We are the high and mighty Lords of Bizness, therefor if We do anything illegal it is obviously SOMEONE ELSES fault,
The fishing company Sanfords has been fined by the US courts for dumping liquid waste in the sea off the coast of American Samoa,
4 million bucks and a years ban from fishing in US waters seems like a fairly light punishment for dumping liquid waste,including what appears to have been some oil contaminate, and you would think that the fishing company involved would have simply paid the fine and hung it’s head in contrition,
Not likely, on RadioNZ National News at 8.00 this morning there is a Rep from the fishing industry, i didn’t catch his name or whether or not He was attached to Sanfords, laying the blame for the waste dumping at the feet of Government inspectors,
According to the Brainless Prick speaking for the fishing industry if those who inspect such ships on behalf of the Government had of picked up the fact that the waste piping had been altered in such a way as to allow the dumping they,( the inspectors), could have stopped the Sanford ship from leaving port here in New Zealand and the ship wouldn’t have been able to dump it’s s**t off of the coast of American Samoa,
Anyone reading the Standard and not understanding the allusion often made in these pages to the Bizness sector being staffed at the management and board level by a bunch of psycho and sociopaths need only listen to that news item for some enlightening education…
I heard the same piece while milking, which means I wasn’t giving it my full attention. However my impression was that the speaker as not trying in any way to excuse Sandford but was trying to draw attention to the fact that, yet again, Government regulators once again seem to have been captured by the Industy they are supposed to be regulating.
Also I’m not sure it’s fair to see the whole incident as some devious and intricate conspiracy by Sandford management and board of directors to shave a few cents off its operating costs. The charges against the company were that it was ‘vicariously liable’ for the acts of the boat’s crew, and my money would be on this being yet another case of incompetence and carelessness at the top in leaving the detail to others further down the chain who cut corners or adopted a ‘she’ll be all right’ attitude. Certainly the damage to Sandford beside the fine far outweighs any profits this practice might have generated – Shares of Sanford fell 0.3 percent to $3.83 on the NZX and have dropped 6 percent this year. Believe me that plus the international damage to Sandford’s reputation will be of far more importance to the top brass at Sandfords than the details of the plumbing on one of its boats.
So yes, management at Sandfords was slack and incompetent – which makes them pretty typical – as they failed to implement proceedures and appoint the right people to stop people down the chain cutting corners to save themselves a dirty chore. So everything they got they deserved. But if this wasn’t picked up, or worse still was picked up but not followed up, by regulators THAT is the real story.
Why did the regulators let the ship sail if they had picked this up? Did they accept a back-hander from the captain to avoid a delay in sailing any repairs might have entailed? Did they turn a blind eye to it because they have become too pally with the crews they are supposed to check? Is there a revolving door between the industry and the regulators? Did the regulators receive instructions from on high not to look too closely or take too much notice of the minor stuff when compared with basic sea-worthiness, in order to ‘encourage’ the fishing industry to beef up its productivity?
Those are the questions I’d like answers to, and at least someone has raised them on the radio.
I disagree – the real story is firstly that Sanfords as a major fishing company is willing to pollute the very environment that we all (themselves included) rely on to survive and secondly that it incompetence at procedural and inspection levels need to be tightened up.
If you or i saved up all our waste for a month including sewerage and then took it down to the harbour and publicly dumped it off of a wharf all hell would break loose and we would probably end up being thrown in a jail cell,
That is the difference between us and in this instance the Board of Sanfords, everyone agrees that it is the Board which is ultimately responsible for the actions of the Company BUT the Boards of company’s found to be breaking the law are seldom, if ever, held personally responsible for the criminal actions of the company…
Jesus, that’s a long winded advertisement on behalf of the Board of Sanford don’t you think, is it not the Board who is ultimately responsible for the actions of those who conduct the company’s business???,
My opinion is that the Board of Sanford’s must take ultimate responsibility for the dumping of waste whether or not They knew of the practice or not, SO, they got what THEY as a company deserved including the drop in share price which effects the share-holders who in essence appoint the Board,
Please provide ‘the evidence’ that those in Government employment tasked with inspecting the particular ship in question were in any way ‘bribed’ to ignore the particular ship’s ability to illegally dump waste into the sea,AND, ‘the evidence’ that these inspectors actually KNEW the dumping was taking place,
Your denigration of these inspectors borders on the defamatory and is simply a reinforcement of the ‘Bizness model’ of blaming the inspectors for the criminal behaviour of Sanford’s….
PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…
Yes, the Board and management at Sandford’s are ultimately responsible for their ships dumping waste at sea. No-one is disputing that, that I’m aware of.
I’m suggesting they didn’t know it was going on. I’m even suggesting they shouldn’t be expected to know it was going on as this involves operational matters at a very low and specialist level. What they should have done and clearly failed to do was to set up the systems and employ the people who should have known and who should have stopped it. This I say is poor management and incompetence on their part which has now been rightly exposed. You seem to be suggesting that at the very highest levels of management, decisions were taken to save a few dollars in a multi-million dollar operation by tweaking some very obscure plumbing in one of their boats. I say that’s nonsense.
You were the one saying that there are Government inspectors/regulators tasked with inspecting these boats to ensure they can’t/don’t pollute the oceans. IF that’s the case then, as the commentator on the radio pointed out, they clearly failed to do their job. This might have been because:
a) they were incompetent,
b) they were paid not to see it
c) they saw it but didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’
e) they think there’s a good chance they might be looking for work in the Industry as Marine Engineers or whatever sometime soon, or have just come from the Industry and don’t want to draw attention to things they did themselves
f) they’ve been instructed by their own seniors not to worry about ‘minor’ or ‘technical’ breaches of the regulations as some-one above them doesn’t want the Fishing Industy hobbled with ‘trivia’.
g) they were short-staffed and too busy to make a proper inspection.
g) I can’t think of any others but feel free to add any other reasons the ship might have sailed in breach of the regs.
To my mind it is important that we know why a(nother) Government agency failed to do its job properly but if you’re happy to blame all the world’s problems on evil, conniving capitalists I don’t give a damn.
“PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…” Actually ‘the Company’ was found guilty vicariously for the acts of certain of its employees. Neither the ‘management’ nor ‘the Board’ were found guilty or any any way personally liable.
Ha….Ha…Ha…For a lesson in how the capitalists shift the blame that’s just perfect, I am not the one who suggested that there are Government inspectors tasked with doing any such thing,
The dickhead on the news this morning representing the fishing industry is the one suggesting that and then like you attempts to blame those inspectors for the criminal actions of the company,
The piping that allowed the emptying of the ships waste into the sea might for all i (or you) know be perfectly legal, it is the actions of dumping the waste illegally that are in question,
The point you make that the Board did not hire management of sufficient intelligence to stop the dumping of the waste is still the responsibility of the Board, the fact that the Board had not issued specific directives about the dumping of waste simply makes them as culpable as those who thought it a good idea to ditch the waste at sea,
I also belatedly notice that you have abhorently blamed the ‘workers’ aboard the Sanford ship for the waste dumping, claiming, again with the provision of not the slightest scrap of evidence, that it was the workers dumping the waste to avoid having to engage in a ‘dirty chore’ at some later point,
The fact that you make these unfounded allegations simply proves the point that i make and illuminates you personally as a prize wanker…
Oh I agree I don’t know why the waste was dumped. However it seems to me reasonable to assume that separating waste oil for storage on board and then disposing of it ‘responsibly’ at a later stage is a dirty and onerous chore compared with just pumping it overboard.
And I’m afraid I do blame the crew of the boat for dumping the waste, unless you are suggesting that the senior management and Board of Sanfords had themselves helicoptered out to the boat as it worked ‘off the coast of American Samoa” and did this nefarious deed themselves while the crew attended a prayer meeting or something below decks.
As far as I can tell from the press reports none of the crew themselves have been charged with this ‘crime’ – responsibility has been quite rightly sheeted home to their employer for failing to take the proper steps to stop what should not have happened from happening.
The ‘crew’ on a ship such as what Sanford’s use as fishing trawlers DO NOT unilaterally DO ANYTHING that they have not been told to do by a senior officer,
IE, the crew don’t even chip paint unless the order comes from on high, you are in fact saying 2 things at once here,(in other words being a wanker),the crew may have been involved in the physical actions of turning on the taps which dumped the waste,BUT, for this to happen orders must have been given,
This simply begs the question of the ‘practice and why the ship wasn’t put into port when the waste tanks were full which in my mind if i were running such a ship would come down to a simple matter of (a), the cost,and (b), the risk of being caught dumping the waste at sea,
These are NOT equations that are made by the crew, on a ship such as this one there is a large amount of doubt in my mind at least that even the Captain would be making such decisions, such decisions of whether or not the ship stayed at sea fishing would be made via radio communication with the company back in New Zealand and would be based upon the gross amount of catch in the hold,
The company in New Zealand would have weighed up the cost/risk equation against a backdrop of what would be the cost of putting into American Samoa to empty the waste or dump some or all of it in the sea thus allowing the ship to continue fishing until the ships capacity to store fish had been reached,
The alternative, if there were even the facilities in American Samoa, were to put into American Samoa or steam home to New Zealand to discharge the waste,
It is obvious that the company in New Zealand has opted to have the ship stay at sea fishing believing it could ‘get away’ with dumping the waste…
The ‘crew’ on a ship such as what Sanford’s use as fishing trawlers DO NOT unilaterally DO ANYTHING that they have not been told to do by a senior officer,
While I have some sympathy for the crew, I can’t help but wonder where I might have heard that excuse before…
Yeah sure Mac,are you a secret anarchist??? we all follow orders Mac, if your in the employ of someone and you don’t follow orders,(requests to direct your labour),then you don’t stay in that employment for long,
Even if we are not in employment we all follow the orders of society as expressed within the laws and statutes of the society we inhabit, other wise that society has places such as jails and phsychiatric facilities where you are removed to,
I assume you mean the guards excuse for having helped operate the death camps, to have objected and refused would have simply resulted in the guards being subjected to much the same treatment as the detainees in the death camp,
The crew of fishing boats aint Green-Peace activists, perhaps you think that en masse the crew should have refused to dump the waste and joined the unemployed in the ever elongating queue so as the rest of the country could look down upon and denigrate them…
preserve one’s job
everyone does it
Nuremburg defense should have worked
Fishing crews aren’t environmentalists, so it’s not their job.
That’s a fairly morally bankrupt list.
Should the crews go to prison? Nope, probably not. But they are still responsible for their own actions, just as you or I am. We choose which orders we obey, and why.
The bigger worry is: how much of the same is going on and the culprits are never caught? Dumping rubbish seem to be common practice – why else is it that the North Pacific and Atlantic have large “islands” of waste, mostly plastic floating just beneath the water surface? What does this do to the ecosystem in regards to weather, oxygen exchange, sea creatures and plankton etc. Seems that a lot of lip service is going on but not much else.
