Fine if you are well-placed to do those things. Pandemics are a classic example of things we can tackle most successfully through collective measures, not individual ones. The US is about to show us that.
We are sitting on 4% unemployed and there's a good risk this will double within 6 months.
Whereas we are 5 infections.
But actually what you heard from the PM's mouth in Parliament is that her focus is on the health of the New Zealand people. This was her clear response to Bridges. You can look it up.
Silent spread from Pre-symptomatic, Asymptomatic & Mild cases … but like the US & various other Western nations … we're in the Don't Test / Don't Tell phase where the economy is prioritised over human life… as opposed to taking urgent & decisive action to slow it down & prevent overwhelmed hospitals & needless death.
(Note: Pre-symptomatic (100% of those infected with COVID-19 go through Pre-Symptomatic incubation period of up to 2 weeks),
Asymptomatic (around20% of infected)
Mild cases (around 60% of those infected experience symptoms similar to a cold)
The number of tests being conducted every day was increasing, he said.
"Yesterday around the country, at least 100 tests were being done, but all our tests yesterday were negative.
"At the moment our labs can do over 500 tests in a day if they have to, and that capacity can be scaled up if needs be."
I read somewhere – but can't find the link – that there had been around 1000 tests done in NZ at that time. That would be around 200 tests per 1,000,000 people which would place NZ around 10th on the list of testing for the virus, above France and just below Australia.
So while you maybe right that there are a few more out there, the fact that testing of suspected cases is occurring and coming back negative – does give some hope that we might dodge the full effect.
But there are tests available and they are testing now over 100 a day and have capacity to be testing up to 500 a day and are working to expand that capacity. See my link above
The other thing is that testing might be the definitive diagnostic tool, but it's not the only diagnostic tool. Case history and symptom diagnosis provide the "probable" case count and suspected cases. Both are similarly sluggish in NZ, probably due to nation-of-origin traveller restrictions and screening.
Ironic/amusing that Robertson is actually flying to Australia for these talks. Because closing the border with Australia is the thing nobody will want to do, but has to happen soon to help prevent community spread here.
And in a broader note – getting the PMC and the wider middle class off aeroplanes would be a good thing not only in this crisis but into the future.
Grant Robertson will be in Australia tomorrow for a scheduled visit to Canberra where he will meet with Australian political and business leaders.
He will hold talks with his Australian counterpart Josh Frydenberg to discuss the actions both Governments are taking on the economic impacts of COVID-19, along with discussions about other economic matters.
The only thing I would add to this clip is that for the est Dems and the liberal media and all their billionaire and corporate master is this was and has never never been about beating Trump, it has always been about stopping Bernie and his progressive movement taking over the Democratic party.
Yeah pretty much. I still think that if you are a Sanders supporter you have a moral obligation not to vote for Trump – and if you are in a swing state to vote for Biden however tightly you have to hold your nose doing so.
I have been pretty amused by the attempts on here and elsewhere to rehabilitate Biden, explain his popularity and disguise his weaknesses. They look to me like obfuscations of a pretty simple phenomenon:
objectively, democratic party voters prefer most of Sander's policy positions (M4A, etc.) if they are discussed independently from the actual primary process
the same voters are less enamoured with some of Sanders rhetoric about democratic socialism and taking on the establishment, but could probably overlook it
the voters are desperate to beat Trump and are looking for guidance from party grandees on who can do this – the bullshit 'electability' myth pushed by the PMC-dominated corporate wing of the Democratic Party has been hugely successful and entirely to be expected as they move to protect their financial and class interests
Biden is a weak candidate because his terrible record will allow Trump to outflank him on the left (e.g. on trade deals and job losses), because of the real or apparent corruption swirling round him (Burisma) and because he is clearly a step or two down in terms of electioneering performance and rhetorical fluency compared to 2016
All up this promises to be the most grimly hilarious and simultaneously sickening US election in a long time. If Covid-19 overwhelms it and the administration proposes postponing it, that might be very interesting to watch too (for those of us who are still around at least)
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." President John Quincy Adams
The “lesser evil” argument in NZ general elections has been run forever, with some obvious merit re needed reforms of course, MMP, and the 30 year neo liberal consensus between National, Labour and later the Greens notwithstanding!
However in the USA in 2020 as Krystal said in the vid–“shoot me or stab me” is the working class’ choice. Nothing will change for the millions without health care if Mr Biden is elected, or any of the other grim shit that currently goes down in the land of the free.
Bernie should stay in the contest as long as he likes because he owes literally nothing to the US ruling class of which the Democratic elite is part, due to his working class funded campaign. He should use any platforms for the future development of the movements that have enabled him. The moderates have to own Biden now.
Bernie is definitely still in the race, he only trails by 148 delegates, Biden is on 800+, Bernie is on 700+, there are still 2000+ to fight for, don’t listen to the media, Bernie will fight the billionaires to the bitter end
Lefties don't owe Biden their vote. It's merely in their very strong interest to give it him rather than put it anywhere else. To ensure the Turd Tornado doesn't get another completely unrestrained four years to trash the remnants of everything lefties value.
The idea that things getting worse will bring the glorious revolution sooner is a craptacularly bad idea that has a historical success rate of zero.
The situation we now have is a testament to the power of patient incrementalism, as practised by the right.
The damage that tRump, and the repugnants who provide him with the power base in the Senate, have done to the climate, the environment, the safe guards of a functioning society, the rights of people, and to the justice system and the courts, whilst enriching themselves at the public expense, is immense; and will not be undone in one or even two terms of office.
The only hope for America is a complete Blue wave in Nov and that realistically can only be achieved with a candidate who appeals to a large cross section of society.
Anyone who thinks Biden is different from trump is completely captured by fear. Both are of the same ilk, corporate lap dogs. trumps a complete dog f&**&^g muppet, but the reality is biden has voted for many things, which if your left wing you would oppose – but no doubt will make up some excuse.
No one wants a revolution, what anarchist are asking for is the left to actually be the bare minimum of left (social democrat) – rather than corporate lick spittles.
FFS! Open your eyes to what is actually going on in the US right now. If you think that things will continue as they are now under the most corrupt, despotic, xenophobic, misogynistic, environmental vandal to have ever disgraced the White House you are very much mistaken, Even so the damage he has wrecked in the 3 long years he has been there is unbelievable – but just take a look a what he has done to the environment for a start:
Grow up, and look at what happened to america for the last 30 years.
trump is a more of an open arsehole than people like biden and co, but they are no different. They might be able to smile better or say all the right words like Obama did, but they still nothing more than hacks for the corporations.
The whole lesser evil argument is spent, the whole trump is the worst is bullshit – try reading how much of an arsehole James Buchanan was, or my personal least favourite fuckwit to sit in the oval office Herbert Hoover. Stop burying you head in fubar rhetoric. Every president since Reagan has been a tool for corporate america.
Face the real world, the USA has been taken over by the corporations and people no longer count.
Obviously you have no understanding of how political action happens in the US nor any appreciation of where the power lies in terms of the implementation of policy. I totally agree with you that America is now a corporatocracy – but that is not just the fault of successive Presidents. If you really want to point the finger at the failure of successive American administrations to implement progressive policies look no further than the far right and the Republican party who have consistently opposed Bill after Bill passing either through the House or the Senate. Take for example the Bill proposed by Democrats to ensure that all persons in America can receive free Covid-19 testing and those without sick leave will receive at least 14 days paid leave. Mitch McConnell is on record as saying that sort of legislation will never be put to the Senate. Despite the fact that Pelosi has been in discussion with the Administration to put together this package. This just the latest example of Republicans sitting on proposed legislation that would be of benefit to all Americans were it to be passed. Gun Laws, Health Care, Environmental Protections, Work and Safety, Employment legislation, indeed dozens of Bills passed by the House this past year sit at McConnell's pleasure and will never see the light of day. As leader of the Senate he does not have to place these Acts to be voted on and he never will.
To effect real change in America will require that the current democrat control of the House is maintained, the Democrats retake control of the Senate (easier said than done), and a Democratic President to ensure that progressive legislation is finally signed into law,
But even that will not ensure the safety of progressive legislation, because the 3rd side of equation – the courts – will come into play. Right wing players opposed to anything that would jeapodise their wealth will sue and bring court actions to oppose anything they disagree with. For instance, we have seen these actions taken by civil rights groups to oppose some of the extreme measures instituted by the Trump administration. Now under a fair court system one would expect justice to prevail and the principles of fair dealings would be sacrosanct. However that can no longer be taken for granted after the past 3 years of Trump. You may not be aware that during this time the only thing that McConnell has been doing in the Senate is to introduce incompetent, unqualified, white, right wing men, to the task of lifetime judges. The courts are now stacked with right wing justices whose sole task is to support the right wing agenda, and this will be so for the next 30+ years. This will be Trumps legacy, along with the destruction of the Constitution, the collapse of civil law and order, and the destruction of the environment.
Indeed just today a senior Judge has resigned from a Bar of the Supreme Court from what he perceives as the Courts being turned into "a junior partner to Trump's Republican Party".
@ Andre, "The situation we now have is a testament to the power of patient incrementalism, as practised by the right"….you are quite right, however you forgot to add it is a trick they learnt from the liberal left who have perfected that very technique themselves over the past 25-30 years.
This MPI document highlights just how severely the dairy industry is in debt. It looks like some sort of ponzi scheme. Here's a few quotes:
On-farm bank debt has increased by $30.1 billion since 2003 and currently stands at $41.4 billion. a 267 percent increase since 2003
In the 2017–2018 season dairy farms on average had a debt-to-asset ratio of 50.7 percent. However, many farms are holding high levels of debt: 24 percent have ratios over 70 percent; and 4 percent have ratios over 90 percent.
Relative to production, farm debt levels have more than doubled from $9.48 per kilogram of milksolids in 2003 to $21.99 in 2019.
The average level of bank debt held per hectare has more than tripled since 2003, rising from $7,700 to $23,600 in 2018.
In addition, the number and proportion of farms Distribution of dairy sector debt per kg of milk solids 2014 and 2018 holding high levels of debt have also increased.
In particular, the percentage of farms holding greater than $30 of debt per kilogram of milk solids produced annually has increased from 16 percent in 2014 to 30 percent in 2018.
Despite falling interest rates over recent years, the burden of servicing this elevated debt has increased. Since 2014, the average annual cost of servicing this elevated debt has increased by 11 cents to $1.22 per kilogram of milk solids in 2018.
Relative to production, farm debt levels have more than doubled from $9.48 per kilogram of milksolids in 2003 to $21.99 in 2019.
The average level of bank debt held per hectare has more than tripled since 2003, rising from $7,700 to $23,600 in 2018.
In addition, the number and proportion of farms Distribution of dairy sector debt per kg of milk solids 2014 and 2018 holding high levels of debt have also increased.
In particular, the percentage of farms holding greater than $30 of debt per kilogram of milk solids produced annually has increased from 16 percent in 2014 to 30 percent in 2018.
Despite falling interest rates over recent years, the burden of servicing this elevated debt has increased.
Since 2014, the average annual cost of servicing this elevated debt has increased by 11 cents to $1.22 per kilogram of milk solids in 2018.
To be that leveraged when interest rates are so low….Sitting ducks.
None of the potential escape routes are flash: Extract even more milk solids from each hectare or surf the imaginary wave of ever increasing farm capital growth.
If the figures in the report related to a rental property portfolio I think the banks would of said "No more money for now" a long time ago. Too risky.
I wonder if there is a degree of faith from the banks with farm lending because of potential escape routes. eg: 'The govt won't let us fail en masse, we're too important to fail.'
Waiting for 25 million Australian climate refugees to push land prices up?
The house of cards that was farming for tax free Capital gains,, by borrowing to pay land prices way over the amount justified by farm incomes, depends on either bigger suckers, or continued exponential population increase.
It is almost bound to burst at some stage.
Unless we sell it all to billionaire refugees, from the mess they have made in their own countries.
Yes. Rather strange when most New Zealanders were either escaping from the power of feudal style land ownership in the UK, or Māori, who had a more socialised model of land ownership.
I suppose because the squattocracy very quickly grabbed land, and power, before the majority got the vote.
Looking past the title, this is an intelligent and reasonably even-handed discussion. Quite a long read but usefully examines the characteristics of the three main systems we've tried to date; feudalism, capitalism and socialism.
As we said at the start, it’s hard these days to find heartfelt support for capitalism. But it is relatively easy to find a reluctant, perhaps begrudging, endorsement of what passes for capitalist ways of running contemporary societies. Thus, it is sometimes said that socialism is a utopian but unrealistic body of ideas — one that simply assumes that people would be willing to work hard for the common good. Socialist theories, it is often said, simply go about describing how nice things would be if this were so.
Of course, the begrudging defence of capitalism goes, such optimistic assumptions about human nature are false. The reality is that humans are selfish creatures, who seek to advance their own good over that of society, perhaps only seeking to help close family and a few friends. To get people to be productive in ways that benefit everyone, we need to set up society with the right incentives. This inevitably results in things like economic inequality, high levels of consumption, and pretty harsh enforcement of laws that protect private property. This state of affairs may be less desirable than a socialist utopia, but it’s the best we can hope for. After all, feudalism as a third alternative is horrible.
Those who advance such an argument see it as an effective defence of capitalism — and it may be — but it’s not typically sold as an ethical defence. On this approach, capitalism simply has no “ethics,” in terms of having moral foundations. Instead, it’s a sort of remedial way of organising the economy, one that tries to save us from ourselves and from each other, without aspiring to any higher moral goal or justification. On this view, capitalism is, at best, second best. Socialism may have moral foundations, but it’s utopian — capitalism, on the other hand, is realistic.
In this view, feudalism is unacceptably tyrannical and unjust, while pure socialism is utopian and unrealistic, leaving capitalism as we know it the compromise we can live with. Yet there isn’t much enthusiasm for capitalism either … which means we need fresh thinking about where to go from here, taking into account the known boundaries of what works.
Expecting, pure, anything, is just delusional. Even with feudalism, the lord was expected to defend the peasants, and release his grain stores in time of famine. Those that didn’t tended to end up on a pitchfork.
If you care to read the article, it points out that all modern societies are some mixture of all three systems, and most developed nations exhibit elements of capitalism and socialism in particular.
You can even point to feudalism and make the argument that it lasted a lot longer than all the other alternatives, even though nowadays we reject it because of it's innate injustice.
And every marxist revolution, which is the 'purest' form of socialism we've tried so far, has ended in catastrophic failure. Only the truly self-deluding would argue otherwise.
Capitalism (or commercialism as it might be more accurately named) carries by itself no expression of any ethical system to be palatable in it's pure form either, it contains no obvious incentives to do the right thing. Maybe there is the problem, we make a fundamental mistake when we expect economic systems, any economic system, to stand duty for personal ethics.
Maybe if we want people to do the right thing, we need to be looking in an entirely different domain, because humans have never been inspired to greatness by purely material interests alone.
Capitalism, is going to end human civilisation.
All human civilisations, including all those greatly pre-dating ‘capitalism’, have come and gone.
Bull. The "purest form" of socialism, in history, occurred in New Zealand from the first Labour Government, and many other Western countries, until overtaken by the return of neo-liberal capitalism. Note that by all measures, they were the most successful societies, ever.
