I have long considered myself a “lefty,’ a “liberal” and a “progressive.” But I have despaired over the last 18 months at the behaviour of what I have often considered “my side.” The sinking of “fellow liberals” into a quagmire of political partisanship, political conspiracy theories, confirmation bias and hateful hostility to anyone daring to present an alternative viewpoint distresses me.
It seems that the “very good” in your comment basically means, “confirming my viewpoint”, Bill. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of “confirmation bias” (the focus of a lot of the article’s discussion?
I thought the one commenter on the site asked a lot of pertinent questions, pointing out inconsistencies in the argument being put forward.
It’s also telling that a person writing a post entitled “Fire and Fury” has this to say about the book: “ I even have my own copy but am unsure now whether to waste time reading it. Wile the mainstream media is promoting it, more rational comments suggest the book is a disaster.” How does this guy measure what is “more rational” if he hasn’t read it?
I’m currently reading “Fire and Fury”. It’s one person’s thinking, based on extensive observations and interviews. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. It certainly isn’t the last word in Trump scholarship (in fact, it’s not a work of scholarship), but that’s hardly surprising this early in the regime. I would say that yes, there is a bias at work (the guy doesn’t like or respect Trump), but I’d also say that it’s not exactly hidden, and when he’s not sure about something he gives various possible explanations or scenarios.
I’m only halfway through the book and so far he’s not suggesting any direct collusion with the Russians – the focus is much more on the dysfunctional relationships within the administration. And whether or not you like Trump, it’s hard to argue that an admin that one year in has left so many critical positions unfilled, has fired so many close-in people and has invented positions for family members is functioning smoothly.
One last comment (a bit of a segue) – I note the author of Open Parachute is an anti-flouride campaigner. Not known for their pro-science, evidence-based approach…
[You note wrong. Very wrong. It’s not at all flash to throw a patently false accusation out there in order to undermine or discredit someone]- Bill
I think that Open Parachute person and others should make a point of stating whether they are talking about international matters or in this country. There is a lot of waffle about Trump, which is reasonable as he himself is full of waffle.
But there is a need for analysis about what is happening in NZ, and the rest of the world impinges on it. But criticising all lefties’ discussion, when the person seems to mean that which is happening about Trump, and North Korea, and Russia is a different matter to what happens on the ground here and is likely to happen in the near and medium future.
So will people please state their point of interest when they are dissing lefties?
I can’t change anything about Trump and watch with foreboding. But I may be able to influence things in NZ, and surely that is the main focus of many people here.
I think most feel in their bones and synapses all the blows to the left. Those who want to be progressives have to spend time looking at planning and testing which ways they think we should try and progress. That is of direct interest I believe to most of us here.
The rest is of interest and concern, but watching and trying to avoid stupid and toxic decisions overseas has to be balanced with the need to do so here. So please lefties with real concern about NZ social needs and climate change and business don’t take your minds away from each other, keep in touch. Please don’t think that you’ll stop taking part here in the discussion if you get annoyed, just drop in each day with something of interest, comment on one thing from someone you know is a mind worker, and then we will keep the intelligent conversation going. It will prevent TS from being affected by pollution from RW maliciousness or careless crap.
Keep putting into the clean stream of thought please, for the mental health of the people devoted to leftie ideas that are bent towards a successful, busy, fair society with the twin goals of kindness and practicality.
Open Parachute’s missive seemed more a complaint about tabloid populism in US politics and media but when has it ever been different? So someone wrote a book criticising Trump – big whoops – he invites it.
Are you or have you ever been a dental professional? Obviously not. Research by all the scientists in the field have proven without a shadow of doubt that fluoride is beneficial for teeth and reduces decay by 70% at the least.
That means its a “science, evidence- based approach”. RB did not use the word “policy” so stop throwing red herrings into conversations because you think it makes you look clever.
“Research by all the scientists in the field have proven without a shadow of doubt that fluoride is beneficial for teeth and reduces decay by 70% at the least.”
I recall that information from Dental lectures I attended admittedly a good many years ago now, But the information hasn’t changed. Go look the subject up Rosemary. There must be oodles of information available from the professionals in the field.
Who is saying Fluoride is a panacea for all ills? No-one here or elsewhere. But it does assist in the prevention of tooth decay especially among children.
Tests have proven as much. Children of the 60s, 70s and 80s who lived in areas where there was fluoridated water had a far lower incidence of tooth decay than those consuming non-fluoridated water.
Anne….much as I would love to get into this issue…I simply do not have the time right now.
Having to deal with the results of an OIA request for information from the Ministry of Health about a completely different issue under their purview.
I was sent a file of over 30 megabytes of scanned documents…much too large for me to share with other affected parties unless it is broken down into manageable portions. Which I can’t do because the file cannot be altered unless the Ministry does it.
Which they have…but still requires me to send four separate emails to 13 or so people with appropriate commentary.
AND, and, despite the monster 30 megabyte break -the -gmail file…I still haven’t got the information I requested.
Sighs. Rolls eyes.
Hopes Anne and others understand why when the Mystery of Health makes dogmatic statements regarding any issue my automatic reaction is to doubt their every word.
Yes, You have told us in the past about some of your experiences with the ministry and I have much sympathy for you Rosemary. I, too,
have been on the receiving end of a government ministry (not the same one as yours) whose attitude left a great deal to be desired.
So I understand your reluctance, but in the case of the fluoridation issue… most of the original research was carried out under the auspices of the WHO which, of course, is an apolitical international body whose findings can be relied upon as accurate.
The link is to a search of the moh site which yields study reviews, cost effectiveness analyses, and comparisons of decayed/missing/filled teeth in NZ schoolchildren based on their flouridated water status.
Fluoride or no fluoride…I don’t really give a toss either way…just get the bloody message through that weaning baby onto sugary drinks is really, really irresponsible.
And there are almost certainly kids in fluoridated areas who have awful teeth, and kids in non-fluoridated areas who drink fizz all the time and have not a filling between them.
Fact is, from a population perspective fluoridation is one of the best and easiest ways to improve kids’ teeth. Pointing to the results of one individual doesn’t count against that statement, even under experimental conditions.
My body is more than my teeth. If I replace rotten parts of my teeth with a mercury containing filler that is durable and seals against any further infection my teeth will be stronger.
But as is the case with mercury, fluoride is also a known poison to other parts of my body.
It has been decided that the poison effect outweighs the dental benefits for mercury and it is still an open question on the cost/benefit with regard to fluouride. Many antifluoride people are quite able to acknowledge the dental benefits of fluoride but believe that the poison effect is great enough to negate these benefits.
Everything in excess is poisonous or dangerous. Everything. Even water. Based on your hypothesis we’d all be dead in a week or so. Best to stop reading pseudo-scientific claptrap. It’s bad for you.
Exactly. Toxicologists have an expression, “The dose makes the poison”.
Everything has toxic effects at some dose, and everything has no toxic effects at another. To think of something as inherently “toxic” or “non-toxic” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Fluoridation is a fantastic public health measure IMHO.
Youre exactly right. Everything has a level of toxicity and it is the level that is the key along with the exposure time. Also people who take the dcientific approach in which I include myself dont usually feel the need to resort to abuse. As you say. The science should speak for itself
I find that 70% figure hard to believe. Where did you get that from? My cousins were brought up in and still live in a non fluoride country and all 3 of them have zero fillings even well into middle age. I think diet has much more to do with it.
“Flouride, pro or anti is neither ‘science’ nor ‘evidence based’ policy…”
Is that your considered opinion? That (pro) fluoridation is neither ‘science’ nor ‘evidence-based’ policy?
As long as the city that hosts NZ’s Faculty of Dentistry (29th-best dental school in the world) continues to fluoridate its public water supply, I’ll be happy for the council that provides services for the city I live in to do so too.
Fluoride is a trace element with important roles in dental health. Dental caries are the most prevalent preventable disease in New Zealand; water fluoridation has been proven to be an effective public health strategy in the prevention of dental caries. We will be assessing the fluoride intakes of 120 children from schools in fluoridated and non-fluoridated regions of the South Island of New Zealand, using 24-hour urine samples, 24-hour duplicate diets, and tooth brushing analysis, and investigating the impact this has on fluoride intake and dental health.
Fluoride is added to the water to reduce tooth decay. The decision to add fluoride to the water is based on recommendations from the Ministry of Health. The council adds fluoride to water at a target dose rate of 0.75 mg/l in order to achieve dosing at the lower end of the Ministry of Health’s recommended range of 0.70 to 1.0 mg/l.
Fluoridation occurs only at Mt Grand and Southern water treatment plants, which service Metropolitan Dunedin, excluding Mosgiel.
Alternatively, it’s all a dental conspiracy, and fluoridation of tap water pollutes our precious bodily fluids, and actually weakens teeth ultimately channeling $$$ into the pockets of the evil dentists!
There is very little contemporary evidence, meeting the review’s inclusion criteria, that has evaluated the effectiveness of water fluoridation for the prevention of caries.
The available data come predominantly from studies conducted prior to 1975, and indicate that water fluoridation is effective at reducing caries levels in both deciduous and permanent dentition in children. Our confidence in the size of the effect estimates is limited by the observational nature of the study designs, the high risk of bias within the studies and, importantly, the applicability of the evidence to current lifestyles. The decision to implement a water fluoridation programme relies upon an understanding of the population’s oral health behaviour (e.g. use of fluoride toothpaste), the availability and uptake of other caries prevention strategies, their diet and consumption of tap water and the movement/migration of the population. There is insufficient evidence to determine whether water fluoridation results in a change in disparities in caries levels across SES. We did not identify any evidence, meeting the review’s inclusion criteria, to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries in adults.
There is insufficient information to determine the effect on caries levels of stopping water fluoridation programmes.
There is a significant association between dental fluorosis (of aesthetic concern or all levels of dental fluorosis) and fluoride level. The evidence is limited due to high risk of bias within the studies and substantial between-study variation.
You missed out the bit where they excluded any study that couldn’t provide a “before and after” picture, and also the bit where they said that
The introduction of water fluoridation resulted in children having 35% fewer decayed, missing and filled baby teeth and 26% fewer decayed, missing and filled permanent teeth. We also found that fluoridation led to a 15% increase in children with no decay in their baby teeth and a 14% increase in children with no decay in their permanent teeth. These results are based predominantly on old studies and may not be applicable today.
Meh. Even if we periodically de-flouridated the entire country and then refluoridated 12 years later, you’d still be unconvinced. And be pissed at nationwide experimentation.
Every single year comparisons in school kids based on fluoridation levels show a increase from fluoridated to nonfluoridated catchments.
At some stage calling the quacky waggly thing a duck is a pretty dafe assumption.
Don’t make assumptions, or crystal ball on my behalf, McFlock….
Your comment leaves the impression that FL in or FL out is the start and end of the metric for reporting….
Surely you’re not that simplistic…
If you weren’t, you might have provided links to the data captured, to which you refer…and provided some analysis on the limitations of the data…Cochrane did…
Besides empirical evidence being an alien concept for you, you confuse “studied a topic to my satisfaction” with “can be bothered writing a text book in order to improve the ‘impression’ of some internet stoner on an acid trip”.
I note the author of Open Parachute is an anti-flouride campaigner.
Is he perchance also a CC denier? Does he believe the moon landing was a fake?
Is he one of those who is convinced the Twin Towers tragedy was an inside job eg. the CIA?
If they’re one pf the above they are usually all of them. I think I will continue to bypass Open Parachute.
And we can remember this particular learning. If ever we want to upset a thread, just put something about fluoride, or perhaps 1080, vaccinations, feminists, rape culture, cats being forbidden….into it, and the cogs and wheels will start turning and all the afficianados will come out and enter the fray. And take it all away. Household hint No. 1.
Well, since RB has got things all arse over tit (ie – Open Parachute belongs to a blogger in favour of fluoridation), I guess you’ll row back on the groundless stuff about moon landings and what not?
Or is it open season on any one who doesn’t toe a particular anti-Trump line?
And if not “moon landing, 9/11” or whatever, then does the mere fact someone doesn’t witlessly jump aboard the anti-Trump bandwagon mean they’re as well being seen as a “moon landing, 9/11” etc flake…and worthy only of opprobrium and dismissal?
I guess the answer to that query is largely “yes”.
He’s far from the only person on the left to observe “The sinking of “fellow liberals” into a quagmire of political partisanship, political conspiracy theories, confirmation bias and hateful hostility to anyone daring to present an alternative viewpoint distresses me.”
A fair few of the comments in this sub-thread serve to illustrate that “hateful hostility” he mentions. And all off the back of a mistake or a lie on the part of Red Blooded that would have taken ‘one click and two seconds’ to get to the bottom of.
From Open Parachute
Fluoridation articles
Some of the anti-fluoridation propaganda can get pretty extreme. Even the less extreme material is often misleading.
I have collected below links to my articles where I debunk these myths and expose the misinformation.
Well, sorry about that… I admit that I didn’t check out the two sections of the blog devoted to fluoride (one labeled “Fluoride” and one “The Fluoride Debate”). Please note that an error isn’t the same as a lie, though, Bill. Usually when people refer to something like “the Fluoride debate” or “the climate change debate” they’re trying to suggest that there is a debate, not trying to refute it.
Perhaps you could see my comment (without having read the appropriate sections of the blog) as being akin to the blogger’s confident commentary on Fire and Fury, without having read the book.
Bill, it’s sometimes hard to respond to you, because it pretty much guarantees ad hominem attack and abuse. Thanks to Drowsy M. Kram, for pointing out that I did actually apologise. (Have you ever done that, I wonder?)
Perhaps you’ve noticed that I often (although not always) disagree with you. This is sometimes because of a difference in values and sometimes because I believe you’re drawing false conclusions based on limited (or misinterpreted) evidence. Even when I think you’re making a mistake, I don’t call you a liar, though, and the reason is that to be a liar, you have to be purposefully promoting something that you know to be untrue. I didn’t do that in my comment above. I’ve admitted a mistake, I’ve explained what caused it and I’ve apologised for it.
[I wrote in relation to your false accusation, and because I’m not a mind reader, that it was a mistake or a lie. You don’t get to play victim in this and also accuse me of making definitive statements I never made. Take a week off. Next Wed.] – Bill
I understand RB – I also find it difficult to communicate with Bill. Although I also often disagree with his POV, I do find his posts thought provoking but usually refrain from participating in discussion on his posts to avoid the ad hominems etc. So thanks for saying to him what I have not had the courage to say!
I also hope that you have read the last two paras of my comment at 1.2.3.3.2 below. As indicated, my suggestion to check out someone”s background was not aimed at you as much as the other people who commented more specifically on fluoridation issues in the thread below your original 1.2 comment. I note that that ‘conversation’ is still continuing. Perhaps they should read some of Ken Perrott’s research articles …
There’s a general comment in Daily Review about moderation (a reminder of how it works).
But for a more specific comment here, I looked at r-b’s comments once Bill had started moderating and what I see is someone arguing about the moderation and taking up a moderator’s time. That’s me coming in and looking from the outside, with no real investment in the conversation.
For me that stuff is hugely problematic and it’s the experience of a number of authors that if you don’t put a strong boundary up then you just have to keep dealing with increasing amounts of shit over time. That’s why some of us moderate the way we do.
If you don’t like how Bill debates, then don’t get involved in those discussions. If you don’t like how he moderates, then figure out where the boundaries are in terms of respect on his terms and take your chances if you want to argue about it (hint, calling a moderator baas is likely to up the ante).
“If you don’t like how Bill debates, then don’t get involved in those discussions. If you don’t like how he moderates, then figure out where the boundaries are in terms of respect on his terms and take your chances if you want to argue about it ”
Or write to the site admin stating your reasons why you think a moderator has lost the illusion of impartiality.
[that is an option too, and that will sometimes lead to a discussion in the back end about a particular moderation, which can be useful. But to be really honest, what I’m seeing here from commenters is not ok. It’s largely disrespectful and some of it looks personal.
btw, moderation isn’t about impartiality. It’s about a number of things including protecting the site, protecting the community and protecting the authors. Needless to say if one thinks that attacking an author is going to lessen the protection around authors, one is really really missing how moderation here works. I suggest people read the note in Daily Review – weka]
It’s definitely an option I recommend people take, but worth noting, reply to lprent directly, and not the generic standard address.
The address is on the contact page, and it does state to use for complaints and operational matters.
Bill it seems to me that you are not infrequently redolent of the very types you complain of in your endorsement of Ken’s Open Parachute piece. You enjoy exceptionalism do you Bill ? Tirades OK for you……slam the same in others. Things are reaching the pitch they did when CV was at his worst. Losing interest……as are others.
I endorse the right of people and their opinions not to be just summarily dismissed by association with the peddling of demonstratively and patently false accusations…not just because it’s a shite thing to do, but because it can make this site vulnerable to legal action.
RB making a mistake and acknowledging it exposes the site to legal action? Just trying to make sense of your justifications: would you please clarify that?
I’m concerned Bill. We don’t want to lose regular good thoughtful feisty commenters. I detect a tendency for all moderators to tighten up too much now the election is over. I believe that you could sit back and let the regulars snap a bit and only step in when there was good reason.
There seems to be micro management entering into the style of the blog. But the long-time commenters are part of the pillars of the blog, and stuck it out and learned a fair bit about how the discussion should go. It should be a discussion between equals, not hand slapping for this and that like schoolkids. A stand-down for a while would be rare for the regulars. but they could suggest it for some of the newbies who just want to disrupt and haven’t a clue to bless themselves with. I’d like to see more relaxation and less didactic approach, and it would be easier on the mods.
We like respect and enjoy TS. Perhaps we need to get a bit sloppy and sentimental like Chris Knox. People who want to be in a good place in coming years need to stick together with others the same. ‘Cause it’s you that I love
And it’s true that I love
And it’s love not given lightly
But I knew this was love
And it’s you that I love
And it’s more than what it might be
I’ll just keep repeating this. It’s not a discussion amongst equals when commenters have a go at authors. Authors take precedence.
I really hope marty and rb come back, both are big assets to this site. But I’m way more concerned about losing authors. No-one seems too concerned about the lack of posts or authors currently. When I see the commentariat putting energy into how to support authors or the site or making the place that new authors might want to come to, I’ll probably see the comments about moderation as being more pertinent.
Just to add to this post by Bill, when I did a quick scroll through of the replies to Bill’s original post at 1 on the Open Parachute posts (without reading these), something was gnawing in my memory – and this increased when the subject of fluoride came up and the resultant discussion as to whether the Open Parachute author was anti-fluoride (and anti-CC etc).
A quick check of the About Me on the Open Parachute site and its sections on fluoridation, and from there the Researchgate link, confirmed the reason for my disquiet.
Ken Parrott, author at open Parachute is not just another blogger – he probably has far higher professional qualifications, experience etc etc in the field of fluoridation than anyone here on TS.
The links also include this very recent (Dec 2017) Scoop article on an article just published in the British Dental Journal by New Zealand researcher Dr Ken Perrott highlighting flaws in a 2015 research paper, widely cited by fluoride opponents, that had reported a connection between fluoridation and ADHD. On a quick glance, it appears to be a good example of a pro-science, evidence-based approach to peer review
Not criticizing anyone who commented, but just suggesting that it sometimes does pay to take a minute or so to check out professional backgrounds etc, before making claims that someone is this, that or the other. It helps to avoid egg on face syndrome – I know from previous personal experience of this!
(EDIT – I see that Bill has now added a further reply to RB … Mine is aimed a bit wider than RB as i had no problem most of RB’s post at 1.2.
Here we go again @Anne (it seems) – re something a bit funny has happened this early new year.
I’m not sure if its just that contributors are wearing the undies someone bought them for Christmas – two sizes too small, or whether there is something other than fluoride in the water.
Roll on 2018, and we’ll see if it’s all as sustainable as we would like, or whether we’ll shoot ourselves in the tootsies
Gold. A commenter on the “Fire and Fury” thread writes:
I’m waiting for all information before jumping to conclusions.
