If you didn’t hear this talk at the weekend, then I highly recommend it.
Linda Tirado is the author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. The book began as a first person blog post about living in poverty in Utah that went viral.
I listened to it as well Paul and I thought it was mind blowing, the courage and conviction that she spoke with and the “I will not apologise for my poverty” was very profound. Good luck with her future career as a writer representing the under-privileged.
Yeah, been quite a turn around in the weather in last week, shorts and tee shirt and not a sign of snow on Remarks the week before. Still very early though for snow to stay there but the first good dump is usually late May.
Not sure about sparking, but maybe more water wearing away at the rock.
Have to say I’m very glad that Shaw is co-leader. Having him, with his background in business, in that photo in a suit, is what is needed at this time. It’s his message to the business community and other power holders in society that is critical now. And the GP do have a plan that NZ could pick up and implement right now. Not as radical as many of us want or know is needed, but it’s a plan that those powerholders could get on board with.
The Green Party has developed a number of solutions that can be undertaken immediately to show New Zealand’s commitment to make this happen.
“First, we would put a proper price on pollution and redistribute the revenue as tax credits to direct spending and investment towards climate-friendly goods and services.
“Second, we would set up a politically independent Climate Commission to advise the Government on policy settings to guide the transition to a low-carbon economy.
“The Green Party would also set up a Green Investment Bank to spur investment in high value green jobs and industries.
“The world doesn’t have time for National to pay lip service to climate change measures. We must take action now. The consequences of a 2 degC temperature rise are too grave.
“Our climate change policy is about improving the way we live and do business. We can reduce emissions, create jobs and enhance our quality of life,” said Mr Shaw.
as an aside, for the people that think that the Greens believe electric cars will save the day,
No ‘silver bullet’ for climate change
“New Zealand’s top scientists have shown in this report that reducing emissions will require a re-think of the current strategy for agriculture, and that climate targets won’t be met by relying solely on tech-fixes like electric vehicles and methane inhibitors,” said Green Party Co-leader James Shaw.
Yes, petrol or diesel too. If you are going to manufacture a car, make it an electric one. But if you read their policy interconnectedly it’s obvious that they value things like public transport and biking more and have policies on them too.
It’s more that replacing the current fleet with electric cars means a huge amount of emissions when we should be powering down and not relying on individual car ownership. We need to travel less, because all travel has a GHG cost. More public transport, more walking/biking, more working and playing closer to home. It’s actually pretty recent in NZ for so many people to own cars (remember when Japanese imports were first allowed in in the 90s?).
I don’t have so much of a problem with the GP policy because NZ is patently not ready to give up its car culture yet and the GP don’t have enough power to be pushing that (thanks lefties who haven’t been voting for them!!). It’s just a pragmatic approach. If it takes us 20 years to transition to not relying on personal cars, we will still have lots of people in that time buying new cars, so they may as well be electric (the case can also be made for preserving the existing fleet for as long as possible, but there are problems with that too).
“It’s more that replacing the current fleet with electric cars ”
Those cars are going to get replaced regardless through the fact that companies tend to be on 3 to 5 year cycles and wealthy kiwis tend to be the same as companies. Add to that cars just don’t last now 20 years use would be rarity now.
As for depowering your right but it won’t happen willingly.
Which I’m guessing is part of what is behind the GP policy. If you have to replace a car anyway, why would you not make it electric in a country that already has power generation at 80% renewable and could pretty easily get it to 100% (GP policy is by 2030).
My car is 20 years old 🙂 I reckon if it had been looked after someone would get another 10 years out of it. If parts were available, it could last a lot longer. It’ll be the lack of parts that will eventually scrap it.
Sure. But not politically feasible in 2016. If we want to do the best thing, we have to start where we are. You and I can push for faster and more radical change. The Greens can’t. I don’t mean to have a go at you, so please don’t take this as that, but honestly, the GP were that radical back in the day, and not enough people voted for them including many lefties like yourself. This is a group of people who were thinking long and hard about CC and resource depletion well before we were even aware it was an issue. The time for them to lead that charge is past. NZ had it’s chance at being progressive via govt and it blew it. It’s going to have to come from somewhere else.
However, I still believe that voting Green (or supporting them in other ways) gives us a much better chance of achieving any meaningful change. Can you imagine how these conversations would be going and what would be happening in the public mind if we had a govt that was taking CC as seriously as the Greens are, even if they’re not yet where we want or need them to be?
I also believe that if a movement arises outside of govt that shifts the public, then parties like the Greens will follow. They want to do the right thing.
I can see the logic in pursuing formal position and power and therefore justifying participating in the Parliamentary game of status quo pretend and extend.
“It’s really a shame that people are so hung up on the electric car thing.”
the hang up is created by a desire to believe that all we need to do is make a few changes here and there and we can carry on pretty much as before…….self delusion can be powerful
It’s like people not being able to let go of Labour proposing that we have to raise the Super eligibility age.
What’s the big deal?
Well, the big deal is that it provides a huge insight into how they look at the world, and what they believe the real issues are. As well as the kinds of solutions which are needed.
Shaw is going where Hooton would advice him to go…well suited and cap in hand to the business community
the Green Party however would do well to remember what Naomi Klein has to say about such liaisons in ‘This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs. the Climate’…from her massive research and evaluations this modus operandi fails
( whenever I see Shaw in a suit I think of the failed ‘Red Peak’ corporate flag and Shaw’s attempt to curry favour with jonkey nactional)
…it will be interesting to see whether the new Green Party strategy is a winner with it’s grassroots voters
Hooton would also advise dissatisfied lefties to frame their potential parties in a poor light, so I guess that makes you and Shaw alike (both apparently defined by what Hooton might suggest).
Shaw isn’t going cap in hand to the business community. He’s speaking their language so he can influence them. It’s smart strategy.
The grassroots membership chose Shaw as co-leader. The green vote has increased every year since Norman was chosen as co-leader (in a business suit!) and everyone was ‘oooh, sell out, you’ll lose the grassroots and fail’. The grassroots chose Norman as co-leader too. Looks to me like they know what they are doing as a party.
If we want the business and political classes to adopt an actual climate change action plan, what other way would that happen if it wasn’t being spearheaded by someone they could understand and relate with?
The beauty of the Greens is that beside and behind Shaw are a whole team of very skilled MPs from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. Having one suit in that team is not going to destroy the party.
I have heard him interviewed a number of times and if I didn’t know who he was the last party I would pick him as representing would be the Greens….his presentation of issues almost appears to deliberately avoid Green party platforms….
An observation of a non activist voter….politics is perception so they say.
What you will be getting from RNZ and TV is the messaging from the Greens to the business and power holder communities.
His maiden speech in parliament is worth listening to/reading. Then read Gordon Campbell’s interview and assessment of the speech and what it means and why it doesn’t meant what Hooton thinks it means (and let’s never forget that Hooton wants everyone to think that Shaw is Blue because it will lessen the green vote).
“Because I’m asking you about why *you* believe Shaw is Blue/Green, not what the media present”
I answered that in my original post……I am voter, not an active party member (like the vast majority of the electorate)….where do I get to “know” the politicians?…..by their public presentation.
If he is presenting as green/blue (your term) and he is not then it inspires little trust ..in other words, simply another politician……do we need any more simple politicians?
As things stand , and until some party with a vision and path form (unlikely imo to be any of the existing) the Greens will probably keep my vote next election despite Shaw
I don’t think he does present as a blue/green, I assumed that was what you meant when you implied that he wasn’t green. When I listen to him on TV or radio I can hear the green politics in what he says. I’m not put off by the suit.
For people that are put off, I’m pointing to evidence that he is real. What you appear to be saying is that he’s somehow misleading you by how he is on TV. I don’t really understand that, probably because all you’ve said is that you think he’s not green but you haven’t said why (and I assume you haven’t bothered watching the vid or reading the Campbell piece).
The Greens will always be open to speculation about who they are and if they are genuine, because they don’t fit into conventional notions of left/right politics. That’s why you can people like Turei and Shaw leading the same party. And that’s why Shaw can be pro market and pro intervention.
There’s not much Shaw can do to make himself more presentable to people who doubt him based on not much evidence (if he presented himself differently than he is, that would be him being false). I have to wonder here if it’s not the politics but the suit that is the problem. The criticisms I hear about Shaw are very similar to what people used to say about Norman.
whether your reasoning for his delivery on RNZ and TV is correct or not is irrelevant….its the perception it creates….anything M.Hooten has to say automatically instills an opposite view so no traction there….have read Gordon Campbell for a while and admire his work (though don’t always agree but hard to fault his research)….an exert from that piece you linked may bear re-examination…..
“Doesn’t a values-centred party always get hammered if it starts messing with its brand, in a belief this will lend them more credibility? “They do,” Shaw replies, “ And some of our people went and joined Mana for precisely that reason. There’s a political risk in anything you do. “ He points to the other current risk. “ If we remain outside of government permanently, I can’t see why anyone would want to continue voting for us. Like, I think it is now getting to that point.”
What’s your point about the Campbell quote? It’s not clear (and I think you have taken it out of context, but I’ll wait to hear what the point is).
If Shaw was say Tanzcos or Bradford, do you think he wouldn’t be creating an impression of some sort? I don’t get what is wrong with him appealing to the suit community. They have to change. Do you think they would listen more to someone who was more hippy or radical?
You appear to be saying that you personally believe that Shaw is Blue/Green based on what you see on brief interviews on TV. Did you listen to the speech and then read the Campbell interview? Because I’m asking you about why *you* believe Shaw is Blue/Green, not what the media present. If you already know that it’s a perception thing, why not go and find out who he really is?
“I don’t really understand that, probably because all you’ve said is that you think he’s not green but you haven’t said why (and I assume you haven’t bothered watching the vid or reading the Campbell piece).”
I have heard him interviewed a number of times and if I didn’t know who he was the last party I would pick him as representing would be the Greens….his presentation of issues almost appears to deliberately avoid Green party platforms….
An observation of a non activist voter….politics is perception so they say.
…and have read the Campbell piece a number of times.
“You appear to be saying that you personally believe that Shaw is Blue/Green based on what you see on brief interviews on TV.”
If he is presenting as green/blue (your term) and he is not then it inspires little trust ..in other words, simply another politician……do we need any more simple politicians?
mainly RNZ,couple TV…all relatively brief granted
“I have to wonder here if it’s not the politics but the suit that is the problem. The criticisms I hear about Shaw are very similar to what people used to say about Norman.”
lol…the suit goes with the job…I have no idea of what people said about Norman but I was never in any doubt as to what party he represented.
I think you may have answered the question……”And that’s why Shaw can be pro market and pro intervention.”….no, he cannot.
Ok, so this is an ideological issue for you. I think that’s why you can’t hear the green in what he says. Norman is also pro market and pro interventionist. It matters what people say about both of them, there’s precedence, and a much higher level of rw meme attack on the Greens now.
Repeating yourself doesn’t actually explain what you mean any better.
No but support the outrage. This is a good example of how a specific easily identified issue results in vast outrage and intense responses, but a more complex issue like TPPA gets a puzzled muted response. Clever corporates and politicians have deliberately made the TPPA issues obscure and have buried the real issues too deep to find.
It doesn’t solve the problem though, white middle class outrage at a problem in poor brown neighborhoods. Getting people out of poverty would help and there’s probably loads of other things that could help too.
I agree, I think that while being poor does play a big part (stress, worry causing excessive drinking etc) in domestic violence, I’m not sure how big a part it plays in the cases of child murder (its murder in my mind anyway) otherwise there would have been a lot of dead kids during the depression
I’m not so sure about that – firstly, I’m not even sure the data exists to make an assumption that there wasn’t a lot of dead kids during the Depression, and secondly we’re talking about somewhere around 8 kids a year being killed out of a population of 4 to 4.5 million. That level has been pretty consistent for at least the last ten years. So a major spike would be needed to demonstrate a meaningful difference in the rate, anyway.
Yes true, theres probably a lot that happened in the Depression that we’ll never know about.
When you’re assaulting a child it doesn’t take much for a hiding to turn fatal but I guess the point I was trying to make was that by focusing on one issue (poverty) then other , potential, issues might get ignored
Yeah, but when you have a factor of 6 or 8 times the rate when talking about poor kids, you definitely need to look at that issue.
There aren’t a huge amount of other factors that even come close to that level, especially (I suspect) when normalised for deprivation.
That having been said, there’s still a level of abuse that crosses economic boundaries (a prominent and unapologetic sports broadcaster comes to mind), so of course there are other issues to consider.
But my perspective is that if we know a major correlative factor and have significant case studies and plausible arguments to attribute a level of causation, then fixing that factor is the low-hanging fruit in solving the bulk of the problem.
And in this case, it would solve a lot of other issues as well.
That’s a good point but since this problem has been brewing for years (decades?) it’ll probably take the same amount of time to fix, but whats a short term issue that could be fixed right now to make a difference?
Well, given the comparatively low numbers, you might be right (or at least not demonstrably wrong 🙂 ).
But it will have an effect on some of the 110-odd other kids who die every year, too. And a more testable hypothesis is that it might bring down the assault hospitalisation rate (some of the static nature of assault deaths could well be just because we’re better at keeping them alive after they’ve been savagely assaulted).
This is a complex situation. But it may be that financial poverty is often found in the same households where there are other types of poverty: social connections, lack of support etc, time.
And it could be that these are the types of “poverty” that result in increased domestic violence – not necessarily a lack of cash.
I think economic poverty exacerbates and even causes much of those lifestyle poverties.
An example is social poverty – going out costs money, even just visiting. Petrol, busses, that sort of thing. I have a friend who has to save up to get the bus across town. Similarly, one of my key social groups is a regular weeknight at the pub. Anywhere between 4 and 8 people turning up on the same night. And I spend about $20-$40 on a given night. Once a week, but if I were on the dole I would gradually lose contact with those folks.
Time? I can earn in one hour what someone else has to work for an hour and a half to get. And I don’t have kids.
My firm opinion is that this is all just another way Marx was right: the system alienates people from each other, down to even the family unit.
“I think economic poverty exacerbates and even causes much of those lifestyle poverties.”
I agree to some extent, but to emphasise – there are those without funds who do have extended social support networks, and who do have a work/life balance that improves their ability to withstand stress and manage difficulties. So the lack of finance is not a causation – although it may be present.
I agree Molly, that the breaking up of social networks that provided positive social, educational (e.g. childcare and establishing effective households) and cultural support is an important factor in domestic violence. New Zealand’s Pakeha history seems to me a case study, as does the changes to employment and social structures that began in the 1980s that disproportionately affected low income (especially Maori) families.
At a guess, this is more important in poorer families with transient work because they are less likely to afford to build alternative community networks in the same way that people moving for high income jobs may be able to do. Having said that, it would be interesting to know if the rates of domestic violence, depression and aggression are greater in high income families that have a history of moving around compared with those that have long term social ties in the community in which they live.
Lots of smokers don’t get heart disease, and lots of non-smokers do get heart disease, but smoking still causes a substantial amount of heart disease.
Similarly, lots of poor people might have strong social networks, and lots of rich people might have weak or non-existent social networks, but I also know people whose poverty directly damages their social networks – embarrassed to visit or be visited because they can’t provide a box of bikkies, can’t afford transport, can’t afford to go out, etc.
I’m a bit hazy on the word “predicative” – it might be a technical word, but I’m hoping that it was a typo for “predictive”as in “can be used to predict”.
In which case, that wasn’t my premise – like pretty much all aggregate data, one can’t really say “this person is poor, therefore they probably have encountered domestic violence as victim/perpetrator”. But with enough data, we could maybe say “if we lower poverty by 50%, we would expect xxx fewer DV hospitalisations”. I.e. the attributable risk of poverty as a factor.
Again, apologies if you used a word bigger than I am and I went off on a tangent.
“When you’re assaulting a child it doesn’t take much for a hiding to turn fatal…”
Hmm…in the majority of cases where an abused child has died the abuse was repetitive. Postmortems showed older injuries, sustained before the injuries that killed the child.
These older injuries include skull and limb fractures, most of which went untreated. The child would have been in pain.
I can stretch my brain to see how a caregiver can ‘lose it’…a one off incident with tragic results, and there are a few of these in the gallery of the dead children, but not many.
And there is a real element of devious deception as well in these cases…denying, hiding, blaming siblings for the abuse, threatening others who might ‘nark’.
You’d normally associate ‘mad’ with a don’t give a shit anymore attitude…this is not the case.
Self preservation is strong in these perpetrators.
I have no answers…I would just like to see various agencies doing their job properly, so when there is a complaint or disclosure they act proactively and promptly. Put the child first.
