of Consulting Engineers (ACENZ), is advocating a balanced approach to the development of productive land. ...
CPAG (Child Poverty Action Group) says that new research from the University of Otago provides a solid foundation for why the Government must not delay instating a comprehensive Warrant of Fitness for tenanted homes in Aotearoa-New Zealand, and ...
The Independent Police Conduct Authority has found that an officer drove carelessly during a pursuit and that this was the primary cause of a collision with a motorcycle that injured the rider. ...
Responding to the Prime Minister’s commitment of $150 million in funding for climate change response in the Pacific, New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says: “It is no secret that many Pacific nations lack serious oversight when it ...
AUT research not only shows an increase in political affiliation, but that candidates affiliated to a central political party are more likely to win seats in Auckland local government. ...
On the 23rd of August School Strike NZ will join Ollie Langridge in his 100th day of sitting outside of New Zealand Parliament calling for the government to declare a climate emergency. School Strike 4 Climate NZ also demand that Parliament acknowledge ...
You have stood up for what is fair, and I am sure you will speak for over 7 million people who have been muted and rendered voiceless in Indian occupied Kashmir for more than a 10 days now. I am writing to bring to your notice the plight of Kashmiri ...
In the last 10 months alone, 11 petitions have been delivered to Parliament calling for medicines to be funded by Pharmac. Today, another nine petitions have been launched by Patient Voice Aotearoa (PVA) members asking that life changing, saving and extending ...
When we were first working to get Miscanthus approved for import into New Zealand, the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) waived the fee for their work because they thought that having Miscanthus in New Zealand was so very much in the ...
PHARMAC’s recent decision to fund two additional drugs from December this year has been widely welcomed by patients and the general public alike. The drugs, Kadcyla and Ibrance, are used in the treatment of advanced lung and breast cancers and will ...
Animal rights organisation SAFE is urging the Government to include experts and advocates from outside the agriculture industry on its newly announced winter crop grazing taskforce. ...
The Government’s plans to prohibit housing on ‘productive’ farmland will serve as yet another regulatory tax on housing, and is a shameful breach of Jacinda Ardern’s promise to fix housing supply, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union . ...
The latest round of the Ethnic Communities Development Fund opens today, supporting projects that grow the leadership and capability of ethnic groups, improve cultural understanding, and ensure our ethnic communities are a vibrant and celebrated part ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union is warning of the dangers of hiking excise tax, in response to calls from a former Prime Minister for stronger action on alcohol harm. Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says, “It seems inevitable ...
LGNZ will be cautiously assessing the wider implications of the newly proposed National Position Statement on Highly Productive Land (NPS-HPL), noting that that it traverses a number of highly complex policy areas including housing affordability and property ...
Horticulture New Zealand has welcomed the Government’s draft National Policy Statement on Highly Productive Land, saying it will help ensure that New Zealand can grow its own vegetables and fruit. ...
Background documents for Budget 2019 are now available from on the Treasury website: https://treasury.govt.nz/publications/information-release/budget-2019-information-release ...
The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry has welcomed a move by Crown agencies to lift confidentiality obligations on survivors of abuse in State care arising from settlement agreements with the Crown. ...
An evaluation of New Zealand’s first sexual violence court has confirmed that the approach taken in the judge-led pilot considerably reduces the time that cases take to reach trial. ...
The National Party is pleased to announce the appointment of Paula Bennett as our Campaign Chair for the 2020 General Election, President Peter Goodfellow says. ...
14 August 2019 – 18 senior business leaders and employment experts have been appointed as judges for New Zealand’s sixth annual Equal Pay Awards reflecting the breadth of companies who have entered. The Awards added three new categories in 2018: Innovation, ...
Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says, “This is more proof that bureaucrats do not make good tech tycoons, no matter how much taxpayer money they throw at geeks in Silicon Valley.” ...
August marks five years of the Community Finance initiative. In addition to its well established Financial Mentoring service, The Salvation Army has held more than 5800 financial conversations with Community Finance clients. The loan program helps ...
Today 14/8/19 on news hub AM show Duncan Garner asked National Party leader Simon Bridges ‘what would he do to combat climate change and improve the economy again if he is the next PM”. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/08/simon-bridges-says-most-kiwis-believe-system-gamed-at-last-election.html ...
DairyNZ Chief Executive Dr Tim Mackle is urging the Government to work with agricultural groups to drive real behaviour change on farm, instead of imposing a broad-based tax. Sector organisations have put forward an alternative Primary Sector Climate ...
Iwi forging closer relationship with Stats NZ over Māori data solutions The Data Iwi Leaders Group supports the findings of an independent review into the 2018 New Zealand Census – but says its failings provide a unique opportunity to co-design ...
“Any justification for paying exorbitant salaries to senior managers in business has just been buried in the Fonterra debacle” said Peter Malcolm spokesperson for Income Equality Aotearoa New Zealand Inc---“Closing the Gap” ...
Good on their own, even better with cheese – these crisp, moreish crackers are destined to become your new go-to savoury snack.These crackers have been on high rotation in our household – they’ve filled lunchboxes, accompanied fine cheeses on evening platters and been eaten by the fistful straight from the jar. ...
Lists are good and so are Sundays. We combine both those things in a new Spinoff feature. This week: Headlines from the past six months about the the Reserve Bank governor, Adrian OrrRBNZ prepares to stick its Orr inASB, March 29Banks Orr-struck yet againThe Australian, April 10Big banks brace for ...
Over 300 hours of interviews condensed into five episodes that cover the entirety of New Zealand’s comedy history – how do you even start to approach that? Sam Brooks interviews Paul Horan, the documentarian behind the show.It’s one of those projects that sounds utterly futile – how does one cover ...
Judgement prevents understanding, which in itself is a barrier to preventing unsafe behaviour. Are different approaches to harm reduction in the Rainbow community needed? Sex. Drugs. Carly Rae Jepsen. This is the iconography that tends to be massaged into mainstream conceptions of gay culture. Depictions in TV/film see us railing lines ...
The Spinoff is covering local elections across the country with a new pop-up section. To kick things off, Hayden Donnell went to a mayoral debate at Grey Power on the North Shore of Auckland.John Tamihere walked into the mayoral debate at North Shore Grey Power on Friday just minutes after ...
The Spinoff is covering local elections across the country with a new pop-up section. To kick things off, Hayden Donnell went to a mayoral debate at Grey Power on the North Shore of Auckland.John Tamihere walked into the mayoral debate at North Shore Grey Power on Friday just minutes after ...
Things I Learned at Art School is a new series featuring artists discussing how they do what they do and know what they know. In the second instalment, Megan Dunn talks to Berlin-based New Zealander Simon Denny about Michael Parekowhai, teaching and technology, and an idea involving the online shoe ...
With the acquisition of global rugby streaming leader RugbyPass, Sky might have just secured its future, writes Trevor McKewen.For several months now, the war between Sky and Spark Sport for the peerless prize of All Blacks and New Zealand rugby rights from 2021 onwards has been escalating. Every week, one ...
The Lightbulb asks innovators and entrepreneurs how they turned their ideas into reality. This week we talk to Jamie Cashmore, co-founder of Auckland-based edible packaging company Twiice. First of all, give us your elevator pitch for Twiice.Twiice is a company making edible coffee cups with plans to progress into other areas ...
The recent discovery of a fossil parrot the size of a human toddler is even more reason for Foulden Maar to be protected, writes the chairperson of Save Foulden Maar, Kimberley Collins.Last week, scientists discovered a new species of extinct parrot in the St Bathans Fauna. Weighing in at seven ...
Could a new hybrid of all the government’s major media holdings solve multiple media and government problems? Duncan Greive assesses the case.The media industry, despite what some of us might like to believe, really doesn’t matter all that much economically. Doesn’t employ all that many people. Relatively low wage. ...
The three governing parties are turning their attention to next year’s general election. RNZ‘s Jo Moir surveys the field.The night New Zealand First formed a government with Labour and the Greens, its leader Winston Peters quoted the song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”.Almost two years later all three ...
Analysis: The botched census brings down a chief executive, there's another wave of speculation about Christopher Luxon standing for National and NZ First could sink an attempt to reverse the ban on prisoner voting. ...
Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk Wording has played a crucial role in a reportedly “fierce” Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu with Australia allegedly managing to alter documental terms to downplay its commitment to climate change mitigation. According to RNZ Pacific, a communiqué and separate statement on climate change was released ...
