The video of the apache helicopter crew laughing as they murder unarmed civillians in Baghdad that was leaked by Chelsea Manning was an event that forever changed my view of what collateral damage actually meant.
It is well known that information is power so unsurprising that elites strive to control the public narrative and unsurprising that Manning paid such a high price. To my mind Obamas finest act was one of his last when he commuted her 35 year sentence.
Manning has just cofirmed her candidacy for the Maryland senate race as a Democrat against the incumbent Ben Cardin. As you may expect this has gone down like a lead balloon. Partly this is because of the realisation that due to her name recognition Cardin will have to spend money rather than just sleepwalk to victory.
So how will Cardin rise to the Manning challenge? Early indications are that the attack lines will be Manning as Russian puppet leaking to an arm of Russian intelligence (wikileaks).
So I guess that answers the question of whether with the whole Russia thing we are dealing with WMD or McCarthyism. The perception of an evil enemy has been created and now all dissenting views get tarred with the evil enemy brush.
I link a twitter post of Zac Petkanas relating to his views on Chelsea Manning and also a Hill article explaining his position and role at the DNC where he leads the narrative of Trump as Putin puppet
The main reason manning’s candidacy has gone down like a lead balloon is that there is very strong support for the military by the US public and rightly or wrongly Manning is seen by many in the public as breaching the trust/treasonous and adding in the sex change in what is still a deeply conservative populace won’t help either.
Sorry for being unclear but I meant gone down like a lead balloon with the powerful not the general population. As regards the general population we will soon know their feelings about Manning
Trump is where he is because of his anti-entrenched power rhetoric. He’s then gone on to entrench the power of the rich even more.
Manning actually did something against that entrenched power. And the USians do support their troops and they support people doing the Right Thing at great risk to themselves.
And to go alongside your Petkanas twitter stream, we have Neera Tanden, who’s apparently the president of the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington re-tweeting :-
“Senator Cardin authored and released a 200 page masterpiece on Russian influence in western elections. Suddenly he has a primary from Kremlin stooge Assange’s Wikileaks primary source Chelsea Manning. The Kremlin plays the extreme left to swing elections. Remember that.”
This conspiracy theory mocks itself. The idea that Vladimir Putin sat in the Kremlin, steaming over Cardin’s report on Russia and thus, developed a dastardly plot to rid himself of his daunting Maryland nemesis — “I know how to get rid of Cardin: I’ll have a trans woman who was convicted of felony leaking run against him!” — is too inane to merit any additional ridicule. But this is the climate in Washington: No conspiracy theory is too moronic, too demented, too self-evidently laughable to disqualify its advocates from being taken seriously — as long as it involves accusations that someone is a covert tool of the Kremlin.
The only “efficiency” I can see in the private education sector is in it’s ability to extract profit out of gullible RWNJs who can’t bear the thought of their little darlings being under the influence of the State system, least their poor wee minds be corrupted by alternative views to what they get at home.
…. and of course its ability to exploit foreigners from the 3rd world – aided and abetted of course with a bureaucracy (a private and public partnership) designed to lie and cheat to anyone that comes into contact with it.
It’s almost like a Nigerian internet scam.
Now we need new Labour Coalition Government to investigate the past publicly broadcast allegations made by Matthew Hooten on Radio Live against the last National Government illegal activities.
“put these dead bones to rest”
Specifically Hooten began rolling the ball in a ‘lively discussion’ with Miscelle Boag the past secretary of the National party.
Mike Williams was also on this debate as the past secretary of the Labour Party also and ca recall this event during the investigations that should now take place.
The first allegation was against the then “Minister of transport” Steven SS Joyce, who was apparently involved with a shady deal to allow his close mate’ of his who was a roading contractor to secure a multi million dollar road contract.
But the roading contractor apparently got into a dispute with MBIE “Ministry of Bussiness Innovation and Employment” over the contract.
The allegations can be heard here on this link to the audio on from ‘Radio live’ at that time 31/8/14.
The debarkle was AT THE 28 minute mark near the end of this 40 minute debate between Hooten and Boag.
Mark Sainsbury says criminal charges should now be leveled and an investigastion needs to be made.
This whole sordid event of “collusion against all political opponents” including the 2011 attack on Labour MP leader Phil Goff, (the Hanover financial ruin debarkle) and all these resulting shady deals be investigated by the new Government over these allegations since National at this time failed to investigate these inappropriate events during the sacking of the ‘Justice Minister Judith Collins and how the SIS obtained the “leaked email” – documents to fire the Minister using Whaleoil Cameon Slater and his connection with the PM and Jason Ede and PM office Wayne Eagleson as Mike Williamson is also importantly also saying on this clip he believes “an investigation is warranted”.
Actually, that is the benefit of PPPs – massive profits for the private sector with all the risk and extra costs landing on the public generating even more profits for the private sector.
They’re just of no benefit to the public as they cost more and provide less service.
Yeah … It’s not so much a problem of PPPs as such as the corruption of the government that administers them. PPPs in Korea deliver as promised or get restructured, and their CEOs investigated by the prosecution service. Strangely this make them work very hard not to bilk the greater population, and to deliver services as promised or better. Those that don’t do not survive.
Part of the problem highlighted in that article is the collapse of the private provider to bankruptcy.
Now, when that happens should the government step in and prop up the business and thus rewarding failure?
Should it buy out the business as the 5th Labour government bought out Transrail for an extortionate amount and thus rewarding failure?
Or should it let the business collapse and the service it provides go with it? This way doesn’t rewarding failure as the other two do but then it’s a government service and is probably essential.
PPPs are essentially a way to get government guaranteed profits with all the risk taken up by the government.
If corruption is a problem, and it is, then we need better laws covering it and I can hear the screams from the RWNJs about that already. Of course, we should still put such laws and investigators in place.
Then there’s the question of if there’s even enough scale in the country for the services provided. Is there really enough ex-government road building in the country to warrant having multiple contractors available to do it? Or are those contractors solely there because the government contracts out road building? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter which means that it’s far more efficient to simply re-institute the MoW and have the government build all their own roads.
If the government is the sole client to keep contractors going then it’s better done directly by the government. Removes huge amounts of bureaucracy and the dead-weight loss of profit.
Last year was one of the hottest years ever, according to new temperature data.
Provisional figures published by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit shows 2017 was the third warmest on record and the hottest ever without El Niño – a natural phase of the climate system that results in warmer temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
The global average temperature last year was about 1C above pre-industrial times, and 0.4C above the 1981-2010 average.
The figures are released on the same day as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Nasa release their independently produced records of Earth’s surface temperatures.
“Forget what the sceptics will tell you, climate change is real and is happening right now,” said Professor Martin Siegert, a climate change expert at Imperial College London.
“With it comes the extreme storms and droughts experienced at historical levels across the world. This is yet another wake-up call – to develop a zero-carbon, sustainable economy before it’s too late to mitigate further dangerous climate change. Our efforts must be redoubled.
Plant based diets and specifically vegan diets are all the rage right now. In fact, vegan foods were one of the fastest growing supermarket categories of the last few years.
It appears the promotion of plant-based lifestyles in mainstream media and among celebrity circles — think Ellen and Portia, Alicia Silverstone and Ariana Grande — is continuing to gain momentum, both for the associated health benefits as well as environmental concern and to support animal rights.
There are numerous health benefits associated with plant based diets — lower body weights, reduced risk of developing some types of cancer, reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes and a longer lifespan.
The health benefits associated with a vegan diet comes from a diet based largely on natural, unprocessed foods.
As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn’t need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.
And the health benefits of bigger brains and better tools include digging up fossil fuels, population explosion, climate change, increased lead in the enviroment, WMDs and genocide…
Interesting link Draco! I found the comparison between average IQ scores of 1937 and 1997 (80 rising to 100) startling to say the least. *
There is also the well known factor of secular development within a population. While it is not clear that these trends are entirely the result of improving nutrition –
Changes in nutrition alone could not account for the trends which exceed the original socioeconomic differentials. In the United States, there have been per capita increases in the intake of protein and fat from animal sources, decreases in carbohydrates and fat from vegetable sources, and little change in caloric intake. It is not clear that these changes constitute better nutrition. The secular trends could reflect environmental improvements, specifically changes in health practices and living conditions leading to improvements in mortality rates and life expectancy. These factors are interrelated with those concerning family size. Also genetic factors, especially heterosis, may have played a small role in causing the secular trends
* For those who are going to argue that this is a misunderstanding of IQ and the average is always 100 – go and read the link Draco provides to see how the 80 figure for 1937 is arrived at.
Just don’t bother discussing the issue. It isn’t of importance to you.
Just like the morals of slavery weren’t important to the Pole and Norris families in Liverpool in the 1750s.
No Ed I don’t know what you think because I’m not a mind reader, thats why I’m asking what you would do and preferably if you could answer without the use of some random youtube that has nothing to do with the question
Omega 3 including the food intake of the brain that plays an important role in the development of cell membranes in the brain and neurological system signal path. Medically proven omega 3 is able to optimise the development of the brain’s memory both in children and adults. This means that better met the needs of omega 3, especially for those who find it easy to forget.
what i want to know is how vegans would stop nz being over run with wild deer,goats and pigs if we stopped hunting them ,because short of releasing a wolf breed and probably a big cat overrun we would be , spose we could just poison them.
Why don’t you become informed on the subject?
Here.
Watch this film.
[I’m putting you in premod until you stop spamming the site with videos. You’ve been warned about this multiple times before. If it happens again I will give a ban.
To be clear, spamming is when you start a conversation, someone asks you a reasonable question and instead of answering that you post a link to a long video and expect them to watch it. Or worse, in this case to a trailer that doesn’t in any way address the question.
Spamming is also posting multiple video links without context. Or just posting too many. If you are still unclear, ask and I will pick the comment up on Moderation. – weka]
Have seen it thank you.
I do think waghorn was deliberately taking the subject away from industrial farming.
And in future I shall ignore such diversions rather than post a video.
He’d probably suggest that government cullers are sent out to kill them but under no circumstances is the meat or skins to be harvested or maybe the animals are trapped and exported
Ahh poisoning…now theres a topic to get everyone going
in general pests are in control from what i see. although since it became next to impossible to sell wild venison there numbers could are building up massively , i’m just dying for a vegen to tell me how we would deal with it if we stopped harvesting them.
rabbits are still a huge issue in the SI. Farmers now use 1080 and other poisonings are routine. It’s a requirement from some councils to control, so if you don’t poison you have to do something else. A scheme that matches landowners with shooters sounds very useful to me.
I agree about the vegan thing. Even putting farming aside for a minute, huge damage is done to ecosystems from rabbits alone. This is why DOC uses poison on the conservation lands, it’s very hard to regenerate native plants in many places because of the rabbits. I’ve seen places eaten back to bare soil and stone (although that’s also to do with previous land management practices like overgrazing and burnoffs). If we don’t act as the main predator of rabbits we are basically saying it’s ok for those ecosystems to be impoverished permanently, or to even die.
The health benefits of being a vegetarian/vegan are undeniable, that certain celebrities promote them is one of the poorest reasons to become vegetarian.
I would expect the largest barriers locally to becoming vegetarian/vegan in no particular order would be:
Cultural attitudes to food
Apathy/lazziness
Perceived cost
Perceived lack of choice/taste
Satisfaction with current diet
It would be interesting to model the possible effect of everyone on the planet moving to veganism/vegetarian over the next decade and the effect on animal welfare and the ecosystem.
The new baby of the Prime Minister will be a hunter gatherer, burning fossil fuels to go fishing and most likely will be very neo-liberal like the parents. Sadly for you there will be nothing you can do to stop this.
1. Life will go on. It may be somewhat reduced but it will go on as has happened before. Five times in fact with the greatest being the Permian Extinction Event which even managed to even wipe out a few insects. Took ten million years for the biodiversity to recover.
2. That probably has something to do with all the grains fed to the meat first rather than an actual law of physics.
What next? Working conditions are really bad in some foreign countries so we should give up work? You really should look up the meaning of “non-sequitur.”
“A plant based diet has been shown in numerous studies to have big health benefits. In general, vegetarians live 6-9 years longer than non-vegetarians, and vegans longer again.
Many of today’s most common killer diseases are linked to diet. In particular, heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers and diseases resulting from obesity. The vegetarian diet can help in all these conditions.
Additionally, the vast array of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients in plant-based foods offer significant health protection. There are still more plant compounds being discovered that are found to offer health benefits.”
Enthusiasts for a particular diet or medicinal drug often promote the idea of “lower death rate from killer disease X.” They usually skip over the question of whether there’s any difference in all-cause mortality, usually because this:
Conclusions: United Kingdom–based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation. [my emphasis]
Actual cost (especially when you include spoilage), the huge hurdle to adapt (I’ve involuntarily vomited nearly every vegetable I’ve ever eaten). But sure, for those who can afford the mental, physical, and financial toll – or who don’t have it – good on them.
The health benefits of being a vegetarian/vegan are undeniable, that certain celebrities promote them is one of the poorest reasons to become vegetarian.
Two things:
1. Being a vegan is detrimental to your health – you have to work pretty hard at managing your diet to maintain even a semblance of good health as a vegan, which is one reason people tend to drop it after a while.
2. The health benefits of being a vegetarian require context. Yes, being a vegetarian is way healthier than a standard western diet of refined carbs and fat, but that has little to do with meat consumption or the lack of it. The typical Masai warrior of a few hundred years ago rarely ate a vegetable but could snap your typical vegetarian like a twig.