If you consider an undemocratic totalitarian dictatorship, with a wealthy class of "nomenclatura" on top hogging most of the resources, "socialism," you have NFI. Taken in by the same bs, that has USA voting for billionaires, against their own best interests.
The Soviet Union was "socialist" and "Democratic" for about two weeks,, before the Bolsheviks took over. The problem with any revolution, including our own Neo-liberal one, is that the most ruthless, self interested bastards, end up on top.
You can hardly claim China, is a failure if you consider that a “Marxist revolution”. Rather a misinterpretation of Marx, BTW.
I don’t like their Government or the methods. Almost as ruthless as the USA, but they have bailed out US, capitalism, several times, and our own economic dependence on the “communists” is becoming painfully obvious.
This New Zealand you paint as a socialist utopia was entirely funded on the back of capitalist enterprise. Most people worked in entirely capitalist enterprises, personal property was still owned by almost everyone; it was at best a 'mixed economy' featuring large components of both capitalism (which appeals to individual self-interest) and socialism (which presumes most people are willing to be altruistic to at least some degree).
As it happens I too share a considerable nostalgia for this all too short era. It seems to me we hit a sweet spot for a few short decades, based largely on the experience of the war generations who had learned the value of sacrifice for the greater good. But that alone was never the basis for a stable ethical system, the trauma of depression and war always fades with time.
But to describe it as the 'purest form of socialism' we have tried is bunk.
If it were just the Bolsheviks you might have a point, but the same brutal failures happened everywhere else that marxism was tried. Besides you are talking with one of the very few kiwis who has stood at the place where the Revolution was actually born, in Sverdlovsk during the Czarist era. Revolutions are by their nature undertaken by people who are willing to pay any price for their victory; the brutality was baked in right from the outset.
More crap. You are parroting the US right wing propaganda view of socialism.
And you have certainly never bothered to read Marx, or Adam Smith for that matter.
Hint. They were not that far apart.
I never thought you would adopt the same self serving religious, and justification for fucking everyone else over, thinking the US, republicans, and our National party parrot.
George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier characterised it more accurately as ' bitter middle class socialists who resented those more successful than them far more than any real concern they had for the poor'.
If you really want to see envy, which I have first hand, it is the rich parasite with the 40m yachts resentment of the rich parasite with the 100m yacht.
And yes correct, there seem to be way too many "chardonnay socialists" like our current Labour party, and right wing converts pretending to be “socialist” who given the opportunity to remove poverty, prefer to keep their own comfort.
Sighs … you pretend not to be resentful, but then describe people more successful than yourself as 'parasites'. Twice in the same sentence. Terms of disgust and disease used to vilify whole groups of people is something you should ask a Jewish friend about; they know very well how that works.
The parroting of US propaganda and right wing memes, from a formerly sensible commentator, is painful to read.
Why don't you just say it "A rising tide lifts all boats". I.e. Trickle down. Which is what you are claiming with your bull.
If a young unemployed bloke, through no fault of his own, on a measly $154 a week, is a "bludger" then someone getting thousands of times more money than their contribution to society justifies, is most definitely a "parasite". Existing on what they have taken off that young fellow, and many others.
"Parasite" is not being envious, just descriptive.
I am comfortable and well off enough in my own life, that I don't envy, anyone. I do however, think everyone should have the same chances I had.
Extremes of wealth and poverty, are what has destroyed civilisations in the past.
The dominance of political power by the "rich" and distressingly the support of other comfortable people, who have forgotten how society helped them get there, is destroying my society.
"Parasite" is not being envious, just descriptive.
It's exactly the same language Hitler used to demonise the Jewish people. It's indefensible.
Extremes of wealth and poverty, are what has destroyed civilisations in the past.
I've lost count how many times I've expressed the identical sentiment here over the years. Probably at least twice a month for over a decade. So don't pretend to lecture me on this.
I've said this many times too, the paradoxical thing is that the modern post WW2 world has dramatically reduced absolute poverty to an extent never seen before in 10,000 years of human history. The left pretends it's all for the eradication of poverty, but much to our chagrin it was highly industrialised, financialised and commercialised economies that did it. Marxism by contrast was a bitter failure wherever it was tried.
It's time we got honest about this, the denial indefensible.
Yet at the same time, these same incredibly productive economies have increased relative poverty dramatically. And it turns out that just throwing more money at this problem makes it worse. The underlying problem is that success creates opportunity and this in turn creates more success. This is a positive feedback loop that for some people drives extreme success.
Even though we can institutionally allocate everyone pretty much the same initial opportunities (and this is the other great achievement of the past few hundred years), humans are not all identical and we don't want to be. We do have different temperaments, different talents, capabilities, and sometimes fortune smiles and other times she doesn't. There is nothing we can do about this, you can have freedom of action, or equality of outcome, but not both. This means that the extremes of wealth is a much harder problem to address than everyone imagines.
To use a crude analogy, we could achieve equality of outcome in the 100m sprint if we cut Usain Bolt's legs off, but that wouldn't make anyone else run any faster, nor make anyone much happier except perhaps those who envied his natural talent.
This is the point I invite you to think about, please don't skip it. It's my sense that relative poverty (or gross inequality) is not best thought of as an economic problem. Certainly it's superficial manifestation can be measured in monetary terms, but the reason why gross disparity causes social instability is much less obvious. The underlying drivers have more to do with human psychology and moral values than anything in the monetary domain.
Wealth by itself is not the problem; it is how it is used that should concern us. This is and the temptation to fall into hubris and entitlement is the ethical or moral question.
At the other extreme, once you have gotten out of absolute poverty, the lack of wealth is not directly the problem either. It is the fact of being hopelessly wedged at the bottom of the social heap which can easily prompt responses of resentment and self sabotage is the underlying problem that traps people into bitterness.
In simple terms, the manifest symptoms of inequality are very different depending on your position in the economic hierarchy, but the moral nature of them lies in the same domain. And maybe reframing the debate this way we can find some fresh thinking toward actual solutions.
We "hit a sweet spot" as a result of returning soldiers determination not to be an underclass, on their return from war.
However returning to a Nation with poverty and an underclass, was the result of deliberate decisions, by two successive Governments, less than 60 people each time, to have poverty, to force people into low wage, exploitative jobs. It wasn't a necessity. Even Bolger had the grace to admit they went too far.
Reversing it will simply take another Government decision, to raise welfare above starvation levels.
The motivation was stated by Wayne Mapp, on this blog. He a lawyer, believed there was "too much equality" exemplified by wharfies "getting paid more than Lawyers". The arrogance and self interest is obvious. He never explained when asked, why, a lawyer should get more than a Wharfie.
You can hardly claim China, is a failure if you consider that a “Marxist revolution”.
It was a monumental failure right up to the point where Nixon opened up the global economy to them and the CCP decided to stop being communist and make filthy capitalist money instead.
That's a pretty narrow view their Redlogix, one based on a whole lot of misconceptions.
It ignores the reality of the failed state that was China in the Warlord period, you double down on it by ignoring the damage done by Japan during the second world war.
No one would argue that Mao was a great economic mind, actually on that front he was bloody useless. But he did win two wars.
The CCP had a plan, and the did stick to it, to uplift the peasantry out of drudgery. They used a planned economy and some aspects of capitalism. But they too have the problems of capitalism – namely the PLA which is frightening corporation
But capitalism as a dominate economic system is deeply flawed for two main reason (actually many more) – monopoly and the concept of growth. Monopoly is a fundamental problem we are stuck with at present. Growth is a problem because we live in a finite planet.
Up until the end of WW2 the historic pattern of the world was always empire. From around 1000AD onward I recall an article that counted over 30 of them.
The simple idea was that in order to develop beyond the physical constraints of your existing territory (usually due to geography or the limits of photosynthesis) it was necessary to grab the resources of others. So you built an army and a navy and set about controlling as much trade and territory as possible. While white ethnicities dominated this game in the past 500 years, history quickly shows that everyone who could had a crack at it.
The process started out pretty crude and brutal, outright theft and tyranny was the norm for centuries. Over time however the process of empire became more sophisticated and the development that it generated were slowly extended to more and more groups. With industrialisation and the massive increase in productivity this process accelerated.
At the end of WW2 the Americans had the only military left standing, the same damage you rightly say happened to China, had left the British and Europeans equally devastated. Germany especially. But the Soviets remained a threat that didn't have a clear military solution to, the logistics of the Americans attempting a ground war into Russia was clearly impossible.
At Bretton Woods the Americans decided to try something different, unprecedented in human history. Instead of building yet another overt empire they cut a deal with the rest of the world that said "we will use our overwhelming naval power to protect trade routes everywhere in the world, and in return you have to be on our side in the Cold War". They essentially bribed up a global alliance.
It also meant that trade routes everywhere were open and secure. The US Navy assured this. You could sent goods between any two nations, and the Americans provided the implicit security without any overt impost. You were expected to use US dollars as the trading currency and support the US politically against Stalin's Soviet Union … but that was pretty much it. It was a hegemony, but not like any that came before it.
And in terms of human development, this innovation was wildly successful. Since the end of WW2 the gradual elimination of absolute poverty has accelerated to the point that in 2016 fully half the human race is now middle class by local standards. That is a stunning achievement, utterly unprecedented, that most lefties like to pretend hasn't happened.
As for China, it's geography means that it is utterly dependent on the freedom of the seas for almost all of it's development. It's trade routes to essential resources and exports are long and vulnerable; without US Naval protection, China would never have become 'the factory of the world' that is today (well it was until a few weeks ago). All the Americans have to do to collapse China is to go home.
This isn't a moral narrative; it isn't a justification for all the obvious fuck ups the American's have made along the way, but it is a realistic description of the unique global order that we have flourished under since WW2.
I could equally describe the myriads of failures in the US attempts to impose capitalist dictatorships around the world. Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, just being the latest.
Even the attempt to run Sears, in the States, as a competitive capitalist corporation within itself has been a dismal failure. Even capitalist corporations cannot exist without social cohesion and Co operation.
The reality is that humans are selfish creatures, who seek to advance their own good over that of society
I'm sick and tired of social darwinist bullshit being peddled as some sort of universal "Truth". Especially in economic discussions – it like some bad rerun of 80's tv. "Dallas" was a tv show, and in no way did it represent reality.
If this social darwin troup was true, then libertarian economics would work, and the social experiment of the last 30 odd years would make everyone a winner! Funny it's almost a complete failure. As this recession we are entering will be particular brutal on individuals.
Mutual aid, is a concept a lot on the left just don't get. It's what makes socialist economics work. The realisation that working together on somthing is beneficial for you and yours. As an anarchist I'd argue that those thing are limited – health care, education, and housing all work better under a mutual aid model. As for material production and agriculture I'm for mix of co-operative and individualist approaches. Some planning is necessary.
And to give Ad his due, we need trade, trade is a good. But trade is not capitalism, nor is dependant on capitalism. Trade can exist without capitalism.
Capitalism is a broken model, as is Marxist economics. We have to look at more than just profit and the next growth cycle.
Capitalist ideas that people can only by motivated by greed, doesn't explain most Teachers, Doctors Aunties, Caregivers and the many other people who are certainly not motivated by greed, that make society function.
Those that are motivated purely by self interest, are totally unable to understand other motivations, though they are happy to profit from them. The main differential between the current left and right in New Zealand. Once we had economic right wingers who agreed that prosperity for all was a goal. We just differed on how to get there. That I could respect. I cannot respect the current self serving justification for what amounts to, theft.
The scientist that gave away the rights to insulin to save lives, is a being beyond their limited comprehension.
Thatcher's, "there is no such thing as society" is one of the most pernicious and dangerous, ideas of modern times. Adam Smith did not say "greed is good". In fact he wanted the people that Marx called, "rentiers" those who got paid from "owning" not "working" to pay the taxes.
The U.S. has just carried out multiple air strikes in Iraq targeting Iranian-backed Shia militia. The air strikes are retaliation for yesterday's rocket attack that killed and wounded American and British troops at camp Taji north of Baghdad.
Every idiot who says "photo op" or "show pony" about Ardern should really watch the media conference she just gave in ChCh.
Anyone can read an autocue (except Trump) but it's the subsequent Q & A that really shows her quality. The key point is that she is saying what she thinks – not what some spin staffer has told her to say. The best fluency comes from sincerity.
Every idiot who's down the "photo op" or "show pony" track could see the media conference, hear the media conference and come away with the same crap they usually parrot.
To compound the sad situation they're in, they would see Simon Bridges doing better, being better and stunning the gathering with his eloquence and presence.
About fkn time. The hero whistleblower who actually took the risks and paid the price and stood up for her principles is finally being released from prison. The assholes are still trying to squeeze her financially, though, by refusing to cancel fines that should never have been imposed.
They tossed her in the slammer because she wouldn't cough up new material to use against Assange (on the perfectly reasonable grounds she didn't have any new material to give them). So I don't really see how releasing her is in any way negative for Assange.
It all depends on why they released her now it’s at the trial stage in the UK (too late to present anything obtained form her or they have reason to be confident about getting the extradition).
From wikipedia (source info is apparently NYT and WaPo):
On March 12, 2020, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia found that the business of the grand jury had concluded. Since Manning's testimony was no longer needed, the judge found that detention no longer served any coercive purpose, and ordered her released.[243] He denied a request by Manning's lawyers to vacate her accrued fines of $256,000, which he ordered due and payable immediately.[244]
If the Grand Jury has wrapped up, then they've more or less finished putting together their case against Assange. Which would presumably include all of Manning's previous testimony, and she says she's already testified to everything she knows.
TOP party talking UBI again. In case anyone missed release around 10 March. Maybe with inflation indexed safeguards, this inflation calculation to include rents and rise in house prices?
Right-wing evangelist Jonathan Shuttlesworth has no time for "loser" pastors who are canceling services because of the coronavirus, saying they should instead be holding mass gatherings to demonstrate the power of their faith. pic.twitter.com/XNXJ89AE32
To be fair, he's correct: holding mass religious gatherings during a pandemic would demonstrate quite clearly just how much power faith has to affect material reality, ie none. Pretty expensive demonstration if you value human life, though…
But a great way of disabusing people of the hilarious notion that the magical sky wizard will protect them from pestilence, famine, war and other interesting ways of dying.
Part of me is in favour of it. A small, dark, bloody-minded part of me I do my best to keep suppressed most of the time.
it’s even happening for Trump cheerleader Stu Varney, who is dumbfounded by 2020 campaign flack Kylie McEnany’s pitiful response (deny, deflect) to concerns that campaign is not ruling out rallies and Trump is still shaking hands.
Turkey's control of coronavirus testing kits is fuelling concerns over a cover-up, a prominent surgeon wrote for The National Interest on Wednesday.
“To date, Turkey has done about 2,500 tests. The lack of any identified cases provoked suspicion because if the test is negative, there was no other way to prove that the test might be positive,” said Dr. Ergin Koçyıldırım, a paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburg’s School of Medicine.
A source at a privately owned hospital in Istanbul told Ahval that the government was controlling the distribution of kits and not allowing hospitals to independently order alternatives.