PS, of course my comment above is me being nice to the Sanfords, we might all learn some time in the future that the dumping of waste products by the company is ‘normal practice’ in New Zealand waters,
If we do learn this at some future point in time i for one will not be surprised in the least…
Halides (what you find in our treated water) are scientifically shown to cause hardening of the arteries. We NEVER hear about this in the news.
A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.
Moral of the story? Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
“A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.”
Which would be rather contra-indicated by the massive increase in life expectancy and improvement in quality of life for those over 70 that have come about in the last 20-30 years.
Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
Absolute Bullshit.
The amount of chlorine added to water in this country is very minimal, typically at about 0.7 ppm at the treatment plant and usually less than 0.3 ppm by the time it gets to your tap. That’s almost nothing.
This is quite different to the practise overseas (often the USA) where much higher levels ( 1.5 -2.5 ppm) are commonplace AND the levels of organics in the water are neither measured nor removed. This creates a problem where the chlorine and the organics can react to create trihalomethanes which are potentially carcinogenic. In this country the plant operators monitor and control for organics and chlorine dosing very tightly. The NZ Drinking Water Standard is very advanced when compared to much of the rest of the world.
Fluoride is also added at very low levels, also 0.7 ppm. This is not actually all that higher than what is typically found in the natural sources:
Fluoride is usually found naturally in low concentration in drinking water and foods. The concentration in seawater averages 1.3 parts per million (ppm). Fresh water supplies generally contain between 0.01–0.3 ppm, whereas the ocean contains between 1.2 and 1.5 ppm.
The treatment process actually reduces the amount of fluoride that was in the raw water to almost zero; the fluoride dosing after treatment merely returns what was taken out and then increases it to a standardised level somewhat above that. Again the level is pretty low and realistically does not represent a risk all that much higher than the natural background.
You might also want to consider that there are water supplies in New Zealand that have been non-fluoridated for a very long time now and there has been zero evidence that this has made any difference whatsoever. People who have lived on tank water all their lives … still get heart-attacks.
As for home filters. These have to be changed on a regular basis, otherwise they become a very real and definite health risk in themselves. If the municipal water treatment operators allowed their filter systems to operate for months or years without backwashing (the equivalent of changing your home filter) there would be a huge health risk, and prosecutions would result.
But somehow when people at home do exactly the same thing with filters they leave in place unchanged for ages … blissfully delude themselves that they’re doing the ‘right thing’ for their health.
Oh I don’t know so much joe … Dwight Lundell may have been struck off for defying the conventional wisdom … but he’s far from being alone on this topic. One for instance:
Indeed. Attacking the messenger is a tactic we should be wary of.
You can’t get much more mainstream than the US CDC and even they are looking into this. Here they discuss a theory of general inflammation caused by contemporary lifestyle factors (“metaflammation”), which might lead to the development of modern chronic diseases – like heart disease.
Gary Taubes (award winning science journalist), and Effe Ravnskov (medical researcher) are also among the reputable people who challenge the fat hypothesis. Taube’s book Good Calories, Bad Calories has a fascinating few chapters on the history of medical research and why we ended up with the wrong public health advice about fat, cholesterol and heart disease.
My own circumstance RL where weight was never a worry the stubbornly high cholesterol level which familial comparisons indicated was unlikely to be hereditary was a concern. The first remedy was a close watch on my diet, the second was a dairy/protein watch and the third was a carbohydrate watch and still the high levels persisted. So I tried a mostly vegetarian and then for 20 or so weeks a vegan diet and apart from being perpetually hungry and a return to the fighting weight of my youth nothing really changed.
So I’m back to eating what gandma ate and statins it is.
VV, ae. Recently through a Whāngai connection I’ve been involved with organising accommodation for some people who, while they’re hardly destitute, are struggling financially quite simply because of the lack of education and skills and paralleled with those factors is a deep seated suspicion of the establishment.
But it’s not the distrust of the services, police etc, that’s the worry, fuck, in the most I agree with them, it’s the anti-fluoride, anti-vaccination attitudes with a couple of world government references thrown in that are. The where and who these attitudes came from concerns me greatly.
I think we might be one of two or three countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise in magazines and on tv.
The bloke who set the theory on cholesterol that the heart foundations around the world have endorsed for too long now was a ‘marine biologist’. Ancel Keys was the same man that put cigarettes into the US Army’s “K-rations” (long time before anyone admitted that smoking was a causal effect of heart disease)
Statin studies have been showing little effect except on men under 20 or some such age (i read these in “Sweet Poison” David Gillespie, 2010). A man (lawyer) motivated by the truth.
Dwight Lundell may be a poor financial whizz and not a surgeon of a gold standard, but he is brave enough to go against the BIG pharmaceuticals and food manufacturers (this is dangerous or mutiny for many health workers) and point out that our bodies are treating our food like ‘foreign particles’ cos thats exactly what our ‘food’ is these days. This is besides ‘experts’ trying to sell books or trendy ideas.
People who struggle financially are more likely to eat food that is cheaper and less likely to be real food and more likely to have added sugar to make it taste like food.
Yep. And the more one reads up about how the American “Food Pyramid” was actually constructed by industry interests, how their recommendations for sugar consumption were reached, etc. the more cynical one becomes.
@Joe, The drug cartels are making billions of dollars off heart medications.
An american doctor i visited was astonished that nz’ers with heart problems were
given asprin to thin the blood.
Weight doesn’t go hand in hand with a high
cholestarol either,my mother was a tiny lady
and had high cholestarol.
A really good trick is to lower the guidelines for what counts as an “acceptable” cholesterol level bu just a smidgeon, and voila out of thin air, millions of new statin customers world wide are created, each one worth hundreds of dollars to the pharmaceutical companies.
Quote: “Some loansharks even require clients to sign power of attorney, allowing lenders to make all kinds of financial decisions on a borrower’s behalf.”
Pretty shocking for me to read that this is occuring. Something has to be done asap.
Charles Chauvel bless him, had some legislation he was trying to get through regarding loan sharks – not sure if it has anything about this in it but I’m picking it won’t.
The Agent under a Power of Attorney is REQUIRED to act in the principal’s best interest. The agent MUST always follow the principal’s directions and holds a fiduciary duty which requires him to always act with the HIGHEST DEGREE OF GOOD FAITH in behalf of their principals.
A Power of Attorney is revocable at any time and no reason is necessary. A simple written revocation suffices – no legalese is specified as long is intent (and capacity) are apparent.
The Agent cannot profit by any transaction where he represents the principal’s interests,
nor make a gift or otherwise transfer any of the principal’s money, personal property or real estate to himself unless the power of attorney explicitly states he can do so.
A court will declare a power of attorney invalid if the court finds that the principal lacked mental competency when the power of attorney was executed, or that the principal was the victim of fraud or UNDUE INFLUENCE.
Given the above I would have thought that a Power of Attorney would be of very little use to a loanshark, particularly as a court declaring a PoA invalid could make the agent personally liable to the principal for any sums improperly disbursed.
Of course this depends upon the debtor having sufficient access legal help to undo the damage but that’s going to be the case whatever arm-twisting methods the loanshark employs and whatever remedies Parliament might in its glacial wisdom enact into New Zealand law.
Really??? has the plum in your mouth migrated to your brain thus stifling your ability to think beyond the point of ‘self interest’,
Yes, you are quite correct in the ‘facts’ of what you say about ‘powers of attorney’, BUT, you only have to think for 1 or 2 seconds about the decile of people that ‘use’ the services of such loan sharks,
Many do not have English as a first language, have very limited knowledge of the law, and, are obviously fucking broke and desperate, the former indicating that they would have no ability to hire a lawyer to get such matter into a courtroom in the first place even if they had the understanding of the laws that we do…
PS, from anecdotal evidence the power of attorney gained by the loan-shark is used at the loan recipient’s bank to advance the automatic payment of the loan ahead of any other automatic payments that might be paid from that account…
Time for for the Green Party to publicly promote anti-climate change legislation that will challenge Australians to demand the same?
Or time for grubby public and backroom haggling over cabinet positions?
As the Ausralian heatwave disaster continues to roll on.
Blaming the citizenry for lack of action over climate change and ridiculous sanctimonious demands to use composting toilets and cycle to work won’t cut it. Central government regulatory initiative is urgently required. Instead of down playing climate change for electoral advantage, the Green Party should be actively calling for such action to be taken.
Why won’t they do it?
Are they corrupted?
Are they cowards?
Are they stupid?
“Today’s report warns that heat waves will become hotter longer and more frequent.” ABC News.
The climate commission was set up two years ago to inform Australians about climate change.
Professor David Karoly is the author of that report and he joins me now from Melbourne….
Louise Criely For ABC TV News
Sitting here in New Zealand it may be hard to guage the psychological effect on those suffering through this heatwave, and now being informed by their climate scientists, that future heatwaves will be twice, too three times, more extreme. In my opinion Australians would be very interrested in any serious actions being promoted in New Zealand to halt climate change.
Australia’s average temperature has increased by 0.9 of a degree since 1910, and the report says small changes in average temperature can have a significant impact on the frequency and nature of extreme weather events.
Professor Karoly says, based on current projections of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the long-term outlook is even more dire.
“We are expecting in the next 50 years for two to three degrees more warming,” he said.
“In other words two or three times the warming we’ve seen already leading to much greater increases in heatwaves and extreme fire danger days.
Watch the following interview, though the camera doesn’t spend much time on her, notice the body language of Louise Criely as she begins to look increasingly uncomfortable as the interview continues, struggling not to bite her lip and shifting in her chair.
Professor Karoly: What we have been trying to do is look at these longer term trends in the context of what we have seen in the last week or so….
We have set a new record for;
The hottest temperature,
The hottest average temperature, over Australia.
We have had more extensive heat over Australia.
A dome of hot air has been located over Australia for the most of last week.
We have had a longer lasting heatwave.
We’ve six days where the average maximum temperature has been hotter than 39 degrees celcius. The previous record was only three days where the average maximum temperature was hotter than that.
Louise Criely: So what’s your outlook now for Australian summers?
Professor Karoly: Not every summer will be hotter than the one before. In fact this year is markedly hotter than the last couple of years when we had relatively milder and wetter conditions.
But what we are going to find on average is more of the hot extremes and faster increases in the future, over the next 10 and 30 years, that we have seen over the last 30 years – more hot extremes, more heatwaves and more extreme fire conditions.
Professor Karoly: Climate scientists have been talking about these increases for more than 20 years in Australia. We are now seeing exactly what was predicted more than 20 years ago
Louise Criely: So what action should policy makers take from the report?
Professor Karoly: We know that climate change is getting worse due to increasing green house gases in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
So if we want to slow down climate change we need to reduce the emissions of green house gases into the atmosphere. We can do that by changing our energy sources….