I’ve got none either, I like the idea of dismantling CYPS and starting anew but my worry is the same people will be put in the same areas with the same reults
They will contract the work out. (with former cyfs and ngo staff in prominent positions with ‘providers’.)
As with the other group of not-quite-real-people in New Zealand. Disabled New Zealanders.
The scariest thing is with disability support…the very portal through which one accesses support is run under contracts with “budget control requirements”. The disabled people with the highest need for support fare badly.
IF you wanted to know who the great depression affected the children, you could use that great search engine GOOGLE to help you find pages upon pages of information on the effect that hunger, homelessness, despairing parents, lack of schools/hospitals/ other public services had on children.
The Depression era is actually quite well documented, they did have a. newspapers, b. film, c. cartoons/caricatures, b. photography.
especially the photography is poingnant. it also pays to remember to see the parents not as 50+ years old, but often only in their late thrities. But i guess lack of food, water, basic sanitary hygiene and medicinal care in case of sickness will age one quickly.
In regards to child abuse, poverty is the one and the first thing to tackle. Stable housing (average rental time in NZ is around the 12 month mark), will lead to stable communities where people know each other and in times of hardship might be able to help each others, will lead to better school attendance where abuse might be recognised early enough, will lead to better job attendance / abilities as the resources needed to move every 12 month might be used to actually find a. a better job, or b. some extra up skilling via night courses etc.
But without tackling poverty we have always poverty as an excuse, oh what can you do, these people are lazy, bludgers, having children only for the benefit etc etc etc etc etc etc, and of course other then lamenting the injured or dead child and locking up the abuser nothing much is done. Its easier that way.
“This is a good example of how a specific easily identified issue results in vast outrage and intense responses, but a more complex issue like TPPA gets a puzzled muted response…”
In terms of numbers attending, and actual engagement with the issues being marched about (rather than just along for a selfie op) I’d say the Moko March and the TPPA March and the Climate Change March had about equal turnout in Hamilton.
Nearly abandoned the whole thing at the muster point as there seemed to be more interest in taking photos of self and groups….all grinning and laughing as if little Moko wasn’t dead.
I guess I’m getting old, tired, cynical and grumpy.
However….awesome turnout…despite the shitty weather.
Best speaker was Karen Morrison-Hume the Missioner for Anglican Action…(http://prisonforum2015.weebly.com/karen-morrison-hume.html is a paper she prepared for the Prison Forum which gives a very good picture of where she is coming from )
There was singing, then a haka….which I personally thought was utterly inappropriate under the circumstances.
And nobody remembered that Hamilton had done the march for (another) dead baby thing 16 years ago.
We marched for Mereana Edmonds. (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=148329)
Some of us also decided to apply to be foster families, so the CYFs and other agencies could not use the excuse that there was a shortage of emergency foster homes to justify doing fuck all when a child discloses abuse.
I’m laughing….really.
I think the next slogan should be…”Hey, Child Protection Agency…What’s With the Phonecall???”
Another researched based public health stance bites the dust,
A large worldwide study has found that, contrary to popular thought, low-salt diets may not be beneficial and may actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and death compared to average salt consumption. The study suggests that the only people who need to worry about reducing sodium in their diet are those with hypertension (high blood pressure) and have high salt consumption.
We have a real problem here. The fat hypothesis (dietary fat causes high cholesterol causes heart disease) is now being shown to be wrong, yet the public health message to eat less fat was based on medical research and conventional processes whereby authorities take research and turn it into health policy. The fat is bad message is now going to have to change, but health authorities are still lagging far behind the research and the growing public movements to make the changes regardless.
The salt hypothesis looks set to go the same way. This is a problem with how science is done and how it is used. It’s not good enough to say that this is science working, see they’ve figured it out eventually, when we’ve had 30+ years of exactly teh wrong advice being given. People will have died and been made sick from that advice.
If this was tobacco companies instead of the US FDA, AMA etc, we’d be talking lawsuits by now.
It has however, got everything to do with how results or supposed results are reported and it’s also got everything to do with (largely vested interests) funding dodgy research or promoting deliberately twisted research findings.
You want the crap to end, then have all science funding come from the public purse and get the private sector out of it, or legislate that every piece of research funded by private interests must headline the source of the funding and provide a rigorous breakdown of the various funding bodies/companies in an attached summary… and have all public funding levels guaranteed.
“It’s got nothing to do with how science is done.”
That depends on what you think science is. If you think about it in the abstract as set of tools to explore and explain the world, maybe. But even if you solve all the vested interest problems from commerce, there is still the issue that the Western scientific mindset creates pathways to follow and those aren’t always good.
Any piece of research is fallible. It’s the believe that the scientific method itself is somehow pure that is also giving us really bad results. Scientists are humans just like everyone else and have bias. Take someone out of the commercial framework and you still have bias, often unacknowledged. The scientific method doesn’t prevent that, and IMO encourages it by the very nature of its core ethos. It doesn’t help that too many pro-science people treat science like god.
None of that is unsolvable, but the very idea that science isn’t the problem is the one of the things that is stopping us from sovling that.
And yes, how science is funded is central as well. But government departments and governments can also have bias and agendas, ditto NGOs. I agree about full disclosure.
From what I remember, vested interests kicked in along the way, but those included the government and medical associations as much as drug companies and commerce. And it’s clear in hindsight that Keys was on a certain track from the start and that that led to the eventual fuck up.
Ancel Keys, responsible for the fat hypothesis, was a university scientist.
Yes. Same with the anti-salt fanatics. And all the public health academics peddling bullshit in New Zealand will be in the public sector as well. Industry funding of research is not the problem here.
Yep. Plus the GPs who are well aware of the problem but keep recommending and prescribing as if there weren’t one because of the direction from public health agencies and organisations.
I do think the pharmaceutical companies are a huge problem as well, with the whole bullshit that’s gone down around statins. Shifting the goalposts of what is unhealthy/healthy, and trying to use drugs with high serious side effect rates is largely their responsiblity. They’re the ones who will probably end up being sued (pretty sure they’ve lied about what they knew too).
Ancel had a hypothesis. Nothing wrong with that. But Ancel did absolutely no science that I’m aware of to try to prove or disprove his hypothesis, and Ancel didn’t appeal to any scientific experiment or enquiry or, well…. anything, that might prove or disprove his hypothesis. He looked at some numbers for heart disease rates in a population and he looked at some numbers for fat intake in the same population. He inferred (I think that’s the right word) a causal link from the two sets of numbers. That’s not science. That’s not even in the ball park of science.
It’s, as Psycho Milt says below – “analysing (interpreting) survey results or other statistical sets…”
And in flies vested business interests to push, what they want to promote as, a scientific finding or conclusion. Bat shit and dog shit.
Which ancient cultures had longer life expectancies than say the current American population, even with America’s current enormous dietary, substance abuse, environmental toxins and all kinds of other really unhealthy problems? What were the common causes of (non-violent) mortality in those ancient cultures? Do those problems still commonly cause death today?
Y’know, the same could be said of almost any culture… broad knowledges around unhealth and health.
But it’s the explanations or understandings, and how useful they are, that matter in the end. So, y’know, when science discovers that germs and not vapours are responsible for the likes of cholera, it’s not that the previous common sense explanation was wrong that mattered, so much as that a scientific understanding allowed for effective action to be taken against the disease…it was a more precise understanding.
I mean, London might have built sewers just to make the smell go away and so ended recurring cholera epidemics. But I doubt it.
And the Tibetan doctor who felt the pulse of a dying woman and gave her a fairly poetic and, to all intent purposes, accurate enough diagnosis or description of her heart failure and why it meant she’s going to die, was more useful on a number of levels than the western doctor who had diagnosed the same condition but rattled off a rather technical, and some may say sterile, prognosis for the woman to take on board.
And then again, without medical science, the Tibetan doctor would have been unable to operate had her condition been diagnosed sooner and been operable…
This whole black and white, or science and anti-science bullshit that flies around is just that….bullshit. Different knowledges have their place and uses, and none can be judged as blanket good or bad just by how close or far they seem to be from a scientific understanding.
That said, it would be pretty stupid to contend that vapours cause cholera…a field of knowledge exists that has given us an understanding so that we know vapours aren’t the cause.
And on the other hand (I don’t know if this is still the case) acupuncture works, but seems to be resisted by the western medical professional bodies on the grounds that no scientific explanation has been provided for its efficacy…or then again, maybe it’s just the same old story of a closed shop in operation 😉
I have no idea how many different knowledges there are or were around the disease. I’d be very surprised if only Europeans associated bad smell with illness though, and if only Europeans assigned a carrier capacity to smell.
And yet, for all its flaws, science still works better than some charismatic random just making shit up and getting a bunch of followers to believe it through a combination of placebo effect and confirmation bias.
After all, it is good science that ends up exposing the crap science or just outright bullshit and fantasy.
I have no idea who exactly you are referring to but you just dropped a gobsmackingly bad false binary into the conversation, one almost certainly based on ideology and prejudice not on evidence. I’m going to guess that you are referring to people people who practice and use non-Western medical health care (which is most people on the planet btw).
Scientists were critising Keys’ methodology right from the start. That’s nearly 70s years ago. And the public health message still isn’t changing, despite the problems now being very well known. I’ve been listening to non-medical people talking about the problems with the fat hypothesis long before Time magazine put it on their front page. Yes, they were relying on science, but the scientific community wasn’t doing anything about it (and were in fact ostracising and suppressing contrary evidence), so other communities of people did.
Basically your argument is that it’s ok to kill and maim people so long as afterwards you say oops, sorry, we were wrong, we’ve got a better idea now. Seventy fucking years. Then you have the gall to hate the alternative practitioners 🙄
People like Andre who are such huge backers of science as the ultimate way couldn’t possibly be victim to the very same biases and lazy thinking as he accuses others of.
As for the placebo effect.
It helps get a lot of people better. Even the orthopaedic surgeons are coming to that view.
Yep, the placebo effect is astonishingly effective. It’s made many a snake-oil salesman wealthy. Amazingly, it even works when the recipient knows it’s just a placebo, though not as well as when both the “practitioner” and recipient are fully emotionally invested in it. Modern medicine really should put a lot of effort into how to use it better.
My pain medicine lecturer said he considered it every practitioners ethical responsibility to maximise their use of the placebo effect. Safe, cheap, effective.
The difference being that some of big pharma’s products actually do work as claimed, better than a placebo. Not all of them get dodgily pushed onto the market on the basis of cherry-picked studies produced and reviewed by …ahh… financially compromised parties, just some of them. I figure that by the time a product has been on the market for 20 or 30 years, there’s been enough guinea pigs gone before me that the hokey products will have been weeded out.
Scientists were calling bullshit on Keys’ assertions from the beginning, yes. And a whole shifting edifice of non-scientific business and government power pushed it along and…threatened the livelihoods or careers or reputations of any scientist who stood up to say “Hey! – Just a minute”
In a different area of science, it happened to Hanson when he piped up with a politically unpalatable truth about global warming.
And so most scientists get on within their field of research and do (probably) good science and keep their mouths shut. You blame individual scientists for not taking it in the neck? I’d call their reaction kind of normal human behaviour and nothing peculiar to the field of science or to scientists.
Besides which, scientists are usually involved in narrowly demarcated areas within fields of research, and their findings are gathered up and compiled by those that stand on the cusp between science and public policy. And they (those on the cusp) are under pressure to say politically palatable stuff.
That’s a systems failure, not a failure of science.
Sometimes I read these criticisms of science and scientists and it’s as though on the one hand they are being accused of playing at god, and then on the other they get condemned for being merely human. Can’t have it both ways.
This is a problem with how science is done and how it is used.
It’s a problem with treating social science research as though it were science. All of these anti-food studies involve people analysing survey results or other statistical sets for evidence to back an agenda, from Keys down to the present day. That’s not science.
Sorry, only just got back to this thread. The scientific method involves hypotheses that can be disproven, and a means of disproving them. That applies even to stuff where you can’t set up an experiment to disprove your hypothesis, eg Haldane’s reported response to the question of whether the theory of evolution was science because what could disprove it? “Rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian.”
The problem with all this diet-related epidemiology is that there’s no useful way to disprove anything. It all involves studies in which you can’t genuinely isolate the factor you’re interested in (because you can’t fully control what a large number of people eat for a long period), which means if any study refutes your pet theory you can find umpteen ways in which the study was “flawed” and those results shouldn’t be taken seriously. The whole field is a mess of correlation = causation errors and confirmation bias. There’s no hypothesis involved for which any disproof that’s found can’t be weaseled out of.
Worse, the agendas seem to come first. The last Listener had a piece on how to live longer in which Jennifer Rowan refers (without citation) to a study in which Type-2 diabetics who replaced red meat with various carbs supposedly improved their blood glucose levels, to which anyone with any idea of the chemistry involved can only think “What the fucketty-fuck-fuck?” What mechanism could even be proposed for that happening? These studies are referred to as though they were science, but any scientist would have alarm bells shrieking in their ears on reading a paper claiming that.
Edited: please note the diet-related epidemiology part. Epidemiology for infectious diseases does a great job.
A huge amount of medical research relies on epidemiology. Likewise public health policy. Are you saying it’s all bogus? What constitutes proper research?
The problem with what Keys did wasn’t that he used data from people’s experiences, it was that he manipulated that data to suit his agenda.
Elijah Wood: ‘Hollywood in the grip of child abuse scandal similar to Jimmy Savile’
Hollywood is in the grip a child sexual abuse scandal similar to that of Jimmy Savile in Britain, Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood has claimed.
The 35-year-old former child actor said paedophiles had been protected by powerful figures in the movie business and that abuse was probably still taking place.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Wood said he had been protected from abuse as he was growing up, but that other child actors had been regularly “preyed upon” at parties by industry figures.
It does look like more stories are emerging, first a trickle then a torrent perhaps. You only have to look at Roman Polanski and how feted he is and that’s out in the open so I’d imagine theres a lot more happening
When Corey Feldman made the allegations I don’t think anyone would believe him but when Elijah Wood and Susan Sarandon start talking it might start going somewhere…
Have a look at Allen’s daughter’s account of him abusing her, and what happened to her when she spoke out. Her brother is a journalist and has written recently about the complicity in the press in not covering stories about famous people.
Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd) has described how US musicians are scared of speaking out about the Palestinian issue, believing that their careers will be destroyed if they do. The connection between Hollywood and other forms of mass media with the Zionist regime isn’t a secret, put pointing it out tends to attract the outrage of the sayanim.
this is a good read.
One does simply not forget having been homeless, and in the last few days i again (as so many times before) realised just how lucky i am.
At home, a nice fire, a happy partner, a happy pooch and warm meal waiting for us.
the worst night in my life was spend in an unfinished building in November in Germany. I was seventeen and i believed that i would freeze to death that night. One simply does not forget that shit.
And shame to a society that wants to pretend that it does not affect them, that it will not happen to them, and that those to whom it has happened deserve it cause they took a ‘bad decision’ or other bullshit that society wants to make up in order to feel better.
Following up on my post here linking to the interview I and Vinny Eastwood had with William Black banker hunter extra=ordinaire and as people are waking up to the horror of having a Wall street banker for a prime Minister, I thought Id republish a series of articles written from 2007-2008 Called the Financial Tsunami by William Engdahl on how we got here.
Here is part 1:
” Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein is a financier and political donor. He is also a convicted sex offender who is the subject of ongoing litigation from at least a dozen of his then-underage victims.
Flight logs show Bill Clinton traveled at least 10 times on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the “Lolita Express” by tabloids, and he is widely reported to have visited Little St. James, Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands. That’s where, according to attorneys for Epstein’s victims, many of the worst crimes against minors were committed by Epstein and friends who traveled there with him.
In a 2011 interview with her attorneys, Virginia Roberts, one of the teenagers preyed upon by Epstein, said he had told her he had “compromising” information on Bill Clinton and that the former president “owes me a favor.”
Yet despite Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein and Trump’s stated willingness to make Clinton’s sexual past an issue in the campaign, Trump will almost certainly avoid bringing up Epstein’s name. Because in addition to haunting Bill Clinton’s past, Epstein also haunts Trump’s.
* * *
Trump’s attorney Alan Garten told VICE News last week that the presidential candidate had “no relationship” with Epstein, and only knew him because Epstein was a member of Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach.
“A lot of people hung out there, including Jeffrey Epstein,” Garten said. “That is the only connection.”
