Holy crap i mustve shit the bed !! Fijoas have been falling for a week or so round here very welcome they are too but im struck by how big they are this year ?cause of the wet spring maybe ? Others are telling me that the incidence of moth infestation is not as bad as last year .Certainly was bad though in some of the peaches .
'Campbell explains how pollsters have a spreadsheet of more than 400 different segments or profiles that need to be ticked off, and why pollsters have to work so hard to reach the "19-year-old man living on the West Coast". '
I would say I am probably a natural Labour supporter but I have voted Green in the last two elections as I feel they are more environmentally and anti-poverty oriented and at points I have had concerns over their survival. The sort of thing I have found off putting from the Greens is stuff like the reclaiming off the word "cunt" it was a "WTF" for me I didn't "get it" then I don't now and doubt I ever will. Apologies for the rambling comment.
I shared your reaction at the time. I kinda reframed on it after pondering awhile. Language does shape our world. Her explanation made sense on the basis that males had hijacked the word and turned it into a perjorative. So she did it as a liberationist feminist thing – reclaiming the word.
Pretty shallow if you vote for all the other parties that will do little about CC for that reason Barfly. Look at the big picture not the fringe elements-the media will of course play up the "cunt" issue, but then they should know.
Several years since I posted here about Substack, so here's an update:
Substack is an online newsletter platform: it was founded in 2017 by developers Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, and writer Hamish McKenzie – a New Zealander who was raised in Alexandra and edited Critic, Otago University’s student magazine, in 2004.
Pretty much anyone can create a newsletter: once you’ve done that, people can sign up for it and Substack will email the newsletter to all your subscribers. It also provides an online WordPress-style platform where writers can interact with their readers.
You can sign up to a newsletter for free, or you can choose to pay for content, with writers deciding what they charge. Generally, Substack takes a 10 per cent cut of paying subscriptions, and the rest goes to the content creator. All in all, more than half a million people have paid Substack subscriptions, and the top 10 writers earn nearly $30 million every year.
The Detail talks to two former writers for mainstream publications who’ve turned to Substack about whether it’s changing the media game for the better.
The biggest hassle that I have with sub-stack or protean is that it is difficult and expensive to follow multiple people at once when you're only interested in reading some of each authors work.
Currently the only single author sites that I pay for are Politik and Phoronix. The former has a low article rate but is in depth on the type of analysis that I want on national politics. The latter, well it is the best news place for linux and the relationship to underlying hardware.
I have the same issue with pay walled media sites.
I subscribe to a number of newspaper/magazine media, but generally just the best international ones. My criteria tends to be ones that I will read a quarter of their articles in the morning read. But many media just don't hit that.
For instance I like reading Fallon's (now guest) economic/political writing on the Herald – but I'm not going to buy a subscription to the Herald to get it. Same for about 4 other authors on there. The articles in the Herald are just too damn uneven. I scan the headlines most days, but seldom want to open more than one or two articles.
I'll scan Stuff, RNZ, ABC.au, BBC.world in preference for an overview.
I'd prefer having a pay per use model at the NZ Herald, rather like the Auckland Transport parking app (which I love) or the AT bus dongle. Don't know why no-one seems to want to do that. Technically it is possible using exactly the same model.
Media site subscriptions are a pain unless it is The Economist – which gives me about a ~80% read article rate.
It was why I had to dropped Medium. Lots of good opinion articles. Highly uneven. Eventually I wasn't reading them because I already knew what each author was likely to say on politics history or science, and the usefulness of the technical was limited. I dropped down to about a 10% article read rate. I really wanted pay-per-view there.
I almost dropped Washington Post last renewal. But when I did, they came back with a offer that I couldn't refuse – about a 10th of the full rate. I guess they tracked what my actual usage was.
So I donate to Stuff because I use their site as the main local news overview pickup.
I donate to wikipedia because I love their random page. Nothing like getting bored and flicking through and scanning pages of information. That is when I'm not using wikipedia as a entry point to fact check or initial research on a topic.
I've trained Google Chrome's 'Discover' to give me the weird and wonderful opinion links in tech and science – which now has a ~50% read article rate…
"New COBOL contender emerges: gcobol"
"ASUS warns of Cyclops Blink malware attacks targeting routers"
"Eight RS232 Ports, one ethernet port"
"Canonical updfates the Ubuntu logo in time for 22.04 LTS"
"In 2045: Alpha Centauri"
"10 amazing exoplanet discoveries"
"C isn't a programming language anymore"
But really I want a conglomeration site like Discover which picks up from all over the place, learns my interests and reading level, and that I pay per view – mostly to the author.
Interesting feedback. I agree with pay per view, in principle. I'd prefer a tick box system though – placed at the end so you can tick it to register your opinion that it was worth reading. And the billing to then happen monthly. That way it would be easy to monitor the expense and the frequency of approvals.
My reading identifies me as a dilettante, notoriously so inasmuch as visitors have been known to try counting how many books they can find lying open with bookmark in place on various tables, chairs etc around the place – often in piles of same. I did a count once & reached 24 despite being a tidy person by nature.
So I share your online tendency. I'm allergic to paying anyone so tend to cruise around doing a brief scan of topics on any site. I have been a regular payer to Wikipedia though. I'd pay for a provider service if their qc was up to my standard.
…notoriously so inasmuch as visitors have been known to try counting how many books they can find…
I used to have piles of completed books around. Just because I read at least one book a day, and more like 8 fiction in a day when I relax.
However I offloaded the extensive paper library in 2012 after moving it around 2 houses when my partner needed a bigger workspace for editing a documentary. I'm now up to ~90% of the paper library as epubs.
These days my library is Calibre running on my servers with a couple of offsite repositories. I seem to be buying most of my books on Kobo at present. Periodically I batch them, strip the DRM and toss them into Calibre. I mostly use FBReader as my reader using ODPS from my servers.
FBReader is good enough that I’m contemplating using their SDK as a core to do my own reader. There are a few features that would make a better reader like the kobo font-sizer.
I've dug through the epub open source enough to know that it'd be a pain doing it from there.
I'm allergic to paying anyone
I don't mind paying. I just don't like wasting my time. Paying to waste my time with reading rubbish (eg NZ Herald) feels like a sin.
Calibre looks useful. I actually can't read for pleasure on a screen – physically unable to relax with one for some reason. Consequently the e-books option has never appealed. However I can see that it would be useful for sourcing text from nonfiction books to illustrate blog comments by expanding or proving points.
Such copying saves having to type it in or run it thro ocr. If there was a way to hook it up to TS it would benefit essay-writers. Expand the resource base considerably! Book writers tend to include more interesting stuff than the more superficial online writing culture provides…
Substack is great. Subscribed to David Farrier's Webworm (free). I thought Medium was really cool as well, until they locked it down and tried charging users to read more than 10 articles a week. Screw that. (there are browser extensions to get around it, but I just don't care enough to go to Medium much these days)
RSS aggregators were pretty nifty and I used a few of them over the years. Found some neat blogs. But eventually it became too tiring/tedious to curate all the crud.
So now I am like a magpie, getting bits off TS, TDB, Twitter, RNZ, NZHerald, Stuff. And occasionally foreign outlets when something significant happens overseas. I follow TheRegister and HackerNews and a few tech journos on Twitter, it's enough to get the gist of what's going on.
There are also useful tools like Outline.com and Bypass Paywalls that will get you full access to most news sites. DuckDuckGo is good for finding stuff that Google doesn’t want you to see. Plus a big shout out to Sci-Hub for the occasional academic paper that would normally cost an unreasonable amount of $$$$
Partner reads Webworm. I had the problem that after reading it a few times I could predict at the start of a article what he was likely to say from the title and first paragraph.
I originally paid for Medium because of the useful articles on the Android display API plus discussions on some of the languages and libraries that I don't use and was vaguely interested in the philosophy of (like flutter, react, haskell, kotlin etc). That was how I started to write in kotlin. I spread to the political, history, and science from that. But it simply wasn't deep enough and usually lacked links to deeper material if I wanted to delve deeper – one of the things that wikipedia was good on (and mass media is usually terrible at).
I magpie as well. But I have a basic set of sites that I go through every day – typically between 0630 and 0830 while I wake up, have breakfast, coffee, and before I start thinking about work.
We ought to give Labour credit for this lurch out of the 19th century into the 21st:
Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti… says the refresh of the school curriculums is scheduled over the next five years and it will be progressed in stages. The social studies curriculum is now out for review as well. "Also the vision for young people and this is an exciting part of the curriculum, this is the first time in this country that we've got a vision for young people that is created by young people."
The PM said
The curriculum has taken three years to develop… It would be very rare to find a country that didn't teach its own history so I think this is about New Zealand joining the pack
Just gloss over why it didn't happen in the 20th century. Try to ignore all the years that Labour was in govt then without feeling the need to drag education out of the 19th. Just feel good that it's finally happening.
She acknowledges NZ finally joining with other countries that teach kids their nation's history without any explanation of Labour's part in why it took more than a century to do it. Still – this is genuine evidence of Labour being transformational. Well done!
Clarks Labour did introduce a researched and comprehensive new curriculum while in Government.
Of course this took time.
To be dumped for Nationals return to the 1890's, emphasise on 3/R's and rote learning. National's low standards ended up coming at the same time as the new curriculum. Leading to an inivitable and typical right wing education stuff up.
No one in teaching is surprised that education standards in everything, including the 3R's, has dropped since. As it always does when right wing zealots get their sticky beaks into teaching.
Paul Goldsmith was reported this morning on breakfast tv as saying that the new history curriculum divides people into "oppressors" and "victims". Will be interesting to see how far the right gets with this line. It's bollocks, but still a promising line of attack for two reasons:
It aims to erase any suggestion that the current distribution (maldistribution?) of wealth/power was unjustly arrived at, i.e.. it allows people to believe that they are fundamentally decent
Binary folk will always default into a binary framing. Their brains can't function without doing so. Oodles of third alternatives are always evident to anyone with an open mind. I bet most settlers & maori would fit more accurately into the opportunist category, for instance.
Recall that Taranaki tribe who bought a ship from the Brits, sailed off to the Chathams to do genocide on the peaceful islanders? Extreme opportunism!
You are wrong there, Dennis. The late Sir Paul Reeves said in a speech ( to paraphrase) '' We came to your lands (Chathams) long ago'' There was no mention of genocide. I wonder if the new history curriculum will mention that with as much detail as Parihaka is recounted?
Dave Seymour was disappointing in this interview. He made few pertinent points in my opinion.
In 1835, around 900 Māori people from Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama were welcomed to the islands. This group arrived in two waves. The first arrived on 19 November 1835 via the hijacked European ship Lord Rodney and carried 500 people along with guns, clubs and axes. This first group killed and hung up a 12-year-old Moriori girl.
The second group arrived on 5 December 1835. With the arrival of the second group "parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories" and "curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals."
Due to the new arrivals' hostility, a hui (council) of 1,000 Moriori was convened at settlement called Te Awapatiki to debate possible responses. Younger members argued that the Moriori could fight back as they outnumbered Māori two-to-one. Elders, however, argued Nunuku's Law should not be broken.
Despite knowing Māori were not pacifist, Moriori ultimately decided to stay pacifist against the invaders, describing Nunuku's Law as "a moral imperative".
Although the council decided in favour of peace, the invading Māori inferred that the decision was a prelude to war. Violence erupted and around 300 Moriori were killed, with hundreds more enslaved. The invaders killed around 10% of the population in a ritual that included staking out women and children on the beach and leaving them to die in great pain over several days.
Yikes that is horrific. Debunks the “noble savage” myth. And here I thought our worst massacre was the little known killing of 250 Maori on Moturua Island in the BOI by some French settlers
Just one (albeit notable) example of the extraordinarily brutal violence & ethnic cleansing of the Musket Wars … but best keep schtum about it … destroys the highly paternalistic Noble Savage Romanticism – grounded in Critical Race Theory & Post-Colonial Theory – at the heart of the new History curriculum.