It actually is capitalist societies that promote buying over renting. It benefits the bankers, and those at the top of the housing ladder.
Yes, have money in the bank and I can tell you this, banks all want to meet with you not to thank you for your money, but to get you in to debt with property so the bank actually can make money off you. Getting people into debt politically makes them slaves to voting for policies to keep interest rates lower and property valuations up. Then they pay the debt off when older and want the opposite. I do not agree with the incentives of encouraging people to get into debt who cannot afford or want it yet it is a vote winner. And in business, most entrepreneurs will tell you, never do with your own money what the bank or others will give to you and you can profit from.
Cactus also correctly asks when NZ is going to benefit once more from true political debate of issues. Debate from actually different points of view on the political continuum, instead of this perennial tepid crowding into the political economic “centre”.
Except for the Romans, and the Jews were allowed to charge non-Jews interest (Deuteronomy 23:20 – “Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.”. And even Muslim banks have a form of interest that gets around their Koranic restrictions. While individuals may have preached against usury in various ancient culture, it has tended not to be observed in the breech.
well, I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain, In the desert, you can remember your name…la,la,la la la la…
was walking down the street early this morning…And I swear I heard the voices singing to me…
I was approached by a boy (16 years old ) and his younger friend to buy some “K2” for them from the Adult Shop (it was Closed) freakin Asparagrass.
It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, if you’ve done it once then you’ll do it again, it’s a fine fine line between pleasure and pain!
As people shift from place to place, as they construct more pliable, less rooted patterns of life, what was once solid melts into air, to recall a comment of Marx.
Rod Oram’s article today on Stuff is well worth a read, and I’d be interested in comments on it from those more knowledgeable about economics than me. he begins:
This will be the make or break year for the Key Government’s economic strategy. If it fails to deliver reasonable growth to businesses and consumers the Government will have to defend a poor economic record in next year’s election.
He is pretty pessimistic:
Our dollar will remain high and our exports lacklustre so our current account deficit will increase from 4.5 per cent of GDP in the March 2012 year to 6.5 per cent in 2017; and New Zealand’s net international investment position (ie, what we owe the rest of the world) worsens from 71.9 per cent of GDP to 83.6 per cent. We will remain one of the most indebted of developed countries….
The real reason for our poor performance lies at home. The economy is stuck in its long-standing dependence on low value commodities. Worse, the volume of commodities grows only slowly because of constraints on land, labour, capital and science.
Then does a run-down on significant areas of the economy: export markets (government has hopes for TPP, but resistance is rising internationally), skills and safe workplaces (mixed outlook based on this government’s past record), natural resources (government may do many dodgy things that’ll upset a lot of voters), infrastructure (more RONS, resistance to Auckland rail loop).
Oram concludes:
The Government has taken far too long to get even this far with them; it co-ordinates, sells and executes these policies badly; there are merits in many of the policies but they are not bold enough to shift the economy to a higher growth track; and public resistance to many of the policies is rising.
not wanting to rain on the “optimists” parade, however, from that Guardian article the other day (muchas gracias);
looming on the global Horizon,
-systematic financial crisis
-water supply challenges
-fiscal imbalances (oh look, Above)
-food shortages
-WMD proliferation
-information breakdown
-chronic disease in developing countries (and some developed country not a million miles from Here)
-asset price collapse
-retrenchment from globalization
-pandemics / anti-biotic resistance
-and last, yet not least ( I “Like” this one) Digital / Social Media provocation of social breakdown ;(
However, large-scale migration and immersion in the societal melting-pot has disrupted the mimetic element.
Alienation, and the turn to rigid forms of faith will be coloured by the particularities of religion and historical circumstances.
In a “witty and profound” book, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Perry describes how, as the scientific description of the universe dominates, and because it asserts to be “objective”, it distances people from engagement with the world around them, promoting further existential angst. Furthermore, modern media such as the internet (and tele-evangelism) can serve the Fundamentalist very well. The internet propagates words, and Fundamentalists tend to put great stock in the power of words. Little wonder that they have shown themselves to be early adopters and swift masters of communication online. In addition, there has been in recent decades an emergence of what may be referred to as a militant form of atheism, wherby individuals are as emotionally committed to to science as the sole form of truth as fundamentalists might be to the documents of their faith (Dawk ins) and it seems important to such atheists to dispatch any alternatives to their world-view.
Julian Baggini (an atheist philosopher ) aspires to values of open-mindedness and in his discussion of militant atheists in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, concludes “Hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with an inflexible conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs is antithetical to such values.
All in All, religious fundamentalism and contemporary scientism are cultural cousins.:)
magic books like peer reviewed journals. And of course you need the circles of old wisemen/old wisewomen who each have their own collections of scrolls, and who pass the final judgements on what is good magic and what is not.
Getting paranoid about peer reviewed journals is ridiculous as the findings are always presented in such a way as any scientist with the resources can recreate the experiment. Expressions like “scientism” is a poisonous bye-blow of trying to apply postmodern semiotics to the scientific method.
CV, how I have missed your paranoia. The system has worked well so far, and short of the need for a Large Hadron Collider or something equally hard to come by, there are very few experiments that can’t be independently verified, or at least immediately understood, by competing scientists, companies, or even rival nations. It is impossible to argue with the process of scientific method, nor is there any need to.
“What is clear is that the forms of peer review are protean. Probably the systems of every journal and every grant giving body are different in at least some detail; and some systems are very different. There may even be some journals using the following classic system. The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper. If the reviewers disagree the editor sends it to a third reviewer and does whatever he or she advises. This pastiche—which is not far from systems I have seen used—is little better than tossing a coin, because the level of agreement between reviewers on whether a paper should be published is little better than you’d expect by chance.
That is why Robbie Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked `publish’ and `reject’. He also joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. When I was editor of the BMJ I was challenged by two of the cleverest researchers in Britain to publish an issue of the journal comprised only of papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. I wrote back `How do you know I haven’t already done it?'”
“CONCLUSION
So peer review is a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative, and scientists and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.”
It’s a human system. But still light years ahead of religion or nutbars who think that surfing equally delusional and pseudo-scientific web pages deserves the term “autodidactic”.
Interesting link CV. Cheers. Being a cynic, my first thought was “Well, the capitalists will love it because it preserves the idea of inbuilt obsolescence.” And my second thought was to do with ‘dis-assembly’. It’s one thing to (chemically?) deconstruct carpet square fibres and bases (melting), but a computer? How does that work without the immense amounts of toxic waste that process currently entails? I’m suspicious that there’s a silver lining being promoted here while a great big black cloud is being ignored. So, I’ll away and read up on it a bit further… no democracy I notice
Introduction Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) has revolutionized the field of translation by harnessing the power of technology to assist human translators in their work. This innovative approach combines specialized software with human expertise to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and consistency of translations. In this comprehensive article, we will delve into the ...
In today’s digital age, mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Among the vast array of portable computing options available, iPads and tablet computers stand out as two prominent contenders. While both offer similar functionalities, there are subtle yet significant differences between these two devices. This ...
A computer is an electronic device that can be programmed to carry out a set of instructions. The basic components of a computer are the processor, memory, storage, input devices, and output devices. The Processor The processor, also known as the central processing unit (CPU), is the brain of the ...
Voice Memos is a convenient app on your iPhone that allows you to quickly record and store audio snippets. These recordings can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as taking notes, capturing ideas, or recording interviews. While you can listen to your voice memos on your iPhone, you ...
Laptop screens are essential for interacting with our devices and accessing information. However, when lines appear on the screen, it can be frustrating and disrupt productivity. Understanding the underlying causes of these lines is crucial for finding effective solutions. Types of Screen Lines Horizontal lines: Also known as scan ...
Right-clicking is a common and essential computer operation that allows users to access additional options and settings. While most desktop computers have dedicated right-click buttons on their mice, laptops often do not have these buttons due to space limitations. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on how to right-click ...
Powering up and shutting down your ASUS laptop is an essential task for any laptop user. Locating the power button can sometimes be a hassle, especially if you’re new to ASUS laptops. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on where to find the power button on different ASUS laptop ...
Dell laptops are renowned for their reliability, performance, and versatility. Whether you’re a student, a professional, or just someone who needs a reliable computing device, a Dell laptop can meet your needs. However, if you’re new to Dell laptops, you may be wondering how to get started. In this comprehensive ...
Two-thirds of the country think that “New Zealand’s economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”. They also believe that “New Zealand needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful”. These are just two of a handful of stunning new survey results released ...
In today’s digital world, screenshots have become an indispensable tool for communication and documentation. Whether you need to capture an important email, preserve a website page, or share an error message, screenshots allow you to quickly and easily preserve digital information. If you’re an Asus laptop user, there are several ...
A factory reset restores your Gateway laptop to its original factory settings, erasing all data, apps, and personalizations. This can be necessary to resolve software issues, remove viruses, or prepare your laptop for sale or transfer. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to factory reset your Gateway laptop: Method 1: ...
“You talking about me?”The neoliberal denigration of the past was nowhere more unrelenting than in its depiction of the public service. The Post Office and the Railways were held up as being both irremediably inefficient and scandalously over-manned. Playwright Roger Hall’s “Glide Time” caricatures were presented as accurate depictions of ...
Roger Partridge writes – When the Coalition Government took office last October, it inherited a country on a precipice. With persistent inflation, decades of insipid productivity growth and crises in healthcare, education, housing and law and order, it is no exaggeration to suggest New Zealand’s first-world status was ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – In 2022, the Curriculum Centre at the Ministry of Education employed 308 staff, according to an Official Information Request. Earlier this week it was announced 202 of those staff were being cut. When you look up “The New Zealand Curriculum” on the Ministry of ...
Chris Bishop’s bill has stirred up a hornets nest of opposition. Photo: Lynn Grieveson for The KākāTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate from the last day included:A crescendo of opposition to the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill is ...
Monday left me brokenTuesday, I was through with hopingWednesday, my empty arms were openThursday, waiting for love, waiting for loveThe end of another week that left many of us asking WTF? What on earth has NZ gotten itself into and how on earth could people have voluntarily signed up for ...
Hello! Here comes the Saturday edition of More Than A Feilding, catching you up on the past week’s editions.State of humanity, 20242024, it feels, keeps presenting us with ever more challenges, ever more dismay.Do you give up yet? It seems to ask.No? How about this? Or this?How about this?Full story Share ...
Determining the hardest sport in the world is a subjective matter, as the difficulty level can vary depending on individual abilities, physical attributes, and experience. However, based on various factors including physical demands, technical skills, mental fortitude, and overall accomplishment, here is an exploration of some of the most challenging ...