The blogger responds:
That is more or less my position – and why I call the media promoted story of Russian Collusion as fact a “myth.”
Er, yes – declaring something “a myth” is what normal people always do when they’re “waiting for all information before jumping to conclusions.” That one’s almost funnier than his comments about everyone else suffering from confirmation bias.
Reporting Russian Collusion as “fact” is, in terms of there being no presentation of concrete evidence on which to base the conclusion that it actually happened, kinda creating a myth.
But hey, here’s Greenwald from last year, because he’s far more erudite and in depth than me.
But no matter. It’s a claim about nefarious Russian control. So it’s instantly vested with credibility and authority, published by leading news outlets, and then blindly accepted as fact in most elite circles. From now on, it will simply be Fact – based on the New York Times article – that the Kremlin aggressively and effectively weaponized Twitter to manipulate public opinion and sow divisions during the election, even though the evidence for this new story is the secret, unverifiable assertions of a group filled with the most craven neocons and national security state liars.
That’s how the Russia narrative is constantly “reported,” and it’s the reason so many of the biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It’s because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties.
No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent.
I’m struggling to think of a high-profile official investigation into something or someone that didn’t also involve public speculation out the wazoo, so it’s hardly surprising that this one also has its partisan followers.
OJ Simpson springs to mind, as does the attempted Clinton impeachment.
Is “Russiagate” another deception like Iraqi WMDs? ‘
Yes
The media is corralling people’s thinking by spreading this lie.
Just as they did over WMD, Vietnam, McCarthyism. If we are lied to enough times, then most believe.
Fortunately there are independent journalists like Patrick Cockburn, and Eva Bartlett who have told us the truth about what has been happening in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Russia, the US and Iran.
Thank you Bill for sharing these important stories that go against the neoliberal lies.
Israel has been buying usa politics for decades ….. wielding so much power and influence,…. that the usa Govt did a white wash and covered up when Israel killed or injured around 200 u.s navy sailors.
At the time of the attack and attempted sinking “The Jewish council could influence 169 of the 270 elctoral votes needed to win the white house”
“The Israelis used code-names to protect their white house agents” …
Does anyone seriously believe the Russians have anywhere near the involvement or influence on U.S politics than Israel ???
I wish I could share your apparent relief or enthusiasm francesca.
Unfortunately, we’re in a kind of cultural morass that sits somewhere between that which surrounded Iraqi WMD and McCarthyism. My impression is the latter was more enthusiastically taken up by the public at large than the former.
I could be wrong on that front, but assuming I’m not, I’d suggest the level of acceptance of Trump/Russia blah tends more towards the McCarthy side of any WMD/McCarthy scale than it does towards any WMD side.
Media and elites had to sell the idea of WMD to a skeptical public, whereas this stuff…fck, it’s just getting gobbled up.
“I have long considered myself a “lefty,’ a “liberal” and a “progressive.” But I have despaired over the last 18 months at the behaviour of what I have often considered “my side.” The sinking of “fellow liberals” into a quagmire of political partisanship, political conspiracy theories, confirmation bias and hateful hostility to anyone daring to present an alternative viewpoint distresses me.
Hear, hear Ken.”
The problem with those kinds of very generalised statements is we have no idea who he is talking about. And that just creates confusion.
(and there is no single anti-Trump movement, hard to get past a headline like that).
Well, I took it to refer to anyone expressing “hostility to anyone daring to present an alternative viewpoint…”
And that being in relation to the rather specific anti-trump bandwagon running on allegations of collusion with Russia; rubbishy innuendo (that is not to be called out), and baseless gossip (also not to be called out).
On Russia, supposed collusion is to be treated as an accepted truth. The evidence will be forthcoming (apparently). Asking for concrete evidence now (after 18 months) is kinda “not cricket” and worthy of (in Ken’s words) “hostility”.
I don’t think Ken was implying there is a single anti_Trump movement, but was referring to ‘the’ anti-Trump movement – bones that both his pieces give flesh to.
Most of the political people on the left I speak with in the real world get that. Notwithstanding, it’s true to say we don’t tend to engage in political discussions with those who stray too far from our own views in real world situations.
Glen Greenwald an others have pointed all this out and termed it as a new McCarthyism. I don’t think they are wrong in having that view.
On Russia, supposed collusion is to be treated as an accepted truth.
Is it? There’s evidence that it happened, but evidence has to be weighted and considered before you can claim it’s proof of anything.
The closest thing we have to first hand knowledge of the motivation behind the investigation is Glenn Simpson’s testimony to Congress, in which he states that he and Steele became concerned that Trump is the victim of blackmail. Other fascinating nuggets include Trump claiming he does business deals in Russia when no such deals exist (which I take to mean that no property changes hands, no companies are registered and so-on – at least on paper), and that the FBI has a source in Trump’s organisation* (whether it predates his run for office remains unclear).
Assuming Simpson isn’t just lying about his motivation, that sheds an entirely different light on latter events.
When Trump says “there was no collusion”, perhaps that’s because he’s being extorted and blackmailed instead. Or perhaps But But But Hillary framed him or something.
Or perhaps it’s all just weak-sauce bs, as you seem convinced of.
*which means, btw, that their evidence probably won’t see the light of day until any trial occurs, for obvious reasons.
PS: Simpson says Steele severed links with the FBI because he came to the conclusion that they were interfering in the election. Make of that what you will.
So far yes, It’s all weak-sauce bs as far as I’m concerned.
That’s qualitatively different from being convinced it will all wind up being nothing more than weak-sauce bs. That’s merely a suspicion, and one that grows the longer no concrete evidence is produced.
There will be others, but Greenwald seems to be particularly surgical and thorough in his approach to supposedly factual claims being made by mainstream liberal outlets, and has very good pieces mapping out the who’s who of those behind pushing (many now debunked) “collusion and interference” stories through those outlets.
it’s completely possible (and probable, really) that the CIA possesses hard evidence that could establish Russian attribution — it’s their job to have such evidence, and often to keep it secret.
If such evidence exists it would no doubt provide part of the case against Trump or his henchmen, and wouldn’t be revealed until then, just like anything provided by the FBI’s purported mole.
Its continued absence until then should be expected. I certainly wouldn’t firm up my position on that basis.
Why would concrete evidence being provided to underpin claims of the Russian government hacking DNC emails “no doubt provide part of the case against Trump…” ?
Also, there’s no mention of the FBI or an FBI mole in the piece you linked to.
Did you link to the wrong piece? Or are you just taking random Russia/Trump stuff and throwing it all in the same pot hoping to conjure up a Trump stew?
Wild projection/speculation about stew aside, I discussed Glenn Simpson’s testimony (in which he mentioned the mole) at 1.6.1.1.
Why would concrete evidence being provided to underpin claims of the Russian government hacked DNC emails “no doubt provide part of the case against Trump…” ?
For the reasons Biddle outlines in the article I linked: because it would validate the provenance of the phishing attack on the DNC, and thus provide strong evidence that anyone possessing that information (and offering it to Trump) was also working for the Russian government.
It would add context and flavour to any eventual charges or case for impeachment, for sure.
So unless it can be shown that the DNC emails were offered to Trump, then…
Well, if the CIA has Putin briefing Guccifer they probably have that conversation too. However, Trump’s people believed that’s what they were being offered, according to Papadopoulos.
As for CNN’s apparent eagerness to believe, I think you’ll find juries are harder to convince than journalists, so that’s another red herring.
All these false dichotomies are pretty tiring anyway. Cheers.
I bring this up because I just watched an interview with Guardian journalist Luke Harding, who recently released a bestseller called Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. The host of The Real News, Aaron Maté, repeatedly pressed him on concrete examples of proven collusion, and the result was embarrassing—Harding had a whole heap of nothing.
Harding wasn’t prepared for what amounted to a skeptical interviewer. I have no doubt that if Paste’s writers were present, …….and Harding’s stumbling incompetence doesn’t necessarily mean there was no collusion. That said, a simple fact remains: The man who wrote the book on Trump-Russia collusion can’t point to a single concrete instance of said collusion.
That’s pretty damning, right?
You can watch the video below, or read the transcript.
The most revealing quote of all. I’m a storyteller.
Not a journalist, then.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah. Right. Don’t kind of quite appreciate the nature of Vladimir Putin’s state. I mean I lived there for four years. I was there for between 2007 and 2011. I was eventually kind of kicked out for writing stories about kleptocracy, about Putin’s fortune, about human rights, about journalists. I’m not sure if you know, but some of my friends in Moscow who are journalists have been murdered. This is not a nice or benign regime. It’s-
AARON MATÉ: [crosstalk 00:10:04] I’m certainly not arguing that Vladimir Putin is a nice person or that he has great policies, but to me though, that doesn’t automatically mean that he waged a massive influence campaign that got Donald Trump elected. Part of the reason why I’m skeptical of that is that, again, there still is actual … There’s zero evidence so far. There’s a lot of supposition and innuendo.
LUKE HARDING: Well I’m a journalist. I’m a storyteller. I’m not head of the CIA or the NSA…
This article in the Guardian is worth checking out. It’s about PFIs (the British equivalent to PPPs), with a particular focus on the implications for the public sector when it’s left picking up the bill for (oh, so efficient!) private sector companies if they fail/declare bankruptcy when delivering public sector services or infrastructure.
So is the concern that a public company gets to run on private business lines and go for profit and big salaries, but if it strikes a bump and loses money, or is damaged and goes bust, then the taxpayer enters the picture and picks up the tab and pays out all the other business players involved?
I have to say that I don’t know enough about the NZ situation to say that things are exactly the same here, but in Britain at least, it seems that the economic benefits of PFIs were sold on the theory that they were a lower cost to the public purse than straight government funding, but that was only (marginally) true if the idea of “risk transfer” was factored in: “When you examine the claims made for the efficiency of the private sector, you soon discover that they boil down to the transfer of risk. Value for money hangs on the idea that companies shoulder risks the state would otherwise carry. But in cases like this (building hospitals), even when the company takes the first hit, the risk ultimately returns to the government. In these situations, the very notion of risk transfer is questionable.”
“The costing of risk is notoriously subjective. Because it involves the passage of a fiendishly complex contract through an unknowable future, you can make a case for almost any value. A study published in the British Medical Journal revealed that, before the risk was costed, every hospital scheme it investigated would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. But once the notional financial risks had been added, building them through PFI came out cheaper in every case, although sometimes by less than 0.1%.
Not only was this exercise (as some prominent civil servants warned) bogus, but the entire concept is negated by the fact that if collapse occurs, the risk ripples through the private sector and into the public.”
Thinking about risk in ventures and assessing it over time and possible cost and so on. Is that what is called actuarial? Anyway I just mention something that got into my head when reading about the great oil spill from a tanker near Alaska. I think it was the Exxon. The risk of the transport of oil had been assessed and it was felt likely that there might be an accident once in 25 years. To protect and mitigate against that there were requirements made of government keeping an overview, and shipping kept in the area for the especial purpose of handling large spills and damage to this large oil tanker.
25 years and perhaps an even shorter time, seems to be too long for people in general, and even government or business, to maintain a watching brief with the awareness and readiness as required by the assessment papers. When the disastrous accident happened, the government overview had been scaled back and to an extent the watchdog role had been captured by the company and industry, and the safety vessels with remedial equipment had been sent off to distant posts, and were
days, weeks away when needed urgently to deal with a very bad spill.
So government can not contract out effectively as it is the entity where the buck stops, and no other entity is going to take responsibility for the services or safety in the same way as the government does, as supposedly serving and answering to its citizens.
Carrillion is a very salient and timely lesson…PPPs (by any name) exist to enable the use of accounting deception (which no one believes) …even without the collapses and public bailouts they are a foolishly expensive method of funding capital expenditure/public service due to the shareholder returns, inflated salaries, self serving bonus culture and race to the bottom in terms of quality (both in construction and service) to win……another appalling example of short- termism.
I hadn’t gone to the link at the beginning of the thread and in case if others haven’t, the below paras are the start of an important column relating to the collapse of some ambitious entity called Carrillion.
Again the “inefficient” state mops up the disasters caused by “efficient” private companies. Just as the army had to step in when G4S failed to provide security for the London 2012 Olympics, and the Treasury had to rescue the banks, the collapse of Carillion means that the fire service must stand by to deliver school meals.
Two hospitals, both urgently needed, that Carillion was supposed to be constructing, the Midland Metropolitan and the Royal Liverpool, are left in half-built limbo, awaiting state intervention. Another 450 contracts between Carillion and the state must be untangled, resolved and perhaps rescued by the government.
We have the penetration of our business opportunities by these international and overseas-modelled companies. Profitable business is their game, and the game is moulded around contracts that are set rock-hard by legalities, if not in any physical legal form, probably all on-line.
The music suitable to the acting out of the whole enterprise, I think would be Chess. The satirising that I know and enjoy best, would be from the Telegraph’s Alex by Peattie and Taylor.
They are on a robot theme at present, and the robots are coming off second best to the simple cunning of stock traders. May as well laugh while business goes on going forward. I like January 15. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/alex/?cc=10151369
Our medias bias will not give much coverage to another rip off and the failures of Privitization ….. or as its modern bastard children are called …. PPP’s, PFI’s, charter schools etc
Its core national party ideology .
With a PPP failure the money is burned and contracted services do not get delivered … Meaning tax payers will pay twice
Even worse in the latest failure from england…. their contracted company also destroyed half a billion pounds of workers pension money …
Here’s a Swedish PPP scam example, which our media has probably never reported on …. As it also involves our Ex PMs line of work ….
“Swedish authorities in 2010 gave a single bidder the contract in a so called public-private partnership (PPP) – not only to build the hospital but also account for the financing and maintenance for decades to come.”
“” (Mission: Investigation) can now reveal that large sums in the prestigious project is routed to the tax haven of Luxembourg.”
Yes, One News reported this last night, interviewing the head of the NZ Veterinary Association who said that even if owners were unaware of it, most of these dogs suffer and that their breathing problems are like trying to breathe through a pillow. I note the SPCA are also in favour.
My neighbour, died recently of emphysema. Very sad. There was the difficulty in breathing and talking made it worse and it was hard to listen to the effort. It seems unfair to the dogs to put them through that state of limiting breathing.
A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.
[…]
But the biggest difference lies in new wording about what constitutes “extreme circumstances.”
In the Trump administration’s draft, those “circumstances could include significant non-nuclear strategic attacks.” It said that could include “attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”
The draft does not explicitly say that a crippling cyberattack against the United States would be among the extreme circumstances. But experts called a cyberattack one of the most efficient ways to paralyze systems like the power grid, cellphone networks and the backbone of the internet without using nuclear weapons.
It appears that the totalitarian dystopia of countless sci-fi movies is almost upon us. (Or am I just late to the party??) This tender…
NZ Police are seeking proposals from suitably experienced, qualified and resourced companies to provide the ABIS 2 (Automated Biometric Identification Solution) Facial Image Identification and Management, Scar, Mark and Tattoo, and Clothing database Technology Solution(s).
The Police seem to try to remain separate from Parliament, though supporting stable government.
Are they under any control at all then? Or just sort of contracted by the gummint and get paid a budget amount, and set targets to reduce, contain crime etc. but the details of how becomes ‘an operational matter’. How much are the police serving the country, or developing into a self-motivated force, with its own individual practices only loosely related to current morals and ethics?
I have high hopes for Cabinet Minister, Tracey Martin. If she can match her deeds with her verbal down to earth, commonsense approach, she will be a very good minister in the Lab. led government.
Yep. If National were honest about what they really thought they would have called it the:
“Ministry for the Children of Hopeless People Who Can’t Survive in the Glorious Economic System Instituted by Dear Leader, Economic Genius, Overlord of the South, Rugged Individualist and Teemingly Fertile Lord English”.
But they settled for ‘Vulnerable’ – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Time and time again we see that private companies are more efficient
than the State – but only in relation to transferring profits to
shareholders and key managers, not to actually producing the goods and
services that they are contracted to provide.
Let this be a lesson to governments – the previous National
governments saw failures that cost taxpayers; will the LGNZF
government be fooled the same way?
The reality is that financing costs are cheaper for the government
than for anyone else – that is an immediate benefit for not having
partnerships with private companies that finance at higher rates. Then
there is control, and whether quality and risk are actually managed
well – for if anything goes wrong, the taxpayer ends up footing a
higher bill.
_________________
There is another perspective than mitigating financial risk – it is the time frame of the different parties. That of business is only a few years, and getting shorter. Under National, some roading projects were contracted to special purpose companies set up by interested parties to undertake the work entirely on borrowed money – those tendering had little capital of their own invested in the project. When the first Labour government decided to build social housing, they used government employees for design, engineering, planning, plans; they used largely contractors to do detailed work, but they used government employees to supervise the work and ensure that standards were understood and maintained. They built to last – and many state houses from that era are now regarded as well built, if now dated in style, and are still being used ovr 60 years later.
As an example of how we have fallen from those standards, consider the Defence Department. They moved out of their Stout Street headquarters, purpose built for them many years ago, to a new building in Aitken Street. In recent years the old building, which was structurally very sound, had become too small and in need of refurbishment. It was sold to a private developer who did that work and now leases it to another governmetn department. Meanwhile, the Aitken Street building is I am told being pulled down as it is now an earthquake risk. Similarly Statistics New Zealand moved to a new building which partially collapsed, fortunately not killing anyone, but leaving many archives lost as the building remains unsafe – in both cases while earlier buildings built with long term use in mind rather than “lowest cost is all that matters,” remain standing and able to be used.
Taking a longer view can be difficult – sometimes a slower project can only deliver full benefits in the next parliamentary term or even later, but running a system that respects employees with proper training programmes and high business ethics can bear fruit in a lot of other ways as those people move into other jobs in the private sector. Fair dealing used to mean something in business, and still does in some parts of the country. I believe the current government can afford to plan for a second term; provided they pander to short termism enough to be elected, but deliver enough permanent solutions in that second term to have a very good chance of a third term.
Addled dotard claims he has the best brain because he found his way through a dementia screen.
He blamed his three immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for failing to resolve the crisis and, a day after his doctor gave him a perfect score on a cognitive test, suggested he had the mental acuity to solve it.
“I guess they all realized they were going to have to leave it to a president that scored the highest on tests,” he said.
He can’t see how his son and son in law having contact with Russians during an election campaign who offer to dish dirt on his opponent isn’t collusion and meddling, but at least we know he can tell a lion, from a rhino, from a camel.
With regard to privacy, in the case of receiving a state funded benefit, I think most people would agree that if the conditions for receiving the benefit are met, even if one of those conditions require revealing who the father is, then equality under the law has been met. Though I don’t believe it is a law that benefits must be paid to citizens – they are just policies of the government at the time.
If privacy is the main concern, then the government has no need to know how much money I earn to tax me.
You appear to have no understanding of NZ’s obligations and responsibilities resulting from NZ’s ratification of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ratification of other related International Conventions and Covenants etc since 1948 relating to things like the rights of the child, the rights of persons with disabilities, elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, status of refugees to name but a few of these – all of which are enshrined in various pieces of NZ legislation.
IMO this statement in your comment is astounding in its ignorance – “Though I don’t believe it is a law that benefits must be paid to citizens – they are just policies of the government at the time.”
If you really believe that then you obviously have no understanding of other pieces of NZ legislation such as the various iterations of the Social Security Act etc that have been enacted in NZ over the last 80 years since 1938 with the introduction of the first Labour Government’s social welfare programme – and which set out both rights and obligations of both the government and the recipients of welfare payments.
It seems property investors are fleeing the rental market with Labour’s policies being one of the driving factors.
With a sufficient number of new homes from Kiwibuild being years away, coupled with an insufficient number of new state homes proposed thus far, Labour are likely to face an increase in the number of homelessness and tenants facing soaring rents (along with their related ills) over its first term. Risking widespread voter disillusionment.