But according to someone with intimate knowledge of the situation, Trump and Epstein appeared to have a somewhat stronger connection.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New Yorkmagazine in a 2002 profile of Epstein written three years before Epstein began to be investigated. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
…@ Penny…well I guess everyone who knew and thought Rolf Harris ( the Queen) and Jimmy Saville and Bill Crosby were good guys did not suspect their true nature and that they were sexual predators…this is how pedophiles and predators get away with these crimes for so long..they are experts at hiding what they do in secret
…so just because Trump came into contact with Epstein and thought he was a good guy does not mean Trump knew his real nature or crimes and endorsed them.. or partook in them!
Following up on my post here linking to the interview I and Vinny Eastwood had with William Black banker hunter extra-ordinaire and as people are waking up to the horror of having a Wall street banker for a prime Minister, I thought Id republish a series of articles written from 2007-2008 Called the Financial Tsunami by William Engdahl on how we got here.
Here is part 1
Not a good look having Tamati Coffey’s husband calling a journalist a nobody, even if it was an off-the-cuff remark. It shows what they really say about people behind closed doors. ‘Nobodies’ vote and make up the missing million. When are we going to get an effective, people-focused opposition? I think Andrew Little is doing a good job but he will need MPs and candidates to back him up. Not ‘somebodies’ who think the plebs are ‘nobodies’.
Not sure what your point is. Labour are saying they’d like to change the tax structure in NZ to make it fairer, including looking at taxing property speculation. Seems like a good idea to me.
Indeed. However, a capital gains tax is not the solution. Moreover, sorting out the property market will cease soaring capital gains. Eliminating the problem.
Don’t you think adding to the cost of housing should make Labour stop and think?
Taxing capital gains is about making taxation fairer. Why should some forms of income be taxed and not others?
“Don’t you think adding to the cost of housing should make Labour stop and think?”
I’m pretty sure that Labour think all the time and that like other parties weigh up the pros and cons. Looking at one aspect of a tax policy in isolation is not useful IMO, nor is looking at that one aspect out of context. I’m guessing this is why they’re forming a Tax Working Group, to look at the whole thing.
btw,
Labour leader Andrew Little would not rule out a comeback for the policies in the future, but said if it got into Government in 2017 it would not introduce them without campaigning on them again in a future election.
The working group would look again at a capital gains tax (CGT), dropped from Labour’s platform when Andrew Little took over as leader in late 2014, and a land tax.
A capital gains tax would not be part of the party’s platform in 2017, but it was not off the table for the working group.
“Why should some forms of income be taxed and not others?”
For starters, if the burden is going to be passed on, those attaining the income won’t bare the tax burden. Is that fair?
Moreover, the goal of sorting out the housing sector (which would take one term according to Little) is to eliminate soaring gains, therefore, with that achieved there would be little if any income to tax.
In a stable housing market, properties that aren’t maintained can actually decrease in value, resulting in losses.
Of course it shouldn’t be looked at in isolation. However, one can’t afford to overlook the risk of adding to the cost of housing when one’s goal is to improve the cost of housing, thus the need for a rethink.
In 2015 (as your first link highlights) Little said if Labour got into Government in 2017 it would not introduce them without campaigning on them again in a future election.
However, while it has been dumped and no longer on the party’s campaign platform, there was no longer any mention of them not introducing them later in that term when the working group reports back – see my link above (which is also your second link).
I’m guessing the use of a tax working group is similar to the ploy Lockwood Smith highlighted a number of years back – see link below.
Militrary helicopter, snow mobiles, sourced to rescue trapped snowed in drivers caught over night in Otago. Not so much S.Auckland overnight car sleepers.
Hooten worried, they might get pregnant, but not worried enough to call on govt to get them into housing, as he scoffed that one car refugee got pregnant while living out of their car. I mean, like they must have been in a benifit, and givt intervention in private citizenship was a sicial impertive for his social fascist.
yes Hooton was particularly strident on RNZ…and particularly sickening really…his making light of the housing crisis for New Zealanders….and he got away with it….you were left with the impression that there was NO REAL PROBLEM!…but there is a PROBLEM…and there is a CRISIS!…for Gods sake can’t nine-to-noon get on an effective counter to Hooton’s spin !!!???
However this interview with Danielle Bergin by Kathryn Ryan was MUCH better than Hooton’s spin…
“Once homeless herself, Danielle Bergin talks about, Island child, the housing trust she set up in East Auckland, and why more and more people are forced to sleep rough. She traces the start of the current housing crisis back to when WINZ took over housing assessments from HNZC.”
Instead of limiting foriegn and new investor kiwis to building new homes, Key pushed the inevitable housing bubble burst out a decade, with the consequence that the bottom of the housing need had no place to live.
This is all on Key, but we’ll never hear it since media is run by those locked into bubble economics.
What was shocking was how undemocratic the EU officials were, and how little power the elected EU finance ministers had in the face of the unelected Troika bureaucrats.
…”Russia does not want – and does not need – war. Yet the “Russian aggression” narrative never stops. Thus it’s always enlightening to come back to this RAND corporation study, which examined what would happen if a war actually took place. RAND reached an “unambiguous” conclusion after a series of war games in 2015-2015; Russia could overrun NATO in a mere 60 hours – if not less – if it ever amounted to a hot war on European soil. …
…”The Threat Narrative rules that Russia has to meekly accept being surrounded by NATO. Russia is not allowed any response; in any case, any response will be branded as “Russian aggression”. If Russia defends itself, this will be “exposed” as an unacceptable provocation. And may even furnish the pretext for a pre-emptive attack by NATO against Russia…
…Everything we were told by the neocons in the lead-up to war was false. To quote the title of a book by the antiwar British MP Peter Kilfoyle, there were Lies, Damned Lies and Iraq.
‘Saddam has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes’.
Horse manure.
‘Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program is active, detailed and growing’.
Hogwash.
‘Saddam Hussein… has the wherewithal to develop smallpox’.
Garbage.
‘We know that Iraq and al-Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade…We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases’.
Baloney.
‘The threat is very real and it is a threat not just to America or the international community but to Britain.’ Has the trash been collected yet?…
Worth remembering the shitty wee deal anticipating the territorial and political division of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into spheres of influence.
Picking up from a comment on the Guest post yesterday
My only issue with inflated numbers on this site is figuring out what causes them so that I can make them drop back to reality. I’m interested in measuring what is actually happening rather than doing a Cameron and inflating numbers.
That is why we have 4 systems counting the numbers. Google analytics, statcounter, wordpress stats, and the log system. Because they operate in different three ways, I usually manage to spot the one(s) that are misbehaving.
For instance, a month ago, I was bemoaning (to the authors) that we seemed to be having inflated google analytics figures. I eventually tracked that down to a double hit in the mobile stats with two seperate plugins requesting the google analytics on the same account – one using async and the other using sync. Found and fixed about two weeks later. It was obviously an error simply because none of the other count mechanisms showed the same bump.
Back in 2012 we had some issues with facebook making a ‘pageview’ every time that someone scrolled past our page. That was showed up in both analytics and statcounter, to a lesser extent in wordpress stats. However it only showed up in awstats on the logs as an aberration with aborted page reads. It took weeks to find and a few months to fully work around. But I eventually worked around it by making statcounter only work on the footer. After a few months facebook obviously fixed whatever problem they had.
Then there are the external changes – especially with getting the growth in persistent visitors. Late last year and early part of this year, we had a minor drop in the growth of google search traffic as they did some significiant changes in their search algorithms. It hit some sites pretty hard – probably why Whaleoil dropped their public stats earlier this year.
If you’ve followed my posts about algorithm updates, you’ll notice I’ve covered ad problems many times. That includes aggressive advertising, blended advertising, too many ads, etc.
During the March algorithm updates, I noticed some sites in a competitive niche that employed very aggressive advertising that inhibited the user experience. Those sites got hammered by the March updates. It’s just a reminder that aggressive and annoying advertising can cause users to run screaming from your site, never to return again. Google can pick up on this in a number of ways. Avoid this at all costs.
Which essentially describes the problem that Whaleoil has most likely to have suffered (ie why they don’t show their figures in public any more). The last few times I have been over there, I’ve really noticed just how crappy the massive ad footprint makes it as a site to discuss issues on. I suspect that it causes pretty major bounce rate because people can’t find most of the post and certainly would have to look to find the comments.
I blame it on Cameron’s chronic inability to do anything in a moral fashion (eg dirty politics, trying to buy a criminal hack on my computers), stay out of court (eg his ignorant and eventually failed attempt to appeal to the Court of Appeal) and his need to make both a living and pay his court costs off the site. He just seems to keep stupidly hoiking ads on to the site and filling the site out with basically rubbish posts without considering what it makes him look like to a google SEO long term. The site has probably been relegated to trash level with recent google search changes.
Just to give you an idea how important google is for our readership growth. Today we have had about 17,500 page views according to wordpress. Incidentally it was a bit less than 17k according to statcounter and analytics. I’m not even going to mention the multiple thousands difference between sessions / visits / etc or each engines supposedly similar measurements of how long people stay on site.
Of those ~17k, ~2800 came from referrals.
About 1600 came from google search in various forms. ~800 from facebook (more than half being the tail end of one widely spread post). 135 from twitter (which is one of the reasons I generally ignore it).
260 from all others. Search sites (38 from yahoo and 14 from bing), blog sites (bowalley at 47 and no minister at 31), news websites (25 from scoop), and nothing much else.
But more importantly, we get almost all new users who stay in via google search. Of the new readers who visit more than 10 times over the following 30 days after first entering the site, usually about 80% come in from google. About 35% start by googling “The Standard” or some variation indicating word of mouth, about 40% from a query about non-current topics, and the remainder from topical topics – which used to be the mainstay. Obviously google search is pushing further back into the excellent posts here in the past from the rate that posts older than 6 months old have been rising. Gotta love google analytics 🙂
Facebook starts us with a lower number of new repeat users. And twitter just gives us people who already know of us (one of the other reasons I tend to ignore it – it appears to be quite self-referential).
Moreover most of the sustained abnormal boost in readers from searches in recent months that has come from NZ. I think that google localised their search results a bit further and made them a lot better targeted. Certainly I’ve noticed much reduced bounce rates both here and from some kiwi destination points offshore. We’re generally getting a lot less bounce traffic from offshore – including those audiences with massive bounce rates from the US overnight. We’re a definitively kiwi site with about 90% of our page view traffic coming from a small country with 4.4 million people. Random searches by humans for loose associations from the US shouldn’t be sent to us.
Anyway, the site is looking pretty healthy for the month. We should do as well as we did last year (and May was the top for 2015 at 537k pageviews) and far higher than May 2013 at the same point in the political cycle – 364k pageviews.
Even more interesting to me is the breaking of long standing periodic patterns. The last couple of years have shown we don’t drop much in winter any more which used to be a depressing yearly trait. I think we have also started to lose that summer vacation drop off as well.
But there are some pretty clear effects in the ‘day’. Since 2013, the times that the site starts and finishes are now quite different. We now start getting traffic at 6am and it goes through pretty solidly to 11pm with a lunch time spike. A far cry from the days when it was largely being read during work hours from 9am to 6pm.
Part of that I think is due to the amount of mobile traffic we now get. That lunchtime spike is has a large chunk of cell phones – about 50%. Probably why google now penalises sites without a good mobile version. Urrgh – for example the micro print of The Daily Blog in its desktop splendour or kiwiblog when I forget to manually insert m. instead of www. There is a reason why some sites say “mobile friendly” when you read google results on a mobile & kiwiblog doesn’t really deserve it.
Anyway, I’m starting to think about how I get the system to not fall over during the usual election month tripling of the site traffic next year and the usual headache of planning to get enough increase in data and speed to withstand both the election year and the subsequent 40-50% boost in annual traffic.
All done for total operational cost of about $250 per month largely from those who do a small voluntary, seldom mentioned, and completely unforced donations over a year (hint: you can donate here).
Of course a lot of skilled unpaid volunteer time, and the deliberately uncosted donation of part of my hotted up and over specced home computers (PBTech love me) helps.
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My top six things to note around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the week to July 27 were:1. The Minister for Ford Rangers strikes againTransport Minister Simeon Brown was again the busiest of the Cabinet ministers this week, announcing an ...
You got a fast carAnd I want a ticket to anywhereMaybe we make a dealMaybe together we can get somewhereAny place is betterYesterday’s newsletter, Trust In Me, on the report of abuse in state care, and by religious organisations, between 1950 and 2019, coupled with the hypocrisy of Christopher Luxon ...
New Zealand is again having to reconcile conflicting pressures from its military and its trade interests. Should we join Pillar Two of AUKUS and risk compromising our markets in China? For a century after New Zealand was founded in 1840, its external security arrangements and external economics arrangements were aligned. ...
The ‘50 Shades of Green’ farmers’ protest in 2019 was heavy on climate change denial, but five years on, scepticism and criticism about the idea that pine forests can save us is growing across the board. File photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: Here’s the top six news items of note in climate ...
This morning the sky was bright.The birds, in their usual joyous bliss. Nature doesn’t seem to feel the heat of what might angst humans.Their calls are clear and beautiful.Just some random thoughts:MāoriPaul Goldsmith has announced his government will roll back the judiciary’s rulings on Māori Customary Marine Title, which recognises ...
In 2003, the Court of Appeal delivered its decision in Ngati Apa v Attorney-General, ruling that Māori customary title over the foreshore and seabed had not been universally extinguished, and that the Māori Land Court could determine claims and confirm title if the facts supported it. This kicked off the ...
Earlier this week at Parliament, Labour leader Chris Hipkins was applauded for saying that the response to the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care had to be “bigger than politics.” True, but the fine words, apologies and “we hear you” messages will soon ring ...
TL;DR: In news breaking this morning:The Ministry of Education is cutting $2 billion from its school building programme so the National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government has enough money to deliver tax cuts; The Government has quietly lowered its child poverty reduction targets to make them easier to achieve;Te Whatu Ora-Health NZ’s ...
Kia ora. These are some stories that caught our eye this week – as always, feel free to share yours in the comments. Our header image this week (via Eke Panuku) shows the planned upgrade for the Karanga Plaza Tidal Swimming Steps. The week in Greater Auckland On ...
1. What's not to love about the way the Harris campaign is turning things around?a. Nothingb. Love all of itc. God what a reliefd. Not that it will be by any means easye. All of the above 2. Documents released by the Ministry of Health show Associate Health Minister Casey ...
Trust in me in all you doHave the faith I have in youLove will see us through, if only you trust in meWhy don't you, you trust me?In a week that saw the release of the 3,000 page Abuse in Care report Christopher Luxon was being asked about Boot Camps. ...
TL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers last night features co-hosts and talking about the Royal Commission Inquiry into Abuse in Carereport released this week, and with:The Kākā’s climate correspondent on a UN push to not recognise carbon offset markets and ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Friday, July 26, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Transport: Simeon Brown announced$802.9 million in funding for 18 new trains on the Wairarapa and Manawatū rail lines, which ...
The northern expressway extension from Warkworth to Whangarei is likely to require radical changes to legislation if it is going to be built within the foreseeable future. The Government’s powers to purchase land, the planning process and current restrictions on road tolling are all going to need to be changed ...
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFirst they came for the doctors But I was confused by the numbers and costs So I didn't speak up Then they came for our police and nurses And I didn't think we could afford those costs anyway So I ...
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on UnsplashWe’re back again after our mid-winter break. We’re still with the ‘new’ day of the week (Thursday rather than Friday) when we have our ‘hoon’ webinar with paying subscribers to The Kākā for an hour at 5 pm.Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream ...
Notes: This is a free article. Abuse in Care themes are mentioned. Video is at the bottom.BackgroundYesterday’s report into Abuse in Care revealed that at least 1 in 3 of all who went through state and faith based care were abused - often horrifically. At least, because not all survivors ...
Luxon speaks in Parliament yesterday about the Abuse in Care report. Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:PM Christopher Luxon said yesterday in tabling the Abuse in Carereport in Parliament he wanted to ‘do the ...
About a decade ago I worked with a bloke called Steve. He was the grizzled veteran coder, a few years older than me, who knew where the bodies were buried - code wise. Despite his best efforts to be approachable and friendly he could be kind of gruff, through to ...
Some of the recent announcements from the government have reminded us of posts we’ve written in the past. Here’s one from early 2020. There were plenty of reactions to the government’s infrastructure announcement a few weeks ago which saw them fund a bunch of big roading projects. One of ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:00 am on Thursday, July 25 are:News: Why Electric Kiwi is closing to new customers - and why it matters RNZ’s Susan EdmundsScoop: Government drops ...