The allure of sport transcends age, culture, and geographical boundaries. It captivates hearts, ignites passions, and provides unparalleled entertainment. Behind the spectacle, however, lies a fascinating world of financial investment and expenditure. Among the vast array of competitive pursuits, one question looms large: which sport carries the hefty title of ...
Introduction Pickleball, a rapidly growing paddle sport, has captured the hearts and imaginations of millions around the world. Its blend of tennis, badminton, and table tennis elements has made it a favorite among players of all ages and skill levels. As the sport’s popularity continues to surge, the question on ...
Abstract: Soccer, the global phenomenon captivating millions worldwide, has a rich history that spans centuries. Its origins trace back to ancient civilizations, but the modern version we know and love emerged through a complex interplay of cultural influences and innovations. This article delves into the fascinating journey of soccer’s evolution, ...
Tinting car windows offers numerous benefits, including enhanced privacy, reduced glare, UV protection, and a more stylish look for your vehicle. However, the cost of window tinting can vary significantly depending on several factors. This article provides a comprehensive guide to help you understand how much you can expect to ...
The pungent smell of gasoline in your car can be an alarming and potentially dangerous problem. Not only is the odor unpleasant, but it can also indicate a serious issue with your vehicle’s fuel system. In this article, we will explore the various reasons why your car may smell like ...
Tree sap can be a sticky, unsightly mess on your car’s exterior. It can be difficult to remove, but with the right techniques and products, you can restore your car to its former glory. Understanding Tree Sap Tree sap is a thick, viscous liquid produced by trees to seal wounds ...
The amount of paint needed to paint a car depends on a number of factors, including the size of the car, the number of coats you plan to apply, and the type of paint you are using. In general, you will need between 1 and 2 gallons of paint for ...
Jump-starting a car is a common task that can be performed even in adverse weather conditions like rain. However, safety precautions and proper techniques are crucial to avoid potential hazards. This comprehensive guide will provide detailed instructions on how to safely jump a car in the rain, ensuring both your ...
Graham Adams writes about the $55m media fund — When Patrick Gower was asked by Mike Hosking last week what he would say to the many Newstalk ZB callers who allege the Labour government bribed media with $55 million of taxpayers’ money via the Public Interest Journalism Fund — and ...
Note: this blog post has been put together over the course of the week I followed the happenings at the conference virtually. Should recordings of the Great Debates and possibly Union Symposia mentioned below, be released sometime after the conference ends, I'll include links to the ones I participated in. ...
The following was my submission made on the “Fast Track Approvals Bill”. This potential law will give three Ministers unchecked powers, un-paralled since the days of Robert Muldoon’s “Think Big” projects.The submission is written a bit tongue-in-cheek. But it’s irreverent because the FTAB is in itself not worthy of respect. ...
One Could Reduce Child Poverty At No Fiscal CostFollowing the Richardson/Shipley 1990 ‘redesign of the welfare state’ – which eliminated the universal Family Benefit and doubled the rate of child poverty – various income supplements for families have been added, the best known being ‘Working for Families’, introduced in 2005. ...
Buzz from the Beehive A few days ago, Point of Order suggested the media must be musing “on why Melissa is mute”. Our article reported that people working in the beleaguered media industry have cause to yearn for a minister as busy as Melissa Lee’s ministerial colleagues and we drew ...
1. What was The Curse of Jim Bolger?a. Winston Peters b. Soon after shaking his hand, world leaders would mysteriously lose office or shuffle off this mortal coilc. Could never shake off the Mother of All Budgetsd. Dandruff2. True or false? The Chairman of a Kiwi export business has asked the ...
Jack Vowles writes – New Zealand is said to be suffering from ‘serious populist discontent’. An IPSOS MORI survey has reported that we have an increasing preference for strong leaders, think that the economy is rigged toward the rich and powerful, and political elites are ignoring ‘hard-working people’. ...
Chris Trotter writes – MELISSA LEE should be deprived of her ministerial warrant. Her handling – or non-handling – of the crisis engulfing the New Zealand news media has been woeful. The fate of New Zealand’s two linear television networks, a question which the Minister of Broadcasting, Communications ...
TL;DR: The podcast above features co-hosts and , along with regular guests Robert Patman on Gaza and AUKUS II, and on climate change.The six things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote and spoke about via The Kākā and elsewhere for paying subscribers in the ...
Policymakers rarely wish to make plain or visible their desire to dismantle environmental policy, least of all to the young. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: Here’s the top five news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above between Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent ...
I like to keep an eye on what’s happening in places like the UK, the US, and over the ditch with our good mates the Aussies. Let’s call them AUKUS, for want of a better collective term. More on that in a bit.It used to be, not long ago, that ...
TL;DR: The global economy will be one fifth smaller than it would have otherwise been in 2050 as a result of climate damage, according to a new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in the journal Nature. (See more detail and analysis below, and ...
New Zealand is said to be suffering from ‘serious populist discontent’. An IPSOS MORI survey has reported that we have an increasing preference for strong leaders, think that the economy is rigged toward the rich and powerful, and political elites are ignoring ‘hard-working people’. The data is from February this ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters is understood to be planning a major speech within the next fortnight to clear up the confusion over whether or not New Zealand might join the AUKUS submarine project. So far, there have been conflicting signals from the Government. RNZ reported the Prime Minister yesterday in ...
Life throws curveballs, and sometimes, those curveballs necessitate wiping your iPhone clean and starting anew. Whether you’re facing persistent software glitches, preparing to sell your device, or simply wanting a fresh start, knowing how to factory reset iPhone without a computer is a valuable skill. While using a computer with ...
Gone are the days when communication was limited to landline phones and physical proximity. Today, computers have become powerful tools for connecting with people across the globe through voice and video calls. But with a plethora of applications and methods available, how to call someone on a computer might seem ...
Open access notables Glacial isostatic adjustment reduces past and future Arctic subsea permafrost, Creel et al., Nature Communications:Sea-level rise submerges terrestrial permafrost in the Arctic, turning it into subsea permafrost. Subsea permafrost underlies ~ 1.8 million km2 of Arctic continental shelf, with thicknesses in places exceeding 700 m. Sea-level variations over glacial-interglacial cycles control ...
The operating system (OS) is the heart and soul of a computer, orchestrating every action and interaction between hardware and software. But have you ever wondered where on a computer is the operating system generally stored? The answer lies in the intricate dance between hardware and software components, particularly within ...
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Screen recording has become an essential tool for various purposes, such as creating tutorials, capturing gameplay footage, recording online meetings, or sharing information with others. Fortunately, Dell laptops offer several built-in and external options for screen recording, catering to different needs and preferences. This guide will explore various methods on ...
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The annual inventory report of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions has been released, showing that gross emissions have dropped for the third year in a row, to 78.4 million tons: All-told gross emissions have decreased by over 6 million tons since the Zero Carbon Act was passed in 2019. ...
Experiencing a locked computer can be frustrating, especially when you need access to your files and applications urgently. The methods to unlock your computer will vary depending on the specific situation and the type of lock you encounter. This guide will explore various scenarios and provide step-by-step instructions on how ...
While the world has largely transitioned to digital communication, faxing still holds relevance in certain industries and situations. Fortunately, gone are the days of bulky fax machines and dedicated phone lines. Today, you can easily send and receive faxes directly from your computer, offering a convenient and efficient way to ...
In our increasingly digital world, home computers have become essential tools for work, communication, entertainment, and more. However, this increased reliance on technology also exposes us to various cyber threats. Understanding these threats and taking proactive steps to protect your home computer is crucial for safeguarding your personal information, finances, ...
In the ever-evolving world of technology, server-based computing has emerged as a cornerstone of modern digital infrastructure. This article delves into the concept of server-based computing, exploring its various forms, benefits, challenges, and its impact on the way we work and interact with technology. Understanding Server-Based Computing: At its core, ...
The absolute brass neck of this guy.We want more medical doctors, not more spin doctors, Luxon was saying a couple of weeks ago, and now we’re told the guy has seven salaried adults on TikTok duty. Sorry, doing social media. The absolute brass neck of it. The irony that the ...
Buzz from the Beehive Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones relishes spatting and eagerly takes issue with environmentalists who criticise his enthusiasm for resource development. He relishes helping the fishing industry too. And so today, while the media are making much of the latest culling in the public service to ...
Having written, taught and worked for the US government on issues involving unconventional warfare and terrorism for 30-odd years, two things irritate me the most when the subject is discussed in public. The first is the Johnny-come-lately academics-turned-media commentators who … Continue reading → ...
Eric Crampton writes – Kainga Ora is the government’s house building agency. It’s been building a lot of social housing. Kainga Ora has its own (but independent) consenting authority, Consentium. It’s a neat idea. Rather than have to deal with building consents across each different territorial authority, Kainga Ora ...
Muriel Newman writes – The Coalition Government says it is moving with speed to deliver campaign promises and reverse the damage done by Labour. One of their key commitments is to “defend the principle that New Zealanders are equal before the law.” To achieve this, they have pledged they “will not advance ...
Chris Trotter writes – The absence of anything resembling a fightback from the public servants currently losing their jobs is interesting. State-sector workers’ collective fatalism in the face of Coalition cutbacks indicates a surprisingly broad acceptance of impermanence in the workplace. Fifty years ago, lay-offs in the thousands ...
Mariupol, on the Azov Sea coast, was one of the first cities to suffer almost complete destruction after the start of the Ukraine War started in late February 2022. We remember the scenes of absolute destruction of the houses and city structures. The deaths of innocent civilians – many of ...
Lindsay Mitchell writes – Ten years ago, I wrote the following in a Listener column: Every year around one in five new-born babies will be reliant on their caregivers benefit by Christmas. This pattern has persisted from at least 1993. For Maori the number jumps to over one in three. ...
Climate change is expected to generate more and more extreme events, delivering a sort of structural shock to inflation that central banks will have to react to as if they were short-term cyclical issues. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMy pick of the six newsey things to know from Aotearoa’s ...
It’s a simple deal. We pay taxes in order to finance the social services we want and need. The carnage now occurring across the public sector though, is breaking that contract. Over 3,000 jobs have been lost so far. Many are in crucial areas like Education where the impact of ...
Hi,A friend had their 40th over the weekend and decided to theme it after Curb Your Enthusiasm fashion icon Susie Greene. Captured in my tiny kitchen before I left the house, I ending up evoking a mix of old lesbian and Hillary Clinton — both unintentional.Me vs Hillary ClintonIf you’re ...
This is a re-post from Andrew Dessler at the Climate Brink blogIn 2023, the Earth reached temperature levels unprecedented in modern times. Given that, it’s reasonable to ask: What’s going on? There’s been lots of discussions by scientists about whether this is just the normal progression of global warming or if something ...
The schools are on holiday and the sun is shining in the seaside village and all day long I have been seeing bunches of bikes; Mums, Dads, teens and toddlers chattering, laughing, happy, having a bloody great time together. Cheers, AT, for the bits of lane you’ve added lately around the ...
