Open mike 15/09/2024

24 comments on “Open mike 15/09/2024 ”

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1. Macro 1

   15 September 2024 at 8:38 am

   What an ignoramus we currently have as Minister of Transport. Nothing more than a petrol head of extreme arrogance. A no nothing, and and full of himself. This latest revelation simply compounds the constant string of outrageous and incompetent decisions this idiot has made in the few months he has held office. The damage he will wreck on this country is unimaginable and could all have been avoided if he would only listen to advice and not his own narcissistic urgings.

   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/528014/transport-minister-pushed-ahead-with-weaker-tailpipe-standards-to-meet-car-industry-s-deadline
   • bwaghorn 1.1

     15 September 2024 at 10:02 am

     I'm sure thame appropriate donations have been made and future offers of employment implied, soooo its allll goooood!!!
   • BK 1.2

     15 September 2024 at 10:30 am

     I may be wrong but, I don't think I have seen one decision this clowns have made that is not against the advice of the people paid to know better than them
   • AB 1.3

     15 September 2024 at 10:31 am

     Does the government seriously think that we can still meet our climate targets and Paris commitments, even when they kick the can down the road like this? It's hard to believe they do – either they naively believe some technology will turn up and save them in the nick of time, or they just don't care if we fail. Probably the latter. And with Simeon Brown, possibly they even relish the prospect of that failure.
     • dv 1.3.1

       15 September 2024 at 10:44 am

       Does the govt seriously think

       That’s the joke.
   • SPC 1.4

     15 September 2024 at 9:29 pm

     According to the Productivity Commission, New Zealand and Australia were the last developed countries to introduce tailpipe emissions standards on imports, aside from Russia.

     Sounds like his elder, Penk, on home build standards (the less well insulated preferred by some builders who don't bother using good architecture design).
2. adam 2

   15 September 2024 at 1:16 pm

   Grace Blakeley, a fine economist. Does a good job of explaining what is capitalism, why it is flawed and not the agent of freedom the idiots who defend it, harp on about.
3. tWig 3

   15 September 2024 at 1:31 pm

   The Guardian summarises Project 2025. Essentially, it is strategies to make the US more religiously conservative (Christian, of course).
4. Jenny 4

   15 September 2024 at 3:04 pm

   Trump pledges "largest deportation" in U.S. history

   Alayna Alvarez, Sep 13, 2024

   "We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country," Trump said at a news conference at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

   Former President Trump on Friday promised, if elected, to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, starting in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado.

   https://www.axios.com/2024/09/13/trump-deportation-immigrants-springfield-ohio-aurora-colorado

   A vulnerable and therefore easy target for populist far right politicians (and fascists), – immigrants, especially vulnerable – undocumented immigrants.

   …..Jews from eastern Europe, mostly from Russian and Polish territory, had been coming to Germany since the 19th century, driven from their homes by anti-Jewish laws, pogroms and poverty. In 1938 there were approximately 50,000 Jews with Polish citizenship living in Germany. Not infrequently they had been settled there for several generations; many had been born in Germany and considered it home.

   After Austria was annexed to Germany in March 1938, the Polish government was afraid that the approximately 20,000 Austrian Jews with Polish citizenship would flee back to Poland. It thus suspended the validity of all Polish passports whose holders had been abroad for more than five years…..

   …..In all, approximately 17,000 people were expelled in this way. However, the Polish authorities refused to accept them, and so most of them had to live for many long weeks in no man's land, or the Polish border area. In most cases they were driven into the surroundings of the Polish towns of Zbaszyn and Bytom. In Zbaszyn, according to various sources, between six and ten thousand Jews gathered in the space of a few days…..

   …..Among those sent to Zbaszyn was the Grynszpan family, whose son Herschel was living in Paris at the time and decided to draw international attention to the plight of the expelled Polish Jews. He shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath with a pistol, seriously wounding him. When vom Rath subsequently died, the Nazis used his death as a welcome pretext to unleash the anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht.

   The case of the Polish Jews expelled from Germany shows that Jewish refugees were having more and more difficulty finding a refuge from persecution. Not only Poland, but other countries were closing their borders in an effort to prevent a flood of Jewish immigrants.

   https://www.holocaust.cz/en/history/events/the-expulsion-of-polish-jews-from-germany/

   Just change the word ‘Jews’ to ‘Haitians’ or ‘Mexicans’, you get the picture.
   • Macro 4.1

     15 September 2024 at 3:43 pm

     Former President Trump on Friday promised, if elected, to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants,

     Except

     However, the vast majority of Haitians in Springfield are in the US legally through a temporary protected status (TPS) that’s been allocated to them due to the violence and unrest in their home country. Citizens of 16 countries, including Afghanistan and Myanmar, are eligible for TPS. It is not a pathway to US citizenship and is valid for only 18 months, at which point it must be renewed by the federal homeland security department for a status holder to remain in the country legally.