Australia’s coal policy and its use of carry over credits to fulfill its obligations under the Paris Agreement have come under fire and been major points of contention at this year’s 50th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Meeting in Funafuti, Tuvalu. READ MORE: ‘We should have done more for our ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael O’Keefe, Head of Department, Politics and Philosophy, La Trobe University The Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Tuvalu this week has ended in open division over climate change. Australia ensured its official communique watered down commitments to respond to climate change, gaining ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Xanthe Mallett, Forensic Criminologist, University of Newcastle Even in death, the voice of Carl Williams is louder than that of his victims. Intimate prison letters written by the convicted murderer and drug trafficker to his ex-wife, Roberta – herself arrested this month ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brianna Chesser, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Justice, RMIT University In September 2018, a prominent Melbourne surgeon and academic was charged with rape and sexual assault for alleged offences committed a year earlier against a male doctor. The surgeon and doctor had ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Dearnaley, Associate Professor, University of Southern Queensland The blotched butterfly orchid (Sarcochilus weinthalii) looks fairly unremarkable when it’s not flowering, generally resembling the far more common orange blossom orchid. But when it flowers, it is exquisite. Dark purple blotches stand out ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Cropper, Senior Lecturer, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne Almost every person throughout the existence of humankind has looked up at the night sky and seen more than just a random scattering of light. Constellations of stars have helped ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Desbrow, Associate Professor, Nutrition and Dietetics, Griffith University A recent study published in the journal Depression and Anxiety has attracted widespread media attention. Media reports said eating chocolate, in particular, dark chocolate, was linked to reduced symptoms of depression. Unfortunately, we ...
He’s the artist who launched a million memes and over a billion streams. Sam Brooks picks out Bazzi’s best moments so far, from his career-making breakthrough to his mature new mixtape Soulsearching.1. ‘Mine’“You’re so fuckin’ precious when you smile.”It’s the line that didn’t just launch a million memes, it’s the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Crosby, Professor, Monash University Since President Trump tweeted about imposing new tariffs on China, global equity markets have gone into a tailspin. Trump’s more recent announcement that the new tariffs would be delayed has not calmed the markets, with recent days ...
A new poem by Waikato poet Loren Thomas.to convince myself we’re dreamingwe were walking through suburbia houses kissing front lawns copied one after anotheryou tasted like mint leaves and chlorophyll that’s been pissed on by catsI held your hand and we walked towards the ocean dodging planks from dead train ...
The ancient Australian shock-jock yesterday targeted Jacinda Ardern, urging Australia’s PM to ‘shove a sock down her throat’. It’s all in keeping with a substantial history of being an arse.The plucky nation of Australia excels in a range of endeavours, but nowhere more than the angry, anguished howls of bloated, ...
Today, TVNZ released its latest findings on who is watching what on TVNZ OnDemand. Sam Brooks analyses the results.Today, TVNZ released the 2019 figures for who is watching TVNZ OnDemand, what they’re watching and in what kind of numbers. The big numbers are hopeful – over 1.4 million people reached ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney The federal government wants to boost the number of migrants moving to regional areas in Australia to fill job vacancies and reduce the pressure on our cities. That’s why ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anastasia Powell, Associate Professor, Criminology and Justice Studies, RMIT University There can be no doubt violence against women is a national crisis. On average in Australia, one woman every week is killed. A 2016 survey found one in four women experienced violence ...
One dignified resignation was a bouquet in a sea of brickbats this week as low levels of accountability had eyes rolling. James Elliott has the news of the week. ...
Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein on the band’s ninth studio album, working with St Vincent, and the departure of bandmate and drummer, Janet Weiss.It’s been almost five years since Sleater-Kinney broke their decade-long hiatus with an album that received almost near-universal praise. It was “raw”, “bristling”, “emotive”, “taut” – all adjectives you’d ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Colleen Murrell, Associate Professor, Journalism, Swinburne University of Technology When news of the stabbings in Sydney on Tuesday afternoon came through, one of the first tweets about the incident came from Sky News reporter Laura Jayes. Immediately it got retweeted and sent ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $23)Sally Rooney Sally Rooney Sally Rooney Sally Rooney2 An ...
When Emily Writes reviewed a life-changing sex toy, the response from orgasm-starved women was huge. So why are so many having so few orgasms, and what can be done?For the last two years I’ve been running a pretty small – about 600-odd member – group for mostly New Zealand women ...
When Josie Adams broke her laptop last week, she knew she’d never find love like that again. Can the Asus Chromebook Flip C213SA offer a new kind of technological relationship? She reviews how it stands up to everyday use and the cosmic forces that seek to destroy her.Last Thursday I ...
Wine should be fun, not intimidating, all you need is a little knowledge. Yvonne Lorkin co-founder and chief tasting officer of WineFriend provides some simple tips to help you empower your palate. Even I can get scared by wine. I’m usually super-meek and a tad feeble at high-brow, ‘industry’ wine tastings. ...
Pacific Media Watch NewsdeskBy Makereta Komai in Funafuti, Tuvalu Tonga’s Prime Minister, ‘Akilisi Pohiva, has delivered a stinging attack against regionalism and the Pacific Islands Forum’s stance of leaving no one behind, for failing to amicably resolve the issue of West Papua. Pohiva admitted the issue has divided ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s content by Dr Bryce Edwards.Corrections, Christchurch mosque shootings Chris Trotter (Daily Blog): Upholding The Accused’s Right To Write Mark Daalder ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amber Marshall, Research fellow, Queensland University of Technology Farming families and communities in Queensland’s remote north are being left behind by the digital economy, putting them at significant social and economic disadvantage. Our report, launched in Cairns today, details the impacts of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Cameron, Associate professor, and Associate Director of the Global Obesity Centre, Deakin University Half-price chips, “two for one” chocolates, “buy one get one free” soft drinks: Australian supermarkets make it very easy for us to fill our trolleys with junk food. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Trethowan, Director, IA Watson Research Centre, Narrabri Plant Breeding Institute, University of Sydney A UN report released last week found a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions come from the food chain, particularly meat farming. This has prompted calls to sharply ...
Open Mike 06/01/2018 
Fully Informed? Labour’s 2017 promises raised expectations that were little short of revolutionary. Unfortunately, they were never adequately shaken through the fiscal sieve. The hard economic work was not done – and it shows. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s critics have long complained that her grasp of the way the New ...27 mins ago
You cannot expect to pound communities into the ground day after day, year after year, decade after decade and just expect them to take it lying down. There’s a point at which the place will explode. And we’re faced with some very big ructions on both sides of the Atlantic ...2 days ago
Back in May, Destiny Church leaders Brian and Hannah Tamaki launched another political party. Despite consisting entirely of followers of their religion, they grandly called it "Coalition New Zealand", in a vain effort to suggest it was something broader. But when they applied for registration, submitters opposed the name, as ...2 days ago
The following article is excerpted and translated from two articles in recent issues of Lutte de Classe (Class Struggle), the magazine of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the revolutionary workers group active in France. We don’t necessarily agree with everything in it – for instance, the 1956-62 war for independence involved rather more revolutionary forces than ...2 days ago
2 days ago
Going Down? Once truth and propaganda become fused in the minds of one’s followers, debate and discussion become redundant. If one’s opponents are all outrageous liars, then engaging with them in any way is pointless. Rather than waste its time, a political party should, instead, target all its messages at ...2 days ago
This section builds on Part 1 of this series to provide a theoretical basis for the final instalment (part 3 – to come). Self-determination: law or resurgence — or both? International law promotes the principal of equal treatment and self-determination, which includes peoples’ rights to freely pursue their social, cultural and ...3 days ago
We need to fundamentally reframe our systems settings to address the drivers causing and underpinning inequality; structural change in systems especially financial. The Equality Network Hui was held in Wellington on 27 June 2019. The hui covered important topics such as child poverty; a living wage; taxation; public health; mental ...4 days ago
The views-per-page for some of my recent postings:Depressing, isn't it? Provide thoughtful and wise commentary on the mainstream of British politics and no-one notices. Make a passing reference to Tommy DICKHEAD Robinson in a thread title and you get hundreds of views. Write something about anti-Semitism and you get another ...4 days ago
The government has announced plans to move the Treaty of Waitangi and other taonga to a new site. Great news! So where are they going? Right next to the old one:The new plan will see a new 22,000-square-metre archive built on the former site of Defence House - the former ...4 days ago
Back in June, StatsNZ went public about a project to track population data on an hourly level by using people's cellphones. It wasn't as bad as it initially looked - they were receiving no individual data, only counts by suburb - but there was still a huge consent problem, so ...4 days ago
Most economists agree that a currently slowing economy could do with some stimulus – and they would also agree that there is no shortage of infrastructure projects which could be brought to productive fruition with help from that stimulus. In view of the current practice of sub-contracting economic policy decisions ...4 days ago
I did an interview on the TVNZ Breakfast Show about the situation in Hong Kong. I tried to frame the issue as a collective action problem between two sides with very different end games. The video is here. Because of time constraints we could not discuss the fact that the ...4 days ago
Image Credit: Wild Rose College A new study reporting the ranges of values for kidney and liver parameters in a healthy population is being actively misrepresented by anti-fluoride campaigners. The Fluoride Action Network’s (FAN) latest ... 4 days ago
Alone, Alone. All, All Alone: Will it be a good or a bad thing, when humanity’s bright blue spacecraft is stricken by the civilisation-destroying problem of Climate Change, that no Huston Control will be standing-by to rescue the crew?“WE HAVE A PROBLEM, HUSTON.” These were the words used by the ...5 days ago
Divided Loyalties: Can the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, be relied upon? That’s what the boys and girls at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon needed to be reassured about. Because, from the perspective of Washington, it’s looking more and more like Jacinda Ardern and her Labour Party comrades are getting ready ...6 days ago
This handy Queer Theory Glossary is from thetranswidow.com In case you’ve had trouble keeping up with the spate of new queer theory terms, here’s a handy glossary for your reference. Queer – A straight person with an interesting haircut. Non-binary/genderqueer – A chubby young female, typically 16-28, who has ...7 days ago
The winter grazing issue is becoming a highly sensitised one that I hope will not become so politicised that it delays solutions and results in the suicides of some very stressed farmers.Winter grazing has hit the headlines after a determined campaign, including the release of a video of some very ...1 week ago
The Green Part has been accused of lack of transparency in two recent situations. The first was the claimed media lockdown during Green's annual conference and the second was Julie Ann Genter's refusal to release a letter she had sent to Phil Twyford.I do get frustrated when journalist's succumb to ...2 weeks ago
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For your breakfast viewing pleasure. Make sure you have a full pot of tea for your schadenfreude. 🙂
I’ve always been fascinated by the lefts ability to schadenfreude.