Turkey has said its own virus detection kits are the fastest and most accurate in the world. While most detection kits generally yield results in around 24 hours, the Turkish government said its kits – produced in Turkey by a private company and funded by the state – can produce results in 90 minutes.
Despite the Health Ministry’s claims that Turkish coronavirus detection kits have been exported to several countries, including the United States, Koçyıldırım said that – to his knowledge – there was not a single institution or lab in that country using the tests.
Koçyıldırım also said that the Turkish government’s censorship of information was preventing people receiving reliable information on the coronavirus and was a disaster waiting to happen.
Turkey is the world’s biggest jailer of journalists and has threatened to take legal action against social media users or journalists who criticise its coronavirus detection approach, said Koçyıldırım.
The global coronavirus pandemic could be over by June if countries mobilize to fight it, a senior Chinese medical adviser said on Thursday, as China declared the peak had passed there and new cases in Hubei fell to single digits for the first time.
Around two-thirds of global cases of the coronavirus have been recorded in China’s central Hubei province, where the virus first emerged in December. But in recent weeks the vast majority of new cases have been outside China.
[…]
“Broadly speaking, the peak of the epidemic has passed for China,” said Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission. “The increase of new cases is falling.”
Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese government’s senior medical adviser, said at a news conference on Thursday that as long as countries take the outbreak seriously and are prepared to take firm measures, it could be over worldwide in a matter of months.
“My advice is calling for all countries to follow WHO instructions and intervene on a national scale,” he said. “If all countries could get mobilized, it could be over by June.”
Mr. Zhong, an 83-year-old epidemiologist renowned for helping combat the SARS outbreak in 2003, said viruses in the same family typically become less active in warm months, which could help slow the spread.
“My estimate of June is based on scenarios that all countries take positive measures. But if some countries do not treat the infectiousness and harmfulness seriously, and intervene strongly, it would last longer.”
We'll find out if the Chinese approach works as they go back to work in the next few weeks.
If they do not go back to work soon the global supply chain is stuffed, if they do and there is a renewed spread of the virus … then that demonstrates there is no guarantees form harsh prolonged action.
They insist that – beyond taking extra care with their personal hygiene – healthy festival-goers need only come prepared to have a good time.
WOMAD is being held at Brooklands Park in New Plymouth for the 16th time this year and can attract up to 15,000 people on each of its three days.
Festival director Emere Wano said its management had been monitoring health officials' advice and so far everything pointed to the event going ahead.
Wano said WOMAD was following steps set out in its risk management plan.
"It's common sense stuff really, when you look at the environment it's all about basic hygiene. If you're not well don't come to the festival, don't come and get amongst groups of people. Look after yourself.
"Washing hands, we should all be doing those things anyway. They're not rocket science as we see it."
insert many many face palm, head on desk and back to face palm
WOMAD. So Sad. Such utter ignorance and disregard for the health and safety of their workers and their patrons.
All public assembly should be banned forthwith.
Where is our leadership? Everyday we delay taking simple, decisive action to contain spread of the virus will cause exponentially greater suffering at the peak.
The normally excellent Mehdi Hassan making the mistake of thinking it's a problem that Joe Biden lies a lot. Sorry Mehdi, in a world where Sanders gets pilloried for NOT lying about Cuba, it matters not a jot.
Good article on the trials of the great Dr Jordan Peterson:
Dependency goes against the core tenets of Peterson’s philosophical brand: stoicism, self-reliance, the power of the will over circumstance and environment.“No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life,” he admonished in his bestselling self-help book 12 Rules for Life.
A China Eastern Airlines' A350 departed for Rome, Italy from Shanghai, bringing 9 Chinese medical experts and 31 tons of medical supplies, including plasma of recovered coronavirus patients, to help Italy fight against the #COVID19 pandemic pic.twitter.com/nbft5NXYB0
The guy standing to Trump’s left just tested positive for coronavirus, according to Brazilian media. Fabio Wajngarten posted this photo, taken during meetings at Mar-a-Lago, five days ago. pic.twitter.com/qioU4qIlxl
What a statement of the Trump era that much international diplomatic business goes on at Mar-a-Lago, barely 2km away from the house of Trump's good friend, Jeffrey Epstein.
I wouldn't gloat at this either. Those poor fucking viruses – I'm just glad they lack the cognitive capacity to realise what a sack of shit they're living in.
The Hyde amendment blocks the use of federal funds to pay for abortion.
Republicans are refusing to pass a bill that has – free coronavirus testing – paid emergency medical leave – extended unemployment insurance – food assistance – help for health care workers. Call their offices, tell them to get their shit together and do it. Thanks.
A key sticking point in the talks appears to be GOP demands to include Hyde amendment language in the bill to prevent federal funds from being used for abortion
Give the present dreadful state of American politics, there are quite a number of 'representatives' for whom, some may say, federally funded retrospective abortions could be a very good idea! 😉
As the world economy slides rapidly towards deep recession there are growing calls for a Universal Benefit coming from some leftists and rightists. Now Finance Minister Grant Robertson is saying it is on the table. This article by a French party Workers Struggle provides analysis of various forms of universal ...
This is the advice from the very top of the anti-fluoride movement – Paul Connett, director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN). Don’t worry about reading up on all the scientific information “You only have ...
. . April 4: Day 10 of living in lock-down… I wake up to a fine Saturday morning which normally would be like an early Christmas. But it’s Day 10 of Level 4 Lock Down. What will my fellow New Zealanders be doing on a day like this – staying ...
Some time during the night we went over the 850,000 views mark. We might have had our millionth view by the end of this year – certainly by early next year. Most of the people involved in Redline spent years and years producing various small left-wing papers and selling them ...
Comfortably, in the very first round, with an impressive 56% of the votes.I wonder, did members of the Shadow Cabinet start tweeting their resignations during Starmer's victory speech, or is that only a trick the right pull?It is odd how all the talk of how the next leader "needs to ...
One of the key voices in this extraordinary time in which we live is that of University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker. Philip Matthews did an an excellent job this weekend of capturing the way he became the man for this moment in a profile for The Press.But one ...
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed the nation today about the decline in daylight New Zealand has been experiencing over the previous few months. She said “As many of you will notice, our attempts to stem the dwindling of the daylight over the last few months have been completely ...
Redline received this article from the KOE a Marxist party in Greece Our friends in the KOE describe here the mounting crisis in Greece and tensions on the Turkish border. As desperate people flee from their homelands which have been ruined after decades of imperialist wars and interventions the people ...
As the first week of Level Four lockdown unfolded, mounting questions grew as to just what was (and was not) allowed under its “rules”. Partly these were driven by some apparently contradictory messagesfrom different authority figures and explanations carried in the media. Partly they reflected a somewhat sketchy legal basis ...
. . April 3: Day 9 of living in lock-down… Another late-start to my work day. Everything is temporarily upended as clients are shuffled around so we can minimise our “bubble” by reducing the number of people we help. One of my colleagues has been removed from his clients; his ...
In order to meet our 2050 carbon target and do our bit to avoid making the Earth uninhabitable, New Zealand needs to decarbonise our economy, replacing fossil fuels with electricity in the energy, industrial and transport sectors. The good news is that it will mean cheaper power for all of ...
For those folk who find my other Lock-Down Diary versions too “negative” or otherwise unpalatable… Here’s a photo of a pretty flower, . . Better? Tomorrow’s Sanitised Version: a cute animal video. . . . =fs= ...
. . April 2: Day eight of living in lock-down… Today, my work day starts late. Our rosters and clients have been dramatically changed, lessening (theoretically) the number of people in our work “bubble”. If just one of us catches covid19 the impact could be considerable as Grey Base Hospital ...
As Aotearoa enters week two of lockdown, it’s clear we’re all still working out what our “bubbles” look like and how to stay in them to stop the spread of Covid-19. New to the government’s Covid-19 website is some good guidance for people living in apartment blocks. Recent decades have ...
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Lenin Don’t we all know that feeling now.
Prospect Magazine alerted me to this particularly apt quote. It is a much more evocative quote than Hemingway’s “gradually then suddenly” which is also doing ...
Yesterday was the day the consequences of the lockdown suddenly got very real for many. Firms have been closing and laying people off since the outset of the quarantine but this has mostly been happening out of the public eye. The mass closure of a number of iconic New Zealand ...
Brian Williamson1, Prof Nick Wilson2 (1Economic consultant, UK; 2University of Otago Wellington)In this blog, we outline how a win-win social contract could be forged to address the major dimensions of response to the COVID-19 pandemic when using a mitigation strategy: the particular need to protect older people from high ...
Resuming Normal Service: The Republican Party's nominee for in 1920, Warren Harding, promised the American people: “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”. If she wishes to remain our prime minister, then Jacinda Ardern will offer New Zealanders the same.HOW EDUCATED AMERICA snickered when the ...
No Free Society Without A Free And Functioning News Media: If we are to surrender our civil rights to the broader cause of defeating Covid-19, then foreign corporations must, likewise, surrender their right to inflict immense economic and cultural harm on New Zealanders simply because it improves their bottom line.I’M ...
by Daphna Whitmore A third of the world is under lockdown and a clear assessment of this measure to curb the spread of COVID-19 is urgently needed. With any high-stakes decisions it has to be asked what are we dealing with here? Are the measures warranted? Will they achieve their ...
I haven’t done a huge amount in the last few days. I’m reading The Poppy War and I’ve sort of poked at a couple of games – I started SOMA but I’m a wimp and I quit while in the first room after the brain scan. I might try it ...
The swan politicians may be gliding on the water, occasionally snapping at one another. Meanwhile, as the Covid19 crisis illustrates, the officials are desperately paddling below providing the real locomotion. One of the most fatuous recent grandstanding comments (of about a week ago), adding to the public’s anxieties, was ...
Much has been written about the importance of discretion in an emergency situation, and the concerns raised by the potential for it to be exercised arbitrarily. Given the quality of the discussion, there seemed little point in adding to it at any length. In particular, I point to the evidence ...
Today has felt surreal. I was all set to touch base online with my science communication students when a colleague shared the news that Bauer Media would be shutting down its publications immediately. The first link I saw implied it was Woman’s Weekly affected, and even that shocked me. But ...
Bogeymen, Real And Imagined: Is the number of psychopathic and sociopathic individuals in any given society truly as vanishingly small as we like to tell ourselves? Isn’t it more likely that the mass-shooters and serial-killers filling the headlines represent only the tip of a much, much larger iceberg of frightfulness? ...
Outgoing Police Commissioner Mike Bush appeared before the Epidemic Response Committee today, who asked him for the rules police are using to enforce the lockdown. He refused:Police Commissioner Mike Bush has admitted the advice given to Kiwis about what they're able to do during the lockdown hasn't been clear enough. ...
For those folk who find my other Lock-Down Diary versions too “negative” or otherwise unpalatable… Here’s a photo of my cat, . . Better? Tomorrow’s Sanitised Version: a pretty flower. . . . =fs= ...
. . April 1: Day seven of living in lock-down… This morning I had a brief chat with one of my neighbours, “D” (social distance between us, a good three or four metres). I learned he had resigned from his previous job and had been hired by another company – ...
Funnily enough, my thought as I start this post is whether it will be well written enough. Or should that be well enough written? Because so much of what I know about good writing came from my two stints at The Listener, which this morning was shut down due to ...
With normal democratic procedures in abeyance, there were two ways to go. First, it was open for the government to dissolve itself and invite the National Party to join a ministry of national salvation. That would have lessened the democratic deficit of the times by having a team of rivals without ...
Dr Kirsty Ross Children and young people can respond differently in times of distress. This also varies by age and developmental stage, with younger children having more magical and imaginative thinking, and older children having more awareness and knowledge of the issues our communities are facing (which brings up ...
Hungary has been a virtual dictatorship for a decade now, as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has gradually eroded its democracy. But now, its official, with the passage of an indefinite emergency law allowing rule by decree:Hungary’s parliament has passed a new set of coronavirus measures that includes jail terms for ...
While the economy is on pause under lockdown, the government is beginning to plan how to cope with the post-lockdown, post-tourism, post-export education world we will eventually find ourselves in. They're planning a lot of infrastructure spending as economic stimulus, and have asked for proposals which can start the moment ...
It's my distraction, setting up tiny scenes to photograph. I've got stuck on the Babushka dolls for now. Something about their bubble shape. Something about their never changing, smiling features, suggesting persistent equanimity. Can we get through everything that is being thrown at us and keep at least a tiny ...
. . March 31: Day six of living in lock-down… This time I managed to sleep a little longer and the alarm woke me at the pre-set time: 6.55am. Then remembered I was working a later shift and could’ve slept in. Oh well, there are things to do at home. ...
Image credit:Diamond Harbour School Blogs I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the blog format is altered. If your blog is unexpectedly missing or ...
Yesterday's Horizon poll showing support for a "Yes" vote in this year's cannabis referendum sliding into the majority for the first time in a year looked like good news for reformers – and it probably is. But the result warrants some scrutiny.The poll is the fifth in a series commissioned ...
For almost a week now, every one of us who isn’t an essential worker has been confined to their bubble. We are allowed to go shopping for groceries, to visit the doctor, and to get a bit of exercise if we stay local. The reason we are doing this is ...
The Covid-19 saga will no doubt produce many twists and turns for us before it is finally brought to an end. But one thing it has shown us – and what comfort it should bring us – is that our country’s government is in good hands. I am not thinking ...
In the absence of a vaccine or a cure for a deadly disease, staying home in your bubble is what you do, the concept is not new. To the best of my knowledge last time we did this in NZ was for polio, in the years before a vaccine came ...
The following statement was released on March 28 by the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 40 groups, based in the United States. In recent weeks, Cuba has deployed hundreds of medical providers to over a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, as well as to their neighbors in Latin ...
This has been a terrible summer for Hector’s dolphins. The first indication was very low numbers of dolphin sightings during late spring and early summer. The Otago University Marine Mammal Research Team has carried out routine dolphin surveys at Banks Peninsula for more than 30 years. In all that time, ...
On March 17, Finance Minister Grant Robertson was quick out of the blocks with an economic rescue package to help businesses through the inevitable recession resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Robertson had pulled together a scheme in short order that so far seems to have saved many jobs. In his ...
The purpose of the lockdown is to save lives, by reducing the spread of covid-19. We won't know if its really working for another week, but given the devastation that will result if it doesn't - 14,000 dead is the optimistic scenario - its definitely worth trying. But pausing the ...
. . March 30: Day five of living in lock-down… Woke up still in darkness. Alarm hadn’t gone off. Turn to radio clock; it’s a few minutes after 6am… I lie there in the dark, waiting to drift off to sleep… but it ain’t happening. Clock ticks over to 6.55 ...
The story of Les Gray, the public sector psychologist who told the truth about his use of cannabis and set off a storm, has a special place in the lore of cannabis reform in New Zealand.When Paul Shannon interviewed Gray for the 'Dope and Hope' issue of Planet magazine in ...
by Phil Duncan For Marxists, a key concern about social trends is their context – not just their causes, but why they happen when they do. Events and phenomena have causes, but they also are time or period-specific. While much of the left have capitulated recently to postmodernism, most notably ...