Completely untrue. I quote from the article I posted at 4.
“There are numerous health benefits associated with plant based diets — lower body weights, reduced risk of developing some types of cancer, reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes and a longer lifespan.”
“There are numerous health benefits associated with plant based diets — lower body weights, reduced risk of developing some types of cancer, reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes and a longer lifespan.”
Compared with the high-carb standard western diet, yes. But lots of us non-vegetarians don’t eat that diet. There are no health benefits for us in a vegetarian diet, just crappier food and extra work to get decent nutrition.
Lots of vegans have health problems after the first few years. I’m sure some people can do ok on vegan diets long term, although we don’t know how that plays out over the really long time frames. Most people need animal products in their diet in some form.
A title designed to lead to confusion over if the First Man is receiving public money, but it actually being a fluff piece on Clark Gayford so people can get upset about low level news designed to have positive news about our lovely PM (whilst ignoring ow the previous PM’s got the same quite a lot)
God what an eyesore, did the architect reuse plans from the early 1990’s? What a shithole it looks like “Albany on sea” for the ‘fast tracked’ America’s cup.
If only normal people got such benefits as fast tracking, but if it comes to billionaires, hobbies and sports then… all hands on board from taxpayers money, stealing the harbour and fast track consenting of an eyesore. Couldn’t they at least design something that looks architecturally sophisticated?
I guess it is a slight step up from the shed 10 efforts/Cloud that bares no relationship to the harbour at all or each building, and has become a knic knack/bad experiences ghetto, that Aucklander’s keep away from.
Another wasted opportunity where corporates and politicians with little imagination and skills siphon off taxpayer money and resources with crap ideas and designers to make a dollar for some corporate enterprise or grab the limelight for themselves, while pretending it will have some use for the wider public later.
Some good public spaces in Auckland, Auckland Art gallery, The tank farm areas and Ponsonby central… all those areas humming day and night, not the ghetto’s that other spaces become.
lprent
I am thinking that you need to think about moderation and discuss with the other mods to find some way to manage it better. There are obvious cases of keeping trolls who want to upset , divide, sneer diminish not disagree and discuss.
It would be a shame to lose the interesting minds that come here and have helped make TS the blog it is. I think it is time to democratise the moderation. I also think
that regular writers with something to say should be able to be paused quietly when in the midst of some long obssession about the usual suspects. And let’s not have onerous PC chastisements. You are all clever buggers, you should be able to come up with a rewritten treatise for mods. The terms under which we operate everything now are changing and we have found we have to be adaptable to stay up with the flow. What is important to you, and I think having concerned, sincere, thoughtful, practical and kindly people who try to be literate and try to use the modern systems online must be, and surely you want to keep them coming and supporting the site or you could lose this.
It seems to me we all are in a slow war. The French Revolution was bloody and dramatic, this is slower but is impacting all the same, and the nobs are trying to turn the revolution over, get their advantages and prominence back. We are getting the let them eat cake while they sleep in the cars and drink themselves silly with our welfare money stuff. We are like WW2 Resistance, who were trained to be fast thinkers and practical doers, and flexible, and were also prepared to die because what they were fighting for was freedom from tyranny.
I think that you and the mods are important for whatever we are fighting for, the exact vision of which is unclear because of fast moving events, but the knowledge of what is already happening and what is likely to occur, should spur us on. Let all good men come to the aid of the party. All sounds a bit hysterical doesn’t it, but if we don’t stimulate those brain cells and get through to others, we are on a hiding to nowhere. TS is useful, good, and needs some changes to keep it in its premier place, and it’s your baby. So could you and the others consider changing mod practices which were drawn up early on, but the baby is now an enquiring, questioning teen ready for a Bar Mitzvah or something like that coming of age recognition.
[from the Policy, one of the reasons for moderating,
Abusing the sysop or post writers on their own site – including telling us how to run our site or what we should write. This is viewed as self-evident stupidity, and should be added as a category to the Darwin Awards.
Maybe have a rethink about how you are framing your comments here. Also, the amount of work you are saying we should be doing. You could try educating yourself about how moderation and writing works here and why it is the way it is before venturing into telling us what we should be doing – weka]
“you need to think about moderation and discuss with the other mods to find some way to manage it better. There are obvious cases of keeping trolls who want to upset , divide, sneer diminish not disagree and discuss.”
Agreed fully greywarshark, these trolls add nothing of any value to the uplifting of our health/well-being/quality-of life for all here and just put others off, which is their only role sadly.
Over at Martyn Bradbury’s ‘The daily blog’ he has heavily sanctioned these trolls already.
So we need to be mindful of keeping the discussion focused on the article we all contribute to assist the new labour coalition in making our country better to live in with a far better enjoyment of life.
Hope we get rid of these National Party disruptive trolls finally.
As long as your not a racist puke, or dump your hate on people Puckish rogue. I don’t care what you say.
That said, your girl Denise, how you feeling about that slacker? Just another lazy tory mp we all got to pay for? Or do you have good feelings about the torpid lunch eater?
Could we at least sacrifice one troll? We could do it spectacularly, all pile on, beat the stuffing out of them and block their responses? That’d be a larf! Pete George already thinks we do that to him whenever he visits, poor luv. We could (metaphorically) barbecue James or give Pucky a good rogueing 🙂
RG
One a month would be a good ritual. It could be done democratically, by voting and then that one stood down for a month. The trolls would enjoy it, boasting how many times they had been stood down.
No I think Grey is musing about something completely different – but I won’t elaborate as I might get myself banned. Just have a look at yesterdays OM for background.
@greywarshark
“It would be a shame to lose the interesting minds that come here and have helped make TS the blog it is.”
and “including telling us how to run our site or what we should write. This is viewed as self-evident stupidity” (moderators comment).
Leading horses to water, and all that. We’ll see how long those interesting minds continue to visit, and whether or not they can be bothered with the dogmatic and egotistic.
And of course, if ‘they’ (them, the other) were really committed and discontented, they’d set up their own blog apparently.
Easier sometimes to just peruse and watch what happens.
Anyway, for the next few weeks, I’m off to places in the third world where community, compassion, integrity, etc., (values ‘the left’ once prided itself on) still exist and are necessary for survival.
Yes OwT here I and you are thinking of survival of humanity and some graciousness, and many that come here one would think, to discuss that, don’t give a tinker’s curse about it. I’ve been coming here for years and observing and thinking and writing and I don’t know if there has been the enlightenment of all and esprit de corps that I expected after all that time – seems to degenerate all the time into just a place for verbal scrapping and point scoring. Bit disappointing really.
weka
You could try not batting back any suggestions for alteration of your approach, and actually treat the commenters as fellow workers in a thinking community, not like students that need behaviour conditioning. It seems that you are an academic or in the teaching profession or have adopted didactic behaviour. There is a group of moderators who have for years adopted a general attitude to the blog which has had a robust flexibility, that seems to be reduced. All commenters are treated the same, with little respect for long-term commenters who have tried to add to the value of the blog.
Not everyone can manage moderation, and that seems to create a division.
I am thinking that there should be a level below the moderators made up of commenters who like to act responsibly.
Anyway I have written enough now, something on OM 18/1 I think and a couple today. I seem to just strike anger in you. How dare I put my ideas forward and want them heard and considered? So I am bowing out, I am not wanted and just get my serious and sensible suggestions to develop the blog further ridiculed by others so i won’t bother further.
[“How dare I put my ideas forward and want them heard and considered?”
It’s all about the *how. There is a difference between sharing ideas and telling Authors/Admin what to do. I know this because I commented on moderation for years as a commenter, in some pretty tense situations, and was never moderated. I paid a lot of attention to the moderators, including very hard out moderators like Lynn. I listened to what they said, and why they did what they did, so that I could understand how it worked here.
And yes, given the shit that’s gone down on this site in the past few years, and what that has cost people, including losing Authors, I don’t actually rate your views on moderation when they are presented in such ignorant ways. You still don’t get it and show no interest in listening to people who have a great deal more experience and knowledge about moderation here than you do.
And yes, I am fucked off now. Because after over a day of trying to evenhandedly explain some things here about moderation I’m still having to deal with people who think it’s all about them. Fellow workers? FFS, when I see commenters taking responsibility and doing some of the mahi around here to help the site instead of treating TS as some kind of personal sand pit where their needs are paramount, I’m sure that things will be more equitable. But as it stands the more work you create for moderators the more likely they are to crack down harder. Lynn set the tone for that and it predates myself and Bill by years.
I actually think you have some good ideas, but your framing and timing is just way way off. Take some time out, because now I am shutting this down. There is no problem with talking about moderation, but you don’t get to tell Authors what to do or how to run the site. If you can’t figure out the difference, then ask when you get back and I’ll explain it. But this has run long enough. 1 week ban. If you have a problem with that, try emailing Lynn and he can explain to you why moderation in the end is precisely about behaviour modification. – weka]
and fwiw, I’m really open to discussing my moderation style. I”m just waiting for someone who knows how to do that constructively and with respect for the Authors here. Not all moderators are willing to do that.
I’d do it meself, but as you know, authors getting banned and demoted aint a good look. It wouldn’t take long. lol.
And besides that, my spealing is shote.
Technically, I can start writing again any time (I still have an author log in) and I’m actively considering it because the TS community means a lot to me and the blog itself clearly needs a shot in the arm.
However, the problem remains that at least two of my fellow authors (with mod powers) appear to find working class voices hard to handle. Ironic given that this blog started out intending to be a voice for the labour movement and is now appears to be almost exclusively written and moderated by folk whose exposure to workers is limited to ordering flat whites from them.
The real sadness of the situation is that when CV and I were booted out in late 2016, losing two male authors was supposed to usher in a new dawn of women writers. TS was suddenly going to become a ‘safe space’ for women and a thousand flowers would bloom. Predictably*, that never happened, and what has happened is that other writers, male and female, have drifted off.
I note TS is losing some terrific commenters too. When we piss off the likes of Marty Mars, the site drifts ever closer to being a blandly bourgeois bore fest.
On the upside, we have some new talent writing. Advantage continues to delight and I can’t begin to tell you what a terrific chap Enzo is, both as a writer and an activist. Fingers crossed there are more engaging writers to come.
So, I’m going to have a hard think this weekend about resuming writing here. Like everyone, I have other calls on my time and energy, however, I think TS is worth the effort.
*I wrote a post, ‘Broken’, which touched on what I saw as the difficulties for women participating on blogs. I still think the post is relevant.
[By the general agreement of the Authors in the back end last year, TRP’s login permissions are set at Contributor not Author. This means he can’t publish posts here. He can submit posts, but they will have to be approved by an Author with Editor level permissions. The dropping of his permissions to Contributor happen some time after he left the site, and it was prompted by him maligning TS off site (dropping permissions also meant he could no longer access the back end discussions but he hadn’t been involved in those for some time anyway).
There are so many mistruths in what he just wrote. I’m not even going to begin to untangle that, because we’ve been here too many times before. Given the last time he was banned as a commenter was for telling lies about an author, it’s really hard to see how he could return as an Author now and not have the same old shit go down again.
As far as I know there are only two Authors that have had their permissions dropped at TS – CV and TRP. TPR’s came after several years and multiple rounds of conflict that cause problems for the community, site, and authors. He is also one of the reasons why it is so hard to get women to write here.
Had he been willing to work *with other authors here, he would know that quite a lot has been done in the background on the women writers project. I will note that he had on a number of occasions worked against women and what we are wanting to have happen here. I think this comment demonstrates that he is still largely incapable of being here without causing problems.
I’m sure there will be discussion about this in the back end but I am going ban him now from commenting here, because of the lying and because of the potential to create the same sets of problems he was responsible for before. I also want the women’s project to largely have a free run once it gets into the public.
I reckon this site needs you now more than ever.
Hope your hard think works out for us mortals at the standard.
Off to read that blog now. Always a pleasure, never a chore. 🙂
No worries, mate. I don’t always agree with you, but I do respect your integrity and latent honesty.
I’ve never had to worry about home town modding on your posts.
[given the abuse I’ve just read in the back end in your comments sitting in moderation, I’m not even going to look at this further. 6 month ban – weka]
[further escalating and misogynistic abuse has led to a permanent ban. – weka]
I’m dropping your comments into Moderation until I have a chance to look at them. You can probably expect a shortish ban for attacking Authors. I’ll put a moderation note up when I’ve had a better look.
So its not enough that Seth Rogen ruins probably the greatest comic series ever written (Preacher) but know he wants to take a big, steaming dump on the best superhero parody ever (although The Pro is pretty good)
And I think Jonathan Freedland is about the worst at the Guardian.
A pro Israel hawk, he led a non stop assault on Corbyn. He makes Josie Pagani and Phil Quinn look like mice.
Jonathan Freedland, writing one of his toxic editorials in The Guardian, begs to differ. The fact that CIA didn’t release any evidence they did it…is evidence they didn’t do it, according to Freedland. His column, long on mockery and self-righteous smears but short on evidence (as usual), does nothing but demonstrate three things:
1. He is only just barely acquainted with the facts of the JFK case.
2. He has no faculty for basic logical thinking.
3. He is not averse to practicing intellectual dishonesty.
If you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention, none of these will come as a surprise.
But this article isn’t about JFK – we’ve written about that before, and will do again. But not today. This article isn’t about Freedland’s aggressively uninformed opinions, his cloying prose or his ill-deserved sense of moral superiority. It’s about the world-view he’s trying to market between banner ads begging for money. It’s about his smug insistence that conspiracy theories just don’t happen.