Hi,I felt a small wet tongue snaking through one of the holes in my Crocs. It explored my big toe, darting down one side, then the other. “He’s looking for some toe cheese,” said the woman next to me, words that still haunt me to this day.Growing up in New ...
Yesterday I happily quoted the Prime Minister without fact-checking him and sure enough, it turns out his numbers were all to hell. It’s not four kg of Royal Commission report, it’s fourteen.My friend and one-time colleague-in-comms Hazel Phillips gently alerted me to my error almost as soon as I’d hit ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Thursday, July 25, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day were:The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquirypublished its final report yesterday.PM Christopher Luxon and The Minister responsible for ...
The Official Information Act has always been a battle between requesters seeking information, and governments seeking to control it. Information is power, so Ministers and government agencies want to manage what is released and when, for their own convenience, and legality and democracy be damned. Their most recent tactic for ...
TL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:Transport and Energy Minister Simeon Brown is accelerating plans to spend at least $10 billion through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) to extend State Highway One as a four-lane ‘Expressway’ from Warkworth to Whangarei ...
I live my life (woo-ooh-ooh)With no control in my destinyYea-yeah, yea-yeah (woo-ooh-ooh)I can bleed when I want to bleedSo come on, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)You can bleed when you want to bleedYea-yeah, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)Everybody bleed when they want to bleedCome on and bleedGovernments face tough challenges. Selling unpopular decisions to ...
Please note:To skip directly to the- parliamentary footage in the video, scroll to 1:21 To skip to audio please click on the headphone iconon the left hand side of the screenThis video / audio section is under development. ...
Given the crackdown on wasteful government spending, it behooves me to point to a high profile example of spending by the Luxon government that looks like a big, fat waste of time and money. I’m talking about the deployment of NZDF personnel to support the US-led coalition in the Red ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:40 am on Wednesday, July 24 are:Deep Dive: Chipping away at the housing crisis, including my comments RNZ/Newsroom’s The DetailNews: Government softens on asset sales, ...
As I reported about the city centre, Auckland’s rail network is also going through a difficult and disruptive period which is rapidly approaching a culmination, this will result in a significant upgrade to the whole network. Hallelujah. Also like the city centre this is an upgrade predicated on the City ...
Today, a 4 kilogram report will be delivered to Parliament. We know this is what the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State and Faith-based Care weighs, because our Prime Minister told us so.Some reporter had blindsided him by asking a question about something done by ...
TL;DR: As of 7:00 am on Wednesday, July 24, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Beehive:Transport Minister Simeon Brownannounced plans to use PPPs to fund, build and run a four-lane expressway between Auckland ...
NewstalkZB host Mike Hosking, who can usually be relied on to give Prime Minister Christopher Luxon an easy run, did not do so yesterday when he interviewed him about the HealthNZ deficit. Luxon is trying to use a deficit reported last year by HealthNZ as yet another example of the ...
Back in January a StatsNZ employee gave a speech at Rātana on behalf of tangata whenua in which he insulted and criticised the government. The speech clearly violated the principle of a neutral public service, and StatsNZ started an investigation. Part of that was getting an external consultant to examine ...
Renting for life: Shared ownership initiatives are unlikely to slow the slide in home ownership by much. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:A Deloittereport for Westpac has projected Aotearoa’s home-ownership rate will ...
You're broken down and tiredOf living life on a merry go roundAnd you can't find the fighterBut I see it in you so we gonna walk it outAnd move mountainsWe gonna walk it outAnd move mountainsAnd I'll rise upI'll rise like the dayI'll rise upI'll rise unafraidI'll rise upAnd I'll ...
There’s been a change in Myers Park. Down the steps from St. Kevin’s Arcade, past the grassy slopes, the children’s playground, the benches and that goat statue, there has been a transformation. The underpass for Mayoral Drive has gone from a barren, grey, concrete tunnel, to a place that thrums ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Global society may have finally slammed on the brakes for climate-warming pollution released by human fossil fuel combustion. According to the Carbon Monitor Project, the total global climate pollution released between February and May 2024 declined slightly from the amount released during the same ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:00 am on Tuesday, July 23 are:Deep Dive: Penlink: where tolling rhetoric meets reality BusinessDesk-$$$’sOliver LewisScoop:Te Pūkenga plans for regional polytechs leak out ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Tuesday, July 23, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Health: Shane Reti announcedthe Board of Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand was being replaced with Commissioner Lester Levy ...
Health NZ warned the Government at the end of March that it was running over Budget. But the reasons it gave were very different to those offered by the Prime Minister yesterday. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon blamed the “botched merger” of the 20 District Health Boards (DHBs) to create Health ...
Long ReadKey Summary: Although National increased the health budget by $1.4 billion in May, they used an old funding model to project health system costs, and never bothered to update their pre-election numbers. They were told during the Health Select Committees earlier in the year their budget amount was deficient, ...
As a momentous, historic weekend in US politics unfolded, analysts and commentators grasped for precedents and comparisons to help explain the significance and power of the choice Joe Biden had made. The 46th president had swept the Democratic party’s primaries but just over 100 days from the election had chosen ...
TL;DR: I’m casting around for new ideas and ways of thinking about Aotearoa’s political economy to find a few solutions to our cascading and self-reinforcing housing, poverty and climate crises.Associate Professor runs an online masters degree in the economics of sustainability at Torrens University in Australia and is organising ...
The Finance and Expenditure Committee has reported back on National's Local Government (Water Services Preliminary Arrangements) Bill. The bill sets up water for privatisation, and was introduced under urgency, then rammed through select committee with no time even for local councils to make a proper submission. Naturally, national's select committee ...
Some years ago, I bought a book at Dunedin’s Regent Booksale for $1.50. As one does. Vandrad the Viking (1898), by J. Storer Clouston, is an obscure book these days – I cannot find a proper online review – but soon it was sitting on my shelf, gathering dust alongside ...
History is not on the side of the centre-left, when Democratic presidents fall behind in the polls and choose not to run for re-election. On both previous occasions in the past 75 years (Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968) the Democrats proceeded to then lose the White House ...
This is a free articleCoverageThis morning, US President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the Presidential race. And that is genuinely newsworthy. Thanks for your service, President Biden, and all the best to you and yours.However, the media in New Zealand, particularly the 1News nightly bulletin, has been breathlessly covering ...
A homeless person’s camp beside a blocked-off slipped damage walkway in Freeman’s Bay: we are chasing our tail on our worsening and inter-related housing, poverty and climate crises. Photo: Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy ...
What has happened to it all?Crazy, some'd sayWhere is the life that I recognise?(Gone away)But I won't cry for yesterdayThere's an ordinary worldSomehow I have to findAnd as I try to make my wayTo the ordinary worldYesterday morning began as many others - what to write about today? I began ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:00 am on Monday, July 22 are:Today’s Must Read: Father and son live in a tent, and have done for four years, in a million ...
TL;DR: As of 7:00 am on Monday, July 22, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:US President Joe Biden announced via X this morning he would not stand for a second term.Multinational professional services firm ...
A listing of 32 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 14, 2024 thru Sat, July 20, 2024. Story of the week As reflected by preponderance of coverage, our Story of the Week is Project 2025. Until now traveling ...
This weekend, a friend pointed out someone who said they’d like to read my posts, but didn’t want to pay. And my first reaction was sympathy.I’ve already told folks that if they can’t comfortably subscribe, and would like to read, I’d be happy to offer free subscriptions. I don’t want ...
National: The Party of ‘Law and Order’ IntroductionThis weekend, the Government formally kicked off one of their flagship policy programs: a military style boot camp that New Zealand has experimented with over the past 50 years. Cartoon credit: Guy BodyIt’s very popular with the National Party’s Law and Orderimage, ...
Day one of the solo leg of my long journey home begins with my favourite sound: footfalls in an empty street. 5.00 am and it’s already light and already too warm, almost.If I can make the train that leaves Budapest later this hour I could be in Belgrade by nightfall; ...
Do you remember Y2K, the threat that hung over humanity in the closing days of the twentieth century? Horror scenarios of planes falling from the sky, electronic payments failing and ATMs refusing to dispense cash. As for your VCR following instructions and recording your favourite show - forget about it.All ...
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts being questioned by The Kākā’s Bernard Hickey.TL;DR: My top six things to note around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the week to July 20 were:1. A strategy that fails Zero Carbon Act & Paris targetsThe National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government finally unveiled ...
Summary:As New Zealand loses at least 12 leaders in the public service space of health, climate, and pharmaceuticals, this month alone, directly in response to the Government’s policies and budget choices, what lies ahead may be darker than it appears. Tui examines some of those departures and draws a long ...
The Minister of Housing’s ambition is to reduce markedly the ratio of house prices to household incomes. If his strategy works it would transform the housing market, dramatically changing the prospects of housing as an investment.Leaving aside the Minister’s metaphor of ‘flooding the market’ I do not see how the ...
As previously noted, my historical fantasy piece, set in the fifth-century Mediterranean, was accepted for a Pirate Horror anthology, only for the anthology to later fall through. But in a good bit of news, it turned out that the story could indeed be re-marketed as sword and sorcery. As of ...
An employee of tobacco company Philip Morris International demonstrates a heated tobacco device. Photo: Getty ImagesTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy on Friday, July 19 are:At a time when the Coalition Government is cutting spending on health, infrastructure, education, housing ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 8:30 am on Friday, July 19 are:Scoop: NZ First Minister Casey Costello orders 50% cut to excise tax on heated tobacco products. The minister has ...
Kia ora, it’s time for another Friday roundup, in which we pull together some of the links and stories that caught our eye this week. Feel free to add more in the comments! Our header image this week shows a foggy day in Auckland town, captured by Patrick Reynolds. ...
TL;DR : Here’s the top six items climate news for Aotearoa this week, as selected by Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent Cathrine Dyer. A discussion recorded yesterday is in the video above and the audio of that sent onto the podcast feed.The Government released its draft Emissions Reduction ...
Save some money, get rich and old, bring it back to Tobacco Road.Bring that dynamite and a crane, blow it up, start all over again.Roll up. Roll up. Or tailor made, if you prefer...Whether you’re selling ciggies, digging for gold, catching dolphins in your nets, or encouraging folks to flutter ...
Waiting In The Wings:For truly, if Trump is America’s un-assassinated Caesar, then J.D. Vance is America’s Octavian, the Republic’s youthful undertaker – and its first Emperor.DONALD TRUMP’S SELECTION of James D. Vance as his running-mate bodes ill for the American republic. A fervent supporter of Viktor Orban, the “illiberal” prime ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Friday, July 19, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:The PSAannounced the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) had ruled in the PSA’s favour in its case against the Ministry ...
Te Rangi e tu nei (The sky above us) Te Papa e takoto nei (The land beneath us) Tatou katoa te hunga ora (To us all the living) Tena koutou katoa (Greetings) ...
A late change to charter school legislation will cheat educators out of fair pay and negotiating power proving charter schools are just a vehicle to make profit out of our education system. ...
In 2004 te iwi Māori rallied against the Crown’s attempt to confiscate our coastlines and moana with the Foreshore and Seabed Act. This led to the largest hīkoi of a generation and the birth of Te Pāti Māori. 20 years later, history is repeating itself. Today the government has announced ...
It has been five and a half years since the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care was established to investigate the abuse of children, young people, and vulnerable adults within state and faith-based institutions. Yesterday, the final report - Whanaketia through pain and trauma, from darkness to light ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to take action off the back of the International Court of Justice ruling on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. ...
On Friday the International Court of Justice reaffirmed what Palestinian’s have been telling us for decades: that the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian lands by Israel is illegal and must end immediately. They also called for reparations for Palestinian’s who have lived under Israeli occupation since it began in 1967. ...
Labour calls on the Government to act after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territories is illegal. ...
The 53.7 percent rise in benefit sanctions over the last year is more proof of this Government’s disdain for our communities most in need of support. ...
Aotearoa could be a country where every child grows up feeling safe, loved and with a sense of belonging in their whānau and community. But for some of our children, this is far from reality. Instead, they are trapped in a maze of intergenerational harm that they can’t escape on ...
Te Pāti Māori are calling for David Seymour to resign as Associate Health Minister in response to his call for Pharmac to ignore the Treaty of Waitangi. “This announcement is just another example of the government’s anti-Tiriti, anti-Māori agenda.” Said Co-leader and spokesperson for health, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. “Seymour thinks it ...
The soaring price of renting is driving the rise of inflation in this country - with latest figures from Stats NZ showing rents are up 4.8 per cent on average while annual inflation is at 3.3 per cent. ...
National’s Emissions Reduction Plan will take New Zealand further from the economy we need to ensure the next generation has a stable climate and secure livelihoods. ...
Following consultation with named parties and thorough consideration of privacy interests, the Green Party is in a position to release the Executive Summary of the final report from the independent investigation into Darleen Tana. ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon should be asking serious questions of his Minister for Resources Shane Jones now it’s been revealed he misled the public about a dinner with mining companies that he didn’t declare and said wasn’t pre-arranged. ...
Te Pāti Māori have submitted to the Justice Select Committee against the Sentencing (Reinstating Three Strikes) Amendment Bill. The bill will further entrench racism in our justice system and fails to focus on rehabilitation. “Reinstating Three Strikes will empower a systematically racist system and exacerbate the overrepresentation of Māori in ...
The Transport and Infrastructure Committee is set to make a determination on the Residential Tenancies Amendment (RTA) Bill in the coming weeks. “This legislation will give landlords the power to kick our whānau out onto the street for no reason” said Housing spokesperson, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “Their solution to the housing ...
“National’s campaign was about tackling crime and the best they can do is a two-year long Ministerial Advisory Group,” Labour justice spokesperson Duncan Webb said. ...
“There are more examples of charter schools failing their students than there are success stories. The coalition Government is driving to dismantle our public school system and instead promote a privatised, competitive structure that puts profits before kids,” Jan Tinetti said. ...
“This government is choosing to deliberately mislead and withhold information, keeping our people in the dark about this government’s agenda and the future of our mokopuna,” said co-leader and spokesperson for Health, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. The call comes after the demand from the Chief Ombudsman that Associate Minister of Health, Casey ...
“Today’s climate announcement by Simon Watts makes clear the National Government is simply paying lip service to meeting its climate change targets,” Megan Woods said. ...
National is choosing to make life harder for workers by taking away the rights our communities have fought hard for. Here's how they’re taking workers backwards. ...
Australia, Canada and New Zealand today issued the following statement on the need for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza and the risk of expanded conflict between Hizballah and Israel. The situation in Gaza is catastrophic. The human suffering is unacceptable. It cannot continue. We remain unequivocal in our condemnation of ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today reminded all State and faith-based institutions of their legal obligation to preserve records relevant to the safety and wellbeing of those in its care. “The Abuse in Care Inquiry’s report has found cases where records of the most vulnerable people in State and faith‑based institutions were ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says the Government’s online safety website for children and young people has reached one million page views. “It is great to see so many young people and their families accessing the site Keep It Real Online to learn how to stay safe online, and manage ...
Tēnā tātou katoa, Ngā mihi te rangi, ngā mihi te whenua, ngā mihi ki a koutou, kia ora mai koutou. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and the invitation to speak at this 50th anniversary conference. I acknowledge all those who have gone before us and paved the ...
New Zealand’s payroll providers have successfully prepared to ensure 3.5 million individuals will, from Wednesday next week, be able to keep more of what they earn each pay, says Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Revenue Minister Simon Watts. “The Government's tax policy changes are legally effective from Wednesday. Delivering this tax ...
An experimental vineyard which will help futureproof the wine sector has been opened in Blenheim by Associate Regional Development Minister Mark Patterson. The covered vineyard, based at the New Zealand Wine Centre – Te Pokapū Wāina o Aotearoa, enables controlled environmental conditions. “The research that will be produced at the Experimental ...
The Coalition Government has confirmed the indicative regional breakdown of North Island Weather Event (NIWE) funding for state highway recovery projects funded through Budget 2024, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Regions in the North Island suffered extensive and devastating damage from Cyclone Gabrielle and the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Floods, and ...
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi, will visit New Zealand next week, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced. “Indonesia is important to New Zealand’s security and economic interests and is our closest South East Asian neighbour,” says Mr Peters, who is currently in Laos to engage with South East Asian partners. ...
He aha te kai a te rangatira? He kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero. The government has reaffirmed its commitment to supporting the aspirations of Ngāti Maniapoto, Minister for Māori Development Tama Potaka says. “My thanks to Te Nehenehenui Trust – Ngāti Maniapoto for bringing their important kōrero to a ministerial ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has thanked outgoing Chair of the Civil Aviation Authority, Janice Fredric, for her service to the board.“I have received Ms Fredric’s resignation from the role of Chair of the Civil Aviation Authority,” Mr Brown says.“On behalf of the Government, I want to thank Ms Fredric for ...