It is one of the more distasteful aspects of (some) lefties in all. All “caring” until it’s someone they do not like – then they get great pleasure from it.
There have been studies linking it to envy – and that does not surprise me at all. As I have personally found a lot of the left envious. Jealous and bitter of the success of others.
Study link schadenfreude Wikipedia
I recognise irony when I see it and this one was particularly easy to spot.
BTW, link is not working.
What? Churlish James muttering defensively about “schaudenfreude”? James and ilk express that sentiment in relation to the ‘culpable poor’ on a daily basis. That’s basically why the big fat kick-ass BBQ is here at all.
See there you go again with the BBQ.
I’m sorry if you don’t have friends and or family that can or want to participate in this great kiwi tradition- but that’s your loss not mine.
I love to BBQ – we do it a lot. It’s partly because we love the food (who dosnt like a nice bloody steak?) – but mainly because it’s fun to surrounded yourself with fantastic friends and family.
You should try it – it will give you a brighter outlook on life.
You should have more brighter future bbq’s, anything to keep you from making a fool of yourself on TS.
I know jimbo, why can’t they just gloat and chuckle smugly like normal decent folk?
Gee Gabs, from the sound of it – you are hanging around with the wrong type of people.
“…I’ve always been fascinated by the lefts ability to schadenfreude…”
That’s because it involves having an imagination, empathy and an entire array of higher order thinking of which you are bereft. I guess it must like looking through a window into a world where you’ll never be able to play.
I try not to play with naughty children.
Schadenfreude has zip to do with envy, Jimmy, and everything to do with the deep, deep satisfaction of seeing someone shooting themselves with one of their very own carefully crafted balls of shit.
Now, revel in your fellow right-wingers schadenfreude, it’s fucking delicious.
Steve Bannon’s spectacular fall from grace in Trump World is a big, salty, delicious bowl of schadenfreude from the political gods in celebration of the new year.
[…]
Now, like two rats in a bag, Trump and Bannon are tearing at one another in a delicious public spat that has every possible bit of drama, except Bannon drunkenly bellowing for a round of fisticuffs with all comers and Trump offering to compare the length of their relative manhoods on live television. They deserve one another in so many ways
https://amp.thedailybeast.com/bannon-banished-for-telling-truths-about-trump-as-maga-monsters-turn-on-each-other
ZOMG that dailybeast piece is so DELICIOUS!
“…the Mercer money train came to a halt when the Metternich of Alabama, after getting beaten like a cheap drum in the U.S. Senate race…”
Deep chortles, they were heard.
The author at 1 minute.
https://art19.com/shows/with-friends-like-these/episodes/1428074c-f9f0-478e-8ecf-bc4c2b50eae1
And I am bemused by James’s ability to demolition the English language.
Schadenfreude is strictly a noun, James – both in the original German, and in English.
To show you how silly it sounds, I have just misused ‘demolition’ the same way you misused schadenfreude. It seems that some righties need the obvious explained to them…
if you bemused by my use of the engligh language – you must love Eco Maoris.
Eco Maori speaks from the heart.
For one who is so sure of his utter perfection in every way, how about thinking whether you should have written “If you ARE so bemused by my use of the E(cap)nglish language…”
I think you’ll find it’s “bitter at” not “bitter of”.
I know I’m not meant to put this out there but this guy was at the fellowship last night.
Still haven’t found any reports in the corporate media about the massive storm that hit the country written in the context of climate change…..
But I found this.
‘Living on the Edge: What climate change means for Taranaki ’
The climate change debate has hogged headlines recently but its influence on humanity is undeniable. In the first of a six-part series called Living on the Edge, reporter Deena Coster takes a deeper look at what it means for Taranaki.
The rough and rugged Taranaki coastline will be unrecognisable in 100 years’ time.
Houses once dotted along the coast will be lost, as coastal erosion and rising sea levels steal away the very land they rest on………..’
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/98838911/living-on-the-edge-what-climate-change-means-for-taranaki
Encouraging to see the topic being discussed properly in parts of the media.
The whole article is worth reading.
More thoughtful analysis here….
‘From drought scare to deluge despair: The science of the storm.’
‘ After a period of calm, dry weather for much of the country, in which century old records for dryness were toppled, the furious storm from the north seemed to come out of the blue.
What may at first seem like atmospheric whiplash was actually a case of cause and effect – and may be a taste of things to come…..’
‘With rising sea-levels, as expected under a warming climate, storm surges will get higher and reach further inland – issues already evident in pockets around the country, where homes and infrastructure have been damaged.’
Again, read the whole article.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/100344401/from-drought-scare-to-deluge-despair-the-science-of-the-storm
Hi Ed;
Thanks for raising the “Climate change” issue it was urgently needed to address our worsening climate of severe weather now reaching us all.
As PM Jacinda Ardern said clearly and correctly;-
“Climate change is truly the nuclear issue of our generation’s time”.
But it is so sad that even with the truly ‘extreme’ weather events we all experienced over the last few days, was not responded to properly by all the media!!!!
All the media could do was to “minimalise’ most of the event, and worsening weather events we are now experiencing now.
Question is to all the ‘climate change deniers’ & naysayers is;
“How much is enough to wake them up” ????
Will it need to take many lives lost?
Will it take a dramatic loss of their own food chain so they starve?
Will it take a loss of all forms of transport?
Will it take a loss of our coastal regions up to 50kms inland before they will actually finally put up their hands in surrender to ‘mother nature’ and plead for forgiveness for their folly???????
We certainly hope they will finally wake up now and join us to begin reducing climate change emissions and begin rebuilding secure future.
Lets do this!!!!!!!
Stuff/Fairfax have had an epiphany.
There’s even a climate change quiz.
Get people to do it.
These operations work on click bait and it would be good for them to see people are interested in climate change.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/100104523/how-much-do-you-know-about-climate-change-test-your-knowledge-here
“As PM Jacinda Ardern said clearly and correctly;-
“Climate change is truly the nuclear issue of our generation’s time”.”
Yep, but can’t see much action on this from Labour in the RMA and in TPPA (whoever version) or any future planning. Climate change is ignored (apart from various taxation schemes) and not actually looked at what’s gonna happen when parts of the world get uninhabitable in particular those that have huge populations (India looking to get to 50 degree temperature in some places), massive pollution in China or islands that will become are under water and all around the world in particular the west, houses destroyed on mass by flooding and storms. Agricultural land in drought and housing and people galore, but less land in agricultural production or even owed locally by the the country but by offshore individuals and corporations whose aim is profit not social conscience. Or maybe wars start breaking out to control dwindling resources. Japan is obsessed already with doing it’s own thing on fisheries and not cooperating in local efforts to have ecological sanctuaries to keep the fish stocks and biodiversity going. Our fisheries control is laughable in this country and it seems NZ are only too happy to turn a blind eye to slave labour to catch and process it as well as overfishing.
Wilson’s car parking for example in Australia show enormous “costs” leading to small profits on eye watering charges and a very small tax take for Australia. Who knew that you were helping the profits of Hong Kong billionaires when you parked at the local hospital. Clearly this type of carry on is going to get worse and worse – National even wanted to sell off the state houses to the Chinese or Australian corporations. China owns 50% of silver fern farms and Fonterra seems more focused on the 8 million salary of it’s executive than any sort of forward planning in any area from innovation to pollution control. I’m sure big business would love to sell Fonterra off into shares on the sharemarket, but for the moment making do with just selling off the daily farms themselves which will eventually change the control more offshore.
Cheese costs more than the average wage after taxes already in this country, bottled water costs more than soft drink. Not looking good for local Kiwis future, if things start going bad around the world and we find we don’t actually own much of our land and assets anymore and other’s are making the profits from NZ produce, water and housing booms (aka James Hardie types) while the Kiwi taxpayers are paying for the infrastructure and disaster costs but have little export income anymore so can’t afford social welfare. With enough of a change in demographics we might start getting a society that doesn’t believe in ‘wasting money” on social welfare anymore and privatise and plunder everything for a business opportunity.
Still haven’t found any reports in the corporate media about the massive storm that hit the country written in the context of climate change…..
That could be because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and weather is just weather. Here’s NIWA on the effects of La Niña weather on New Zealand.