Since the lockdown began, we've all suddenly been reminded who the actually essential workers in our society are: not the people at the top who pay themselves the big bucks and rort the perks, but the people at the bottom they screw over and squeeze: cleaners, warehouse staff, truck drivers ...
Kia ora! As I've watched nearly all my remaining work vanish over the past couple of days, it has occured to me that one good way to keep me away from arguing with fools on Twitter all the time (in the knowledge that all we're really doing is processing our ...
Aotearoa New Zealand has committed to trying to extirpate the virus that causes COVID-19 from its shores. To do that, as a society we’ve moved to “Level 4”. That means adapting to unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedoms, particularly to our rights to move freely and associate with friends and ...
When the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency last week, she handed the police powers to enforce it. And almost immediately, we started hearing about heavy-handed, arbitrary "enforcement" by police who (at best) cared more about order than law, or (more likely) had no idea what the rules were ...
. . Lock Down: Day 4 – A photo essay with observations . March 29: Usual wake up routine as RNZ snaps on my radio-clock. Jim Mora’s voice slowly enters my conciousness; there’s talk of a second wave of covid19 taking hold in South Korea; the week in Parliament – ...
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... ‘Misinformation kills’: The link between coronavirus conspiracies and climate denialGrist / Rob Kim / Stringer / CSA Images Scientific ...
The kids did surprisingly well today – meltdown count was about 3, and mostly fairly short ones. (And a fourth while I was writing.) Game-wise I had a go at Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark. It’s a fairly standard RPG with turn-based combat and what they call a “mature storyline” (it ...
by Don Franks Hi David, Nice hearing from you, I’m glad to hear you’re getting by okay in these grim times. You asked how’s it going for us back here in New Zealand. You would have heard that the whole country is locked down and with breaks for exercise and ...
. . Lock Down: Day 3 – A photo essay with observations . March 28: First day of the first weekend in Lock Down. It feels like it’s been weeks since only Level 3 was declared last Tuesday, only four days ago. Woke up this morning to RNZ; coffee; toast, ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Mar 22, 2020 through Sat, Mar 28, 2020Articles Linked to on FacebookSun, Mar 22, 2020In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of Disasters by Chelsea Harvey, ...
I’m here in lockdown with my flatmate and her two girls (6 and 2) and it. is. a time. They’re usually really active so to start with the only boardgame in the house is the copy of Guess Who that the 6 year old got for her birthday. Flatmate commented ...
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...
. . Lock Down: Day 2 – A photo essay with observations . March 27 – Day 2 of our Strange New World. The Park and Ride near my suburb, usually filled with hundreds of vehicles, had just… four; . . Another drive into Wellington City on a highway nearly ...
Fortune's Children: Under extraordinary pressure, the leader of the Government and the leader of the Opposition will each show us what they are made of. Have they been blessed with intelligence, grace, wit, poise, toughness, empathy and humour – and in what measure? More importantly, to what extent have they ...
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to rent a property on the open market in New Zealand, which is one of the most expensive in the entire world, you’ll likely be keenly aware of just how arrogant and entitled landlords and their real estate agents can be.Unfortunately for ...
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights:In this legal blog we outline some ...
by Equipo Jurídico Pueblos and Gearóid Ó Loingsigh (25/03/2020) An escape plan in question On the night of March 21st and the early morning of the 22nd, the forces of the Colombian state stormed into the Modelo prison in Bogotá, murdering 23 prisoners and injuring 83, in response to the ...
When the government banned semi-automatic weapons in response to a terrorist atrocity, gun-nuts were outraged. Mired in toxic American gun culture, they thought owning weapons whose sole purpose was killing people was some sort of "constitutional right", a necessity for "defending themselves" against the government. Now, the Court of Appeal ...
Just before midnight on Wednesday March 25, Aotearoa New Zealand entered a countrywide alert level four lockdown. For at least the next four weeks, everyone who isn’t an essential worker is confined to their bubble. We are doing this to stop the explosive growth in people contracting and dying from ...
. . Lock Down: Day 1 – A photo essay with observations . Day one of the Level 4 nationwide lock-down (or, DefCon 4 as I sometimes cheekily call it) started at 11.59PM on 25 March. For a moment, most of the nation held it’s collective breath. In that brief ...
Broad, Sunlit Uplands: How those words fired my young imagination! Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say: how those words fused, in my young mind, with the image printed on every packet of Fielder’s Cornflour. Always fascinated by history, especially modern history, I cannot hear Churchill’s wonderfully evocative words, even ...
. . 24 March 2020 9.46AM Number of covid19 cases in Aotearoa New Zealand: 102 . As of 11.59 on Thursday, most of New Zealand will go into “lock down”. People will be expected not to travel to work; not to socialise; and to stay home. I will not be ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections A respected research group, Project Drawdown, finds that deploying solutions consistent with meeting the Paris climate targets would cost tens of trillions of dollars globally. But crucially, those outlays would also yield long-term savings many times larger than the up-front costs. The new 2020 Drawdown ...
It will pass. What happens next? Not immediately, but longer term. There are many opinions, fewer certainties. Will it “change everything!” as many confidently, and contradictorily predict? In this post I look at how foresight can help bound some of the uncertainties so you can more objectively consider the future. ...
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our Government has striven to provide calm, clear and consistent communication, including daily press conference updates from the Prime Minister. ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters says getting New Zealanders back home and other travellers out of the country is "a nightmare for our embassies, consuls, and staff around the world".Speaking to NewstalkZB's Mike Hosking, the Foreign Minister said that he gave a clear message to people travelling overseas that they ...
The domestic travel ban has been lifted for stranded foreign tourists trying to get to international airports to fly home, after the Coalition Government announced a plan to help the tens of thousands of foreigners stranded here. Foreign Minister Rt. Hon. Winston Peters spoke with RNZ's Susie Ferguson said foreign ...
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters believes the country is rediscovering its resilience and self-reliance through its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.He says he is heartened that the mass majority of New Zealanders are following lockdown rules and that the government looking at the future, including paying to keep much ...
New Zealand can emulate the success of the US after the Great Depression by exploiting our own resources to turn the economy around quickly, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says. Mr. Peters told Magic Talk that New Zealand has an opportunity to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic a "superior, ...
All 45 New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel are either on their way back to New Zealand, or already in the country, according to Defence Minister Ron Mark."Twenty-eight personnel arrived back in New Zealand last week and are in isolation at the Royal New Zealand Air Force base in ...
The COVID-19 situation in New Zealand is moving fast - and to avoid what we've seen overseas - the Government's response must be to move fast too. We're committed to keeping New Zealanders safe and well-informed every step of the way. ...
We know people are feeling anxious about COVID-19. While the situation is serious, New Zealand has a world-class health system and we’re well-prepared to keep New Zealanders safe. ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging New Zealanders overseas to stay where they are amid the COVID-19 pandemic. "We are reaching a point where the best option for most New Zealanders offshore is to shelter in place, by preparing to safely stay where they are.” "This includes following the instructions ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging the tens of thousands of New Zealanders travelling overseas to consider sheltering in place, in light of COVID-19. “Since 18 March, we have been warning New Zealanders offshore that the window for flying ...
Ground-breaking law has passed that will decriminalise abortion and ensure women and pregnant people seeking abortions have compassionate healthcare. ...
The Green Party says that the measures announced by the Government today will help families and businesses to prioritise our collective health and wellbeing in the response to COVID-19. ...
As New Zealanders brace for a global downturn due to Covid-19, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says his Coalition Government’s rescue package "more significant" than any other he's seen around the world. The Coalition is to reveal a multi-billion-dollar stimulus plan on Tuesday afternoon designed to cushion the economic blow ...
The Government will be introducing legislation to make changes to the Companies Act to help companies facing insolvency due to COVID-19 to remain viable and keep New Zealanders in jobs. The temporary changes include: Giving directors of companies facing significant liquidity problems because of COVID-19 a ‘safe harbour’ from insolvency ...
The Government’s plan to cushion the blow of COVID-19 by supporting incomes, jobs and businesses, and position the economy to recover has been backed by another international report. International credit rating agency Moody’s today reaffirmed its highest Aaa credit rating on New Zealand, saying the economy is expected to remain ...
National sports organisations have been given certainty of funding to ensure they can remain viable through the COVID-19 pandemic, Sport and Recreation Minister Grant Robertson announced today. “The global spread of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on sport and recreation in New Zealand, including the cancellation or postponement of ...
Changes have been made to allow butchers to process pork, only for supply to supermarkets or other processors or retailers that are open, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor has announced. “We carefully weighed the risk of allowing butchers to open their shops for retail customers, but the risk of spreading COVID-19 ...
Essential workers who take leave from work to comply with public health guidance are being supported with a leave scheme to ensure they will continue to receive income, say the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety Iain Lees-Galloway and Minister for Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni. A number of essential businesses ...
A Government WhatsApp channel has been launched to help make information more easily accessible and shareable in the fight against COVID-19. Govt.NZ, which is free to use on any mobile device, will carry information and news for the public, businesses, healthcare providers, not for profits and local government. It can ...
The Government has announced a plan to enable the safe, orderly exit of tens of thousands of stranded foreign nationals from New Zealand during the current COVID-19 Alert Level 4 restrictions, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Winston Peters has said. “When we moved into lockdown a week ago, the ...
Health Minister Dr David Clark says the Government is delivering on its commitment to support general practice doctors and nurses, and pharmacies on the front-line of our fight against COVID-19. "For us to overcome COVID-19, we need community health services such as general practice and community pharmacy to step up ...
Justice Susan Thomas has been appointed Chief High Court Judge, Attorney-General David Parker announced today. She replaces Justice Geoffrey Venning who has resigned from the position. David Parker paid tribute to Justice Venning, who he said had stewarded the High Court very capably over the last five years. “On behalf ...
Businesses can start applying to their banks for loans under the Business Finance Guarantee Scheme set up to support the New Zealand economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re moving quickly to protect New Zealand businesses, jobs and the economy during this unprecedented global economic shock,” Finance Minister Grant Robertson said. ...
Work is underway looking at measures to speed up consents for development and infrastructure projects during the recovery from COVID 19, to provide jobs and stimulate our economy. Environment Minister David Parker said the COVID-19 pandemic is a serious global crisis that will have a wide ranging and lasting impact ...
Advance payments will be made to transport construction industry contractors to retain the workforce and ensure it is ready to quickly gear up to build projects which will be vital to New Zealand’s COVID-19 economic recovery, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. He said keeping the workforce required to build ...
The Government has tasked a group of industry leaders to seek out infrastructure projects that are ready to start as soon as the construction industry returns to normal to reduce the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Economic Development Minister Phil Twyford and Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones say. The Infrastructure ...
Work to scale up the health system in preparation for COVID-19 was today outlined by Health Minister David Clark, as he reported back to the new Epidemic Response Committee. “We are well placed to contain the spread of COVID-19. We have taken early and decisive action at our borders, and ...
The Government is refining its COVID-19 essential business guidance to include the distribution of news publications for communities which are hard to reach. The Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media, Kris Faafoi, said the move was in recognition of the importance for New Zealanders who might be harder to ...
The Government is ensuring supermarkets can open on Easter Sunday so we can buy groceries, but stay closed on Good Friday allowing workers to take a break. This provides a balanced approach and ensures we avoid large queues that two days closure may cause. “Supermarkets will be able to open ...
Following the successful conclusion of the Building Partner Capacity (BPC) mission at Taji, New Zealand defence personnel are returning to New Zealand from Iraq, in accordance with the Cabinet decision made in June 2019, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Ron Mark announced today. “New Zealand is very ...
The State of National Emergency to help stop the spread of COVID-19 has been extended for a further seven days, Minister of Civil Defence Peeni Henare said. The initial declaration on March 25 lasted seven days and can be extended as many times as necessary. “Since we went into isolation ...
New Zealand’s ability to go hard and go early in the fight against COVID-19 has been underpinned by strong Government finances and the growing economy heading into this global pandemic, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. The Treasury today released the Crown financial statements for the eight months to the end ...
Health Minister Dr David Clark says 36 new intensive care beds at Christchurch Hospital’s new Hagley building are being fast tracked so they are available for treatment of COVID-19 patients. The Ministry of Health is working with contractor CPB and Canterbury DHB to enable access to the hospital’s ICU, ...
The Government has fast-tracked up to $1 million to help Air New Zealand move urgent freight to and from New Zealand, with the first flight to Shanghai leaving tonight, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. Phil Twyford says it’s crucial that trade in vital goods such as medical supplies and ...
New Zealand will temporarily remove tariffs on all medical and hygiene imports needed for the COVID-19 response. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker and Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi said today that the New Zealand Customs Service will apply tariff concessions to all diagnostic reagents and testing ...
Minister of Finance Grant Robertson has clarified that the changes to the wage subsidy scheme announced yesterday mean that employers should be passing on the full subsidy to workers, except in the case where the person’s normal income is less than the level of the subsidy. “We still want employers ...
Medical face masks from the national reserve supply are now being distributed to District Health Boards, while at the same time local production is being ramped up. Yesterday more than 640,000 masks were sent to DHBS – that is an immediate two week supply, with more to follow in coming ...
The Government has made modifications to the wage subsidy scheme to ensure people don’t lose their jobs during the national lockdown. These changes will soften the impact of COVID-19 on workers, families and businesses, and position them to exit the lockdown and look to recovery, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. ...
Farmers whose herds were culled in response to the outbreak of Mycoplasma bovis will be able to minimise the tax treatment of their income in some circumstances. Revenue Minister Stuart Nash says Cabinet has agreed to change the law. It means farmers may be eligible to spread their income over ...
A $27 million dollar package, effective immediately, is being provided to social sector services and community groups to ensure they can continue to provide essential support to communities as we stay at home as a nation to stop the spread of COVID-19, Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni announced. “At ...
“The guilty plea today will provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered by what happened on March 15,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. “These guilty pleas and conviction bring accountability for what happened and also save the families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, ...
The Prime Minister is holding daily press conferences to update New Zealanders on the Government's response to COVID-19. Links to videos and transcripts of these updates below. These transcripts also include All of Government press conferences led by Director Ministry of Health's Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. 25 March: Live update from the Prime ...
Frontline Police numbers have broken through the 10,000 mark for the first time in history as officers step forward to keep the community safe during the COVID19 lockdown. “Two Police graduations in Auckland and Wellington in the past week have been conducted in unprecedented circumstances,” Police Minister Stuart Nash said. ...
Urgent legislation has been passed to support the package of economic and social measures needed to recover from the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. “The COVID-19 Response (Taxation and Social Assistance Urgent Measures) Bill will cushion New Zealanders from the worst economic impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak,” said Revenue Minister ...
From tomorrow, Government support for farmers and growers affected by drought will be expanded and extended across the country, with access to Rural Assistance Payments (RAPS) available throughout the North Island, parts of the South Island and the Chatham Islands, Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni announced. “These challenging conditions have ...
Parliament has passed amendments to legislation that give the Secretary of Education stronger powers to act in the fight to limit the spread of COVID-19, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “They are part of a suite of changes passed under the COVID-19 Response (Urgent Management Measures) Legislation Bill,” Chris ...
