You can stick people into two groups. Those who comply and those don't. Those who comply do so for their own safety and the safety of others. They do so for the greater collective good. Those who don't don't comply feel they themselves are the most important unit and will break any rule which suggests otherwise. These people are from the political right.
Because SARS – CoV 2 favours the non-complying group I comply. I wear a mask, wash my hands, physically distance and avoid crowds, try to stay as healthy as I can – easier for some than others.
"This metasynthesis provides among the most compelling evidence to date that personality predicts overall health and well-being."
In the past weeks own south people seem pretty relaxed about L2, basically not really doing much. More Q codes visible, some manual lists to sign, signs telling people to keep their distance, but while people are aware I guess, seems like it's a bit lax. Presumably because most people think there's no covid here. I assume people are allowed to leave Auckland now so hopefully that perception will change.
Anyone know why 900 state houses in Porirua were handed over to iwi, even though the government promised to put an end to privatisation of state housing?
Probably part of a Treaty of Waitangi settlement and I would not call handing these houses over to Iwi to administer privatisation. Meeting of a treaty settlement is paramount I would have thought. What owners do then is the same as any other owner whose land has been taken. Some handing back is subject to restrictions but I am not sure if this part of the Treaty claim was.
I am looking forward to the time when Paraparaumu airport, taken for Defence purposes around the time of WW2 and the Iwi never compensated, is handed back.
Any shareholder owned organisation that's accumulating and reinvesting virtually all returns from invested settlement assets is by definition a private business.
Iwi have businesses (like the government), but they're not businesses. The Pākehā system forced Māori to adopt Iwi legal structures that suited Pākehā, but Iwi themselves predate any modern concept of business by a long time.
And does or should this overly technical approach by Joe90 override the fact that these settlements endeavour to bring the Iwi into a situation that they should have been had the Treaty of Waitangi breach not occurred.
I think not.
As Weka has said these are our Treaty partners, they have been badly treated in cases where Maori land has been taken for Public Works such as housing, roads, schools etc etc. and most have chosen a range or mix of former crown assets and $$$ to settle their grievances. It is mean-spirited not to allow Iwi to conduct their own commercial operations. Some of these ops have meant that Iwi does the managing eg Ngai Tahu and others the managing has been done by the former Govt dept.
If land owned by the Crown is not going to be in the mix, and Iwi want productive land as part of their settlement then the Treaty Settlements will stall big time.
I think to define the use of assets returned under Treaty settlements as private business is simplistic. To trammel the return of assets to Iwi with strictures on future use risks setting up yet another ToW claim. There are crown assets such as particular reserves that are not available for sale that are passed over to Iwi control.
Possibly it is a lack of knowledge about what the meaning of being a treaty partner is that has led to these mystifying picky comments
I would suggest that readers look at some of these settlements
Some of us who were around in Govt Depts when the full force of the Rogernomics was upon us will recall that it was only the intervention of our Treaty partner, by and through the NZ Maori Council taking Court cases, that some of the worst land related affects such as the proposal to sell the land under the trees as well as the forest crops were tossed out. Ordinary NZers had no ability to seek any stop to the tidal wave of Rogernomics that was going on. There were several cases other than the Forestry one where they over turned what had been proposed. Our Treaty partners have stepped up many times over the years since 1840, and it behoves us to treat their claims in a generous and fair-spirited way.
"The Speaker has referred independent MP Jami-Lee Ross to the Privileges Committee for misusing edited parliamentary TV video for political ads.
"Trevor Mallard ordered the anti-vaccination video – posted by Ross's party and that of Billy Te Kahika's NZ Public Party – to be removed from social media, but that's been met with a blunt refusal.
Parliamentary footage of an exchange between government minister Megan Woods and National's Erica Stanford was edited for use in the political ad, posted on several sites."
Yeah I wonder why we can't force the main internet players twitter facebook etc to have a "local office" so that when something like this comes along they can easily be contacted so that at the very least it can be labeled "false" or "edited"or taken down fast rather than going through some offshore process.
Yes, it is certainly time for government to declare that being connected is a right and then ensure that the means exist for people to fulfil that right without being ripped off by private enterprise.
In other words, time to re-nationalise telecommunications and to produce capable phones and PCs here in NZ also by a government owned production process.