La Niña events have different impacts on New Zealand’s climate. More north–easterly winds are characteristic, which tend to bring moist, rainy conditions to the north–east of the North Island, and reduced rainfall to the south and south–west of the South Island.
…
Warmer than normal temperatures typically occur over much of the country during La Niña, although there are regional and seasonal exceptions.
So, it’s been a lot warmer than usual and the north-east is copping it from storms – classic La Niña weather. If journalists aren’t rushing to blame local weather conditions on climate change, good on them.
Yes, Milt
Sometime it’s just weather conditions..
The ad nauseum of ‘climate change’ does not add positive value
This is climate change, not weather.
Some of you will only wake up to it when the flood is at your own doorstep.
And the world can’t wait for you.
‘Those warm, dry, and settled conditions contributed to an unusual phenomena: a marine heat wave, in which sea temperatures around New Zealand were about 2 degrees Celsius warmer than average.
Off the west coast, in the Tasman Sea, temperatures were as much as 6C above normal – at the time, it was the largest sea temperature anomaly in the world.’
Insurance companies are responding to CC
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/property/98797867/insurers-warn-climate-change-will-hit-policy-prices-and-make-some-properties-uninsurable
Ans in stuff today
How climate change could send your insurance costs soaring
Climate change is not only set to transform our environment, it’s also likely to cause insurance costs to skyrocket.
The Insurance Council of New Zealand has warned that our country is one of the most vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters for an economy of our size.
Council chief executive Tim Grafton says New Zealand can expect to face, on average, annual costs of $1.6 billion (just under 1 per cent of its GDP) from natural disasters, based on data going back to 1900
Organisations with money in the situation clearly realise climate change is happening fast. Exxon Mobil knew about CC in the 70s ( and hid their findings as it would impact their profits)
But to some misguided fellows, like Trump and PM, it’s just weather.
Humankind and other species on this planet can’t wait for such dilettantes and deniers.
In 1959 Edward Teller warned the industry about the consequences of burning fossil fuel.
Yeah, but Teller was beating his own project plowshare – nuclear fracking (happened) and using three hydrogen bombs to make a large harbour on aussie west coast (politely declined).
I vaguely recall hearing something about their ambitions when I was a kid but shit, they were convinced.
Although we had our own canal dreams, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#Proposals
https://timespanner.blogspot.co.nz/2008/11/canal-that-was-never-dug.html
At least they didn’t start digging it and lose funding.
Insurance companies as part of the financial industry have underwritten some primary causes of planetary pollution and destruction since, day one…and will continue to do so…
The ‘institutions have profited heavily playing a part in creating the circumstances, and they will attempt to continue the plunder…
Swiss Re and out major players in the Global Insurance industry have been warning of the financial effects of Climate Change for years. In 2010 Swiss RE wrote this:
My bold
http://www.swissre.com/rethinking/the_effects_of_climate_change.html
Their assessments were based on the IPPC projections then of a 0.37m rise in sea level. The fact that those projections have now increased by around a factor of 10, exacerbates the problem dramatically.
Yep, they’re realising that they won’t be able to cover it at all and are reaching for government subsidies.
I would nationalise all insurance companies and stop their blackmailing rort once and for all.
No reason why not have a govt srvice. Nationally-based rates system collected via TLAs to fund the building insurance, EQC, and fire levies, separate assessments for contents.
This is climate change, not weather.
Weather is weather. You’re wanting journalists to report storms as climate change, something which would only encourage people with functioning cognitive faculties to ridicule the journalists, and worse, might encourage people to believe climate change is bullshit. Worse yet, it encourages other people to mistake weather for climate, resulting in even more imbecilic “Frosty again – so much for global warming!” comments by right-wingers.
By all means expect news reports to mention that storms can be expected to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change, but an individual storm remains just a storm.
Yes I am expecting journalists to use context for a story.
That’s a basic of the job.
Reporting Brexit without the context of the deindustrialisation of parts of the UK makes no sense.
Reporting Trump without the context of the deindustrialisation of parts of the US makes no sense.
Reporting the war in Syria without the context of climate change and the desertification of parts of Syria makes no sense.
Reporting the changing weather patterns in New Zealand without the context of climate change makes no sense.
Reporting the events in Gaza without the context of 1917, 1948, 1967 and other key historical dates makes no sense.
Context is everything.
My lovely strawman !
http://www.brixtonbuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/wickerman-image-1.jpg
To be fair, the main Stuff article about the recent storms does put it in the context of climate change: “With rising sea-levels, as expected under a warming climate, storm surges will get higher and reach further inland – issues already evident in pockets around the country, where homes and infrastructure have been damaged.”
I was complimenting them at 3 and 3.1
Context is everything.
It sure is. And the context of a weather event is weather patterns – La Niña, for instance. Storms have been causing floods in New Zealand since before there were humans here – linking any individual storm to climate change would be as stupid as claiming global warming doesn’t exist because there was an early snowfall.
Ok – we shall agree to disagree.
And let’s use more polite language.
There is no need for aggressive words.
That’s pretty funny from someone who’s had a moderator warning today for accusing a commenter of having a “psychopathic mentality”…
I have heeded the advice.
Is saying someone is stupid the same, as might be stupid, or showing stupid tendencies or ideas, better, worse or just different than saying someone has a psychopathic mentality? And is that the same as saying someone is a psychopath? And can hard critical words never be used against anyone here? Questions that run through my head but then I am borderline crazy these days.
That’s a removal of context.
Well, to be accurate they should be reporting storms in relation to climate change and how one affects the other. They shouldn’t be ignoring it just because it’s weather.
Actually Psycho attribution of Climate Change to Extreme weather events is a developing science. The 2003 European Heatwave that had a not insignificant effect on the Syrian situation, has been assessed for instance to have been more likely to have occurred as a result of AGW.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03089
However,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-can-now-blame-individual-natural-disasters-on-climate-change/
As you say – you just can’t look at an extreme weather event and say “that’s climate change” but what is becoming more possible with improving climate modelling is to say the AGW has contributed significantly to the possibility of that event occurring.
Furthermore take for instance the major damage done to my favourite piece of roadway, the coastal road north from Thames over the weekend. (it truly is a delight to pass along especially at christmas with the pohutakawas all in full bloom and the sea and little bays alongside).
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/100346389/evacuation-warnings-and-rocks-on-the-road-in-firth-of-thames
But this road SH25 is under severe threat from rising sea levels, the direct result of AGW. With a king tide and storm surge the destruction caused is inevitable. I’m not sure just how this vital link to the Peninsula will be maintained into the future.
Newsroom did some good stories on the vulnerability of several Coromandel towns.
Whitianga
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/@environment/2017/12/11/67390/drowning-dreams-72-new-houses-on-man-made-canals
Thames, Cooks Beach
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/@environment/2017/12/11/67374/drowning-dreams-billions-at-stake-as-govt-mulls-sea-level-rules
Yes I’m well aware of the work of both Denis and Thomas (referred to in the first link). I too have submitted to the TCDC on the matter wrt to the district plan, and my daughter is a Community Board member so we are all on to the problem.
The developers however are only concerned in making a quick buck and will find any piece of nonsense to hide behind. This piece of nonsense from Gloria Humphries is typical:
The 1.6mm pa SLR she refers to above is the long term average over the past century. ie there has been around 17cm of SLR over the past 100 years. This, of course, completely ignores the increasing rate of SLR from melting ice shelves, that has been increasingly rapid over the past couple of decades. But if she can get away with it, and sell off a few more properties, and pass the buck on to Council – well who cares?
TCDC will need a lot of government money.
SH 25 being a State Highway is of course maintained by Govt. – Just how and what the level of funding will be or what the long term solution is has yet to be determined. But SH 25 is repeatedly closed due to slips and subsidence. Even though it is a very attractive piece of NZ – I wouldn’t consider living up the coast – my doc lives up that way and on one occasion the slip was in place for days. He would ride his bike to the slip, clamber over the rocks, and then pick up his car to drive the rest of the way into work each day. This is becoming a regular occurrence for those people living up that way.
As for the fate of the sea side residences – this is a problem over the whole of NZ but TCDC is unique in that it has one of the longest coastlines of any regional council in the country and only around 30,000 rate payers. It is also unique in that in 1931 during the Depression and the closure of the gold mines Thames, which had borrowed heavily for a number of large projects, was unable to pay its way with a high unemployment and rate payers now unable to pay their bills. The incoming Mayor went to the govt and the town was promptly placed in Administration and remained so until 1947. You can still se the results of this in the rather sad civil works – monsoon drains rather than modern guttering etc – around the town even to this day.
Thank you for sharing your detailed historical knowledge of the area.
Why in your opinion we’re all those developments on the waterways permitted?
Corruption?
Naivety?
Ignorance?
Slackness?
Or something else?
Like all councils TCDC tends to be the governance of the privileged for the privileged. The past Mayor’s family is in the civil construction business – so naturally is generally supportive of “development” in all its forms. The geology of the area is also not conducive to large urban areas, being in essence a string of extinct volcanos. There is constant pressure from the three major cities Auckland Hamilton and Tauranga – all within 2 hours drive from Coromandel for further development as people retire, and wish to move to be by the sea. So if a developer proposes a new subdivision – it will be looked at favourably. Having said that the fact is that these developments were reviewed under the guidelines of what was then the available knowledge of projected SLR. The T & T report referred to the IPPC report and the Whitianga development as you see was constructed with that scenario in mind.