Or, to be more specific, conspiracy theories don’t happen…here.
Because, despite his deep-held belief that Conspiracy Theories are dangerous, he certainly believes in a lot of them. He thinks the Russian Government poisoned Alexander Litvinenko. He thinks Vladimir Putin had Boris Nemstov shot. He thinks Russian banks have been backing the far-right in Europe and supported Brexit. And he thinks the FSB “hacked” the American presidential election in order to get their Manchurian candidate elected.
Buzz in when you spot the connection.
These are all, by definition, conspiracy theories – but they are also all things done by the other. Conspiracies happen over there. They are done by the bad guys. We don’t do them.
The Guardian newspaper is a limited company and has been since 2008 when the Scott Trust was wound up and replaced by The Scott Trust Ltd, which appoints a board comprised of bankers, management consultants, venture capitalists and other classic left-wingers. The paper itself is written nearly exclusively by elite-educated members of the upper middle class. The viewpoint you would expect to come from this privileged set-up is what you do get.
Murray McDonald, in his Hidden History of the Guardian, explains that The Guardian was launched to undermine working-class leaders of the early 19th century reform movement (whose members were massacred at Peterloo), and during its 150 year history has denounced Ireland’s freedom fighters, Women Suffragettes, Abraham Lincoln’s campaign to end slavery, third world nationalism and pretty much any kind of genuine independence from the system. It supported Tony Blair, even when the worst of his crimes were known and continues to give him uncritical space, it regularly presents official pronouncements as news, regularly disguises adverts for its corporate sponsors as news and regularly finds time to pour bile on Jeremy Corbyn, Julian Assange, Media Lens and Noam Chomsky, who was so appalled by Emma Brocke’s infamous and outrageous distortions he forced them to print a long retraction.
In short, The Guardian is far to the right — just read a few articles by Nick Cohen, Jonathan Freedland or Michael White (with whom I had some correspondence a few years ago about thought-control in his paper) if you doubt where on the actual political spectrum the UK’s ‘leading left-liberal newspaper’ is situated.
Brian Fallow calls out business on their pro-National and anti-Labour government bias, clearly feeling so miserable about their businesses when unemployment, inflation, economic growth, interest rates, and bunches of other stuff are going so well for so long in New Zealand:
I’m worried to the extent that space travel becomes so cheap that people with overgrown lawns and hoarders become those nasty Martian neighbours from hell you see on TV… Overwhelming the criteria for gaining a seat on a shuttle is so high it weeds out the unfit. Unless some one makes a nano sky crane to space I just don’t see how it’s economically viable to get those commodities back on solid ground.
Although military commanders do accept that the first person to colonise the moon will be the most powerful man in the solar system. Because unlike earth bound natives who have to spend vast resources getting weapons systems to the moon, any one who colonises the moon can just chuck devastating rocks back at us for free basically.
So there are problems and we don’t really want nasty neighbours from hell.
Yeah, but if we can support a moon base to the point it’s sustainable, similar players can still obliterate the moonbase or its mother country. And if the moonbase is big enough to declare independence, the major nations down here will have the ability to put counter-battery fire in orbit. Even in the 1970s it would have been technically trivial to convert a rocket motor turbopump into a turbogenerator for a decent rail gun
Mr Peters will become the first Maori Priminster even only for 6 weeks this is a good thing for Maoris culture and Mana Ka pai. There is going to be a lot of howls from all the neoliberals racist bigots they can go get_____LOL. I’m happy that my Ngti Porou IWI has taken down shonky keys photo teno pai.
Now my Maori culture people know this if any dum stuff goes down at Waitangi this year I won’t be as polite as I have been with other Maori issues I have involved myself in. Ka kite ano
Following Pelosi releasing the Senate version, Nunes has released the House Intelligence Committee testimony by Fusion GPS.
Okay, politikids. Grab thyselves a beverage and settle in.I just careened through 180-pages of House Intel Committee testimony by Fusion GPS and it was just chockablock with tasty bits.Let's hit the buffet.1/— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) January 19, 2018
Okay, politikids. Grab thyselves a beverage and settle in.
I just careened through 180-pages of House Intel Committee testimony by Fusion GPS and it was just chockablock with tasty bits.
[I don’t allow climate change deniers on posts I put up, especially not ones that can’t pass even a basic test of manners in a new place to a guest post.
I also note that following your first link takes me to a page that is a comment by you that has a link to another page that is a comment by you, and eventually ends up at a climate change denier site. Way below the standard of debate that is acceptable here. Claims such as you are making require actual evidence. I’m moving this to Open Mike, you might find someone who will debate with you, personally I think it’s an utter waste of time. btw, have a read of the site Policy. – weka]
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
deafening silence on legalising marijuana.
the dompost can run a front page confabulating P with cannabis all mixed up and a million fallacies of composition to write a crummy ad for the justice industry but their standards have fallen into the abyss and it is to be hope that a progressive government will do the right thing immediately.
My Department Right Or Wrong: Far from “politicians involving themselves in some Corrections matters” being a bad thing, their involvement – along with that of the Ombudsman – constitutes a necessary check upon the unreasonable and unlawful exercise of authority over prison inmates by prison staff. A Corrections Minister who ...
New Zealand is supposed to have a progressive tax system, which taxes people according to their ability to pay. But it turns out that the rich are cheating: The wealthiest New Zealanders pay just 12 per cent of their total income in tax on average, according to research from ...
Ground truths on warming When we think about rapid climate change of the kind we've accidentally unleashed and the warming of Earth systems inherent in the process, we tend to focus on phenomena in order of their immediate tangibility, their drama. Sea ice loss in the Arctic, atmospheric and ocean ...
by Daphna Whitmore The Department of Corrections has called in the police over a pamphlet that supports protests at Waikeria Prison, saying the material might incite another riot. The group People Against Prisons Aotearoa denies it advocates for riots and has said it “encourages persistent, peaceful protest action such as striking from ...
One theme in the literature dedicated to democratic theory is the notion of a “tyranny of the minority.” This is where the desire to protect the interests of and give voice to electoral minorities leads to a tail wagging the dog syndrome whereby minorities wind up having disproportionate influence in ...
I've just lodged my fourth complaint to the Ombudsman for deemed refusal of an OIA request by police this year. That brings their total to four for four - every request I have sent them has not been answered within the legal timeframe, even when they extend it to give ...
Will the health reforms proposed for the Labour Government make the system better or worse? Health commentator Ian Powell (formerly the Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists) gives his analysis of what change is most necessary, and what should be avoided. The review of the Health ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections An off-course polar vortex meandered toward the Mexican border, bringing with it frigid Arctic air rarely seen as far south as Texas. Frozen equipment rendered power generation systems in the state inoperable, forcing grid operators to begin rolling blackouts to customers then left to fend ...
Just as National once produced a “rock star economy” that Grant Robertson rejected as being only for the rich, the Labour Government has produced an economic “bounce back” that leaves out the poor. Branko Marcetic argues for a rise in benefit levels to give the poor a real bounce back. ...
Virginia has voted to abolish the death penalty: State lawmakers gave final approval on Monday to a bill that will end capital punishment in Virginia, a dramatic turnaround for a state that has executed more people than any other. The legislation repealing the death penalty now heads to the ...
Yesterday a New Zealand Judge issued a formal finding that the Department of Corrections had treated prisoners in a cruel, degrading and inhumane manner, illegally detaining them, using excessive force, denying them basic necessities unless they performed degrading rituals of submission first. Some of the conduct appears to be criminal: ...
The Herald reports that there is a "storm brewing for the Climate Change Commission". The "problem"? Polluters are unhappy with its economic projections saying that action will not be as costly as they have previously claimed: Last week a coalition of over a dozen New Zealand business and industry ...
You're Move: What would a genuinely powerful Maori Caucus do? What policies would it insist upon? More to the point, since the single most important question in politics is always “Or you’ll what?”, does the Maori Caucus possess the wherewithal to enforce its demands?THAT LABOUR’S MAORI CAUCUS is potentially powerful ...
This post is a mix of a few recent reports on trends, recent discoveries or developments. Topics covered are the future of work, the geopolitical shift from oil to semiconductors, transition to low carbon futures, disappearing Artic sea ice, and AI in health care. Yesterday’s Gone A Canadian report ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson One of the hottest years in U.S. history, 2020 was besieged by a record number of billion-dollar disasters, led by two of the most dangerous phenomena with links to climate change: wildfires and hurricanes. In its initial U.S. climate summary for 2020, ...
Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it’s easy to criminalise. Graham Adams argues that the proposed ban on gay conversion therapy is messier than many realise, and he delves into some of the difficulties facing the Government in their promise to legislate. A highly successful petition has inadvertently ...
Story of the Week... Editorial of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... ‘Absolutely ridiculous’: top scientist slams UK government over coalmineExclusive:Prof Sir Robert Watson says backing of ...
Over the weekend we learned that Turkey plans to deport a New Zealand woman and her children who had fled Syria after previously joing the Islamic State. Which means that Andrew Little's tyrannical Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Act 2019 - rammed through under all-stages urgency on the basis of an ...
While it has made a lot of noise about inequality, Labour has resolutely avoided reversing the 1990 benefit cuts and improving living standards for the poorest in our society. Meanwhile, 70% of kiwis think they should: A survey has found seven out of 10 New Zealanders believe the government ...
Anti-Philosopher President? Emmanuel Macron and his party’s reaction to the terrorist atrocities committed on French soil targets the very same philosophical movements excited and emboldened by New Zealand’s own terrifying tragedy.IT IS NOT the sort of thought experiment New Zealanders are encouraged to conduct in these culturally sensitive times. Even ...
If Jacinda Ardern or ay of her Auckland-based cabinet ministers stepped outside this weekend, they would have realised that this afternoon’s cabinet decision on whether to move Auckland back to Level 1 has already been made. The residents of our biggest city have voted with their feet.While some places where ...
According to epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker, the decision to end the second Auckland lockdown after just three days was a ‘calculated risk’. The possibility of undetected community transmission cannot be ruled out. In the United States, modelling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that the ...
As I rose for the first time to speak from the Despatch Box in the House of Commons, I had the comfort of seeing that the Despatch Box had on it the inscription “A Gift from the People of New Zealand”. But I was also a little daunted, like so ...
This article is by Laura Biggs, from the Marxist-Feminist blog On the Woman Question. The term ‘sex work’ has come to replace the word ‘prostitution’ in contemporary discussions on the subject. This is not accidental. The phrase ‘sex work’ has been adopted by liberal feminists and powerful lobbyists in a ...
Sometimes it’s smaller, intensive studies that shed light on issues. Just reported results of daily sampling of COVID-19 patients indicate patients with the B.1.1.7 variant first observed in Kent, UK may have a longer infection compared to patients infected with non-B.1.1.7 variants. This is the variant seen in NZ’s most ...
Redline has just passed one million views – as I start writing this we have reached 1,000,015 views. It took us nearly seven years to reach our first 500,000 and just three months short of three years to reach our second 500,000, with 2019 being our best year, with over ...
. . As the rest of the world was perceived to be “going to hell in a handbasket with an out-of-control pandemic; ructions in Europe as Britain copes with “Brexit” chaos; Trumpism in the United States climaxing with the 6 January mob-led coup attempt in Washington’s Capitol; a deadly ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Feb 14, 2021 through Sat, Feb 20, 2021Editor's ChoiceQ&A: Is Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Book a Hopeful Look at the Promise of Technology, or a Cautionary Tale?The Pulitzer Prize-winning ...
Session Thirty-Five. We have had some in-game and out-of-game indication that we are drawing to the end of the Dreamland adventure… which has lasted since the fourth session. Getting back to the Waking World will require some mental adjustment, especially considering that Annalax has spent thirty-odd sessions not ...
A Friend In Need: I have grown up, and grown old, within earshot of New Zealand’s public broadcaster. Through times of peace and plenty, through days of tumult and recrimination, it has been a constant and reliable presence. The calm and authoritative voices of Radio New Zealand kept their fellow ...
This article, authored by Dr Lisa Schipper, Dr Morgan Scoville-Simonds, Dr Katharine Vincent and Prof Siri Eriksen, was originally published on the Carbon Brief website on Feb 10, 2021. It is reposted below in its entirety. Click here to access the original article and comments posted on Carbon Brief. Photo by ...
. . As the rest of the world was perceived to be “going to hell in a handbasket with an out-of-control pandemic; ructions in Europe as Britain copes with “Brexit” chaos; Trumpism in the United States climaxing with the 6 January mob-led coup attempt in Washington’s Capitol; a deadly resurgent ...
by Georgina Blackmore Instead ask the government to separate the two issues caught under the heading of “Conversion Therapy”. 1) Gay Conversion Therapy which is what 99.9% of people believe this petition is about. It is a ban I personally support. 2) Gender Identity Conversion Therapy which doesn’t have any ...
The burning of books has a long history. That it no reason why we should add to it.If you want to get Burning of the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack from the National Library you may have to hurry. It is in the overseas nonfiction section; many books ...
by Daphna Whitmore After promising to tackle poverty, housing, transport, and climate issues in 2017, and failing on all these measures, Labour has moved to a Helen Clark “promise little and disappoint less” style of government. Poverty – perversely called “child poverty” by Ardern – has worsened under Labour. Much ...