The Government is proposing legislation to overturn a Court of Appeal decision and amend the Marine and Coastal Area Act in order to restore Parliament’s test for Customary Marine Title, Treaty Negotiations Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “Section 58 required an applicant group to prove they have exclusively used and occupied ...
Regulation Minister David Seymour says that opposition parties have united in bad faith, opposing what they claim are ‘dangerous changes’ to the Early Childhood Education sector, despite no changes even being proposed yet. “Issues with affordability and availability of early childhood education, and the complexity of its regulation, has led ...
After receiving more than 740 submissions in the first 20 days, Regulation Minister David Seymour is asking the Ministry for Regulation to extend engagement on the early childhood education regulation review by an extra two weeks. “The level of interest has been very high, and from the conversations I’ve been ...
The Coalition Government is investing $802.9 million into the Wairarapa and Manawatū rail lines as part of a funding agreement with the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA), KiwiRail, and the Greater Wellington and Horizons Regional Councils to deliver more reliable services for commuters in the lower North Island, Transport Minister Simeon ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced his intention to appoint a Crown Manager to both Hawke’s Bay Regional and Wairoa District Councils to speed up the delivery of flood protection work in Wairoa."Recent severe weather events in Wairoa this year, combined with damage from Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 have ...
Mr Speaker, this is a day that many New Zealanders who were abused in State care never thought would come. It’s the day that this Parliament accepts, with deep sorrow and regret, the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. At the heart of this report are the ...
For the first time, the Government is formally acknowledging some children and young people at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital experienced torture. The final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State and Faith-based Care “Whanaketia – through pain and trauma, from darkness to light,” was tabled in Parliament ...
The Government has acknowledged the nearly 2,400 courageous survivors who shared their experiences during the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State and Faith-Based Care. The final report from the largest and most complex public inquiry ever held in New Zealand, the Royal Commission Inquiry “Whanaketia – through ...
With a week to go before hard-working New Zealanders see personal income tax relief for the first time in fourteen years, 513,000 people have used the Budget tax calculator to see how much they will benefit, says Finance Minister Nicola Willis. “Tax relief is long overdue. From next Wednesday, personal income ...
Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden says a bill that has passed its first reading will improve parental leave settings and give non-biological parents more flexibility as primary carer for their child. The Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill (No3), passed its first reading this morning. “It includes a change ...
Two Bills designed to improve regulation and make it easier to do business have passed their first reading in Parliament, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. The Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill make key changes to legislation administered by the Ministry ...
New legislation paves the way for greater competition in sectors such as banking and electricity, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly says. “Competitive markets boost productivity, create employment opportunities and lift living standards. To support competition, we need good quality regulation but, unfortunately, a recent OECD report ranked New ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says lotteries for charitable purposes, such as those run by the Heart Foundation, Coastguard NZ, and local hospices, will soon be allowed to operate online permanently. “Under current laws, these fundraising lotteries are only allowed to operate online until October 2024, after which ...
The Coalition Government is accelerating work on the new four-lane expressway between Auckland and Whangārei as part of its Roads of National Significance programme, with an accelerated delivery model to deliver this project faster and more efficiently, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “For too long, the lack of resilient transport connections ...
Sir Don McKinnon will travel to Viet Nam this week as a Special Envoy of the Government, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced. “It is important that the Government give due recognition to the significant contributions that General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong made to New Zealand-Viet Nam relations,” Mr ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says newly appointed Commissioner, Grant Illingworth KC, will help deliver the report for the first phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons, due on 28 November 2024. “I am pleased to announce that Mr Illingworth will commence his appointment as ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters travels to Laos this week to participate in a series of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-led Ministerial meetings in Vientiane. “ASEAN plays an important role in supporting a peaceful, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” Mr Peters says. “This will be our third visit to ...
Construction of a new mental health facility at Te Nikau Grey Hospital in Greymouth is today one step closer, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey says. “This $27 million facility shows this Government is delivering on its promise to boost mental health care and improve front line services,” Mr Doocey says. ...
New Zealand is committing nearly $50 million to a package supporting sustainable Pacific fisheries development over the next four years, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones announced today. “This support consisting of a range of initiatives demonstrates New Zealand’s commitment to assisting our Pacific partners ...
Associate Education Minister David Seymour says proposed changes to the Education and Training Amendment Bill will ensure charter schools have more flexibility to negotiate employment agreements and are equipped with the right teaching resources. “Cabinet has agreed to progress an amendment which means unions will not be able to initiate ...
In response to serious concerns around oversight, overspend and a significant deterioration in financial outlook, the Board of Health New Zealand will be replaced with a Commissioner, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti announced today. “The previous government’s botched health reforms have created significant financial challenges at Health NZ that, without ...
Minister for Space and Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins will travel to Adelaide tomorrow for space and science engagements, including speaking at the Australian Space Forum. While there she will also have meetings and visits with a focus on space, biotechnology and innovation. “New Zealand has a thriving space ...
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts will travel to China on Saturday to attend the Ministerial on Climate Action meeting held in Wuhan. “Attending the Ministerial on Climate Action is an opportunity to advocate for New Zealand climate priorities and engage with our key partners on climate action,” Mr Watts says. ...
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones is travelling to the Solomon Islands tomorrow for meetings with his counterparts from around the Pacific supporting collective management of the region’s fisheries. The 23rd Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Committee and the 5th Regional Fisheries Ministers’ Meeting in Honiara from 23 to 26 July ...
The Government today launched the Military Style Academy Pilot at Te Au rere a te Tonga Youth Justice residence in Palmerston North, an important part of the Government’s plan to crackdown on youth crime and getting youth offenders back on track, Minister for Children, Karen Chhour said today. “On the ...
The Government has welcomed news the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) has begun work to replace nine priority bridges across the country to ensure our state highway network remains resilient, reliable, and efficient for road users, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“Increasing productivity and economic growth is a key priority for the ...
Acting Prime Minister David Seymour has been in contact throughout the evening with senior officials who have coordinated a whole of government response to the global IT outage and can provide an update. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet has designated the National Emergency Management Agency as the ...
New Zealand and Japan will continue to step up their shared engagement with the Pacific, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. “New Zealand and Japan have a strong, shared interest in a free, open and stable Pacific Islands region,” Mr Peters says. “We are pleased to be finding more ways ...
New developments in the heart of North Island forestry country will reinvigorate their communities and boost economic development, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones visited Kaingaroa and Kawerau in Bay of Plenty today to open a landmark community centre in the former and a new connecting road in ...
President Adeang, fellow Ministers, honourable Diet Member Horii, Ambassadors, distinguished guests. Minasama, konnichiwa, and good afternoon, everyone. Distinguished guests, it’s a pleasure to be here with you today to talk about New Zealand’s foreign policy reset, the reasons for it, the values that underpin it, and how it ...
Last summer when Matairangi burned, Ginny and Tom stood at the window of their lounge, watching kākā shoot skyward from the burning trees. From the distance, they looked to Ginny like pages torn from books and thrown into a bonfire. It was Tom, voice tight, who told her it was ...
Opinion: The Canadian short story writer Alice Munro – winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 – died in May at the age of 92. Her work was about “the damage people inflict on one another in the name of love”, Deborah Treisman wrote in the New Yorker. ...
This month marks two years since the most powerful telescope ever built sent its first pictures back to earth. From its lofty vantage point, beyond the moon in orbit around the sun, the James Webb Space Telescope was tuned to observe the first stars and galaxies being born soon after ...
Comment: After Climate Change Minister Simon Watts’ preview several weeks ago, I had some optimism about the Government’s emissions reduction plan. Now I’ve read the discussion document, that hope has been dashed. How can the Government propose a plan that wants to take New Zealand taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and spend ...
Christopher Luxon: hurdles The little man from National jumps hurdles in his sleep. He’s quite good at it in his dreams and even though the reality doesn’t quite match up you have to give him credit for getting up every morning and crashing into the very first hurdle of the ...
Comment: It was a good two hours into the conversation when Tyrone Marks raised the most basic of questions when I first spoke to him in 2017. “They didn’t explain the things they did to me. They never told me why. And they still haven’t. There’s no explanation for it. ...
Madeleine Chapman rounds out Death Week on The Spinoff with a final recommendation. You can read all of our Death Week coverage here. Nothing forces you to reflect on your life and relationships quite like proximity to death. For those whose nearest and dearest have died, there are reasonably obvious ...
Whitney Greene takes us through her life in television, including the TV character she’d like to plan a funeral for and her cow lung catastrophe on The Traitors NZ. “If the phone rings, I have to answer it,” Whitney Greene from The Traitors NZ warns as we begin our My ...
Maddie Ballard reviews the debut essay collection of Pōneke writer Flora Feltham.In ‘The Raw Material’, the longest essay in Flora Feltham’s dazzling debut collection, the author heads out for a run after hours of weaving and sees the world turn to textile. “Pounding along the Parade, I saw the ...
Andy Christiansen, one half of the experimental rock-pop duo TRiPS, shares the tunes inspiring the band’s perfect weekend and new release. “Good speakers, good food, good music, no distractions”: that’s all you need to enjoy the psychedelic stylings of TRiPS, a new band formed by Fly My Pretties’ Barnaby Weir ...
Celebrating our quadrennial opportunity to become experts in a bunch of sports we never normally watch.The games of the XXXIII Olympiad are upon us. Paris will host this year’s showcase of sporting and athletic prowess, which means some late-night and early-morning viewing for us in Aotearoa.But what sports ...
The photograph is striking and beautiful, but also disturbing – a reminder that my love for John was often entangled in shame.The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.In the spring of 1980, in Dunedin, shortly before his death, someone took a photograph ...
Get to know Babushka, our latest Dog of the Month. This feature was offered as a reward during our What’s Eating Aotearoa PledgeMe campaign. Thank you to Babu’s humans, Jo and Isabel, for their support. Dog name: Babushka (Babu for short) Age: 2Breed: Border Collie X poodleIf rescued, ...
Pacific Media Watch A Lebanese photojournalist who was severely wounded during an Israeli air strike in south Lebanon carried the Olympic torch in Paris this week in honour of her peers who have been wounded and killed in the field — especially in Gaza and Lebanon. Christina Assi of Agence ...
The first report in a five-part web series focused on the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women taking place in the Marshall Islands this week.SPECIAL REPORT:By Netani Rika in Majuro Women continue to fight for justice 70 years after the first nuclear tests by the United States caused ...
Christopher Luxon has joined with Australia and Canada's leaders in voicing support for US President Joe Biden's ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The 2022 election brought the “teal wave” into parliament. The next election will test whether teals, who occupy what were Liberal seats, and other independents can maintain their momentum. Joining us on the Podcast ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Musgrave, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Adelaide Pixavri/Shutterstock A major Federal Court class action has been dismissed this week after Justice Michael Lee ruled there was not enough evidence to prove the weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. Plaintiff Kelvin ...
In The Week in Politics: politicians have to decide what to do about child abuse, Health NZ is booked in for major surgery and Darleen Tana returns. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University Mainstream media are surprisingly muted at the prospect of the world’s most powerful nation being led for the first time by a woman – specifically a woman of colour, Vice President Kamala ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Bennett, PhD Student, Associate Research Fellow, Deakin University Last week, a drone delivery company called Wing (owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet) started operating in Melbourne. Some 250,000 residents in parts of the city’s eastern suburbs can now order food from ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Foo, Lecturer, Physiotherapy, Monash University pikselstock/Shutterstock In the next 40 years in Australia, it’s predicted the number of Australians aged 65 and over will more than double, while the number of people aged 85 and over will more than triple. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katrina Grant, Research Associate, Power Institute for Arts and Visual Culture, University of Sydney Jonas Åkerström’s 1790 work, Session of the Accademia dell’Arcadia on August 17 1788.Nationalmuseum/Cecilia Heisser Ever wondered whether you’d have a better chance at winning an Olympic gold ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Jones, Program Lead, Food Governance, George Institute for Global Health wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock On Thursday, Australian and New Zealand food ministers at state, federal and national levels met to thrash out what’s next for health star ratings on packaged foods. Now, after ...
The Abuse in Care report found many Pacific survivors lost their connections to their culture and language, resulting in trauma that has been carried from generation to generation. ...
In the regulatory review, ECC intends to suggest that ERO focus on curriculum delivery reviews rather than the Ministry, because it’s not efficient or effective to have two agencies with radically different approaches climbing over each other. ...
Te Rūnanga Nui o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori invites the current government to work in partnership with them to develop a pathway forward, including the development of a parallel pathway and meaningful policy and strategy for Kura Kaupapa Māori ...
If you haven’t started watching yet, Tara Ward begs you to reconsider. This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. In the world of New Zealand reality television, we have many gems in our crown. There’s the delicious second season of the Celebrity Treasure ...
A new poem by Fiona Kidman. The clothes of the dead I did not keep my mother’s furry red beret for long nor the stringy scarves that adorned the necks of my aunts, although I have kept tag ends of gold, the rings and trinkets they wore, the brooches no ...
The government’s announcement that it will re-open the foreshore and seabed controversy by changing the rules on recognising centuries-old Māori customary title for a third time goes against the rule of law and New Zealand values,” Mr Tipa says. ...
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If you didn’t hear this talk at the weekend, then I highly recommend it.
Linda Tirado is the author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. The book began as a first person blog post about living in poverty in Utah that went viral.
“I will not apologise for my poverty.”
http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/201801602
I listened to it as well Paul and I thought it was mind blowing, the courage and conviction that she spoke with and the “I will not apologise for my poverty” was very profound. Good luck with her future career as a writer representing the under-privileged.
9/11 Trumped Democracy.
Elementary, my dear Watson !
Finally snow on Ruapehu! And Cardona!
Cardrona
Yeah, been quite a turn around in the weather in last week, shorts and tee shirt and not a sign of snow on Remarks the week before. Still very early though for snow to stay there but the first good dump is usually late May.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/304495/plan-needed-to-tackle-climate-change-greens
what chance this will spark some action?
Not sure about sparking, but maybe more water wearing away at the rock.
Have to say I’m very glad that Shaw is co-leader. Having him, with his background in business, in that photo in a suit, is what is needed at this time. It’s his message to the business community and other power holders in society that is critical now. And the GP do have a plan that NZ could pick up and implement right now. Not as radical as many of us want or know is needed, but it’s a plan that those powerholders could get on board with.
https://www.greens.org.nz/news/press-release/time-government-do-right-thing-and-take-strong-action-climate-change
Last year’s discussion paper,
Options for domestic climate action to achieve a target of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030
https://www.greens.org.nz/sites/default/files/YesWeCanPresentation.pdf
as an aside, for the people that think that the Greens believe electric cars will save the day,
No ‘silver bullet’ for climate change
“New Zealand’s top scientists have shown in this report that reducing emissions will require a re-think of the current strategy for agriculture, and that climate targets won’t be met by relying solely on tech-fixes like electric vehicles and methane inhibitors,” said Green Party Co-leader James Shaw.
https://www.greens.org.nz/news/press-release/no-%E2%80%98silver-bullet%E2%80%99-climate-change
he thinks that electric cars are part of the solution. You have to release a lot of GHGs to manufacture an electric car.
Yes, petrol or diesel too. If you are going to manufacture a car, make it an electric one. But if you read their policy interconnectedly it’s obvious that they value things like public transport and biking more and have policies on them too.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green
They’re still a better option depending on which country your in.
It’s more that replacing the current fleet with electric cars means a huge amount of emissions when we should be powering down and not relying on individual car ownership. We need to travel less, because all travel has a GHG cost. More public transport, more walking/biking, more working and playing closer to home. It’s actually pretty recent in NZ for so many people to own cars (remember when Japanese imports were first allowed in in the 90s?).
I don’t have so much of a problem with the GP policy because NZ is patently not ready to give up its car culture yet and the GP don’t have enough power to be pushing that (thanks lefties who haven’t been voting for them!!). It’s just a pragmatic approach. If it takes us 20 years to transition to not relying on personal cars, we will still have lots of people in that time buying new cars, so they may as well be electric (the case can also be made for preserving the existing fleet for as long as possible, but there are problems with that too).
“It’s more that replacing the current fleet with electric cars ”
Those cars are going to get replaced regardless through the fact that companies tend to be on 3 to 5 year cycles and wealthy kiwis tend to be the same as companies. Add to that cars just don’t last now 20 years use would be rarity now.