This is a very real problem with both government and private sector. There are whole communities that are effectively excluded.
I've stayed offline because I can't be bothered with the being hacked bit plus I have the ability to complain loudly – which not everyone has.
The government needs to sort its act out for starters. Any government fee or charge should be capable of being paid on the ground with no extra charge or fee payable – that is far from the current situation. Nor should costs and access be pushed sideways onto community organisations libraries funded by ratepayers etc.
There is also the major secondary discrimination- there are government jobs that cannot be applied for unless a real me id is used. Citizen tracking by default.
edit
There is a major and obvious question here, so obvious that nobody has thought to ask it. Did the citizens get asked if they agreed to have government retreat from face to face dealings, to only communicating with citizens through machines? Was it right that such swingeing changes were enabled by a handful of anarchists? Were taxpayers advised that lower taxes meant limited human input into dealing with citizens?
Were people enabled to discuss the result of withdrawal of government from the ordering of people's lives and that elections and ministers in government were becoming less and less true agents of the people? Perhaps if there wasn't so much hype about how marvellous it is, and truthfulness instead of truthiness about this bloody technological takeover and its constant expansion with obsolescence designed in, people might see things as they are, not rosy at all.
Addlepated* is a great word for the quandary we are in. Google quickly finds all I need to know to describe the poor state we and our state are in. I don't think that is quixotic (extremely idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.)
* In Middle English an adel eye was a putrid egg. The stench of such an egg apparently affected the minds of some witty thinkers, who hatched a comparison between the diminished, unsound quality of an adel eye (or addle egg as it came to be called in modern English) and an empty, confused head—or pate. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/addlepated
I want government back – with real people, and all channels open to all citizens., on-line plus traditional. I think that we need to reorganise Parliament though, and all people who work for government have to have a skill or profession that they have worked at adequately for five years before applying for government jobs.
Corin Dan this morning commenting (to Phil Goff I think) that the poor messaging that asked South and West Aucklanders to get tested "muddied the waters" on the country's response and then goes on to ask questions that invite others to muddy the messaging even further.
The PM on TVNZ this morning sensibly sidestepped a question about opening the borders because of "business". If she had addressed it, anything she said would be used to muddy the country's response at the moment. The best response for the economy is a health response. What is the sharemarket doing at the moment? Is the MSM banging on about it?
The thing about Distributed Denial of Service Attacks is they are often (always?) done by people activating Bot Nets.
"
A botnet is a logical collection of Internet-connected devices such as computers, smartphones or IoT devices whose security have been breached and control ceded to a third party. Each compromised device, known as a "bot", is created when a device is penetrated by software from a malware (malicious software) distribution. The controller of a botnet is able to direct the activities of these compromised computers through communication channels formed by standards-based network protocols, such as IRC and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).[3][4]
Those who are not complying with wearing a mask the reasons why not would need to be known. Wise to wear a mask and not a team player if not wearing a mask.
I have a goal of making 500 cloth masks and donating them where needed. I will even cut extra elastic for ear loops and safety pin it on the mask as the elastic may wear due to a hot soapy hand wash.
I feel that a new cluster could only be a day away anywhere.
Another Auckland CCO failure. Not Watercare, this time it's POAL. Not content with shitting on Aucklanders by building a bloody great carpark in the middle of the harbour, Ports of Auckland is an exploitative employer as well.
The next government needs to take a serious look at the corporate model of governance for public utilities. The profit motive does not deliver for the people, only a bunch of MBA executives whose only skills are "cost" cutting and bullshit.
No. Just that massive port and truckie testing drive a few weeks ago. And the fact the Auckland outbreak is still sourced to Americold.
They still came up with nothing but a possible theory: Foreign crew member > stevedore > truck-driver > Americold worker. These people generally work (and have smoke breaks) in close contact so I wonder if there was a bit of mixing going on which shouldn't have happened.
I've had thoughts often re Americool as their Melbourne branch apparently had 2 cases a fortnight earlier – I know they dismiss it but seeing how some things are packed and that it can withstand cold surely is not just coincidence.
Around August 15th through 18th there was a big fluffy of articles about Americold Melbourne covid cases getting genome sequenced.