Eternal Māori virtue, innocence, powerlessness & pacifism at all times.
Historical facts & moral complexity are far too yukky & inconvenient for Woke dogmatists pursuing a pure Good vs Evil Morality Tale.
Of course any sensible person would trust teachers as far as they can kick them, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt to start with.
Any lack of teacher credibility can always be exposed by a parent who primes their kid to ask the right question in class. Unsatisfactory performance by the teacher revealed in consequence can then be dealt with via a formal complaint to the headmaster, the minister of education, or both.
As a beneficiary of the status quo, Goldsmith's primary fear is that it is examined and found wanting in terms of justice – either in its historical origins or present day operation.
His fears are indeed well-founded – and his response is to either erase historical context, or have it defined by the winners, in order to maintain this "just world" fallacy.
And it's a pretty good strategy, as most people who have done OK in life share exactly the same predisposition.
I don't think Goldsmith's concern is an examination of NZ History, I think the concern is who is doing the examining & how it is presented. A definition of history by the "losers" may be as biased as one presented by the ""winners". (Winners & losers being your definition)
European & Maori history is full of brutal acts within their own people & against other people. I hope our NZ History when taught shows a warts & all full picture. Sadly if it doesn't it will become "the history you are taught at school & then here are the other bits they didn't tell you" It will become a sad joke.
I don't think how well you have done in life should determine how you view history.
Nah she's an intelligent young Millennial, who lacks life experience, but has a fine mind and decent ethics, who wants a better NZ. Her blind spots are privilege and wokeness, but I think she is smart enough to overcome those limitations sooner or later. I like her leadership potential and outspoken socialist leanings.
Her understanding of issues and communication skills rival those of Jacinda. A bright future.
Unfortunately, I have a suspicion that some of the concerns raised by the letter to the Listener, regarding mātauranga Māori inclusion into the curriculum are justified, or at least worth getting more details on. If we conflate those concerns as opponents of the non-defined Critical Race Theory, we fall into the same trap as those who view Gender Critical as transphobic.
It is openness and transparency of process and impact that will allow the public to discuss.
I have had a conversation with someone who said that when compiling the new NCEA standards, the initial work is done by subject specialists, and then Māori representatives are asked for their input, which is then shoehorned in.
I can see problems if that is the case. And OIR of some of the drafted standards might be the only way to see if the concerns of the letter writers above are justified, or whether the dismissal of those concerns are.
Found the hardest "wordle" derivative yet … called "semantle" (h/t weka). Yesterday my score was 47. Today it was 63.
I solved Semantle #47 in 63 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 7.36. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #18. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 34.71 (949/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org
semantle is the hardest one so far, also much more addictive. Although sometimes I find myself wondering if the game as any meaning, lol. Not being geeky enough to understand quite what they are doing with the connections there.
Michael Laws said, “I’m afraid the toxicity of social media is killing freedom of speech."
He reckons social media was stifling expression. This is after reaction to comments he made on his Facebook page. We're coming to terms with social media and how to use it and respond to it.
He'd written, "When did girls with lovely faces/breasts but unhealthy bums/legs become sexy?"
I'm not on Facebook to see if someone answered his question with: "About the same time arseholes became politicians or media personalities."
Not boding well for the stability of "The Platform"… lots of large egos on there. Without some kind of moderation, the “Free speech” outlet could easily devolve into thoughtless ranting that turns people off.
Sounds like he is unhappy that freedom of expression does not include the freedom from other private citizens making comments, judgement and even ostracism whether on social media, in a pub or in the town square.
He's mentioned a real issue, but skipped over it to pursue his low tastes.
Most are probably aware of Popper's paradox of tolerance, that An open society needs to be intolerant of intolerance.
The rise of Trumpism brings us the spectacle of people that will cheerfully suppress the freedoms of others, claiming the protection of an enlightenment constitution that they clearly do not subscribe to.
The right of propagandists who oppose free speech to claim their own speech is protected is necessarily less than infinite. In a moral sense they are freeloaders on their more enlightened fellows. But Laws just wants to talk about boobies.
I would really like to know why meat is as expensive as it is in the supermarket.
A breakdown of costs in the total supply chain, from the price paid to the farmer, cost at the works, shipping to the wholesale butchery, cutting up, packaging, transport costs et etc.
Free marketeers would tell you it's just supply and demand, and prices meeting the market. But they ignore the anticompetitive behaviour of the supermarket duopoly that has been well documented and ongoing for decades.
I say, nationalise the lot. They are (like many segments of the economy) exploitative and profiteering from market power. Screwing suppliers and workers, and inflating prices of essentials.
Nationalising them isn't required. They each sell up say 25 sites across NZ which is then taken by a 3rd player (Aldi, sainsburys etc) and you have a competitive industry.
Aldi shook up oz along with Costco but the entrenched duopoly here requires political cajones to resolve.
That's the real issue….political will to rule for a fair deal for all kiwis.
Political will relies on opinion polls and vested interests. So public opinion is a prerequisite to any major change. And the public is quite restless and annoyed at the moment, so I do expect the government to come up with something more than the usual platitudes.
Sam Brooks is just another queer stuck in the queer bubble of believing the queer community have some relevance in mainstream life. Bridges was just being what a conservative should be – true to himself and his worldview, like Sam Brooks is to himself and his worldview.
But I don't blame the queer community for their militancy, and attempting to push their agenda's on the world. For so long they where discriminated against. Alan Turing and Quentin Crisp are famous examples of the shit gay people had to endure.
As an aside, someone gave me a book called ''The Alan Turing Cryptic Codebreaker's Puzzle Book.'' F@#k me, you not only have to solve the puzzle… you sometimes have to work out what the question is. This blog gives me plenty of practice.
“A report published last week by the World Health Organization (see go.nature.com/3j9xcpi) says that if policymakers didn’t have a “pathological obsession with GDP”, they would spend more on making health care affordable for every citizen. Health spending does not contribute to GDP in the same way that, for example, military spending does, say the authors, led by economist Mariana Mazzucato at University College London.”
"Health spending does not contribute to GDP in the same way that, for example, military spending does, say the authors, led by economist Mariana Mazzucato at University College London.”
The authors apparently say this, and you quote this but what on earth does it mean? Can you explain this statement?
It means that a healthy working populace is not valued properly by GDP measures. But around the world (especially with Covid) it has been shown that a functioning public health system is actually better for the economy than sending workers and their families into bankruptcy when someone is hit by illness or accident.
I have read both and do not see where the conflict lies. Both argue that GDP is incomplete and measures the price of everything but the real value of nothing.
Just like on a personal level, we take our health for granted, until one day misfortune strikes.
One has its foundation in degrowth and wishes to destructure GDP (Doughnut economics) whereas the other advocates growth as measured by GDP and promotes its adoption through the measure seen as problematic by the former….they couldnt be more opposed if they tried.
The problem the original has (doughnut) and the point I was making to Alwyn was, it is utopic without any roadmap…..great to have a vision but difficult to support without the 'how' and probably why GDP remains the poor measure we use ….the lack (yet) of a viable alternative.
Perhaps they choose to see health spending as a cost and military spending as an investment; in that mindset a fighter jet will seem a more effective acquisition than a linear accelerator and the trained staff to run it.
Look at anything GDP measures in the desperately out of date 20th-century model: who chooses the values and categories; quis custodes custodiet?
It's journos with a conscience vs zombies in Russia.
Protesting journalist says Russians zombified by propaganda… "I was an ordinary cog in the propaganda machine. Until the very last moment I didn't think about it too much," she said.
Before her protest she recorded a video in which she said she was ashamed to work for what she called Kremlin propaganda.
The journalist said she was detained and questioned by police for 14 hours, and fined 30,000 roubles ($280; £210) for the video. The authorities had been convinced she had been acting on someone else's behalf, she said. "Nobody believed it was my personal decision. They suggested it could be conflict at work, relatives who were angry about Ukraine or that I was doing it for Western special services."
"They couldn't believe that I had so many objections to the government that I could not stay silent," she said.
Marina Ovsyannikova is a Russian TV producer who was employed on the Channel One Russia TV channel. She worked for Russia's main evening newscast Vremya since beginning of the 2000s.
Okay, I need to explain the difference between those two job descriptions. When I was working in the TVNZ newsroom 30 years ago I cut stories for reporters & journalists, but often for a hybrid professional category called news producers. This third category were given responsibility for producing news stories on an assigned basis by the programme producer.
Marina seems to fall into this category of a journalist who also produces tv news stories. The fact [see her wiki] that she had done so for 20 years for the state broadcaster suggests attainment of a senior position.
Since her father is Ukrainian and her mother Russian, her identity naturally forms a bridge between the two nations. Childhood in Chechnya during the war there is probably a contributor to her antiwar feeling.
Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at state-controlled Channel 1, was detained after she ran on to the set on Monday holding a sign saying "no war". She said she had been questioned for 14 hours and not slept for two days, and was not given access to legal help.
"I'm ashamed that I allowed myself to tell lies from the television screen. Ashamed that I allowed Russians to be turned into zombies," she explained… since the war in Ukraine began, at least three journalists have resigned from top Russian TV channels: Zhanna Agalakova from Channel 1, and Lilia Gildeyeva and Vadim Glusker from NTV.
In this report she is given a third job description. I was a video editor (the craftsperson who actually creates the product) and I worked with journos who operated as programme editors sometimes. I suspect her role was sufficiently senior that she did that editorial work as part of her normal duties.
The four resignations we know of are probably just high-level news due to reputation – tip of the iceberg I suspect. State compulsion to produce disinformation creates a toxic work environment. For workers to sacrifice their career and possibly their safety (or even their life) it shows an intense commitment to a better alternative.
For workers to sacrifice their career and possibly their safety (or even their life) it shows an intense commitment to a better alternative.
"Possibly their safety" I think is a given. Someone needs to get her out of Russia. She's in mortal danger.
And I agree the few resignations and the fleeing we know about is just the tip of the iceberg. I would suggest there are a great many Russians fleeing their homeland as we speak. We won't know how many until its all over – bar the shouting.
Could be her husband is in a position to protect her – he's also in a significant job elsewhere in Russian television. She's courageous (or naive) enough to refuse the offer from Macron.
Russia’s Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova says she has quit her job but refused to accept an asylum offer in France… Speaking to France 24, the editor said she had “handed in all the documents” for her resignation from Channel One. “It’s a legal procedure,” she said.
Ovsyannikova, who has two young children, said she had “broken the life of our family with this gesture”, with her son in particular showing anxiety. “But we need to put an end to this fratricidal war so this madness does not turn into nuclear war. I hope when my son is older he will understand why I did this,” she said.
In a separate interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, Ovsyannikova said she would not take up an asylum offer put forward by France’s President Emmanuel Macron and would stay in Russia. “I don’t want to leave our country. I am a patriot, my son is even more so. We don’t want to leave in any way, we don’t want to go anywhere,” she said.
Despite having been freed, she could face further prosecution, risking years in prison under draconian new laws approved on March 4 that limit freedom of speech about the war in Ukraine.
It wouldn't hurt to offer her asylum in NZ – the odd journalist that understands and appreciates the importance of democracy would be a breath of fresh air.
Men who identify as women would never rape women in the single sex spaces that they are allowed to as they now identify as women.
Unless of course it does. And then what?
Well it is easy
Deny that there is a man on the 'female only ward'
Deny that a man could have been in the 'female only ward'
Tell the police that there was no man on the 'female only ward'
Disregards the Nurses, others Staff and CCTV Camera.
Tell the women (female adult human) who got raped that clearly she did not get raped cause there was no male on the 'female only ward'.
Instruct NHS staff to lie about men on the 'female only wards'.
Find CTTV camera and view the contents there of, learn that indeed there was a man on the female only ward and that indeed a women got raped.