This is one of those subject matters better suited to a thesis than a blog post, and far smarter people than I have tackled the question in a more detailed and accurate manner. But it’s a question that’s been running around in my brain for a fortnight or so. ...
Chris Fogwill, Keele University; Alan Hogg, University of Waikato; Chris Turney, UNSW, and Zoë Thomas, UNSWThe world experienced a few centuries of apocalyptic conditions 42,000 years ago, triggered by a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles combined with changes in the Sun’s behaviour. That’s the key finding of our ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jan Ellen Spiegel Colorado is no stranger to drought. The current one is closing in on 20 years, and a rainy or snowy season here and there won’t change the trajectory. This is what climate change has brought. “Aridification” is what ...
Sweet Surrender: By 1933, Adolf Hitler was the last political leader left standing, and his Nazis the only party Germany had yet to try. It was ever thus. Dictators and dictatorships succeed by being the only medicine a desperately sick nation hasn’t swallowed; the only strength that hasn’t failed.NOT ALL ...
"I know what you're not thinking!" Thanks to their polling agency and the participants in its focus-groups, the Labour leadership possesses a great deal more information about the Kiwis clamouring for action on the housing and inequality fronts than most journalists and lobbyists.ACCORDING TO PEOPLE “in the know”, Labour is ...
James Higham, University of OtagoThe Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s second tourism report urges the government to take advantage of the disruption caused by COVID-19 to transform the tourism industry. Titled “Not 100% – but four steps closer to sustainable tourism”, it builds on commissoner Simon Upton’s 2019 “Pristine, ...
My column over at Newsroom this week points out the fairly obvious. The government can add daily saliva testing for everyone at the border to the existing testing regimen. If daily testing winds up proving the swab tests to be redundant, ditch the swab tests when we find that out. ...
Geoengineering heats up Sorry, that was irresistible. By chance in this edition of New Research are two intriguing papers including different perspectives on the subject of geoengineering, a topic increasingly arousing emotions. Happily both of these papers are open access and free to read. A third article underlines that enthusiasm ...
Tamra Burns Loeb, University of California, Los Angeles; AJ Adkins-Jackson, Harvard University, and Arleen F. Brown, University of California, Los AngelesRacial and ethnic minority communities that lack internet access have been left behind in the race to get a COVID-19 vaccine. The average monthly cost of internet access, about ...
Zach St. GeorgeThe first and only time Steve Jackson spoke to Bill Critchfield was in the late 1980s. Critchfield, an authority on the conifers of North America, was at home recovering from a heart attack. Jackson, then a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, had called looking for advice on how ...
Richelle Butcher, Massey University; Britta Denise Hardesty, CSIRO, and Lauren Roman, CSIROPlastic in the ocean can be deadly for marine wildlife and seabirds around the globe, but our latest study shows single-use plastics are a bigger threat to endangered albatrosses in the southern hemisphere than we previously thought. You ...
On Monday, the US Congress failed to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for inciting an attempted coup against the US constitution. So now someone is doing it privately, in the traditional American way: suing him: Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, the former president’s personal lawyer, have been accused ...
The media this morning was full of hopeful stories about how the current lockdown may have been a "false alarm" and an over-reaction and how it would all be over soon (I bet those journalists and editors all feel pretty stupid now). But along the way, National's Michael Woodhouse let ...
Jen Purdie, University of OtagoAs fossil fuels are phased out over the coming decades, the Climate Change Commission (CCC) suggests electricity will take up much of the slack, powering our vehicle fleet and replacing coal and gas in industrial processes. But can the electricity system really provide for this ...
Nearly twenty years after they first arrived, the last New Zealand troops will finally be leaving Afghanistan in May: New Zealand troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by May 2021. The current deployment consists of six Defence Force personnel - three deployed to the Afghanistan National Army Officer Academy, ...
I’m a bit of an ETS-absolutist. Or at least a carbon-pricing absolutist, in a place the size of NZ. I think the Weitzman reasons for preferring a carbon tax to an ETS are second-order relative to political economy considerations, and any weight at all put on switching costs makes it ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson Despite the speed bump posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is rolling toward completion of its Sixth Assessment Report, the latest in a series that began in 1990. IPCC’s assessments, produced by many hundreds of scientists volunteering countless hours, ...
On Friday (5 February) we went for a walk in the Karangahake Gorge, and were very happy to discover (during the Windows Walk) that there are glow-worms in the darker parts of the mine workings. (Strictly speaking they’re glow-maggots as they’re the larvae of small flies/midges, but that is perhaps ...
Alysha JohnsonThey say a good day is a busy day, and aboard the R/V Falkor (Seafloor to Seabirds in the Coral Sea – Schmidt Ocean Institute), almost every day is busy! On this particular day, we deployed a CTD, which stands for Conductivity, Temperature and Density. It is ...
This is a transcript of a speech by developmental biologist Dr Emma Hilton delivered at on 29 November 2020 for the ‘Feminist Academics Talk Back!’ meeting. This talk was originally published by womentalkback.org Sex denialists have captured existing journals We are dealing with a new religion Thank you for the ...
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway wallsAnd tenement halls"Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence, 1963-64 BOMBER’S RIGHT about Adam Curtis’s latest offering, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, it is brilliant. You can tell it’s a work of genius by the ...
Familiar Excuses: Those wondering why our Prime Minister was so willing to countenance a reputationally damaging breaking of Air New Zealand's contract with the Saudi Arabian navy should wonder no longer. Pieces are in motion on the Middle East chessboard. The interests of the majority shareholder in Air New Zealand ...
Three new community cases of Covid-19 and an unknown source have plunged Auckland into lockdown and the rest of the country into alert level two. Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles tackles some of the critical questions we now face. Could we be looking at a situation as worrying as last August in ...
Over the years, members from our team have published several handbooks providing information about how to successfully counter misinformation and conspiracy theories. These include The Conspiracy Theory Handbook and The Debunking Handbook 2020, both published in 2020. In addition, we have our list of rebuttals as well as our MOOC Denial101x to specifically ...
Government data today shows that the wealthiest New Zealanders aren’t paying their fair share of tax, whilst everyone else chips in, Green Party spokesperson on Finance Julie Anne Genter said today. ...
The Green Party welcomes the change in the Reserve Bank’s remit to consider the impacts on housing when making financial decisions, but housing affordability shouldn’t be left to the Reserve Bank, Green Party Co-leader and Housing spokesperson Marama Davidson said today. ...
The Green Party welcomes the passing of the Local Electorate Act Māori Wards Amendment Bill which ensures Māori have a say on local issues across Aotearoa New Zealand. ...
New UMR research reveals that 69 percent of New Zealanders agree that the government should increase the amount if income support paid to those on low incomes or not in paid work. ...
The Green Party are celebrating the Labour Government bringing forward the timeline to ban conversion therapy, and will push to ensure any draft bill properly protects all of our Rainbow communities. ...
The Green Party is joining the call for ‘brave policy action’ to address rapidly increasing inequality in New Zealand, which is likely to be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
Green MPs currently in Auckland, Marama Davidson, Chlöe Swarbrick and Golriz Ghahraman, will remain in Auckland for the next 72 hours. Those in Auckland today for Big Gay Out who have flown home will self-isolate for 72 hours. These decisions will be subject to any new information that may arise ...
It’s Pride month, and as we celebrate our LGBTIA+ community, we’re taking the next steps towards a more inclusive Aotearoa. From investing in mental health services to banning harmful conversion therapy, we’re building a New Zealand where everyone can be safe, healthy and happy. ...
The Green Party strongly condemns the revelation that Air New Zealand may have provided assistance and maintenance to Saudi Arabian vessels involved in committing atrocities in Yemen. ...
This week, Labour MPs headed north to take part in Waitangi events, and acknowledge Aotearoa’s shared history. Here’s a quick look at what our team got up to at Waitangi, and how we’re working together with Māori to build a better future for us all. ...
Attorney-General David Parker today announced the appointment of three new District Court Judges. Two of the appointees will take up their roles on 1 April, replacing sitting Judges who have reached retirement age. Kirsten Lummis, lawyer of Auckland has been appointed as a District Court Judge with jury jurisdiction to ...
Government announces list of life-shortening conditions guaranteeing early KiwiSaver access The Government changed the KiwiSaver rules in 2019 so people with life-shortening congenital conditions can withdraw their savings early The four conditions guaranteed early access are – down syndrome, cerebral palsy, Huntington’s disease and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder An alternative ...
The Reserve Bank is now required to consider the impact on housing when making monetary and financial policy decisions, Grant Robertson announced today. Changes have been made to the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee’s remit requiring it to take into account government policy relating to more sustainable house prices, while working ...
The Labour Government will invest $6 million for 70 additional adult cochlear implants this year to significantly reduce the historical waitlist, Health Minister Andrew Little says. “Cochlear implants are life changing for kiwis who suffer from severe hearing loss. As well as improving an individual’s hearing, they open doors to ...
The Local Electoral (Māori Wards and Māori Constituencies) Amendment Bill passed its third reading today and will become law, Minister of Local Government Hon Nanaia Mahuta says. “This is a significant step forward for Māori representation in local government. We know how important it is to have diversity around ...
The Government has added 1,000 more transitional housing places as promised under the Aotearoa New Zealand Homelessness Action Plan (HAP), launched one year ago. Minister of Housing Megan Woods says the milestone supports the Government’s priority to ensure every New Zealander has warm, dry, secure housing. “Transitional housing provides people ...
A second batch of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines arrived safely yesterday at Auckland International Airport, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says. “This shipment contained about 76,000 doses, and follows our first shipment of 60,000 doses that arrived last week. We expect further shipments of vaccine over the coming weeks,” Chris Hipkins said. ...
The Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Carmel Sepuloni has today announced $18 million to support creative spaces. Creative spaces are places in the community where people with mental health needs, disabled people, and those looking for social connection, are welcomed and supported to practice and participate in the arts ...
Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Minister Andrew Little today welcomed Moriori to Parliament to witness the first reading of the Moriori Claims Settlement Bill. “This bill is the culmination of years of dedication and hard work from all the parties involved. “I am delighted to reach this significant milestone today,” Andrew ...
22,400 fewer children experiencing material hardship 45,400 fewer children in low income households on after-housing costs measure After-housing costs target achieved a year ahead of schedule Government action has seen child poverty reduce against all nine official measures compared to the baseline year, Prime Minister and Minister for Child Poverty ...
It’s time to recognise the outstanding work early learning services, kōhanga reo, schools and kura do to support children and young people to succeed, Minister of Education Chris Hipkins says. The 2021 Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Awards are now open through until April 16. “The past year has reminded us ...
Three new Jobs for Nature projects will help nature thrive in the Bay of Plenty and keep local people in work says Conservation Minister Kiri Allan. “Up to 30 people will be employed in the projects, which are aimed at boosting local conservation efforts, enhancing some of the region’s most ...
The Government has accepted all of the Holidays Act Taskforce’s recommended changes, which will provide certainty to employers and help employees receive their leave entitlements, Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Michael Wood announced today. Michael Wood said the Government established the Holidays Act Taskforce to help address challenges with the ...
The Government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and faster than expected economic recovery has been acknowledged in today’s credit rating upgrade. Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) today raised New Zealand’s local currency credit rating to AAA with a stable outlook. This follows Fitch reaffirming its AA+ rating last ...
Tena koutou e nga Maata Waka Ngai Tuahuriri, Ngai Tahu whanui, Tena koutou. Nau mai whakatau mai ki tenei ra maumahara i te Ru Whenua Apiti hono tatai hono, Te hunga mate ki te hunga mate Apiti hono tatai hono, Te hunga ora ki te hunga ora Tena koutou, Tena ...
The Minister of Justice has reaffirmed the Government’s urgent commitment, as stated in its 2020 Election Manifesto, to ban conversion practices in New Zealand by this time next year. “The Government has work underway to develop policy which will bring legislation to Parliament by the middle of this year and ...
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage and Social Development Hon Carmel Sepuloni today launched a new Creative Careers Service, which is expected to support up to 1,000 creatives, across three regions over the next two years. The new service builds on the most successful aspects of the former Pathways to ...
Overseas consumers eager for natural products in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic have helped boost honey export revenue by 20 percent to $425 million in the year to June 30, 2020, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor says. “The results from the latest Ministry for Primary Industries’ 2020 Apiculture Monitoring ...
Thanks to more than $10-million in new services from the Government, more rangatahi will be able to access mental health and addiction support in their community. Minister of Health Andrew Little made the announcement today while visiting Odyssey House Christchurch and acknowledged that significant events like the devastating earthquakes ten ...
Two month automatic visitor visa extension for most visitor visa holders Temporary waiver of time spent in New Zealand rule for visitor stays Visitor visa holders will be able to stay in New Zealand a little longer as the Government eases restrictions for those still here, the Minister of Immigration ...
The Tourism and Conservation Ministers say today’s report by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) adds to calls to overhaul the tourism model that existed prior to COVID19. “The PCE tourism report joins a chorus of analysis which has established that previous settings, which prioritised volume over value, are ...
The Government is providing certainty for the dietary supplements industry as we work to overhaul the rules governing the products, Minister for Food Safety Dr Ayesha Verrall said. Dietary supplements are health and wellness products taken orally to supplement a traditional diet. Some examples include vitamin and mineral supplements, echinacea, ...
The Government is joining the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime (the Budapest Convention), Justice Minister Kris Faafoi and Minister for the Digital Economy and Communications Dr David Clark announced today. The decision progresses a recommendation by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terror attack to accede to ...