I have yet to find anything explicitly saying the genomes were different to the B.1.1.1 strain in the outbreak here, but I think it's safe to assume that if the Melbourne cases were also B.1.1.1 we would have heard all about it.
Over the last thirty odd years we've seen that the profit motive always brings about the worst possible response and does not meet the needs of the community.
Tony Gibson again, "Their health is our number one concern." Sure it is, mate. Sure it is. This guy was an arsehole all through the strikes, and he's still an arsehole.
The Pentagon is forming a new task force to investigate UFOs that have been observed by US military aircraft, according to two defense officials. Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist will help oversee the task force
Members of Congress and Pentagon officials have long expressed concerns about the appearance of the unidentified aircraft that have flown over US military bases, posing a risk to military jets. There is no consensus on their origin… The Senate Intelligence Committee voted in June to have the Pentagon and intelligence community provide a public analysis of the encounters, following the official Pentagon release of three short videos showing US aircraft encountering these phenomena.
You can understand how distressing it must be when your top guns get left flat-footed all the time. Hard to be macho. The hormones just stop flowing.
If US intelligence would only learn from random website entrepreneurs posing as tech expert theoreticians, instead of believing what defense personnel & hotshot pilots saw, everyone would live happily ever after… 👽
Hotshot pilots with a penchant for trolling those who want to believe.
Said Fravor, “We used to fly night vision goggles… [and] you can see a campfire from like fifty miles away. So we would go out at night flying around on goggles. You’d see a campfire and go, ‘Oh. UFO time’”. “[Y]ou get the airplane going around 600 knots and then you pull the power back to idle so you can’t hear it. Then you get zinging toward the fire and you turn the lights all down because we’re in a restricted area so you can do that. There’s lights on it you can only see if you’re on vision goggles. So the other airplanes can see us, but no one else can see us. Then you go zinging at it and right when you get to the campfire you pull the airplane into vertical and stroke the afterburners, let ’em light off, you count to three and then you just go away. Instant UFO reporting.”
Obviously pranksters get in on such acts. I recall some faking crop circles in the early '90s & impressing the media – but not the experts, who would point out the physical differences between the fakes and the real thing. So that's a red herring. Military authorities aren't ever likely to be fooled by time-wasters.
"…the real thing." Oh Dennis, isn't your inner skeptic twitching, just a little?
"Although obscure natural causes or alien origins of crop circles are suggested by fringe theorists, there is no scientific evidence for such explanations, and all crop circles are consistent with human causation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle
I admire the creativity/artistry of some hoaxers, provided it’s all in good fun.
all crop circles are consistent with human causation
Seems like total crap to me. Written by the type of sceptic who is possessed by an inner ideological agenda. You know, the kind of person who is too lazy to check out evidence.
Not that I have. I just looked at the photos & read parts of the books at the time. So I arrived at an opinion based on pattern recognition. Neither true believer nor retard sceptic. Binary folk are ever so reluctant to categorise stuff into the maybe category, eh? That's due to being unable to conceive a third alternative.
Like me, a physics graduate, so he ought to have known better! We may be alone, we may not, so that third option exists until you collapse the wave function (via experimental detection).
Journalists who enquired of Clarke whether he was gay were told, "No, merely mildly cheerful."
However, Michael Moorcock wrote: "Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s, I'd go out drinking with his boyfriend."
"There are many theories about what creates crop circles, including aliens, mysterious vortices, time travelers and wind patterns, but they all lack one important element: good evidence. The only known cause of crop circles is humans. Perhaps one day a mysterious, unknown source will be discovered for crop circles, but until then perhaps they are best thought of as collective public art."
Radford, B. "Crop Circles Explained". LiveScience. [2017]
"Seems like total crap to me."
Like Radford, I’m all for keeping an open mind, but with past and present crop circle evidence pointing in one direction, we’ll have to agree to disagree re “total crap“.
Anticipating publication of another theory sometime soon: those crop circles in English fields that have been reported on & off since the Middle Ages (according to one researcher years ago) must have been done by wallabies travelling from Oz on ufos.
What bothered me was the perfect symmetry exhibited by the wheat stalks. Perhaps wallabies are capable of levitation? That would explain the lack of footprints within the circles. 🤩
Wallabies are not capable of levitation AFAIK but some birds are and then there is the flying squirrel, of course, which happened to be native to Europe and is nocturnal.