However, it was always understood that the IPPC is conservative in its assessments as it is an international body and the report has to be agreed by a large variety of people and nations.
The sad fact however is that the last government (ie Nick Smith) sat on the latest SLR assessment and these were not made public or given any credence until James Shaw released them on taking office. Had these figures been available at the time it is probable that the developments would not have been given the green light.
Very interesting macro. Thank you for sharing your detailed knowledge of the subject.
The ‘ad nauseam’ Of climate change.
Do you think like that dinosaur David Bellamy?
ED, your thinking appears lacks depth
Paul had a similar approach
Perhaps you know eachother…
Another troll like James .
I suspected so after your climate denial.
I shall be exiting the conversation.
There is nothing to be gained from encouraging the nonsense you lot spout.
Are you all one and the same?
Ed, if that is the level of your thinking and the tactics you continue to employ, it is no surprise that Paul was banned….
The posts you put up about various and many subjects, lack fundamental awareness and thought when you upload them…
Does that mean that you are ‘wrong’ in what you upload….maybe/maybe not….but the tactics are not going to attract people to take your links and then perhaps do some further reading of their own into [subject]
1. Post links with statements in absolutes [financial crash coming et al]
2. When another commentator questions/queries, refutes or proposes another angle….
3. Accuse the commentator of tr*lling…
In no way are such tactics likely to encourage others to read further …
Surely that is why you post comments with links here…..to encourage others to investigate further and thus having greater numbers of people becoming engaged?
If the above is not why you post the subject links, then I would suggest taking some time to assess internally, why it is you are doing so….
Have a good day
Didn’t Paul have an ideological eating disorder also.
The ad nauseum holier than thou trolling about climate change is a pain.
All true PM but C.C. is exacerbating their normal effects.
It’s possibly changing the oscillation of the ENSO as well which will have unknown consequences.
And I have no problem with journalists reporting that, which they do. Ed is asking them to pretend weather is climate.
I’m asking for context.
> That could be because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and weather is just weather.
Where were you when I was trying to argue this the other day?! I got soundly rubbished by everyone here
A.
Sorry, I must have been annoying people on Kiwiblog that day.
That doesnt narrow it down much
And sometimes one causes the other.
Actually it’s a given that climate causes the weather.
100% of the weather is affected by climate change. 100% of the weather occurs on a planet which has warmer oceans and surface temperatures and more water vapour in the atmosphere and therefore, more energy.
The degree to which this affects individual weather events is asking the wrong question. It’s of academic interest only. From a practical perspective resilience and planning are far more important than attribution.
This is what is happening in my part of the country.
https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/west-coast/erosion-exposes-old-greymouth-rubbish-dump
I walk my dog most days on this beach and the situation is worsening by the day. The council dumped a few loads of rock, but the huge seas and recent king tide have swept over and around the rocks. A proper sea wall is needed but the Grey District Council apparently can’t afford it.
At the moment layers of barely composed rubbish is visible complete with black rubbish sacks. Apparently there’s all sorts of toxic goodies in there including radioactive waste from the local hospital.
There you go I told you all that all our internet devices could be hacked.
But it is not just the internet devices it is all the smart devices in OUR world.
Some good intelligent person alerts US to the back door Entrance into our passwords on these chips and the chip manufacturers put a sticky tape cover of a lie on this subject and say O we new about this a while ago we are finding a patch we just did not want to ALARM the public . What a load of bullshit these back door entrances are not a design flaw they have been forced to put these BDE into our chips so the Governments of the west can control us most likely the USA FBI CIA . Why do you think China has invested billions in to making there own chips and a laser beam communication satellite so they have safe secure COMS . I no all my coms are hacked my childrens com to . The neo liberal 1% want total control they have been deliberately suppressing our Ladys Mana to over the centuries because they know they will get there asses kicked by OUR strong intelligent humane caring LADYS . There is a doco on wonderwoman DC comics started this comic to lift our ladys mana at the time the 1% were ok with that because they wanted to motivate our ladys to go to work and what was the work well making crap for the world wars and when the war was over they stopped using her to lift ladys mana and got wander woman to act like a dutiful submissive house wife .
These wankers like interfering in every aspect of OUR lives and don t want to cede power they don t give a shit that they are stuffing up our WORLDS SOCIETY and motherearth and all her wonderfull beings . ECO Maori knows that US the 99% will put a stop to this way of life of shitting in ones own back yard and we will create a beautiful caring equal world society for all whom are on Papatuanuku.
Ka kite ano
It’s not ALL devices. It’s intel based ones. AMD chips are just fine.
“Serious security flaws that could let attackers steal sensitive data, including passwords and banking information, have been found in processors designed by Intel, AMD and ARM.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/04/meltdown-spectre-worst-cpu-bugs-ever-found-affect-computers-intel-processors-security-flaw
Thank you – I stand corrected.
This link here explains it all
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/meltdown-spectre-exploits-intel-amd-arm-nvidia,36219.html
“World Rugby will be overdosing on fury. Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu has just let the coke out of the bag and there is nothing they can do about it. Our favourite Samoan casually said that some top All Blacks have taken cocaine and World Rugby can’t even slap a ban on him. The secret is out, if he is to be believed.”
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/opinion/100355280/mark-reason-eliota-fuimaonosapolus-cocaine-bomb-makes-perfect-sense
Thugby coke heads. Who knew (everyone). James?
From the article you reference
A damning description of MCaw and other well paid All Blacks
‘The tragedy for Fuimaono-Sapolu is that he has been grievously unsupported by players in New Zealand and Australia who all seem under the corporate yoke. Where is today’s Anton Oliver? Richie McCaw sits on a panel that absurdly makes Beauden Barrett the World Rugby Player of the Year again, not a title that a player is ever likely to win in a Samoan shirt – Beauden, blondish poster boy, good for business.
When did McCaw ever speak out on behalf of anything? No wonder he was a school prefect. But as Fuimaono-Sapolu says: “If Richie McCaw said anything about the GCSB, the whole of New Zealand would be up in arms against it.”
They key words…..
‘players in New Zealand and Australia who all seem under the corporate yoke.’
MCaw pimps for Fonterra and supports a company destroying our rivers and environment.
Some All Blacks….
Rich
Entitled
Coke sniffers
Wife beaters
Booze addled
Young men.
What role models.
Liar! According to your own definition, that is.
Wrong. It’s Intel, some ARM and maybe AMD depending upon which security hole is being used.
Don’t worry about your device(s) getting hacked. Instead, be more concerned about your brain being manipulated & changed by and through those devices. The content, delivery, and interaction/consumption of ‘information’ through those devices are having major impact on us and (our) society. What happens when you ‘lose’ (control of) your smart phone is nothing compared to when you ‘lose’ (control of) your mind – they seem to go hand-in-hand and maybe that’s not coincidental either …
That is some of the more salient points, Incognito…
The lack of awareness about the impacts of technology related mental health, is increasingly well documented, but not widely understood at the ‘consumer end’…
The way that the one-way is being pushed on us is amazing. Everyone is brainwashed about wonderful technology, you need to be immersed in it up to your nose to get anywhere, a job, connect with anybody. Kids are learning to type rather than write. Why not, it is so much easier to interface with machines and soon some people will have chips put in so their brains can connect directly with the communications port – cut out the middleman.
I wanted to speak to someone, phoned up and went through the numbers game, then got message that it was so easy to go on-line, this while I was on the phone already. Finally I did get service without waiting too long but the process of ‘disruption’ embedded in business practice now means that nothing you value now can be guaranteed to remain available, all must be subject to eternal, infernal change and churn.
Be nice to the people at call centres, they may be replaced with machines, as we all may be until some sort of saturation point is reached.
A recent contact did not want to accept my landline number though there was no particular reason not to, and I have an answerphone attached.
My choices are being taken away, yet this was part of the mantra of free markets, neo lib economics etc. I don’t believe any of the upbeat future-is-great drum-beaters any more. They are either stool pigeons, or specialise in living in the ‘now’, or are too young to be trusted to understand or be interested in the context of what they are speiling.
Johan;
Thanks for correcting that fake statement made by a troll saying ‘AMD chips are just fine.’
We have enough mis-information around now without more fake statements made to fool us all to believe some systems are safe or ‘fine’.
We all need to be given free upgades for them to block these flaws and rid ‘stealing of our sensitive data, including passwords and banking information’.
If the manufacturer caused these flaws in these IC chips then they must pay to fix them too. “consumers have rights too.”
Like automobile ‘recalls’ we should have the same rights to repairs.
Same applies with whoever caused our destructive “climate change” it is the companies who marketed the products who must be held responsible for the repair of our climate again too.
Someone got analytical about the timing and relationship between Fox and Friends and the terracotta turdface eruptions on twitter. And yep, he’s basically just live-tweeting F&F.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/05/trump-media-feedback-loop-216248
A Sugar tax is well overdue here.