How will Labour overcome this? Will they buy private rentals and turn them into state rentals? Will they buy and turn private rentals into Kiwibuild homes?
Will they be forced to house more in motels? Giving the opposition their stick to hit them with.
How will Labour overcome this? Will they buy private rentals and turn them into state rentals? Will they buy and turn private rentals into Kiwibuild homes?
Hold it. Every one look at BM becoming a stable genius. How amazing it is the house prices will go up. Your a real fucking genius you know that BM… Amazing…
You know at some point when investors make shitty investments they should actually lose out on it when it goes tits up. I mean. My god, the government can’t keep bailing out unsophisticated investors all the time.
Nah. It’s like BM is reading from a script or something… Like he’s given these messages to say with out even understanding the words that are coming of his keyboard and when ever he goes off script he just comes across as a Nigerian con artist. He’s worthless.
In Wellington, it will, if it became known the government was buying existing rentals and they were desperate for them, then it becomes a seller’s market and you can start asking above the going rate.
Not like the government has to go to the bank and get a mortgage.
Anyway, the big issue is that people have taken their rentals off the market, so unless the government can convince these people to either sell their rentals to the government or put them back on the market it will make no difference.
The problem still is there’s not enough rentals, complete fuck up by Labour.
I mean that’s the definition of a property bubble. If the government purchase above market rates then who will pay the next trench up of house prices… See the false ideology? People want security not a Ponzi scheme.
Regardless of it being Wellington or not, they would merely be shoring up the downfall in demand, thus largely maintaining current market prices, not increasing them.
Due to the poor condition of a number of rentals (especially in Wellington) and the fact the Government’s budget will be limited, one would expect offers will be realistic, despite any perceived desperation.
We’ve already had BMs hysteria over drug testing state houses, and not even been unfit for habitation. Now BMs so thick in the head he dosnt even understand that he’s pushing a Ponzi scam. He’s a totally con.
If you think all rentals and tenants are the same then you’re insane… Because when BM assumes that all tenants and rentals are the same it’s actually mathematically impossible for BM to derive a supply curve…
I mean… Fuck me… This is why I don’t educate flaky virtue signallers.
If carefully managed a glut of homes for sale that eases pricing in the ‘1st home’ category could be a good thing. I think it would be interesting to see what price range of properties investors are selling up. Gut feel tells me it won’t be the expensive end of the rental market, those tenants are better placed to absorb increases. The renters that are finally able to afford a starter home of their own will be making their previous rental home available to others with their move.
At this stage, easing pricing to widen accessibility to more first home buyers would more than likely require prices to fall. And a falling housing market would exacerbate the new Government’s problems. Which is one reason why Labour campaigned on slowing the rate of increase, not dropping the current value of homes.
Investors selling up basic boxes in West and South Auckland could see an over supply in one sector of the market, prices easing in that under 500k sector. I guess there would be a spill-over to the 1.5 million dollar McMansions but that sector could remain quite buoyant. Investors won’t be pumping stock into that sector, not increasing the supply.
The problem is with the realestate industry needing sales volume, so pretty much convincing retirees to sell the family home for a million and scale down. The problem is those scaled down beach homes or what ever… Is closing in on the million dollar average. And this is usually the one nest egg for retirement so it’s like once the money gone. Then what?
If there’s continued down turn in construction then there will be a recession kiwi style so consideration must be given to keeping the kiwi home, not selling.
“1st home ownership take-up is the highest it’s been for 5 years “
With record high immigration, thus new immigrants looking for their first NZ home, it’s not that surprising.
“Those first home buyers are vacating rental homes”
While some of them will be, evidently it’s done little to ease the current rental shortage problem with demand exceeding supply. Which suggests it’s more a case of new immigrants buying their first homes squeezing locals out, hence forcing more to rent.
While it will be largely centered around the lower end of the market and in areas with a high number rentals, it won’t be solely limited to that end or area of the market. So yes, their will be spillover. Along with a heighten risk it could all quickly unravel.
Buyers are far less inclined to buy in a declining market, preferring to hold off (thus adding to the downward spiral) expecting to save thousands as they anticipate prices to further decline.
The world dodged a bullet when the warmonger lost…oh
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday committed the United States to an indefinite military presence in Syria, citing a range of policy goals that extend far beyond the defeat of the Islamic State as conditions for American troops to go home.
New Zealand is the most wasteful country in the developed world but investment in organic waste facilities could reduce that by almost a third.
Research published on Waste Management World has found New Zealand produces 3.68kg of waste per capita per day, the worst in the developed world and the 10th worst of countries worldwide surveyed.
The greed of farmers, the weakness of neoliberal politicians and the devastating impact of irrigation
Its consequences.
Millan Ruka on Facebook
Millan Ruka I paddled this beautiful living river around 2009. Now its life force has been sucked from it and nobody cares (except Matt Coffey). The RMA has clauses to stop this greed but our leaders do not have the will or the guts to implement restrictions. Come on Labour Coalition instruct the Local Government to put immediate restrictions on irrigation
Before you condemn Fox News as the most outrageous media outlet in
the world, have a look at the English version of French state television.
France 24 News, 11 p.m., FACE TV (Sky Channel 83), Tuesday 16 Jan. 2018
We are depressingly accustomed to television “news” being often little more than a conduit of state propaganda, whether it’s on the BBC, ABC (the Australian one), RT, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, PBS, CBS, ABC (the American one), NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, and our own TVNZ and NewsHub. As craven as all of the above are, however, the other night I saw something that equalled, perhaps even surpassed, all of the above for sheer brass-plated, malicious, bloody-minded dishonesty: I watched the first ten minutes of the English version of France 24.
The alarm bells were ringing on this from the first live cross on the very first item, about the call for the PLO to cut its ties with Israel. That cross was to “our correspondent in the region, Irris Makler.” Now, long-time listeners will remember that we encountered this shamelessly one-sided Israeli-Australian back in July 2011 when RNZ National wheeled her on to talk about a convoy of peace activists trying to break the illegal blockade of Gaza. She joked to Kathryn Ryan that the Gaza peace convoy was “dead in the water”, sneered that there were “celebrities like Alice Walker” on board, and ignored the presence of the 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein. [1] A week later, she was still defaming peace protestors, this time for Deutsche-Welle. [2])
It turns out that Irris Makler has not changed her modus operandi in the slightest: “You know Palestinians will pay a price internationally,” she intoned darkly. Then she claimed, in contradiction to all evidence, that the Oslo agreements had led to “great changes” in the Occupied Territories.
Unbelievably, there was worse to come. The newsreader, one Alexander Aucott, introduced the next item, about Ahed Tamimi, the 16 year old Palestinian girl arrested and charged for slapping an armed IDF soldier. He read out, with a straight face, that she had been:
caught on film pushing, kicking, and hitting the soldiers, who did not respond. The video provoked outrage in Israel, but she has been hailed as a hero by Palestinians.”
Alexander Aucott should have mentioned that just before Ahed Tamimi slapped one of the soldiers who’d invaded her yard, she had learned that her 15-year-old cousin Mohammed had been shot in the head at close range by an Israeli soldier. But for some reason Aucott—or more likely, his scriptwriter—chose to ignore all that and instead portray her as an aggressor and the soldier as a victim. It’s not many years since French state media and scurrilous tabloids approvingly covered the Sarkozy government’s loading of gypsies on to trains and expelling them from France. Clearly, honesty and integrity still count for little or nothing in the French state media.
The impression of shabbiness and lack of professionalism was only magnified by the appearance of Alexander Aucott, who looks like a young, scruffy clone of Neil Kinnock, and glowers at the camera reproachfully as he mouths his loaded lines. The wretchedness of all this was only magnified by its following immediately after a brilliant Democracy Now! special on Martin Luther King.
Well all Stuff and rhe Herald provide is propaganda and fake news.
Hence the apathy and ignorance of some many New Zealanders.
So many people vote against their own interests, supporting ghastly neoliberal policies that ruin society and the environment.
The media corral people into opinions by repeating the lies.
France 24 is fake news. At least it was on Tuesday night. And I’m sure it regularly and dependably delivers such nasty propaganda; I don’t think Mr Aucott’s gruesome performance was an aberration.
Trump is a direct result of the Clinton’s. Why do I say this well first Trump and the Clinton’were associates and Bill would have told trump about the Mana that A President of America has and this would have made Trump obsessed with the goal of becoming President in my view. Bill was that obsessed with getting that Mana back through Hillary that he minupulated the Democratic party to get Hillary as there front runner candidate and not Bernice Sanders and wallar we have Trump as President the way trump is behaving is because of what Bill told Trump. I say if it looks like one talks like one than he is a Racist Bigot who panders to his polling that is what is keeping him in power and he will use anything through anyone under the bus say anything to keep this Mana that he is intoxicated with. This is a very dangerous man with the world future in his hands and you know what comes first in trumps world Trump. Is this the person whom is supposed to look after all Americans wellbeing Ana to kai
Sorry about the heat morning rumble you should have got the bug spray out and sprayed the sandflys lol. They won’t shut you down that would make OUR Mana even greater I wonder what happened to that South Waikato airial of yours last year???????. I figure out that when I get a random phone call unanswered my phone is been hacked they can’t stop me using it for posting on the standard but they can listen and use the camera and also change my alarm and turn alarm off. Every time the sandflys try and spin shit about me they end up with shit in there face. This will allways happen because I have done nothing.
Its cool being famous from Pokai Tikapa Waiomatatini Tairawhiti I go into the Putaruru supermarket and there is a lot of chatting and excitement going down I start shopping and when I got to the checkout everyone’s vanished. The sandflys have followed me into the shop and told/bullied everyone and told them to not let me know that I’m well known. I have been going into this supermarkets for 12 years off and on The same thing happens at Rotorua pack and save they are so _____ its not funny Ka kite ano
Surprisingly enough, one could argue (as I often do) that the day inserted into a leap year is not that we label 29th February, but actually the 24th of February. Here I explain why, briefly. Almost everyone assumes that the day added into February in a leap year is the ...
If you haven’t watched Newsroom’s video showing Oranga Tamariki staff attempting to uplift a newborn baby yet you should do so. Although it's not the worst case as far as interventions go, it’s certainly not a good look for the Government. Because of this controversy there’s been a plethora of ...
Genesis Energy is planning to build the country's biggest PV solar farm:Power generator and retailer Genesis Energy says it is in advanced discussions to build New Zealand's biggest solar farm in northern Waikato. The company, which earlier reported a 15 per cent decline in operating earnings to $167.2 million, said ...
Transport is our second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Any credible effort to reduce emissions to net-zero has to target it. So what is the government doing? Subsidising some of the dirtiest, most inefficient vehicles on the roads:New Zealand's favourite cars - double cab utes - are largely exempt ...
You’ve really got to wonder what the NZ First Party was thinking and drinking last Friday? Not only did they hamstring the Greens by halting one of their main environmental policies, the electric vehicle fee-bate scheme, a policy that the public was led to believe was a done deal…but they ...
High Risk Call: Insensitive though it may seem to even pose the question: how will the electorate respond to what the Prime Minister’s opponents will undoubtedly characterise as an attack on New Zealanders’ freedom of speech? At more than twelve month’s remove from the terrible events of 15 March 2019, ...
Story of the Week... Opinion of the Week... El Niño/La Niña Update... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... Climate change leads to more violence against women, girlsRape, domestic violence, forced marriages: A new ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Feb 16, 2020 through Sat, Feb 22, 2020 Editor's Pick JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human raceLeaked report for world’s major fossil fuel financier says ...
Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article ‘The Dangerous Denial of Sex by two scientists Colin Wright and Emma Hilton. Write is an evolutionary biologist at Penn State and Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester. It is well worth reading the article in full. Here ...
I am about to mail my overseas ballot to Florida so that it can be counted in the Democratic primary on March 17. In Florida you have closed as opposed to open primaries, which means that one must declare a party preference in order to vote in a party primary. ...
Winston Peters - Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the NZ First PartyWe all know that politics can be pretty messy at times. Just look at the Dirty Politics saga in New Zealand, the misgovernment of the Australian bushfires or the recent Trump impeachment debacle in the US. In a ...
Last Monday SpaceX launched another clutch of Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, bringing up to 300 the number of these units intended to bring 5G internet to the whole globe. In this post I present a movie showing how all 300 such satellites will be zipping around our planet over ...
The recent floods in Southland have highlighted the issue of Rio Tinto's illegal toxic waste dump in Mataura. But according to Newsroom, there's an even worse mess in Ruakaka near Whangarei:A Northland property stockpiled one million litres of flammable and toxic chemicals. Almost two years since the situation came to ...
It’s amazing just how many attack ads $100,000 buys you these days. The National Party has really been going to town lately, with their latest Twitter campaign making a number of questionable and blatantly false assertions, one being that poverty has worsened under the Labour led Government.The National Party's claim ...
OMV's exploratory drilling in the Great South Basin has failed to find oil. Good. Firstly, because we can't afford to burn the oil and gas we've already found, so there's just no point looking for more. And secondly, because offshore, deep-water drilling poses a risk of an environmental catastrophe, which ...
The government has announced it will strengthen whistleblower protections. The major change is "allowing people to report serious wrongdoing direct to an external authority if they wish", which fixes one of the big flaws in the Act. At present, whistleblowers must generally make their disclosure direct to the body they ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bruce Lieberman CARLSBAD, CA. – When it comes to paying the electric bill, most people don’t give it a second thought – it’s something that in effect is “baked in.” But across California and several other states, local governments increasingly are ...
Excerpts from Being and Being Bought, by Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Spinifex Press, 2013. Part 4 Ekman, a Swedish journalist and critic, brings together a Marxist and feminist analysis of prostitution and surrogacy in this groundbreaking book. This is the fourth part of a synopsis and brief commentary of the book by Daphna ...
The Democracy Virus: China’s authoritarian political system enables a level of social surveillance and control that liberal democratic societies cannot match. The Chinese Government makes full use of the latest digital technology to both punish – and reward – its citizens. The plans it formulates cannot be challenged, or hindered. Where ...
Another day, another IPCA report on criminal conduct by policy. This time they kicked a child in the head when he was handcuffed:Police chased him and yelled out for him to stop. When he turned to face the police, he threatened them with a hammer. That's when the officers tasered ...
The investigation of two of the five parties in Parliament for fraud around their election donations has pushed the issue of party funding back into the spotlight. And while there are obvious things we can do to tighten up the donations regime - a much lower declaration threshold, realtime disclosure ...
While the south of New Zealand has been struggling with too much rain in recent days, here in the north we are so very short of it (though Saturday’s forecast looks promising). Basically, we have had almost none since Christmas.As someone who relies on rain to wash the car, ...
Former National Party MP Jami-Lee RossIt comes as no surprise that Jami-Lee Ross has been named as one of the defendants in the X2 $100,000 National Party donations case currently before the courts. Click bait journalists who were chaffing at the bit to discredit the former senior whip had already ...
Stand Clear! Winston Peters is encouraging voters to think of RNZ as belonging to “The Media Party”. He wants them to see it as a politically partisan institution with its own, vicious attack-dogs in the electoral fight. If he succeeds, it will be, and probably should be, the end of ...
"You're going to need a longer runway" Gratton et al explore the ongoing effects of upward-creeping temperatures on aviation in Greece in the period since 1955 at a range of airports in that country. For longer runways impacts are measurable but with little impact on operations. For airports with shorter runways, ...
In mid-December the Israeli secret police, the Shin Beit, revealed it had arrested dozens of Palestinian left-wing activists, including members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), in the previous few months. Among those arrested was one of the central leaders of the PFLP, Khalida Jarrar. As ...
Former National Party chief whip Jami-Lee Ross is one of the four people charged over National's multiple fraudulent donations. How unsurprising. Meanwhile, just days ago National leader Simon Bridges was trying to pretend the charges were nothing to do with his party. Yeah, right. When your chief whip effectively publicly ...
If you've been watching FYI for a while, you'll have noticed that the police have a bad habit of demanding ID from requesters. They have apparently been repeatedly told to stop doing this by the Ombudsman, but we all know what law enforcement thinks of the law, so thye keep ...
Collateral Damage: For the Green Phoenix to be reborn, the funeral pyre so patiently assembled by its identity politicians over the course of many fractious years – but with growing intensity over the past three – first has to be ignited. The terrible probability, of course, is that, in setting ...
If you follow politics in New Zealand you've likely noticed that the right wing have been going on and on about the Coalition Government failing to reduce poverty. In fact they’ve been incessantly claiming, in the absence of any conclusive data, that poverty has been getting worse.Yesterday, NewstalkZB reported:Mike Hosking: ...
The Herald reported over the weekend that an Auckland business owner is being targeted with asset forfeiture laws over a workplace death:A workplace fatality has seen police use a law usually associated with drugs and organised crime to seize millions of dollars in assets from a business owner because of ...
Just days after talking about how people feel "squeezed" and promising tax and service cuts as a "solution", National is talking about cancelling a rise in the minimum wage if elected: National is considering scrapping the Government's planned minimum wage increase if it wins this year's election, the party's finance ...
Nobody thinks about the next century anymore. That at least is Sci-Fi writer William Gibson’s observation (in this BBC 4 short interview, starting at 1:43:50 ). He calls it “Futures Fatigue”, but isn’t judgemental about it. Gibson notes that in the 20th century speculation about the 21st (and beyond) was common. Now ...
A Labour government desperate for the numbers crawls into bed with Winston Peters. Winston ignores the law and secretly takes money under the table from someone. When it is exposed just months out from an election, he is investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. That's what happened back in 2008. ...
So the Serious Fraud Office has another secret $100,050 National Party donation before the Courts in a major scandal that looks set to quash any chances Simon Bridges had of winning the 2020 election.Yesterday, Newsroom reported:The Serious Fraud Office prosecution of four people over donations to the National Party involves ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... Story of the Week... Iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., breaks off Pine Island glacier in Antarctica Story Highlights: The Pine Island ...
Prof Philippa Howden-ChapmanHousing policy is building up to be the key election issue again. In this blog I reflect on the importance of the role of the New Zealand Government in improving access to affordable housing. I look at what the Government has been doing to increase quality public housing ...
Writing on The Spinoff, Danyl Mclauchlan argues that we have a vacuum in our political system, in that there is no longer an anti-establishment party anymore:I think there’s a vacuum in our political system. There are obvious problems with the status quo but no real critics offering reform. It’s a ...
Stuff today has a piece about the government discovering it has been oversubsidising polluters for a decade under the Emissions Trading scheme:The Government is pledging to urgently fix an issue within the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), after it emerged some polluters are likely being over-compensated with taxpayer-funded carbon credits. [...] ...
The Marlborough District Council, tired of public scrutiny, wants to increase the amount it charges for LGOIMA requests:The cost of requesting official information from Marlborough's government agency could almost double after a jump in "fishing expeditions". Charges could be raised from $60 to $100 an hour for information supplied by ...
When Winston Peters was caught money laundering donations and stalking journalists, the Greens were conspicuous by their silence. It was another example of how getting along with their government partners was eroding their values and their own reputation. It was obviously unsustainable, and so now James Shaw has finally spoken ...
I am among the most pro-free speech people I know. I don’t doubt there are others more strident than me, but I’m certainly up there. And my support for freedom of expression isn’t limited to opposition to government-imposed restrictions. It extends to a belief that employers should have limited powers ...
With over 69,000 confirmed cases and 1,600 deaths, here’s your round-up of the latest coronavirus news. New disease and virus have now officially been named On the 11th February, the WHO Director General announced a new name for the disease: COVID-19 which is short for coronavirus disease 2019. The naming ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Feb 9, 2020 through Sat, Feb 15, 2020 Editor's Pick ANALYSIS-Climate change opens up 'frontier' farmland, but at what cost to the planet?Climate change could expand farmland globally by ...