I'd bet there's some really interesting aerodynamics going on. Maybe something like each loop of the undulations generating lift off a specific part of a vortex shed from the loop ahead.
I hope you didn't think I included your good self in that categorisation! There's an immense difference between a sceptic with an open mind and one without, and, operating within the former category, I tend to see you as more likely to be in that camp.
Those wielding scepticism as an ideology are sufficiently robotic that you can read them from phraseology used, denial of existence of evidence, aversion to even looking for it, etc.
“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
– Richard Feynman
Terence McKenna says it's the Japanese crop-circle tourists who make them; they're always there as soon as the circles appear (and before, nearby, waiting…) and act completely innocent when challenged. Cameras are the perfect excuse for being there and a lack of English language the perfect foil to interrogation. The precision of some of those crop-circles certainly points toward a culture of accuracy, elegance and attention to detail in the creators: the Japanese fit the bill!
I wasn't aware that I was claiming anything, John, but I think upon re-reading what I wrote that I can see why you thought so.
So to clarify: my perception of the difference between the fakes and the real thing is derived from the researchers plus the photos in their books, but I probably was too loose in the phrasing.
This is merely my personal impression we're talking about. Nothing to do with objective fact. And I don't rely on any single source – I scan the field & get an overview, a technique I acquired long ago. So my opinion re authenticity is not an assertion in the way you read it. I'm sorry to have used real thing in a way that may have implied whatever, when I just meant `no evidence of fakery apparent'. To differentiate those from the obvious fakes!
You are assuming that pentagon (especially air arm) officials see no advantage in a perceived techological "gap" between the USA and an unidentified neer-peer adversary.
After all, 60-70 years ago the "missile gap" resulted in budget cuts, right? But that had claims that were demonstrably false. These videos, released without comment, make no claims other than the subjects weren't conclusively and individually identified. Like, whose balloon was it? Obviously it's unidentified.
No, I agree that budget capture is a thing, and the US military hierarchy are masters of the art. It would be fair enough to then classify the senators as suckers – unless you'd rather deem them scamsters (ie operating as agents for the military), but that is probably more feasible for those with military corporations in their home state.
The only thing I deem is that there is nothing particularly novel or interesting about those films – the release of the footage and lack of classification of the objects is not proof of aliens, nor is it proof of a funding conspiracy, nor is it proof of haoxers, nor does it indicate that the pentagon merely declassifies shit without comment because it wants to keep the tinfoil hats at arm's length.
The general indications of the videos and the debunkers and the alternative theories is that the explanations for the content of those videos are incredibly banal. Why would I care to know or speculate beyond that, other than to respond to some obscurantist stupidity posted here?
If I were in their shoes (US military decision-makers & their pr hire) I'd reassure the public by making obscure videos available too! Heaven forbid they'd ever release the good ones!!
Anyway the point of the posting is the oscillating tendency of the US military & govt to create official UFO investigation orgs, wind them up some years or decades later, then do it all again in a different form…
Anyway the point of the posting is the oscillating tendency of the US military & govt to create official UFO investigation orgs, wind them up some years or decades later, then do it all again in a different form…
Really?
The new one seemed to be the subject of comment 10, but the point still seems to be elusive. Could you please express your point more clearly?
The news reported by CNN alerts us to a pattern of behaviour by the US military & govt: create official UFO investigations, terminate them a considerable time later, then recreate them in a somewhat different form some years after that.
Bureaucracy is like gardening – the well-tended plots have things come and go and regrow and pruning is done, preferably for the health of the plant rather than convoluted topiary.
Bureaucracy is like a tropical jungle, full of poisonous animals and plants (e.g. Triffid deskus), and easy to get lost in and die, never to be seen again.
Back when children did domestic chores every day, I received training from the patriarch & become proficient at pushing a mechanical mower around the lawn. Come the 1960s, we moved up-market & became fossil-fuel dependent local neighbourhood noise polluters.
Last year I told my neighbour I intend to eliminate my front lawn & gazed curiously at him to see how much he would freak out, but he rolled with it. Sam is cool. Electrical inspector & staunch Labour voter, but we shoot the breeze with political conversations often with no arguments. Maori but looks Greek patrician, talks more like a pakeha, and his property is immaculate!