Attorney-General David Parker announced today that an appointment round for Queen’s Counsel will take place in 2021. Appointments of Queen’s Counsel are made by the Governor-General on the recommendation of the Attorney-General and with the concurrence of the Chief Justice. The Governor-General retains the discretion to appoint Queen’s Counsel in ...
The new Resurgence Support Payment passed by Parliament this week will be available to eligible businesses now that Auckland will be in Alert Level 2 until Monday. “Our careful management of the Government accounts means we have money aside for situations like this. We stand ready to share the burden ...
A dry run of the end-to-end process shows New Zealand’s COVID-19 vaccination programme is ready to roll from Saturday, when the first border workers will receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says. “The trial run took place in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch yesterday afternoon, ahead of the ...
From June this year, all primary, intermediate, secondary school and kura students will have access to free period products, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti announced today. The announcement follows a successful Access to Period Products pilot programme, which has been running since Term 3 last ...
The latest update shows the Government’s books are again in better shape than forecast, meaning New Zealand is still in a strong position to respond to any COVID-19 resurgence. The Crown Accounts for the six months to the end of December were better than forecast in the Half-year Economic and ...
The Department of Conservation’s (DOC) new Heritage and Visitor Strategy is fully focused on protecting and enhancing the value of New Zealand’s natural, cultural and historic heritage, while also promoting a sustainable environmental experience, Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “It has been a quarter of a century since DOC first developed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Defence Minister Peeni Henare have announced that New Zealand will conclude its deployment of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) to Afghanistan by May 2021. “After 20 years of a NZDF presence in Afghanistan, it is now time to conclude ...
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. This is a special time in our country. A little over a week ago, it was the anniversary of the signature by Māori and the British Crown of Te Tiriti O Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi), a founding document in ...
The Government is in contact with relevant authorities in Turkey following the arrest of a former Australian and New Zealand dual citizen there, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. “Contingency planning for the potential return of any New Zealander who may have been in the conflict zone has been underway for ...
Figures released today by Stats NZ show there was strong growth in median household incomes in 2020, before surveying was halted due to COVID-19. Stats NZ found the median annual household income rose 6.9 percent to $75,024 in the year to June 2020 compared with a year earlier. The survey ...
Legislation will be introduced under urgency today to set up a new Resurgence Support Payment for businesses affected by any resurgence of COVID-19. “Since the scheme was announced in December we have decided to make a change to the payment – reducing the time over which a revenue drop is ...
Trade and Export Growth Minister Damien O’Connor congratulated Nigeria’s Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on her ground-breaking selection as the next Director General of the World Trade Organization last night. Dr Okonjo-Iweala will be the first female and first African Director General of the organisation. She has a strong background in international ...
From 1 April 2021, people getting a benefit will be able to earn more through work before their benefit payments are affected, Social Development and Employment Minister Carmel Sepuloni has announced. “Overall, around 82,900 low-income people and families will be better off by $18 a week on average,” says Carmel ...
The first batch of COVID-19 vaccine arrived in New Zealand this morning, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has confirmed. The shipment of around 60,000 doses arrived as airfreight at Auckland International Airport at 9.34am today. “The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine’s arrival allows us to start New Zealand’s largest-ever immunisation programme,” Jacinda Ardern said. ...
Good evening Cabinet has met this evening to make decisions on our response to the three cases reported earlier within a household in Auckland. Shortly I will ask Dr Bloomfield to set out some further information we now have relating to these cases. New Zealanders have enjoyed more freedoms for ...
For the first time, the Government will provide targeted nationwide funding to services that provide mental health support to Rainbow young people Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced. The announcement fulfils an election commitment to allocate $4 million specifically targeted to Rainbow mental wellbeing initiatives aimed at young people. There ...
A significant milestone in support to the regions has been passed with more than one billion dollars pumped into economic development projects to back local jobs and businesses. Economic and Regional Development Minister Stuart Nash says the Provincial Development Unit (PDU) has now invested $1.26 billion in regional projects since ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James B. Dorey, PhD Candidate, Flinders University It’s not often you get to cast your eyes on a creature feared to be long-gone. Perhaps that’s why my recent rediscovery of the native bee species Pharohylaeus lactiferus is so exciting — especially after ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Georgina Heydon, Associate professor, RMIT University The alleged rape of former Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins has raised many questions about how sexual assault gets reported. Members of the Morrison government have repeatedly stressed the appropriate response to allegations of sexual assault ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dana M Bergstrom, Principal Research Scientist, University of Wollongong In 1992, 1,700 scientists warned that human beings and the natural world were “on a collision course”. Seventeen years later, scientists described planetary boundaries within which humans and other life could have a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally Patfield, Postdoctoral Fellow, Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, University of Newcastle It’s that time of year again when hundreds of thousands of Australian students start university for the first time. Commencing students account for about 40% of the more than 1.6 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Mountain, Director, Victoria Energy Policy Centre, Victoria University Australia’s electricity market is unsustainable. Texas shows us why. A week ago Texas experienced a bout of severe weather as arctic air reached deep into the state, driving temperature down to levels that ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Stokes, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University Tim Hart was sitting on his couch one evening in November 2011 when he got an email with the subject line: “I’m watching”. The message that followed was short and to the point ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Edwards, Associate Professor, Sydney School of Health Sciences, University of Sydney Brisbane has just been confirmed as the preferred host for the 2032 Olympics. But Olympic organisers have more immediate concerns in mind — how to safely run the postponed Tokyo ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for February 26. All the latest news from New Zealand, updated throughout the day. Reach me at stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur Members make The Spinoff happen. Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us from ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Reserve Bank put in bind by Robertson move, Bridges clashes with top cop, and critical migrant health workers can’t get families in while new arrivals can.Finance minister Grant Robertson will be requiring the Reserve Bank to consider the impact on ...
There are clues globally that the avalanche threat is escalating in some regions as the planet warms, triggered by greater temperature swings and more intense rain and snow storms. Bob Berwyn reports for Inside Climate News Big dumps of powder snow are a precious gift in the best of times ...
District health board members have been made aware of a new problem with a just-opened Christchurch Hospital building. Oliver Lewis reports. It was two years late and plagued by errors during construction, now a further major issue can be revealed at the new $525 million Christchurch Hospital building, Waipapa. Hundreds ...
As further reports of torture and systemic rape emerge from Xinjiang, the PRC’s propaganda machine is hard at work in New Zealand. Laura Walters looks at why a Chinese New Year performance in Wellington was more than just cultural appropriation State-sponsored appropriation of Uyghur culture has been labelled “disgusting” and “disrespectful” ...
Covid-19 vaccination won’t be enough to save us from hard choices that will need to be made during our second or even third year of living with the coronavirus. Keeping Covid-19 mostly out of New Zealand has been a Herculean feat, drawing praise from around the world. Over the next year, ...
If there’s a time for screaming into the void, 2021 is surely it. Josie Adams shares a baker’s dozen of Aotearoa’s top contenders.When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you, and it’s nice to have company. New Zealand’s geography is perfect for abysses, or abyssoi ...
Jake Millar is an extraordinary young man. The young entrepreneur who convinced the rich and famous to invest millions in his business has now disappeared - and so has the money. Jake Millar was just a teenager in 2015 when he sold his first business to the government for six figures. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Defence Minister Linda Reynolds faces an agonising question. Should she say to Scott Morrison she doesn’t feel up to staying in what is one of the most demanding portfolios in the government? Reynolds broke down ...
SPECIAL REPORT:By Sheldon Chanel in Suva Much of archipelagic Fiji was forced indoors by lockdowns and a nationwide curfew in March last year when the country recorded its first case of covid-19. The quick and decisive action by legislators was successful in helping contain the spread of a highly ...
Asia Pacific Report The indigenous people of West Papua have rejected the extension of special autonomy and the planned expansion of new provinces announced by the central government of Indonesia. The rejection comes from grassroots communities across West Papua and Papuan students who are studying in Indonesia and overseas. Responding ...
The man who led the review into the dysfunctional Tauranga City Council before it was taken over by a commissioner has been appointed to lead the review into Wellington's council. ...
Opposition MPs are questioning whether there had been any special treatment from immigration officials in regards to Ricardo Menéndez March's partner's application. ...
In this week’s episode, host Simon Pound meets Lisa Fong (aka Move It Mama) whose Facebook Live workouts have found a loyal – and huge – audience worldwide.Nearly every morning, thousands of people around New Zealand and the world start their day with a workout led by a mum of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ted Snell, Honorary Professor, Edith Cowan University Review: A Forest of Hooks and Nails, Fremantle Arts Centre for Perth Festival Several years ago, when being shown around an exhibition under preparation with a Nobel prize-winning guest, an academic colleague asked what one ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael McGreevy, Research Associate, Flinders University Less than two decades ago, South Australia generated all its electricity from fossil fuels. Last year, renewables provided a whopping 60% of the state’s electricity supply. The remarkable progress came as national climate policy was gripped ...
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer’s parents – according to a report in Stuff – delivered some strong mantra to live by. One of them: “Don’t accept, you push back, be provocative, but always be respectful.” But what happens when political opponents don’t accept, push back and – dare we suggest it? – are ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kamaljit K Sangha, Senior Ecological Economist, Charles Darwin University Northern Australia is by far the most fire-prone region of Australia, with enormous bushfires occurring annually across thousands of square kilometres. Many of these vast, flammable landscapes have precious few barriers to slow ...
Inspired by Bridges’ brave stand against the evil wokesters, Emily Writes unearths other examples of the woke peril.This week, Simon Bridges described NZ Police’s Andrew Coster as a “wokester commissioner” who isn’t fit for the job. The “too nice” Coster is not arresting enough baddies, you see.When asked why Coster ...
Banks welcome today’s announcement that the Reserve Bank will consider the impact of its monetary and financial policy decisions on the housing market. “Banks support today’s announcement and are keen to be involved in discussions around how to tackle ...
Our Beehive Bulletin … It’s all go – well, sort of – on the housing front. The Nats yesterday were scoring brownie points by scoffing at the state’s spending on a professional promotional video, including drone footage, celebrating a housing scheme that has helped only 12 families. But Housing Minister ...
Legislation regulating New Zealand's organic sector is about to pass through its final stages in Parliament and will be a major boost for exporters meeting the global demand for safe, 'clean', GE-free organic products. The Organic Products Bill helps ...
The Spinoff’s cricket podcast is back! Join Simon Day and Alex Braae on the road to Lord’s with special guest, White Fern Frankie Mackay.With the Blackcaps headed for the final of the inaugural ICC World Test Championship at Lord’s in June, Simon Day and Alex Braae have successfully appealed to ...
University of Otago public health experts Michael Baker, Amanda Kvalsvig and Nick Wilson ponder what we’ve learned about the pandemic over the past 12 months, and how we can improve our response in the future.Exactly one year ago tomorrow (February 26) the first confirmed case of Covid-19 arrived in Aotearoa ...
The SpinoffBy Michael Baker, Amanda Kvalsvig and Nick Wilson
A crowdfunding campaign for a ‘tool’ that attaches to the back of the neck is abhorrent to people with lived neurodivergent experience, writes ADHD and Autism advocate Rory McCarthy.Just over a fortnight ago, I discovered a device on Kickstarter that was being marketed as a treatment for children and adults ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Baker, Professor of Public Health, University of Otago Exactly one year ago tomorrow (February 26) the first confirmed case of COVID-19 arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand. Identified only as “a person in their 60s recently returned from Iran”, the case marked ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nichola Shelton, PhD candidate, University of Sydney Tens of thousands of Australian teenagers live with a communication disability, meaning they struggle with speaking, listening, reading, writing, and/or social skills. Communication disability can include It can start in early childhood and much of ...
Senior National Party MP Simon Bridges has continued his attack on Police Commissioner Andrew Coster in a fiery Justice Select Committee this morning. ...
Health officials have contacted attendees of a Papatoetoe home viewing for a property in which a tenant later tested positive for Covid-19. Alex Braae reports. An open home took place at a Papatoetoe address on Saturday while a tenant who had been deemed a “causal-plus contact” was present. The tenant later ...
New Zealand rhythmic gymnast Angela Walker’s sporting career ended with her winning a gold medal at the 1990 Commonwealth Games. It was the culmination of a dream that started 14 years earlier.I remember the day I set my heart on going to the Olympics. I was a little kid watching ...
Now the honeymoon is over, it’s down to hard work for American President Joe Biden and his new administration. Only a handful of his Cabinet nominees have been approved in Congress and he faces the prospect that up to three candidates may fail to pass muster. This will test his ...
E tū is calling on the country’s national carrier to ensure it rebuilds better than before, after the half-year announcement of a profit loss of $185 million, before other significant items and taxation. E tū Head of Aviation, Savage, says the announcement ...
Treasury’s research on the ‘economic income’ of high-wealth individuals is voodoo economics, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union . Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says, “David Parker has commissioned research from Treasury estimating ...
The Reserve Bank is now required to consider the impact on housing when making monetary and financial policy decisions, Finance Minister Grant Robertson has announced. ...
Nevada Wolfgramm, a year 13 student at Mount Aspiring College in Wānaka, has been repeatedly censured by the school for breaching its dress code, told by teachers that what she’s wearing is distracting boys and male teachers. Here, she explains why it must stop. The first time I was “dress coded” ...
The Reserve Bank – Te Pūtea Matua welcomes the direction it has received today from the Minister of Finance. The Bank is tasked with considering how it can contribute to the Government’s housing policy objectives, consistent with its financial stability ...