Offer meaningless arse covering excuses to the victim who for a period of one year was told that a. there was no male on the female only ward, and b. that she never got raped at all, and thus there is nothing the Police should or could do.
And then have a Baroness state all of that in the house, and hope that by gosh, golly and the gods that shit will finally hit the fan, while simultaneous know that nothing will happen.
female adult human beings, are they even human, and do we care at all?
Disclaimer: not all men rape, but the vast majority of rapists are men, and in the UK all rapists are men as in the UK by definition of the law a penis needs to be involved in that rape to make it rape. And yes, only men have penises.
I hope to find some time to follow that up and maybe write a post, but on the face of it that would have to be one of the worst instances I've seen of not just the problems with self-ID, but the problems with half the world, including many on the left, having lost their goddam minds.
It's massive gaslighting of the raped woman, women rape survivors, and well, just women generally.
Better you write this post then me, cause i am starting to piss vinegar when it comes to these stories that would never ever happen.
Also, there must be a better word then 'gaslighting' for the mindfuckery that we put women (adult human females) and girls (children human females) through in order to protect violent men no matter their self professed identity.
One aspect of this discussion, is that requests for clarity on this single-sex provision is often asked for, but not given. Even in institutional and government documents, the words sex, gender, and gender identity are often conflated and used interchangeably so that intention and meaning is impossible to define.
A nurse has claimed that NHS trusts are “gaslighting” patients with official policy documents labelling those who ask for single-sex spaces “transphobes” and “perpetrators”.
Annex B states that trans people should be accommodated “according to their presentation: the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use”, rather than their biological sex at birth.
snip
The goalposts have been moved and I don’t quite understand who was consulted about Annex B and where we go from here.
“How can one reconcile this gender-friendly Annex B with a single-sex ward pledge in the main guidance.
“At the very least there needs to be a review of what exactly is the regime that we want to support.”
He added: “I was particularly concerned to see that effectively if you classify yourself as non-binary you can take your choice as to whether you go in a ward of any particular sex.”
so yeah, there is a law, but then there is a rule to ignore that law, and there is a rule to demonize those that point out that law by calling htem all sorts of not kind words…………and women and girls (the adult/child human female kind) are the ones paying the price.
But then, i guess someone is always forced to pay the piper, and why would it not be the adult/child human female kind. Its not as if they count, and have rights, or needs to respect, dignity and sex appropriate care and accommodation.
“This is the NHS gaslighting women patients,” she said. “In other policies, women patients who ask for wards to be single-sex are described variously as transphobic service users, offenders, perpetrators or those who should be given trans education sessions to improve their attitudes.”
So you are needing a double masectomy and some chemo for your cancer, but we have decided that before we can do that we need to give your trans education so as to improve your attitude before we can start working on that pesky breast cancer that brings you here and no you can not expect 'single sex accommodation' even tho we should actually provide this to you,.
Sabine thanks for posting this. I had just copied the link.
This is what happens when the trans lobby infiltrates Govt organisations and gas lights people with statements like trans women are women.
It is an outrage that this could happen, then the hospital denied the rape as there were “ no males” there.
This is one of the many reasons organisations like SUFW have been trying to get across that there are some circumstances when women require their own spaces, eg bathrooms, hospital wards and prisons. For that the SUFW were utterly vilified and treated with contempt by female politicians…
this will not be published in any NZ media outlets because there is a shut down of anything that challenges gender ideology and their spin.
When JKR made the statement that "the be-penised individual that raped you was a woman" she was referring to the discussion at the time of the some 436 cases of rape over about 5 years in England and Wales that were recorded as being committed by 'women" In those jurisdictions, rape can only be committed by the unlawful use of a penis. So that is 436 complaints about rape, committed by individuals with a penis who demand that they be recognised as women. https://4w.pub/uk-home-office-orders/
Just watched the PM on Australian Sunrise tv promoting NZ as a travel destination. She does that so well, looks so charming, and has such a friendly, welcoming personality.
Simply can't imagine Luxon being able to carry off a promotional slot with any panache at all. I suppose he could remind the Aussies he ran the airline that they may fly on.
Watched it on the Herald website, so of course being the Herald, immediately after that up loomed a large photo of Luxon demanding restrictions be over NOW. Their editorial staff maintain they are balanced, according to a recent response to questions from the public. Never noticed that particularly.
He waits for the government to signal it is making a review of policy and calls for change. If he was any faster follower, he would be accused of sniffing the PM's hair.
As a keen history buff, I am very interested to see what the new NZ history curriculum will be like. In school during the 1970s NZ history teaching was very limited.
In Primary school in Taranaki, in the 60's, I was taught a great deal about Māori culture and local history, including Parihaka down the road.
To the extent I didn’t realise Pakeha had a distinct culture until years later.
Stick games, Poi, Māori phrases and words were part of my education in that school, despite it being mostly Pakeha. (Between Ruapehu and Taranaki). Maybe it was the young, at the time, hippy Teachers?
Second World War, Tudors – still have my copy of Rowse's excellent book The England of Elizabeth, Wakefield Settlements in a way that presented the Wakefields as pioneering heroes.
Albert Wendt's poem post school introduced me to Parihaka and made me wonder why he felt anger that none of my European family or friends ever mentioned let alone expressed. That sent me on a journey of understanding NZ history in much more depth. Still my favourite poem.
ALBERT WENDT
Into the First Cold
1.
Once his sight and bones didn’t know the four seasons
He was born into Samoa’s two seasons of wet and dry
and the air’s wrap that rarely dropped below 22 degrees
The lush forests did not ever shed their green
and crops sucked up the soil’s precocious blood all year round
No need for fur or other animal skin or fabric
Apt nakedness was adequate clothing for the times
despite the Victorian taboo of covering from neck to toe
Not one inch of erect skin shine to be exposed
Sex was only for procreation and in the sin-chocka dark of night
2.
His first taste of ice water was a shocking burn around his teeth
then round his mouth and down his gullet and chest
as a long-nailed finger that scraped up choking tears
Ice cream was the only cold he loved but his family couldn’t afford it
He learned about snow and ice from books and films
Across the Pasefika on the banana boat out of the sun’s cling
into a cold that seeped down into his marrow and wouldn’t let go—
a journey from warm ease into seasick body crunched up
in his first ever woollen clothes and shoes the seas and skies turning
wilder darker predicting a New Zealand locked in the loneliness of cold
3.
First at boarding school under cone-perfect Taranaki beanied
with ice snow and tapu the cold and homesickness gripped his every bit
The teachers ordered early morning runs and cold showers afterwards
to toughen the will against the invading winter and shape them
into men who wouldn’t flinch from any kind of pain
Rugby and military drill were the other manly prescriptions
Twice weekly rugby practice and the game against another school and winter
Tackle and tackle attack and attack the pain was exhilarating and beat
the cold and forged the ideal team that would die for one another
Winning wasn’t everything—it was the only thing
Military drill in prickly uniforms with his courage as steely as the rifle
he carried erectly at the epic school parades with their much medalled
headmaster in splendid command and some of his teachers mimicking
the decorated heroes they’d been in the Second World War others with silence
refusing to glorify the futile leap into colonial wars’ insatiable gobs
Left-right left-right left-right halt! Young fit acclimatised he now lived
comfortably with the cold weather and being away from home
But every morning when he walked in Taranaki’s compass to breakfast
the mountain signalled not all was well with the path
His history teacher praised Te Whiti’s stand at Parihaka
He researched that and discovered almost 200 years
of settler invasion fraud and theft of iwi land
A deadlier cold slid into his throat and held him hostage
to an anger as rich as Taranaki’s beauty and defiance
of colonialism injustice and greed behind the eyes
''To the extent I didn’t realise Pakeha had a distinct culture until years later.''
I had a pakeha aunt pull me up when I said the exact same thing to her. My biggest mistake was thinking Maori culture was a way forward. It's not unless you are on the public tit – then it pays well.
We were well schooled in history when I was at school. Our teacher made it quite clear some Maori had been rorted out of land and that the crown had sometimes acted dishonourably much to the detriment of Maori self determination.
But…and this is a no-no, he also explained the benefits of colonisation, both for Maori and Pakeha.
Forget the 'woke whipping boy' ideological warblings.
Are you telling us that the benefits of colonisation will not be taught along with the downsides?
Because if you are, you dishonour the professional integrity of teachers, of academic knowledge, of the special understanding that history, the study of who we are, where we come from, what we have done as a human species brings us.
Which is why history, as a branch of learning, is so important.
And so feared by those who might feel ashamed, so liberating for those whose truth has been obscured and hidden, so enlightening for those who seek the truth and justice that come from real stories, told in truth and held up to the light of succeeding generations for their understanding and education.
Then we can investigate whether what you allege is true- that the teaching of colonisation as an historical concept is " an excuse for Māori failure", or on the other hand is an explanation for where our society has advanced from its earlier times, for good and bad, for good intentions or exploitation.
Truth ought not be feared. Historians teach the subject so we may learn from it and grow stronger as a society.
The fear comes from the realisation that we might need to change, alter our ways, and make right the wrongs.
History might teach us all that the cost of doing differently need not necessarily disadvantage us but rather benefit us all in a more harmonious and essentially just, fair and equal society.
Thanks, Blade, for the chance to put into words why I was a teacher of history. This is so important for our maturity as a society.
He says Maori have done historical research as part of the treaty settlement process but there hasn't been similar work done by pakeha because the Crown does that work.
"The unspoken contract that goes into this arrangement is don't disrupt the amnesia, don't disrupt the intentional and organised forgetting of our history that is a huge part of our pakeha culture.'
Regarding the rant about leaving the Māori language to die. The guest speaker at our graduation class in 1970 was the local Professor of German. He decried Māori as a second class language because it used so many borrowed words to overcome its vocabulary impoverishment.
He orated, naturally, in English……… what occurred to me even then was the errancy of this, and his contrary refusal to comprehend that the language he spoke in was similar with its seconded vocabulary- from French, Germanic and other sources- for example, garage, verandah, and the 30 instances I have used in these two paragraphs.
I wonder whether, as our German university academic for instance munched on his hamburger, did he discover what that grilled delicacy in its linguistic origins contained- beef, sauce, farmhouse bread, oil, tomato, onion, lettuce salad, mustard, salsa, all served with panache by the chef. Bon appétit!
Yes English probably has borrowed more words from other languages than any other. It is one of its delights. It is also clear that NZ English is really starting to adopt Maori words as well – hui, whanau, morena… I hear these as part of normal conversation spoken by lots of people who are not even close to fluent.
And then there is the beauty of words in all languages, that have no quite equivalent expression in English that are starting to make a difference in NZ thinking – manaakitanga in how we treat people and kaitiakitanga in how we treat our environment. Terms that I just never heard growing up that I now hear often.
We had 'the coming of the Maori to NZ' 3 years running, when I was in Primary School.
No idea why, or what happened to the curriculum in those years to get a double-up.
Lots of current events stuff around Bastion Point and the Maori Land marches, and later, the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal (social studies, politics, history).
Catholic primary school in a pretty much working-to-middle-class Auckland suburb, FWIW.
Really, then, as now, what will matter is the individual teacher. A good teacher with an interest in the subject will teach it well, and make it interesting; a poor teacher who is going through the motions, will make it dull as ditch-water.
Kids who have a passion for history will find their own resources (and that's a lot easier now, than it was 40 years ago); kids with zero interest will zone out in class, and forget what they've been taught in a week's time.
"Kids who have a passion for history will find their own resources (and that's a lot easier now, than it was 40 years ago); kids with zero interest will zone out in class, and forget what they've been taught in a week's time."
Around the world, people took action. Tens of thousands turned out to demonstrate support. People-power shamed politicians into action.
If countries want to enjoy the benefits of global trade, sports and investment, then they should agree to a minimum standard of behaviour. Civilised countries should exclude human rights abusers and genocidal maniacs. We don't need to trade only with democracies, but excluding war criminals, expansionists and murderers is not setting the bar too high.