     As you rightly point out above, this is a neo-nazi trope. As is, the regurgitation of the immigrants eating pets.
     • Jenny 4.1.1

       15 September 2024 at 7:04 pm

       Macro @4.1

       15 September

       …..As you rightly point out above, this is a neo-nazi trope. As is, the regurgitation of the immigrants eating pets.

       Indeed it is.

       From the link you supplied;

       Since animals such as dogs and cats are considered “honorary humans” in the US,…

       ….Trump was “in effect portraying immigrants as perpetrators of the most savage or heinous act that is humanly possible – cannibalism”.

       Perpetrators of the most savage or heinous act that is humanly possible? The charge of cannibalism made against indigenous peoples, including Maori in this country, is a form of atrocity propaganda that Western imperialists and white supremacists use to portray themselves as morally superiour to justify committing atrocities, displacement, mass murder and genocide.

       Whether 'cannibalism' is the 'most savage or heinous act that is humanly possible' is debatable.

       Hitler famously was an animal lover who would never dream of eating a dog or a cat.

       Westerners don't eat dead pets, we don't eat dead people. That makes us morally superior, morally superior enough to kill human beings on an industrial scale and bury the bodies in mass graves.

       Europeans in Nazi Germany weren't cannibals. They didn't eat pets, they didn't eat people, they starved and gassed people to death, and then buried their dead bodies in mass graves or burnt them in specialy built industrial crematoria.

       "There are two words in the English language, which when used in combination, signal that an obscene crime of historic proportions is taking place."

       Owen Jones

       Here's a clue. It is not eating pets.
   • joe90 4.2

     15 September 2024 at 8:20 pm

     Just change the word ‘Jews’ to ‘Haitians’ or ‘Mexicans’, you get the picture.

     And call it infrastructure.

     @StephenM

     Yes. We started a new denaturalization project under Trump. In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.

     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/us/politics/denaturalization-immigrants-justice-department.html

     https://x.com/StephenM/status/1712094935820780029

     A key Trump White House adviser said the operation would be “greater than any national infrastructure project we've done to date” as a country.

     […]

     Key allies and advisers aren’t mincing their words: In order to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the United States will need enormous prison camps for immigrant families, part of an effort to deport millions of people at a record pace.

     The mass deportation operation will be a “bloody story,” Trump said last weekend. And key advisers have promised a historic infrastructure project to churn people out of the country.

     The camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States’ current immigrant detention capacity, Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trump’s White House, said last year. In multiple interviews, Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.

     “Trump comes back in January — I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Thomas Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, said in July at a conference for Trump-aligned conservatives.

     “They ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said. “Wait until 2025.”

     https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-deportation-camps_n_66e4793de4b03e3cc10020c3
     • Jenny 4.2.1

       16 September 2024 at 1:55 pm

       From Wikipedia the online encyclopeida:

       The actual size and the origin of the undocumented alien population of the United States is uncertain and is difficult to determine due to of difficulty in accurately counting individuals in this population. Figures from national surveys, administrative data, and other sources of information vary widely…..

       ….. Pew estimated the total population to be 11.1 million in 2014, or approximately 3 percent of the US population.[7][6][8] This "is in the same ballpark" as figures from the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which estimated that 11.4 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in January 2012.[3][9]

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undocumented_immigrant_population_of_the_United_States#:~:text=A%202018%20paper%20by%20three,leading%20to%20vastly%20overstated%20results.

       joe90 @4.2

       15 September 2024 at 8:20 pm

       Just change the word ‘Jews’ to ‘Haitians’ or ‘Mexicans’, you get the picture.

       And call it infrastructure.

       To deport, at a minimum, 11.1 million undocumented people, in Stephen Miller words, that Joe90 pointed to, infrastructure will be needed.

       Infrastructure was needed to commit the Holocaust.

       A bureaucracy, to adminster the identification, forcible round up, deportation and transport of 6 million people, coordinating rail transport, comandeering rail wagons, constructing purpose built death camps,

       ….to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the United States will need enormous prison camps for immigrant families….

       … camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people…

       ….Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.

       Just as the Nazis inevitably determined, their Madagascar plan to deport millions of Jews, could only be "partially successful". When Miller determines his plan to round up millions of immigrants, and herd them into camps and then fly them to "all corners of the world" as too impractical and expnsive, the infrastructure will be in place for another, more final, solution.