Canada, Australia, Chile, Brunei and Myanmar have joined forces with New Zealand and Singapore by committing to keep supply chains open and remove any existing trade restrictive measures on essential goods, especially medical supplies, in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker today welcomed ...
Immediate freeze on rent increases Tenancies will not be terminated during the lock-down period, unless the parties agree, or in limited circumstances Tenants who had previously given notice can stay in their if they need to stay in the tenancy during the lock-down period Tenants will still be able to ...
As New Zealand unites to lock-down in the fight against COVID-19, the Finance Minister is urging all businesses and workers to stay connected over the next four weeks. “We understand the extreme pressure many businesses are under right now. I know most business owners think of their workers as family ...
A State of National Emergency has been declared across the country as the Government pulls out all the stops to curtail the spread of COVID-19. “Today we put in place our country’s second ever State of National Emergency as we fight a global pandemic, save New Zealanders’ lives and prevent ...
Mr Speaker I wish to make a Ministerial Statement under Standing Order 347 in relation to the recent declaration of a State of National Emergency. Having considered the advice of the Director Civil Defence Emergency Management, the Minister of Civil Defence declared a State of National Emergency for the whole of ...
People needing to travel on domestic flights, trains and Cook Strait ferries to get home before the country moves into level 4 lock-down tomorrow night will be able to continue using the passenger services until midnight on Friday, Transport Minister Phil Twyford said today. Domestic passenger services, particularly ferries, have ...
The Government, retail banks and the Reserve Bank are today announcing a major financial support package for home owners and businesses affected by the economic impacts of COVID-19. The package will include a six month principal and interest payment holiday for mortgage holders and SME customers whose incomes have been ...
Sam Brooks, a lifelong Studio Ghibli fan, presents a guide to the Japanese studio’s animated films, including which ones to show your kids when.Just heard ‘Let It Go’ for the billionth time? Sick of those class-traitor dogs that make up the cast of Paw Patrol? Look no further than the ...
Alan Simmons co-leader of the NZ Outdoors Party says tensions are at breaking point around New Zealand. “I cannot keep up with the calls and messages from New Zealanders who are extremely stressed, distressed and frustrated by dramatic changes imposed ...
Welcome back to Papercuts, our monthly books podcast hosted by Louisa Kasza, Jenna Todd and Kiran Dass.Well, we’ve all said we wish we had more time to read and now we’ve got what we wished for. Jenna, Kiran and Louisa delve into some book news (that’s not too heavy for ...
The prime minister says she expects the health minister to continue doing his job, including media interviews, after he broke the lockdown rules last week to go mountain biking. ...
Ardern says the role of planning for moving out of lockdown is not the Government's alone Businesses should plan how they will operate in an environment where intensive contact tracing would be needed post-lockdown, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. The Government was working on additional guidance for the move to Level 3 ...
Netflix’s four-part series Unorthodox traces a woman’s escape from a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. Emily Writes considers the lessons we can all learn from her journey. There was a moment watching Netflix’s miniseries Unorthodox when I felt like I was actually in Berlin, where much of the show is ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening.The following charts are based on numbers shared at the daily press conference. These may vary from the full day's numbers released in the Ministry of Health's spreadsheet of ...
By RNZ Pacific The number of people with Covid-19 in the Pacific continues to climb with French Polynesia hitting 40 cases, Guam now over 90 and the US state of Hawai’i suffering its third coronavirus death. In the past day, another person tested positive for Covid-19 in French Polynesia. ...
We needed a reasonable period of time to allow the recent surging wave of highly geared first home buyers to get financially comfortable. We didn’t get it, writes David Hargreaves of interest.co.nz.You know, I was really beginning to think (as well as hope) that we might just get away with it.By ‘it’ ...
Being stuck inside all day might be wearing you and your kids down, but there’s never been a better time to encourage them to pick up their musical instrument and get stuck into writing songs. Mike Chunn from Play It Strange explains how. Mums and dads and households with teenage children. ...
Siouxsie Wiles on the vitriolic correspondence she’s received since the Covid-19 outbreak struck, and the realities of communicating evidence.I recently received an email and text from someone telling me they are planning to email my boss, the University of Auckland vice chancellor. They are going to ask for me to ...
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, five of New Zealand’s best writers chronicle the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, Fiona Farrell.There’s a sign sticky-taped to the bakery window. Closed Until Further Notice. Stay Safe NZ and Be Kind. We will get through this!We all know where the words ...
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level four. The country is shut down, apart from essential services. For updated official government advice, see here.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The ...
Covid-19 is a real threat to older people, but these Central Otago seniors are embracing technology, experiencing no FOMO, and finding new ways to connect and share, finds Jill Herron When the full lockdown began on March 25 it meant the end of going for a swim, spa or to ...
Former editor of the Woman's Weekly, Nicky Pellegrino, bids farewell to the magazine that brought information and fun to generations of New Zealand women. All those stories. Gone. Stories about our politics, our health, our education, our aspirations. Stories about the houses we lived in and the gardens we grew, ...
As small businesses fight for their survival in the Covid-19 lockdown, it seems one of the country’s biggest retail landlords is not keen to share the pain. On the one side, you have Jonathan*. Jonathan runs a small business out of South Auckland’s Sylvia Park - New Zealand’s biggest mall. ...
With no Covid-19 cases and its economy desperate to restart, the Chathams is keen to go fishing again, writes Jim Kayes.It shouldn’t really be a surprise. They are, after all, ahead of New Zealand by 45 minutes.And though they are part of Wellington’s Rongotai electorate, the fiercely ...
On Friday night, the government quietly laid down some lockdown rules via a legal order under the Health Act. Law professor Andrew Geddis explains what it means for all of us (including David Clark). As the first week of level four lockdown unfolded, mounting questions grew as to just what was ...
The health and wellbeing of people working and being held inside our prisons needs to be a priority, writes JustSpeak director Tania Sawicki Mead. Kelvin Davis’s interview on The Hui last weekend made it clear that precautions taken by Corrections to stop the spread of Covid-19 will create an unprecedented restriction ...
Like countless New Zealanders stranded overseas, Wellingtonian Rosie O’Hagan will be braving authorities, airlines, airports and uncertainty to make it back from the other side of the world, writes Jim Kayes.Rosie O’Hagan hadn’t stepped outside for three weeks.When she finally did – around midnight on Friday ...
PACIFIC PANDEMIC DIARY:By David Robie A rather beautiful Guåhan legend is rather poignant in these stressed pandemic times. It is one about survival and cooperation. In ancient times, goes the story, a giant fish was eating great chunks out of this western Pacific island. The men used muscle ...
Simon Wren-Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford, raises good questions about Britain’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Some of them seem germane to this country’s response. Wren-Lewis posted his critique on his Mainly Macro blog under the heading Following the Science or a ...
Alex Casey speaks to a dream expert about why so many people are suddenly remembering their vivid and often horrible dreams. As the days begin to blur together and the only thing we get between sleeps is unimaginably horrible news and an embarrassing tootle around the block, it’s no surprise ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening.The following charts are based on numbers shared at the daily press conference. These may vary from the full day's numbers released in the Ministry of Health's spreadsheet of ...
Medical centres across the country are condensing services, moving online, and ushering in pandemic plans. Josie Adams assesses what it’s like to access and provide essential medical care under alert level four.On Monday, Sandra Russell woke up before dawn and drove to Milford to get her blood tested. She has ...
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, some of New Zealand’s best writers tell us what they’ve been up to in the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, writer and doctor Glenn Colquhoun, with the second of his Letters to Hone Tūwhare and his Travelling Band of Constant Companions. ...
ANALYSIS:By Haiqing Yu of RMIT University and Michael Keane of Curtin University China has gradually emerged out of its shadow of despair as the epicentre where the coronavirus pandemic started. Now, there is face saving required – as well as agenda-setting in the global power play. China played ...
Tech giant Google has released a giant global data set which shows how different countries are locking down, and which NZ regions are most compliant with its lockdown.A giant set of reports released by Google, created using its anonymised cellphone location data reveals the scale of human behaviour change the ...
Comedian Penny Ashton writes on the necessity of the arts, especially during lockdown.On March 22, everyone’s favourite fiscal bloodhounds, the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, sent out a tweet in response to Creative New Zealand’s announcement that it will dedicate an emergency response package to helping New Zealand’s artists, in the ...
Wellington writer Philippa Swan’s new novel TheNight of All Souls is an homage to Pulitzer-winning and all-round fabulous American writer Edith Wharton. Wharton died in 1937 but, Swan writes, she’s very much of the moment. Nobody does social distancing like Wharton did. While Wharton was still comparatively young, she created the ...
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level four. The country is shut down, apart from essential services. For updated official government advice, see here.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The ...
Normally heaving year-round, Queenstown has ground to an eerie halt as Covid-19 cases rise and tourism income plummets, reports Paul Taylor. On a hill behind Queenstown's coronavirus Covid-19 community testing centre, the resort's iconic Skyline gondola sits motionless. More than 17 million people are estimated to have ridden the gondola ...
Are we drinking more in the lockdown? Hard to know, writes David Slack, but we’re certainly having to get creative about it. Almost every phone call I’ve answered this week has begun the same way: “You still off the drink, then?” Fair question. What a time to be not drinking. ...
Kiwi clinical psychologist Desiree Dickerson is stuck with her family in Spain and has written a guide in Nature: "Seven tips to manage your mental health and well-being during the Covid-19 outbreak." It’s Day 17 of the Covid-19 lockdown in Spain. In a small village on the Mediterranean coast, about ...
"Will our ills be cured? Will our feet carry us? For how long?": a short story set in Henderson by West Auckland writer Serie Barford.I learned to drive a tractor when I was a kid feeding out hay with my cousins on a dairy farm down the line. I ...
Without active testing in the community our Covid-19 picture isn’t complete, an epidemiologist says. David Williams reports. There are worse places to be self-isolating than Whakatāne, in the Bay of Plenty, says Bridget Robson, who lives on a two-acre block and keeps chickens. “We live in a beautiful part of ...
How do you hold a funeral service with the country in lockdown? Where there’s a will – and a tech-savvy uncle – there’s a way, Erin Kavanagh-Hall discovered.I was floating somewhere in the Cook Strait when I heard my grandfather’s funeral had been cancelled.I should elaborate. It was a Monday, ...
‘Stay in your bubble’ didn’t exist 100 years ago, but our ancestors would want us to know how essential it is to do so, says Jai Breitnauer.It was a warm but slightly grey January day in 2019 when I pulled the car over to the side of SH1, just south ...
David Clark’s misadventure in mountain biking was a stupid, but ultimately forgivable offence. The bigger problem is the continued uncertainty around what is and isn’t appropriate activity in lockdown, as Sam Sachdeva writes. Given the pressure he and his Cabinet colleagues are under, it is little surprise Health Minister David ...
Assessing the economic impact of Covid-19 requires a new approach to a problem economists have not encountered in modern times, writes Dr Kirdan Lees Covid-19 has presented quite a problem for economists. Containment policies that seek to flatten the Covid-19 curve or eliminate the virus, restrict economic activity. All governments ...
Every day at 1pm New Zealand’s Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield announces precise figures on the number of confirmed and probable cases of Covid-19 in the country. He is working on the best information available, and during this week the level of community transmission was put at around ...
Most of New Zealand's MPs are in lockdown just like the rest of us, confined to their neighbourhoods and stuck in their bubbles. Checkpoint called a few to ask them what they're doing. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Deery, Lecturer in Early Childhood Education, University of Melbourne “Stupid coronavirus!” I heard my six-year-old mumble while talking in her sleep. Earlier that day her swimming and basketball lessons were cancelled, a birthday party postponed, and she had to race with ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University “Zoombombing” in case you haven’t heard, is the unsavoury practice of posting distressing comments, pictures or videos after gatecrashing virtual meetings hosted by the videoconferencing app Zoom. With hundreds of millions ...
Analysis - A leading epidemiologist says health authorities 'really have no idea' of the extent of community spread, Parliament's Epidemic Response Committee gets its teeth into what's going on during the lockdown and the horrendous economic imp ...
The fifth in our new series of charts, graphics and data visualisations by Chris McDowall, covering the Covid-19 epidemic within New Zealand. We’ll publish the latest set each day on The Spinoff.This work is entirely funded by the generosity of The Spinoff MembersInformation about confirmed and probable cases of Covid-19 ...
The Finance Minister says struggling companies will be able to put some debt into hibernation, under new legislation unveiled today. Watch the latest government update here. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Lund, Commissioning Editor, The Conversation Editor’s note: The following is current as at April 3, 2020. Things are changing quickly so best to keep an eye on the latest information from WA Health, as well as the federal government.This article ...
During the challenges associated with lockdown, the Māori Party are congratulating Ngāti Ruanui and South Taranaki on the decision of the Court of Appeal, announced today, to stop Trans-Tasman Resources plans for risky seabed mining off the South ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling What does the COVID-19 pandemic sound like? For this episode, Dallas Rogers – a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney – asked academic colleagues from all over ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sven Gallasch, Lecturer in Law, Swinburne University of Technology “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,” wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), “but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the ...
Environment Minister David Parker has directed officials to find ways to fast-track consents for infrastructure and development projects. He says his goal is to help create a pipeline of projects so that some can start immediately once Covid-19 restrictions are lifted “so people can get back into work as fast ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin Spain and Switzerland top cases, countries converging. Chart by Keith Rankin.Spain and Switzerland top cases, countries converging. Chart by Keith Rankin.Of the larger European countries, Italy is now in third place for known cases per person in the population. Spain has overtaken Switzerland for ...
Contact tracing is a crucial part of the Covid-19 puzzle and technology might prove essential to scaling up New Zealand's tracing capacity, Marc Daalder reports With the lockdown reducing physical contact between members of the public and testing ramping up, the only missing piece of the Covid-19 puzzle is contact tracing. ...
Insolvency laws will be temporarily changed to allow troubled companies to trade while technically insolvent Finance Minister Grant Robertson has announced changes to the Companies Act to allow companies to put their debts into "hibernation". Robertson said companies facing liquidity problems would have "safe harbour" from their normal insolvency duties ...
Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Ruanui and Te Kaahui o Rauru are celebrating the decision of the Court of Appeal, announced today, to stop Trans-Tasman Resources plans for risky seabed mining off the South Taranaki Bight. The Court of Appeal found that there ...
Bernard Hickey talks to Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr about a massive spike in US jobless claims, and they talk about an inspiring Kiwi app to fight Covid-19 globally. Guest, Pie Funds chief executive Mike Taylor also joins them to talk about the massive market swings and hopes for recovery. Bernard zooms out ...
Political commentators from the left and right sides of the political divide are questioning the powers being exercised by police during the nation-wide “lockdown”. The Asian Invasion 2019 blog draws attention to the warning sounded by former UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption when he challenged Covid-19 actions by British ...
Pacific Media Watch The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) has strongly condemned the shoot-to-kill order by President Rodrigo Duterte this week as a ‘dangerous’ opening to target and kill anyone in a public space. “We are raising the alarm in the international community on President ...