Corporates around the world are rightly being required to observe environmental, social and corporate responsibility standards. One of those standards should be a bar on commerce with outlaw countries
Ukraine has become the frontline in a struggle over what the new world order will be – a moral one of tomorrow, or the paralysis of international institutions today and war-torn nationalism of the past?
PARIS, March 17 (Reuters) – The Ukraine crisis could knock more than a percentage point off global growth this year and add two and a half percentage points to inflation, the OECD estimated on Thursday, calling for targeted government spending hikes in response.
Former National politician and Northland MP Matt King, a Northland beef farmer, launched the DemocracyNZ Party on Friday afternoon… that he says stands for “freedom of choice” and unity.
The party stood for “democracy and uniting all Kiwis through our common values”, he said.
Cool! Obviously uniting the political left and political right is a task overdue for action! Their covert collusion has been going on too long.
Not sure if he's got what it takes, mind you, but full marks for ambition. It does mean, of course, that he will be unable to issue policies that are divisive. "Aha!" I hear you say. Don't assume he actually means what he says! Well, yeah, right-wing politician, fair point. Still, it does leave him wide open to attack from hungry journalists seeing a double-standard looming in whatever utterances he eventually utters…
We need as many anti-mandate parties as the ballot papers can fit. Also on polling day, if none of these fits you precisely, then its best to tick all the ones you support.
the current mandates against punching Matt King in the face are offending my freedom and I would like them removed, just in your case…
If you are sincere about bullshit freedoms which encroach on others and prevent their liberty to a much greater extent please start with this one. I’m sure we can find some takers to protest this mandate by punching you in the face.
Every disgruntled ambassador sent back to Russia increases pressure on the regime.
Everyone asks; 'What can we do to stop the war in Ukraine?'
The answer is very little. But every little bit helps.
Maybe we could do this.
Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on Friday announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats over the invasion of Ukraine, prompting Moscow to say it would respond in kind…..
….Lithuania's foreign ministry meanwhile announced that it had declared four Russian embassy employees persona non grata, a move made "in solidarity with Ukraine".
"Russia's military attacks on civilians, civilian objects, hospitals, schools, maternity wards, and cultural objects are war crimes and crimes against humanity," it said in a statement…..
Australians need to understand the cyber threat from China. US President Donald Trump described the launch of Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot, DeepSeek, as a wake-up call for the US tech industry. The Australian government moved ...
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The Australian government’s underreaction to China’s ongoing naval circumnavigation of Australia is a bigger problem than any perceived overreaction in public commentary. Some politicisation of the issue before a general election is natural in a ...
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The StrategistBy Karryl Kim Sagun Trajano and Adhi Priamarizki
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Green Party Co-Leaders Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick have announced the party’s plans to deliver a Green Budget this year to offer an alternative vision to the Government’s trickle-down economics and austerity politics. ...
At this year's State of the Planet address, Green Party co-leaders Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick announced the party’s plans to deliver a Green Budget this year to offer an alternative vision to the Government’s trickle-down economics and austerity politics. ...
The Government has spent $3.6 million dollars on a retail crime advisory group, including paying its chair $920 a day, to come up with ideas already dismissed as dangerous by police. ...
The Green Party supports the peaceful occupation at Lake Rotokākahi and are calling for the controversial sewerage project on the lake to be stopped until the Environment Court has made a decision. ...
ActionStation’s Oral Healthcare report, released today, paints a dire picture of unmet need and inequality across the country, highlighting the urgency of free dental care for all New Zealanders. ...
The Golden Age There has been long-standing recognition that New Zealand First has an unrivalled reputation for delivering for our older New Zealanders. This remains true, and is reflected in our coalition agreement. While we know there is much that we can and will do in this space, it is ...
Labour Te Atatū MP Phil Twyford has written to the charities regulator asking that Destiny Church charities be struck off in the wake of last weekend’s violence by Destiny followers in his electorate. ...
Bills by Labour MPs to remove rules around sale of alcohol on public holidays, and for Crown entities to adopt Māori names have been drawn from the Members’ Bill Ballot. ...
The Government is falling even further behind its promised target of 500 new police officers, now with 72 fewer police officers than when National took office. ...
This morning’s Stats NZ child poverty statistics should act as a wake-up call for the government: with no movement in child poverty rates since June 2023, it’s time to make the wellbeing of our tamariki a political priority. ...
Green Party Co-Leader Marama Davidson’s Consumer Guarantees Right to Repair Amendment Bill has passed its first reading in Parliament this evening. ...
“The ACT Party can’t be bothered putting an MP on one of the Justice subcommittees hearing submissions on their own Treaty Principles Bill,” Labour Justice Spokesperson Duncan Webb said. ...
The Government’s newly announced funding for biodiversity and tourism of $30-million over three years is a small fraction of what is required for conservation in this country. ...
The Government's sudden cancellation of the tertiary education funding increase is a reckless move that risks widespread job losses and service reductions across New Zealand's universities. ...
National’s cuts to disability support funding and freezing of new residential placements has resulted in significant mental health decline for intellectually disabled people. ...
The hundreds of jobs lost needlessly as a result of the Kinleith Mill paper production closure will have a devastating impact on the Tokoroa community - something that could have easily been avoided. ...
Today Te Pāti Māori MP for Te Tai Tokerau, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, released her members bill that will see the return of tamariki and mokopuna Māori from state care back to te iwi Māori. This bill will establish an independent authority that asserts and protects the rights promised in He Whakaputanga ...
The Whangarei District Council being forced to fluoridate their local water supply is facing a despotic Soviet-era disgrace. This is not a matter of being pro-fluoride or anti-fluoride. It is a matter of what New Zealanders see and value as democracy in our country. Individual democratically elected Councillors are not ...
Nicola Willis’ latest supermarket announcement is painfully weak with no new ideas, no real plan, and no relief for Kiwis struggling with rising grocery costs. ...
As the world marks three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced additional sanctions on Russian entities and support for Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction. “Russia’s illegal invasion has brought three years of devastation to Ukraine’s people, environment, and infrastructure,” Mr Peters says. “These additional sanctions target 52 ...
Associate Finance Minister David Seymour has today announced the Government’s plan to reform the Overseas Investment Act and make it easier for New Zealand businesses to receive new investment, grow and pay higher wages. “New Zealand is one of the hardest countries in the developed world for overseas people to ...
Associate Health Minister Hon Casey Costello is traveling to Australia for meetings with the aged care sector in Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney next week. “Australia is our closest partner, so as we consider the changes necessary to make our system more effective and sustainable it makes sense to learn from ...
The Government is boosting investment in the QEII National Trust to reinforce the protection of Aotearoa New Zealand's biodiversity on private land, Conservation Minister Tama Potaka says. The Government today announced an additional $4.5 million for conservation body QEII National Trust over three years. QEII Trust works with farmers and ...
The closure of the Ava Bridge walkway will be delayed so Hutt City Council have more time to develop options for a new footbridge, says Transport Minister Chris Bishop and Mayor of Lower Hutt, Campbell Barry. “The Hutt River paths are one of the Hutt’s most beloved features. Hutt locals ...
Good afternoon. Can I acknowledge Ngāti Whātua for their warm welcome, Simpson Grierson for hosting us here today, and of course the Committee for Auckland for putting on today’s event. I suspect some of you are sitting there wondering what a boy from the Hutt would know about Auckland, our ...
The Government will invest funding to remove the level crossings in Takanini and Glen Innes and replace them with grade-separated crossings, to maximise the City Rail Link’s ability to speed up journey times by rail and road and boost Auckland’s productivity, Transport Minister Chris Bishop and Auckland Minister Simeon Brown ...
The Government has made key decisions on a Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage (CCUS) framework to enable businesses to benefit from storing carbon underground, which will support New Zealand’s businesses to continue operating while reducing net carbon emissions, Energy and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. “Economic growth is a ...
Minister for Regulation David Seymour says that outdated and burdensome regulations surrounding industrial hemp (iHemp) production are set to be reviewed by the Ministry for Regulation. Industrial hemp is currently classified as a Class C controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act, despite containing minimal THC and posing little ...
The Ministerial Advisory Group on transnational and serious organised crime was appointed by Cabinet on Monday and met for the first time today, Associate Police Minister Casey Costello announced. “The group will provide independent advice to ensure we have a better cross-government response to fighting the increasing threat posed to ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon will travel to Viet Nam next week, visiting both Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City, accompanied by a delegation of senior New Zealand business leaders. “Viet Nam is a rising star of Southeast Asia with one of the fastest growing economies in the region. This ...
The coalition Government has passed legislation to support overseas investment in the Build-to-Rent housing sector, Associate Minister of Finance Chris Bishop says. “The Overseas Investment (Facilitating Build-to-Rent Developments) Amendment Bill has completed its third reading in Parliament, fulfilling another step in the Government’s plan to support an increase in New ...
The new Police marketing campaign starting today, recreating the ‘He Ain’t Heavy’ ad from the 1990s, has been welcomed by Associate Police Minister Casey Costello. “This isn’t just a great way to get the attention of more potential recruits, it’s a reminder to everyone about what policing is and the ...
No significant change to child poverty rates under successive governments reinforces that lifting children out of material hardship will be an ongoing challenge, Child Poverty Reduction Minister Louise Upston says. Figures released by Stats NZ today show no change in child poverty rates for the year ended June 2024, reflecting ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden is pleased to announce the most common family names given to newborns in 2024. “For the seventh consecutive year, Singh is the most common registered family name, with over 680 babies given this name. Kaur follows closely in second place with 630 babies, while ...
A new $3 million fund from the International Conservation and Tourism Visitor Levy will be used to attract more international visitors to regional destinations this autumn and winter, Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston says. “The Government has a clear priority to unleash economic growth and getting our visitor numbers ...
Good Evening Let us begin by acknowledging Professor David Capie and the PIPSA team for convening this important conference over the next few days. Whenever the Pacific Islands region comes together, we have a precious opportunity to share perspectives and learn from each other. That is especially true in our ...
The Reserve Bank’s positive outlook indicates the economy is growing and people can look forward to more jobs and opportunities, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The Bank today reduced the Official Cash Rate by 50 basis points. It said it expected further reductions this year and employment to pick up ...
Agriculture Minister, Todd McClay and Minister for Māori Development, Tama Potaka today congratulated the finalists for this year’s Ahuwhenua Trophy, celebrating excellence in Māori sheep and beef farming. The two finalists for 2025 are Whangaroa Ngaiotonga Trust and Tawapata South Māori Incorporation Onenui Station. "The Ahuwhenua Trophy is a prestigious ...
The Government is continuing to respond to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care by establishing a fund to honour those who died in care and are buried in unmarked graves, and strengthen survivor-led initiatives that support those in need. “The $2 million dual purpose fund will be ...
A busy intersection on SH5 will be made safer with the construction of a new roundabout at the intersection of SH28/Harwoods Road, as we deliver on our commitment to help improve road safety through building safer infrastructure, Transport Minister Chris Bishop says. “Safety is one of the Government’s strategic priorities ...
The Government is turbo charging growth to return confidence to the primary sector through common sense policies that are driving productivity and farm-gate returns, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced today. “The latest Federated Farmers Farm Confidence Survey highlights strong momentum across the sector and the Government’s firm commitment to back ...
Improving people’s experience with the Justice system is at the heart of a package of Bills which passed its first reading today Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee says. “The 63 changes in these Bills will deliver real impacts for everyday New Zealanders. The changes will improve court timeliness and efficiency, ...
Returning the Ō-Rākau battle site to tūpuna ownership will help to recognise the past and safeguard their stories for the benefit of future generations, Minister for Māori Crown Relations Tama Potaka says. The Te Pire mō Ō-Rākau, Te Pae o Maumahara / Ō-Rākau Remembrance Bill passed its third reading at ...