After cross-examination Jones knew he would lose the defamation case he took against film maker Renae Maihi. That’s why he threw in the towel. The weight of evidence was clearly against the old tycoon with the defense presenting fifty articles to confirm Jones’ racist views.Being unable to harass somebody into ...
Sprung! Former NZ First president, Lester Gray, chats with RNZ's Guyon Espiner in the carpark of a Tauranga shopping centre.(Photo supplied anonymously to NZ First and The BFD.)IT’S CLEAR THAT an important aspect of Jacinda Ardern’s political success is her willingness to seek – and take – advice. This ...
Ruth Cunningham, Charlotte Paul, Andrew MoorePublic health responses to infectious diseases such as COVID-19 require us to draw on our common humanity and be explicit about our values. Recognising this will help us make good decisions in difficult situations so that, for example, the need to impose restrictive measures ...
The Helen Clark Foundation has released its report on the housing crisis, and found that house-hoarders are to blame for it:Property investors are to blame for New Zealand's high house prices, a new research paper published by the Helen Clark Foundation says. [...] McArthur said previous attempts to address housing ...
The Abortion Legislation Committee has reported back on the Abortion Legislation Bill and recommended that it be passed with some amendments. Unfortunately, the latter include even more hoops to jump through for those seeking abortions after 20 weeks, including a time-wasting requirement to consult a second doctor. No-one casually seeks ...
Brexit is likely to be a disaster for the UK (how sad, never mind). But now that they're out of the EU, the latter has finaly taken the opportunity to blacklist one of their key tax havens:The Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory, is to be put on an EU ...
I’m not quite sure of what to make of the new figures for COVID-19 (as we must now call the novel coronavirus – though I’m not sure the capitalisation is correct) from Hubei province:Image from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51495484The spike yesterday is a consequence of a using a different way of ...
Bob Jones has dropped his defamation case against Renae Maihi. Good. But at the same time, it perfectly exposes what the case was all about: not protecting Jones' reputation, but punishing someone who had dared to criticise him, and deterring others from doing the same. This rich pompous asshat dragged ...
As I've done for the past few years, I'm curating and presenting The Listening Lounge, the talk programme at Splore. On the morning of Saturday the 22nd at the Living Lounge stage, the korero goes like this.Yes, we're talking about drugs again, not just because I'm professionally interested in drug ...
What Were They Thinking? RNZ's CEO Paul Thompson (left) and Jim Mather, Chairman of the RNZ Board of Governors, attempt to justify the debacle arising out of their attempt to downgrade RNZ Concert to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Select Committee at Parliament on Thursday, 13 February 2020.WHAT IS ...
Dame Tariana Turia with former PM John KeyWhat is it about Tariana Turia’s grudge against the Labour Party? Not content with attacking the Government over Whānau Ora funding, which was increased by $80 million in 2019, she has now made it personal by saying that Jacinda Ardern is out of her ...
Back in 2017, right after being elected, Jacinda Ardern promised that there would be no new mines on conservation land. Since then, her government has done nothing to make that happen, and now the policy has been officially "parked" for the election:West Coast-Tasman MP Damien O'Connor says the "no new ...
So the guy who advocated for public burning and beheading feels offended because someone called him a racist!Perhaps Bob Jones hasn't heard of the very old saying; Live by the sword, die by the sword?I mean for someone who often writes opinionated nonsense about Maori; this is a ridiculous case ...
The government today announced a major support package aimed at reducing homelessness. A thousand new transitional housing places, more support for people to find homes (or not lose them in the first place), all good stuff. The one problem with it is that they're going to start charging people in ...
Courtroom Drama: There is no off-switch in a courtroom. Neither is it possible to turn the page in disgust. Ill-formed and ill-defended opinions will be exposed ruthlessly and unapologetically. As Shakespeare put it: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.” Sometimes the ...
As of today, the novel coronavirus spreading in China is called COVID-19. Why does it matter? Around the office, we’ve had several conversations over the past few weeks about how 2019-nCoV needed its own name. First, it was getting annoying calling it by the above designation, and ‘novel coronavirus’ doesn’t ...
by Philip Ferguson Last month B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reported: “In 2019, Israeli security forces killed 133 Palestinians, including 28 minors. Of the casualties, 104 were killed in the Gaza Strip, 26 in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and three within ...
A ballot for a single Member's Bill was held today, and the following bill was drawn: Arms (Firearms Prohibition Orders) Amendment Bill (No 2) (Brett Hudson)Its basicly more "tough on crime" nonsense (its already illegal for unlicensed people to own guns) designed to wedge NZ First against its arsehole base. ...
In 2015 the world agreed to the Paris Agreement to fight climate change. Each country would offer a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) "that it intends to achieve", and "pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving [it]". And every five years, they'd improve on it, ratcheting up ambition until ...
In theory, the emissions trading scheme should reduce emissions. Making polluters pay for permits to pollute lets them save money by reducing pollution, giving them a financial incentive to do the right thing. But right from the start the ETS was broken with a system of free allocation, so polluters ...
Irish voters went to the polls on Saturday in parliamentary elections, and perhaps delivered a political revolution. Since independence, Irish politics has been dominated by two parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Basicly patronage networks with indistinguishable policies, their cleavage isn't ideology, but who killed whose father or grandfather in ...
Once again the Aotearoa Bike Challenge is on us, and once again I’m participating. In principle this is not hard because it does not represent a significant switch in behavior for me. I already bike nearly every day. The Bicycle The fascinating thing about cycling is the realisation that this ...
Lately there has been a great deal of misinformation regarding the origins and purpose of Skeptical Science. As John Cook wrote nearly a decade ago, Skeptical Science is primarily a website that debunks climate misinformation with peer-reviewed science. Despite the ever-worsening impacts from climate change, with record after record being broken in ...
Under Attack: By sacking not only RNZ Concert’s presenters, but also its producers and librarians, and reducing the station to an automated purveyor of classical music in-between parliamentary broadcasts, RNZ’s CEO, Paul Thompson, wasn’t simply announcing an operational shake-up, he was declaring war on one of the most important guardians of ...
Story of the Week... Editorial of the Week... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Reviews... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... Australian smoke plume sets recordsThe recent wildfires in Australia sent one of ...
Fletcher Tabuteau MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development New Zealand First Deputy Leader and Spokesperson for Finance, Fletcher Tabuteau has welcomed Statistics New Zealand’s latest report as a timely reminder of the value that this Coalition Government brings to every day New Zealanders: “This Coalition Government has meant a ...
Today New Zealand First made a pledge to campaign at the election to fund St John Ambulance the 90 per cent it has asked for. Government funding would allow St. John’s to achieve fully funded status. Leader of New Zealand First, Rt Hon Winston Peters publicly declared his determination to deliver ...
Darroch Ball MP, Spokesperson for Law and Order Newly released Police data shows once again the number of fleeing drivers have continued to skyrocket with a record 512 incidents occurring in December – almost tripling the number of incidents occurring just ten years ago, says New Zealand First Law and ...
While the Provincial Growth Fund has provided $2 million to set up temporary water supplies in Kaikohe and Kaitaia, Regional Economic Minister Shane Jones said he is greatly concerned that there are “issues” in implementing the projects. The Minister said the immediate solution was to pipe water from a bore ...
Mark Patterson MP, New Zealand First List MP for Clutha-Southland NZ First is calling on Rio Tinto to accept its responsibilities to the Southland community and enable the immediate removal of the toxic Aluminium Dross from the Mataura Paper Mill site. New Zealand First List MP for Clutha-Southland, Mark Patterson ...
The Coalition Government has announced that a further $500,000 will be given to help residents in Southland and Otago to speed up recovery efforts from the floods. It follows prior government assistance of $200,000 earlier this month where the Southland Mayoral Relief Fund received $100,000 to support communities impacted by ...
Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones was on RNZ’s Morning Report talking about the recent droughts in the Northland region and what the Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) is doing to alleviate its impact. The PGF recently announced a funding of $2 million for temporary water supplies to Kaikohe and Kaitaia, ...
Speaking to The Country’s Jamie Mackay, New Zealand First MP and Cabinet Minister Shane Jones talks water storage, plant-based meat imitation, and superstar Hollywood director James Cameron. While water storage may have its critics, Minister Jones defended the scheme by saying: “unless we invest and continue to invest” in this ...
Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones is accusing northern iwi leaders of selling out Māori by voting for ideologically-driven court cases rather than practical steps to increase water supply. “I just think that iwi leaders who think that water issues are going to be solved by perpetually fighting in the ...
A dairy owner in St Kilda, Dunedin was delighted to hear that an attempted robbery of his establishment was foiled by a government-funded security system. Sean Lee was delighted at how well the anti-theft smoke system worked. When a knife-wielding man entered the store, the shop assistant immediately pressed a ...
Customs says it stopped more than three tonnes of illegal drugs coming into New Zealand last year. This includes 1,180kg of methamphetamine, 329kg of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine precursors, which could have been converted into 246kg of methamphetamine, 739kg and 6469 pills of MDMA or Ecstasy and 60kg of cocaine. Offshore, ...
Hon. Shane Jones, Minister for Regional Economic Development Up to $2 million will be allocated from the Provincial Growth Fund to set up temporary water supplies in Kaikohe and Kaitaia where drought is biting hard, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones has announced. Drought conditions in Northland have led to ...
Darroch Ball, Spokesperson for Law and Order New Zealand First welcomes the deployment of an Eagle Police helicopter in Christchurch in what is a step towards fulfilling its long-standing goal to increase the use of police helicopters for the front line, particularly in addressing the scourge of fleeing drivers. Christchurch leads ...
It may have been the first sitting week of 2020, but our Government is already in full-swing - managing a strong economy, investing in infrastructure, and working to break the cycle of homelessness. Read below for all that, and more... ...
In a heated debate in Parliament, National's Deputy Leader Paula Bennett claimed that “nearly 1600 patched gang members have been added” since the Coalition Government took power. To illustrate her point, she altered a chart used by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to show her government’s progress in housing to instead ...
Speech by the Rt Hon Winston Peters at Parliament’s Opening 2020 "We all need insurance" This year New Zealanders are going to have a clear choice to make That choice is between: Optimism versus pessimism; More progress versus back to the future; Investment versus divestment; Unity versus division. New Zealand ...
Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones has slammed the Board of Auckland Airport following the airport's runway closing twice within two weeks due to maintenance. Around 2,000 passengers were affected by last week’s runway closures, according to 1NEWS. Another maintenance closure on January 24 saw two international flights and three domestic flights ...
Jenny Marcroft, Spokesperson for Broadcasting New Zealand First supports the commissioning of a business case to assess the viability of a new public media entity. “A strong media environment is critical for a healthy democracy. New Zealand First is a strong supporter of a diverse, independent media,” New Zealand First broadcasting spokesperson ...
Pounamou and technology industries in the West Coast region are set to receive more than $2 million in Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) funding. This was announced by the Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau during Waitangi Day commemorations in Hokitika. He said $800,000 would be given to Development West ...
Clayton Mitchell MP, New Zealand First spokesperson for Labour and Industrial Relations Unemployment and wage growth numbers released by Stats NZ today demonstrate a labour market in good shape with unemployment falling to 4.0%, the underutilisation rate falling to an 11 year low, and wage growth at a 10-year high ...
Hon. Ron Mark, New Zealand First Spokesperson for Defence New Zealand First Spokesperson for Defence Ron Mark, welcomes the official opening of Te Rau Aroha, a new museum at Waitangi Treaty Grounds as part of our Coalition Agreement. “It is a great honour to be part of an effective Government ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime MinisterGood morning,Let us start with important acknowledgements.First, this special day, in remembrance of the 28th Maori Battalion, is also to honour all those men and women who have risked their lives in the service of our country.Second, special guest Robert ...
Benefit settings rise in line with wages as of 1 April Main benefits will increase by over 3 percent, instead of 1.66 percent, on 1 April with the Government’s decision to annually adjust benefit rates to increases in the average wage. The Minister for Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni, said ...
Strengthening New Zealand’s political and business ties with India will be the focus of Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters’ and Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker’s visit to India this week. The Ministers are co-leading a high level business delegation to India to support increased people and economic engagement ...
The Minister for Pacific Peoples, Aupito William Sio continues to champion for greater Pacific participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers with the announcement of the Toloa Awards, with 8 recipients of the Toloa Community Fund and 13 Toloa Tertiary Scholarships. “The Toloa Programme encourages more Pacific peoples ...
Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage has extended the date for people to have their say on proposed changes to improve management of whitebait across New Zealand. Submissions were due to close on 2 March 2020 but will now remain open until 9am on Monday 16 March 2020. “I have ...
The endangered toroa/Antipodean albatross has new international protection for its 100,000km annual migration, thanks to collaborative efforts led by New Zealand, Australia and Chile. Today, 130 countries agreed to strictly protect Antipodean albatross at the Conference of Parties on the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild ...
No sales to under-18-year-olds No advertising and sponsorship of vaping products and e-cigarettes No vaping or smokeless tobacco in smokefree areas Regulates vaping product safety comprehensively, - including devices, flavours and ingredients Ensure vaping products are available for those who want to quit smoking Vaping regulation that balances ...
Justice Minister Andrew Little will travel to Berlin tomorrow to represent New Zealand at a high-level summit on nuclear disarmament. This year, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) celebrates 50 years since it entered into force. “New Zealand’s proud record and leadership on nuclear disarmament is unwavering, so it’s important we are present ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will visit two of New Zealand’s most important Pacific partners, Fiji and Australia, next week. The visit to Fiji will be the first by a New Zealand Prime Minister in four years and comes during the 50th anniversary of Fijian independence and diplomatic relations between our ...
Justice Minister Andrew Little and New Zealand First MP Darroch Ball, have today announced the appointment of the Chief Commissioner of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the location, and the membership of the Establishment Advisory Group. Colin Carruthers QC has been appointed Chief Commissioner of the CCRC for an ...
Māori Development Minister Hon Nanaia Mahuta and Agriculture Minister Hon Damien O’Connor co-announced the first horticultural finalists for the Ahuwhenua Trophy celebrating excellence in the Māori agricultural sector. The three finalists are Ngai Tukairangi Trust from Mt Maunganui, Otama Marere Trust from Tauranga, and Hineora Orchard Te Kaha 15B Ahuwhenua ...
A new kete of resources to strengthen support for students with dyslexia will provide extra tools for the new Learning Support Coordinators (LSCs) as they start in schools, Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin announced today. The Minister launched the kete in Wellington this morning, at the first of three induction ...
The Government continues to make progress on a fairer and more secure rental market for renters and landlords with the First Reading of the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill and its referral to the Social Services and Community Select Committee. “Now is the opportunity for landlords, tenants and others who want ...
Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister Hon James Marape will visit New Zealand from 21-25 February, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced today. “New Zealand and Papua New Guinea have a warm and friendly relationship. I look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Marape here and strengthening the relationship between our two countries,” ...
Thousands of children have begun receiving a free lunch on every day of the school week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. The Government’s free and healthy school lunch programme is under way for 7,000 students at 31 schools in Hawke’s Bay / Tairāwhiti and Bay of Plenty / Waiariki, extending ...
The Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni today announced a new approach that continues to broaden the Government’s social sector focus from a narrow, investment approach to one centred on people and wellbeing. Minister Sepuloni said redefining the previous approach to social investment by combining science, data and lived experience ...
The Government is strengthening the Protected Disclosures Act to provide better protection for whistle blowers, Minister of State Services Chris Hipkins said today. “The Protected Disclosures Act is meant to encourage people to speak up about serious wrongdoing in the workplace and protect them from losing their jobs or being ...
Nǐn hǎo (Hello in Mandarin). Xīn Nián Kuài Lè (Happy New Year in Mandarin) Néi Hóu (Hello in Cantonese). Sun Nin Fai Lok (Happy New Year in Cantonese) Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Thank you for your invitation to attend this celebration today. I would like to acknowledge ...
Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa. Nau mai haere mai ki te Whare Pāremata. E ngā mana whenua ki tēnei rohe Taranaki Whānui, Te Upoko o Te Ika, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Ngāti Raukawa – kei te mihi, kei te mihi, kei te mihi. E ngā mana, e ...
Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa. Nau mai haere mai ki te Whare Pāremata. E ngā mana whenua ki tēnei rohe Taranaki Whānui, Te Upoko o Te Ika, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Ngāti Raukawa – kei te mihi, kei te mihi, kei te mihi. E ngā mana, e ngā ...
Tougher penalties for gun crime are a step closer with the passage of firearms reform legislation through another stage in Parliament. The Arms Legislation Bill has tonight passed its Second Reading. “The changes have one objective - to prevent firearms falling into the wrong hands,” said Police Minister Stuart Nash. ...
Introduction Mr Speaker We all know why we are here today. It has been a long journey. The journey did not actually begin on 15 March 2019. It began on 30 June 1997. Almost 23 years ago, Justice Sir Thomas Thorp told us what was wrong with our firearms legislation. ...
The Government’s work to put trades and vocational education back on the agenda took another major step forward today with the passing of the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Amendment Bill, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said. “This is a watershed day for trades and vocational education. These law changes formalise ...
Speeding up the return of Christchurch regeneration activities to local leadership is behind the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Amendment Bill introduced to Parliament today by Minister Megan Woods. “As we approach nine years since the February 2011 earthquake in Canterbury, and with the transition to local leadership well underway, the time ...
Hundreds of New Zealanders and international visitors will be able to get back out into nature with the Milford Track partially reopening next week, after extensive assessments and repairs, the Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage announced today. The popular Great Walk has been closed since 3 February after an extreme ...
Up to 110 new EV chargers nationwide in cities and regions 50 electric vehicles for ride-sharing The Government is helping deliver more infrastructure and options for low emissions transport through new projects, Energy and Resources Minister Dr Megan Woods says. Tauranga, Nelson, Levin, New Plymouth and Oamaru are just some ...
New Zealanders are increasingly better off under this Government as wages rise and families have more disposable income, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. Stats NZ reported today that average household disposable incomes after housing costs rose 4.9% in 2019. This was the highest rise in four years and came as ...
All New Zealanders need to have their voices heard at work to ensure we have an inclusive and productive economy. Today we introduce a Bill to do this for workers in the New Zealand screen industry, Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. “The Screen Industry Workers Bill will ...
The Government has announced further help for the Southland and Otago regions to speed up recovery efforts from the floods. “I’ve approved Enhanced Taskforce Green (ETFG), making $500,000 available to help with the clean-up in Fiordland, Southland, and the Clutha district in Otago,” Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni said. ...
Following the announcement that more than 340 schools will be funded to run events promoting vocational education, the Government has announced it will fund a further 257 events to be run by employers and industry. “These industry-run events will allow more than 30,000 students to connect with more than 2,000 ...
Today the Government is making progress on a fairer and more secure rental market for renters and landlords with the introduction of the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill in Parliament. “This Bill includes a series of reforms to improve the wellbeing of the 609,700 households that live in rented homes, and ...
A Government programme to wipe out pea weevil has achieved a world first, with Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor today announcing the successful eradication of the noxious pest from Wairarapa. This means the nearly four-year ban on pea plants and pea straw was lifted today. Commercial and home gardeners can again grow ...
Southland residents hit by flooding caused by heavy rainfall can now access help finding temporary accommodation with the Government activating the Temporary Accommodation Service, Minister of Civil Defence Peeni Henare announced today. “The Temporary Accommodation Service (TAS) has been activated by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to help ...
“Is that it?” That’s Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s response to Simon Bridges’ much-hyped economic speech today. “Simon Bridges just gave the most over-hyped and under-delivered speech that I can remember during my time in politics,” Grant Robertson said. “It’s not surprising. Simon Bridges literally said on the radio this morning ...
A trial deployment of the Police Eagle helicopter in Christchurch will test whether the aircraft would make a significant difference to crime prevention and community safety. “The Bell 429 helicopter will be based in Christchurch for five weeks, from 17 February to 20 March,” said Police Minister Stuart Nash. “The ...