Today in our National-led authoritarian nightmare: Shane Jones thinks Ministers should be above the law: New Zealand First MP Shane Jones is accusing the Waitangi Tribunal of over-stepping its mandate by subpoenaing a minister for its urgent hearing on the Oranga Tamariki claim. The tribunal is looking into the ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Politicians across the political spectrum are implicated in the New Zealand media’s failing health. Either through neglect or incompetent interventions, successive governments have failed to regulate, foster, and allow a healthy Fourth Estate that can adequately hold politicians and the powerful to account. ...
Citizen Science writes – Last week saw two significant developments in the debate over the treatment of trans-identifying children and young people – the release in Britain of the final report of Dr Hilary Cass’s review into gender healthcare, and here in New Zealand, the news that the ...
One night while sleeping in my bed I had a beautiful dreamThat all the people of the world got together on the same wavelengthAnd began helping one anotherNow in this dream, universal love was the theme of the dayPeace and understanding and it happened this wayAfter such an eventful day ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
A significant milestone has been reached in the fight to strike an anti-Pasifika and unfair law from the country’s books after Teanau Tuiono’s members’ bill passed its first reading. ...
New Zealand has today missed the opportunity to uphold the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, says James Shaw after his member’s bill was voted down in its first reading. ...
Today’s advice from the Climate Change Commission paints a sobering reality of the challenge we face in combating climate change, especially in light of recent Government policy announcements. ...
Minister for Disability Issues Penny Simmonds appears to have delayed a report back to Cabinet on the progress New Zealand is making against international obligations for disabled New Zealanders. ...
The Government’s newly announced review of methane emissions reduction targets hints at its desire to delay Aotearoa New Zealand’s urgent transition to a climate safe future, the Green Party said. ...
The Government must commit to the Maitai School building project for students with high and complex needs, to ensure disabled students from the top of the South Island have somewhere to learn. ...
Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey and his Government colleagues have made a meal of their mental health commitments, showing how flimsy their efforts to champion the issue truly are, says Labour Mental Health spokesperson Ingrid Leary. ...
Māori are yet to see anything from this Government except cuts, reversals and taking our people backwards, Māori Development spokesperson Willie Jackson said. ...
The Coalition Government’s refusal to commit to ongoing funding for social housing is seeing the sector pull back on developments and families watch their dreams of securing a home fade away, says Labour Housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty. ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has completed a successful trip to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, deepening relationships and capitalising on opportunities. Mr Luxon was accompanied by a business delegation and says the choice of countries represents the priority the New Zealand Government places on South East Asia, and our relationships in ...
New Zealand is demonstrating its commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions, and supporting clean energy transition in South East Asia, through a contribution of NZ$41 million (US$25 million) in climate finance to the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-led Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts announced ...
The Government is today releasing a list of organisations who received letters about the Fast-track applications process, says RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. “Recently Ministers and agencies have received a series of OIA requests for a list of organisations to whom I wrote with information on applying to have a ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Wellington Barrister David Jonathan Boldt as a Judge of the High Court, and the Honourable Justice Matthew Palmer as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Boldt graduated with an LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990, and also holds ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford will lead the New Zealand delegation at the 2024 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) held in Singapore. The delegation includes representatives from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Riu Roa. The summit is co-hosted ...
A stopbank upgrade project in Tairawhiti partly funded by the Government has increased flood resilience for around 7000ha of residential and horticultural land so far, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones today attended a dawn service in Gisborne to mark the end of the first stage of the ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters will represent the Government at Anzac Day commemorations on the Gallipoli Peninsula next week and engage with senior representatives of the Turkish government in Istanbul. “The Gallipoli campaign is a defining event in our history. It will be a privilege to share the occasion ...
Science, Innovation and Technology and Defence Minister Judith Collins will next week attend the OECD Science and Technology Ministerial conference in Paris and Anzac Day commemorations in Belgium. “Science, innovation and technology have a major role to play in rebuilding our economy and achieving better health, environmental and social outcomes ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Prime Minister was accompanied by MP Paulo Garcia, the first Filipino to be elected to a legislature outside the Philippines. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon and President Marcos Jr discussed opportunities to ...
The Government has announced that $20 million in funding will be made available to Westport to fund much needed flood protection around the town. This measure will significantly improve the resilience of the community, says Local Government Minister Simeon Brown. “The Westport community has already been allocated almost $3 million ...
The Government is proud to support the first ever Repco Supercars Championship event in Taupō as up to 70,000 motorsport fans attend the Taupō International Motorsport Park this weekend, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. “Anticipation for the ITM Taupō Super400 is huge, with tickets and accommodation selling out weeks ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced an increase to the Rates Rebate Scheme, putting money back into the pockets of low-income homeowners. “The coalition Government is committed to bringing down the cost of living for New Zealanders. That includes targeted support for those Kiwis who are doing things tough, such ...
The Coalition Government is investing in a project to boost survival rates of New Zealand mussels and grow the industry, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has announced. “This project seeks to increase the resilience of our mussels and significantly boost the sector’s productivity,” Mr Jones says. “The project - ...
Benefit figures released today underscore the importance of the Government’s plan to rebuild the economy and have 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “Benefit numbers are still significantly higher than when National was last in government, when there was about 70,000 fewer ...
The Government’s commitment to doubling New Zealand’s renewable energy capacity is backed by new data showing that clean energy has helped the country reach its lowest annual gross emissions since 1999, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. New Zealand’s latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory (1990-2022) published today, shows gross emissions fell ...
The Government is bringing the earthquake-prone building review forward, with work to start immediately, and extending the deadline for remediations by four years, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “Our Government is focused on rebuilding the economy. A key part of our plan is to cut red tape that ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Thai counterpart, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, have today agreed that New Zealand and the Kingdom of Thailand will upgrade the bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership by 2026. “New Zealand and Thailand have a lot to offer each other. We have a strong mutual desire to build ...
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Transport Minister Simeon Brown have today announced the Coalition Government’s intention to extend port coastal permits for a further 20 years, providing port operators with certainty to continue their operations. “The introduction of the Resource Management Act in 1991 required ports to obtain coastal ...
Today’s announcement that inflation is down to 4 per cent is encouraging news for Kiwis, but there is more work to be done - underlining the importance of the Government’s plan to get the economy back on track, acting Finance Minister Chris Bishop says. “Inflation is now at 4 per ...
Refreshed health guidance released today will help parents and schools make informed decisions about whether their child needs to be in school, addressing one of the key issues affecting school attendance, says Associate Education Minister David Seymour. In recent years, consistently across all school terms, short-term illness or medical reasons ...
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones is streamlining high-level oceans management while maintaining a focus on supporting the sector’s role in the export-led recovery of the economy. “I am working to realise the untapped potential of our fishing and aquaculture sector. To achieve that we need to be smarter with ...
Associate Agriculture Minister Mark Patterson is speaking at the International Wool Textile Organisation Congress in Adelaide, promoting New Zealand wool, and outlining the coalition Government’s support for the revitalisation the sector. "New Zealand’s wool exports reached $400 million in the year to 30 June 2023, and the coalition Government ...
The Government is making legislative changes to make it easier for new early learning services to be established, and for existing services to operate, Associate Education Minister David Seymour says. The changes involve repealing the network approval provisions that apply when someone wants to establish a new early learning service, ...
Changes to the Resource Management Act will align consenting for coal mining to other forms of mining to reduce barriers that are holding back economic development, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. “The inconsistent treatment of coal mining compared with other extractive activities is burdensome red tape that fails to acknowledge ...
Trade, Agriculture and Forestry Minister Todd McClay has concluded productive discussions with ministerial counterparts in Beijing today, in support of the New Zealand-China trade and economic relationship. “My meeting with Commerce Minister Wang Wentao reaffirmed the complementary nature of the bilateral trade relationship, with our Free Trade Agreement at its ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon today paid tribute to Singapore’s outgoing Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Meeting in Singapore today immediately before Prime Minister Lee announced he was stepping down, Prime Minister Luxon warmly acknowledged his counterpart’s almost twenty years as leader, and the enduring legacy he has left for Singapore and South East ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. While in Singapore as part of his visit to South East Asia this week, Prime Minister Luxon also met with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and will meet with Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has made further appointments to the Board of Antarctica New Zealand as part of a continued effort to ensure the Scott Base Redevelopment project is delivered in a cost-effective and efficient manner. The Minister has appointed Neville Harris as a new member of the Board. Mr ...
Finance Minister Nicola Willis will travel to the United States on Tuesday to attend a meeting of the Five Finance Ministers group, with counterparts from Australia, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. “I am looking forward to meeting with our Five Finance partners on how we can work ...
The coalition Government has today announced purrfect and pawsitive changes to the Residential Tenancies Act to give tenants with pets greater choice when looking for a rental property, says Housing Minister Chris Bishop. “Pets are important members of many Kiwi families. It’s estimated that around 64 per cent of New ...
State Highway 1 (SH1) through Wellington City is heavily congested at peak times and while planning continues on the duplicate Mt Victoria Tunnel and Basin Reserve project, the Government has also asked NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) to consider and provide advice on a Long Tunnel option, Transport Minister Simeon Brown ...
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Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has announced the Australian Governor-General, His Excellency General The Honourable David Hurley and his wife Her Excellency Mrs Linda Hurley, will make a State visit to New Zealand from Tuesday 16 April to Thursday 18 April. The visit reciprocates the State visit of former Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy ...
Associate Health Minister David Seymour has announced that Medsafe has approved 11 cold and flu medicines containing pseudoephedrine. Pharmaceutical suppliers have indicated they may be able to supply the first products in June. “This is much earlier than the original expectation of medicines being available by 2025. The Government recognised ...
New Zealand and the United States have recommitted to their strategic partnership in Washington DC today, pledging to work ever more closely together in support of shared values and interests, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. “The strategic environment that New Zealand and the United States face is considerably more ...
April 11, 2024 Joint Declaration by United States Secretary of State the Honorable Antony J. Blinken and New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs the Right Honourable Winston Peters We met today in Washington, D.C. to recommit to the historic partnership between our two countries and the principles that underpin it—rule ...
Headline: The moment of friction. – 36th Parallel Assessments In strategic studies “friction” is a term that it is used to describe the moment when military action encounters adversary resistance. “Friction” is one of four (along with an unofficial fifth) “F’s” in military strategy, which includes force (kinetic mass), ...
The Fast-track Bill, if passed, would allow three Ministers, unchallenged and unchecked, to approve the immediate extraction and exhaustion of one-off resources. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne iamharin/Shutterstock For many people, the term “bulk billed” refers to a GP visit they don’t have to pay ...