We should not follow the UK – instead we should tax sugar at the cost it has to our society and it’s health. Tax at $5 per litre and make sugary drinks expensive items.
And stop all advertising.
And limit points of sale.
Here is the timid approach of the UK.
‘Coca-Cola to sell smaller bottles at higher prices in response to sugar tax.
‘…..The sugar tax – designed to help combat child obesity – was announced by then chancellor George Osborne in 2016 and he gave drinks-makers time to change their recipes if they wished to escape the levy. From April soft drinks manufacturers will be taxed at 18p per litre on drinks containing 5g of sugar or more per 100ml, or 24p per litre if the drink has 8g of sugar or more per 100ml. The tax will apply to one in five drinks sold in the UK…….’
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/05/coca-cola-to-sell-smaller-bottles-at-higher-prices-in-response-to-sugar-tax
Yeah, and we should have a special car tax for those cars that in the wrong hands kill the users. Or a sun tax cos melanoma. Or an internet tax because some people write silly things on blogs.
Or we could start banning people who can’t sensibly and safely use the products that the vast majority have no problems with.
That sounds fun
Let’s start with you.
We already have petrol taxes to cover the roading and other infrastructure, and ACC levies on registration and fuel to cover the health and income costs of accidents.
A fat tax is well overdue here.
We should not follow the UK – instead we should tax fat pricks at the cost they have to our society and vote health. Tax at $5 per kilo over normal bodyweight as determined by the Ministry of body normality
Alternatively we can just burn the witches !
How about updated food standards preventing manufacturers from selling all this sugar-filled crap.
The critics of a sugar tax speak like true believers of the neoliberal cult.
You sound like John Galt.
Pigovian taxes are neoliberal. Regulate sugar maximums, don’t tax content.
Probably best just to make the products illegal.
Well Coke with what, nine teaspoons of sugar per 330ml, sure. Three or four not so much. Regulate a steadily decreasing maximum and neither manufacturer nor customer is penalized.
Ed that sounds like what a troll would come up with. Illegal causes more problems and creates black markets etc. if there is some demand for the product then it encourages people on the make to encourage others to use more. Instead of discouraging. This is already known. A facetious comment on your part, but it’s the first thought to the minds of the brainless.
Yes that was tongue in cheek.
I recommend we approach sugar and alcohol the same way we tackled tobacco.
Gradual and significant price increases.
Stop advertising.
Make health campaigns to explain bad health outcomes.
Limit places it can be sold.
Make it lose its glamour.
Programmes at school to edit the young.
Alcohol free and sugar free places.
In 20-30 years, Coca Cola and Heineken would be on the run, like Philip Morris are now.
Only works if it is a bipartisan initiative, I cannot see the political will on either side of the House at the moment
A.
+100000 Ed sugar is limiting us poor people life span to the low 60
Nah , that’s your stupidity and mental weakness.
[I think you’ve been warned about this before. The only reason you’re not getting a ban is I don’t have time to look, but if I see you doing that shit again I will ban you.
Seeing your comment to Paul below as well, I suggest having a think about how you want to be here too, because the whole nasty shit coming from you since the election is getting tedious. Your history of contributions here will only get you so far if moderators have to keep putting time into this. – weka]
BM Bloody minded.
moderator note for you to read above.
Sorry Weka.
my comment was for BM. Nothing wrong with your comment.
Please ignore bm and his psychopathic mentality.
They are part of the ME world, not the WE society.
[I really don’t want to have to be moderating today, so please tone down the abuse and the mental health slurs (they harm everyone) – weka]
Fuck off Paul.
This guy has got some mental health issues which need addressing asap ?
Actually, it’s the RWNJs that have mental health issues.
“we should tax sugar at the cost it has to our society and it’s health. Tax at $5 per litre and make sugary drinks expensive items”.
I trust you can provide a link to some analysis that the cost is $5.00/litre?
It does seem such a suspiciously round number doesn’t it?
Exactly $5.00/litre. I’m sure you didn’t just pull it out of thin air.
You remind me of when then Mayor Ken Livingston brought in a Congestion Charge in London. He claimed that it was merely to cover the costs that traffic congestion was causing. It just happened to be five pounds a time.
Pure coincidence of course that it was such a round figure.
Now, where do you get $5.00/litre as being the cost to society of sugary drinks?
Cigarettes now cost $30 a pack. The tax on them must be over $20 a pack.
My $5 is an arbitrary number to deter the purchase of debilitating sugary drinks and mitigate their devastating impact on people, society and the country.
It could just as easily be $10 tax per litre .
Personally, I’d copy some South American countries and boot companies like Coca-Cola and McDonalds out of the country.
Cigarettes now cost $30 a pack. The tax on them must be over $20 a pack.
Yep. The government’s raised taxes on cigarettes so high that they’ve created a black market for them and people are robbing dairies to supply that black market. Three cheers for good governance!
Given the above, I’m surprised that anyone thinks it would be a great idea to do something similar for sugar. Public health activists are a very unusual breed.
They are paid to be single-minded when you need to be triple-minded to get around the combination of sugar carving, advertising promotion and profit.
There is no care of humanity in business. If you want to buy they rarely twist your arm, they just play on your mind starting with tv ads when you are a baby, and if you buy good, and if you get sick, then they will charge you for some treatment that will get you on your feet and buying again. And we buy into this sweet and vicious circle.
+1
+111
There’s a range to where taxes work. Beyond that you need other methods.
I don’t have the slightest problem with the statement about it being an arbitrary figure that is simply intended to make the drinks expensive.
What I object to is the oft-used claim that some level of tax is, in your own words, “tax sugar at the cost it has to our society and it’s health”.
It is done far to often when there is no actual justification for the setting of the tax at a particular level. If people would simply say that they want to make something expensive they are being honest. When they claim that it is to meet the costs of the vice they are not.
As far as smoking goes smokers are probably the only group who pay enough for their vice to pay for the health treatment they incur. When you include the fact that they are likely to collect superannuation for fewer years they may actually be doing the taxpayer a favour.
The tax collected is about $2 billion per year. That is a pretty good chunk of the Health budget. As long ago as 2012 Treasury said that smokers do pay for their costs.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10809145
I don’t mind these taxes being charged. It helped persuade me to give up smoking cigars, a habit I greatly enjoyed. I just object to the idea of increasing the taxes because “you cost us taxpayers money”
Obesity and tooth decay cost society a lot of money.
Perhaps they do Ed, but you are missing the point.
If you are going to tax the sales of Sugary drinks in order to recover the costs to Society from consuming the drinks then you have to work out, at least to a reasonable approximation, what that cost is. Then you can charge a tax that will recover that amount.
If you are going to apply a punitive tax in order to discourage people consuming those items then you should have the courage of your convictions. Say that is what you are doing. Don’t pretend it is only to save the poor taxpayer from having to pay.
You appear to be following the punitive approach. Well admit it.
I would do it for both reasons.
That’s why I put out a large arbitrary number.
It’s the right wing way: get tough.
Fine by me.
The whole point of high taxation for cigarettes and other bad for you stuff is to stop people from using them.
The cost of both their medical costs and the premature death is far too high. The amount cannot be accurately measured in monetary terms as a lot of it is emotional which causes a lot of flow on effects.
Oh, suck my balls. My odds of premature death are my business. You’re just as bad as Ed railing about a vegan lifestyle, which might make me live longer and it’ll sure as shit feel like it.
I’ll go to hell in my own damned way, thankyou very much. If there were mandatory workplace air quality standards rather than arbitrary bans on stinky things, I wouldn’t take anyone with me, either.
You do realise that you’re whinging about the same thing don’t you?
No, they’re not the same thing.
Because tobacco smoke isn’t the only bad thing in the air. And decent ventilation and filtration to address those other things would make most bans unnecessary.
No. It doesn’t work that way.
Most other pollutants are external while smoking indoors is internal. Thus it will affect those inside disproportionately.
Well, yes it does work that way. Because air from outside comes inside, glycol smoke machines in gigs have their own issues, and packing a few hundred people into a nightclub with barely adequate ventilation becomes a nightmare of mutual-contamination. I have literally had ceiling condensate drip on me.
But the classic example is aircraft – recirculate the air as much as possible for a random collection of dozens or hundreds of people, and keep them exposed for hours.
I recall a Washington Post article from years ago saying a Dutch study found smokers actually end up costing the health system less than non-smokers, because they tend to die of things that kill you quickly (eg heart attacks, lung cancer) rather than spending decades deteriorating in old age with successive expensive health issues. If our primary concern were costs to health system, we should subsidise smoking instead of penalising it.
One study? Gosh.
Where there’s one, there are usually more …
http://www.justfacts.com/healthcare.asp#spending-preventative
I understand the tobacco industry paid good money for them.
Well, good, because no public health departments of publicly-funded universities would fund research that might return such politically-unsatisfactory results.
Yeah, but the numbers still add up.
@ One Anonymous Bloke 6 January 2018 at 8:18 pm:
Scepticism is healthy in science; suspicion is not.
This Dutch study published in 2008 is freely available/accessible (Open Access) and was funded by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports:
Lifetime Medical Costs of Obesity: Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029
Conclusions: Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.