       From wikipedia the online encyclopedia:

       ..The idea of re-settling Polish Jews to Madagascar was investigated by the Second Polish Republic in 1937,[1][2] but the task force sent to evaluate the island's potential determined that only 5,000 to 7,000 families could be accommodated, or even as few as 500 families by some estimates.[a] As the efforts by the Nazis to encourage the emigration of the Jewish population of Germany before World War II were only partially successful,…
       ….With Adolf Hitlers's approval, Adolf Eichmann released a memorandum on 15 August 1940 calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years,….

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

       Maybe the ability to forcibly deport millions of human beings against their will has improved since the 1930s and '40s, but I doubt it.
       • Jenny 4.2.1.1

         16 September 2024 at 5:27 pm

         From Joe90's link

         Key allies and advisers aren’t mincing their words: In order to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the United States will need enormous prison camps for immigrant families, part of an effort to deport millions of people at a record pace.

         The numbers are mind boggling.

         To transport 11.1 million people you would need tens of thousands of buses and drivers, and guards.

         How much if any luggage would each undocumented person to be deported, be allowed to take on the bus with them on their way to the camps?
         What happens to the mountains of private property left behind by the millions of undocumented immigrants forced into camps to be deported?

         11 Sept 2017 — More than 3.4 million undocumented immigrants are homeowners, according to the Migration Policy Institute analysis of the 2014 U.S. census data.

         https://www.marketplace.org/2017/09/11/american-dream-how-undocumented-immigrants-buy-homes-us/

         Houses, cars, consumer goods, furniture, computers, art works, that the deportees can't take on the bus with them on their way to the camps?
         Who gets it?

         Will it all be confiscated by the state to pay for all the 'infrastructure' costs?

         Trains are still the most efficient way to transport millions of people. This means a rail spur will have to be run out to each camp. If Miller is serious about flying all these people out of the country, airfields would have to be built beside each camp. That leads to the camps themselves, will lethal force be used to keep the millions of deportees behind the wire?
         Will the wire be electrified?
5. Stephen D 5

   15 September 2024 at 3:59 pm

   Fascinating read.

   https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350397585/auckland-sisters-took-dna-test-and-ended-apologising-slavery-jamaica

   “The economic benefits derived from chattel slavery contributed to the financial and imperial strength of Britain, which in turn supported its colonisation activities worldwide, including New Zealand.

   “We take this opportunity to also let you know that we will be asking the New Zealand government to acknowledge these historical links to injustices that took place in the wider Caribbean.

   “We share a history as descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved. Our history is intertwined with your history, and your history is intertwined with ours”

   David Seymour wouldn’t like this to be acknowledged, I reckon.
   • Muttonbird 5.1

     15 September 2024 at 7:17 pm

     Aidee Walker is one to watch. Not saying she's going to enter politics but she's increasingly active in that international advocacy of the disenfranchised space.

     The end game for Atlas/ACT/National is to lock in the gains made by Westerners wherever they have made themselves apparent. It's important for them to eliminate any redress movements, and conveniently (for the historically wealthy) to ask for a reset where all peoples, with the swish of a pen, are now suddenly and miraculously equal.
   • Ngungukai 5.2

     16 September 2024 at 4:07 am

     Some of our Scottish ancestors were taken to the West Indies as slaves in the 16th Century during "The Killing Times", and the religious wars when the Scottish Covenanters were fighting the English Monarchy. Many descendants of these Covenanters from the Scottish villages migrated to the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
6. Ngungukai 6

   15 September 2024 at 6:22 pm

   Seymore is no more than a jumped up little c**k doing the bidding for the likes of Sir Allan Gibbs whose family made a truck load of money with the Holyoke Family at the Kinloch Development at Lake Taupo which I believe is still under a TOW Claim.
   • Mike the Lefty 6.1

     15 September 2024 at 8:50 pm

     Seymour is a young Roger Douglas – totally convinced that his brand of neo-liberal trickle down economic euthenics is the answer to all of society's problems.

     But even Roger Douglas knew when he should back off.

     Seymour has no such wisdom. He now tells us that he has a mighty tax dragon to unleash on us, to be announced sometime soon. We have a pretty fair idea of what it will involve – flat income tax which makes the rich a lot richer and the rest of us no better. Privatisation of pretty much anything in government that can be flogged off. Mass tolling of roads etc.

     The man is intoxicated with delusions of grandeur.

     He needs to be stopped, but National won't do anything because their survival in government depends on him.

     At least Lange had the sense to stop Douglas before he could totally f… the economy.

     It seems nothing will stop Seymour.
   • Descendant Of Smith 6.2

     15 September 2024 at 10:22 pm

     Gibbs and Holyoake. Thieving bastards.