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In apparent defiance of the Biden administration, the Netanyahu government has now initiated missile strikes against Iran. Last Saturday night (Sunday morning in New Zealand) Iran launched more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles against Israeli military targets. With the assistance of US, UK and possibly French forces, ...
Māori representation brings a perspective that encompasses not only the interests of Māori communities but also a broader, holistic approach to environmental stewardship and community well-being, principles deeply embedded in Te Ao Māori (the Māori ...
This week in Auckland, a group of young people took over the microphone at a ministerial press conference, to explain why they oppose the Fast-Track Approvals Bill. One young woman said, ‘We’re here because we love Aotearoa New Zealand. We want to raise our children in an environment that’s thriving, ...
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When Thomas James was on his solo camp as part of Outward Bound, the keen outdoorsman didn’t find it too challenging, as others often do. In what might just be the perfect illustration of his character, he saw it as a great opportunity to solve a few problems. “I thought, ...
From the unstable and drippy to the hi-tech and pretty, here’s our ranking of all the tunnels you can drive through in this country. The first tunnel seems to have been built in 2200BC in Babylonia, kicking off a global phenomenon for digging holes in order to get places more ...
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Zoë Colling’s favourite piece in the ‘That’s So Last Century’ collection is a lubrication chart for a sewing machine from the ’60s. It’s about the size of a postcard, and carefully maintained. “I like it that this piece of ephemera highlights that manual and technical side of the skill involved ...
Kia Ora Gaza A passionate haka reverberated through Auckland International Airport as a medical team of three New Zealand doctors received an emotional farewell from a big crowd of supporters before flying to Turkey to join the international Freedom Flotilla to Gaza. The doctors, who left Auckland yesterday, hope to ...
With submissions closing today, Macassey-Pickard says groups around the country have been supporting a huge range of people to make their submissions. ...
Our response to the new legislation is informed by targeted conversations with practitioners working in the system and through an implementation lens. ...
The new ‘Fast-track Approvals Bill’ would give just three Ministers the power to approve or deny development projects. They would avoid the usual checks and balances that are in place to protect rivers, land, the ocean, and communities. ...
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The Mental Health Foundation provides support and resources for those facing the loss of their job, so it’s wrong in the very week the Government adds another 1000 jobs to its tally of cuts, that this is happening. ...
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Hineaupounamu ‘Missy’ Nuku has been scaling mountains in Canada for her college basketball team, the Lakeland Rustlers. Alberta is currently home for the 20-year-old point guard, who is in her first year of a scholarship at Lakeland College, where she is studying for a business degree. She has certainly made ...
New Zealand and the Philippines have signed a new maritime security agreement and stated their concerns over activity in the South China Sea, as Chinese vessels continue to flout international law. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Philippines President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos committed to signing a Mutual Logistics Supporting Arrangement by ...
It appears that the White House is not planning on building the Death Star any time soon. Tea Party followers will be relieved …
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20997144
“in a playful response, a senior US government official said the Obama administration “does not support blowing up planets”.
Let’s hope that now he’s won his re-election, he can go that bit further and have a go at trying to save one.
We are the high and mighty Lords of Bizness, therefor if We do anything illegal it is obviously SOMEONE ELSES fault,
The fishing company Sanfords has been fined by the US courts for dumping liquid waste in the sea off the coast of American Samoa,
4 million bucks and a years ban from fishing in US waters seems like a fairly light punishment for dumping liquid waste,including what appears to have been some oil contaminate, and you would think that the fishing company involved would have simply paid the fine and hung it’s head in contrition,
Not likely, on RadioNZ National News at 8.00 this morning there is a Rep from the fishing industry, i didn’t catch his name or whether or not He was attached to Sanfords, laying the blame for the waste dumping at the feet of Government inspectors,
According to the Brainless Prick speaking for the fishing industry if those who inspect such ships on behalf of the Government had of picked up the fact that the waste piping had been altered in such a way as to allow the dumping they,( the inspectors), could have stopped the Sanford ship from leaving port here in New Zealand and the ship wouldn’t have been able to dump it’s s**t off of the coast of American Samoa,
Anyone reading the Standard and not understanding the allusion often made in these pages to the Bizness sector being staffed at the management and board level by a bunch of psycho and sociopaths need only listen to that news item for some enlightening education…
I heard the same piece while milking, which means I wasn’t giving it my full attention. However my impression was that the speaker as not trying in any way to excuse Sandford but was trying to draw attention to the fact that, yet again, Government regulators once again seem to have been captured by the Industy they are supposed to be regulating.
Also I’m not sure it’s fair to see the whole incident as some devious and intricate conspiracy by Sandford management and board of directors to shave a few cents off its operating costs. The charges against the company were that it was ‘vicariously liable’ for the acts of the boat’s crew, and my money would be on this being yet another case of incompetence and carelessness at the top in leaving the detail to others further down the chain who cut corners or adopted a ‘she’ll be all right’ attitude. Certainly the damage to Sandford beside the fine far outweighs any profits this practice might have generated – Shares of Sanford fell 0.3 percent to $3.83 on the NZX and have dropped 6 percent this year. Believe me that plus the international damage to Sandford’s reputation will be of far more importance to the top brass at Sandfords than the details of the plumbing on one of its boats.
So yes, management at Sandfords was slack and incompetent – which makes them pretty typical – as they failed to implement proceedures and appoint the right people to stop people down the chain cutting corners to save themselves a dirty chore. So everything they got they deserved. But if this wasn’t picked up, or worse still was picked up but not followed up, by regulators THAT is the real story.
Why did the regulators let the ship sail if they had picked this up? Did they accept a back-hander from the captain to avoid a delay in sailing any repairs might have entailed? Did they turn a blind eye to it because they have become too pally with the crews they are supposed to check? Is there a revolving door between the industry and the regulators? Did the regulators receive instructions from on high not to look too closely or take too much notice of the minor stuff when compared with basic sea-worthiness, in order to ‘encourage’ the fishing industry to beef up its productivity?
Those are the questions I’d like answers to, and at least someone has raised them on the radio.
I disagree – the real story is firstly that Sanfords as a major fishing company is willing to pollute the very environment that we all (themselves included) rely on to survive and secondly that it incompetence at procedural and inspection levels need to be tightened up.
If you or i saved up all our waste for a month including sewerage and then took it down to the harbour and publicly dumped it off of a wharf all hell would break loose and we would probably end up being thrown in a jail cell,
That is the difference between us and in this instance the Board of Sanfords, everyone agrees that it is the Board which is ultimately responsible for the actions of the Company BUT the Boards of company’s found to be breaking the law are seldom, if ever, held personally responsible for the criminal actions of the company…
Jesus, that’s a long winded advertisement on behalf of the Board of Sanford don’t you think, is it not the Board who is ultimately responsible for the actions of those who conduct the company’s business???,
My opinion is that the Board of Sanford’s must take ultimate responsibility for the dumping of waste whether or not They knew of the practice or not, SO, they got what THEY as a company deserved including the drop in share price which effects the share-holders who in essence appoint the Board,
Please provide ‘the evidence’ that those in Government employment tasked with inspecting the particular ship in question were in any way ‘bribed’ to ignore the particular ship’s ability to illegally dump waste into the sea,AND, ‘the evidence’ that these inspectors actually KNEW the dumping was taking place,
Your denigration of these inspectors borders on the defamatory and is simply a reinforcement of the ‘Bizness model’ of blaming the inspectors for the criminal behaviour of Sanford’s….
PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…
Drop in share price makes them more buyable for a foreign company – Chinese or Korean.
Lower the share price the cheaper to buy.
Yes, the Board and management at Sandford’s are ultimately responsible for their ships dumping waste at sea. No-one is disputing that, that I’m aware of.
I’m suggesting they didn’t know it was going on. I’m even suggesting they shouldn’t be expected to know it was going on as this involves operational matters at a very low and specialist level. What they should have done and clearly failed to do was to set up the systems and employ the people who should have known and who should have stopped it. This I say is poor management and incompetence on their part which has now been rightly exposed. You seem to be suggesting that at the very highest levels of management, decisions were taken to save a few dollars in a multi-million dollar operation by tweaking some very obscure plumbing in one of their boats. I say that’s nonsense.
You were the one saying that there are Government inspectors/regulators tasked with inspecting these boats to ensure they can’t/don’t pollute the oceans. IF that’s the case then, as the commentator on the radio pointed out, they clearly failed to do their job. This might have been because:
a) they were incompetent,
b) they were paid not to see it
c) they saw it but didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’
e) they think there’s a good chance they might be looking for work in the Industry as Marine Engineers or whatever sometime soon, or have just come from the Industry and don’t want to draw attention to things they did themselves
f) they’ve been instructed by their own seniors not to worry about ‘minor’ or ‘technical’ breaches of the regulations as some-one above them doesn’t want the Fishing Industy hobbled with ‘trivia’.
g) they were short-staffed and too busy to make a proper inspection.
g) I can’t think of any others but feel free to add any other reasons the ship might have sailed in breach of the regs.
To my mind it is important that we know why a(nother) Government agency failed to do its job properly but if you’re happy to blame all the world’s problems on evil, conniving capitalists I don’t give a damn.
“PS, the Management, including the Board of Sanford were guilty of criminal acts, nothing more, nothing less…” Actually ‘the Company’ was found guilty vicariously for the acts of certain of its employees. Neither the ‘management’ nor ‘the Board’ were found guilty or any any way personally liable.
Ha….Ha…Ha…For a lesson in how the capitalists shift the blame that’s just perfect, I am not the one who suggested that there are Government inspectors tasked with doing any such thing,
The dickhead on the news this morning representing the fishing industry is the one suggesting that and then like you attempts to blame those inspectors for the criminal actions of the company,
The piping that allowed the emptying of the ships waste into the sea might for all i (or you) know be perfectly legal, it is the actions of dumping the waste illegally that are in question,
The point you make that the Board did not hire management of sufficient intelligence to stop the dumping of the waste is still the responsibility of the Board, the fact that the Board had not issued specific directives about the dumping of waste simply makes them as culpable as those who thought it a good idea to ditch the waste at sea,
But hell i tend to agree it was all my fault…
I also belatedly notice that you have abhorently blamed the ‘workers’ aboard the Sanford ship for the waste dumping, claiming, again with the provision of not the slightest scrap of evidence, that it was the workers dumping the waste to avoid having to engage in a ‘dirty chore’ at some later point,
The fact that you make these unfounded allegations simply proves the point that i make and illuminates you personally as a prize wanker…
Oh I agree I don’t know why the waste was dumped. However it seems to me reasonable to assume that separating waste oil for storage on board and then disposing of it ‘responsibly’ at a later stage is a dirty and onerous chore compared with just pumping it overboard.
And I’m afraid I do blame the crew of the boat for dumping the waste, unless you are suggesting that the senior management and Board of Sanfords had themselves helicoptered out to the boat as it worked ‘off the coast of American Samoa” and did this nefarious deed themselves while the crew attended a prayer meeting or something below decks.