So I get your point. Encultured control of nature is embedded as much as bureaucracy. I'm rewilding – but slowly enough to not spook the locals. My frogs have been in winter hibernation but have seen a couple medium-sized, almost black, moving now & then but not much. Wonder why they never croak (even in spring & summer)…
A scout troup were on a camp over the hills to the East of Paraparaumu at Camp Waghorn I think. One of the tasks was to build some hot air balloons out of tissue paper and fuelled with methylated spirits on cotton wool. Launched at night they drifted westwards over Paraparaumu. They were sighted by excited townsfolk. Police notified. Reports of figures looking out of portholes and craft as big as two football fields. Certain eyewitnesses. Until the lads went home on Sunday PM. Cover blown.
You have reminded me of the international ballyhoo over the UFO's seen in the night sky seaward of Kaikoura in 1978. Every now and them TV3 comes up with a re-run of the story, totally ignoring the explanation for the phenomena issued at the time by the Meteorological Service.
There was an intense anticyclone over the South Island and an inversion layer at about 2000 feet. On the surface and just beyond the 12 mile limit there was a Japanese fishing fleet. The lights from the fishing fleet was being reflected back at the point of the inversion layer as bright lights seemingly bobbing around the night sky. Sea must have been quite choppy.
What I can't figure out is why we sceptics never see the paranormal. The Kaikoura episode with Blenheim pilot Bill Startup brings back Bruce Cathie's leylines and Harmonic 33, and a local woman Moreland who saw a UFO there in 1959.
Seriously, I can identify with the startling sight of something inexplicable but evident to the eyes. Earlier this year looking at the night sky and then seeing travelling lights in a straight line was freaky, until I looked up online what was happening with a series of satellites……….
The individual experiences are often explained via optical illusions. The mass simultaneous sightings are usually ignored by sceptics due to being too hard to dismiss via this method.
I recall reading once about one such in Taupo, that happened in the 1950s. Think it made the newspaper, but what impressed me was the sheer number of eyewitness accounts that all told the same story.
Re Cathie's theory, I couldn't get my head into it, so I share the sceptic's view. Ley lines in Britain I'm agnostic about. Since they have a fair bit of physical correlates from the megalithic era, not just a personal fantasy of some nutcase.
except 10.2.1 was literally a mass sighting addressed by sceptics. They tend to be hyper-examined these days – e.g. the "missile" off California was examined exhaustively.
What "mass sightings" of ufos have been ignored? A taupo one in the 1950s deserves to be added to wikipedia.
On a related note, a while back I saw a joke chart that purported to show the incidence of miracles – consistantly high until photography was invented, then low and flat until photoshop was invented when it spiked up again. Same sort of thing applies to UFOs, I reckon.
Funnily, this sceptic has never been even part of a mass sighting. I did, though, find out as a young student on a ouija board that I could very subtly spell out all sorts of messages. Nearly cost me a relationship when my girlfriend finally sussed what I was doing………
Something similar happened to me in my first year at university: a group of us tried the ouija method & got mixed results. Some gibberish yet some words spelt out. After we gave up my old school friend & current flatmate admitted to the group that he had been steering the pointer. Taught me that the spirit of (scientific) enquiry is always vulnerable to being trumped by jokers…
Extremely upsetting to hear parent being part of the problem and spouting some very unpleasant Pasifika remarks with regards to the outbreak, and by extension, immigration in general. No amount of calling out and calmly challenging her thought process made any difference.
I'm more confused given she's a refugee herself, and is also disgusted by her father's anti-semetic views during the war when his Jewish neighbours were literally being carted off for extermination. It seems her own life experiences haven't produced tolerance. The only thing we seem to agree on is maybe it stems from her growing up in Australia at a time when racism/white superiority was actively encouraged and perhaps a bit of indoctrination that stuck.
Is there any point in continuing to reason with her?
build bridges and keep lines of communication open over time (if you can). Change doesn't have to happen in one conversation or debate, it can happen gradually, building on each previous discussion.
My experience in conservative communities was that keeping the relationship sound was just as important as any reasoning.
When worldometers is updated Australia's total deaths from Covid will be 652. The 'first wave' stopped at 102 so the July outbreak there has cost 550 lives so far.