A new university programme will help prepare PhD students for world-class careers in science by building stronger connections between research and industry, Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Dr Shane Reti says. “Our Government is laser focused on growing New Zealand’s economy and to do that, we must realise the potential ...
Health Minister Simeon Brown has today announced funding of more than $14 million to replace the main water supply and ring mains in the main building of Auckland City Hospital. “Addressing the domestic hot water system at the country’s largest hospital, which opened in 2003, is vitally important to ensure ...
The Government is investing $30 million from the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy to fund more than a dozen projects to boost biodiversity and the tourist economy, Conservation Minister Tama Potaka says. “Tourism is a key economic driver, and nature is our biggest draw card for international tourists,” says ...
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters will travel to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, China, Mongolia, and the Republic of Korea later this week. “New Zealand enjoys long-standing and valued relationships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both highly influential actors in their region. The visit will focus on building ...
Minister for Rail Winston Peters has announced director appointments for Ferry Holdings Limited – the schedule 4a company charged with negotiating ferry procurement contracts for two new inter-island ferries. Mr Peters says Ferry Holdings Limited will be responsible for negotiating long-term port agreements on either side of the Cook Strait ...
Ophthalmology patients in Kaitaia are benefiting from being able to access the complete cataract care pathway closer to home, Health Minister Simeon Brown says. “Ensuring New Zealanders have access to timely, quality healthcare is a priority for the Government. “Since 30 September 2024, Kaitaia Hospital has been providing cataract care ...
With legislation gaining support from across the house, congestion charging may soon be a reality for Auckland drivers, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. Time-of-use charging passes first hurdle Congestion charging took a step closer on Tuesday ...
Gifts are not unusual in politics, especially where foreign affairs are involved. But have any of our globe-trotting dignitaries ever scored anything to rival a Mongolian horse? Gabi Lardies scoured the registers to find out. When Winston Peters was given a horse last week in Mongolia, the honour was immediately ...
Paul Brislen is on a mission this year and it could probably be summed up as ‘don’t stuff things up like Australia did’.It’s to do with New Zealand’s 3G networks being shut down by the end of 2025, and upgraded to the next generation of technology.It’s a world-wide move, with ...
Comment: Diplomacy is the long-established art of dealing with delicate topics in a sensitive and tactful manner. What we saw on Saturday (NZT), with US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance berating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office when Ukraine is the victim of an illegal Russian invasion, was the ...
NewsroomBy Robert G Patman and Alexander Gillespie
Analysis: Back in the old days – pre-Covid, say – academics of at least moderate renown would cheer themselves up by Googling themselves to see others refer to their work and heap praise on it, or at least cite it. Now we have a better outlet for our vanity: Large ...
Which books made the final 16? With commentary by books editor Claire Mabey. From 175, to 43, to the final 16. Publishing is brutal. Awards are a necessary and propulsive part of the industry: recognising excellence and giving the market a boost. This is the stage of the awards cycle ...
Loading…(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){var ql=document.querySelectorAll('A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if(ql){if(ql.length){for(var k=0;k<ql.length;k++){ql[k].id='quiz-embed-'+k;ql[k].href="javascript:var i=document.getElementById('quiz-embed-"+k+"');try{qz.startQuiz(i)}catch(e){i.start=1;i.style.cursor='wait';i.style.opacity='0.5'};void(0);"}}};i['QP']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','https://take.quiz-maker.com/3012/CDN/quiz-embed-v1.js','qp');Got a good quiz question?Send Newsroom your questions.The post Newsroom daily quiz, Wednesday 5 March appeared first on Newsroom. ...
The two best New Zealand books of 2024 – Delirious, the beautiful novel by Damien Wilkins about growing old with one foot in the grave, two if you’re a couple, and the deeply moving memoir Hine Toa by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku – have made it onto the shortlist of the ...
Asia Pacific Report The Green Party has called on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to rule out Aotearoa New Zealand joining the AUKUS military technical pact in any capacity following the row over Ukraine in the White House over the weekend. President Donald Trump’s “appalling treatment” of his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr ...
The prime minister's comment that parents who are dissatisfied with the new school lunch programme should pack the lunches themselves has not gone down well with some. ...
AMY GOODMAN:And the Oscars were held Sunday evening. History was made in the best documentary category.SAMUEL L. JACKSON: And the Oscar goes to ‘No Other Land’. AMY GOODMAN:The Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land won for best documentary. The film follows the struggles of Palestinians in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Murray, Professor of Cybersecurity, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne Ludovic Toinel/Unsplash In July last year, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, directed tech companies to develop codes of practice to keep children safe from online ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Conley Tyler, Honorary Fellow, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne Hard on the heels of Donald Trump’s dismantling of USAID, the United Kingdom has ripped more than A$12 billion (£6 billion) from its foreign assistance budget. The double hit from ...
Marmite should be basking in the same warm prime ministerial glow as Weet-Bix right now, but the finance minister had other plans. In case you’ve been buried under a pile of melted plastic for the last two months, school lunches have become something of a political norovirus. An endless spray ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Wright, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney, University of Technology Sydney Richard White, head of WiseTech Global, is the latest of a small number of charismatic business founders to have captured the public and corporate imagination. The businessman is synonymous with one ...
The petition has been initiated by the Women’s Rights Party and Life Member Sandi Hall, a former leader of the New Zealand Women’s Political Party women, a feminist political party founded in 1982 that contested the 1984 snap election. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stewart Riddle, Professor, School of Education, University of Southern Queensland The federal government and NSW government have announced a new funding deal for the state’s public schools. This will see the Commonwealth contribution jump from 20% to 25% of the schooling ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Chubb, Associate Professor of International Relations, Deakin University Shutterstock This week, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea issued an appeal to the international community. She expressed concern about the future of civil society work on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Francis Thrush, Director of the Institute of Marine Science, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau Shutterstock/Danita Delimont For New Zealand, a country with an underwater territory 14 times its landmass, marine ecosystems present a significant opportunity to investigate carbon storage ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Duncan Caillard, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology Director Sean Baker has made history by becoming the first person to win four Academy Awards in the same night for the same film – Anora – taking home ...
A members-run not-for-profit that manages access to the .nz internet domain has been caught up in a manufactured controversy that’s stoking fears of censorship. It’s nothing new, but it matters, argues Kyle Matthews. Over the last fortnight, InternetNZ has been drawn into a “culture war” with the Free Speech Union ...
The government’s continued support for anti-climate policies further entrenches this kind of environmental destruction. It is a criminal coalition between policymakers and industry that locks out the public and sets us up to a fate unimaginably bad. ...
Holy crap i mustve shit the bed !! Fijoas have been falling for a week or so round here very welcome they are too but im struck by how big they are this year ?cause of the wet spring maybe ? Others are telling me that the incidence of moth infestation is not as bad as last year .Certainly was bad though in some of the peaches .
Greens double their poll rating by doing nothing. Who said zen politics doesn't work?!
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/labour-just-ahead-in-latest-poll-after-crash-in-support/4F6MDGBHUEMWZ3JSTUDDPBBJHY/
Picking up the Left vote, sick of neoliberal incrementalism
Exactly Robo.
Nope a sudden change like that is more likely a polling error , which is enevitable in the statistic based polling methods that are used.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018757020/polls-rogue-polls-and-statistics
'Campbell explains how pollsters have a spreadsheet of more than 400 different segments or profiles that need to be ticked off, and why pollsters have to work so hard to reach the "19-year-old man living on the West Coast". '
polls are all over the place.
Pretty typical in the mid-term
I would say I am probably a natural Labour supporter but I have voted Green in the last two elections as I feel they are more environmentally and anti-poverty oriented and at points I have had concerns over their survival. The sort of thing I have found off putting from the Greens is stuff like the reclaiming off the word "cunt" it was a "WTF" for me I didn't "get it" then I don't now and doubt I ever will. Apologies for the rambling comment.
Pretty shallow if you vote for all the other parties that will do little about CC for that reason Barfly. Look at the big picture not the fringe elements-the media will of course play up the "cunt" issue, but then they should know.
Several years since I posted here about Substack, so here's an update:
The biggest hassle that I have with sub-stack or protean is that it is difficult and expensive to follow multiple people at once when you're only interested in reading some of each authors work.
Currently the only single author sites that I pay for are Politik and Phoronix. The former has a low article rate but is in depth on the type of analysis that I want on national politics. The latter, well it is the best news place for linux and the relationship to underlying hardware.
I have the same issue with pay walled media sites.
I subscribe to a number of newspaper/magazine media, but generally just the best international ones. My criteria tends to be ones that I will read a quarter of their articles in the morning read. But many media just don't hit that.
For instance I like reading Fallon's (now guest) economic/political writing on the Herald – but I'm not going to buy a subscription to the Herald to get it. Same for about 4 other authors on there. The articles in the Herald are just too damn uneven. I scan the headlines most days, but seldom want to open more than one or two articles.
I'll scan Stuff, RNZ, ABC.au, BBC.world in preference for an overview.
I'd prefer having a pay per use model at the NZ Herald, rather like the Auckland Transport parking app (which I love) or the AT bus dongle. Don't know why no-one seems to want to do that. Technically it is possible using exactly the same model.
Media site subscriptions are a pain unless it is The Economist – which gives me about a ~80% read article rate.
It was why I had to dropped Medium. Lots of good opinion articles. Highly uneven. Eventually I wasn't reading them because I already knew what each author was likely to say on politics history or science, and the usefulness of the technical was limited. I dropped down to about a 10% article read rate. I really wanted pay-per-view there.
I almost dropped Washington Post last renewal. But when I did, they came back with a offer that I couldn't refuse – about a 10th of the full rate. I guess they tracked what my actual usage was.
So I donate to Stuff because I use their site as the main local news overview pickup.
I donate to wikipedia because I love their random page. Nothing like getting bored and flicking through and scanning pages of information. That is when I'm not using wikipedia as a entry point to fact check or initial research on a topic.
I've trained Google Chrome's 'Discover' to give me the weird and wonderful opinion links in tech and science – which now has a ~50% read article rate…
"New COBOL contender emerges: gcobol"
"ASUS warns of Cyclops Blink malware attacks targeting routers"
"Eight RS232 Ports, one ethernet port"
"Canonical updfates the Ubuntu logo in time for 22.04 LTS"
"In 2045: Alpha Centauri"
"10 amazing exoplanet discoveries"
"C isn't a programming language anymore"
But really I want a conglomeration site like Discover which picks up from all over the place, learns my interests and reading level, and that I pay per view – mostly to the author.
Sounds like a retirement project.
Interesting feedback. I agree with pay per view, in principle. I'd prefer a tick box system though – placed at the end so you can tick it to register your opinion that it was worth reading. And the billing to then happen monthly. That way it would be easy to monitor the expense and the frequency of approvals.
My reading identifies me as a dilettante, notoriously so inasmuch as visitors have been known to try counting how many books they can find lying open with bookmark in place on various tables, chairs etc around the place – often in piles of same. I did a count once & reached 24 despite being a tidy person by nature.
So I share your online tendency. I'm allergic to paying anyone so tend to cruise around doing a brief scan of topics on any site. I have been a regular payer to Wikipedia though. I'd pay for a provider service if their qc was up to my standard.
I used to have piles of completed books around. Just because I read at least one book a day, and more like 8 fiction in a day when I relax.
However I offloaded the extensive paper library in 2012 after moving it around 2 houses when my partner needed a bigger workspace for editing a documentary. I'm now up to ~90% of the paper library as epubs.
These days my library is Calibre running on my servers with a couple of offsite repositories. I seem to be buying most of my books on Kobo at present. Periodically I batch them, strip the DRM and toss them into Calibre. I mostly use FBReader as my reader using ODPS from my servers.
FBReader is good enough that I’m contemplating using their SDK as a core to do my own reader. There are a few features that would make a better reader like the kobo font-sizer.