Another study (two authors in common with above study) published in 2014 is also freely available/accessible (Open Access):
Disease Prevention: Saving Lives or Reducing Health Care Costs?
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0104469
[NB The contributions of author Pieter van Baal were supported by the Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement (NETSPAR http://www.netspar.nl) as part of the project “Rising life expectancy: causes and consequences in the Netherlands”. NETSPAR is a think tank and knowledge network established in 2005. The Foundation’s activities are pursued through the Netspar Center, an operational unit of Tilburg University.]
Conclusions: The stronger the negative impact of a disease on longevity, the higher health care costs would be after elimination. Successful treatment of fatal diseases leaves less room for longevity gains due to effective prevention but more room for health care savings.
The third study (different authors altogether) published in 1998 is also freely available/accessible and was funded by the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Cultural Affairs, the Netherlands:
Preventing fatal diseases increases healthcare costs: cause elimination life table approach
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.316.7124.26
Conclusions: The aim of prevention is to spare people from avoidable misery and death not to save money on the healthcare system. In countries with low mortality, elimination of fatal diseases by successful prevention increases healthcare spending because of the medical expenses during added life years.
You’ll notice that neither study focused solely on smoking and they, in fact, covered a very wide range of life-threatening diseases.
There have been plenty more studies published and I reject any suggestion that they all were biased through ‘inducements’ from ‘invested interests’.
Which is one of the reasons why I think we need to go to a UBI. Get rid of the pension and encourage older people to work – if they want to.
I’ve seen quite a lot of them over the years.
Usually done by University economists who smoke.
They get sick of the other academics who complain that the smokers are being supported by their wowser compatriots.
It is quite easy to justify the claim that smokers pay in full for their habit.
They never get published of course. It would be fatal for your professional reputational to publish such a thing. Rather like questioning any of the left wing shibboleths. The same thing was true in 1930s Germany when you were sacked for claiming that “Jewish” Physics, ie Relativity and Quantum Theory were correct.
I wish they would start a subsidy scheme..
Oh to be able to afford the occasional Romeo y Julieta Churchill again.
A 7 inch Cuban cigar with a 47 ring size. Bliss for an hour.
As Rudyard Kipling is reputed to have said.
“A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke”.
I’ll bet he never said it in his wife’s hearing though.
They were fucking awesome. Sitting in the garden on a summer’s evening, quietly smoking as the birds and insects lived their lives – some of the most peaceful moments of my life.
Some fine havanas available at outrageous prices up in Auckland.
http://www.havanahouse.co.nz/webfiles/HavanaHouseCigarsNZ/files/2017_Retail_Pricelist.pdf
Sigh. Sadly, it’s been that long since I bought a cigar that those prices really are truly, truly outrageous.
Agreed – a borderline hate crime even.
I think good marijuana is cheaper on a per gram perspective.
Philistine.
“synonyms: crass, tasteless, uncultured, uncultivated, uneducated, untutored, unenlightened, unread, commercial, materialist, bourgeois, unsophisticated, unrefined”
How could you possibly compare Mary Jane to a fine Cuban cigar?
Or even one from the Dominican Republic as they are mostly are these days.
In New Zealand with a superannuation that’s not means or asset tested, that’s particularly true as every year early that someone dies from smoking-related causes is a significant saving in super that doesn’t have to be paid.
However, personally I’d rather people didn’t smoke and lived longer, so I’m OK with trying to convince people to stop smoking.
If it were just “trying to convince”, I’m okay with “telling to piss off”. Extortion and ostracism are a bit much, though.
Yep. There’s “trying to convince,” and there’s “let’s tax these things so much that fuckwits find it worth bashing a shop assistant to get them.”
My university’s currently trying to implement an extortion/ostracism plan for making the entire campus smoke-free, in which we managers are supposedly going to accost and note down identifying details of non-compliant smokers – “supposedly” because, well, like fuck that’s going to happen. My favourite part of the proceedings was when the public-health academics got into a scrap with the OSH people over whether designated smoking booths should be open or not – if they’re open, the deadly toxic fumes might be breathed in by innocent victims, but if they’re enclosed, that’s a breach of OSH regulations re smoking in an enclosed area in a workplace. Ah, good times…
Every so often I pull out the line that complete exclusion is discrimination on the grounds of having a medical condition, specifically addiction. If there’s nowhere for you to smoke, there’s nowhere for you to treat your addiction, therefore the place is not accessible to you because of your condition. Like stairs with no wheelchair access.
That’s why the ostracism is needed – so nobody looks at it logically.
Why did you enjoy it?
why does one enjoy a fine meal?
It’s actually a serious question – from an ex-smoker.
Someone who once would have sat down and ‘enjoyed’ a cigar.
I haven’t smoked for nearly 20 years and I actually gave up more than 20 years ago.
And that was a serious answer.
I mean, you can break down the appeal into things like the ritual, the diverse aromas, the variation between aroma and flavour, the art of storing and preparation, the breath control, and the generally calming and almost meditative practise, but (like poetry criticism and frog dissection) the experience is in the whole, not the sum of the parts.
It’s either something you go for, or something you don’t. Again, like poetry or frog dissection.
No, actually, it’s not.
This is what i mean by ‘ex-smoker’. It means that I’ve analysed the whole and realised that there was no attraction.
You smoked cigars?
Well, each to their own. I’m sure there are some musical pieces you think are awesome that I wouldn’t see the appeal of.
I have only just noticed this line of comments and this question.
I guess on this one I have to go along with McFlock.
It is the whole experience. I suppose the most pleasant part is sitting outside on a fine evening taking the occasional puff on the cigar and watching the smoke gently rise. Pure peace.
I really isn’t something that is subject to “analysis”
Perhaps Oscar Wilde put it best though
“If I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand”.
I never thought a simple comment about a cigar would have caused so many comments though.
Global economic crash coming in 2018.
Debt at $ 233 trillion…..
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/global-debt-crisis-explained-all-time-high-world-economy-causes-solutions-definition-a8143516.html
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/homer_simpson_end_is_near.jpg
It’s truly amazing how RWNJs always find ways to minimise or distract from the damage that their policies cause.
They don’t care anything except themselves.
The tornado/ tsunami/ flood has to actually hit them for it to become an important issue.
Their attitude is best summed up by the expression “I’m alright Jack.”
The 2017 version was “I’ve got a big barbecue and a boat.”
And then they’ll complain that a) the government isn’t doing enough and b) that the government should have acted sooner completely ignoring that it was them that prevented the government from acting as needed.
As you repeatedly and correctly state, we cannot afford the rich.
http://www.codecmoments.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-End-is-NOT-Nigh-01.jpg
More delusional pictures that mean nothing from a RWNJ that can’t make an argument.
How will they in the mega-high-finance world totter away from that. Would another war fix it?
I’m pretty sure that they’re hoping that it will.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11970041
John Roughan takes his shit with a ‘healthy’ dose of salt.
This is very possibly a piss take…I’m hoping…
“We are probably going to need bags of the stuff over the next few years. We are still enjoying good times economically and long may they last, but human society has to have something to worry about, or at least talk about, and in good times these days we fret about the environment. We had an election last year in which we were urged to worry that it was no longer safe to swim in rivers.
Be honest, do you want to swim in a river? “
Roughan.
Hosking.
Garner.
Soper.
Richardson
Smith
Williams
Pale
Male
Stale
Burn the witches !
Little bitches ?
Save your breath Jimmy.
Stunned mullet is looking for a reaction.
This is obviously the type of person who will get caught in the rip just off the beach and need to be rescued because he’s not swimming between the flags. The type of person who doesn’t understand that the flags are placed where swimming is safest. That moving the flags will make swimming less safe both for the swimmers and the lifeguards.
Good question? Why doesn’t he have any?
It was never right and has caused major problems. Please keep up to date with the real world.
That’s because you and them are really bloody stupid. Please note that if any of them had ended up in the hospital it would have been on our dime paying for their stupidity and then you would have been complaining about that.
One that would have ensured that the river would die. And we actually do need the environment to be healthy else we die as well.
We’re not separate from the environment but a part of it and we need it to live.
There’s a lot more joy provided by protecting the environment so that we can all survive than by trashing it to make a few rich and killing us all off.
Oh god, he even thinks that things stay the same all the bloody time. What a fucken moron.
Good reply dtb
And Roughan is a senior editor at the Herald.
That is how bad journalism is in this country.
He is the Master Clown?
Someone’s leaking details about the Downer – Papadopoulos meeting.
What followed was the now infamous May 2016 conversation over many glasses of wine at the swanky Kensington Wine Rooms, during which the 28-year-old Papadopoulos spilled to Downer that he knew of a Russian dirt file on the rival Clinton campaign consisting of thousands of hacked emails.
That night was a key moment that helped spark the FBI probe – since taken over by respected former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel – into possible Trump campaign collusion with the Kremlin, including its hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/romantic-encounter-set-off-australias-role-in-triggering-donald-trump-investigation-20180105-h0e34r.html?
Maybe someone should speak with Mifsud (the London based professor who apparently doesn’t speak Russian, but who has claimed to have contact with Putin and what-not.) and who the Austalian guy says Papadopoulos said told him there was a tranch of emails held by the Russian government.