As far as I can tell from the press reports none of the crew themselves have been charged with this ‘crime’ – responsibility has been quite rightly sheeted home to their employer for failing to take the proper steps to stop what should not have happened from happening.
The ‘crew’ on a ship such as what Sanford’s use as fishing trawlers DO NOT unilaterally DO ANYTHING that they have not been told to do by a senior officer,
IE, the crew don’t even chip paint unless the order comes from on high, you are in fact saying 2 things at once here,(in other words being a wanker),the crew may have been involved in the physical actions of turning on the taps which dumped the waste,BUT, for this to happen orders must have been given,
This simply begs the question of the ‘practice and why the ship wasn’t put into port when the waste tanks were full which in my mind if i were running such a ship would come down to a simple matter of (a), the cost,and (b), the risk of being caught dumping the waste at sea,
These are NOT equations that are made by the crew, on a ship such as this one there is a large amount of doubt in my mind at least that even the Captain would be making such decisions, such decisions of whether or not the ship stayed at sea fishing would be made via radio communication with the company back in New Zealand and would be based upon the gross amount of catch in the hold,
The company in New Zealand would have weighed up the cost/risk equation against a backdrop of what would be the cost of putting into American Samoa to empty the waste or dump some or all of it in the sea thus allowing the ship to continue fishing until the ships capacity to store fish had been reached,
The alternative, if there were even the facilities in American Samoa, were to put into American Samoa or steam home to New Zealand to discharge the waste,
It is obvious that the company in New Zealand has opted to have the ship stay at sea fishing believing it could ‘get away’ with dumping the waste…
While I have some sympathy for the crew, I can’t help but wonder where I might have heard that excuse before…
Yeah sure Mac,are you a secret anarchist??? we all follow orders Mac, if your in the employ of someone and you don’t follow orders,(requests to direct your labour),then you don’t stay in that employment for long,
Even if we are not in employment we all follow the orders of society as expressed within the laws and statutes of the society we inhabit, other wise that society has places such as jails and phsychiatric facilities where you are removed to,
I assume you mean the guards excuse for having helped operate the death camps, to have objected and refused would have simply resulted in the guards being subjected to much the same treatment as the detainees in the death camp,
The crew of fishing boats aint Green-Peace activists, perhaps you think that en masse the crew should have refused to dump the waste and joined the unemployed in the ever elongating queue so as the rest of the country could look down upon and denigrate them…
Let’s see, the excuse list:
preserve one’s job
everyone does it
Nuremburg defense should have worked
Fishing crews aren’t environmentalists, so it’s not their job.
That’s a fairly morally bankrupt list.
Should the crews go to prison? Nope, probably not. But they are still responsible for their own actions, just as you or I am. We choose which orders we obey, and why.
Yeah sure Mac, it’s easy for you to sit in judgement, let us all know wont you when you stand up for the ecology and lose your job as a consequence,
I wont hold my breath waiting for that to happen tho…
Actually, I said I had some sympathy for the crew.
But they’re still responsible for their actions. As am I.
The bigger worry is: how much of the same is going on and the culprits are never caught? Dumping rubbish seem to be common practice – why else is it that the North Pacific and Atlantic have large “islands” of waste, mostly plastic floating just beneath the water surface? What does this do to the ecosystem in regards to weather, oxygen exchange, sea creatures and plankton etc. Seems that a lot of lip service is going on but not much else.
PS, of course my comment above is me being nice to the Sanfords, we might all learn some time in the future that the dumping of waste products by the company is ‘normal practice’ in New Zealand waters,
If we do learn this at some future point in time i for one will not be surprised in the least…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTZUVjF69eg
A link so that we can hear the offending track would be nice. Please.
For those of you and to all the rest of the good people in Aotearoa who are concerned about the rise in cost of prescriptions, ask yourself or your doctor – “do I really need these pills?”. Check out this link http://myscienceacademy.org/2012/08/19/world-renown-heart-surgeon-speaks-out-on-what-really-causes-heart-disease/
Halides (what you find in our treated water) are scientifically shown to cause hardening of the arteries. We NEVER hear about this in the news.
A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.
Moral of the story? Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
“A conspiracy theorist might think that our water is treated so that older people die earlier from heart disease lessening the burdern of retirement on the state and killing off the worker drones once they come to the end of their working life.”
Which would be rather contra-indicated by the massive increase in life expectancy and improvement in quality of life for those over 70 that have come about in the last 20-30 years.
Filter your water to remove added fluoride + chlorine as much as possible.
Absolute Bullshit.
The amount of chlorine added to water in this country is very minimal, typically at about 0.7 ppm at the treatment plant and usually less than 0.3 ppm by the time it gets to your tap. That’s almost nothing.
This is quite different to the practise overseas (often the USA) where much higher levels ( 1.5 -2.5 ppm) are commonplace AND the levels of organics in the water are neither measured nor removed. This creates a problem where the chlorine and the organics can react to create trihalomethanes which are potentially carcinogenic. In this country the plant operators monitor and control for organics and chlorine dosing very tightly. The NZ Drinking Water Standard is very advanced when compared to much of the rest of the world.
Fluoride is also added at very low levels, also 0.7 ppm. This is not actually all that higher than what is typically found in the natural sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride
The treatment process actually reduces the amount of fluoride that was in the raw water to almost zero; the fluoride dosing after treatment merely returns what was taken out and then increases it to a standardised level somewhat above that. Again the level is pretty low and realistically does not represent a risk all that much higher than the natural background.
You might also want to consider that there are water supplies in New Zealand that have been non-fluoridated for a very long time now and there has been zero evidence that this has made any difference whatsoever. People who have lived on tank water all their lives … still get heart-attacks.
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/fluoride.pdf
As for home filters. These have to be changed on a regular basis, otherwise they become a very real and definite health risk in themselves. If the municipal water treatment operators allowed their filter systems to operate for months or years without backwashing (the equivalent of changing your home filter) there would be a huge health risk, and prosecutions would result.
But somehow when people at home do exactly the same thing with filters they leave in place unchanged for ages … blissfully delude themselves that they’re doing the ‘right thing’ for their health.
Thank you for the great read Lou, having heart disease i was interested in what the
article was about, very informative.cheers.
Oh look,
Dr.Dwight Lundell has his own page.http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/lundell.html
@ Joe, Just goes to show you shouldn’t believe everything you read or hear (:
Oh I don’t know so much joe … Dwight Lundell may have been struck off for defying the conventional wisdom … but he’s far from being alone on this topic. One for instance:
http://eatingacademy.com/category/cholesterol-2
Indeed. Attacking the messenger is a tactic we should be wary of.
You can’t get much more mainstream than the US CDC and even they are looking into this. Here they discuss a theory of general inflammation caused by contemporary lifestyle factors (“metaflammation”), which might lead to the development of modern chronic diseases – like heart disease.
http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2012/11_0301.htm
Gary Taubes (award winning science journalist), and Effe Ravnskov (medical researcher) are also among the reputable people who challenge the fat hypothesis. Taube’s book Good Calories, Bad Calories has a fascinating few chapters on the history of medical research and why we ended up with the wrong public health advice about fat, cholesterol and heart disease.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm
http://www.ravnskov.nu/uffe.htm
My own circumstance RL where weight was never a worry the stubbornly high cholesterol level which familial comparisons indicated was unlikely to be hereditary was a concern. The first remedy was a close watch on my diet, the second was a dairy/protein watch and the third was a carbohydrate watch and still the high levels persisted. So I tried a mostly vegetarian and then for 20 or so weeks a vegan diet and apart from being perpetually hungry and a return to the fighting weight of my youth nothing really changed.
So I’m back to eating what gandma ate and statins it is.
VV, ae. Recently through a Whāngai connection I’ve been involved with organising accommodation for some people who, while they’re hardly destitute, are struggling financially quite simply because of the lack of education and skills and paralleled with those factors is a deep seated suspicion of the establishment.
But it’s not the distrust of the services, police etc, that’s the worry, fuck, in the most I agree with them, it’s the anti-fluoride, anti-vaccination attitudes with a couple of world government references thrown in that are. The where and who these attitudes came from concerns me greatly.
I think we might be one of two or three countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise in magazines and on tv.
The bloke who set the theory on cholesterol that the heart foundations around the world have endorsed for too long now was a ‘marine biologist’. Ancel Keys was the same man that put cigarettes into the US Army’s “K-rations” (long time before anyone admitted that smoking was a causal effect of heart disease)
Statin studies have been showing little effect except on men under 20 or some such age (i read these in “Sweet Poison” David Gillespie, 2010). A man (lawyer) motivated by the truth.
Dwight Lundell may be a poor financial whizz and not a surgeon of a gold standard, but he is brave enough to go against the BIG pharmaceuticals and food manufacturers (this is dangerous or mutiny for many health workers) and point out that our bodies are treating our food like ‘foreign particles’ cos thats exactly what our ‘food’ is these days. This is besides ‘experts’ trying to sell books or trendy ideas.
People who struggle financially are more likely to eat food that is cheaper and less likely to be real food and more likely to have added sugar to make it taste like food.
Yep. And the more one reads up about how the American “Food Pyramid” was actually constructed by industry interests, how their recommendations for sugar consumption were reached, etc. the more cynical one becomes.
@Joe, The drug cartels are making billions of dollars off heart medications.
An american doctor i visited was astonished that nz’ers with heart problems were
given asprin to thin the blood.
Weight doesn’t go hand in hand with a high
cholestarol either,my mother was a tiny lady
and had high cholestarol.
A really good trick is to lower the guidelines for what counts as an “acceptable” cholesterol level bu just a smidgeon, and voila out of thin air, millions of new statin customers world wide are created, each one worth hundreds of dollars to the pharmaceutical companies.
THATS MY GIRL! (I knew you had it in you, you procrastinator you’re not!)
(up for a little “scrabble” later;mwaaahaahaa) 🙂
Worrying article in the Herald, “DESPERATE BORROWERS SIGN AWAY PRIVACY”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10858785
Quote: “Some loansharks even require clients to sign power of attorney, allowing lenders to make all kinds of financial decisions on a borrower’s behalf.”
Pretty shocking for me to read that this is occuring. Something has to be done asap.
Charles Chauvel bless him, had some legislation he was trying to get through regarding loan sharks – not sure if it has anything about this in it but I’m picking it won’t.
FWIW:
The Agent under a Power of Attorney is REQUIRED to act in the principal’s best interest. The agent MUST always follow the principal’s directions and holds a fiduciary duty which requires him to always act with the HIGHEST DEGREE OF GOOD FAITH in behalf of their principals.
A Power of Attorney is revocable at any time and no reason is necessary. A simple written revocation suffices – no legalese is specified as long is intent (and capacity) are apparent.