The Reserve Bank looks set to start buying council bonds as well as Government bonds to unfreeze financial markets and allow councils to defer rates and jointly invest in infrastructure with the central Government, Dileepa Fonseka reports In what would be another unprecedented move to calm financial markets and help ...
Four PhD students engaged a clinical psychologist to help them navigate an uncertain time in their studies. They share their findings here.As four PhD students from Massey University’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research we, like many others, can’t stop reading and talking about the unfolding events that have gripped our ...
The SpinoffBy Ashleigh Rushton, Lisa McLaren, Marion Tan & Sara Harrison
Covid-19 testing of the wider population is on the cards as World Health Organisation research shows people are most contagious within their first few days of being infected Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield says Covid-19 carriers are highly infectious when they show few signs of carrying the virus. People were ...
Z Energy is the latest company to cut its dividend payout and start talking to its banks about strengthening its finances. Chief executive Mike Bennetts said the company, the largest fuel retailer in the country, had been battered by a range of issues over the past 18 months, and was ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Kang, Associate professor, University of Technology Sydney Young people in Australia are among the fastest-growing group to contract COVID19. According to the Department of Health, there are now more cases in Australia among people aged 20 – 29 years than any ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cassandra Pattinson, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland Getting a good night’s sleep can be difficult at the best of times. But it can be even harder when you’re anxious or have something on your mind – a global pandemic, for example. ...
Journalist and Great Barrier Island resident Lindsay Wright reflects on outer gulf pandemic preparedness. Hardy locals can tough it out but Auckland bach owners and boaties should keep their distance. Aotea Great Barrier, the easternmost island in the Hauraki Gulf, are undergoing a Covid-19-inspired population flood. Great Barrier has scenery that makes ...
The Pharmaceutical Society of New Zealand is delighted that the government has moved quickly to provide an initial financial support package for pharmacy. The $15 million package was paid this week to pharmacy contract holders. Pharmaceutical Society president ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening.The following charts are based on numbers shared at the daily press conference and are "as of 9am" of the day. There were 71 new cases of Covid-19 in ...
A new poem by Wellington poet and bookseller Ash Davida Jane. washed up! it gets tiring pushing the fire alarm every nightbut things keep catching on fireor sometimes ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Foster, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Sydney Our earliest vertebrate (animals with backbones) ancestors laid eggs, but over millions of years of evolution, some species began to give birth to live young. There is a traditional dichotomy in vertebrate reproduction: species ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Foster, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Sydney Our earliest vertebrate (animals with backbones) ancestors laid eggs, but over millions of years of evolution, some species began to give birth to live young. There is a traditional dichotomy in vertebrate reproduction: species ...
Welcome to the second edition of our lockdown Top 10s. A reminder that this chart has nothing to do with sales or launches or the publishing cycle; these are just books the Unity team love – and this week it’s westerns, full of big skies and long rides and showdowns.AUCKLANDAll ...
Open mike 13/03/2020 
As the world economy slides rapidly towards deep recession there are growing calls for a Universal Benefit coming from some leftists and rightists. Now Finance Minister Grant Robertson is saying it is on the table. This article by a French party Workers Struggle provides analysis of various forms of universal ...27 mins ago
This is the advice from the very top of the anti-fluoride movement – Paul Connett, director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN). Don’t worry about reading up on all the scientific information “You only have ... 2 hours ago
. . April 4: Day 10 of living in lock-down… I wake up to a fine Saturday morning which normally would be like an early Christmas. But it’s Day 10 of Level 4 Lock Down. What will my fellow New Zealanders be doing on a day like this – staying ...6 hours ago
Comfortably, in the very first round, with an impressive 56% of the votes.I wonder, did members of the Shadow Cabinet start tweeting their resignations during Starmer's victory speech, or is that only a trick the right pull?It is odd how all the talk of how the next leader "needs to ...8 hours ago
One of the key voices in this extraordinary time in which we live is that of University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker. Philip Matthews did an an excellent job this weekend of capturing the way he became the man for this moment in a profile for The Press.But one ...8 hours ago
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed the nation today about the decline in daylight New Zealand has been experiencing over the previous few months. She said “As many of you will notice, our attempts to stem the dwindling of the daylight over the last few months have been completely ...23 hours ago
As the first week of Level Four lockdown unfolded, mounting questions grew as to just what was (and was not) allowed under its “rules”. Partly these were driven by some apparently contradictory messages from different authority figures and explanations carried in the media. Partly they reflected a somewhat sketchy legal basis ...1 day ago
We must root out the traitors among us! ...2 days ago
In order to meet our 2050 carbon target and do our bit to avoid making the Earth uninhabitable, New Zealand needs to decarbonise our economy, replacing fossil fuels with electricity in the energy, industrial and transport sectors. The good news is that it will mean cheaper power for all of ...2 days ago
As Aotearoa enters week two of lockdown, it’s clear we’re all still working out what our “bubbles” look like and how to stay in them to stop the spread of Covid-19. New to the government’s Covid-19 website is some good guidance for people living in apartment blocks. Recent decades have ...2 days ago
Resuming Normal Service: The Republican Party's nominee for in 1920, Warren Harding, promised the American people: “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”. If she wishes to remain our prime minister, then Jacinda Ardern will offer New Zealanders the same.HOW EDUCATED AMERICA snickered when the ...3 days ago
I haven’t done a huge amount in the last few days. I’m reading The Poppy War and I’ve sort of poked at a couple of games – I started SOMA but I’m a wimp and I quit while in the first room after the brain scan. I might try it ...3 days ago
46 Articles Physical science of global warming & effects Global response of evapotranspiration ratio to climate conditions and watershed characteristics in a changing environment Greenhouse effect: the relative contributions of emission height and total absorption Observations & observational methods of global warming & effects Climate change induced a ...4 days ago
Image credit: Diamond Harbour School Blogs I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the blog format is altered. If your blog is unexpectedly missing or ... 4 days ago
The Covid-19 saga will no doubt produce many twists and turns for us before it is finally brought to an end. But one thing it has shown us – and what comfort it should bring us – is that our country’s government is in good hands. I am not thinking ...4 days ago
The following statement was released on March 28 by the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 40 groups, based in the United States. In recent weeks, Cuba has deployed hundreds of medical providers to over a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, as well as to their neighbors in Latin ...5 days ago
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...6 days ago
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...1 week ago
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...1 week ago
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights: In this legal blog we outline some ...1 week ago
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our Government has striven to provide calm, clear and consistent communication, including daily press conference updates from the Prime Minister. ...52 mins ago
Foreign Minister Winston Peters says getting New Zealanders back home and other travellers out of the country is "a nightmare for our embassies, consuls, and staff around the world". Speaking to NewstalkZB's Mike Hosking, the Foreign Minister said that he gave a clear message to people travelling overseas that they ...2 days ago
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The scale of what we face right now is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Overcoming it is our common purpose. ...2 weeks ago
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Simon Wren-Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford, raises good questions about Britain’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Some of them seem germane to this country’s response. Wren-Lewis posted his critique on his Mainly Macro blog under the heading Following the Science or a ...1 day ago
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Without active testing in the community our Covid-19 picture isn’t complete, an epidemiologist says. David Williams reports. There are worse places to be self-isolating than Whakatāne, in the Bay of Plenty, says Bridget Robson, who lives on a two-acre block and keeps chickens. “We live in a beautiful part of ...2 days ago
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Why to take action urgently. https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
I fear this advice will fall on stony ground.
I guess it is up to us, individually.
Stock up, self isolate.
Look after whanau.
Fine if you are well-placed to do those things. Pandemics are a classic example of things we can tackle most successfully through collective measures, not individual ones. The US is about to show us that.
I'm liking our PM's measured approach.
Ratcheting up only in response to our conditions here.
Also Robertson synchronizing mesdures with Australian Treasurer with well timed talks.
Goods heads team.
It's all just fine and dandy…did I hear yesterday from the PM’s own mouth that she's listening to the business community?
All good.
Safe hands.
Rolls eyes.
We are sitting on 4% unemployed and there's a good risk this will double within 6 months.
Whereas we are 5 infections.
But actually what you heard from the PM's mouth in Parliament is that her focus is on the health of the New Zealand people. This was her clear response to Bridges. You can look it up.
The PM and the Government she leads are currently striking the right balance between health and economic issues, IMHO.
;
Many more than that, I'd say.
Silent spread from Pre-symptomatic, Asymptomatic & Mild cases … but like the US & various other Western nations … we're in the Don't Test / Don't Tell phase where the economy is prioritised over human life… as opposed to taking urgent & decisive action to slow it down & prevent overwhelmed hospitals & needless death.
(Note: Pre-symptomatic (100% of those infected with COVID-19 go through Pre-Symptomatic incubation period of up to 2 weeks),
Asymptomatic (around20% of infected)
Mild cases (around 60% of those infected experience symptoms similar to a cold)
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/411572/no-more-cases-of-covid-19-in-nz-for-fifth-straight-day
I read somewhere – but can't find the link – that there had been around 1000 tests done in NZ at that time. That would be around 200 tests per 1,000,000 people which would place NZ around 10th on the list of testing for the virus, above France and just below Australia.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/
So while you maybe right that there are a few more out there, the fact that testing of suspected cases is occurring and coming back negative – does give some hope that we might dodge the full effect.
Are tests available?
No? then we have absolutly no idea how many are affected and will not know until they become very ill.
Might pay to keep that in mind.
But there are tests available and they are testing now over 100 a day and have capacity to be testing up to 500 a day and are working to expand that capacity. See my link above
yei.
how long for the test results to come back?
also, Mrs. Trudeau has the virus, and Mr. Trudeau is in 'self isolation'. 🙂
The test results are known within a day. Of the over 100 test carried out on Wednesday all were negative. See the comment of Dr Bloomfield.
good.
at least there is that. Now hopefully they get the numbers of tests up to something a bit more then 500 a day.
The other thing is that testing might be the definitive diagnostic tool, but it's not the only diagnostic tool. Case history and symptom diagnosis provide the "probable" case count and suspected cases. Both are similarly sluggish in NZ, probably due to nation-of-origin traveller restrictions and screening.
Ironic/amusing that Robertson is actually flying to Australia for these talks. Because closing the border with Australia is the thing nobody will want to do, but has to happen soon to help prevent community spread here.
And in a broader note – getting the PMC and the wider middle class off aeroplanes would be a good thing not only in this crisis but into the future.
He isn't flying to Australia.
Did I make the mistake of believing something in the NZ herald? My bad if I did.
Skype meeting
you made the mistake of reading the thing in the first place!
Mea culpa
Is he swimming to OZ ?
Grant Robertson will be in Australia tomorrow for a scheduled visit to Canberra where he will meet with Australian political and business leaders.
He will hold talks with his Australian counterpart Josh Frydenberg to discuss the actions both Governments are taking on the economic impacts of COVID-19, along with discussions about other economic matters.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA2003/S00101/finance-minister-heads-to-australia-to-meet-with-political-and-economic-leaders.htm
A lot can change in a few hours.
Australia trip is cancelled. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/411639/grant-robertson-cancels-trip-to-australia
The left doesn't owe Joe Biden their vote
The only thing I would add to this clip is that for the est Dems and the liberal media and all their billionaire and corporate master is this was and has never never been about beating Trump, it has always been about stopping Bernie and his progressive movement taking over the Democratic party.
Yeah pretty much. I still think that if you are a Sanders supporter you have a moral obligation not to vote for Trump – and if you are in a swing state to vote for Biden however tightly you have to hold your nose doing so.
I have been pretty amused by the attempts on here and elsewhere to rehabilitate Biden, explain his popularity and disguise his weaknesses. They look to me like obfuscations of a pretty simple phenomenon:
All up this promises to be the most grimly hilarious and simultaneously sickening US election in a long time. If Covid-19 overwhelms it and the administration proposes postponing it, that might be very interesting to watch too (for those of us who are still around at least)
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." President John Quincy Adams
The “lesser evil” argument in NZ general elections has been run forever, with some obvious merit re needed reforms of course, MMP, and the 30 year neo liberal consensus between National, Labour and later the Greens notwithstanding!
However in the USA in 2020 as Krystal said in the vid–“shoot me or stab me” is the working class’ choice. Nothing will change for the millions without health care if Mr Biden is elected, or any of the other grim shit that currently goes down in the land of the free.
Bernie should stay in the contest as long as he likes because he owes literally nothing to the US ruling class of which the Democratic elite is part, due to his working class funded campaign. He should use any platforms for the future development of the movements that have enabled him. The moderates have to own Biden now.
Bernie is definitely still in the race, he only trails by 148 delegates, Biden is on 800+, Bernie is on 700+, there are still 2000+ to fight for, don’t listen to the media, Bernie will fight the billionaires to the bitter end
You're still in the first stage of grief.
Give yourself the time to get to the next one.
Same joke from 2016 – but so many of you have not got over trump…
You are in the final stage of condescension. Back off and leave Adrian alone.
You probably thought that was funny when you read it somewhere.
Lefties don't owe Biden their vote. It's merely in their very strong interest to give it him rather than put it anywhere else. To ensure the Turd Tornado doesn't get another completely unrestrained four years to trash the remnants of everything lefties value.
The idea that things getting worse will bring the glorious revolution sooner is a craptacularly bad idea that has a historical success rate of zero.
The situation we now have is a testament to the power of patient incrementalism, as practised by the right.
Exactly!
The damage that tRump, and the repugnants who provide him with the power base in the Senate, have done to the climate, the environment, the safe guards of a functioning society, the rights of people, and to the justice system and the courts, whilst enriching themselves at the public expense, is immense; and will not be undone in one or even two terms of office.
The only hope for America is a complete Blue wave in Nov and that realistically can only be achieved with a candidate who appeals to a large cross section of society.
We should put up the Christmas lights now.
Anyone who thinks Biden is different from trump is completely captured by fear. Both are of the same ilk, corporate lap dogs. trumps a complete dog f&**&^g muppet, but the reality is biden has voted for many things, which if your left wing you would oppose – but no doubt will make up some excuse.
No one wants a revolution, what anarchist are asking for is the left to actually be the bare minimum of left (social democrat) – rather than corporate lick spittles.
Too soon…
FFS! Open your eyes to what is actually going on in the US right now. If you think that things will continue as they are now under the most corrupt, despotic, xenophobic, misogynistic, environmental vandal to have ever disgraced the White House you are very much mistaken, Even so the damage he has wrecked in the 3 long years he has been there is unbelievable – but just take a look a what he has done to the environment for a start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Donald_Trump_administration
Grow up, and look at what happened to america for the last 30 years.
trump is a more of an open arsehole than people like biden and co, but they are no different. They might be able to smile better or say all the right words like Obama did, but they still nothing more than hacks for the corporations.
The whole lesser evil argument is spent, the whole trump is the worst is bullshit – try reading how much of an arsehole James Buchanan was, or my personal least favourite fuckwit to sit in the oval office Herbert Hoover. Stop burying you head in fubar rhetoric. Every president since Reagan has been a tool for corporate america.
Face the real world, the USA has been taken over by the corporations and people no longer count.