As for depowering your right but it won’t happen willingly.
Which I’m guessing is part of what is behind the GP policy. If you have to replace a car anyway, why would you not make it electric in a country that already has power generation at 80% renewable and could pretty easily get it to 100% (GP policy is by 2030).
My car is 20 years old 🙂 I reckon if it had been looked after someone would get another 10 years out of it. If parts were available, it could last a lot longer. It’ll be the lack of parts that will eventually scrap it.
There was a post recently which relayed the scientific opinion that we need to get down to zero fossil fuel use by 2030.
Manufacturing new cars is out of the question, in this scenario.
Sure. But not politically feasible in 2016. If we want to do the best thing, we have to start where we are. You and I can push for faster and more radical change. The Greens can’t. I don’t mean to have a go at you, so please don’t take this as that, but honestly, the GP were that radical back in the day, and not enough people voted for them including many lefties like yourself. This is a group of people who were thinking long and hard about CC and resource depletion well before we were even aware it was an issue. The time for them to lead that charge is past. NZ had it’s chance at being progressive via govt and it blew it. It’s going to have to come from somewhere else.
However, I still believe that voting Green (or supporting them in other ways) gives us a much better chance of achieving any meaningful change. Can you imagine how these conversations would be going and what would be happening in the public mind if we had a govt that was taking CC as seriously as the Greens are, even if they’re not yet where we want or need them to be?
I also believe that if a movement arises outside of govt that shifts the public, then parties like the Greens will follow. They want to do the right thing.
I can see the logic in pursuing formal position and power and therefore justifying participating in the Parliamentary game of status quo pretend and extend.
But they’re not justifying pretend and extend. I wonder how much of the GP material you actually read.
It’s really a shame that people are so hung up on the electric car thing.
Edit, sorry, that sounded a bit harsh. I’m just aware that there are lots of misperceptions about the Greens from outside views.
“It’s really a shame that people are so hung up on the electric car thing.”
the hang up is created by a desire to believe that all we need to do is make a few changes here and there and we can carry on pretty much as before…….self delusion can be powerful
But the Greens don’t believe that so why get hung up on that one small part of their policy?
It’s like people not being able to let go of Labour proposing that we have to raise the Super eligibility age.
What’s the big deal?
Well, the big deal is that it provides a huge insight into how they look at the world, and what they believe the real issues are. As well as the kinds of solutions which are needed.
And it’s not good.
Thanks for that link. Really good to see people including manufacturing emissions in their thinking.
Shaw is going where Hooton would advice him to go…well suited and cap in hand to the business community
the Green Party however would do well to remember what Naomi Klein has to say about such liaisons in ‘This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs. the Climate’…from her massive research and evaluations this modus operandi fails
( whenever I see Shaw in a suit I think of the failed ‘Red Peak’ corporate flag and Shaw’s attempt to curry favour with jonkey nactional)
…it will be interesting to see whether the new Green Party strategy is a winner with it’s grassroots voters
Hooton would also advise dissatisfied lefties to frame their potential parties in a poor light, so I guess that makes you and Shaw alike (both apparently defined by what Hooton might suggest).
Shaw isn’t going cap in hand to the business community. He’s speaking their language so he can influence them. It’s smart strategy.
The grassroots membership chose Shaw as co-leader. The green vote has increased every year since Norman was chosen as co-leader (in a business suit!) and everyone was ‘oooh, sell out, you’ll lose the grassroots and fail’. The grassroots chose Norman as co-leader too. Looks to me like they know what they are doing as a party.
If we want the business and political classes to adopt an actual climate change action plan, what other way would that happen if it wasn’t being spearheaded by someone they could understand and relate with?
The beauty of the Greens is that beside and behind Shaw are a whole team of very skilled MPs from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. Having one suit in that team is not going to destroy the party.
well I guess with Norman he wore his suit very casually ( as does David Cunliffe)and it was clear Norman was an activist in a suit
…with Shaw the suit wears him
at least Russel Norman’s suit was green
lol …the Green ELF look
What makes you think Shaw’s isn’t?
I have heard him interviewed a number of times and if I didn’t know who he was the last party I would pick him as representing would be the Greens….his presentation of issues almost appears to deliberately avoid Green party platforms….
An observation of a non activist voter….politics is perception so they say.
Interesting how we can hear such different things. Do you mind me asking what kind of interviews you heard?
mainly RNZ,couple TV…all relatively brief granted…..perhaps he improves with time
What you will be getting from RNZ and TV is the messaging from the Greens to the business and power holder communities.
His maiden speech in parliament is worth listening to/reading. Then read Gordon Campbell’s interview and assessment of the speech and what it means and why it doesn’t meant what Hooton thinks it means (and let’s never forget that Hooton wants everyone to think that Shaw is Blue because it will lessen the green vote).
https://home.greens.org.nz/speeches/james-shaws-maiden-speech
http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2014/11/04/gordon-campbell-on-greens-mp-james-shaw-and-the-prospects-for-ecumenical-politics/
None of this makes sense to me. Why would you use your RNZ and TV time to message to the business elite.
It’s not just the business elite. And why wouldn’t you? It’s not like it’s the only way that the Greens talk to that part of society.
“Because I’m asking you about why *you* believe Shaw is Blue/Green, not what the media present”
I answered that in my original post……I am voter, not an active party member (like the vast majority of the electorate)….where do I get to “know” the politicians?…..by their public presentation.
If he is presenting as green/blue (your term) and he is not then it inspires little trust ..in other words, simply another politician……do we need any more simple politicians?
As things stand , and until some party with a vision and path form (unlikely imo to be any of the existing) the Greens will probably keep my vote next election despite Shaw
I don’t think he does present as a blue/green, I assumed that was what you meant when you implied that he wasn’t green. When I listen to him on TV or radio I can hear the green politics in what he says. I’m not put off by the suit.
For people that are put off, I’m pointing to evidence that he is real. What you appear to be saying is that he’s somehow misleading you by how he is on TV. I don’t really understand that, probably because all you’ve said is that you think he’s not green but you haven’t said why (and I assume you haven’t bothered watching the vid or reading the Campbell piece).
The Greens will always be open to speculation about who they are and if they are genuine, because they don’t fit into conventional notions of left/right politics. That’s why you can people like Turei and Shaw leading the same party. And that’s why Shaw can be pro market and pro intervention.
There’s not much Shaw can do to make himself more presentable to people who doubt him based on not much evidence (if he presented himself differently than he is, that would be him being false). I have to wonder here if it’s not the politics but the suit that is the problem. The criticisms I hear about Shaw are very similar to what people used to say about Norman.
whether your reasoning for his delivery on RNZ and TV is correct or not is irrelevant….its the perception it creates….anything M.Hooten has to say automatically instills an opposite view so no traction there….have read Gordon Campbell for a while and admire his work (though don’t always agree but hard to fault his research)….an exert from that piece you linked may bear re-examination…..
“Doesn’t a values-centred party always get hammered if it starts messing with its brand, in a belief this will lend them more credibility? “They do,” Shaw replies, “ And some of our people went and joined Mana for precisely that reason. There’s a political risk in anything you do. “ He points to the other current risk. “ If we remain outside of government permanently, I can’t see why anyone would want to continue voting for us. Like, I think it is now getting to that point.”
What’s your point about the Campbell quote? It’s not clear (and I think you have taken it out of context, but I’ll wait to hear what the point is).
If Shaw was say Tanzcos or Bradford, do you think he wouldn’t be creating an impression of some sort? I don’t get what is wrong with him appealing to the suit community. They have to change. Do you think they would listen more to someone who was more hippy or radical?
You appear to be saying that you personally believe that Shaw is Blue/Green based on what you see on brief interviews on TV. Did you listen to the speech and then read the Campbell interview? Because I’m asking you about why *you* believe Shaw is Blue/Green, not what the media present. If you already know that it’s a perception thing, why not go and find out who he really is?
“I don’t really understand that, probably because all you’ve said is that you think he’s not green but you haven’t said why (and I assume you haven’t bothered watching the vid or reading the Campbell piece).”
I have heard him interviewed a number of times and if I didn’t know who he was the last party I would pick him as representing would be the Greens….his presentation of issues almost appears to deliberately avoid Green party platforms….
An observation of a non activist voter….politics is perception so they say.
…and have read the Campbell piece a number of times.
“You appear to be saying that you personally believe that Shaw is Blue/Green based on what you see on brief interviews on TV.”
If he is presenting as green/blue (your term) and he is not then it inspires little trust ..in other words, simply another politician……do we need any more simple politicians?
mainly RNZ,couple TV…all relatively brief granted
“I have to wonder here if it’s not the politics but the suit that is the problem. The criticisms I hear about Shaw are very similar to what people used to say about Norman.”
lol…the suit goes with the job…I have no idea of what people said about Norman but I was never in any doubt as to what party he represented.
I think you may have answered the question……”And that’s why Shaw can be pro market and pro intervention.”….no, he cannot.
Ok, so this is an ideological issue for you. I think that’s why you can’t hear the green in what he says. Norman is also pro market and pro interventionist. It matters what people say about both of them, there’s precedence, and a much higher level of rw meme attack on the Greens now.
Repeating yourself doesn’t actually explain what you mean any better.
the repetition appeared to be required ….I thought it was expressed clearly enough….sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
and ideological?..meh…always considered myself a more of a pragmatist
Did anyone go to the anti-child-violence marches on the weekend?
No but support the outrage. This is a good example of how a specific easily identified issue results in vast outrage and intense responses, but a more complex issue like TPPA gets a puzzled muted response. Clever corporates and politicians have deliberately made the TPPA issues obscure and have buried the real issues too deep to find.
It doesn’t solve the problem though, white middle class outrage at a problem in poor brown neighborhoods. Getting people out of poverty would help and there’s probably loads of other things that could help too.
maui…if poverty causes child abuse, then there would be a shit load more dead babies.
Poor people don’t stomp on their children until their insides burst.
Bad or totally mad people do.
Hi Rosemary
I agree, I think that while being poor does play a big part (stress, worry causing excessive drinking etc) in domestic violence, I’m not sure how big a part it plays in the cases of child murder (its murder in my mind anyway) otherwise there would have been a lot of dead kids during the depression
I’m not so sure about that – firstly, I’m not even sure the data exists to make an assumption that there wasn’t a lot of dead kids during the Depression, and secondly we’re talking about somewhere around 8 kids a year being killed out of a population of 4 to 4.5 million. That level has been pretty consistent for at least the last ten years. So a major spike would be needed to demonstrate a meaningful difference in the rate, anyway.
On the flipside, we also know that assaults on children are much more frequent among poor kids.
Poverty doesn’t make people bad, but it might make them mad.
Yes true, theres probably a lot that happened in the Depression that we’ll never know about.
When you’re assaulting a child it doesn’t take much for a hiding to turn fatal but I guess the point I was trying to make was that by focusing on one issue (poverty) then other , potential, issues might get ignored
Yeah, but when you have a factor of 6 or 8 times the rate when talking about poor kids, you definitely need to look at that issue.
There aren’t a huge amount of other factors that even come close to that level, especially (I suspect) when normalised for deprivation.
That having been said, there’s still a level of abuse that crosses economic boundaries (a prominent and unapologetic sports broadcaster comes to mind), so of course there are other issues to consider.
But my perspective is that if we know a major correlative factor and have significant case studies and plausible arguments to attribute a level of causation, then fixing that factor is the low-hanging fruit in solving the bulk of the problem.
And in this case, it would solve a lot of other issues as well.
That’s a good point but since this problem has been brewing for years (decades?) it’ll probably take the same amount of time to fix, but whats a short term issue that could be fixed right now to make a difference?
Make benefits more accessible (e.g guards, forms, staff who treat you like muck, walk-in appointments). And boost every benefit by $50/wk.
That would put a dent in poverty right there.
I’d have no issues with an increase in the benefit paid out however I don’t think it’ll do anything to stop kids getting killed
Well, given the comparatively low numbers, you might be right (or at least not demonstrably wrong 🙂 ).
But it will have an effect on some of the 110-odd other kids who die every year, too. And a more testable hypothesis is that it might bring down the assault hospitalisation rate (some of the static nature of assault deaths could well be just because we’re better at keeping them alive after they’ve been savagely assaulted).
This is a complex situation. But it may be that financial poverty is often found in the same households where there are other types of poverty: social connections, lack of support etc, time.
And it could be that these are the types of “poverty” that result in increased domestic violence – not necessarily a lack of cash.
I think economic poverty exacerbates and even causes much of those lifestyle poverties.
An example is social poverty – going out costs money, even just visiting. Petrol, busses, that sort of thing. I have a friend who has to save up to get the bus across town. Similarly, one of my key social groups is a regular weeknight at the pub. Anywhere between 4 and 8 people turning up on the same night. And I spend about $20-$40 on a given night. Once a week, but if I were on the dole I would gradually lose contact with those folks.
Time? I can earn in one hour what someone else has to work for an hour and a half to get. And I don’t have kids.
My firm opinion is that this is all just another way Marx was right: the system alienates people from each other, down to even the family unit.
Reply to McFlock:
“I think economic poverty exacerbates and even causes much of those lifestyle poverties.”
I agree to some extent, but to emphasise – there are those without funds who do have extended social support networks, and who do have a work/life balance that improves their ability to withstand stress and manage difficulties. So the lack of finance is not a causation – although it may be present.
I agree Molly, that the breaking up of social networks that provided positive social, educational (e.g. childcare and establishing effective households) and cultural support is an important factor in domestic violence. New Zealand’s Pakeha history seems to me a case study, as does the changes to employment and social structures that began in the 1980s that disproportionately affected low income (especially Maori) families.
At a guess, this is more important in poorer families with transient work because they are less likely to afford to build alternative community networks in the same way that people moving for high income jobs may be able to do. Having said that, it would be interesting to know if the rates of domestic violence, depression and aggression are greater in high income families that have a history of moving around compared with those that have long term social ties in the community in which they live.
I’m not sure I agree with that logic, Molly.
Lots of smokers don’t get heart disease, and lots of non-smokers do get heart disease, but smoking still causes a substantial amount of heart disease.
Similarly, lots of poor people might have strong social networks, and lots of rich people might have weak or non-existent social networks, but I also know people whose poverty directly damages their social networks – embarrassed to visit or be visited because they can’t provide a box of bikkies, can’t afford transport, can’t afford to go out, etc.
Reply to McFlock:
Yes, having been in that situation myself, I agree there is reluctance on keeping some social contacts going because of lack of funds.
But the original premise, was that financial hardship is predicative of domestic abuse. I still think this is too simplistic.
It is the lack of social connections and reliable support that may be worth looking at.
@ molly
I’m a bit hazy on the word “predicative” – it might be a technical word, but I’m hoping that it was a typo for “predictive”as in “can be used to predict”.
In which case, that wasn’t my premise – like pretty much all aggregate data, one can’t really say “this person is poor, therefore they probably have encountered domestic violence as victim/perpetrator”. But with enough data, we could maybe say “if we lower poverty by 50%, we would expect xxx fewer DV hospitalisations”. I.e. the attributable risk of poverty as a factor.
Again, apologies if you used a word bigger than I am and I went off on a tangent.
“I think economic poverty exacerbates and even causes much of those lifestyle poverties.”
Indeed.
“When you’re assaulting a child it doesn’t take much for a hiding to turn fatal…”
Hmm…in the majority of cases where an abused child has died the abuse was repetitive. Postmortems showed older injuries, sustained before the injuries that killed the child.
These older injuries include skull and limb fractures, most of which went untreated. The child would have been in pain.
I can stretch my brain to see how a caregiver can ‘lose it’…a one off incident with tragic results, and there are a few of these in the gallery of the dead children, but not many.
And there is a real element of devious deception as well in these cases…denying, hiding, blaming siblings for the abuse, threatening others who might ‘nark’.
You’d normally associate ‘mad’ with a don’t give a shit anymore attitude…this is not the case.
Self preservation is strong in these perpetrators.
I have no answers…I would just like to see various agencies doing their job properly, so when there is a complaint or disclosure they act proactively and promptly. Put the child first.
I’ve got none either, I like the idea of dismantling CYPS and starting anew but my worry is the same people will be put in the same areas with the same reults
They will contract the work out. (with former cyfs and ngo staff in prominent positions with ‘providers’.)
As with the other group of not-quite-real-people in New Zealand. Disabled New Zealanders.