The Agent cannot profit by any transaction where he represents the principal’s interests,
nor make a gift or otherwise transfer any of the principal’s money, personal property or real estate to himself unless the power of attorney explicitly states he can do so.
A court will declare a power of attorney invalid if the court finds that the principal lacked mental competency when the power of attorney was executed, or that the principal was the victim of fraud or UNDUE INFLUENCE.
Given the above I would have thought that a Power of Attorney would be of very little use to a loanshark, particularly as a court declaring a PoA invalid could make the agent personally liable to the principal for any sums improperly disbursed.
Of course this depends upon the debtor having sufficient access legal help to undo the damage but that’s going to be the case whatever arm-twisting methods the loanshark employs and whatever remedies Parliament might in its glacial wisdom enact into New Zealand law.
Really??? has the plum in your mouth migrated to your brain thus stifling your ability to think beyond the point of ‘self interest’,
Yes, you are quite correct in the ‘facts’ of what you say about ‘powers of attorney’, BUT, you only have to think for 1 or 2 seconds about the decile of people that ‘use’ the services of such loan sharks,
Many do not have English as a first language, have very limited knowledge of the law, and, are obviously fucking broke and desperate, the former indicating that they would have no ability to hire a lawyer to get such matter into a courtroom in the first place even if they had the understanding of the laws that we do…
PS, from anecdotal evidence the power of attorney gained by the loan-shark is used at the loan recipient’s bank to advance the automatic payment of the loan ahead of any other automatic payments that might be paid from that account…
Which is exctly why I said what I said in my final paragraph.
Time for for the Green Party to publicly promote anti-climate change legislation that will challenge Australians to demand the same?
Or time for grubby public and backroom haggling over cabinet positions?
As the Ausralian heatwave disaster continues to roll on.
Blaming the citizenry for lack of action over climate change and ridiculous sanctimonious demands to use composting toilets and cycle to work won’t cut it. Central government regulatory initiative is urgently required. Instead of down playing climate change for electoral advantage, the Green Party should be actively calling for such action to be taken.
Why won’t they do it?
Are they corrupted?
Are they cowards?
Are they stupid?
“Today’s report warns that heat waves will become hotter longer and more frequent.” ABC News.
Sitting here in New Zealand it may be hard to guage the psychological effect on those suffering through this heatwave, and now being informed by their climate scientists, that future heatwaves will be twice, too three times, more extreme. In my opinion Australians would be very interrested in any serious actions being promoted in New Zealand to halt climate change.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-12/heat-waves-exacerbated-by-climate-change/4462014
Watch the following interview, though the camera doesn’t spend much time on her, notice the body language of Louise Criely as she begins to look increasingly uncomfortable as the interview continues, struggling not to bite her lip and shifting in her chair.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-12/climate-commission-predicts-more-heatwaves-bushfires/4461960
Cactus Kate has a strong take on Hpusing policies generally.
A good read.
http://asianinvasion2006.blogspot.co.nz/2013/01/labour-struggles-with-its-direction.html?m=1
It actually is capitalist societies that promote buying over renting. It benefits the bankers, and those at the top of the housing ladder.
Yes, have money in the bank and I can tell you this, banks all want to meet with you not to thank you for your money, but to get you in to debt with property so the bank actually can make money off you. Getting people into debt politically makes them slaves to voting for policies to keep interest rates lower and property valuations up. Then they pay the debt off when older and want the opposite. I do not agree with the incentives of encouraging people to get into debt who cannot afford or want it yet it is a vote winner. And in business, most entrepreneurs will tell you, never do with your own money what the bank or others will give to you and you can profit from.
Cactus also correctly asks when NZ is going to benefit once more from true political debate of issues. Debate from actually different points of view on the political continuum, instead of this perennial tepid crowding into the political economic “centre”.
KV
From time immemorial a banker’s job has always been to lend money.
often at no interest I might add, because many ancient societies rejected usury.
lol
Except for the Romans, and the Jews were allowed to charge non-Jews interest (Deuteronomy 23:20 – “Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.”. And even Muslim banks have a form of interest that gets around their Koranic restrictions. While individuals may have preached against usury in various ancient culture, it has tended not to be observed in the breech.
A banker’s job has always been to MAKE money.
well, I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain, In the desert, you can remember your name…la,la,la la la la…
was walking down the street early this morning…And I swear I heard the voices singing to me…
I was approached by a boy (16 years old ) and his younger friend to buy some “K2” for them from the Adult Shop (it was Closed) freakin Asparagrass.
It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, if you’ve done it once then you’ll do it again, it’s a fine fine line between pleasure and pain!
As people shift from place to place, as they construct more pliable, less rooted patterns of life, what was once solid melts into air, to recall a comment of Marx.
-Sister ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxgGVIrDqY )
(Blinded By The Light) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-GqYkwjTM. M.A.N
‘
Australian Government Official Climate Commission Report on the Heatwave:
http://climatecommission.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/CC_Jan_2013_Heatwave4.pdf
Home:
http://climatecommission.gov.au/
Anybody got any idea why for the last 2 days posts from The Standard are not showing up in Google Reader?
Huh. I only just noticed this because you pointed it out.
Rod Oram’s article today on Stuff is well worth a read, and I’d be interested in comments on it from those more knowledgeable about economics than me. he begins:
He is pretty pessimistic:
Then does a run-down on significant areas of the economy: export markets (government has hopes for TPP, but resistance is rising internationally), skills and safe workplaces (mixed outlook based on this government’s past record), natural resources (government may do many dodgy things that’ll upset a lot of voters), infrastructure (more RONS, resistance to Auckland rail loop).
Oram concludes:
not wanting to rain on the “optimists” parade, however, from that Guardian article the other day (muchas gracias);
looming on the global Horizon,
-systematic financial crisis
-water supply challenges
-fiscal imbalances (oh look, Above)
-food shortages
-WMD proliferation
-information breakdown
-chronic disease in developing countries (and some developed country not a million miles from Here)
-asset price collapse
-retrenchment from globalization
-pandemics / anti-biotic resistance
-and last, yet not least ( I “Like” this one) Digital / Social Media provocation of social breakdown ;(
anyway, back to the Fundamentalists
previously, the inhabiting of a dual tradition that included both an intellectual engagement with texts and practical tradition learnt by a process of mimesis, for example,
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo3760020.html
http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm
However, large-scale migration and immersion in the societal melting-pot has disrupted the mimetic element.
Alienation, and the turn to rigid forms of faith will be coloured by the particularities of religion and historical circumstances.
In a “witty and profound” book, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Perry describes how, as the scientific description of the universe dominates, and because it asserts to be “objective”, it distances people from engagement with the world around them, promoting further existential angst. Furthermore, modern media such as the internet (and tele-evangelism) can serve the Fundamentalist very well. The internet propagates words, and Fundamentalists tend to put great stock in the power of words. Little wonder that they have shown themselves to be early adopters and swift masters of communication online. In addition, there has been in recent decades an emergence of what may be referred to as a militant form of atheism, wherby individuals are as emotionally committed to to science as the sole form of truth as fundamentalists might be to the documents of their faith (Dawk ins) and it seems important to such atheists to dispatch any alternatives to their world-view.
Julian Baggini (an atheist philosopher ) aspires to values of open-mindedness and in his discussion of militant atheists in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, concludes “Hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with an inflexible conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs is antithetical to such values.
All in All, religious fundamentalism and contemporary scientism are cultural cousins.:)
Indeed.
except one generally relies on magic books, and the other insists on verifiable evidence.
magic books like peer reviewed journals. And of course you need the circles of old wisemen/old wisewomen who each have their own collections of scrolls, and who pass the final judgements on what is good magic and what is not.
The authors of peer reviewed journals don’t normally claim to have written the infallible word of god.
Hey Flockie, sure gettin’ interestin “down on the farm” (free thought good, two legs bad )
Having an open mind is fine up until the point you brain falls out.
what are you implying Pop?
Getting paranoid about peer reviewed journals is ridiculous as the findings are always presented in such a way as any scientist with the resources can recreate the experiment. Expressions like “scientism” is a poisonous bye-blow of trying to apply postmodern semiotics to the scientific method.
Exactly.
CV, how I have missed your paranoia. The system has worked well so far, and short of the need for a Large Hadron Collider or something equally hard to come by, there are very few experiments that can’t be independently verified, or at least immediately understood, by competing scientists, companies, or even rival nations. It is impossible to argue with the process of scientific method, nor is there any need to.
Those are two completely different things and quite different from your original assertion
which isn’t always true any way.
This is a statement quite suitable for the protector of a religion, or exponent of dogma.
I can’t be bothered arguing semantics with someone who apparently doesn’t know how to read a peer-reviewed paper.
Only the priesthood appropriately trained in interpreting scripture may approach the temple.
“What is clear is that the forms of peer review are protean. Probably the systems of every journal and every grant giving body are different in at least some detail; and some systems are very different. There may even be some journals using the following classic system. The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper. If the reviewers disagree the editor sends it to a third reviewer and does whatever he or she advises. This pastiche—which is not far from systems I have seen used—is little better than tossing a coin, because the level of agreement between reviewers on whether a paper should be published is little better than you’d expect by chance.
That is why Robbie Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked `publish’ and `reject’. He also joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. When I was editor of the BMJ I was challenged by two of the cleverest researchers in Britain to publish an issue of the journal comprised only of papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. I wrote back `How do you know I haven’t already done it?'”
“CONCLUSION
So peer review is a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative, and scientists and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.”
http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/4/178.full
The whole thing is worth the read. CV is just pointing out the Emperor is nekkid.
It’s a human system. But still light years ahead of religion or nutbars who think that surfing equally delusional and pseudo-scientific web pages deserves the term “autodidactic”.
Ellen MacArthur – Redesigning the whole system to create an inspirational Circular Economy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGy683afyo
Interesting link CV. Cheers. Being a cynic, my first thought was “Well, the capitalists will love it because it preserves the idea of inbuilt obsolescence.” And my second thought was to do with ‘dis-assembly’. It’s one thing to (chemically?) deconstruct carpet square fibres and bases (melting), but a computer? How does that work without the immense amounts of toxic waste that process currently entails? I’m suspicious that there’s a silver lining being promoted here while a great big black cloud is being ignored. So, I’ll away and read up on it a bit further… no democracy I notice
testing smiley 🙂
I found smiley testing, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHU8EXWc840
🙁
A rather long read for those so inclined.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/rough-transcript-stimulus-or-stymied-the-macroeconomics-of-recessions.html
some words
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/407801_592499697442758_137233956_n.jpg
some Swiss Cheese
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/9797668/Swiss-move-towards-barring-Eurozone-refugees.html
cannot see those bicycles above Beijing
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/science/earth/beijing-air-pollution-off-the-charts.html?_r=0