"The whole lesser evil argument is spent"…exactly right+1
Obviously you have no understanding of how political action happens in the US nor any appreciation of where the power lies in terms of the implementation of policy. I totally agree with you that America is now a corporatocracy – but that is not just the fault of successive Presidents. If you really want to point the finger at the failure of successive American administrations to implement progressive policies look no further than the far right and the Republican party who have consistently opposed Bill after Bill passing either through the House or the Senate. Take for example the Bill proposed by Democrats to ensure that all persons in America can receive free Covid-19 testing and those without sick leave will receive at least 14 days paid leave. Mitch McConnell is on record as saying that sort of legislation will never be put to the Senate. Despite the fact that Pelosi has been in discussion with the Administration to put together this package. This just the latest example of Republicans sitting on proposed legislation that would be of benefit to all Americans were it to be passed. Gun Laws, Health Care, Environmental Protections, Work and Safety, Employment legislation, indeed dozens of Bills passed by the House this past year sit at McConnell's pleasure and will never see the light of day. As leader of the Senate he does not have to place these Acts to be voted on and he never will.
To effect real change in America will require that the current democrat control of the House is maintained, the Democrats retake control of the Senate (easier said than done), and a Democratic President to ensure that progressive legislation is finally signed into law,
But even that will not ensure the safety of progressive legislation, because the 3rd side of equation – the courts – will come into play. Right wing players opposed to anything that would jeapodise their wealth will sue and bring court actions to oppose anything they disagree with. For instance, we have seen these actions taken by civil rights groups to oppose some of the extreme measures instituted by the Trump administration. Now under a fair court system one would expect justice to prevail and the principles of fair dealings would be sacrosanct. However that can no longer be taken for granted after the past 3 years of Trump. You may not be aware that during this time the only thing that McConnell has been doing in the Senate is to introduce incompetent, unqualified, white, right wing men, to the task of lifetime judges. The courts are now stacked with right wing justices whose sole task is to support the right wing agenda, and this will be so for the next 30+ years. This will be Trumps legacy, along with the destruction of the Constitution, the collapse of civil law and order, and the destruction of the environment.
Indeed just today a senior Judge has resigned from a Bar of the Supreme Court from what he perceives as the Courts being turned into "a junior partner to Trump's Republican Party".
The idea that things getting worse will bring the glorious revolution sooner is a craptacularly bad idea that has a historical success rate of zero.
You've added a wonderful new word to my vocabulary! Along with a perfect usage context.
@ Andre, "The situation we now have is a testament to the power of patient incrementalism, as practised by the right"….you are quite right, however you forgot to add it is a trick they learnt from the liberal left who have perfected that very technique themselves over the past 25-30 years.
This MPI document highlights just how severely the dairy industry is in debt. It looks like some sort of ponzi scheme. Here's a few quotes:
On-farm bank debt has increased by $30.1 billion since 2003 and currently stands at $41.4 billion. a 267 percent increase since 2003
In the 2017–2018 season dairy farms on average had a debt-to-asset ratio of 50.7 percent. However, many farms are holding high levels of debt: 24 percent have ratios over 70 percent; and 4 percent have ratios over 90 percent.
Relative to production, farm debt levels have more than doubled from $9.48 per kilogram of milksolids in 2003 to $21.99 in 2019.
The average level of bank debt held per hectare has more than tripled since 2003, rising from $7,700 to $23,600 in 2018.
In addition, the number and proportion of farms Distribution of dairy sector debt per kg of milk solids 2014 and 2018 holding high levels of debt have also increased.
In particular, the percentage of farms holding greater than $30 of debt per kilogram of milk solids produced annually has increased from 16 percent in 2014 to 30 percent in 2018.
Despite falling interest rates over recent years, the burden of servicing this elevated debt has increased. Since 2014, the average annual cost of servicing this elevated debt has increased by 11 cents to $1.22 per kilogram of milk solids in 2018.
Relative to production, farm debt levels have more than doubled from $9.48 per kilogram of milksolids in 2003 to $21.99 in 2019.
The average level of bank debt held per hectare has more than tripled since 2003, rising from $7,700 to $23,600 in 2018.
In addition, the number and proportion of farms Distribution of dairy sector debt per kg of milk solids 2014 and 2018 holding high levels of debt have also increased.
In particular, the percentage of farms holding greater than $30 of debt per kilogram of milk solids produced annually has increased from 16 percent in 2014 to 30 percent in 2018.
Despite falling interest rates over recent years, the burden of servicing this elevated debt has increased.
Since 2014, the average annual cost of servicing this elevated debt has increased by 11 cents to $1.22 per kilogram of milk solids in 2018.
https://www.mpi.govt.nz/dmsdocument/38930/direct
Yes, the trendlines in those stats are all ugly.
To be that leveraged when interest rates are so low….Sitting ducks.
None of the potential escape routes are flash: Extract even more milk solids from each hectare or surf the imaginary wave of ever increasing farm capital growth.
If the figures in the report related to a rental property portfolio I think the banks would of said "No more money for now" a long time ago. Too risky.
I wonder if there is a degree of faith from the banks with farm lending because of potential escape routes. eg: 'The govt won't let us fail en masse, we're too important to fail.'
I wonder if they're thinking Australia is running out of decent farmland.
Waiting for 25 million Australian climate refugees to push land prices up?
The house of cards that was farming for tax free Capital gains,, by borrowing to pay land prices way over the amount justified by farm incomes, depends on either bigger suckers, or continued exponential population increase.
It is almost bound to burst at some stage.
Unless we sell it all to billionaire refugees, from the mess they have made in their own countries.
No freedom to roam, whoever owns it.
Yes. Rather strange when most New Zealanders were either escaping from the power of feudal style land ownership in the UK, or Māori, who had a more socialised model of land ownership.
I suppose because the squattocracy very quickly grabbed land, and power, before the majority got the vote.
Liberal free market economics is all a ponzi scheme..just check out the house hold debt to income ratio's…pretty scary..
https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/households-debt-to-income#:~:text=Households%20Debt%20To%20Income%20in,the%20first%20quarter%20of%201991.
https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/statistics/key-graphs/key-graph-household-debt
Bolsonaro aide who met Trump tests positive for Covid-19. Possible double-whammy-maybe there is a non-malevolent God after all?
But, but, but……trump refuses to take one of the 'beautiful' Covid19 tests.
It may sound cruel but I'm going to laugh my arse off if he get's it.
And PeedaDuddin – maybe nonmalevolent god has a sensa yuma?
Is there an ethical case for Capitalism?
Looking past the title, this is an intelligent and reasonably even-handed discussion. Quite a long read but usefully examines the characteristics of the three main systems we've tried to date; feudalism, capitalism and socialism.
In this view, feudalism is unacceptably tyrannical and unjust, while pure socialism is utopian and unrealistic, leaving capitalism as we know it the compromise we can live with. Yet there isn’t much enthusiasm for capitalism either … which means we need fresh thinking about where to go from here, taking into account the known boundaries of what works.
We did try socialism.
It worked.
Capitalism, is going to end human civilisation.
Expecting, pure, anything, is just delusional. Even with feudalism, the lord was expected to defend the peasants, and release his grain stores in time of famine. Those that didn’t tended to end up on a pitchfork.
We did try socialism. It worked.
If you care to read the article, it points out that all modern societies are some mixture of all three systems, and most developed nations exhibit elements of capitalism and socialism in particular.
You can even point to feudalism and make the argument that it lasted a lot longer than all the other alternatives, even though nowadays we reject it because of it's innate injustice.
And every marxist revolution, which is the 'purest' form of socialism we've tried so far, has ended in catastrophic failure. Only the truly self-deluding would argue otherwise.
Capitalism (or commercialism as it might be more accurately named) carries by itself no expression of any ethical system to be palatable in it's pure form either, it contains no obvious incentives to do the right thing. Maybe there is the problem, we make a fundamental mistake when we expect economic systems, any economic system, to stand duty for personal ethics.
Maybe if we want people to do the right thing, we need to be looking in an entirely different domain, because humans have never been inspired to greatness by purely material interests alone.
Capitalism, is going to end human civilisation.
All human civilisations, including all those greatly pre-dating ‘capitalism’, have come and gone.
Bull. The "purest form" of socialism, in history, occurred in New Zealand from the first Labour Government, and many other Western countries, until overtaken by the return of neo-liberal capitalism. Note that by all measures, they were the most successful societies, ever.
If you consider an undemocratic totalitarian dictatorship, with a wealthy class of "nomenclatura" on top hogging most of the resources, "socialism," you have NFI. Taken in by the same bs, that has USA voting for billionaires, against their own best interests.
The Soviet Union was "socialist" and "Democratic" for about two weeks,, before the Bolsheviks took over. The problem with any revolution, including our own Neo-liberal one, is that the most ruthless, self interested bastards, end up on top.
You can hardly claim China, is a failure if you consider that a “Marxist revolution”. Rather a misinterpretation of Marx, BTW.
I don’t like their Government or the methods. Almost as ruthless as the USA, but they have bailed out US, capitalism, several times, and our own economic dependence on the “communists” is becoming painfully obvious.
This New Zealand you paint as a socialist utopia was entirely funded on the back of capitalist enterprise. Most people worked in entirely capitalist enterprises, personal property was still owned by almost everyone; it was at best a 'mixed economy' featuring large components of both capitalism (which appeals to individual self-interest) and socialism (which presumes most people are willing to be altruistic to at least some degree).
As it happens I too share a considerable nostalgia for this all too short era. It seems to me we hit a sweet spot for a few short decades, based largely on the experience of the war generations who had learned the value of sacrifice for the greater good. But that alone was never the basis for a stable ethical system, the trauma of depression and war always fades with time.
But to describe it as the 'purest form of socialism' we have tried is bunk.
If it were just the Bolsheviks you might have a point, but the same brutal failures happened everywhere else that marxism was tried. Besides you are talking with one of the very few kiwis who has stood at the place where the Revolution was actually born, in Sverdlovsk during the Czarist era. Revolutions are by their nature undertaken by people who are willing to pay any price for their victory; the brutality was baked in right from the outset.
More crap. You are parroting the US right wing propaganda view of socialism.
And you have certainly never bothered to read Marx, or Adam Smith for that matter.
Hint. They were not that far apart.
I never thought you would adopt the same self serving religious, and justification for fucking everyone else over, thinking the US, republicans, and our National party parrot.
"The poor resent the rich" FFS.
"The poor resent the rich" FFS.
George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier characterised it more accurately as ' bitter middle class socialists who resented those more successful than them far more than any real concern they had for the poor'.
Yeah sure.
If you really want to see envy, which I have first hand, it is the rich parasite with the 40m yachts resentment of the rich parasite with the 100m yacht.
And yes correct, there seem to be way too many "chardonnay socialists" like our current Labour party, and right wing converts pretending to be “socialist” who given the opportunity to remove poverty, prefer to keep their own comfort.
Sighs … you pretend not to be resentful, but then describe people more successful than yourself as 'parasites'. Twice in the same sentence. Terms of disgust and disease used to vilify whole groups of people is something you should ask a Jewish friend about; they know very well how that works.
The lack of self awareness is painful to watch.
The parroting of US propaganda and right wing memes, from a formerly sensible commentator, is painful to read.
Why don't you just say it "A rising tide lifts all boats". I.e. Trickle down. Which is what you are claiming with your bull.
If a young unemployed bloke, through no fault of his own, on a measly $154 a week, is a "bludger" then someone getting thousands of times more money than their contribution to society justifies, is most definitely a "parasite". Existing on what they have taken off that young fellow, and many others.
"Parasite" is not being envious, just descriptive.
I am comfortable and well off enough in my own life, that I don't envy, anyone. I do however, think everyone should have the same chances I had.
Extremes of wealth and poverty, are what has destroyed civilisations in the past.
The dominance of political power by the "rich" and distressingly the support of other comfortable people, who have forgotten how society helped them get there, is destroying my society.
https://eand.co/this-is-how-a-society-dies-35bdc3c0b854
"Parasite" is not being envious, just descriptive.
It's exactly the same language Hitler used to demonise the Jewish people. It's indefensible.
Extremes of wealth and poverty, are what has destroyed civilisations in the past.
I've lost count how many times I've expressed the identical sentiment here over the years. Probably at least twice a month for over a decade. So don't pretend to lecture me on this.
I've said this many times too, the paradoxical thing is that the modern post WW2 world has dramatically reduced absolute poverty to an extent never seen before in 10,000 years of human history. The left pretends it's all for the eradication of poverty, but much to our chagrin it was highly industrialised, financialised and commercialised economies that did it. Marxism by contrast was a bitter failure wherever it was tried.
It's time we got honest about this, the denial indefensible.
Yet at the same time, these same incredibly productive economies have increased relative poverty dramatically. And it turns out that just throwing more money at this problem makes it worse. The underlying problem is that success creates opportunity and this in turn creates more success. This is a positive feedback loop that for some people drives extreme success.
Even though we can institutionally allocate everyone pretty much the same initial opportunities (and this is the other great achievement of the past few hundred years), humans are not all identical and we don't want to be. We do have different temperaments, different talents, capabilities, and sometimes fortune smiles and other times she doesn't. There is nothing we can do about this, you can have freedom of action, or equality of outcome, but not both. This means that the extremes of wealth is a much harder problem to address than everyone imagines.
To use a crude analogy, we could achieve equality of outcome in the 100m sprint if we cut Usain Bolt's legs off, but that wouldn't make anyone else run any faster, nor make anyone much happier except perhaps those who envied his natural talent.
This is the point I invite you to think about, please don't skip it. It's my sense that relative poverty (or gross inequality) is not best thought of as an economic problem. Certainly it's superficial manifestation can be measured in monetary terms, but the reason why gross disparity causes social instability is much less obvious. The underlying drivers have more to do with human psychology and moral values than anything in the monetary domain.
Wealth by itself is not the problem; it is how it is used that should concern us. This is and the temptation to fall into hubris and entitlement is the ethical or moral question.
At the other extreme, once you have gotten out of absolute poverty, the lack of wealth is not directly the problem either. It is the fact of being hopelessly wedged at the bottom of the social heap which can easily prompt responses of resentment and self sabotage is the underlying problem that traps people into bitterness.
In simple terms, the manifest symptoms of inequality are very different depending on your position in the economic hierarchy, but the moral nature of them lies in the same domain. And maybe reframing the debate this way we can find some fresh thinking toward actual solutions.
We "hit a sweet spot" as a result of returning soldiers determination not to be an underclass, on their return from war.
However returning to a Nation with poverty and an underclass, was the result of deliberate decisions, by two successive Governments, less than 60 people each time, to have poverty, to force people into low wage, exploitative jobs. It wasn't a necessity. Even Bolger had the grace to admit they went too far.
Reversing it will simply take another Government decision, to raise welfare above starvation levels.
The motivation was stated by Wayne Mapp, on this blog. He a lawyer, believed there was "too much equality" exemplified by wharfies "getting paid more than Lawyers". The arrogance and self interest is obvious. He never explained when asked, why, a lawyer should get more than a Wharfie.
He never explained when asked, why, a lawyer should get more than a Wharfie.
When the day comes you really need a good one, you don't care how much they get paid.
You can hardly claim China, is a failure if you consider that a “Marxist revolution”.