The Government has kept up the pace of its work to promote New Zealand’s trade interests and diversify our export markets, with visits to Fiji and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker. Building momentum to bring the PACER Plus trade and development agreement ...
The Coalition Government’s investment in a strong border and disrupting transnational organised crime produced record results for stopping drugs in 2019, says Minister of Customs Jenny Salesa. The illegal drugs were seized at the New Zealand border by Customs, and overseas by Customs’ international border partners before the drugs could ...
Transport Minister Phil Twyford today kicked off construction of a separated cycleway alongside Tamaki Drive. A two-way separated cycleway will be built along the northern side of Tamaki Drive, between the Quay Street Cycleway extension and Ngapipi Road. There will be a separate walking path alongside. Phil Twyford said giving ...
Owner-occupiers of unit and apartments living in earthquake-prone buildings will have certainty about the financial support they’ll be eligible for with the release of criteria for an upcoming assistance scheme, Minister for Building and Construction Jenny Salesa says. The Residential Earthquake-Prone Building Financial Assistance Scheme will help unit owners facing ...
Temporary restrictions on travel from China will remain in place as a precautionary measure to protect against the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. The restrictions which prevent foreign nationals travelling from, or transiting through, mainland China from entering New Zealand have been extended for a further 8 days. This position ...
Employment Minister Willie Jackson announced today that Tairāwhiti rangatahi will benefit from an investment made by the Government’s He Poutama Rangatahi (HPR) scheme. The funding will go to the Tautua Village, Kauneke programme and the Matapuna Supported Employment Programme which will fund 120 rangatahi over two years. “Both programmes work ...
By Vasinatta Yama in Mt Hagen Eight prisoners at the Baisu Correctional Service prison near the Western Highlands provincial capital of Mt Hagen are dead following a massive jail breakout. Western Highlands Acting Provincial Police Commander David Kongui confirmed that two prisoners have surrendered, while an unknown number of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra A foreign intelligence service sent a “sleeper” agent to Australia, who provided logistical support for visiting spies, the head of ASIO, Mike Burgess, has revealed, in a speech pledging to intensify the fight against the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Apart from committing a crime, what do you have to do or say to be stripped of your order of Australia award? Where “a line” should be drawn is the question the Council for the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Stewart, Doctoral Candidate at BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University In the wake of last week’s horrific murder of a woman and her three children in Brisbane at the hands of her estranged partner, Social Services Minister Anne Ruston ...
Politicians who have appeared on Dancing with the Stars over the past 15 years say the publicity could backfire for would-be politician Hannah Tamaki if she puts on her dancing shoes. ...
Marlin’s Dreaming have a new single out ahead of their next, ‘least accessible’ album. Frontman Semisi Maiai sat down to talk about how a bunch of jocks from Dunedin became indie darlings.Semisi Maiai embodies the duality of man. He’s a barista and a basketballer; he’s a jock and an indie ...
Pacific Media Watch A University of Waikato researcher says some of the current colonial representations of climate change in the Pacific are obscuring Pacific voices and failing to recognise the importance of Indigenous knowledge in the fight against the changing climate. Dr Jessica Pasisi’s thesis, Niue Women’s Perspective and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne Bernie Sanders has easily won the Nevada Democratic caucus, cementing his status as front-runner for the Democratic nomination in the US presidential election. With 88% of precincts reporting, Sanders won ...
An announcement that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) will be based in Hamilton makes “perfect sense” given the city’s location and strong transport links says Hamilton Mayor Paula Southgate. On Friday Justice Minister Andrew Little ...
Steel & Tube has recorded a large half-year loss, in line with forecasts, mostly because of a $37 million write-down in asset values. For the six months ended December the steel manufacturing company made a $36.9m loss. Chief executive Mark Malpass said the company expected an improved second half. "While ...
The Tiwai Point aluminium smelter has slumped to a large loss because of volatile prices and power costs. Pacific Aluminium, controlled by Rio Tinto, made a loss of $313 million for the year ended December compared with the previous year's profit of $207m. However, the underlying loss fell to $46m ...
The Government has extended its ban on travel from China by another eight days until early March, but may provide an exemption for international students, while the Treasury is considering global recession scenarios. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced Cabinet decided on Monday afternoon to extend its ban on travel ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland Australia’s catastrophic bushfire season has done immense damage to Australia’s tourist industry. Then, just as heavy rain began to bring the situation under control, came the coronavirus outbreak in China – now ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Hole, Senior Research Fellow, Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University Recent reports from scientists pursuing a new kind of nuclear fusion technology are encouraging, but we are still some distance away from the “holy grail of clean energy”. The technology developed ...
First the broadcaster was caught up in an online swindle using Facebook – now it’s the other media giant.“Hosking’s Latest Investment”, went the headline on the Google-served advertisement, complete with a photograph of the award-winning broadcaster, placed on a New Zealand news site. “New Zealand’s citizens are already raking in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University Opposition leader Anthony Albanese’s announcement on Friday that a Labor government would adopt a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 was a big step in the right direction. But a bit of simple maths reveals ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Gurrieri, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University Under Australia’s harsh sun, we’ve long slapped on sunscreen to protect ourselves from skin damage and cancer. Now the product, once known for protecting skin against harmful UV rays, is becoming part of beauty ...
Get data at the national level, by regional council area, territorial authority / Auckland local board area, statistical area 2 (SA2), and district health board area. Tables contain 2018, 2013, and 2006 Census data. Access data in NZ.Stat Use ...
Northland's biggest trucking operator has accused the Transport Agency of letting an employee wage a personal vendetta against him that's cost him millions of dollars. Stan Semenoff says the employee went after his scalp, but he's defeated the Agency and shown that it had no safety case to begin with. ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s contentPolitical donations scandals John Armstrong (TVNZ): Jacinda Ardern’s refusal to reprimand Winston Peters is nothing short of disgraceful Luke ...
Keep New Zealand Beautiful partners with Waste Management New Zealand to send educational book to New Zealand schools New Zealand not-for-profit organisation, Keep New Zealand Beautiful, has teamed up with Waste Management to distribute an educational storybook ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paxton Loke, Paediatric Allergist and Immunologist, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Some children grow out of their food allergies, but researchers don’t exactly know why. Here’s how to work with your allergy specialist if you suspect your child isn’t allergic any more. Read ...
The Māori Party candidate for Waiariki - Rawiri Waititi - believes the younger generation will be the key to the party getting back into Parliament this year. ...
The Sustainable New Zealand Party is struggling to demonstrate it has enough political sustainability to last until the election campaign heats up later this year. Within just a few months media attention has turned from its founding to its foundering. The New Zealand Herald seems not to have caught up ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling You’ve heard of dark matter. You’ve probably heard there’s a fair bit of it out there in space, and that astronomers don’t know for sure what it is. But, strange as dark matter is, there’s an ...
When NZME reports its annual results on Tuesday, attention will focus on its mooted purchase of rival Stuff Ltd and the revenue its paywalled nzherald.co.nz site has brought in ...
After 43 years on the telly, Fair Go knows exactly how to stick up for Kiwi consumers. Tara Ward talks to Sophie Baird, the woman changing New Zealand, one consumer complaint at a time. For over four decades, Fair Go has been our saviour. They’ve defended us when we’ve been ripped ...
ANALYSIS:By Asmiati Malik in Jakarta The Indonesian government plans to evaluate the efficacy of special funds for the West Papua region. These funds have been disbursed to the easternmost region, comprising the two provinces of Papua and West Papua, for nearly two decades. The funds, paid since 2002 to ...
Last week Nick Loosley, founder of food waste and food poverty charity Everybody Eats, was named the 2020 Kiwibank New Zealand Local Hero of the Year. He talked to Alex Braae about how a more sustainable approach to our food system can help feed those in need. There’s a theme of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natalie Skead, Professor, Dean of Law School, University of Western Australia In 2017, a business lecturer posted a photo on LinkedIn showing a completely empty university classroom, 15 minutes after the class had been scheduled to start. This is not an isolated ...
The coronavirus outbreak is set to cost Air New Zealand as much as $75 million, as it moved to cut more flights to lessen the impact. The airline has issued a revised forecast for its full year earnings, cutting its estimate of operating earnings by between $35m to $75m to ...
New Zealand's steps to shield itself from the Covid-19 coronavirus will not save the economy from feeling its effects. Hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be shaved off the value of the economy for the first quarter, with estimates currently between 0.3 and 0.6 percentage points less than ...
By Evaristo Soares Martins in Dili Early elections cannot be allowed to “become the political culture” in Timor-Leste, says the leader of the opposition Fretilin party, Dr Marí Alkatiri. The former Prime Minister said he wants to see an end to the political impasse, prompted by the collapse of ...
By Sharlyne Eri in Lae A Papua New Guinean man who once resorted to crime to make a living is now running a bicycle repair business. Collin Kunan is a long-time resident of West Taraka, one of Lae’s urban settlements where petty crime is rife because of high unemployment. ...
Jamie’s away with the lads, Claire’s elbow deep in a dead man’s abdomen, and Roger wants to go back to the future. Tara Ward recaps episode two of season five of Outlander.Well, my thirstly little Outlander cherubs, that was something else, wasn’t it? It’s been many a moon since I watched ...
Opposition leader Simon Bridges says a National government will look at amending the law to allow Australians convicted of serious crimes in New Zealand to be deported. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carlo Perrotta, Senior lecturer, Monash University The spread of the coronavirus disease known as COVID-19 is a public health emergency with economic and social ramifications in China and across the world. While the impacts on business are well documented, education is also ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Holly Cullen, Adjunct professor, University of Western Australia The extradition hearing to decide whether to send Julian Assange to the United States to be tried for publishing classified military documents on Wikileaks is expected to finally begin today in London. Assange is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bernadette McSherry, Foundation Director, Melbourne Social Equity Institute, University of Melbourne In 2018, the Victorian Ombudsman, Deborah Glass, delivered a report about “the saddest case” she had ever seen. A 39-year-old woman with a developmental disorder had been locked in her prison ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick O’Connor, Associate Professor, University of Adelaide Among the vast number of native species damaged by the recent bushfire crisis, we must not forget native pollinators. These animals, mainly insects such as native bees, help sustain ecosystems by pollinating native plants. Native ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natalie Skead, Professor, Dean of Law School, University of Western Australia In 2017, a business lecturer posted a photo on LinkedIn showing a completely empty university classroom, 15 minutes after the class had been scheduled to start. This is not an isolated ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neil G Sipe, Adjunct Researcher in Transport and Planning, The University of Queensland Over the past decade almost US$200 billion has been invested globally in mobility technology that promises to improve our ability to get around. More than US$33 billion was invested ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Dodd, Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne In a recent ruling the Australian Press Council has given a signal to gossip magazines it is OK to make up and publish rubbish about people, so long as the ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern anticipates cabinet ministers will decide to extend the ban on foreign travellers arriving from mainland China which is due to expire tonight. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The transformation of the national electricity market has “progressed at a remarkable pace and scale” over the last year as it moves towards renewables, but security is a critical issue, according to the Energy Security ...
The Labour Party has selected Kerrin Leoni as their candidate for the electorate of Waikato. In a confirmation meeting held in Ngaruawahia on 23rd February, Ms Leoni, 39, was nominated unopposed as the electorate candidate, with the electorate covering ...
RNZ Checkpoint last week reported that the rodeo industry has killed two animals during the current rodeo season. Information recently obtained by animal rights organisation SAFE reveals two bulls were killed at ‘Mad Bull’ rodeo events in November and ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern anticipates cabinet ministers will decide to extend the ban on foreign travellers arriving from mainland China - which is due to expire tonight. ...
Climate change will be a hot topic in Jacinda Ardern's meeting with the Fijian PM this week, but an elephant in the room for her talk with the Australian PM. ...
In today’s edition: plant-based diets add a new item to the rural-urban tension menu, Genesis plans NZ’s biggest solar farm and a major regulatory push on vaping.The Sunday Star-Timesdevoted its whole cover to a dramatic image under the headline ‘Is meat for the chop?’, while inside a Colmar ...
What’s the economic impact of draining a wetland, or depleting soil health? An economist is looking at the value of some of the mostly unseen ecological services nature performs. A lot of what occupies economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta’s mind is invisible processes. While environmentalists fighting for wetland protection, or ...
Coronavirus has created new economic uncertainties in China and beyond. There is no doubt the short-term impact on New Zealand’s businesses will be severe, but how exactly is difficult to foresee. The outlook for global trade already looks grim compared to our expectations late last year. CNN reported that Maersk, ...
Belinda Muller has managed major Kiwi sports teams in three different codes – netball, rugby and, now, cricket. The only difference, she's found, is the size of their balls. It was supposed to last just three days. A bit of a paperwork at a netball centre, to help out a ...
The Children’s Commissioner responds to a UN committee's decision about the torture of children at Lake Alice. David Williams reports Pressure is building on a police review of their file into Lake Alice psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks. The review was prompted by a landmark decision by the United Nations Committee against ...
ReadingRoom is devoting all week to the best-selling book in New Zealand right now, In The Clearing, the brilliant new thriller by Kiwi author JP Pomare, inspired by creepy Australian cult The Family. Today: The creepy opening chapter.— Amy’s journal — Here are two things I learnt today: 1. ...
Back to university today? Beware the flashy voluntourism brochures promising a chance to save the world, writes AUT lecturer Daniel Crouch.It was my first day as a lecturer, February 2018, and I was feeling pretty nervous as students filed in. Just before the nine o’clock start, a young woman approached ...
The rise of litigation funding in New Zealand puts politicians and business leaders on notice – their actions will now be policed by a powerful new sheriff, writes Chris Lee.In business, as in life, there may be a range of thought processes that quell the temptation to cheat. One would ...
Aucklanders are breaking records for water usage - at the same time as the city breaks records for days without rain. How secure is the city's future water supply if these droughts continue? Auckland's water use has gone through the roof this summer, breaking records of 560 million litres per ...
News broke today that Hannah Tamaki has been cast for the upcoming season of Dancing with the Stars. Emily Writes explains why the religious leader and aspirant politician has no place on the show.In an exceptionally sad display of desperation, MediaWorks appears to have booked Hannah Tamaki, known for her ...
Political parties must, this election year, pledge to press forward with a massive build of “social” homes to tackle New Zealand’s human rights crisis in housing, a move that will also help reduce inequality, Peter Malcolm, spokesperson for the ...
Details of the Government's newly-announced vaping crackdown may keep New Zealanders smoking and paying exorbitant excise taxes, says the New Zealand Taxpayers' Union. Taxpayers' Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says, "We welcome the decision not ...
News that the Government is set to regulate vaping is welcomed. However, heavily restricting where most vape flavours can be sold is a step too far and could lead to rising smoking rates, says the Vaping Trade Association of New Zealand (VTANZ). ...
Open Mike 18/01/2018 
Surprisingly enough, one could argue (as I often do) that the day inserted into a leap year is not that we label 29th February, but actually the 24th of February. Here I explain why, briefly. Almost everyone assumes that the day added into February in a leap year is the ...7 hours ago
If you haven’t watched Newsroom’s video showing Oranga Tamariki staff attempting to uplift a newborn baby yet you should do so. Although it's not the worst case as far as interventions go, it’s certainly not a good look for the Government. Because of this controversy there’s been a plethora of ...15 hours ago
Genesis Energy is planning to build the country's biggest PV solar farm:Power generator and retailer Genesis Energy says it is in advanced discussions to build New Zealand's biggest solar farm in northern Waikato. The company, which earlier reported a 15 per cent decline in operating earnings to $167.2 million, said ...16 hours ago
High Risk Call: Insensitive though it may seem to even pose the question: how will the electorate respond to what the Prime Minister’s opponents will undoubtedly characterise as an attack on New Zealanders’ freedom of speech? At more than twelve month’s remove from the terrible events of 15 March 2019, ...18 hours ago
Story of the Week... Opinion of the Week... El Niño/La Niña Update... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... Climate change leads to more violence against women, girls Rape, domestic violence, forced marriages: A new ...21 hours ago
Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article ‘The Dangerous Denial of Sex by two scientists Colin Wright and Emma Hilton. Write is an evolutionary biologist at Penn State and Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester. It is well worth reading the article in full. Here ...2 days ago
I am about to mail my overseas ballot to Florida so that it can be counted in the Democratic primary on March 17. In Florida you have closed as opposed to open primaries, which means that one must declare a party preference in order to vote in a party primary. ...2 days ago
In mid-December the Israeli secret police, the Shin Beit, revealed it had arrested dozens of Palestinian left-wing activists, including members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), in the previous few months. Among those arrested was one of the central leaders of the PFLP, Khalida Jarrar. As ...5 days ago
I am among the most pro-free speech people I know. I don’t doubt there are others more strident than me, but I’m certainly up there. And my support for freedom of expression isn’t limited to opposition to government-imposed restrictions. It extends to a belief that employers should have limited powers ...1 week ago
Fletcher Tabuteau MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development New Zealand First Deputy Leader and Spokesperson for Finance, Fletcher Tabuteau has welcomed Statistics New Zealand’s latest report as a timely reminder of the value that this Coalition Government brings to every day New Zealanders: “This Coalition Government has meant a ...16 hours ago
We're taking action on child poverty, getting Kiwis into the trades, and more ...2 days ago
Benefit settings rise in line with wages as of 1 April Main benefits will increase by over 3 percent, instead of 1.66 percent, on 1 April with the Government’s decision to annually adjust benefit rates to increases in the average wage. The Minister for Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni, said ...13 hours ago
By Vasinatta Yama in Mt Hagen Eight prisoners at the Baisu Correctional Service prison near the Western Highlands provincial capital of Mt Hagen are dead following a massive jail breakout. Western Highlands Acting Provincial Police Commander David Kongui confirmed that two prisoners have surrendered, while an unknown number of ...2 hours ago
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is brushing off pressure from National to take a tougher stance on deporting Australian criminals. ...8 hours ago
What weakened the "West" and led to today's restless world? ...9 hours ago
The Government tells Wellington city council they should tread carefully before bucking a national trend on water ...9 hours ago
Marlin’s Dreaming have a new single out ahead of their next, ‘least accessible’ album. Frontman Semisi Maiai sat down to talk about how a bunch of jocks from Dunedin became indie darlings.Semisi Maiai embodies the duality of man. He’s a barista and a basketballer; he’s a jock and an indie ...10 hours ago
Without the feebate scheme - which was mildly ambitious at best - the Government has virtually no policy on cutting transport emissions. ...11 hours ago
An announcement that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) will be based in Hamilton makes “perfect sense” given the city’s location and strong transport links says Hamilton Mayor Paula Southgate. On Friday Justice Minister Andrew Little ...12 hours ago
Steel & Tube has recorded a large half-year loss, in line with forecasts, mostly because of a $37 million write-down in asset values. For the six months ended December the steel manufacturing company made a $36.9m loss. Chief executive Mark Malpass said the company expected an improved second half. "While ...12 hours ago
The Tiwai Point aluminium smelter has slumped to a large loss because of volatile prices and power costs. Pacific Aluminium, controlled by Rio Tinto, made a loss of $313 million for the year ended December compared with the previous year's profit of $207m. However, the underlying loss fell to $46m ...12 hours ago
The Government has extended its ban on travel from China by another eight days until early March, but may provide an exemption for international students, while the Treasury is considering global recession scenarios. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced Cabinet decided on Monday afternoon to extend its ban on travel ...12 hours ago
Immigration staff are stretched thin after the shutdown of their Beijing office and people on work visas could face major delays. ...13 hours ago
Two ministers are heading to India this week for a high-powered visit - but is it too little, too late? ...13 hours ago
Northland's biggest trucking operator has accused the Transport Agency of letting an employee wage a personal vendetta against him that's cost him millions of dollars. Stan Semenoff says the employee went after his scalp, but he's defeated the Agency and shown that it had no safety case to begin with. ...14 hours ago
The Sustainable New Zealand Party is struggling to demonstrate it has enough political sustainability to last until the election campaign heats up later this year. Within just a few months media attention has turned from its founding to its foundering. The New Zealand Herald seems not to have caught up ...15 hours ago
The coronavirus outbreak is set to cost Air New Zealand as much as $75 million, as it moved to cut more flights to lessen the impact. ...15 hours ago
When NZME reports its annual results on Tuesday, attention will focus on its mooted purchase of rival Stuff Ltd and the revenue its paywalled nzherald.co.nz site has brought in ...16 hours ago
The coronavirus outbreak is set to cost Air New Zealand as much as $75 million, as it moved to cut more flights to lessen the impact. The airline has issued a revised forecast for its full year earnings, cutting its estimate of operating earnings by between $35m to $75m to ...18 hours ago
New Zealand's steps to shield itself from the Covid-19 coronavirus will not save the economy from feeling its effects. Hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be shaved off the value of the economy for the first quarter, with estimates currently between 0.3 and 0.6 percentage points less than ...18 hours ago
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern anticipates cabinet ministers will decide to extend the ban on foreign travellers arriving from mainland China which is due to expire tonight. ...19 hours ago
The public has sent a clear message to the Reserve Bank that people would not tolerate moves to make New Zealand a cashless society. ...19 hours ago
National won't scrap planned minimum wage hikes - Collins; and Auckland Council struggling to sell construction disruption as good news. ...20 hours ago
What’s the economic impact of draining a wetland, or depleting soil health? An economist is looking at the value of some of the mostly unseen ecological services nature performs. A lot of what occupies economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta’s mind is invisible processes. While environmentalists fighting for wetland protection, or ...23 hours ago
Coronavirus has created new economic uncertainties in China and beyond. There is no doubt the short-term impact on New Zealand’s businesses will be severe, but how exactly is difficult to foresee. The outlook for global trade already looks grim compared to our expectations late last year. CNN reported that Maersk, ...23 hours ago
Belinda Muller has managed major Kiwi sports teams in three different codes – netball, rugby and, now, cricket. The only difference, she's found, is the size of their balls. It was supposed to last just three days. A bit of a paperwork at a netball centre, to help out a ...23 hours ago
The Children’s Commissioner responds to a UN committee's decision about the torture of children at Lake Alice. David Williams reports Pressure is building on a police review of their file into Lake Alice psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks. The review was prompted by a landmark decision by the United Nations Committee against ...23 hours ago
ReadingRoom is devoting all week to the best-selling book in New Zealand right now, In The Clearing, the brilliant new thriller by Kiwi author JP Pomare, inspired by creepy Australian cult The Family. Today: The creepy opening chapter. — Amy’s journal — Here are two things I learnt today: 1. ...23 hours ago
Aucklanders are breaking records for water usage - at the same time as the city breaks records for days without rain. How secure is the city's future water supply if these droughts continue? Auckland's water use has gone through the roof this summer, breaking records of 560 million litres per ...23 hours ago
Nationwide councils have underspent on water infrastructure by billions, Wellington is one of the first to feel the fallout. ...1 day ago
Two very good posts over at Open Parachute.