…… the Victorian health department said Monday's deaths included 22 people who died in the weeks leading up to August 27 and were only reported to DHHS by aged-care facilities on Sunday.
Save those cute little bats, and their home territory for hundreds, thousands? of years, that nasty great humans are just preparing to rip away and colonise with their own kind.
That is such a familiar theme in our country – here in NZ where we like to say we are a developed, highly civilised country. But a query – what did we develop from and what, to? Have we been fooling ourselves – is there someone who can give a studied, balanced opinion out there (not Mike Hosking or others with their feet in the troughs out there overflowing with goodies that I've heard of)?
Why bother to save anything (sarc). Think how rich we could be by allowing what is unique to NZ die out and we are left with sparrows, Tahr, Wallibies, rabbits, rats etc
I'm not into saving anything. Habitat restoration and pest free islands then leave the mainland (plus Rakiura and Te Waipounamu) to mother nature. Love chilling on a river bank smothered with blossoming broom, watching the hares skittering, quail coveying, trout dimpling.
No maybe, ifs or buts. SkyCity is a private business with restrictions and not a public place as such. There are also CCTVs operating in prisons, which is an equally flawed comparison for this discussion. You are diverting, and this may be accidental, but now I have pointed it out to you, you have a conscious choice.
Ignore my point about SkyCity using facial recognition.
I just don't have an issue with the police using facial recognition if it catches bad people.
Yes, there may one or two cases of people using it for bad things, but the same could be argued for police having access to vehicle owners personal details from number plates at the push of a few buttons.
Matching vehicle ownership for licensing purposes, for example, is not quite the same as biometrics identification (and authorisation?), is it? A better comparison would be the use of fingerprints or the publication of photos taken in public.
It really helps to very clearly articulate the issue before launching (into) debate.
Well I have a lot of issues with nasty little authoritarian tribes like the cops running around and spying on people going about their normal daily business. What about the taking of photos at demo's – then later using these to discriminate against certain classes of people. Where are these cameras going to be and will there be a bias towards younger and lower skilled people being photographed.
As to catching bad people – they would need to CCTV far more executive workplaces , clubs , the roads to coromandel baches and exclusive restaurants to catch the real crooks who prey on society.
Then the traffic enforcement side – the costs of licences, rego's etc has soared compared to minimal wages and benefits. Little wonder that otherwise law abiding citizens slither around in not so legal cars – the costs are beyond them. If the legalise dope goes through then there is whole areas of enforcement that will no longer be needed. Looks like cops are going for some job protection there.
From my limited understanding of dealing with them. And it is pretty limited apart from someone trying to sell it,
It is anywhere where the cameras are up to spec' to be good enough to pick up the details needed visually by the software, used on the servers which controls the network of cameras.
Ie your average old camera from the 90s is probably a bit screwed, but new ones on the main black spots like Courtney Place where there are drunken fights or same sort of places in Auckland would probably be ok.
And obviously the thing looking at the cameras needs access two the visual in real time or it is a bit pointless, so public ones in this case.
Thank you for confirming my point. and no we do not need the attempted distraction of the type of camera.
Clearly your idea of a camera set up to catch a "bad guy" boils down to a public camera for low level street drug deals, some public drunkenness and a forgot to rego the car moment.
How about a few cameras that catch high income males in cafes assaulting female wait staff, issuing warrants to search journalists homes and insinuating to third parties that said journalists are being looked at for criminal reasons all of which turned out to be blatantly untrue. Street camera's won't catch the real crooks of society they will just be used to intimidate lawful people going about their lawful business.
What if the cops become bad people and set out to catch good people. It is important to try and care about surveillance, loss of personal freedom if you are commenting on a leftish blog Chris T.
If we are going to do hypotheticals I can come up with doozys
What if [name deleted; against TS policy] got away that day and the to catch him was through facial CCTV facial recognition?
Look I agree there will be bad cops like in every other profession, and a couple may even take advantage of it, that is a security issue for the police, but they already have way more access to private info' through other methods like vehicle registration etc, tracing phone movements with a warrant, to the point that I really can't see facial recognition making a difference to privacy.
If they start talking about bugging peoples phones and planting tracking devices on peoples cars I would be concerned. But this. Not really.