The scariest thing is with disability support…the very portal through which one accesses support is run under contracts with “budget control requirements”. The disabled people with the highest need for support fare badly.
a quick read on the ‘family’ during the great depression.
start here
http://www.wisegeek.org/what-were-the-effects-on-the-children-of-the-great-depression.htm
or here
http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?displayGroupName=Reference&zid=7acfdc9d4390b9e20a4818ed155eab29&p=UHIC%3AWHIC&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CCX3404500173&source=Bookmark&u=nysl_ro_rush&jsid=11f17704edb9a99bc9
click through the three pages
http://newdeal.feri.org/eleanor/er2a.htm
or here
http://informationgreatdepression.weebly.com/affect-on-children.html
IF you wanted to know who the great depression affected the children, you could use that great search engine GOOGLE to help you find pages upon pages of information on the effect that hunger, homelessness, despairing parents, lack of schools/hospitals/ other public services had on children.
The Depression era is actually quite well documented, they did have a. newspapers, b. film, c. cartoons/caricatures, b. photography.
especially the photography is poingnant. it also pays to remember to see the parents not as 50+ years old, but often only in their late thrities. But i guess lack of food, water, basic sanitary hygiene and medicinal care in case of sickness will age one quickly.
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/photoessay.htm
In regards to child abuse, poverty is the one and the first thing to tackle. Stable housing (average rental time in NZ is around the 12 month mark), will lead to stable communities where people know each other and in times of hardship might be able to help each others, will lead to better school attendance where abuse might be recognised early enough, will lead to better job attendance / abilities as the resources needed to move every 12 month might be used to actually find a. a better job, or b. some extra up skilling via night courses etc.
But without tackling poverty we have always poverty as an excuse, oh what can you do, these people are lazy, bludgers, having children only for the benefit etc etc etc etc etc etc, and of course other then lamenting the injured or dead child and locking up the abuser nothing much is done. Its easier that way.
@ianmac
“This is a good example of how a specific easily identified issue results in vast outrage and intense responses, but a more complex issue like TPPA gets a puzzled muted response…”
In terms of numbers attending, and actual engagement with the issues being marched about (rather than just along for a selfie op) I’d say the Moko March and the TPPA March and the Climate Change March had about equal turnout in Hamilton.
@Ad
Yes.
Hamilton.
Nearly abandoned the whole thing at the muster point as there seemed to be more interest in taking photos of self and groups….all grinning and laughing as if little Moko wasn’t dead.
I guess I’m getting old, tired, cynical and grumpy.
However….awesome turnout…despite the shitty weather.
Best speaker was Karen Morrison-Hume the Missioner for Anglican Action…(http://prisonforum2015.weebly.com/karen-morrison-hume.html is a paper she prepared for the Prison Forum which gives a very good picture of where she is coming from )
The other standout speaker was Cherie Kurarangi Sweeny…(http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5072801/Child-abuse-nark-starts-Facebook-page)
And there was a short but effective speech from Darryl Brougham (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11554286)
There was singing, then a haka….which I personally thought was utterly inappropriate under the circumstances.
And nobody remembered that Hamilton had done the march for (another) dead baby thing 16 years ago.
We marched for Mereana Edmonds. (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=148329)
Some of us also decided to apply to be foster families, so the CYFs and other agencies could not use the excuse that there was a shortage of emergency foster homes to justify doing fuck all when a child discloses abuse.
I’m laughing….really.
I think the next slogan should be…”Hey, Child Protection Agency…What’s With the Phonecall???”
Another researched based public health stance bites the dust,
A large worldwide study has found that, contrary to popular thought, low-salt diets may not be beneficial and may actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and death compared to average salt consumption. The study suggests that the only people who need to worry about reducing sodium in their diet are those with hypertension (high blood pressure) and have high salt consumption.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160521071410.htm
We have a real problem here. The fat hypothesis (dietary fat causes high cholesterol causes heart disease) is now being shown to be wrong, yet the public health message to eat less fat was based on medical research and conventional processes whereby authorities take research and turn it into health policy. The fat is bad message is now going to have to change, but health authorities are still lagging far behind the research and the growing public movements to make the changes regardless.
The salt hypothesis looks set to go the same way. This is a problem with how science is done and how it is used. It’s not good enough to say that this is science working, see they’ve figured it out eventually, when we’ve had 30+ years of exactly teh wrong advice being given. People will have died and been made sick from that advice.
If this was tobacco companies instead of the US FDA, AMA etc, we’d be talking lawsuits by now.
It’s got nothing to do with how science is done.
It has however, got everything to do with how results or supposed results are reported and it’s also got everything to do with (largely vested interests) funding dodgy research or promoting deliberately twisted research findings.
You want the crap to end, then have all science funding come from the public purse and get the private sector out of it, or legislate that every piece of research funded by private interests must headline the source of the funding and provide a rigorous breakdown of the various funding bodies/companies in an attached summary… and have all public funding levels guaranteed.
“It’s got nothing to do with how science is done.”
That depends on what you think science is. If you think about it in the abstract as set of tools to explore and explain the world, maybe. But even if you solve all the vested interest problems from commerce, there is still the issue that the Western scientific mindset creates pathways to follow and those aren’t always good.
Any piece of research is fallible. It’s the believe that the scientific method itself is somehow pure that is also giving us really bad results. Scientists are humans just like everyone else and have bias. Take someone out of the commercial framework and you still have bias, often unacknowledged. The scientific method doesn’t prevent that, and IMO encourages it by the very nature of its core ethos. It doesn’t help that too many pro-science people treat science like god.
None of that is unsolvable, but the very idea that science isn’t the problem is the one of the things that is stopping us from sovling that.
And yes, how science is funded is central as well. But government departments and governments can also have bias and agendas, ditto NGOs. I agree about full disclosure.
Ancel Keys, responsible for the fat hypothesis, was a university scientist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_hypothesis
One of his main studies was funded by the US Public Health Service,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Countries_Study
From what I remember, vested interests kicked in along the way, but those included the government and medical associations as much as drug companies and commerce. And it’s clear in hindsight that Keys was on a certain track from the start and that that led to the eventual fuck up.
Ancel Keys, responsible for the fat hypothesis, was a university scientist.
Yes. Same with the anti-salt fanatics. And all the public health academics peddling bullshit in New Zealand will be in the public sector as well. Industry funding of research is not the problem here.
Yep. Plus the GPs who are well aware of the problem but keep recommending and prescribing as if there weren’t one because of the direction from public health agencies and organisations.
I do think the pharmaceutical companies are a huge problem as well, with the whole bullshit that’s gone down around statins. Shifting the goalposts of what is unhealthy/healthy, and trying to use drugs with high serious side effect rates is largely their responsiblity. They’re the ones who will probably end up being sued (pretty sure they’ve lied about what they knew too).
Surely the truth can remain intact and be properly expounded and delivered to us from within massive hierarchies of money, power and prestige.
Ancel had a hypothesis. Nothing wrong with that. But Ancel did absolutely no science that I’m aware of to try to prove or disprove his hypothesis, and Ancel didn’t appeal to any scientific experiment or enquiry or, well…. anything, that might prove or disprove his hypothesis. He looked at some numbers for heart disease rates in a population and he looked at some numbers for fat intake in the same population. He inferred (I think that’s the right word) a causal link from the two sets of numbers. That’s not science. That’s not even in the ball park of science.
It’s, as Psycho Milt says below – “analysing (interpreting) survey results or other statistical sets…”
And in flies vested business interests to push, what they want to promote as, a scientific finding or conclusion. Bat shit and dog shit.
Good luck to you guys chasing this science around in circles. Ancient cultures already figured out what is required for good health and a long life.
No human can survive in a toxic, hostile environment for long.
Which ancient cultures had longer life expectancies than say the current American population, even with America’s current enormous dietary, substance abuse, environmental toxins and all kinds of other really unhealthy problems? What were the common causes of (non-violent) mortality in those ancient cultures? Do those problems still commonly cause death today?
mate, you think its such a superior lifestyle, you are free to go live like the typical American. Good luck.
But since you are over here, I think you already figured out something different.
Y’know, the same could be said of almost any culture… broad knowledges around unhealth and health.
But it’s the explanations or understandings, and how useful they are, that matter in the end. So, y’know, when science discovers that germs and not vapours are responsible for the likes of cholera, it’s not that the previous common sense explanation was wrong that mattered, so much as that a scientific understanding allowed for effective action to be taken against the disease…it was a more precise understanding.
I mean, London might have built sewers just to make the smell go away and so ended recurring cholera epidemics. But I doubt it.
And the Tibetan doctor who felt the pulse of a dying woman and gave her a fairly poetic and, to all intent purposes, accurate enough diagnosis or description of her heart failure and why it meant she’s going to die, was more useful on a number of levels than the western doctor who had diagnosed the same condition but rattled off a rather technical, and some may say sterile, prognosis for the woman to take on board.
And then again, without medical science, the Tibetan doctor would have been unable to operate had her condition been diagnosed sooner and been operable…
This whole black and white, or science and anti-science bullshit that flies around is just that….bullshit. Different knowledges have their place and uses, and none can be judged as blanket good or bad just by how close or far they seem to be from a scientific understanding.
That said, it would be pretty stupid to contend that vapours cause cholera…a field of knowledge exists that has given us an understanding so that we know vapours aren’t the cause.
And on the other hand (I don’t know if this is still the case) acupuncture works, but seems to be resisted by the western medical professional bodies on the grounds that no scientific explanation has been provided for its efficacy…or then again, maybe it’s just the same old story of a closed shop in operation 😉
Anyway. Fuck all cultists, say I.
Yes its very handy to know that bacterium cause cholera.
But most old cultures had long figured out that you don’t shit upstream of where you collect your drinking water.
As for the vapours causing cholera…IIRC only primitive western culture believed in that one.
I have no idea how many different knowledges there are or were around the disease. I’d be very surprised if only Europeans associated bad smell with illness though, and if only Europeans assigned a carrier capacity to smell.
Miasma huh, and then John Snow drew his picture.
And yet, for all its flaws, science still works better than some charismatic random just making shit up and getting a bunch of followers to believe it through a combination of placebo effect and confirmation bias.
After all, it is good science that ends up exposing the crap science or just outright bullshit and fantasy.
I have no idea who exactly you are referring to but you just dropped a gobsmackingly bad false binary into the conversation, one almost certainly based on ideology and prejudice not on evidence. I’m going to guess that you are referring to people people who practice and use non-Western medical health care (which is most people on the planet btw).
Scientists were critising Keys’ methodology right from the start. That’s nearly 70s years ago. And the public health message still isn’t changing, despite the problems now being very well known. I’ve been listening to non-medical people talking about the problems with the fat hypothesis long before Time magazine put it on their front page. Yes, they were relying on science, but the scientific community wasn’t doing anything about it (and were in fact ostracising and suppressing contrary evidence), so other communities of people did.
Basically your argument is that it’s ok to kill and maim people so long as afterwards you say oops, sorry, we were wrong, we’ve got a better idea now. Seventy fucking years. Then you have the gall to hate the alternative practitioners 🙄
People like Andre who are such huge backers of science as the ultimate way couldn’t possibly be victim to the very same biases and lazy thinking as he accuses others of.
As for the placebo effect.
It helps get a lot of people better. Even the orthopaedic surgeons are coming to that view.
Yep, the placebo effect is astonishingly effective. It’s made many a snake-oil salesman wealthy. Amazingly, it even works when the recipient knows it’s just a placebo, though not as well as when both the “practitioner” and recipient are fully emotionally invested in it. Modern medicine really should put a lot of effort into how to use it better.
My pain medicine lecturer said he considered it every practitioners ethical responsibility to maximise their use of the placebo effect. Safe, cheap, effective.
Like the big pharma corporations.
The difference being that some of big pharma’s products actually do work as claimed, better than a placebo. Not all of them get dodgily pushed onto the market on the basis of cherry-picked studies produced and reviewed by …ahh… financially compromised parties, just some of them. I figure that by the time a product has been on the market for 20 or 30 years, there’s been enough guinea pigs gone before me that the hokey products will have been weeded out.
IMO the brand new “block buster” drugs are the riskiest…
Scientists were calling bullshit on Keys’ assertions from the beginning, yes. And a whole shifting edifice of non-scientific business and government power pushed it along and…threatened the livelihoods or careers or reputations of any scientist who stood up to say “Hey! – Just a minute”
In a different area of science, it happened to Hanson when he piped up with a politically unpalatable truth about global warming.
And so most scientists get on within their field of research and do (probably) good science and keep their mouths shut. You blame individual scientists for not taking it in the neck? I’d call their reaction kind of normal human behaviour and nothing peculiar to the field of science or to scientists.
Besides which, scientists are usually involved in narrowly demarcated areas within fields of research, and their findings are gathered up and compiled by those that stand on the cusp between science and public policy. And they (those on the cusp) are under pressure to say politically palatable stuff.
That’s a systems failure, not a failure of science.
Sometimes I read these criticisms of science and scientists and it’s as though on the one hand they are being accused of playing at god, and then on the other they get condemned for being merely human. Can’t have it both ways.
This is a problem with how science is done and how it is used.
It’s a problem with treating social science research as though it were science. All of these anti-food studies involve people analysing survey results or other statistical sets for evidence to back an agenda, from Keys down to the present day. That’s not science.
Can you explain that some more?
Sorry, only just got back to this thread. The scientific method involves hypotheses that can be disproven, and a means of disproving them. That applies even to stuff where you can’t set up an experiment to disprove your hypothesis, eg Haldane’s reported response to the question of whether the theory of evolution was science because what could disprove it? “Rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian.”
The problem with all this diet-related epidemiology is that there’s no useful way to disprove anything. It all involves studies in which you can’t genuinely isolate the factor you’re interested in (because you can’t fully control what a large number of people eat for a long period), which means if any study refutes your pet theory you can find umpteen ways in which the study was “flawed” and those results shouldn’t be taken seriously. The whole field is a mess of correlation = causation errors and confirmation bias. There’s no hypothesis involved for which any disproof that’s found can’t be weaseled out of.
Worse, the agendas seem to come first. The last Listener had a piece on how to live longer in which Jennifer Rowan refers (without citation) to a study in which Type-2 diabetics who replaced red meat with various carbs supposedly improved their blood glucose levels, to which anyone with any idea of the chemistry involved can only think “What the fucketty-fuck-fuck?” What mechanism could even be proposed for that happening? These studies are referred to as though they were science, but any scientist would have alarm bells shrieking in their ears on reading a paper claiming that.
Edited: please note the diet-related epidemiology part. Epidemiology for infectious diseases does a great job.
yup
A huge amount of medical research relies on epidemiology. Likewise public health policy. Are you saying it’s all bogus? What constitutes proper research?
The problem with what Keys did wasn’t that he used data from people’s experiences, it was that he manipulated that data to suit his agenda.
OMG Scotland just won a Sevens round against South Africa!
New Zealand team really need to improve before Rio if they keep running fourth in every round.
Elijah Wood: ‘Hollywood in the grip of child abuse scandal similar to Jimmy Savile’
Hollywood is in the grip a child sexual abuse scandal similar to that of Jimmy Savile in Britain, Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood has claimed.
The 35-year-old former child actor said paedophiles had been protected by powerful figures in the movie business and that abuse was probably still taking place.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Wood said he had been protected from abuse as he was growing up, but that other child actors had been regularly “preyed upon” at parties by industry figures.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/22/hollywood-in-the-grip-of-child-abuse-scandal-similar-to-jimmy-sa/
It does look like more stories are emerging, first a trickle then a torrent perhaps. You only have to look at Roman Polanski and how feted he is and that’s out in the open so I’d imagine theres a lot more happening
Been a few allegations about Woody Allen as well
Yes susan sarandon was very up front about woody allen with her views….interesting times
And some still make movies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Salva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Singer#Personal_life
When Corey Feldman made the allegations I don’t think anyone would believe him but when Elijah Wood and Susan Sarandon start talking it might start going somewhere…
Also, if you’re interested: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3677412/
Have a look at Allen’s daughter’s account of him abusing her, and what happened to her when she spoke out. Her brother is a journalist and has written recently about the complicity in the press in not covering stories about famous people.
Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd) has described how US musicians are scared of speaking out about the Palestinian issue, believing that their careers will be destroyed if they do. The connection between Hollywood and other forms of mass media with the Zionist regime isn’t a secret, put pointing it out tends to attract the outrage of the sayanim.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/roger-waters-pink-floyd-israel-boycott-ban-palestine-a6884971.html
My advise to any young person contemplating a career in the creative industry: Don’t.
Unless you plan to work as a sell out for big fuck off corporate entities in PR, advertising, surveillance, etc.
Ironically for our society to survive we need more people creating in the not for profit arts and literature, not less.
this is a good read.