The first begins –
Hear, hear Ken.
Fire and Fury.
Russiagate
…Clinton’s story…
I suppose that’s one way to pretend that Papadopoulos and Flynn’s testimony doesn’t exist.
It exists… so far it has not contained any facts relevant to the assertion of collusion
😆
Is that why they lied about meeting Russians claiming they had dirt on But But But Hillary?
Is it? …… . What do you know!
Xanthe – “so far” – an advisedly ‘safe’ while backhanded way of expressing your own confirmation bias.
You dont understand “confirmation bias”
It seems that the “very good” in your comment basically means, “confirming my viewpoint”, Bill. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of “confirmation bias” (the focus of a lot of the article’s discussion?
I thought the one commenter on the site asked a lot of pertinent questions, pointing out inconsistencies in the argument being put forward.
It’s also telling that a person writing a post entitled “Fire and Fury” has this to say about the book: “ I even have my own copy but am unsure now whether to waste time reading it. Wile the mainstream media is promoting it, more rational comments suggest the book is a disaster.” How does this guy measure what is “more rational” if he hasn’t read it?
I’m currently reading “Fire and Fury”. It’s one person’s thinking, based on extensive observations and interviews. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. It certainly isn’t the last word in Trump scholarship (in fact, it’s not a work of scholarship), but that’s hardly surprising this early in the regime. I would say that yes, there is a bias at work (the guy doesn’t like or respect Trump), but I’d also say that it’s not exactly hidden, and when he’s not sure about something he gives various possible explanations or scenarios.
I’m only halfway through the book and so far he’s not suggesting any direct collusion with the Russians – the focus is much more on the dysfunctional relationships within the administration. And whether or not you like Trump, it’s hard to argue that an admin that one year in has left so many critical positions unfilled, has fired so many close-in people and has invented positions for family members is functioning smoothly.
One last comment (a bit of a segue) – I note the author of Open Parachute is an anti-flouride campaigner. Not known for their pro-science, evidence-based approach…
[You note wrong. Very wrong. It’s not at all flash to throw a patently false accusation out there in order to undermine or discredit someone]- Bill
I think that Open Parachute person and others should make a point of stating whether they are talking about international matters or in this country. There is a lot of waffle about Trump, which is reasonable as he himself is full of waffle.
But there is a need for analysis about what is happening in NZ, and the rest of the world impinges on it. But criticising all lefties’ discussion, when the person seems to mean that which is happening about Trump, and North Korea, and Russia is a different matter to what happens on the ground here and is likely to happen in the near and medium future.
So will people please state their point of interest when they are dissing lefties?
I can’t change anything about Trump and watch with foreboding. But I may be able to influence things in NZ, and surely that is the main focus of many people here.
I think most feel in their bones and synapses all the blows to the left. Those who want to be progressives have to spend time looking at planning and testing which ways they think we should try and progress. That is of direct interest I believe to most of us here.
The rest is of interest and concern, but watching and trying to avoid stupid and toxic decisions overseas has to be balanced with the need to do so here. So please lefties with real concern about NZ social needs and climate change and business don’t take your minds away from each other, keep in touch. Please don’t think that you’ll stop taking part here in the discussion if you get annoyed, just drop in each day with something of interest, comment on one thing from someone you know is a mind worker, and then we will keep the intelligent conversation going. It will prevent TS from being affected by pollution from RW maliciousness or careless crap.
Keep putting into the clean stream of thought please, for the mental health of the people devoted to leftie ideas that are bent towards a successful, busy, fair society with the twin goals of kindness and practicality.
Well said, grey.
Open Parachute’s missive seemed more a complaint about tabloid populism in US politics and media but when has it ever been different? So someone wrote a book criticising Trump – big whoops – he invites it.
I was ignoring you earlier because you were being a leftie fundamentalist.
+100 well said Grey.
Death to careless crap.
Life to clean streams of thought.
The point that should be made is that there is a split between the right and Left of Labour and they must be brought back to heel.
I note the author of Open Parachute is an anti-flouride campaigner. Not known for their pro-science, evidence-based approach…
Flouride, pro or anti is neither ‘science’ nor ‘evidence based’ policy…
That you made ‘one last comment’ serves to show you’ve not read or understand the ‘flouride’ debate…
So you did a fart in the lift…then walked away…
Are you or have you ever been a dental professional? Obviously not. Research by all the scientists in the field have proven without a shadow of doubt that fluoride is beneficial for teeth and reduces decay by 70% at the least.
That means its a “science, evidence- based approach”. RB did not use the word “policy” so stop throwing red herrings into conversations because you think it makes you look clever.
“Research by all the scientists in the field have proven without a shadow of doubt that fluoride is beneficial for teeth and reduces decay by 70% at the least.”
Citation, please?
I recall that information from Dental lectures I attended admittedly a good many years ago now, But the information hasn’t changed. Go look the subject up Rosemary. There must be oodles of information available from the professionals in the field.
There is ‘oodles’ of information…some of which appears to contradict your “…all the scientist in the field have proven….” narrative.
Yet, today, when a community swamps a free dental service there is no mention of fluoride as a preventative to tooth decay.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?
c_id=1&objectid=11976798
Fluoride is not, and never will be, a panacea for dental health.
Who is saying Fluoride is a panacea for all ills? No-one here or elsewhere. But it does assist in the prevention of tooth decay especially among children.
Tests have proven as much. Children of the 60s, 70s and 80s who lived in areas where there was fluoridated water had a far lower incidence of tooth decay than those consuming non-fluoridated water.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/panacea
Edit: it took me 10 secs to come up with updated information:
http://www.ehinz.ac.nz/indicators/drinking-water-quality/oral-health-of-children/
Anne….much as I would love to get into this issue…I simply do not have the time right now.
Having to deal with the results of an OIA request for information from the Ministry of Health about a completely different issue under their purview.
I was sent a file of over 30 megabytes of scanned documents…much too large for me to share with other affected parties unless it is broken down into manageable portions. Which I can’t do because the file cannot be altered unless the Ministry does it.
Which they have…but still requires me to send four separate emails to 13 or so people with appropriate commentary.
AND, and, despite the monster 30 megabyte break -the -gmail file…I still haven’t got the information I requested.
Sighs. Rolls eyes.
Hopes Anne and others understand why when the Mystery of Health makes dogmatic statements regarding any issue my automatic reaction is to doubt their every word.
“…when the Mystery of Health makes dogmatic statements regarding any issue my automatic reaction is to doubt their every word.”
Don’t mistake incompetence for duplicity.
Yes, You have told us in the past about some of your experiences with the ministry and I have much sympathy for you Rosemary. I, too,
have been on the receiving end of a government ministry (not the same one as yours) whose attitude left a great deal to be desired.
So I understand your reluctance, but in the case of the fluoridation issue… most of the original research was carried out under the auspices of the WHO which, of course, is an apolitical international body whose findings can be relied upon as accurate.
knock yourself out.
The link is to a search of the moh site which yields study reviews, cost effectiveness analyses, and comparisons of decayed/missing/filled teeth in NZ schoolchildren based on their flouridated water status.
700ppm-1000ppm is optimal for tooth health.
Oh my goodness! My kids have been brought up on untreated tank water….and barely a filling between them.
OTOH….even well into their twenties, they still act really, really guilty if they’re caught with a can of fizzy.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/78269090/rotten-to-the-core–our-childrens-dental-decay-problem
Terrible parent am I…
Fluoride or no fluoride…I don’t really give a toss either way…just get the bloody message through that weaning baby onto sugary drinks is really, really irresponsible.
And there are almost certainly kids in fluoridated areas who have awful teeth, and kids in non-fluoridated areas who drink fizz all the time and have not a filling between them.
Fact is, from a population perspective fluoridation is one of the best and easiest ways to improve kids’ teeth. Pointing to the results of one individual doesn’t count against that statement, even under experimental conditions.
Anne, leaving aside the obvious and many misinformed comments in your response….
You’ve made no mention of K2 or its place in the the body’s function with tooth development and maintenance…
The ‘fluoride dental industry’ is….not what you think…that is clear from the statements you’ve made…
Oh piss off. You come across to me as a fraud suffering from some sort of Dunning Kruger disorder.
Anne…
You responded to my comment which I had posted to someone else, and when you don’t like my reply to your interruption. …you tell me to “piss off”…
That’s itrational….
You seem to believe WHO are independent and apolitical…which of course they are not…
No surprise that you think I’m a fraud…
I don’t think you’re a fraud. Dunning-Kruger is the inability to recognise your own incompetence, whereas fraud involves an element of malice.
My body is more than my teeth. If I replace rotten parts of my teeth with a mercury containing filler that is durable and seals against any further infection my teeth will be stronger.
But as is the case with mercury, fluoride is also a known poison to other parts of my body.
It has been decided that the poison effect outweighs the dental benefits for mercury and it is still an open question on the cost/benefit with regard to fluouride. Many antifluoride people are quite able to acknowledge the dental benefits of fluoride but believe that the poison effect is great enough to negate these benefits.
Everything in excess is poisonous or dangerous. Everything. Even water. Based on your hypothesis we’d all be dead in a week or so. Best to stop reading pseudo-scientific claptrap. It’s bad for you.
Exactly. Toxicologists have an expression, “The dose makes the poison”.
Everything has toxic effects at some dose, and everything has no toxic effects at another. To think of something as inherently “toxic” or “non-toxic” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Fluoridation is a fantastic public health measure IMHO.
Youre exactly right. Everything has a level of toxicity and it is the level that is the key along with the exposure time. Also people who take the dcientific approach in which I include myself dont usually feel the need to resort to abuse. As you say. The science should speak for itself
I find that 70% figure hard to believe. Where did you get that from? My cousins were brought up in and still live in a non fluoride country and all 3 of them have zero fillings even well into middle age. I think diet has much more to do with it.
Your ‘position’ seems devoid of nuance.
“Flouride, pro or anti is neither ‘science’ nor ‘evidence based’ policy…”
Is that your considered opinion? That (pro) fluoridation is neither ‘science’ nor ‘evidence-based’ policy?
As long as the city that hosts NZ’s Faculty of Dentistry (29th-best dental school in the world) continues to fluoridate its public water supply, I’ll be happy for the council that provides services for the city I live in to do so too.
Alternatively, it’s all a dental conspiracy, and fluoridation of tap water pollutes our precious bodily fluids, and actually weakens teeth ultimately channeling $$$ into the pockets of the evil dentists!
A former lecturer of mine used to say by way of an easily understood scenario:
A person would have to drink a full bath of fluoridated water in one sitting before they succumbed to any detrimental effects.
They’d also succumb to hyponatremia after the first seven-or-eight litres.
Dosage rears its fact-based head again.
You’ve misinterpreted my comment, completely…
And then you’ve posted irrelevant details…
I have misinterpreted some comments on this site, and am trying to learn. Which of your fluoride-related comments @1.2.2 did I misinterpret?
http://www.cochrane.org/CD010856/ORAL_water-fluoridation-prevent-tooth-decay
NOTE: Large extract cut/paste
Authors’ conclusions:
There is very little contemporary evidence, meeting the review’s inclusion criteria, that has evaluated the effectiveness of water fluoridation for the prevention of caries.
The available data come predominantly from studies conducted prior to 1975, and indicate that water fluoridation is effective at reducing caries levels in both deciduous and permanent dentition in children. Our confidence in the size of the effect estimates is limited by the observational nature of the study designs, the high risk of bias within the studies and, importantly, the applicability of the evidence to current lifestyles. The decision to implement a water fluoridation programme relies upon an understanding of the population’s oral health behaviour (e.g. use of fluoride toothpaste), the availability and uptake of other caries prevention strategies, their diet and consumption of tap water and the movement/migration of the population. There is insufficient evidence to determine whether water fluoridation results in a change in disparities in caries levels across SES. We did not identify any evidence, meeting the review’s inclusion criteria, to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries in adults.
There is insufficient information to determine the effect on caries levels of stopping water fluoridation programmes.
There is a significant association between dental fluorosis (of aesthetic concern or all levels of dental fluorosis) and fluoride level. The evidence is limited due to high risk of bias within the studies and substantial between-study variation.
You missed out the bit where they excluded any study that couldn’t provide a “before and after” picture, and also the bit where they said that
It’s all in the link , McFlock
Nothing was missed…you managed to find it
The outdated information speaks for itself…it’s all unreliable…
🙄
“We don’t know everything, therefore we know nothing”.
Meh. Even if we periodically de-flouridated the entire country and then refluoridated 12 years later, you’d still be unconvinced. And be pissed at nationwide experimentation.
Every single year comparisons in school kids based on fluoridation levels show a increase from fluoridated to nonfluoridated catchments.
At some stage calling the quacky waggly thing a duck is a pretty dafe assumption.
Don’t make assumptions, or crystal ball on my behalf, McFlock….
Your comment leaves the impression that FL in or FL out is the start and end of the metric for reporting….
Surely you’re not that simplistic…
If you weren’t, you might have provided links to the data captured, to which you refer…and provided some analysis on the limitations of the data…Cochrane did…
But you didn’t…
Besides empirical evidence being an alien concept for you, you confuse “studied a topic to my satisfaction” with “can be bothered writing a text book in order to improve the ‘impression’ of some internet stoner on an acid trip”.
I note the author of Open Parachute is an anti-flouride campaigner.
Is he perchance also a CC denier? Does he believe the moon landing was a fake?
Is he one of those who is convinced the Twin Towers tragedy was an inside job eg. the CIA?
If they’re one pf the above they are usually all of them. I think I will continue to bypass Open Parachute.
It should be noted that the spelling is fluoride. Flour is finely ground something usually grains.
Well-spotted, Greywarshark. A silly typo.
And we can remember this particular learning. If ever we want to upset a thread, just put something about fluoride, or perhaps 1080, vaccinations, feminists, rape culture, cats being forbidden….into it, and the cogs and wheels will start turning and all the afficianados will come out and enter the fray. And take it all away. Household hint No. 1.
If they’re one pf the above they are usually all of them.
Not a very considered position, Anne…’life’ is more nuanced than that statement of generalized ‘missive’…
It leads to opinions being formed from ignorance, which is ultimately, hypocritical thinking…
Well, since RB has got things all arse over tit (ie – Open Parachute belongs to a blogger in favour of fluoridation), I guess you’ll row back on the groundless stuff about moon landings and what not?
Or is it open season on any one who doesn’t toe a particular anti-Trump line?
And if not “moon landing, 9/11” or whatever, then does the mere fact someone doesn’t witlessly jump aboard the anti-Trump bandwagon mean they’re as well being seen as a “moon landing, 9/11” etc flake…and worthy only of opprobrium and dismissal?
I guess the answer to that query is largely “yes”.
He’s far from the only person on the left to observe “The sinking of “fellow liberals” into a quagmire of political partisanship, political conspiracy theories, confirmation bias and hateful hostility to anyone daring to present an alternative viewpoint distresses me.”
A fair few of the comments in this sub-thread serve to illustrate that “hateful hostility” he mentions. And all off the back of a mistake or a lie on the part of Red Blooded that would have taken ‘one click and two seconds’ to get to the bottom of.
From Open Parachute
Well, sorry about that… I admit that I didn’t check out the two sections of the blog devoted to fluoride (one labeled “Fluoride” and one “The Fluoride Debate”). Please note that an error isn’t the same as a lie, though, Bill. Usually when people refer to something like “the Fluoride debate” or “the climate change debate” they’re trying to suggest that there is a debate, not trying to refute it.
Perhaps you could see my comment (without having read the appropriate sections of the blog) as being akin to the blogger’s confident commentary on Fire and Fury, without having read the book.
You made a fucking accusation based on nothing, nada and zilch. And you made the accusation with the sole purpose of undermining someone.
Your attempt at some innocent moi “an error isn’t the same as a lie” bullshit is just plain sickening.
A straight up apology would have been appropriate.
“fucking” “bullshit” “sickening”, all in response to a comment that begins “Well, sorry about that…”
Thankfully, red-blooded apologised for her error; imagine the invective if she hadn’t.
Bill, it’s sometimes hard to respond to you, because it pretty much guarantees ad hominem attack and abuse. Thanks to Drowsy M. Kram, for pointing out that I did actually apologise. (Have you ever done that, I wonder?)
Perhaps you’ve noticed that I often (although not always) disagree with you. This is sometimes because of a difference in values and sometimes because I believe you’re drawing false conclusions based on limited (or misinterpreted) evidence. Even when I think you’re making a mistake, I don’t call you a liar, though, and the reason is that to be a liar, you have to be purposefully promoting something that you know to be untrue. I didn’t do that in my comment above. I’ve admitted a mistake, I’ve explained what caused it and I’ve apologised for it.