Hmm.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/professor-named-in-russia-disclosures-says-he-has-clean-conscious/2017/10/31/41a7a08e-be3b-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html?utm_term=.1aebcb8d9213
I guess we’ll have to wait until Downer’s referred to the DOJ for making false statements to find out whether or not there’s fire.
/
Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham on Friday issued a criminal referral to the Justice Department, urging it to examine whether the former British spy Christopher Steele made false statements to the FBI “about the distribution of claims” contained in a dossier he wrote about alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/dossier-author-chris-steele-referred-to-doj-by-grassley-and-graham-2018-1?r=US&IR=T
That doesn’t follow joe90.
Downer’s statement can be honest enough, but simply not reflect reality.
The Fusion GPS op-ed earlier this week called for the release of the transcripts of their committee testimony. Grassley and Graham are shit scared of what might be revealed so they’ve come up with a reason to hold up any release – Steele and his report are subject to an investigation.
So, *cough*, any move to shut down the Downer story says they’re shit scared of any further information that may come to light.
So can Assange and Murray’s. Neither of them know where the hacked/leaked email’s they were provided with came from. Murray can only repeat what he was told by the intermediary.
That doesn’t stop people from treating their hearsay as evidence.
This “key moment that helped spark” the FBI investigation. From the description it was one of the factors involved – it “helped”.
These days of course, we can take Jared Kushner’s word for it that he thought he was going to collude with Moscow to get the emails.
I thought Assange stated the wikileaks release got passed to them by a “Washington insider” (or some such) but wouldn’t reveal the source. And Murray said something similar, no?
In other words, they say they know who provided the info.
I guess it’s possible that the Russian government (or an agency of) had emails that they obtained via the net and decided to put them on some hardware that they gave to someone else, who then passed said hardware and the info it held on to Wikileaks.
I’d have thought there were more direct and less fraught ways to get info up through Wikileaks mind. But hey…
Murray said what the intermediary told him and Assange acted as Murray’s stenographer.
And it’s what Kushner and the other Trump grunts thought that matters anyway. It wasn’t Assange offering to collude with them.
…these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
Mark Felt.
yeah and I wonder why Papadopolous wasn’t hauled in then and there for a thorough questioning. The Trump dossier has become such a liability that it cant be what prompted the FBI to surveil the Trump campaign. Now it has to be some earlier bullshit trigger
Meanwhile, on Earth, it’s likely that the FBI had a variety of reasons to start their investigation.
I can imagine why you would think there’d be just one though.
PS: the reason they don’t just “haul people in for questioning right then and there” is because from an investigator’s point of view, it’s nice to know the answers to the questions you’re putting to potential perps before you ask them.
And it takes 6 months ?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-31/nyt-publishes-report-debunking-fbi-use-dossier-gets-shredded-immediately-fake-news
It takes as long as it takes. These are, as Michael Shermer says, “extraordinary claims”: “an extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger context to see how it fits.”
I have some real problems with this – leaving aside how much of a creep Downer is.
Drunken conversations are generally full of overblown bs and bluster at the best of times. To have a Yank boast when they are drunk is somthing I’ve encountered many a time in my work and socially. To much hot air, and no substance. This looks like it may all turn to custard and everyone will walk free, again.
That said, if the right wing wanna stab each other in the back, who am I to stop them.
#freeahed
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-42417938/palestinian-girl-arrested-after-slap-video
edit: previously on TS
We should keep this one in people’s minds.
Thanks for adding the previous TS posts, so people have more information.
Clean green New Zealand. What a joke.
We’re kidding ourselves and the world is rapidly working that out.
We’re a selfish, squalid, polluting and corrupt nation that has succumbed to the worst extremes of neoliberalism and suffer from its worst outcomes.
‘China is refusing to take the world’s rubbish any longer, including New Zealand plastic. This move once again casts doubts on New Zealand’s claim to be a clean and green country. It also highlights the fact that recycling isn’t always a sign of ecological virtue……’
‘…..New Zealand’s “100 per cent pure” reputation takes another knock when we realise we are using other countries to dump our rubbish. But it also raises doubts about our own integrity as “green” householders. In fact, recycling seems even to have encouraged us to become more wasteful consumers than before…….’
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/100357268/chinas-refusal-to-take-our-rubbish-should-make-us-greener
We also use 95% of the world’s 1080 supposedly ?
We’re about the only place in the world where 1080 is a useful poison for wide-spread pest control.
Pretty much every where else in the world has ground-feeding native mammals they want to protect. New Zealand doesn’t. So the fact that 1080 is particularly effective on mammals and can be easily laid in baits on the ground means it has a low risk of killing species we want to protect here, so we use a lot. Almost all other places in the world, the risk of killing ground-feeding mammal species they want to protect is too high for them to use 1080.
Thanks andre for info.
The oligarchs the likes of Fletchers, Fay Richwhite, Alan Gibbs etc etc have done particularly well here in NZ since the introduction of neoliberalism in the 1980’s, according to Roger Douglas neoliberalism was going to be the best thing for New Zealand since the invention of sliced bread ?
Did we get suckered or did we not ?
MSM still keep telling us how well we are doing as a country ?
You speak a lot of sense.
This
https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/west-coast/erosion-exposes-old-greymouth-rubbish-dump
No money to fix it apparently
The sandflys are that scared of eco maori they are around were ever I go they think that they are going to break ecos wairua but no they are just adding to my mana ka pai sandflys you will never break ecos wairua Ana to kai .
I say that all the photos of shonky key on Ngati Porou web site should be deleted he was just stealing OUR mana. Kia kaha
Let’s learn from Iceland.
‘Iceland has long been deemed the best place in the world to be a woman. For the past nine years, the country has topped the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index.
In Iceland men get at least three months’ paternity leave, and 90% of them take it. This gives them time to become comfortable with child-rearing, encouraging them to share the workload with their partners. Women in Iceland are highly educated, a high percentage hold managerial positions and they don’t give up their careers to have children: they do both – like the country’s new prime minister. At the end of 2017 Iceland got its second female prime minister, a 41-year-old with three young sons.
Many in Iceland see the women’s strike of 1975 as a defining moment in the gender equality struggle. On the “women’s day off”, as it’s known, 90% of women stopped work and refused to do any household chores. Schools and nurseries were closed. Many shops, factories and theatres had to close their doors. Fathers were left with no choice but to bring their kids to work, stocking up on sweets and colouring pencils to keep them occupied. On the radio, children could be heard playing in the background while the newsreaders read the news. After work, the children needed to be fed and the whole thing ended up as the day the men of Iceland ran out of sausages…..’
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/05/iceland-female-women-equal-pay-gender-equality
+100 Ed
I find it intriguing that things that eco is interested in can no longer be found on the net
the first was that website dedicated to the corruption on NZ police after I told IPCA about it next was the photo of Waiomatatini marae Porourangi showing the white tekoteko on the marae 2 days ago the photo came up on the first search google photos not now and the books that Colonel William Porter one in particle is East Coast Maori myths and legends ???? why are they hiding this book what are the sandflys scared of it well eco knows you will have to find William Porters book to find out the one I found was on a Australian website. Ka kite ano
The colour revolution in Iran fizzes
The “colour revolution” in Iran disappeared from headlines with a massive pro-government demonstration
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2018/01/iran-europe-rejects-u_6.html?m=1
How Wolff got access: a bit of sucking up and a few friendly pieces early on. So it seems no Trumpies ever thought to check out any of his earlier work before letting him into the adult daycare playroom.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/04/donald-trump-michael-wolff-book-216245
They’re having a wee cry, and getting a shellacking down thread.
If you watch one film this year, watch this one.
Save the animals.
Save the planet.
Save yourself.
Good to see you back @OAB
Thanks UCG.
Ed/Paul/The jackal has missed you.
Have you? 😈
To the same degree as a fine dose of herpes. 😆
Getting under your skin is a bonus.
As is getting on your nerves 😉
😆
Just when you think these pricks couldn’t go any lower.
“Thump found friends in strange places and in all shapes and sizes. Such as the frogs that croaked ‘KEK!’ They were full of surprises!”
[…]
“Thump was caught talking of grabbing all things pusillanimous. Protesters even made pink hats: their ire was unanimous.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/01/04/alex-jones-hawking-pro-trump-children-s-book-indoctrinates-them-white-nationalism/218970
I don’t know how many would read that – too many multi syllable words.
I think giving the sandflys the pukana and letting everyone know the truth about the way they think and operate is nothing compared to what they are saying about me I know what they are saying and the tactics they are using on me would break most people so I think my intimidation is justified by there actions they best get a mirror .
Ana to kai
I can already see the sandflys next lines of malicious attacks to my character .
I will stop referring to eco as a second being as this is there next line of attack that they will try and lock me up on false charges.
I can see the line they are taking with the words there trolls on this site are trying to use against me .The difference here is a lot of good people know that what I write about ie the harassment the intimerdation the suppression the damage to my character these sandflys are trying to do are true. If they try and lock me up with there false charges everyone will be very upset .I am happy that I have thestandard website to defend my good character with PS they really don t like a MAORI with Mana do they .
Ka kite ano