One does simply not forget having been homeless, and in the last few days i again (as so many times before) realised just how lucky i am.
At home, a nice fire, a happy partner, a happy pooch and warm meal waiting for us.
the worst night in my life was spend in an unfinished building in November in Germany. I was seventeen and i believed that i would freeze to death that night. One simply does not forget that shit.
And shame to a society that wants to pretend that it does not affect them, that it will not happen to them, and that those to whom it has happened deserve it cause they took a ‘bad decision’ or other bullshit that society wants to make up in order to feel better.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/304469/'i've-been-homeless-i-know-how-it-feels‘
Following up on my post here linking to the interview I and Vinny Eastwood had with William Black banker hunter extra=ordinaire and as people are waking up to the horror of having a Wall street banker for a prime Minister, I thought Id republish a series of articles written from 2007-2008 Called the Financial Tsunami by William Engdahl on how we got here.
Here is part 1:
Can the moderator please delete this version of my comment? I’ts missing a link
Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump – sordid connections of the global elite?
How much support is Donald Trump going to get from ordinary ‘anti-establishment’ Americans when this story spreads?
https://news.vice.com/article/the-salacious-ammo-even-donald-trump-wont-use-in-a-fight-against-hillary-clinton-bill-clinton
” Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein is a financier and political donor. He is also a convicted sex offender who is the subject of ongoing litigation from at least a dozen of his then-underage victims.
Flight logs show Bill Clinton traveled at least 10 times on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the “Lolita Express” by tabloids, and he is widely reported to have visited Little St. James, Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands. That’s where, according to attorneys for Epstein’s victims, many of the worst crimes against minors were committed by Epstein and friends who traveled there with him.
In a 2011 interview with her attorneys, Virginia Roberts, one of the teenagers preyed upon by Epstein, said he had told her he had “compromising” information on Bill Clinton and that the former president “owes me a favor.”
Yet despite Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein and Trump’s stated willingness to make Clinton’s sexual past an issue in the campaign, Trump will almost certainly avoid bringing up Epstein’s name. Because in addition to haunting Bill Clinton’s past, Epstein also haunts Trump’s.
* * *
Trump’s attorney Alan Garten told VICE News last week that the presidential candidate had “no relationship” with Epstein, and only knew him because Epstein was a member of Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach.
“A lot of people hung out there, including Jeffrey Epstein,” Garten said. “That is the only connection.”
But according to someone with intimate knowledge of the situation, Trump and Epstein appeared to have a somewhat stronger connection.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New Yorkmagazine in a 2002 profile of Epstein written three years before Epstein began to be investigated. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
….”
In my view – sickening.
Penny Bright
2016 Auckland Mayoral candidate.
…@ Penny…well I guess everyone who knew and thought Rolf Harris ( the Queen) and Jimmy Saville and Bill Crosby were good guys did not suspect their true nature and that they were sexual predators…this is how pedophiles and predators get away with these crimes for so long..they are experts at hiding what they do in secret
…so just because Trump came into contact with Epstein and thought he was a good guy does not mean Trump knew his real nature or crimes and endorsed them.. or partook in them!
Bill Clinton however does seem to have a history…
Following up on my post here linking to the interview I and Vinny Eastwood had with William Black banker hunter extra-ordinaire and as people are waking up to the horror of having a Wall street banker for a prime Minister, I thought Id republish a series of articles written from 2007-2008 Called the Financial Tsunami by William Engdahl on how we got here.
Here is part 1
Hi travellerev,
Do you know of any sources that documents these claims made by Vinnie Eastwood?
http://www.thevinnyeastwoodshow.com/vinny-mr-news-eastwoods-blog/john-keys-real-past-exposed-must-see-please-share-6mins
This is what a war on the weak looks like
http://www.gaynz.com/articles/publish/2/article_18297.php
Just one more reasons why civil disobedience is the only answer.
Anybody else seen this. 14000000 owed to the IRS is a lot of money.
http://www.leagle.com/decision/In%20CACO%2020090616012/IN%20RE%20MARRIAGE%20OF%20FAIRBANK
Munter McMutton maybe should check that the cheque cleared.
Not a good look having Tamati Coffey’s husband calling a journalist a nobody, even if it was an off-the-cuff remark. It shows what they really say about people behind closed doors. ‘Nobodies’ vote and make up the missing million. When are we going to get an effective, people-focused opposition? I think Andrew Little is doing a good job but he will need MPs and candidates to back him up. Not ‘somebodies’ who think the plebs are ‘nobodies’.
Yeah they knuckleheads.
While National play the on again off again tax cuts, seems Labour are doing similar with capital gains.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/80272365/tax-increases-on-the-table-for-labour-for-2017-campaign
https://youtu.be/YT5G3Cq_d2Q
Not sure what your point is. Labour are saying they’d like to change the tax structure in NZ to make it fairer, including looking at taxing property speculation. Seems like a good idea to me.
Not to long ago Little ruled out a capital gains tax, now it’s back on the table.
Areas of high demand and short supply (in which vendors set the asking price) will allow vendors to pass the burden on, adding to the cost of housing.
Does that still seem like a good idea to you?
The property market has to be sorted out anyway, shouldn’t stop Labour rearranging the tax system to be fairer.
Citation for Little ruling out a CGT?
“The property market has to be sorted out anyway”
Indeed. However, a capital gains tax is not the solution. Moreover, sorting out the property market will cease soaring capital gains. Eliminating the problem.
Don’t you think adding to the cost of housing should make Labour stop and think?
Taxing capital gains is about making taxation fairer. Why should some forms of income be taxed and not others?
“Don’t you think adding to the cost of housing should make Labour stop and think?”
I’m pretty sure that Labour think all the time and that like other parties weigh up the pros and cons. Looking at one aspect of a tax policy in isolation is not useful IMO, nor is looking at that one aspect out of context. I’m guessing this is why they’re forming a Tax Working Group, to look at the whole thing.
btw,
Labour leader Andrew Little would not rule out a comeback for the policies in the future, but said if it got into Government in 2017 it would not introduce them without campaigning on them again in a future election.
Nov 2015
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11541749
The working group would look again at a capital gains tax (CGT), dropped from Labour’s platform when Andrew Little took over as leader in late 2014, and a land tax.
A capital gains tax would not be part of the party’s platform in 2017, but it was not off the table for the working group.
May 2016
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/80272365/tax-increases-on-the-table-for-labour-for-2017-campaign
That looks consistent to me. Perhaps we should leave this conversation until the 2020 election.
“Why should some forms of income be taxed and not others?”
For starters, if the burden is going to be passed on, those attaining the income won’t bare the tax burden. Is that fair?
Moreover, the goal of sorting out the housing sector (which would take one term according to Little) is to eliminate soaring gains, therefore, with that achieved there would be little if any income to tax.
In a stable housing market, properties that aren’t maintained can actually decrease in value, resulting in losses.
Of course it shouldn’t be looked at in isolation. However, one can’t afford to overlook the risk of adding to the cost of housing when one’s goal is to improve the cost of housing, thus the need for a rethink.
In 2015 (as your first link highlights) Little said if Labour got into Government in 2017 it would not introduce them without campaigning on them again in a future election.
However, while it has been dumped and no longer on the party’s campaign platform, there was no longer any mention of them not introducing them later in that term when the working group reports back – see my link above (which is also your second link).
I’m guessing the use of a tax working group is similar to the ploy Lockwood Smith highlighted a number of years back – see link below.
http://www.newshub.co.nz/nznews/lockwood-smith-secretly-recorded-suggests-national-has-hidden-agenda-2008080518#axzz49SO2cIZ7
Labour don’t seem to want to let this one go.
Militrary helicopter, snow mobiles, sourced to rescue trapped snowed in drivers caught over night in Otago. Not so much S.Auckland overnight car sleepers.
Hooten worried, they might get pregnant, but not worried enough to call on govt to get them into housing, as he scoffed that one car refugee got pregnant while living out of their car. I mean, like they must have been in a benifit, and givt intervention in private citizenship was a sicial impertive for his social fascist.
yes Hooton was particularly strident on RNZ…and particularly sickening really…his making light of the housing crisis for New Zealanders….and he got away with it….you were left with the impression that there was NO REAL PROBLEM!…but there is a PROBLEM…and there is a CRISIS!…for Gods sake can’t nine-to-noon get on an effective counter to Hooton’s spin !!!???
However this interview with Danielle Bergin by Kathryn Ryan was MUCH better than Hooton’s spin…
“Once homeless herself, Danielle Bergin talks about, Island child, the housing trust she set up in East Auckland, and why more and more people are forced to sleep rough. She traces the start of the current housing crisis back to when WINZ took over housing assessments from HNZC.”
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201801690/from-sleeping-rough-to-providing-shelter
Instead of limiting foriegn and new investor kiwis to building new homes, Key pushed the inevitable housing bubble burst out a decade, with the consequence that the bottom of the housing need had no place to live.
This is all on Key, but we’ll never hear it since media is run by those locked into bubble economics.
Some good insight here
https://youtu.be/szIGZVrSAyc
Ha, watched this last night!!!
What was shocking was how undemocratic the EU officials were, and how little power the elected EU finance ministers had in the face of the unelected Troika bureaucrats.
It was a good and insightful discussion.
‘Beware what you wish for: Russia is ready for war’
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/344002-beware-russia-war-us/
…”Russia does not want – and does not need – war. Yet the “Russian aggression” narrative never stops. Thus it’s always enlightening to come back to this RAND corporation study, which examined what would happen if a war actually took place. RAND reached an “unambiguous” conclusion after a series of war games in 2015-2015; Russia could overrun NATO in a mere 60 hours – if not less – if it ever amounted to a hot war on European soil. …
…”The Threat Narrative rules that Russia has to meekly accept being surrounded by NATO. Russia is not allowed any response; in any case, any response will be branded as “Russian aggression”. If Russia defends itself, this will be “exposed” as an unacceptable provocation. And may even furnish the pretext for a pre-emptive attack by NATO against Russia…
Worth remembering that “NATO” is at least 75% US forces.
yep…meantime
‘Architects of disastrous Iraq War still at large’
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/343174-time-conversation-iraq-war/
…Everything we were told by the neocons in the lead-up to war was false. To quote the title of a book by the antiwar British MP Peter Kilfoyle, there were Lies, Damned Lies and Iraq.
‘Saddam has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes’.
Horse manure.
‘Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program is active, detailed and growing’.
Hogwash.
‘Saddam Hussein… has the wherewithal to develop smallpox’.
Garbage.
‘We know that Iraq and al-Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade…We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases’.
Baloney.
‘The threat is very real and it is a threat not just to America or the international community but to Britain.’ Has the trash been collected yet?…
Worth remembering the shitty wee deal anticipating the territorial and political division of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into spheres of influence.
It was the ordinary imperial/colonial behaviour of the day. From dividing up China to dividing up the middle east to dividing up europe.
A ratepayer-backed insurer is seeking permission to hike directors’ fees by 15 per cent, even though it is unable to write new business.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/80292689/cash-strapped-council-insurer-seeks-15-per-cent-director-fee-hike
Thoughts?
Picking up from a comment on the Guest post yesterday
My only issue with inflated numbers on this site is figuring out what causes them so that I can make them drop back to reality. I’m interested in measuring what is actually happening rather than doing a Cameron and inflating numbers.
That is why we have 4 systems counting the numbers. Google analytics, statcounter, wordpress stats, and the log system. Because they operate in different three ways, I usually manage to spot the one(s) that are misbehaving.
For instance, a month ago, I was bemoaning (to the authors) that we seemed to be having inflated google analytics figures. I eventually tracked that down to a double hit in the mobile stats with two seperate plugins requesting the google analytics on the same account – one using async and the other using sync. Found and fixed about two weeks later. It was obviously an error simply because none of the other count mechanisms showed the same bump.
Back in 2012 we had some issues with facebook making a ‘pageview’ every time that someone scrolled past our page. That was showed up in both analytics and statcounter, to a lesser extent in wordpress stats. However it only showed up in awstats on the logs as an aberration with aborted page reads. It took weeks to find and a few months to fully work around. But I eventually worked around it by making statcounter only work on the footer. After a few months facebook obviously fixed whatever problem they had.
Then there are the external changes – especially with getting the growth in persistent visitors. Late last year and early part of this year, we had a minor drop in the growth of google search traffic as they did some significiant changes in their search algorithms. It hit some sites pretty hard – probably why Whaleoil dropped their public stats earlier this year.
I was having a look at this post last month (repetitive as it was to read)
http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/march-2016-google-algorithm-update/
I particularly liked the
Which essentially describes the problem that Whaleoil has most likely to have suffered (ie why they don’t show their figures in public any more). The last few times I have been over there, I’ve really noticed just how crappy the massive ad footprint makes it as a site to discuss issues on. I suspect that it causes pretty major bounce rate because people can’t find most of the post and certainly would have to look to find the comments.
I blame it on Cameron’s chronic inability to do anything in a moral fashion (eg dirty politics, trying to buy a criminal hack on my computers), stay out of court (eg his ignorant and eventually failed attempt to appeal to the Court of Appeal) and his need to make both a living and pay his court costs off the site. He just seems to keep stupidly hoiking ads on to the site and filling the site out with basically rubbish posts without considering what it makes him look like to a google SEO long term. The site has probably been relegated to trash level with recent google search changes.
Just to give you an idea how important google is for our readership growth. Today we have had about 17,500 page views according to wordpress. Incidentally it was a bit less than 17k according to statcounter and analytics. I’m not even going to mention the multiple thousands difference between sessions / visits / etc or each engines supposedly similar measurements of how long people stay on site.
Of those ~17k, ~2800 came from referrals.
About 1600 came from google search in various forms. ~800 from facebook (more than half being the tail end of one widely spread post). 135 from twitter (which is one of the reasons I generally ignore it).
260 from all others. Search sites (38 from yahoo and 14 from bing), blog sites (bowalley at 47 and no minister at 31), news websites (25 from scoop), and nothing much else.
But more importantly, we get almost all new users who stay in via google search. Of the new readers who visit more than 10 times over the following 30 days after first entering the site, usually about 80% come in from google. About 35% start by googling “The Standard” or some variation indicating word of mouth, about 40% from a query about non-current topics, and the remainder from topical topics – which used to be the mainstay. Obviously google search is pushing further back into the excellent posts here in the past from the rate that posts older than 6 months old have been rising. Gotta love google analytics 🙂
Facebook starts us with a lower number of new repeat users. And twitter just gives us people who already know of us (one of the other reasons I tend to ignore it – it appears to be quite self-referential).
Moreover most of the sustained abnormal boost in readers from searches in recent months that has come from NZ. I think that google localised their search results a bit further and made them a lot better targeted. Certainly I’ve noticed much reduced bounce rates both here and from some kiwi destination points offshore. We’re generally getting a lot less bounce traffic from offshore – including those audiences with massive bounce rates from the US overnight. We’re a definitively kiwi site with about 90% of our page view traffic coming from a small country with 4.4 million people. Random searches by humans for loose associations from the US shouldn’t be sent to us.
Anyway, the site is looking pretty healthy for the month. We should do as well as we did last year (and May was the top for 2015 at 537k pageviews) and far higher than May 2013 at the same point in the political cycle – 364k pageviews.
Even more interesting to me is the breaking of long standing periodic patterns. The last couple of years have shown we don’t drop much in winter any more which used to be a depressing yearly trait. I think we have also started to lose that summer vacation drop off as well.
But there are some pretty clear effects in the ‘day’. Since 2013, the times that the site starts and finishes are now quite different. We now start getting traffic at 6am and it goes through pretty solidly to 11pm with a lunch time spike. A far cry from the days when it was largely being read during work hours from 9am to 6pm.
Part of that I think is due to the amount of mobile traffic we now get. That lunchtime spike is has a large chunk of cell phones – about 50%. Probably why google now penalises sites without a good mobile version. Urrgh – for example the micro print of The Daily Blog in its desktop splendour or kiwiblog when I forget to manually insert m. instead of www. There is a reason why some sites say “mobile friendly” when you read google results on a mobile & kiwiblog doesn’t really deserve it.
Anyway, I’m starting to think about how I get the system to not fall over during the usual election month tripling of the site traffic next year and the usual headache of planning to get enough increase in data and speed to withstand both the election year and the subsequent 40-50% boost in annual traffic.
All done for total operational cost of about $250 per month largely from those who do a small voluntary, seldom mentioned, and completely unforced donations over a year (hint: you can donate here).
Of course a lot of skilled unpaid volunteer time, and the deliberately uncosted donation of part of my hotted up and over specced home computers (PBTech love me) helps.