As reports pile up on the success of vaccines against Covid 19, is it time for New Zealand to think of how it will return to normal? The vaccines will not simply eradicate the virus, so governments will need to start thinking about how to live with it. The London ...
Before his passing in 2020, Weta frontman Aaron Tokona initiated the vinyl reissue of the band’s sole album Geographica. Released last week, it’s a poignant reminder that the band were on the cusp of cracking Australia 20 years ago. Rock bands in Australia reside at one of two poles, according ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denise Thwaites, Assistant Professor in Digital Arts and Humanities , University of Canberra Since May 2007, US-based digital artist Mike Winkelmann (who goes by the name Beeple) has posted a new artwork online every day. He posted the 5,000th one in January, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Holcombe, Senior Research Fellow, The University of Queensland Just as the parliamentary inquiry into Rio Tinto’s destruction of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters was reconvening in Canberra, another culturally significant site was damaged at one of BHP’s iron ore mines in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Farr-Wharton, Associate Professor in Management, Edith Cowan University The aged care royal commission is due to hand down its final report on February 26, and it will be tabled in parliament in the days after that. The long-term sustainability of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics, Griffith University The US state of Texas has this month experienced some of its coldest weather on record. Houston recorded a temperature of -10.6℃, which is around 20℃ below average. And Dallas-Fort Worth recorded its lowest-ever ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mengbi Li, Lecturer in Built Environment (Architecture), First Year College and Research Fellow, ISILC, Victoria University The coronavirus has been escaping with distressing frequency from quarantine hotels, threatening serious outbreaks. To make things worse, multiple variants of the virus, possibly more infectious ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland The fight between Facebook and the Morrison government is over almost before it began. Having drastically overplayed its hand by banning a vast range of content, Facebook has been forced to settle ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Hesketh, ARC Future Fellow and Association Professor, The University of Queensland When Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was first published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, the book was conspicuously silent about how his theory applied to humans. ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for February 25. All the latest news from New Zealand, updated throughout the day. Reach me at stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur Members make The Spinoff happen. Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us from ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Corrections minister picks fight with activist groups, Foster calls in independent Wellington Council governance review, and OCR kept unchanged.For a lead story today, a confrontation that has been brewing for a while, with several flashpoints along the way. Corrections minister Kelvin ...
The Reserve Bank will now have to take into account the impact on housing affordability when making monetary and financial policy decisions The Government has widened the central bank's remit, with immediate effect, requiring it to take into account government policy relating to "more sustainable house prices", while still working ...
Te Pāti Māori is celebrating the third reading of the Local Electoral (Māori Wards and Māori Constituencies) Amendment Bill and vowing to continue the fight for guaranteed tangata whenua representation in local government. “The passage ...
Green Party spokesperson on Human Rights and Foreign Affairs Golriz Ghahraman will today accept a petition from Oxfam calling on a fair and equitable global distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine. “If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that in order ...
ACC predicted quake-related claims would hit $200 million but payments to date are nowhere near that. David Williams reports Mark Maynard returned to full-time work just before last year’s Covid-19 lockdown – for a single day. “I got to 4 o’clock,” the Christchurch carpet salesman quips. “I thought, shit, I’m ...
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last of the Beats, died this week. To mark the occasion we republlish Nelson poet Cliff Fell's epic tribute to Ferlinghetti , published at ReadingRoom last year to mark his 101st birthday.101 Bows to Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the Occasion of His 101st Birthday Like one who ...
The video of the apache helicopter crew laughing as they murder unarmed civillians in Baghdad that was leaked by Chelsea Manning was an event that forever changed my view of what collateral damage actually meant.
It is well known that information is power so unsurprising that elites strive to control the public narrative and unsurprising that Manning paid such a high price. To my mind Obamas finest act was one of his last when he commuted her 35 year sentence.
Manning has just cofirmed her candidacy for the Maryland senate race as a Democrat against the incumbent Ben Cardin. As you may expect this has gone down like a lead balloon. Partly this is because of the realisation that due to her name recognition Cardin will have to spend money rather than just sleepwalk to victory.
So how will Cardin rise to the Manning challenge? Early indications are that the attack lines will be Manning as Russian puppet leaking to an arm of Russian intelligence (wikileaks).
So I guess that answers the question of whether with the whole Russia thing we are dealing with WMD or McCarthyism. The perception of an evil enemy has been created and now all dissenting views get tarred with the evil enemy brush.
I link a twitter post of Zac Petkanas relating to his views on Chelsea Manning and also a Hill article explaining his position and role at the DNC where he leads the narrative of Trump as Putin puppet
https://mobile.twitter.com/Zac_Petkanas/status/952982355228221443
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/315980-dems-continue-campaign-with-war-room-on-trump
The main reason manning’s candidacy has gone down like a lead balloon is that there is very strong support for the military by the US public and rightly or wrongly Manning is seen by many in the public as breaching the trust/treasonous and adding in the sex change in what is still a deeply conservative populace won’t help either.
Sorry for being unclear but I meant gone down like a lead balloon with the powerful not the general population. As regards the general population we will soon know their feelings about Manning
Ah OK – Will be interesting to see the public response in Maryland, I would expect the general public response will be less than enthusiastic.
I think you’ll be surprised.
Trump is where he is because of his anti-entrenched power rhetoric. He’s then gone on to entrench the power of the rich even more.
Manning actually did something against that entrenched power. And the USians do support their troops and they support people doing the Right Thing at great risk to themselves.
Cardin is a solid left Dem with a 50 year service record in elected Maryland offices. He’ll have no problem.
Check his Wikipedia entry for the actual record.
Yep I do sense another over hyped ‘moment of truth’ from certain sectors is on its way.
Partly this is because of the realisation that due to her name recognition Cardin will have to spend money rather than just sleepwalk to victory.
Cardin’s dealings with AIPAC should ensure money’s not a problem.
And to go alongside your Petkanas twitter stream, we have Neera Tanden, who’s apparently the president of the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington re-tweeting :-
“Senator Cardin authored and released a 200 page masterpiece on Russian influence in western elections. Suddenly he has a primary from Kremlin stooge Assange’s Wikileaks primary source Chelsea Manning. The Kremlin plays the extreme left to swing elections. Remember that.”
The commentary on that from Greenwald runs…
The benefits of PPP’s…. NOT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/18/taxpayers-to-foot-200bn-bill-for-pfi-contracts-audit-office
And to put it in a new Zealand context, one word
Fletchers
Corporate Welfare Graeme $400 million for dodgy repairs supervised by Fletcher’s.
Casino Capitalism the Casino Contract etc.
Another example of private sector “efficiency”
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/1027k-integrated-education
Although the private providers would probably argue that they were providing a “better”standard and environment for their customers.
How is the information in that article and example of efficiency or the lack thereof ?
The only “efficiency” I can see in the private education sector is in it’s ability to extract profit out of gullible RWNJs who can’t bear the thought of their little darlings being under the influence of the State system, least their poor wee minds be corrupted by alternative views to what they get at home.
Yes yes all good, but as I said above …
How is the information in that article and example of efficiency or the lack thereof ?
…. and of course its ability to exploit foreigners from the 3rd world – aided and abetted of course with a bureaucracy (a private and public partnership) designed to lie and cheat to anyone that comes into contact with it.
It’s almost like a Nigerian internet scam.
100% correct Save NZ.
National Party spin doctors (Joyce/(Hooten) was all about this PPP stuff then back as far as the 2014 election when this happend.
Listen at the closing statement from Hooten/Boag then.
http://www.thepaepae.com/matthew-hootons-assertions-re-the-prime-ministers-office/35076/
Now we need new Labour Coalition Government to investigate the past publicly broadcast allegations made by Matthew Hooten on Radio Live against the last National Government illegal activities.
“put these dead bones to rest”
Specifically Hooten began rolling the ball in a ‘lively discussion’ with Miscelle Boag the past secretary of the National party.
Mike Williams was also on this debate as the past secretary of the Labour Party also and ca recall this event during the investigations that should now take place.
The first allegation was against the then “Minister of transport” Steven SS Joyce, who was apparently involved with a shady deal to allow his close mate’ of his who was a roading contractor to secure a multi million dollar road contract.
But the roading contractor apparently got into a dispute with MBIE “Ministry of Bussiness Innovation and Employment” over the contract.
The allegations can be heard here on this link to the audio on from ‘Radio live’ at that time 31/8/14.
Mark Sainsbury hosts ‘Sunday morning’ at RadioLIVE with guests Michelle Boag, Mike Williams, Matthew Hooton & Duncan Garner 31 Aug 2014
MP3 file
http://www.thepaepae.com/matthew-hootons-assertions-re-the-prime-ministers-office/35076/
The debarkle was AT THE 28 minute mark near the end of this 40 minute debate between Hooten and Boag.
Mark Sainsbury says criminal charges should now be leveled and an investigastion needs to be made.
This whole sordid event of “collusion against all political opponents” including the 2011 attack on Labour MP leader Phil Goff, (the Hanover financial ruin debarkle) and all these resulting shady deals be investigated by the new Government over these allegations since National at this time failed to investigate these inappropriate events during the sacking of the ‘Justice Minister Judith Collins and how the SIS obtained the “leaked email” – documents to fire the Minister using Whaleoil Cameon Slater and his connection with the PM and Jason Ede and PM office Wayne Eagleson as Mike Williamson is also importantly also saying on this clip he believes “an investigation is warranted”.
Actually, that is the benefit of PPPs – massive profits for the private sector with all the risk and extra costs landing on the public generating even more profits for the private sector.
They’re just of no benefit to the public as they cost more and provide less service.
Yeah … It’s not so much a problem of PPPs as such as the corruption of the government that administers them. PPPs in Korea deliver as promised or get restructured, and their CEOs investigated by the prosecution service. Strangely this make them work very hard not to bilk the greater population, and to deliver services as promised or better. Those that don’t do not survive.
Part of the problem highlighted in that article is the collapse of the private provider to bankruptcy.
Now, when that happens should the government step in and prop up the business and thus rewarding failure?
Should it buy out the business as the 5th Labour government bought out Transrail for an extortionate amount and thus rewarding failure?
Or should it let the business collapse and the service it provides go with it? This way doesn’t rewarding failure as the other two do but then it’s a government service and is probably essential.
PPPs are essentially a way to get government guaranteed profits with all the risk taken up by the government.
If corruption is a problem, and it is, then we need better laws covering it and I can hear the screams from the RWNJs about that already. Of course, we should still put such laws and investigators in place.
Then there’s the question of if there’s even enough scale in the country for the services provided. Is there really enough ex-government road building in the country to warrant having multiple contractors available to do it? Or are those contractors solely there because the government contracts out road building? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter which means that it’s far more efficient to simply re-institute the MoW and have the government build all their own roads.
If the government is the sole client to keep contractors going then it’s better done directly by the government. Removes huge amounts of bureaucracy and the dead-weight loss of profit.
The Herald calls it ‘weird weather.’
Rachel Stewart asks if we’re worried yet.
Global temperature figures show 2017 one of world’s hottest years on record
In the Herald.
Want to be a vegan? Here’s how to do it, safely
https://www.npr.org/2010/08/02/128849908/food-for-thought-meat-based-diet-made-us-smarter
As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn’t need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.
And the health benefits of bigger brains and better tools include digging up fossil fuels, population explosion, climate change, increased lead in the enviroment, WMDs and genocide…
…and music…and art..and literature……… and mathematics….. and science..so not all bad stuff.
Ye Gods I’ve turned into PhilU
There’s some really bad music out there. Crap literature too.
You’ll get no argument from an old fart like me Robert – I was thinking of some of the less recent efforts.
No such thing as bad music, just music that doesn’t appeal to you.
Does it have the same effect on an individual in these advanced times, Puckish? If not, your argument is not worth a fig.
Probably.
We’re still evolving after all and each generation gets smarter.
Interesting link Draco! I found the comparison between average IQ scores of 1937 and 1997 (80 rising to 100) startling to say the least. *
There is also the well known factor of secular development within a population. While it is not clear that these trends are entirely the result of improving nutrition –
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/503084
* For those who are going to argue that this is a misunderstanding of IQ and the average is always 100 – go and read the link Draco provides to see how the 80 figure for 1937 is arrived at.
What about the pressing issue of saving life on this planet?
Does that not get factored in?
What would happen to these animals if everyone went vegan?
They would not be bred.
They should not be bred.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chicken-breed-sizes-and-weight-over-time-2014-11?IR=T
No Ed, what would happens to all those animals right now.
The, probably, hundreds of millions sheep, cows, pigs, chickens and deer
Would you have them all slaughtered and their carcasses not used
What would you do Ed
What do you think?
No …what do you think ?
Great attempt to divert rather than discuss the bigger issue.
And stupid as ever.
😆
Just don’t bother discussing the issue. It isn’t of importance to you.
Just like the morals of slavery weren’t important to the Pole and Norris families in Liverpool in the 1750s.
Look at my lovely strawman !
No Ed I don’t know what you think because I’m not a mind reader, thats why I’m asking what you would do and preferably if you could answer without the use of some random youtube that has nothing to do with the question
It is a hypothetical question as industrial farming is not going to stop this second.
Once it stops, it will be phased out.
Stop being a coward and answer what is a pretty straight forward question Ed
I do not answer hypothetical questions.
From memory you don’t answer any questions.
And cut the abuse.
I am over it from the right wing brigade who come on this site simply to disrupt debate.