[I wrote in relation to your false accusation, and because I’m not a mind reader, that it was a mistake or a lie. You don’t get to play victim in this and also accuse me of making definitive statements I never made. Take a week off. Next Wed.] – Bill
I understand RB – I also find it difficult to communicate with Bill. Although I also often disagree with his POV, I do find his posts thought provoking but usually refrain from participating in discussion on his posts to avoid the ad hominems etc. So thanks for saying to him what I have not had the courage to say!
I also hope that you have read the last two paras of my comment at 1.2.3.3.2 below. As indicated, my suggestion to check out someone”s background was not aimed at you as much as the other people who commented more specifically on fluoridation issues in the thread below your original 1.2 comment. I note that that ‘conversation’ is still continuing. Perhaps they should read some of Ken Perrott’s research articles …
I didn’t do that in my comment above. I’ve admitted a mistake, I’ve explained what caused it and I’ve apologised for it.
That doesn’t count for much with some people. I hope we’ll see you back again later, although it would be understandable if we didn’t.
+1
It’s not like you to employ weasel words though, PM. Feet, meet eggshells 🙁
Yeah, but I got bored the last time I was banned – mud-wrestling gimps at Kiwiblog palls quickly.
There’s a general comment in Daily Review about moderation (a reminder of how it works).
But for a more specific comment here, I looked at r-b’s comments once Bill had started moderating and what I see is someone arguing about the moderation and taking up a moderator’s time. That’s me coming in and looking from the outside, with no real investment in the conversation.
For me that stuff is hugely problematic and it’s the experience of a number of authors that if you don’t put a strong boundary up then you just have to keep dealing with increasing amounts of shit over time. That’s why some of us moderate the way we do.
If you don’t like how Bill debates, then don’t get involved in those discussions. If you don’t like how he moderates, then figure out where the boundaries are in terms of respect on his terms and take your chances if you want to argue about it (hint, calling a moderator baas is likely to up the ante).
“If you don’t like how Bill debates, then don’t get involved in those discussions. If you don’t like how he moderates, then figure out where the boundaries are in terms of respect on his terms and take your chances if you want to argue about it ”
Or write to the site admin stating your reasons why you think a moderator has lost the illusion of impartiality.
[that is an option too, and that will sometimes lead to a discussion in the back end about a particular moderation, which can be useful. But to be really honest, what I’m seeing here from commenters is not ok. It’s largely disrespectful and some of it looks personal.
btw, moderation isn’t about impartiality. It’s about a number of things including protecting the site, protecting the community and protecting the authors. Needless to say if one thinks that attacking an author is going to lessen the protection around authors, one is really really missing how moderation here works. I suggest people read the note in Daily Review – weka]
It’s definitely an option I recommend people take, but worth noting, reply to lprent directly, and not the generic standard address.
The address is on the contact page, and it does state to use for complaints and operational matters.
+1
Bill it seems to me that you are not infrequently redolent of the very types you complain of in your endorsement of Ken’s Open Parachute piece. You enjoy exceptionalism do you Bill ? Tirades OK for you……slam the same in others. Things are reaching the pitch they did when CV was at his worst. Losing interest……as are others.
I endorse the right of people and their opinions not to be just summarily dismissed by association with the peddling of demonstratively and patently false accusations…not just because it’s a shite thing to do, but because it can make this site vulnerable to legal action.
Hows about you?
RB making a mistake and acknowledging it exposes the site to legal action? Just trying to make sense of your justifications: would you please clarify that?
No. That’s not what I wrote. Can you not read?
edit – in response to your edit. My comment was explaining something.
Yes baas. Edit: yes baas.
[Too many levels of offence there OAB. 8 days (you managed to skip a step 😉 ] – Bill
+ 1 Mate I’m gone. Wishing all those I enjoyed reading lots of good vibes – mauriora
I hope you’ll be back Marty. You’ve educated me more than once.
Appreciate your take on things, Marty.
Hope you’ll be back.
I’m concerned Bill. We don’t want to lose regular good thoughtful feisty commenters. I detect a tendency for all moderators to tighten up too much now the election is over. I believe that you could sit back and let the regulars snap a bit and only step in when there was good reason.
There seems to be micro management entering into the style of the blog. But the long-time commenters are part of the pillars of the blog, and stuck it out and learned a fair bit about how the discussion should go. It should be a discussion between equals, not hand slapping for this and that like schoolkids. A stand-down for a while would be rare for the regulars. but they could suggest it for some of the newbies who just want to disrupt and haven’t a clue to bless themselves with. I’d like to see more relaxation and less didactic approach, and it would be easier on the mods.
We like respect and enjoy TS. Perhaps we need to get a bit sloppy and sentimental like Chris Knox. People who want to be in a good place in coming years need to stick together with others the same.
‘Cause it’s you that I love
And it’s true that I love
And it’s love not given lightly
But I knew this was love
And it’s you that I love
And it’s more than what it might be
I’ll just keep repeating this. It’s not a discussion amongst equals when commenters have a go at authors. Authors take precedence.
I really hope marty and rb come back, both are big assets to this site. But I’m way more concerned about losing authors. No-one seems too concerned about the lack of posts or authors currently. When I see the commentariat putting energy into how to support authors or the site or making the place that new authors might want to come to, I’ll probably see the comments about moderation as being more pertinent.
Just to add to this post by Bill, when I did a quick scroll through of the replies to Bill’s original post at 1 on the Open Parachute posts (without reading these), something was gnawing in my memory – and this increased when the subject of fluoride came up and the resultant discussion as to whether the Open Parachute author was anti-fluoride (and anti-CC etc).
A quick check of the About Me on the Open Parachute site and its sections on fluoridation, and from there the Researchgate link, confirmed the reason for my disquiet.
Ken Parrott, author at open Parachute is not just another blogger – he probably has far higher professional qualifications, experience etc etc in the field of fluoridation than anyone here on TS.
https://openparachute.wordpress.com/about-me/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ken_Perrott?ev=hdr_xprf
A google search on his name/country NZ also provides a wealth of links re his background in the fluoride field, including a guest post a couple of years ago on TDB.
https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=Ken+Perrott+NZ&rlz=1C1LDJZ_enNZ499&source=lnt&tbs=ctr:countryNZ&cr=countryNZ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjloKSRi-DYAhVKa7wKHU1ACRAQpwUIIQ&biw=1024&bih=724
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2014/02/11/guest-post-ken-perrott-making-sense-of-the-fluoride-debate/
The links also include this very recent (Dec 2017) Scoop article on an article just published in the British Dental Journal by New Zealand researcher Dr Ken Perrott highlighting flaws in a 2015 research paper, widely cited by fluoride opponents, that had reported a connection between fluoridation and ADHD. On a quick glance, it appears to be a good example of a pro-science, evidence-based approach to peer review
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/GE1712/S00027/fluoridation-is-not-linked-to-adhd.htm
Not criticizing anyone who commented, but just suggesting that it sometimes does pay to take a minute or so to check out professional backgrounds etc, before making claims that someone is this, that or the other. It helps to avoid egg on face syndrome – I know from previous personal experience of this!
(EDIT – I see that Bill has now added a further reply to RB … Mine is aimed a bit wider than RB as i had no problem most of RB’s post at 1.2.
Here we go again @Anne (it seems) – re something a bit funny has happened this early new year.
I’m not sure if its just that contributors are wearing the undies someone bought them for Christmas – two sizes too small, or whether there is something other than fluoride in the water.
Roll on 2018, and we’ll see if it’s all as sustainable as we would like, or whether we’ll shoot ourselves in the tootsies
They’ll settle down. 😉
Gold. A commenter on the “Fire and Fury” thread writes:
I’m waiting for all information before jumping to conclusions.
The blogger responds:
That is more or less my position – and why I call the media promoted story of Russian Collusion as fact a “myth.”
Er, yes – declaring something “a myth” is what normal people always do when they’re “waiting for all information before jumping to conclusions.” That one’s almost funnier than his comments about everyone else suffering from confirmation bias.
Reporting Russian Collusion as “fact” is, in terms of there being no presentation of concrete evidence on which to base the conclusion that it actually happened, kinda creating a myth.
But hey, here’s Greenwald from last year, because he’s far more erudite and in depth than me.
Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?
I’m struggling to think of a high-profile official investigation into something or someone that didn’t also involve public speculation out the wazoo, so it’s hardly surprising that this one also has its partisan followers.
OJ Simpson springs to mind, as does the attempted Clinton impeachment.
No questioning of official claims is allowed.
Writes the man busily questioning official claims. Now there’s a myth being created.
You for the excellent links.
Is “Russiagate” another deception like Iraqi WMDs? ‘
Yes
The media is corralling people’s thinking by spreading this lie.
Just as they did over WMD, Vietnam, McCarthyism. If we are lied to enough times, then most believe.
Fortunately there are independent journalists like Patrick Cockburn, and Eva Bartlett who have told us the truth about what has been happening in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Russia, the US and Iran.
Thank you Bill for sharing these important stories that go against the neoliberal lies.
Israel has been buying usa politics for decades ….. wielding so much power and influence,…. that the usa Govt did a white wash and covered up when Israel killed or injured around 200 u.s navy sailors.
At the time of the attack and attempted sinking “The Jewish council could influence 169 of the 270 elctoral votes needed to win the white house”
“The Israelis used code-names to protect their white house agents” …
Does anyone seriously believe the Russians have anywhere near the involvement or influence on U.S politics than Israel ???
At last!
I wish I could share your apparent relief or enthusiasm francesca.
Unfortunately, we’re in a kind of cultural morass that sits somewhere between that which surrounded Iraqi WMD and McCarthyism. My impression is the latter was more enthusiastically taken up by the public at large than the former.
I could be wrong on that front, but assuming I’m not, I’d suggest the level of acceptance of Trump/Russia blah tends more towards the McCarthy side of any WMD/McCarthy scale than it does towards any WMD side.
Media and elites had to sell the idea of WMD to a skeptical public, whereas this stuff…fck, it’s just getting gobbled up.
“I have long considered myself a “lefty,’ a “liberal” and a “progressive.” But I have despaired over the last 18 months at the behaviour of what I have often considered “my side.” The sinking of “fellow liberals” into a quagmire of political partisanship, political conspiracy theories, confirmation bias and hateful hostility to anyone daring to present an alternative viewpoint distresses me.
Hear, hear Ken.”
The problem with those kinds of very generalised statements is we have no idea who he is talking about. And that just creates confusion.
(and there is no single anti-Trump movement, hard to get past a headline like that).
Well, I took it to refer to anyone expressing “hostility to anyone daring to present an alternative viewpoint…”
And that being in relation to the rather specific anti-trump bandwagon running on allegations of collusion with Russia; rubbishy innuendo (that is not to be called out), and baseless gossip (also not to be called out).
On Russia, supposed collusion is to be treated as an accepted truth. The evidence will be forthcoming (apparently). Asking for concrete evidence now (after 18 months) is kinda “not cricket” and worthy of (in Ken’s words) “hostility”.
I don’t think Ken was implying there is a single anti_Trump movement, but was referring to ‘the’ anti-Trump movement – bones that both his pieces give flesh to.
Most of the political people on the left I speak with in the real world get that. Notwithstanding, it’s true to say we don’t tend to engage in political discussions with those who stray too far from our own views in real world situations.
Glen Greenwald an others have pointed all this out and termed it as a new McCarthyism. I don’t think they are wrong in having that view.
On Russia, supposed collusion is to be treated as an accepted truth.
Is it? There’s evidence that it happened, but evidence has to be weighted and considered before you can claim it’s proof of anything.
The closest thing we have to first hand knowledge of the motivation behind the investigation is Glenn Simpson’s testimony to Congress, in which he states that he and Steele became concerned that Trump is the victim of blackmail. Other fascinating nuggets include Trump claiming he does business deals in Russia when no such deals exist (which I take to mean that no property changes hands, no companies are registered and so-on – at least on paper), and that the FBI has a source in Trump’s organisation* (whether it predates his run for office remains unclear).
Assuming Simpson isn’t just lying about his motivation, that sheds an entirely different light on latter events.
When Trump says “there was no collusion”, perhaps that’s because he’s being extorted and blackmailed instead. Or perhaps But But But Hillary framed him or something.
Or perhaps it’s all just weak-sauce bs, as you seem convinced of.
The length of the investigation is a red herring.
*which means, btw, that their evidence probably won’t see the light of day until any trial occurs, for obvious reasons.
PS: Simpson says Steele severed links with the FBI because he came to the conclusion that they were interfering in the election. Make of that what you will.
So far yes, It’s all weak-sauce bs as far as I’m concerned.
That’s qualitatively different from being convinced it will all wind up being nothing more than weak-sauce bs. That’s merely a suspicion, and one that grows the longer no concrete evidence is produced.
There will be others, but Greenwald seems to be particularly surgical and thorough in his approach to supposedly factual claims being made by mainstream liberal outlets, and has very good pieces mapping out the who’s who of those behind pushing (many now debunked) “collusion and interference” stories through those outlets.
Sam Biddle, The Intercept.
If such evidence exists it would no doubt provide part of the case against Trump or his henchmen, and wouldn’t be revealed until then, just like anything provided by the FBI’s purported mole.
Its continued absence until then should be expected. I certainly wouldn’t firm up my position on that basis.
Why would concrete evidence being provided to underpin claims of the Russian government hacking DNC emails “no doubt provide part of the case against Trump…” ?
Also, there’s no mention of the FBI or an FBI mole in the piece you linked to.
Did you link to the wrong piece? Or are you just taking random Russia/Trump stuff and throwing it all in the same pot hoping to conjure up a Trump stew?
Wild projection/speculation about stew aside, I discussed Glenn Simpson’s testimony (in which he mentioned the mole) at 1.6.1.1.
For the reasons Biddle outlines in the article I linked: because it would validate the provenance of the phishing attack on the DNC, and thus provide strong evidence that anyone possessing that information (and offering it to Trump) was also working for the Russian government.
It would add context and flavour to any eventual charges or case for impeachment, for sure.
It’s worth reading Simpson’s testimony first-hand, if you have the time.
So unless it can be shown that the DNC emails were offered to Trump, then…
Yeah, CNN and a host of others already tried to run on that (“Proof” they said). it didn’t really end well for them 😉
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the-u-s-media-yesterday-suffered-its-most-humiliating-debacle-in-ages-now-refuses-all-transparency-over-what-happened/
So unless it can be shown that the DNC emails were offered to Trump, then…
Well, if the CIA has Putin briefing Guccifer they probably have that conversation too. However, Trump’s people believed that’s what they were being offered, according to Papadopoulos.
As for CNN’s apparent eagerness to believe, I think you’ll find juries are harder to convince than journalists, so that’s another red herring.
All these false dichotomies are pretty tiring anyway. Cheers.
CNN lied through their fcking back teeth.
Will you be ok?
Collusion.
There is none.
Author of Trump-Russia Collusion Book Can’t Name Single Instance of Collusion in 30-Minute Interview
Like one of those repeat comedies that has you laughing as hard the second time around as the first. 🙂
The most revealing quote of all.
I’m a storyteller.
Not a journalist, then.
Luke Harding is further evidence of how far the Guardian has slid in the past 15 years.
“Pretty damning”.
This book about daffodils doesn’t mention Friesian Cows once!
Was the existence of the daffodils dependent upon the presence of Friesian cows?
No?
No matter whether mention is made of cows or not then.
Yawn. An argument with Hornetinthemiddle has more substance.
I wonder if Wolff’s Faulkner reference has any substance.
This article in the Guardian is worth checking out. It’s about PFIs (the British equivalent to PPPs), with a particular focus on the implications for the public sector when it’s left picking up the bill for (oh, so efficient!) private sector companies if they fail/declare bankruptcy when delivering public sector services or infrastructure.
So is the concern that a public company gets to run on private business lines and go for profit and big salaries, but if it strikes a bump and loses money, or is damaged and goes bust, then the taxpayer enters the picture and picks up the tab and pays out all the other business players involved?
Basically, yes.
I have to say that I don’t know enough about the NZ situation to say that things are exactly the same here, but in Britain at least, it seems that the economic benefits of PFIs were sold on the theory that they were a lower cost to the public purse than straight government funding, but that was only (marginally) true if the idea of “risk transfer” was factored in: “When you examine the claims made for the efficiency of the private sector, you soon discover that they boil down to the transfer of risk. Value for money hangs on the idea that companies shoulder risks the state would otherwise carry. But in cases like this (building hospitals), even when the company takes the first hit, the risk ultimately returns to the government. In these situations, the very notion of risk transfer is questionable.”
“The costing of risk is notoriously subjective. Because it involves the passage of a fiendishly complex contract through an unknowable future, you can make a case for almost any value. A study published in the British Medical Journal revealed that, before the risk was costed, every hospital scheme it investigated would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. But once the notional financial risks had been added, building them through PFI came out cheaper in every case, although sometimes by less than 0.1%.
Not only was this exercise (as some prominent civil servants warned) bogus, but the entire concept is negated by the fact that if collapse occurs, the risk ripples through the private sector and into the public.”
Thinking about risk in ventures and assessing it over time and possible cost and so on. Is that what is called actuarial? Anyway I just mention something that got into my head when reading about the great oil spill from a tanker near Alaska. I think it was the Exxon. The risk of the transport of oil had been assessed and it was felt likely that there might be an accident once in 25 years. To protect and mitigate against that there were requirements made of government keeping an overview, and shipping kept in the area for the especial purpose of handling large spills and damage to this large oil tanker.
25 years and perhaps an even shorter time, seems to be too long for people in general, and even government or business, to maintain a watching brief with the awareness and readiness as required by the assessment papers. When the disastrous accident happened, the government overview had been scaled back and to an extent the watchdog role had been captured by the company and industry, and the safety vessels with remedial equipment had been sent off to distant posts, and were
days, weeks away when needed urgently to deal with a very bad spill.
So government can not contract out effectively as it is the entity where the buck stops, and no other entity is going to take responsibility for the services or safety in the same way as the government does, as supposedly serving and answering to its citizens.
Carrillion is a very salient and timely lesson…PPPs (by any name) exist to enable the use of accounting deception (which no one believes) …even without the collapses and public bailouts they are a foolishly expensive method of funding capital expenditure/public service due to the shareholder returns, inflated salaries, self serving bonus culture and race to the bottom in terms of quality (both in construction and service) to win……another appalling example of short- termism.
I hadn’t gone to the link at the beginning of the thread and in case if others haven’t, the below paras are the start of an important column relating to the collapse of some ambitious entity called Carrillion.
Again the “inefficient” state mops up the disasters caused by “efficient” private companies. Just as the army had to step in when G4S failed to provide security for the London 2012 Olympics, and the Treasury had to rescue the banks, the collapse of Carillion means that the fire service must stand by to deliver school meals.
Two hospitals, both urgently needed, that Carillion was supposed to be constructing, the Midland Metropolitan and the Royal Liverpool, are left in half-built limbo, awaiting state intervention. Another 450 contracts between Carillion and the state must be untangled, resolved and perhaps rescued by the government.
We have the penetration of our business opportunities by these international and overseas-modelled companies. Profitable business is their game, and the game is moulded around contracts that are set rock-hard by legalities, if not in any physical legal form, probably all on-line.
The music suitable to the acting out of the whole enterprise, I think would be Chess. The satirising that I know and enjoy best, would be from the Telegraph’s Alex by Peattie and Taylor.
They are on a robot theme at present, and the robots are coming off second best to the simple cunning of stock traders. May as well laugh while business goes on going forward. I like January 15.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/alex/?cc=10151369
Our medias bias will not give much coverage to another rip off and the failures of Privitization ….. or as its modern bastard children are called …. PPP’s, PFI’s, charter schools etc
Its core national party ideology .
With a PPP failure the money is burned and contracted services do not get delivered … Meaning tax payers will pay twice
Even worse in the latest failure from england…. their contracted company also destroyed half a billion pounds of workers pension money …
Here’s a Swedish PPP scam example, which our media has probably never reported on …. As it also involves our Ex PMs line of work ….