I've dug through the epub open source enough to know that it'd be a pain doing it from there.
I don't mind paying. I just don't like wasting my time. Paying to waste my time with reading rubbish (eg NZ Herald) feels like a sin.
Calibre looks useful. I actually can't read for pleasure on a screen – physically unable to relax with one for some reason. Consequently the e-books option has never appealed. However I can see that it would be useful for sourcing text from nonfiction books to illustrate blog comments by expanding or proving points.
Such copying saves having to type it in or run it thro ocr. If there was a way to hook it up to TS it would benefit essay-writers. Expand the resource base considerably! Book writers tend to include more interesting stuff than the more superficial online writing culture provides…
Substack is great. Subscribed to David Farrier's Webworm (free). I thought Medium was really cool as well, until they locked it down and tried charging users to read more than 10 articles a week. Screw that. (there are browser extensions to get around it, but I just don't care enough to go to Medium much these days)
RSS aggregators were pretty nifty and I used a few of them over the years. Found some neat blogs. But eventually it became too tiring/tedious to curate all the crud.
So now I am like a magpie, getting bits off TS, TDB, Twitter, RNZ, NZHerald, Stuff. And occasionally foreign outlets when something significant happens overseas. I follow TheRegister and HackerNews and a few tech journos on Twitter, it's enough to get the gist of what's going on.
There are also useful tools like Outline.com and Bypass Paywalls that will get you full access to most news sites. DuckDuckGo is good for finding stuff that Google doesn’t want you to see. Plus a big shout out to Sci-Hub for the occasional academic paper that would normally cost an unreasonable amount of $$$$
Partner reads Webworm. I had the problem that after reading it a few times I could predict at the start of a article what he was likely to say from the title and first paragraph.
I originally paid for Medium because of the useful articles on the Android display API plus discussions on some of the languages and libraries that I don't use and was vaguely interested in the philosophy of (like flutter, react, haskell, kotlin etc). That was how I started to write in kotlin. I spread to the political, history, and science from that. But it simply wasn't deep enough and usually lacked links to deeper material if I wanted to delve deeper – one of the things that wikipedia was good on (and mass media is usually terrible at).
I magpie as well. But I have a basic set of sites that I go through every day – typically between 0630 and 0830 while I wake up, have breakfast, coffee, and before I start thinking about work.
I checked out his archive & found the Bill Gates conspiracy one – based on a public media even, great context!
We ought to give Labour credit for this lurch out of the 19th century into the 21st:
The PM said
Just gloss over why it didn't happen in the 20th century. Try to ignore all the years that Labour was in govt then without feeling the need to drag education out of the 19th. Just feel good that it's finally happening.
She acknowledges NZ finally joining with other countries that teach kids their nation's history without any explanation of Labour's part in why it took more than a century to do it. Still – this is genuine evidence of Labour being transformational. Well done!
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/463479/aotearoa-new-zealand-history-curriculum-launches
This is wonderful to see.
Financial literacy is something I think needs to be taught at an…early age.
Clarks Labour did introduce a researched and comprehensive new curriculum while in Government.
Of course this took time.
To be dumped for Nationals return to the 1890's, emphasise on 3/R's and rote learning. National's low standards ended up coming at the same time as the new curriculum. Leading to an inivitable and typical right wing education stuff up.
No one in teaching is surprised that education standards in everything, including the 3R's, has dropped since. As it always does when right wing zealots get their sticky beaks into teaching.
Paul Goldsmith was reported this morning on breakfast tv as saying that the new history curriculum divides people into "oppressors" and "victims". Will be interesting to see how far the right gets with this line. It's bollocks, but still a promising line of attack for two reasons:
Binary folk will always default into a binary framing. Their brains can't function without doing so. Oodles of third alternatives are always evident to anyone with an open mind. I bet most settlers & maori would fit more accurately into the opportunist category, for instance.
Recall that Taranaki tribe who bought a ship from the Brits, sailed off to the Chathams to do genocide on the peaceful islanders? Extreme opportunism!
You are wrong there, Dennis. The late Sir Paul Reeves said in a speech ( to paraphrase) '' We came to your lands (Chathams) long ago'' There was no mention of genocide. I wonder if the new history curriculum will mention that with as much detail as Parihaka is recounted?
Dave Seymour was disappointing in this interview. He made few pertinent points in my opinion.
https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/audio/david-seymour-and-graeme-ball-on-aotearoa-new-zealand-history-being-compulsory/
A history lesson for you:
Yikes that is horrific. Debunks the “noble savage” myth. And here I thought our worst massacre was the little known killing of 250 Maori on Moturua Island in the BOI by some French settlers
.
Just one (albeit notable) example of the extraordinarily brutal violence & ethnic cleansing of the Musket Wars … but best keep schtum about it … destroys the highly paternalistic Noble Savage Romanticism – grounded in Critical Race Theory & Post-Colonial Theory – at the heart of the new History curriculum.
Eternal Māori virtue, innocence, powerlessness & pacifism at all times.
Historical facts & moral complexity are far too yukky & inconvenient for Woke dogmatists pursuing a pure Good vs Evil Morality Tale.
Of course any sensible person would trust teachers as far as they can kick them, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt to start with.
Any lack of teacher credibility can always be exposed by a parent who primes their kid to ask the right question in class. Unsatisfactory performance by the teacher revealed in consequence can then be dealt with via a formal complaint to the headmaster, the minister of education, or both.
Would the Musket Wars have been so brutal had not Maori been fuelled by the white man's technology, deceit, and theft?
Clearly they would not have been called the Musket Wars if it were not for muskets.
They would have been more noble, had they been more savages? I mean you have an open and shut case there regarding the technology.
It seems less clear that Maori were unfamiliar with deceit and theft from times before settlers arrived.
Maori warfare before the arrival of the settlers was brutal. Ever heard of Pouwhenua? Tewhatewha? Tao? Huata? Patu?
Funny – your first bullet point seems to confirm Paul Goldsmith's fears.
As a beneficiary of the status quo, Goldsmith's primary fear is that it is examined and found wanting in terms of justice – either in its historical origins or present day operation.
His fears are indeed well-founded – and his response is to either erase historical context, or have it defined by the winners, in order to maintain this "just world" fallacy.
And it's a pretty good strategy, as most people who have done OK in life share exactly the same predisposition.
I don't think Goldsmith's concern is an examination of NZ History, I think the concern is who is doing the examining & how it is presented. A definition of history by the "losers" may be as biased as one presented by the ""winners". (Winners & losers being your definition)
European & Maori history is full of brutal acts within their own people & against other people. I hope our NZ History when taught shows a warts & all full picture. Sadly if it doesn't it will become "the history you are taught at school & then here are the other bits they didn't tell you" It will become a sad joke.
I don't think how well you have done in life should determine how you view history.
The subject is so all encompassing that what is taught in schools will only ever be a selective once over lightly
Great news. I appreciated Chlöe's response to those complaining about "critical race theory" or whatever…
https://twitter.com/_chloeswarbrick/status/1504588865449132035?s=20&t=C2_FidPOJnZ503XBLdM0uQ
She’s a grandstanding narcissist who knows neither New Zealand history nor historiography.
Hope you are going ok. Swordfish?
Interesting comments about Chole. Not a fan myself
Nah she's an intelligent young Millennial, who lacks life experience, but has a fine mind and decent ethics, who wants a better NZ. Her blind spots are privilege and wokeness, but I think she is smart enough to overcome those limitations sooner or later. I like her leadership potential and outspoken socialist leanings.
Her understanding of issues and communication skills rival those of Jacinda. A bright future.
Unfortunately, I have a suspicion that some of the concerns raised by the letter to the Listener, regarding mātauranga Māori inclusion into the curriculum are justified, or at least worth getting more details on. If we conflate those concerns as opponents of the non-defined Critical Race Theory, we fall into the same trap as those who view Gender Critical as transphobic.
https://www.fsu.nz/in_defence_of_science_article
It is openness and transparency of process and impact that will allow the public to discuss.
I have had a conversation with someone who said that when compiling the new NCEA standards, the initial work is done by subject specialists, and then Māori representatives are asked for their input, which is then shoehorned in.
I can see problems if that is the case. And OIR of some of the drafted standards might be the only way to see if the concerns of the letter writers above are justified, or whether the dismissal of those concerns are.
Found the hardest "wordle" derivative yet … called "semantle" (h/t weka). Yesterday my score was 47. Today it was 63.
Also recommended: hellowordl, Absurdle, Quordle, Octordle
semantle is the hardest one so far, also much more addictive. Although sometimes I find myself wondering if the game as any meaning, lol. Not being geeky enough to understand quite what they are doing with the connections there.
loving Octordle and its wide screen mode!
I failed it today!
just started, taking it slowly now though haha.
I fucked it up. Seem to be a lot of words with the same letters.
Yeah I think it's a bit too weird, Quordle is more fun
https://twitter.com/wekatweets/status/1504681446778163204
Whaaat! 30 guesses … I didn't realise #48 was available yet. Will give it a crack.
It's a test of similarity – i.e. how similar your brain is to a thesaurus.
yes, but some words that are quite similar have very low scores so it must be more than that
It's about the meanings, themes and thoughts behind the words. Synonyms on steroids. Maybe my practice of Cryptic crosswords helps!
If you fancy the same but different, try Globle.
It sure tests your knowledge of where countries are, and how to spell their names
https://globle-game.com/
Free speech makes the news again.
Michael Laws said, “I’m afraid the toxicity of social media is killing freedom of speech."
He reckons social media was stifling expression. This is after reaction to comments he made on his Facebook page. We're coming to terms with social media and how to use it and respond to it.
He'd written, "When did girls with lovely faces/breasts but unhealthy bums/legs become sexy?"
I'm not on Facebook to see if someone answered his question with: "About the same time arseholes became politicians or media personalities."
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/appalling-example-michael-laws-obesity-comments-draw-fire-online/TMWIRJNDILGBSHNIAB3P4QP4KQ/
There are all sorts of problems with FB and other social media. There are also problems with Laws being a sexist, body shaming, regressive.
Aww poor Antoinette Beck's "friend" it's harsh out here.
Not boding well for the stability of "The Platform"… lots of large egos on there. Without some kind of moderation, the “Free speech” outlet could easily devolve into thoughtless ranting that turns people off.
Sounds like he is unhappy that freedom of expression does not include the freedom from other private citizens making comments, judgement and even ostracism whether on social media, in a pub or in the town square.
He's mentioned a real issue, but skipped over it to pursue his low tastes.
Most are probably aware of Popper's paradox of tolerance, that An open society needs to be intolerant of intolerance.
The rise of Trumpism brings us the spectacle of people that will cheerfully suppress the freedoms of others, claiming the protection of an enlightenment constitution that they clearly do not subscribe to.
The right of propagandists who oppose free speech to claim their own speech is protected is necessarily less than infinite. In a moral sense they are freeloaders on their more enlightened fellows. But Laws just wants to talk about boobies.
Regarding the price of meat.
I would really like to know why meat is as expensive as it is in the supermarket.
A breakdown of costs in the total supply chain, from the price paid to the farmer, cost at the works, shipping to the wholesale butchery, cutting up, packaging, transport costs et etc.
You can see the beef and sheep schedules here on interest.co.nz – rural dropdown shows the various cattle schedules.
https://www.interest.co.nz/rural/sheep/lamb-y
Free marketeers would tell you it's just supply and demand, and prices meeting the market. But they ignore the anticompetitive behaviour of the supermarket duopoly that has been well documented and ongoing for decades.
‘Extraordinary profits’: New Zealand considers breaking up supermarket duopoly | New Zealand | The Guardian
I say, nationalise the lot. They are (like many segments of the economy) exploitative and profiteering from market power. Screwing suppliers and workers, and inflating prices of essentials.