🙄
“From memory you don’t answer any questions.”
Maybe this will help
https://drhealthbenefits.com/food-bevarages/meats/health-benefits-red-meat
Red Meat to Feed Brain
10. Improving Memory
Omega 3 including the food intake of the brain that plays an important role in the development of cell membranes in the brain and neurological system signal path. Medically proven omega 3 is able to optimise the development of the brain’s memory both in children and adults. This means that better met the needs of omega 3, especially for those who find it easy to forget.
PR fertilizer.
what i want to know is how vegans would stop nz being over run with wild deer,goats and pigs if we stopped hunting them ,because short of releasing a wolf breed and probably a big cat overrun we would be , spose we could just poison them.
Why don’t you become informed on the subject?
Here.
Watch this film.
[I’m putting you in premod until you stop spamming the site with videos. You’ve been warned about this multiple times before. If it happens again I will give a ban.
To be clear, spamming is when you start a conversation, someone asks you a reasonable question and instead of answering that you post a link to a long video and expect them to watch it. Or worse, in this case to a trailer that doesn’t in any way address the question.
Spamming is also posting multiple video links without context. Or just posting too many. If you are still unclear, ask and I will pick the comment up on Moderation. – weka]
moderation note for you to respond to.
Have seen it thank you.
I do think waghorn was deliberately taking the subject away from industrial farming.
And in future I shall ignore such diversions rather than post a video.
Got the message
Some more educational material
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnUdoZRSRCY
He’d probably suggest that government cullers are sent out to kill them but under no circumstances is the meat or skins to be harvested or maybe the animals are trapped and exported
Ahh poisoning…now theres a topic to get everyone going
By the by I don’t know if you’ve heard of this:
https://farmerassist.com.au/
but a NZ version is going to be trialled in Canterbury and then, if successful, rolled out to the rest of the country
Excellent! I hope they add in an animal welfare and there is enough flexibility to give away the meat but otherwise a bloody good idea.
PR meat and milk will be made in labs .
Farming will collapse as we know it.
is that you roger douglas.?
in general pests are in control from what i see. although since it became next to impossible to sell wild venison there numbers could are building up massively , i’m just dying for a vegen to tell me how we would deal with it if we stopped harvesting them.
rabbits are still a huge issue in the SI. Farmers now use 1080 and other poisonings are routine. It’s a requirement from some councils to control, so if you don’t poison you have to do something else. A scheme that matches landowners with shooters sounds very useful to me.
I agree about the vegan thing. Even putting farming aside for a minute, huge damage is done to ecosystems from rabbits alone. This is why DOC uses poison on the conservation lands, it’s very hard to regenerate native plants in many places because of the rabbits. I’ve seen places eaten back to bare soil and stone (although that’s also to do with previous land management practices like overgrazing and burnoffs). If we don’t act as the main predator of rabbits we are basically saying it’s ok for those ecosystems to be impoverished permanently, or to even die.
The health benefits of being a vegetarian/vegan are undeniable, that certain celebrities promote them is one of the poorest reasons to become vegetarian.
I would expect the largest barriers locally to becoming vegetarian/vegan in no particular order would be:
Cultural attitudes to food
Apathy/lazziness
Perceived cost
Perceived lack of choice/taste
Satisfaction with current diet
There is also the more urgent issue of saving our planet.
And the moral imperative of animal welfare.
It would be interesting to model the possible effect of everyone on the planet moving to veganism/vegetarian over the next decade and the effect on animal welfare and the ecosystem.
Animals in agriculture are not part of the ecosystem.
I believe they would be in most peoples understanding of an ecosystem.
Have you looked at how industrial farming works?
Yes I am aware of how the many facets of industrial farming.
So it is clearly not a normal natural food chain.
Is this an ecosystem?
Part of one …Yes.
There is also the more urgent issue of saving our planet.
And the moral imperative of animal welfare.
1. The planet doesn’t need saving. It’s indifferent to what happens to us.
2. Becoming vegetarian has little environmental benefit compared with just stopping the feeding of grain crops to livestock.
3. Animal welfare isn’t significantly improved by vegetarianism, it just changes the animals being killed.
1. Life on this planet.
2. Eating meat has a much bigger carbon footprint than eating plants.
3. Have you looked at how industrial farming operates?
The new baby of the Prime Minister will be a hunter gatherer, burning fossil fuels to go fishing and most likely will be very neo-liberal like the parents. Sadly for you there will be nothing you can do to stop this.
That is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Life on this planet.
Life on this planet isn’t dependent on humans changing from omnivores to herbivores.
Eating meat has a much bigger carbon footprint than eating plants.
Under specific circumstances that aren’t essential to an omnivorous diet.
Have you looked at how industrial farming operates?
Have you? Where do you think all that soy comes from?
1. Life will go on. It may be somewhat reduced but it will go on as has happened before. Five times in fact with the greatest being the Permian Extinction Event which even managed to even wipe out a few insects. Took ten million years for the biodiversity to recover.
2. That probably has something to do with all the grains fed to the meat first rather than an actual law of physics.
3. Yes.
This is what the industrial farming system looks like.
What next? Working conditions are really bad in some foreign countries so we should give up work? You really should look up the meaning of “non-sequitur.”
Another attempt to divert from the issue.
Ed, you do understand that the human body requires nutrients which are best absorbed through eating certain animal products…
You understand that….right?
That is not true.
“A plant based diet has been shown in numerous studies to have big health benefits. In general, vegetarians live 6-9 years longer than non-vegetarians, and vegans longer again.
Many of today’s most common killer diseases are linked to diet. In particular, heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers and diseases resulting from obesity. The vegetarian diet can help in all these conditions.
Additionally, the vast array of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients in plant-based foods offer significant health protection. There are still more plant compounds being discovered that are found to offer health benefits.”
http://www.vegetarian.org.nz/health-and-nutrition/benefits-of-a-plant-based-diet/
https://www.pcrm.org/health/medNews/vegetarians-live-longer
http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/2009_ADA_position_paper.pdf
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/89/5/1627S.full
And these……
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/70/3/516s.short
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8bdd/e18a9b0eab9dd65a74dcfa4909630a84e671.pdf
Widen your reading..
Take of the blinkers first…
Enthusiasts for a particular diet or medicinal drug often promote the idea of “lower death rate from killer disease X.” They usually skip over the question of whether there’s any difference in all-cause mortality, usually because this:
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/103/1/218
Conclusions: United Kingdom–based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation. [my emphasis]
You are part of the problem blocking a no meat world.
So are you meatsack.
You have no idea what my meat intake is.
For some reason Kenneth Williams seems appropriate here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsCItIDUl5s
I shouldn’t lol, but I did
The classics never go out of fashion
If you dare question these right wingers thinking you get abuse.
Remember.
“All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. ”
Arthur Schopenhauer.
Actual cost (especially when you include spoilage), the huge hurdle to adapt (I’ve involuntarily vomited nearly every vegetable I’ve ever eaten). But sure, for those who can afford the mental, physical, and financial toll – or who don’t have it – good on them.
Do you also gag on grains? Puke over pulses? Barf after bananas and hurl on hummus?
The health benefits of being a vegetarian/vegan are undeniable, that certain celebrities promote them is one of the poorest reasons to become vegetarian.
Two things:
1. Being a vegan is detrimental to your health – you have to work pretty hard at managing your diet to maintain even a semblance of good health as a vegan, which is one reason people tend to drop it after a while.
2. The health benefits of being a vegetarian require context. Yes, being a vegetarian is way healthier than a standard western diet of refined carbs and fat, but that has little to do with meat consumption or the lack of it. The typical Masai warrior of a few hundred years ago rarely ate a vegetable but could snap your typical vegetarian like a twig.
Completely untrue. I quote from the article I posted at 4.
“There are numerous health benefits associated with plant based diets — lower body weights, reduced risk of developing some types of cancer, reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes and a longer lifespan.”
Watch this as well
“There are numerous health benefits associated with plant based diets — lower body weights, reduced risk of developing some types of cancer, reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes and a longer lifespan.”
Compared with the high-carb standard western diet, yes. But lots of us non-vegetarians don’t eat that diet. There are no health benefits for us in a vegetarian diet, just crappier food and extra work to get decent nutrition.
Exactly.
+2.
Lots of vegans have health problems after the first few years. I’m sure some people can do ok on vegan diets long term, although we don’t know how that plays out over the really long time frames. Most people need animal products in their diet in some form.
Ahh, a Herald article that everyone can complain about
New Zealand’s first man receives welfare check
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11977607
A title designed to lead to confusion over if the First Man is receiving public money, but it actually being a fluff piece on Clark Gayford so people can get upset about low level news designed to have positive news about our lovely PM (whilst ignoring ow the previous PM’s got the same quite a lot)
Not a welfare cheque though ;p. Also pretty sure welfare cheques don’t exist, that you must have a bank account.
God what an eyesore, did the architect reuse plans from the early 1990’s? What a shithole it looks like “Albany on sea” for the ‘fast tracked’ America’s cup.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11977653
If only normal people got such benefits as fast tracking, but if it comes to billionaires, hobbies and sports then… all hands on board from taxpayers money, stealing the harbour and fast track consenting of an eyesore. Couldn’t they at least design something that looks architecturally sophisticated?
I guess it is a slight step up from the shed 10 efforts/Cloud that bares no relationship to the harbour at all or each building, and has become a knic knack/bad experiences ghetto, that Aucklander’s keep away from.
Another wasted opportunity where corporates and politicians with little imagination and skills siphon off taxpayer money and resources with crap ideas and designers to make a dollar for some corporate enterprise or grab the limelight for themselves, while pretending it will have some use for the wider public later.
Some good public spaces in Auckland, Auckland Art gallery, The tank farm areas and Ponsonby central… all those areas humming day and night, not the ghetto’s that other spaces become.
lprent
I am thinking that you need to think about moderation and discuss with the other mods to find some way to manage it better. There are obvious cases of keeping trolls who want to upset , divide, sneer diminish not disagree and discuss.
It would be a shame to lose the interesting minds that come here and have helped make TS the blog it is. I think it is time to democratise the moderation. I also think
that regular writers with something to say should be able to be paused quietly when in the midst of some long obssession about the usual suspects. And let’s not have onerous PC chastisements. You are all clever buggers, you should be able to come up with a rewritten treatise for mods. The terms under which we operate everything now are changing and we have found we have to be adaptable to stay up with the flow. What is important to you, and I think having concerned, sincere, thoughtful, practical and kindly people who try to be literate and try to use the modern systems online must be, and surely you want to keep them coming and supporting the site or you could lose this.
It seems to me we all are in a slow war. The French Revolution was bloody and dramatic, this is slower but is impacting all the same, and the nobs are trying to turn the revolution over, get their advantages and prominence back. We are getting the let them eat cake while they sleep in the cars and drink themselves silly with our welfare money stuff. We are like WW2 Resistance, who were trained to be fast thinkers and practical doers, and flexible, and were also prepared to die because what they were fighting for was freedom from tyranny.
I think that you and the mods are important for whatever we are fighting for, the exact vision of which is unclear because of fast moving events, but the knowledge of what is already happening and what is likely to occur, should spur us on. Let all good men come to the aid of the party. All sounds a bit hysterical doesn’t it, but if we don’t stimulate those brain cells and get through to others, we are on a hiding to nowhere. TS is useful, good, and needs some changes to keep it in its premier place, and it’s your baby. So could you and the others consider changing mod practices which were drawn up early on, but the baby is now an enquiring, questioning teen ready for a Bar Mitzvah or something like that coming of age recognition.
[from the Policy, one of the reasons for moderating,
Abusing the sysop or post writers on their own site – including telling us how to run our site or what we should write. This is viewed as self-evident stupidity, and should be added as a category to the Darwin Awards.
Maybe have a rethink about how you are framing your comments here. Also, the amount of work you are saying we should be doing. You could try educating yourself about how moderation and writing works here and why it is the way it is before venturing into telling us what we should be doing – weka]
100% greywarshark; well said,
“you need to think about moderation and discuss with the other mods to find some way to manage it better. There are obvious cases of keeping trolls who want to upset , divide, sneer diminish not disagree and discuss.”
Agreed fully greywarshark, these trolls add nothing of any value to the uplifting of our health/well-being/quality-of life for all here and just put others off, which is their only role sadly.
Over at Martyn Bradbury’s ‘The daily blog’ he has heavily sanctioned these trolls already.
So we need to be mindful of keeping the discussion focused on the article we all contribute to assist the new labour coalition in making our country better to live in with a far better enjoyment of life.
Hope we get rid of these National Party disruptive trolls finally.
My lovely echo chamber !
Red Alert 2.0 🙂
Perhaps Lynn could appoint Clare Curran overlord and chief moderator of this site.
She might be a bit busy at the moment, I’d suggest T. Mallard
Oh the fun we’d have !
As long as your not a racist puke, or dump your hate on people Puckish rogue. I don’t care what you say.
That said, your girl Denise, how you feeling about that slacker? Just another lazy tory mp we all got to pay for? Or do you have good feelings about the torpid lunch eater?
What are you going on about?
Come on Bro, your racist puke comment you made, which got you banned.
Are you not a national party supporter? I’m sure most of your comments have been supporting the last government, am I wrong?
I get a few bans so you’ll need to refresh my memory
So you get banned for being a racist puke a lot do you?
Not that I’m aware of, can you post a link to back up what you’re saying or are you just assuming?
So you forgot the last time you were banned from here, you know, the long one?