     John Roughan in the New Zealand Herald noted the lack of ‘strong comment’,5 while Bassett remarked upon the need for more explanation in respect to ‘the accusations levelled at Holyoake over his influence to get essential services into Kinloch that appears to have turned him and his partners into wealthy men’.6 Just what was Holyoake up to at the holiday resort of Kinloch, where from 1953 until his death in 1983 much of his private life was focused? There is much more to scrutinize than his influence in having a road built to his property. Most particularly, there are the circumstances of his acquisition of Mäori land there in 1956. The extent to which Gustafson chose to confront Holyoake’s manoeuvrings at Kinloch, therefore, is certainly a mark by which his account can be measured.7 Holyoake’s own narrative can introduce us to the origins of the Kinloch purchase. In the silver jubilee history of the settlement, an account written by Holyoake was made available by his family. In it he related how he was told in June 1953 by friend and National Party stalwart Theodore Nisbett (T.N.) Gibbs that the latter’s son, Ian, was interested in purchasing a block of land on the north-western shore of Lake Taupö. The land comprised the best part of Whangamata No.1, which had been purchased from Mäori in 1884, and after a succession of owners was now in the hands of Ian Gibbs’s employer, New Zealand Forest Products Ltd. The block comprised some 5385 acres and was largely covered in scrub and fern. Holyoake, who was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture at the time, inspected paul hamer 158 the land the next weekend and ‘advised the purchase of the block.’8 Exactly when the purchase took place is unclear. Ian Gibbs had secured a 14day option to purchase by the time of Holyoake’s June 1953 inspection,9 but the certificate of title for the land states ‘Transfer N.Z. Forest Products Limited to Ian Ogilvie Gibbs of Tokoroa engineer and Theodore Nisbett Gibbs of Wellington public accountant as tenants in common in equal shares produced 23/11/53.’10 In any event, Holyoake was quickly in on the deal. He recorded that his experience as a ‘practical farmer’soon ledT.N. Gibbs to offer him a stake in the block, which he accepted. The partnership, which was called Whangamata Station, was formalized in October 1953. T.N. and Ian Gibbs held quarter shares each, Holyoake three sixteenths , and each of his five children a sixteenth each.11 By the time the partnership was formalized Holyoake had already made good use of the expertise at his disposal in the Department of…

     https://muse.jhu.edu/article/879336/summary
7. Muttonbird 7

   15 September 2024 at 6:55 pm

   Early Childhood Council chief executive Simon Laube does not want to teach, just babysit:

   Do we really need all of the hours that parents want, to be at that premium level. Surely six hours per day is enough educational content to deliver to a child in one sitting and so then for the hours over and above six hours a day can we not have flexibility and move the quality of the service down a grade?

   Capitalist theory demands two parents work. Under 5s are in these battery farms for 10 hours a day because ambitious parents place material gain over child bonding. Simon Laube is only too happy to double down on this practice, for huge profit.

   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/528048/education-body-calls-for-overhaul-of-early-learning-rules-ineffective-teacher-to-child-ratios
   • SPC 7.1

     15 September 2024 at 9:44 pm

     I would agree. There is no reason to have more "teacher" time than in a primary school (9 to 11, break and then lunch, and 1-3).

     The before and after part is oversight and access to play areas, books and indoor activity.
     • gsays 7.1.1

       16 September 2024 at 7:05 am

       There is a strong argument to be had that pre-school, the purpose of life is to play. That doesn't mean I'm all for the early child racket education.

       As MB points out, the system we operate in deems wage slavery to be more important than a parent bringing up their children.

       Wage slavery is more vital than supporting elderly parents in their twilight years too. Not to worry, we have a few foreign operators that can spend government money on making a return to their shareholders, employ migrants at as low wages as possible while also providing 'care' to our senior citizens.
8. joe90 8

   15 September 2024 at 7:55 pm

   Public health enforcement with teeth.

   .

   VIENNA (AP) — A woman in Austria was found guilty of fatally infecting her neighbor with COVID-19 in 2021, her second pandemic-related conviction in a year, according to local media. A judge sentenced the 54-year-old on Thursday to four months’ suspended imprisonment and an 800-euro fine ($886.75) for grossly negligent homicide.

   The victim, who was also a cancer patient, died of pneumonia that was caused by the coronavirus, according to Austrian news agency APA. A virological report showed that the virus DNA matched both the deceased and the 54-year-old woman, proving that the defendant “almost 100 percent” transmitted it, an expert told the court.

   “I feel sorry for you personally — I think that something like this has probably happened hundreds of times,” the judge said Thursday. “But you are unlucky that an expert has determined with almost absolute certainty that it was an infection that came from you."

   https://apnews.com/article/austria-covid-conviction-court-coronavirus-ef341c5f6714526f05c67662a94eeb13

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