“Swedish authorities in 2010 gave a single bidder the contract in a so called public-private partnership (PPP) – not only to build the hospital but also account for the financing and maintenance for decades to come.”
“” (Mission: Investigation) can now reveal that large sums in the prestigious project is routed to the tax haven of Luxembourg.”
https://www.icij.org/investigations/luxembourg-leaks/controversial-swedish-hospital-partnership-has-luxembourg-links/
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/granskning/ug/new-karolinska-advanced-tax-scheme-in-luxembourg
Trade Me making change in dog breed advertising that seems very ethical – reported
by The Wireless.
http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/pugs-prohibited-trade-me-bans-sale-of-brachycephalic-breeds
Yes, One News reported this last night, interviewing the head of the NZ Veterinary Association who said that even if owners were unaware of it, most of these dogs suffer and that their breathing problems are like trying to breathe through a pillow. I note the SPCA are also in favour.
My neighbour, died recently of emphysema. Very sad. There was the difficulty in breathing and talking made it worse and it was hard to listen to the effort. It seems unfair to the dogs to put them through that state of limiting breathing.
I see Treasury has admitted an error, again!! It is amazing when they get it right.
Straight out of Doctor Strangelove.
A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.
[…]
But the biggest difference lies in new wording about what constitutes “extreme circumstances.”
In the Trump administration’s draft, those “circumstances could include significant non-nuclear strategic attacks.” It said that could include “attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”
The draft does not explicitly say that a crippling cyberattack against the United States would be among the extreme circumstances. But experts called a cyberattack one of the most efficient ways to paralyze systems like the power grid, cellphone networks and the backbone of the internet without using nuclear weapons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nuclear-review-cyberattack-trump.html
It appears that the totalitarian dystopia of countless sci-fi movies is almost upon us. (Or am I just late to the party??) This tender…
NZ Police are seeking proposals from suitably experienced, qualified and resourced companies to provide the ABIS 2 (Automated Biometric Identification Solution) Facial Image Identification and Management, Scar, Mark and Tattoo, and Clothing database Technology Solution(s).
https://www.gets.govt.nz/NZP/ExternalTenderDetails.htm?id=19367937
We already know who you are…
That’s OK PR – we know who you are too 🙂
Dammit, not again!
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OPWZw48US2w/maxresdefault.jpg
The Police seem to try to remain separate from Parliament, though supporting stable government.
Are they under any control at all then? Or just sort of contracted by the gummint and get paid a budget amount, and set targets to reduce, contain crime etc. but the details of how becomes ‘an operational matter’. How much are the police serving the country, or developing into a self-motivated force, with its own individual practices only loosely related to current morals and ethics?
@ phantom snowflake (7)
Some say China is the future we’re closely tying ourselves too.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/100399747/in-china-facial-recognition-is-sharp-end-of-a-drive-for-total-surveillance
I have high hopes for Cabinet Minister, Tracey Martin. If she can match her deeds with her verbal down to earth, commonsense approach, she will be a very good minister in the Lab. led government.
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/ministry-vulnerable-children-today-drops-its-name
Yep. If National were honest about what they really thought they would have called it the:
“Ministry for the Children of Hopeless People Who Can’t Survive in the Glorious Economic System Instituted by Dear Leader, Economic Genius, Overlord of the South, Rugged Individualist and Teemingly Fertile Lord English”.
But they settled for ‘Vulnerable’ – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
That;s all changed AB. The old term was far too blatant.
I agree, Anne – I think she’ll be great – she has a huge task ahead of her though, and a lot of hurting people who want everything done yesterday
I’m also looking forward to Labour dropping the term “vulnerable workers”…
http://communitylaw.org.nz/community-law-manual/chapter-15-being-employed/vulnerable-workers-additional-protections-in-certain-industries-chapter-15/
From usenet (yes it still exists!)
__________________
Time to bring back the Ministry of Works
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/16/pfi-bosses-carillion-money-george-monbiot
Time and time again we see that private companies are more efficient
than the State – but only in relation to transferring profits to
shareholders and key managers, not to actually producing the goods and
services that they are contracted to provide.
Let this be a lesson to governments – the previous National
governments saw failures that cost taxpayers; will the LGNZF
government be fooled the same way?
The reality is that financing costs are cheaper for the government
than for anyone else – that is an immediate benefit for not having
partnerships with private companies that finance at higher rates. Then
there is control, and whether quality and risk are actually managed
well – for if anything goes wrong, the taxpayer ends up footing a
higher bill.
_________________
There is another perspective than mitigating financial risk – it is the time frame of the different parties. That of business is only a few years, and getting shorter. Under National, some roading projects were contracted to special purpose companies set up by interested parties to undertake the work entirely on borrowed money – those tendering had little capital of their own invested in the project. When the first Labour government decided to build social housing, they used government employees for design, engineering, planning, plans; they used largely contractors to do detailed work, but they used government employees to supervise the work and ensure that standards were understood and maintained. They built to last – and many state houses from that era are now regarded as well built, if now dated in style, and are still being used ovr 60 years later.
As an example of how we have fallen from those standards, consider the Defence Department. They moved out of their Stout Street headquarters, purpose built for them many years ago, to a new building in Aitken Street. In recent years the old building, which was structurally very sound, had become too small and in need of refurbishment. It was sold to a private developer who did that work and now leases it to another governmetn department. Meanwhile, the Aitken Street building is I am told being pulled down as it is now an earthquake risk. Similarly Statistics New Zealand moved to a new building which partially collapsed, fortunately not killing anyone, but leaving many archives lost as the building remains unsafe – in both cases while earlier buildings built with long term use in mind rather than “lowest cost is all that matters,” remain standing and able to be used.
Taking a longer view can be difficult – sometimes a slower project can only deliver full benefits in the next parliamentary term or even later, but running a system that respects employees with proper training programmes and high business ethics can bear fruit in a lot of other ways as those people move into other jobs in the private sector. Fair dealing used to mean something in business, and still does in some parts of the country. I believe the current government can afford to plan for a second term; provided they pander to short termism enough to be elected, but deliver enough permanent solutions in that second term to have a very good chance of a third term.
Do the work and run the counterfactual then.
The state builds everything as you want, and what happens next?
Addled dotard claims he has the best brain because he found his way through a dementia screen.
He blamed his three immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for failing to resolve the crisis and, a day after his doctor gave him a perfect score on a cognitive test, suggested he had the mental acuity to solve it.
“I guess they all realized they were going to have to leave it to a president that scored the highest on tests,” he said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-exclusive/exclusive-trump-says-russia-helping-north-korea-skirt-sanctions-pyongyang-getting-close-on-missile-idUSKBN1F62KO
He can’t see how his son and son in law having contact with Russians during an election campaign who offer to dish dirt on his opponent isn’t collusion and meddling, but at least we know he can tell a lion, from a rhino, from a camel.
Great stuff, from the idiot president.
Got my hands on his cognitive assessment.
https://archive.li/G9OSa/b5b35d2d6e586e46ef4374c2b2984ebd599cd7e9.jpg
Funny
🙂
You have to be a genius to answer that.
And a score of 40 out of 30 is absolutely amazing!
It’s a well known fact that some geniuses are raving mad.
You know how Einstein’s primary school grades were terrible? Well mine were even worse!
[lifted from Calvin and Hobbs]
I was referring to the copy of the “examination” joe linked to Anne. It is a joke.
If you have a look at the link you will see what I mean.
My reply was a light hearted quip too at Trump’s expense. Didn’t want to upset Bill by being too explicit. 😉
That was great. Bill and his mate Dr. Ken will not be pleased though.
Surprising result, but whatevs. At least he’s fit enough to stand trial…
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11976860
Let the rorting commence!
A gift for you.
When you already have this:
Several exemptions can be granted such as if the mother is at risk of violence, or if there is insufficient evidence of who the father is.
Why change it?
For example, articles seven and twelve of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
With regard to privacy, in the case of receiving a state funded benefit, I think most people would agree that if the conditions for receiving the benefit are met, even if one of those conditions require revealing who the father is, then equality under the law has been met. Though I don’t believe it is a law that benefits must be paid to citizens – they are just policies of the government at the time.
If privacy is the main concern, then the government has no need to know how much money I earn to tax me.
I don’t give a shit what you and “most people” agree on. Human rights are universal, no matter how many justifications you can come up with.
+1 in respect of OAG’s response to you.
You appear to have no understanding of NZ’s obligations and responsibilities resulting from NZ’s ratification of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ratification of other related International Conventions and Covenants etc since 1948 relating to things like the rights of the child, the rights of persons with disabilities, elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, status of refugees to name but a few of these – all of which are enshrined in various pieces of NZ legislation.
IMO this statement in your comment is astounding in its ignorance – “Though I don’t believe it is a law that benefits must be paid to citizens – they are just policies of the government at the time.”
If you really believe that then you obviously have no understanding of other pieces of NZ legislation such as the various iterations of the Social Security Act etc that have been enacted in NZ over the last 80 years since 1938 with the introduction of the first Labour Government’s social welfare programme – and which set out both rights and obligations of both the government and the recipients of welfare payments.
Trouble brewing for the new Government.
It seems property investors are fleeing the rental market with Labour’s policies being one of the driving factors.
With a sufficient number of new homes from Kiwibuild being years away, coupled with an insufficient number of new state homes proposed thus far, Labour are likely to face an increase in the number of homelessness and tenants facing soaring rents (along with their related ills) over its first term. Risking widespread voter disillusionment.
How will Labour overcome this? Will they buy private rentals and turn them into state rentals? Will they buy and turn private rentals into Kiwibuild homes?
Will they be forced to house more in motels? Giving the opposition their stick to hit them with.
“Trouble brewing for the new Government.”
You’re excited, I can tell!!
I don’t find a potential increase in the number of homelessness and tenants facing soaring rents exciting, Robert.
How will Labour overcome this? Will they buy private rentals and turn them into state rentals? Will they buy and turn private rentals into Kiwibuild homes?
That’s going to force up house prices.
Desperate government = ask for whatever you want.
Hold it. Every one look at BM becoming a stable genius. How amazing it is the house prices will go up. Your a real fucking genius you know that BM… Amazing…
It will offset falling investor and owner buyer demand. Thus, will make little if any net difference to demand, hence market price.
You know at some point when investors make shitty investments they should actually lose out on it when it goes tits up. I mean. My god, the government can’t keep bailing out unsophisticated investors all the time.
It’s not about bailing out investors (which maybe an unintended consequence) it’s about securing homes for people and families.
Nah. It’s like BM is reading from a script or something… Like he’s given these messages to say with out even understanding the words that are coming of his keyboard and when ever he goes off script he just comes across as a Nigerian con artist. He’s worthless.
In Wellington, it will, if it became known the government was buying existing rentals and they were desperate for them, then it becomes a seller’s market and you can start asking above the going rate.
Not like the government has to go to the bank and get a mortgage.
Anyway, the big issue is that people have taken their rentals off the market, so unless the government can convince these people to either sell their rentals to the government or put them back on the market it will make no difference.
The problem still is there’s not enough rentals, complete fuck up by Labour.
I mean that’s the definition of a property bubble. If the government purchase above market rates then who will pay the next trench up of house prices… See the false ideology? People want security not a Ponzi scheme.
Regardless of it being Wellington or not, they would merely be shoring up the downfall in demand, thus largely maintaining current market prices, not increasing them.
Due to the poor condition of a number of rentals (especially in Wellington) and the fact the Government’s budget will be limited, one would expect offers will be realistic, despite any perceived desperation.
We’ve already had BMs hysteria over drug testing state houses, and not even been unfit for habitation. Now BMs so thick in the head he dosnt even understand that he’s pushing a Ponzi scam. He’s a totally con.
he does understand supply and demand
If you think all rentals and tenants are the same then you’re insane… Because when BM assumes that all tenants and rentals are the same it’s actually mathematically impossible for BM to derive a supply curve…
I mean… Fuck me… This is why I don’t educate flaky virtue signallers.
If carefully managed a glut of homes for sale that eases pricing in the ‘1st home’ category could be a good thing. I think it would be interesting to see what price range of properties investors are selling up. Gut feel tells me it won’t be the expensive end of the rental market, those tenants are better placed to absorb increases. The renters that are finally able to afford a starter home of their own will be making their previous rental home available to others with their move.
At this stage, easing pricing to widen accessibility to more first home buyers would more than likely require prices to fall. And a falling housing market would exacerbate the new Government’s problems. Which is one reason why Labour campaigned on slowing the rate of increase, not dropping the current value of homes.
Investors selling up basic boxes in West and South Auckland could see an over supply in one sector of the market, prices easing in that under 500k sector. I guess there would be a spill-over to the 1.5 million dollar McMansions but that sector could remain quite buoyant. Investors won’t be pumping stock into that sector, not increasing the supply.
Great spin potential for Jacinda’s mob.
“Does the Prime Minister acknowledge that 2000 rental homes have had ‘For Sale’ signs hammered into their verges in the last 3 months?”
“Yes, 1st home ownership take-up is the highest it’s been for 5 years and rising. Those first home buyers are vacating rental homes.”
The problem is with the realestate industry needing sales volume, so pretty much convincing retirees to sell the family home for a million and scale down. The problem is those scaled down beach homes or what ever… Is closing in on the million dollar average. And this is usually the one nest egg for retirement so it’s like once the money gone. Then what?
If there’s continued down turn in construction then there will be a recession kiwi style so consideration must be given to keeping the kiwi home, not selling.
“1st home ownership take-up is the highest it’s been for 5 years “
With record high immigration, thus new immigrants looking for their first NZ home, it’s not that surprising.
“Those first home buyers are vacating rental homes”
While some of them will be, evidently it’s done little to ease the current rental shortage problem with demand exceeding supply. Which suggests it’s more a case of new immigrants buying their first homes squeezing locals out, hence forcing more to rent.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/property/100675144/rentals-in-hot-demand-and-shortage-wont-ease-anytime-soon-trade-me
@ David Mac (12.3.1.1)
While it will be largely centered around the lower end of the market and in areas with a high number rentals, it won’t be solely limited to that end or area of the market. So yes, their will be spillover. Along with a heighten risk it could all quickly unravel.
Buyers are far less inclined to buy in a declining market, preferring to hold off (thus adding to the downward spiral) expecting to save thousands as they anticipate prices to further decline.
The world dodged a bullet when the warmonger lost…oh
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday committed the United States to an indefinite military presence in Syria, citing a range of policy goals that extend far beyond the defeat of the Islamic State as conditions for American troops to go home.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/us-troops-will-stay-in-syria-to-counter-strategic-threat-from-iran/2018/01/17/eeed9d16-fb8f-11e7-9b5d-bbf0da31214d_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.04b2a86d0a7a
Not clean.
Not green.
Wasteful.
‘Idiotic systems’: NZ most wasteful country in developed world
The greed of farmers, the weakness of neoliberal politicians and the devastating impact of irrigation
Its consequences.
Millan Ruka on Facebook
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
A history lesson…….
Before you condemn Fox News as the most outrageous media outlet in
the world, have a look at the English version of French state television.
France 24 News, 11 p.m., FACE TV (Sky Channel 83), Tuesday 16 Jan. 2018
We are depressingly accustomed to television “news” being often little more than a conduit of state propaganda, whether it’s on the BBC, ABC (the Australian one), RT, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, PBS, CBS, ABC (the American one), NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, and our own TVNZ and NewsHub. As craven as all of the above are, however, the other night I saw something that equalled, perhaps even surpassed, all of the above for sheer brass-plated, malicious, bloody-minded dishonesty: I watched the first ten minutes of the English version of France 24.
The alarm bells were ringing on this from the first live cross on the very first item, about the call for the PLO to cut its ties with Israel. That cross was to “our correspondent in the region, Irris Makler.” Now, long-time listeners will remember that we encountered this shamelessly one-sided Israeli-Australian back in July 2011 when RNZ National wheeled her on to talk about a convoy of peace activists trying to break the illegal blockade of Gaza. She joked to Kathryn Ryan that the Gaza peace convoy was “dead in the water”, sneered that there were “celebrities like Alice Walker” on board, and ignored the presence of the 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein. [1] A week later, she was still defaming peace protestors, this time for Deutsche-Welle. [2])
It turns out that Irris Makler has not changed her modus operandi in the slightest: “You know Palestinians will pay a price internationally,” she intoned darkly. Then she claimed, in contradiction to all evidence, that the Oslo agreements had led to “great changes” in the Occupied Territories.
Unbelievably, there was worse to come. The newsreader, one Alexander Aucott, introduced the next item, about Ahed Tamimi, the 16 year old Palestinian girl arrested and charged for slapping an armed IDF soldier. He read out, with a straight face, that she had been:
Alexander Aucott should have mentioned that just before Ahed Tamimi slapped one of the soldiers who’d invaded her yard, she had learned that her 15-year-old cousin Mohammed had been shot in the head at close range by an Israeli soldier. But for some reason Aucott—or more likely, his scriptwriter—chose to ignore all that and instead portray her as an aggressor and the soldier as a victim. It’s not many years since French state media and scurrilous tabloids approvingly covered the Sarkozy government’s loading of gypsies on to trains and expelling them from France. Clearly, honesty and integrity still count for little or nothing in the French state media.
The impression of shabbiness and lack of professionalism was only magnified by the appearance of Alexander Aucott, who looks like a young, scruffy clone of Neil Kinnock, and glowers at the camera reproachfully as he mouths his loaded lines. The wretchedness of all this was only magnified by its following immediately after a brilliant Democracy Now! special on Martin Luther King.
[1] /open-mike-04072011/#comment-347912
[2] /open-mike-11072011/#comment-350723
Take a look into the ‘free speech’ laws in France…
They’re currently seeking to control ‘fake news’…
No doubt you’re already aware…
No, he’s lucky, there are no fake news laws in NZ.
Well all Stuff and rhe Herald provide is propaganda and fake news.
Hence the apathy and ignorance of some many New Zealanders.
So many people vote against their own interests, supporting ghastly neoliberal policies that ruin society and the environment.
The media corral people into opinions by repeating the lies.
France 24 is fake news. At least it was on Tuesday night. And I’m sure it regularly and dependably delivers such nasty propaganda; I don’t think Mr Aucott’s gruesome performance was an aberration.
Trump is a direct result of the Clinton’s. Why do I say this well first Trump and the Clinton’were associates and Bill would have told trump about the Mana that A President of America has and this would have made Trump obsessed with the goal of becoming President in my view. Bill was that obsessed with getting that Mana back through Hillary that he minupulated the Democratic party to get Hillary as there front runner candidate and not Bernice Sanders and wallar we have Trump as President the way trump is behaving is because of what Bill told Trump. I say if it looks like one talks like one than he is a Racist Bigot who panders to his polling that is what is keeping him in power and he will use anything through anyone under the bus say anything to keep this Mana that he is intoxicated with. This is a very dangerous man with the world future in his hands and you know what comes first in trumps world Trump. Is this the person whom is supposed to look after all Americans wellbeing Ana to kai
trump is the world’s biggest mana muncher.
Sorry about the heat morning rumble you should have got the bug spray out and sprayed the sandflys lol. They won’t shut you down that would make OUR Mana even greater I wonder what happened to that South Waikato airial of yours last year???????. I figure out that when I get a random phone call unanswered my phone is been hacked they can’t stop me using it for posting on the standard but they can listen and use the camera and also change my alarm and turn alarm off. Every time the sandflys try and spin shit about me they end up with shit in there face. This will allways happen because I have done nothing.
Its cool being famous from Pokai Tikapa Waiomatatini Tairawhiti I go into the Putaruru supermarket and there is a lot of chatting and excitement going down I start shopping and when I got to the checkout everyone’s vanished. The sandflys have followed me into the shop and told/bullied everyone and told them to not let me know that I’m well known. I have been going into this supermarkets for 12 years off and on The same thing happens at Rotorua pack and save they are so _____ its not funny Ka kite ano