Nationalising them isn't required. They each sell up say 25 sites across NZ which is then taken by a 3rd player (Aldi, sainsburys etc) and you have a competitive industry.
Aldi shook up oz along with Costco but the entrenched duopoly here requires political cajones to resolve.
That's the real issue….political will to rule for a fair deal for all kiwis.
Political will relies on opinion polls and vested interests. So public opinion is a prerequisite to any major change. And the public is quite restless and annoyed at the moment, so I do expect the government to come up with something more than the usual platitudes.
Your saying two players doesn't make a competitive market but 3 will? Colour me skeptical.
You have to start somewhere, it's just an example of one of the submissions I heard was tabled.
That submitter has a future on Tui billboards.
A different take on Simon Bridges. And one nearer the mark of the man than the usual fawning MSM interviews.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/18-03-2022/what-simon-bridges-means-to-me
Sam Brooks is just another queer stuck in the queer bubble of believing the queer community have some relevance in mainstream life. Bridges was just being what a conservative should be – true to himself and his worldview, like Sam Brooks is to himself and his worldview.
But I don't blame the queer community for their militancy, and attempting to push their agenda's on the world. For so long they where discriminated against. Alan Turing and Quentin Crisp are famous examples of the shit gay people had to endure.
As an aside, someone gave me a book called ''The Alan Turing Cryptic Codebreaker's Puzzle Book.'' F@#k me, you not only have to solve the puzzle… you sometimes have to work out what the question is. This blog gives me plenty of practice.
GDP is not infinite.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00723-1?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=bd4e52b6e3-briefing-dy-20220317&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-bd4e52b6e3-47041915
“A report published last week by the World Health Organization (see go.nature.com/3j9xcpi) says that if policymakers didn’t have a “pathological obsession with GDP”, they would spend more on making health care affordable for every citizen. Health spending does not contribute to GDP in the same way that, for example, military spending does, say the authors, led by economist Mariana Mazzucato at University College London.”
GDP is a crude measure but it serves the interests of the corporate elites plundering the Earth, who only measure things in terms of money.
"Health spending does not contribute to GDP in the same way that, for example, military spending does, say the authors, led by economist Mariana Mazzucato at University College London.”
The authors apparently say this, and you quote this but what on earth does it mean? Can you explain this statement?
https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/council-on-the-economics-of-health-for-all/who_councilbrief3.pdf?sfvrsn=b121f943_11&download=true
Its long and involved and will still leave you asking the same question.
It means that a healthy working populace is not valued properly by GDP measures. But around the world (especially with Covid) it has been shown that a functioning public health system is actually better for the economy than sending workers and their families into bankruptcy when someone is hit by illness or accident.
How prioritizing health could help rebuild economies | McKinsey
You do realise that the article you linked to is in direct opposition to the one that is the basis of Stephen D's post?
I have read both and do not see where the conflict lies. Both argue that GDP is incomplete and measures the price of everything but the real value of nothing.
Just like on a personal level, we take our health for granted, until one day misfortune strikes.
Please elaborate.
One has its foundation in degrowth and wishes to destructure GDP (Doughnut economics) whereas the other advocates growth as measured by GDP and promotes its adoption through the measure seen as problematic by the former….they couldnt be more opposed if they tried.
The problem the original has (doughnut) and the point I was making to Alwyn was, it is utopic without any roadmap…..great to have a vision but difficult to support without the 'how' and probably why GDP remains the poor measure we use ….the lack (yet) of a viable alternative.
Perhaps they choose to see health spending as a cost and military spending as an investment; in that mindset a fighter jet will seem a more effective acquisition than a linear accelerator and the trained staff to run it.
Look at anything GDP measures in the desperately out of date 20th-century model: who chooses the values and categories; quis custodes custodiet?
Is that small thought too 'simplistic'?
Not a simple thought, a reasonable explanation.
It's journos with a conscience vs zombies in Russia.
Okay, I need to explain the difference between those two job descriptions. When I was working in the TVNZ newsroom 30 years ago I cut stories for reporters & journalists, but often for a hybrid professional category called news producers. This third category were given responsibility for producing news stories on an assigned basis by the programme producer.
Marina seems to fall into this category of a journalist who also produces tv news stories. The fact [see her wiki] that she had done so for 20 years for the state broadcaster suggests attainment of a senior position.
Since her father is Ukrainian and her mother Russian, her identity naturally forms a bridge between the two nations. Childhood in Chechnya during the war there is probably a contributor to her antiwar feeling.
In this report she is given a third job description. I was a video editor (the craftsperson who actually creates the product) and I worked with journos who operated as programme editors sometimes. I suspect her role was sufficiently senior that she did that editorial work as part of her normal duties.
The four resignations we know of are probably just high-level news due to reputation – tip of the iceberg I suspect. State compulsion to produce disinformation creates a toxic work environment. For workers to sacrifice their career and possibly their safety (or even their life) it shows an intense commitment to a better alternative.
For workers to sacrifice their career and possibly their safety (or even their life) it shows an intense commitment to a better alternative.
"Possibly their safety" I think is a given. Someone needs to get her out of Russia. She's in mortal danger.
And I agree the few resignations and the fleeing we know about is just the tip of the iceberg. I would suggest there are a great many Russians fleeing their homeland as we speak. We won't know how many until its all over – bar the shouting.
Could be her husband is in a position to protect her – he's also in a significant job elsewhere in Russian television. She's courageous (or naive) enough to refuse the offer from Macron.
It wouldn't hurt to offer her asylum in NZ – the odd journalist that understands and appreciates the importance of democracy would be a breath of fresh air.
I agree. Someone ought to email Mahuta & suggest she call in the Russian ambassador to make the offer!

The PM says that they will review mandates and passes next week.
So "clever" Luxton and Bishop declare to media ,"We demand that mandates and passes be dropped immediately."
When the PM announces such action next week, Lux/Bish will claim that they made the
PM act. How clever – not.
I demand that the sun sets this evening! And claim that I made it happen.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-omicron-national-party-leader-christopher-luxon-calls-for-vaccine-passes-mandates-passes-and-other-covid-19-restrictions-to-be-dumped/LFNBLVCZHGODSGCBBECBUJDAGY/
Yep, for the 20th time, and this time on a very busy Lower Hutt road, the National Party has declared this pandemic, over!
Until it's not, then we'll have to reinstate restrictions, The Bish adds helpfully.
Ah! The intellectual basis of virtually all prototype priesthoods. Time and season management.
Ahh but is only seasonal waves as Europe goes into its seventh winter in 2 years.
https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1503782053531193346
File this under would never happen.
Men who identify as women would never rape women in the single sex spaces that they are allowed to as they now identify as women.
Unless of course it does. And then what?
Well it is easy
Deny that there is a man on the 'female only ward'
Deny that a man could have been in the 'female only ward'
Tell the police that there was no man on the 'female only ward'
Disregards the Nurses, others Staff and CCTV Camera.
Tell the women (female adult human) who got raped that clearly she did not get raped cause there was no male on the 'female only ward'.
Instruct NHS staff to lie about men on the 'female only wards'.
Find CTTV camera and view the contents there of, learn that indeed there was a man on the female only ward and that indeed a women got raped.
Offer meaningless arse covering excuses to the victim who for a period of one year was told that a. there was no male on the female only ward, and b. that she never got raped at all, and thus there is nothing the Police should or could do.
And then have a Baroness state all of that in the house, and hope that by gosh, golly and the gods that shit will finally hit the fan, while simultaneous know that nothing will happen.
speech by the Baroness
CFWBaronessNicholsonHouseofLords170322_0104am
transcript on Glinner https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/baroness-nicholson-uncovers-a-horrific?s=r
female adult human beings, are they even human, and do we care at all?
Disclaimer: not all men rape, but the vast majority of rapists are men, and in the UK all rapists are men as in the UK by definition of the law a penis needs to be involved in that rape to make it rape. And yes, only men have penises.
I hope to find some time to follow that up and maybe write a post, but on the face of it that would have to be one of the worst instances I've seen of not just the problems with self-ID, but the problems with half the world, including many on the left, having lost their goddam minds.
It's massive gaslighting of the raped woman, women rape survivors, and well, just women generally.
Better you write this post then me, cause i am starting to piss vinegar when it comes to these stories that would never ever happen.
Also, there must be a better word then 'gaslighting' for the mindfuckery that we put women (adult human females) and girls (children human females) through in order to protect violent men no matter their self professed identity.
I watched her speech this morning, and looked up the NHS Annex A and B documents, and got confused over the apparent contradictions in advice.
However, Sex Matters organisation has gone through the documentation in a series of articles so I don't have to.
Download of pdf specifically to do with Annex B here:
https://sex-matters.org/posts/publications/reviewing-annex-b/
do you have a link to the series of articles? I find their website a bit hard to navigate.
Link, click view for starters …
what?
Using the link given, click view to see Annex B.
Just a site search for "Annex B".
Four hits, including the pdf linked above.
Other three are articles/posts:
NHS Hospitals: “single-sex” accommodation cannot be mixed sex
No need for sex data on domestic abuse? – regarding the impact on domestic violence refuges
EHRC to issue guidance on single-sex and separate-sex services
One aspect of this discussion, is that requests for clarity on this single-sex provision is often asked for, but not given. Even in institutional and government documents, the words sex, gender, and gender identity are often conflated and used interchangeably so that intention and meaning is impossible to define.
I can understand hte nurses stating that 'no men are on female (adult/child human females) only wards'
from the daily fail….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10500729/Nurses-sacked-raising-concerns-trans-patients-single-sex-wards.html
paywalled in the same sense The Times UK
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nhs-gaslights-women-who-want-single-sex-wards-as-transphobes-claims-nurse-9xntx69p5
from the Independent
so yeah, there is a law, but then there is a rule to ignore that law, and there is a rule to demonize those that point out that law by calling htem all sorts of not kind words…………and women and girls (the adult/child human female kind) are the ones paying the price.
But then, i guess someone is always forced to pay the piper, and why would it not be the adult/child human female kind. Its not as if they count, and have rights, or needs to respect, dignity and sex appropriate care and accommodation.
Times article archived here:
https://archive.ph/qMDlI
“This is the NHS gaslighting women patients,” she said. “In other policies, women patients who ask for wards to be single-sex are described variously as transphobic service users, offenders, perpetrators or those who should be given trans education sessions to improve their attitudes.”
How familiar.
So you are needing a double masectomy and some chemo for your cancer, but we have decided that before we can do that we need to give your trans education so as to improve your attitude before we can start working on that pesky breast cancer that brings you here and no you can not expect 'single sex accommodation' even tho we should actually provide this to you,.
That's how it reads to me as well.
thanks. Sorry, I thought you meant they'd done a series of posts on that case.
Oh, ok.
Apparently the amendment 184ZBA proposed by the Baroness was withdrawn.
UK Hansard regarding amendment here:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2022-03-16/debates/84C9B6AA-0214-4CEF-A41D-302373BDC190/HealthAndCareBill
Haven't had time to read through, but it may be of use if you are writing a post.
thanks Molly. I'll see if I can piece it all together, appreciate the links.
Sabine thanks for posting this. I had just copied the link.
This is what happens when the trans lobby infiltrates Govt organisations and gas lights people with statements like trans women are women.
It is an outrage that this could happen, then the hospital denied the rape as there were “ no males” there.
This is one of the many reasons organisations like SUFW have been trying to get across that there are some circumstances when women require their own spaces, eg bathrooms, hospital wards and prisons. For that the SUFW were utterly vilified and treated with contempt by female politicians…
this will not be published in any NZ media outlets because there is a shut down of anything that challenges gender ideology and their spin.