It was a monumental failure right up to the point where Nixon opened up the global economy to them and the CCP decided to stop being communist and make filthy capitalist money instead.
That's a pretty narrow view their Redlogix, one based on a whole lot of misconceptions.
It ignores the reality of the failed state that was China in the Warlord period, you double down on it by ignoring the damage done by Japan during the second world war.
No one would argue that Mao was a great economic mind, actually on that front he was bloody useless. But he did win two wars.
The CCP had a plan, and the did stick to it, to uplift the peasantry out of drudgery. They used a planned economy and some aspects of capitalism. But they too have the problems of capitalism – namely the PLA which is frightening corporation
But capitalism as a dominate economic system is deeply flawed for two main reason (actually many more) – monopoly and the concept of growth. Monopoly is a fundamental problem we are stuck with at present. Growth is a problem because we live in a finite planet.
Redlogix, has had a "road to Damascus".
And turned into "Gordon Gecko".
If that's what being a landlord does to you, I'm pleased I decided not to add more petrol to our housing market.
Up until the end of WW2 the historic pattern of the world was always empire. From around 1000AD onward I recall an article that counted over 30 of them.
The simple idea was that in order to develop beyond the physical constraints of your existing territory (usually due to geography or the limits of photosynthesis) it was necessary to grab the resources of others. So you built an army and a navy and set about controlling as much trade and territory as possible. While white ethnicities dominated this game in the past 500 years, history quickly shows that everyone who could had a crack at it.
The process started out pretty crude and brutal, outright theft and tyranny was the norm for centuries. Over time however the process of empire became more sophisticated and the development that it generated were slowly extended to more and more groups. With industrialisation and the massive increase in productivity this process accelerated.
At the end of WW2 the Americans had the only military left standing, the same damage you rightly say happened to China, had left the British and Europeans equally devastated. Germany especially. But the Soviets remained a threat that didn't have a clear military solution to, the logistics of the Americans attempting a ground war into Russia was clearly impossible.
At Bretton Woods the Americans decided to try something different, unprecedented in human history. Instead of building yet another overt empire they cut a deal with the rest of the world that said "we will use our overwhelming naval power to protect trade routes everywhere in the world, and in return you have to be on our side in the Cold War". They essentially bribed up a global alliance.
It also meant that trade routes everywhere were open and secure. The US Navy assured this. You could sent goods between any two nations, and the Americans provided the implicit security without any overt impost. You were expected to use US dollars as the trading currency and support the US politically against Stalin's Soviet Union … but that was pretty much it. It was a hegemony, but not like any that came before it.
And in terms of human development, this innovation was wildly successful. Since the end of WW2 the gradual elimination of absolute poverty has accelerated to the point that in 2016 fully half the human race is now middle class by local standards. That is a stunning achievement, utterly unprecedented, that most lefties like to pretend hasn't happened.
As for China, it's geography means that it is utterly dependent on the freedom of the seas for almost all of it's development. It's trade routes to essential resources and exports are long and vulnerable; without US Naval protection, China would never have become 'the factory of the world' that is today (well it was until a few weeks ago). All the Americans have to do to collapse China is to go home.
This isn't a moral narrative; it isn't a justification for all the obvious fuck ups the American's have made along the way, but it is a realistic description of the unique global order that we have flourished under since WW2.
Partially correct on what happened, but not the cause.
A convenient fiction from the Yanks.
I could equally describe the myriads of failures in the US attempts to impose capitalist dictatorships around the world. Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, just being the latest.
Even the attempt to run Sears, in the States, as a competitive capitalist corporation within itself has been a dismal failure. Even capitalist corporations cannot exist without social cohesion and Co operation.
https://eand.co/this-is-how-a-society-dies-35bdc3c0b854 The USA, and New Zealand if we keep allowing greedy thieves, power, is a failing society.
I'm sick and tired of social darwinist bullshit being peddled as some sort of universal "Truth". Especially in economic discussions – it like some bad rerun of 80's tv. "Dallas" was a tv show, and in no way did it represent reality.
If this social darwin troup was true, then libertarian economics would work, and the social experiment of the last 30 odd years would make everyone a winner! Funny it's almost a complete failure. As this recession we are entering will be particular brutal on individuals.
Mutual aid, is a concept a lot on the left just don't get. It's what makes socialist economics work. The realisation that working together on somthing is beneficial for you and yours. As an anarchist I'd argue that those thing are limited – health care, education, and housing all work better under a mutual aid model. As for material production and agriculture I'm for mix of co-operative and individualist approaches. Some planning is necessary.
And to give Ad his due, we need trade, trade is a good. But trade is not capitalism, nor is dependant on capitalism. Trade can exist without capitalism.
Capitalism is a broken model, as is Marxist economics. We have to look at more than just profit and the next growth cycle.
Capitalist ideas that people can only by motivated by greed, doesn't explain most Teachers, Doctors Aunties, Caregivers and the many other people who are certainly not motivated by greed, that make society function.
Those that are motivated purely by self interest, are totally unable to understand other motivations, though they are happy to profit from them. The main differential between the current left and right in New Zealand. Once we had economic right wingers who agreed that prosperity for all was a goal. We just differed on how to get there. That I could respect. I cannot respect the current self serving justification for what amounts to, theft.
The scientist that gave away the rights to insulin to save lives, is a being beyond their limited comprehension.
Thatcher's, "there is no such thing as society" is one of the most pernicious and dangerous, ideas of modern times. Adam Smith did not say "greed is good". In fact he wanted the people that Marx called, "rentiers" those who got paid from "owning" not "working" to pay the taxes.
The U.S. has just carried out multiple air strikes in Iraq targeting Iranian-backed Shia militia. The air strikes are retaliation for yesterday's rocket attack that killed and wounded American and British troops at camp Taji north of Baghdad.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020/03/retaliatory-strikes-attack-troops-iraq-200312220946232.html?__twitter_impression=true
Virus pandemic or no virus pandemic, the show must go on.
Every idiot who says "photo op" or "show pony" about Ardern should really watch the media conference she just gave in ChCh.
Anyone can read an autocue (except Trump) but it's the subsequent Q & A that really shows her quality. The key point is that she is saying what she thinks – not what some spin staffer has told her to say. The best fluency comes from sincerity.
The visiting Australian journalists seem to respect her.
Well-said. Her natural and unprocessed responses are inherently decent. Much respect and admiration due to her for that.
Every idiot who's down the "photo op" or "show pony" track could see the media conference, hear the media conference and come away with the same crap they usually parrot.
To compound the sad situation they're in, they would see Simon Bridges doing better, being better and stunning the gathering with his eloquence and presence.
About fkn time. The hero whistleblower who actually took the risks and paid the price and stood up for her principles is finally being released from prison. The assholes are still trying to squeeze her financially, though, by refusing to cancel fines that should never have been imposed.
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/us-judge-orders-wikileaks-source-chelsea-manning-released-from-prison/ar-BB1179bc?li=BBqdg4K&ocid=mailsignout
Wow. I missed that. An interesting and hopefully welcome development.
Given that it's come right after a serious suicide attempt, I hope like hell she's got damn good wraparound support post-release.
Not so good for Assange if it means the Americans are confident he is going to be extradited.
How do you figure that?
They tossed her in the slammer because she wouldn't cough up new material to use against Assange (on the perfectly reasonable grounds she didn't have any new material to give them). So I don't really see how releasing her is in any way negative for Assange.
It all depends on why they released her now it’s at the trial stage in the UK (too late to present anything obtained form her or they have reason to be confident about getting the extradition).
From wikipedia (source info is apparently NYT and WaPo):
If the Grand Jury has wrapped up, then they've more or less finished putting together their case against Assange. Which would presumably include all of Manning's previous testimony, and she says she's already testified to everything she knows.
Yes. I saw that today.
There might be a go fund me page or something.
TOP party talking UBI again. In case anyone missed release around 10 March. Maybe with inflation indexed safeguards, this inflation calculation to include rents and rise in house prices?
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2020/03/10/top-calls-for-ubi-stimulus-in-response-to-covid-19/#comment-494949
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
This gives good details about UBI.
Doing the lord's work.
/
To be fair, he's correct: holding mass religious gatherings during a pandemic would demonstrate quite clearly just how much power faith has to affect material reality, ie none. Pretty expensive demonstration if you value human life, though…
But a great way of disabusing people of the hilarious notion that the magical sky wizard will protect them from pestilence, famine, war and other interesting ways of dying.
Part of me is in favour of it. A small, dark, bloody-minded part of me I do my best to keep suppressed most of the time.
Darwin's theory at work.
edit:
If you want to consider another threat, then there is bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
And yes we import pork from China.
WHO reckon they'll be killing 4 times as many annually as cancer does within 20 years.
Pork's in trouble from swine flu which's decimating the pig population. China faces an internal shortfall so great it'll probably cease exporting.
The fear is if it hits Germany (as it's in Poland now) there goes the global market as they're one of the biggest pork exporters.
Yes that is a positive, as the pork export from China was another worldwide health threat.
Authoritarian despot doing his thing.
Turkey's control of coronavirus testing kits is fuelling concerns over a cover-up, a prominent surgeon wrote for The National Interest on Wednesday.
“To date, Turkey has done about 2,500 tests. The lack of any identified cases provoked suspicion because if the test is negative, there was no other way to prove that the test might be positive,” said Dr. Ergin Koçyıldırım, a paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburg’s School of Medicine.
A source at a privately owned hospital in Istanbul told Ahval that the government was controlling the distribution of kits and not allowing hospitals to independently order alternatives.
Turkey has said its own virus detection kits are the fastest and most accurate in the world. While most detection kits generally yield results in around 24 hours, the Turkish government said its kits – produced in Turkey by a private company and funded by the state – can produce results in 90 minutes.
Despite the Health Ministry’s claims that Turkish coronavirus detection kits have been exported to several countries, including the United States, Koçyıldırım said that – to his knowledge – there was not a single institution or lab in that country using the tests.
Koçyıldırım also said that the Turkish government’s censorship of information was preventing people receiving reliable information on the coronavirus and was a disaster waiting to happen.
Turkey is the world’s biggest jailer of journalists and has threatened to take legal action against social media users or journalists who criticise its coronavirus detection approach, said Koçyıldırım.
https://ahvalnews.com/coronavirus/turkeys-control-coronavirus-testing-kits-fuels-concerns-over-cover-surgeon
Overly optimistic?
The global coronavirus pandemic could be over by June if countries mobilize to fight it, a senior Chinese medical adviser said on Thursday, as China declared the peak had passed there and new cases in Hubei fell to single digits for the first time.
Around two-thirds of global cases of the coronavirus have been recorded in China’s central Hubei province, where the virus first emerged in December. But in recent weeks the vast majority of new cases have been outside China.
[…]
“Broadly speaking, the peak of the epidemic has passed for China,” said Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission. “The increase of new cases is falling.”
Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese government’s senior medical adviser, said at a news conference on Thursday that as long as countries take the outbreak seriously and are prepared to take firm measures, it could be over worldwide in a matter of months.
“My advice is calling for all countries to follow WHO instructions and intervene on a national scale,” he said. “If all countries could get mobilized, it could be over by June.”
Mr. Zhong, an 83-year-old epidemiologist renowned for helping combat the SARS outbreak in 2003, said viruses in the same family typically become less active in warm months, which could help slow the spread.
“My estimate of June is based on scenarios that all countries take positive measures. But if some countries do not treat the infectiousness and harmfulness seriously, and intervene strongly, it would last longer.”
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-chinese-medical-official-says-coronavirus-pandemic-could-be-over-by/
We'll find out if the Chinese approach works as they go back to work in the next few weeks.
If they do not go back to work soon the global supply chain is stuffed, if they do and there is a renewed spread of the virus … then that demonstrates there is no guarantees form harsh prolonged action.
oh well….sure thing, why not
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/411655/coronavirus-womad-organisers-ask-unwell-attendees-to-stay-home
insert many many face palm, head on desk and back to face palm
WOMAD. So Sad. Such utter ignorance and disregard for the health and safety of their workers and their patrons.
All public assembly should be banned forthwith.
Where is our leadership? Everyday we delay taking simple, decisive action to contain spread of the virus will cause exponentially greater suffering at the peak.
The normally excellent Mehdi Hassan making the mistake of thinking it's a problem that Joe Biden lies a lot. Sorry Mehdi, in a world where Sanders gets pilloried for NOT lying about Cuba, it matters not a jot.
Apparently, Dolt45 fired the US pandemic response team in 2018. Sounds too stupid and timely to be true? Passes the Snopes test.
The yanks are lucky he has a natural genetic talent for sciencing.
Good article on the trials of the great Dr Jordan Peterson:
https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peterson
Showing the way.
BUT NO TOILET PAPER! USELESS!!!
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120276244/coronavirus-australian-politician-peter-dutton-has-coronavirus
Hahahahahaha!
We should really ban travel from Australia. Filthy beasts.
Certainly a problem fot the top end of town.
What a statement of the Trump era that much international diplomatic business goes on at Mar-a-Lago, barely 2km away from the house of Trump's good friend, Jeffrey Epstein.
That's well over the line.
Which bit?
Probably the bit about laughing at Dutton having the disease.
Although that was close to my first impulse, too. Odious man.
Well, he's single-handedly caused a surge in violent crime in this country, so fuck him.
As a kiwi living in Australia I’ve been aware of Dutton’s odious policies long before most people here. But I’d still not gloat at this.
Then there is the ‘filthy beasts’ reference to all Australians. That’s a line with dark precedents.
Can't really get myself to worried about people who do gloat at it, though.
But would the gloaters consider losing as Tom Hanks too high a price for the world to pay?
Not sure Tom Hanks has worked so very hard to destroy the close relationship between New Zealand and Australia.
Could be wrong – I'll rewatch his movies 🙂
Can't really get myself to worried about people who do gloat at it, though.
But if hypothetically Ardern was to be hospitalised, and someone on kiwiblog made a similar ugly comment I'm sure you'd be fairly unimpressed.
What has Ardern done to export crime to other countries?
Lol
Plenty of right wingers have long list of grudges against her and would be as equally motivated to gloat as you have.
Grudges for what? Hugging people wearing a hijab?
Regardless of the motive, gloating is always ugly and reveals far more about the character of the person doing it than anything else.
By all means have a bit of a smirk to yourself, but FFS think before typing.
I'll throw a "thoughts and prayers" in there for Dutton, then. Apparently that does the trick.
I wouldn't gloat at this either. Those poor fucking viruses – I'm just glad they lack the cognitive capacity to realise what a sack of shit they're living in.
I wouldn't feel too sorry for those viruses…
Will you still be laughing if Dutton has given Coronavirus to Tracey Martin?
Nope. Just Dutton.
Seems that this virus really does bring out the worst in some people.
oh fuck
The Hyde amendment blocks the use of federal funds to pay for abortion.
Give the present dreadful state of American politics, there are quite a number of 'representatives' for whom, some may say, federally funded retrospective abortions could be a very good idea! 😉
Faith based healthcare, ain't it grand?
however,
it goes hand in hand with this.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/93988v/whole-foods-suggests-that-workers-share-paid-time-off-during-coronavirus
Whole foods is wholly owned by Amazons Jeff Bezo.