So thats a no then, you can’t post what should be a reasonably simple to find link
“Perhaps Lynn could appoint Clare Curran overlord and chief moderator of this site.”
NO. She’s otherwise occupied, doing a wee job for me.
Lol, Martyn Bradbury’s a troll…
Could we at least sacrifice one troll? We could do it spectacularly, all pile on, beat the stuffing out of them and block their responses? That’d be a larf! Pete George already thinks we do that to him whenever he visits, poor luv. We could (metaphorically) barbecue James or give Pucky a good rogueing 🙂
https://giphy.com/gifs/creepy-beard-zach-galifianakis-V6R9thgW7fimI
RG
One a month would be a good ritual. It could be done democratically, by voting and then that one stood down for a month. The trolls would enjoy it, boasting how many times they had been stood down.
The left are in power so we attract the opposition.
It’s just business Grey.
Takes a bit to get used to after 9 years.
I could moderate but I’d be too permissive. Plus it’s too much time.
I think having the neoliberals trolls gives us the insight into the way they think and what they are up to just don’t let them get to you Ka pai
aye
Censorship, echo chamber, and propaganda – enough on the left already beat themselves with these things.
tl:dr – Greywarshark doesn’t like seeing comments by right-wingers and Something Must Be Done.
No I think Grey is musing about something completely different – but I won’t elaborate as I might get myself banned. Just have a look at yesterdays OM for background.
PM
It’s a waste of time trying to talk reasonably with some of you.
@greywarshark
“It would be a shame to lose the interesting minds that come here and have helped make TS the blog it is.”
and “including telling us how to run our site or what we should write. This is viewed as self-evident stupidity” (moderators comment).
Leading horses to water, and all that. We’ll see how long those interesting minds continue to visit, and whether or not they can be bothered with the dogmatic and egotistic.
And of course, if ‘they’ (them, the other) were really committed and discontented, they’d set up their own blog apparently.
Easier sometimes to just peruse and watch what happens.
Anyway, for the next few weeks, I’m off to places in the third world where community, compassion, integrity, etc., (values ‘the left’ once prided itself on) still exist and are necessary for survival.
Yes OwT here I and you are thinking of survival of humanity and some graciousness, and many that come here one would think, to discuss that, don’t give a tinker’s curse about it. I’ve been coming here for years and observing and thinking and writing and I don’t know if there has been the enlightenment of all and esprit de corps that I expected after all that time – seems to degenerate all the time into just a place for verbal scrapping and point scoring. Bit disappointing really.
weka
You could try not batting back any suggestions for alteration of your approach, and actually treat the commenters as fellow workers in a thinking community, not like students that need behaviour conditioning. It seems that you are an academic or in the teaching profession or have adopted didactic behaviour. There is a group of moderators who have for years adopted a general attitude to the blog which has had a robust flexibility, that seems to be reduced. All commenters are treated the same, with little respect for long-term commenters who have tried to add to the value of the blog.
Not everyone can manage moderation, and that seems to create a division.
I am thinking that there should be a level below the moderators made up of commenters who like to act responsibly.
Anyway I have written enough now, something on OM 18/1 I think and a couple today. I seem to just strike anger in you. How dare I put my ideas forward and want them heard and considered? So I am bowing out, I am not wanted and just get my serious and sensible suggestions to develop the blog further ridiculed by others so i won’t bother further.
[“How dare I put my ideas forward and want them heard and considered?”
It’s all about the *how. There is a difference between sharing ideas and telling Authors/Admin what to do. I know this because I commented on moderation for years as a commenter, in some pretty tense situations, and was never moderated. I paid a lot of attention to the moderators, including very hard out moderators like Lynn. I listened to what they said, and why they did what they did, so that I could understand how it worked here.
And yes, given the shit that’s gone down on this site in the past few years, and what that has cost people, including losing Authors, I don’t actually rate your views on moderation when they are presented in such ignorant ways. You still don’t get it and show no interest in listening to people who have a great deal more experience and knowledge about moderation here than you do.
And yes, I am fucked off now. Because after over a day of trying to evenhandedly explain some things here about moderation I’m still having to deal with people who think it’s all about them. Fellow workers? FFS, when I see commenters taking responsibility and doing some of the mahi around here to help the site instead of treating TS as some kind of personal sand pit where their needs are paramount, I’m sure that things will be more equitable. But as it stands the more work you create for moderators the more likely they are to crack down harder. Lynn set the tone for that and it predates myself and Bill by years.
I actually think you have some good ideas, but your framing and timing is just way way off. Take some time out, because now I am shutting this down. There is no problem with talking about moderation, but you don’t get to tell Authors what to do or how to run the site. If you can’t figure out the difference, then ask when you get back and I’ll explain it. But this has run long enough. 1 week ban. If you have a problem with that, try emailing Lynn and he can explain to you why moderation in the end is precisely about behaviour modification. – weka]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njd8AX-SIHI
and fwiw, I’m really open to discussing my moderation style. I”m just waiting for someone who knows how to do that constructively and with respect for the Authors here. Not all moderators are willing to do that.
Hang in there Grey I’ll stick a post up about The Standard itself shortly.
Can you bring back TRP as well?
and i’ll just pluck perpetual goodness out of my capacious ass.
go get us a punchy author or two Union :-}
I’d do it meself, but as you know, authors getting banned and demoted aint a good look. It wouldn’t take long. lol.
And besides that, my spealing is shote.
‘n oath
Did you just call me an effin oaf? lol
Comment o’ the day, Ucg!
Technically, I can start writing again any time (I still have an author log in) and I’m actively considering it because the TS community means a lot to me and the blog itself clearly needs a shot in the arm.
However, the problem remains that at least two of my fellow authors (with mod powers) appear to find working class voices hard to handle. Ironic given that this blog started out intending to be a voice for the labour movement and is now appears to be almost exclusively written and moderated by folk whose exposure to workers is limited to ordering flat whites from them.
The real sadness of the situation is that when CV and I were booted out in late 2016, losing two male authors was supposed to usher in a new dawn of women writers. TS was suddenly going to become a ‘safe space’ for women and a thousand flowers would bloom. Predictably*, that never happened, and what has happened is that other writers, male and female, have drifted off.
I note TS is losing some terrific commenters too. When we piss off the likes of Marty Mars, the site drifts ever closer to being a blandly bourgeois bore fest.
On the upside, we have some new talent writing. Advantage continues to delight and I can’t begin to tell you what a terrific chap Enzo is, both as a writer and an activist. Fingers crossed there are more engaging writers to come.
So, I’m going to have a hard think this weekend about resuming writing here. Like everyone, I have other calls on my time and energy, however, I think TS is worth the effort.
*I wrote a post, ‘Broken’, which touched on what I saw as the difficulties for women participating on blogs. I still think the post is relevant.
[By the general agreement of the Authors in the back end last year, TRP’s login permissions are set at Contributor not Author. This means he can’t publish posts here. He can submit posts, but they will have to be approved by an Author with Editor level permissions. The dropping of his permissions to Contributor happen some time after he left the site, and it was prompted by him maligning TS off site (dropping permissions also meant he could no longer access the back end discussions but he hadn’t been involved in those for some time anyway).
There are so many mistruths in what he just wrote. I’m not even going to begin to untangle that, because we’ve been here too many times before. Given the last time he was banned as a commenter was for telling lies about an author, it’s really hard to see how he could return as an Author now and not have the same old shit go down again.
As far as I know there are only two Authors that have had their permissions dropped at TS – CV and TRP. TPR’s came after several years and multiple rounds of conflict that cause problems for the community, site, and authors. He is also one of the reasons why it is so hard to get women to write here.
Had he been willing to work *with other authors here, he would know that quite a lot has been done in the background on the women writers project. I will note that he had on a number of occasions worked against women and what we are wanting to have happen here. I think this comment demonstrates that he is still largely incapable of being here without causing problems.
I’m sure there will be discussion about this in the back end but I am going ban him now from commenting here, because of the lying and because of the potential to create the same sets of problems he was responsible for before. I also want the women’s project to largely have a free run once it gets into the public.
12 month ban from commenting – weka]
Second comment of the day, TRP lol
I reckon this site needs you now more than ever.
Hope your hard think works out for us mortals at the standard.
Off to read that blog now. Always a pleasure, never a chore. 🙂
Cheers, and thanks for the encouragement!
No worries, mate. I don’t always agree with you, but I do respect your integrity and latent honesty.
I’ve never had to worry about home town modding on your posts.
Now look what you did.
The problem was your moderating … and you and CV had terrible fights …
And rightly so, the guy was a fucking shill.
There was much more to it than that Micky. But I’m fed up of reading stuff that’s just people throwing lit matches and petrol. So….end.
[given the abuse I’ve just read in the back end in your comments sitting in moderation, I’m not even going to look at this further. 6 month ban – weka]
[further escalating and misogynistic abuse has led to a permanent ban. – weka]
I’m dropping your comments into Moderation until I have a chance to look at them. You can probably expect a shortish ban for attacking Authors. I’ll put a moderation note up when I’ve had a better look.
So not political at all but
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11977896
So its not enough that Seth Rogen ruins probably the greatest comic series ever written (Preacher) but know he wants to take a big, steaming dump on the best superhero parody ever (although The Pro is pretty good)
Media Lens
18/1/18
“A Liberal Pillar Of The Establishment – ‘New Look’ Guardian, Old-Style Orthodoxy”
http://medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=861:a-liberal-pillar-of-the-establishment-new-look-guardian-old-style-orthodoxy&catid=56:alerts-2018&Itemid=250
Liberal “Left” media like The Guardian are probably one of the the greatest enemies of real Progressive Left change in the west..IMO.
The Guardian’s Luke Harding’s recent interview was another low by the Guardian.
“I’m a storyteller.”
Sums up the paper nowadays – sells a narrative .
And then there was this article by Olivia Solon.
How Syria’s White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine
Which was brilliantly dissected here.
And I think Jonathan Freedland is about the worst at the Guardian.
A pro Israel hawk, he led a non stop assault on Corbyn. He makes Josie Pagani and Phil Quinn look like mice.
“Conspiracies don’t happen….here.”
A beginner’s guide to the Guardian
Brian Fallow calls out business on their pro-National and anti-Labour government bias, clearly feeling so miserable about their businesses when unemployment, inflation, economic growth, interest rates, and bunches of other stuff are going so well for so long in New Zealand:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11977515
Is anyone else quietly worried about the commodification of space?
https://www.planetaryresources.com/
Or that private companies are adding the spy networks?
http://www.spacex.com/
It’s feeling more and more like “in the mirror darkly”, rather than “to boldly go”.
I’m worried to the extent that space travel becomes so cheap that people with overgrown lawns and hoarders become those nasty Martian neighbours from hell you see on TV… Overwhelming the criteria for gaining a seat on a shuttle is so high it weeds out the unfit. Unless some one makes a nano sky crane to space I just don’t see how it’s economically viable to get those commodities back on solid ground.
Although military commanders do accept that the first person to colonise the moon will be the most powerful man in the solar system. Because unlike earth bound natives who have to spend vast resources getting weapons systems to the moon, any one who colonises the moon can just chuck devastating rocks back at us for free basically.
So there are problems and we don’t really want nasty neighbours from hell.
Yeah, but if we can support a moon base to the point it’s sustainable, similar players can still obliterate the moonbase or its mother country. And if the moonbase is big enough to declare independence, the major nations down here will have the ability to put counter-battery fire in orbit. Even in the 1970s it would have been technically trivial to convert a rocket motor turbopump into a turbogenerator for a decent rail gun
Same fucking “game”, bigger scale.
Mr Peters will become the first Maori Priminster even only for 6 weeks this is a good thing for Maoris culture and Mana Ka pai. There is going to be a lot of howls from all the neoliberals racist bigots they can go get_____LOL. I’m happy that my Ngti Porou IWI has taken down shonky keys photo teno pai.
Now my Maori culture people know this if any dum stuff goes down at Waitangi this year I won’t be as polite as I have been with other Maori issues I have involved myself in. Ka kite ano
I think, with this cool government, that you’ll find that Waitangi this year will be the celebration it’s meant to be. Ka kite
Following Pelosi releasing the Senate version, Nunes has released the House Intelligence Committee testimony by Fusion GPS.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/954149622397710337.html
This Dave Kennedy needs to harden the f. up and get real. It’s weather, not climate, you looney true believer. Start reading here…
https://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2017/07/12/climate-sceptic-end-chris-de-freitas-dies/#comment-261280
Amongst all this, take particular note of this comment and link….
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2016/09/13040/#comment-582401
If confusion still exists in his mind that there is no atmospheric “greenhouse effect” ,the penny should finally drop with this comment….
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/24/can-a-cold-object-warm-a-hot-object/#comment-2685034
[I don’t allow climate change deniers on posts I put up, especially not ones that can’t pass even a basic test of manners in a new place to a guest post.
I also note that following your first link takes me to a page that is a comment by you that has a link to another page that is a comment by you, and eventually ends up at a climate change denier site. Way below the standard of debate that is acceptable here. Claims such as you are making require actual evidence. I’m moving this to Open Mike, you might find someone who will debate with you, personally I think it’s an utter waste of time. btw, have a read of the site Policy. – weka]
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
deafening silence on legalising marijuana.
the dompost can run a front page confabulating P with cannabis all mixed up and a million fallacies of composition to write a crummy ad for the justice industry but their standards have fallen into the abyss and it is to be hope that a progressive government will do the right thing immediately.