When JKR made the statement that "the be-penised individual that raped you was a woman" she was referring to the discussion at the time of the some 436 cases of rape over about 5 years in England and Wales that were recorded as being committed by 'women" In those jurisdictions, rape can only be committed by the unlawful use of a penis. So that is 436 complaints about rape, committed by individuals with a penis who demand that they be recognised as women. https://4w.pub/uk-home-office-orders/
Just watched the PM on Australian Sunrise tv promoting NZ as a travel destination. She does that so well, looks so charming, and has such a friendly, welcoming personality.
Simply can't imagine Luxon being able to carry off a promotional slot with any panache at all. I suppose he could remind the Aussies he ran the airline that they may fly on.
Watched it on the Herald website, so of course being the Herald, immediately after that up loomed a large photo of Luxon demanding restrictions be over NOW. Their editorial staff maintain they are balanced, according to a recent response to questions from the public. Never noticed that particularly.
The Herald/ Balanced? Oxymoron.
He waits for the government to signal it is making a review of policy and calls for change. If he was any faster follower, he would be accused of sniffing the PM's hair.
Granny Herald who was a cheerleader for the war in the Waikato?
No the bigger question should be why they have supported Jacinda as much as they have…
perhaps look as far as OneRoof for that
As a keen history buff, I am very interested to see what the new NZ history curriculum will be like. In school during the 1970s NZ history teaching was very limited.
It pretty much didn't exist. I learnt way more about Tudor and Stuart history than I ever learnt about anything in NZ.
Must have depended greatly on the Teachers..
In Primary school in Taranaki, in the 60's, I was taught a great deal about Māori culture and local history, including Parihaka down the road.
To the extent I didn’t realise Pakeha had a distinct culture until years later.
Stick games, Poi, Māori phrases and words were part of my education in that school, despite it being mostly Pakeha. (Between Ruapehu and Taranaki). Maybe it was the young, at the time, hippy Teachers?
Second World War, Tudors – still have my copy of Rowse's excellent book The England of Elizabeth, Wakefield Settlements in a way that presented the Wakefields as pioneering heroes.
Albert Wendt's poem post school introduced me to Parihaka and made me wonder why he felt anger that none of my European family or friends ever mentioned let alone expressed. That sent me on a journey of understanding NZ history in much more depth. Still my favourite poem.
ALBERT WENDT
Into the First Cold
1.
Once his sight and bones didn’t know the four seasons
He was born into Samoa’s two seasons of wet and dry
and the air’s wrap that rarely dropped below 22 degrees
The lush forests did not ever shed their green
and crops sucked up the soil’s precocious blood all year round
No need for fur or other animal skin or fabric
Apt nakedness was adequate clothing for the times
despite the Victorian taboo of covering from neck to toe
Not one inch of erect skin shine to be exposed
Sex was only for procreation and in the sin-chocka dark of night
2.
His first taste of ice water was a shocking burn around his teeth
then round his mouth and down his gullet and chest
as a long-nailed finger that scraped up choking tears
Ice cream was the only cold he loved but his family couldn’t afford it
He learned about snow and ice from books and films
Across the Pasefika on the banana boat out of the sun’s cling
into a cold that seeped down into his marrow and wouldn’t let go—
a journey from warm ease into seasick body crunched up
in his first ever woollen clothes and shoes the seas and skies turning
wilder darker predicting a New Zealand locked in the loneliness of cold
3.
First at boarding school under cone-perfect Taranaki beanied
with ice snow and tapu the cold and homesickness gripped his every bit
The teachers ordered early morning runs and cold showers afterwards
to toughen the will against the invading winter and shape them
into men who wouldn’t flinch from any kind of pain
Rugby and military drill were the other manly prescriptions
Twice weekly rugby practice and the game against another school and winter
Tackle and tackle attack and attack the pain was exhilarating and beat
the cold and forged the ideal team that would die for one another
Winning wasn’t everything—it was the only thing
Military drill in prickly uniforms with his courage as steely as the rifle
he carried erectly at the epic school parades with their much medalled
headmaster in splendid command and some of his teachers mimicking
the decorated heroes they’d been in the Second World War others with silence
refusing to glorify the futile leap into colonial wars’ insatiable gobs
Left-right left-right left-right halt! Young fit acclimatised he now lived
comfortably with the cold weather and being away from home
But every morning when he walked in Taranaki’s compass to breakfast
the mountain signalled not all was well with the path
His history teacher praised Te Whiti’s stand at Parihaka
He researched that and discovered almost 200 years
of settler invasion fraud and theft of iwi land
A deadlier cold slid into his throat and held him hostage
to an anger as rich as Taranaki’s beauty and defiance
of colonialism injustice and greed behind the eyes
Brilliant…poem.
''To the extent I didn’t realise Pakeha had a distinct culture until years later.''
I had a pakeha aunt pull me up when I said the exact same thing to her. My biggest mistake was thinking Maori culture was a way forward. It's not unless you are on the public tit – then it pays well.
We were well schooled in history when I was at school. Our teacher made it quite clear some Maori had been rorted out of land and that the crown had sometimes acted dishonourably much to the detriment of Maori self determination.
But…and this is a no-no, he also explained the benefits of colonisation, both for Maori and Pakeha.
Why do you say it is a no-no?
I'm a history teacher from the 70s. Explain to me why the benefits of colonisation are a 'no-no'.
In the modern context, colonisation is a woke whipping boy. An excuse for Maori failure. It supports woke culture.
I can't wait to see what the new school history studies have to say about colonisation.
Forget the 'woke whipping boy' ideological warblings.
Are you telling us that the benefits of colonisation will not be taught along with the downsides?
Because if you are, you dishonour the professional integrity of teachers, of academic knowledge, of the special understanding that history, the study of who we are, where we come from, what we have done as a human species brings us.
Which is why history, as a branch of learning, is so important.
And so feared by those who might feel ashamed, so liberating for those whose truth has been obscured and hidden, so enlightening for those who seek the truth and justice that come from real stories, told in truth and held up to the light of succeeding generations for their understanding and education.
Then we can investigate whether what you allege is true- that the teaching of colonisation as an historical concept is " an excuse for Māori failure", or on the other hand is an explanation for where our society has advanced from its earlier times, for good and bad, for good intentions or exploitation.
Truth ought not be feared. Historians teach the subject so we may learn from it and grow stronger as a society.
The fear comes from the realisation that we might need to change, alter our ways, and make right the wrongs.
History might teach us all that the cost of doing differently need not necessarily disadvantage us but rather benefit us all in a more harmonious and essentially just, fair and equal society.
Thanks, Blade, for the chance to put into words why I was a teacher of history. This is so important for our maturity as a society.
We like to forget.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/201839522/taranaki-tensions-rooted-in-pakeha-collective-amnesia
He says Maori have done historical research as part of the treaty settlement process but there hasn't been similar work done by pakeha because the Crown does that work.
"The unspoken contract that goes into this arrangement is don't disrupt the amnesia, don't disrupt the intentional and organised forgetting of our history that is a huge part of our pakeha culture.'
Regarding the rant about leaving the Māori language to die. The guest speaker at our graduation class in 1970 was the local Professor of German. He decried Māori as a second class language because it used so many borrowed words to overcome its vocabulary impoverishment.
He orated, naturally, in English……… what occurred to me even then was the errancy of this, and his contrary refusal to comprehend that the language he spoke in was similar with its seconded vocabulary- from French, Germanic and other sources- for example, garage, verandah, and the 30 instances I have used in these two paragraphs.
I wonder whether, as our German university academic for instance munched on his hamburger, did he discover what that grilled delicacy in its linguistic origins contained- beef, sauce, farmhouse bread, oil, tomato, onion, lettuce salad, mustard, salsa, all served with panache by the chef. Bon appétit!
Yes English probably has borrowed more words from other languages than any other. It is one of its delights. It is also clear that NZ English is really starting to adopt Maori words as well – hui, whanau, morena… I hear these as part of normal conversation spoken by lots of people who are not even close to fluent.
And then there is the beauty of words in all languages, that have no quite equivalent expression in English that are starting to make a difference in NZ thinking – manaakitanga in how we treat people and kaitiakitanga in how we treat our environment. Terms that I just never heard growing up that I now hear often.
The Suez crisis
TheIrish Question
The leadup to the first world war
thats how I remember it
We had 'the coming of the Maori to NZ' 3 years running, when I was in Primary School.
No idea why, or what happened to the curriculum in those years to get a double-up.
Lots of current events stuff around Bastion Point and the Maori Land marches, and later, the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal (social studies, politics, history).
Catholic primary school in a pretty much working-to-middle-class Auckland suburb, FWIW.
Really, then, as now, what will matter is the individual teacher. A good teacher with an interest in the subject will teach it well, and make it interesting; a poor teacher who is going through the motions, will make it dull as ditch-water.
Kids who have a passion for history will find their own resources (and that's a lot easier now, than it was 40 years ago); kids with zero interest will zone out in class, and forget what they've been taught in a week's time.
"Kids who have a passion for history will find their own resources (and that's a lot easier now, than it was 40 years ago); kids with zero interest will zone out in class, and forget what they've been taught in a week's time."
And aint that the truth
Have often wondered about the ECE industry and their capitalist, extreme profit model. Also, what are they teaching our youngest people?
It appears some of them are teaching racist, anti-semitic propaganda via BitChute.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/kids-kampus-parent-in-disbelief-as-auckland-preschool-emails-far-right-conspiracy-website-link-to-caregivers/OPCA27YFCKJLB3K6WQUCXLMQZU/
This kind of thing is why I strongly support freedom of speech.
The cognitive dissonance of "man".
https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/127943246/people-power-shames-governments-into-action
https://www.reuters.com/business/ukraine-crisis-could-cut-1-off-global-growth-this-year-oecd-2022-03-17/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Reuters%20Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=17-3-22&utm_campaign=17-3-22
A peaceful resolution, rather than a Cold War with Russia – and its consequences for western capability to contain the rise of China is possible.
https://original.antiwar.com/david_stockman/2022/02/23/george-kennan-warned-nato-expansion-would-lead-to-this/
https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/128082010/we-should-dump-the-net-zero-carbon-goal
No more vast than a new Cold War involved weaning the EU off Russia oil an gas and the global impact on growth and inflation.
Murderous little prick's boosters must be feeling real good now.
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1504627665097089027
Whats wrong with it?
He didn't sell it enough. I don't think his heart was in the role this time.
Bit like Bruce Willis you reckon, only in it for the money
Bruce Willis career was negatively affected when Christmas movie roles dried up. He was simply type cast.
His best was Fifth Element – there are plenty more Moebius or Druillet stories he could have done.
I see your Fifth Element and I raise you a Pulp Fiction
12 monkeys.
Cool! Obviously uniting the political left and political right is a task overdue for action! Their covert collusion has been going on too long.
Not sure if he's got what it takes, mind you, but full marks for ambition. It does mean, of course, that he will be unable to issue policies that are divisive. "Aha!" I hear you say. Don't assume he actually means what he says! Well, yeah, right-wing politician, fair point. Still, it does leave him wide open to attack from hungry journalists seeing a double-standard looming in whatever utterances he eventually utters…
Perhaps he is looking to attract United Future ex voters. He needs a worm!
Yes:
We need as many anti-mandate parties as the ballot papers can fit. Also on polling day, if none of these fits you precisely, then its best to tick all the ones you support.
lol
https://twitter.com/LI_politico/status/1504656859818754052
Dear Matt King,
the current mandates against punching Matt King in the face are offending my freedom and I would like them removed, just in your case…
If you are sincere about bullshit freedoms which encroach on others and prevent their liberty to a much greater extent please start with this one. I’m sure we can find some takers to protest this mandate by punching you in the face.
sincerely
newsense
Mandates will be over (or close) by the election!!!!
Every disgruntled ambassador sent back to Russia increases pressure on the regime.
Everyone asks; 'What can we do to stop the war in Ukraine?'
The answer is very little. But every little bit helps.
Maybe we could do this.
Send the Russian Ambassador in Wellington packing
So what if our protest makes little difference, every little bit helps. Surely it is better than doing nothing.