It is happening all over the world as part of policing, in airports, casinos as mentioned earlier etc (Yes I know these aren't public places)
[Some hypotheticals are just a bad idea – Incognito]
Again you confirm that there is far too much access by cops to private data in an unregulated way already. And the few bad cops – get real we have a continuing trickle of stories roast busters, Hager and other journalists, computer hacking investigations, illegal traffic stops to get information, tooling up and running around doing traffic stops like they are in a war zone and that's just what we know about .. that's just more than the odd bad egg it's a systemic problem that needs dealing with.
Nor is it correct to conflate such things as phone hacking which should need a warrant to the unrestricted unsupervised collection of public data using facial recognition of citizens doing absolutely nothing wrong as they go about their lawful daily lives.
and yes a lot of stuff is collected in non public spaces and again should we be ruling more fully against some of this.
Just remember the police work for us as a society not for some right wing authoritarian clique.
I like No Right Turn – it often has interesting information that is picked up much later by other media, but at other times it is frustrating in its blatant partisanship:
National often claims that the government has failed because an element of party policy put forward before the election has not been achieved and that this represents a failure of government – and the policy is of course always represented as a promise, so according to National it is a "broken promise." We know that a three party government does require compromises, but these do not always represent failure by the party or party that wants something to happen; it may represent a ''victory" for the third party. Also of course there are some policies which are overtaken by events (covid for example?) or where other priorities mean something gets lower than desired priority.
In this case NRT is talking about a "failure'' by the Green Party and Labour – not a failure of government. We need to remember this going into an election campaign; we collectively get what we collectively vote for…
Sadly NRT does not accept comments – fair enough as far as the time it clearly takes on The Standard to keep discussion civil and weed out the nutters; but for a blog that clearly supports some Green policies to blame the government for the need for consensus that is a fundamental part of that government is somewhat short sighted – despite problems I believe that a smaller party like the Green Party does have legitimate views; I do not want voters to think that it is only worth voting for Labour or National.
IS at NRT used to accept comments a long time ago. He shut it down because he prefers to write rather than deal with the ignorant dipshits who used to write most of the comments. I think that he stopped about 2006 or 7
It was pity because the comments were often as good as the posts.
A terrible look for Judith Collins here. Corrupt husband and chief Kauri stump digger David Wong tung has taken to posting misogynist memes about the Prime Minister.
You are well known for not recognising misogyny. One clue is in the use of the name "Cindy" which minimises and trivialises the PM, and all women, really.
Also worrying for Collins is the second one retweeted there by her apparently unruly husband is watermarked “the BFD” which is Slater’s vehicle. He set it up after claiming he had a stroke in order to avoid paying his debtors from the failed WOBF.
Collins has had a cosy relationship with Slater through the years, using him to conduct Dirty Politics. That relationship also contributed to her fall from grace and generally highlighted her and her husband’s corrupt nature.
It's actually less IMO about Jacinda Ardern who just gets one vote & given a raft of slights that most of the public have not had to witness, and would be rightly appalled by, this is how the public will view the LOTO. Regardless of her trying to dismiss it & perhaps suggesting NZers can't "take a joke" or a bit of levity it goes to the core of showing two faces to the public, one that's relatively benign and the other that is a relationship with a nasty and dismissive view of wider NZ
But What About Judith's personal responsibility for the poor personal choice of 41 years ago? Isn't that what the RW says to single mothers struggling to bring up the kids? They made a poor personal choice to have kids with someone so need to be pounded by the right?
Could you imagine the uproar if first bloke was doing anything like this? but he's far too sensible.
Collins shrugs and claims she can't do anything about it. This is an admission she endorses it. If she felt it was damaging she could say to her husband, "you are hurting my career, please stop". But she won't because she doesn't believe he is hurting her career.
Or, she told him to stfu and he didn't and it's better for her to make light of it in public. Her husband sounds like a total dick, and her point about not being able to control him seems potentially true.
Bring it on. The more he tweets the more the election will be a referendum on Judith Collins' relationship with her husband. If she can't control him, how can she control a cabinet?
" If you’ve got the secret to how you control a man who is 64 years old, used to play a lot of rugby and was a policeman, good luck and let me know,” Judith said.
"“He is one of the least sexist men I know, he is married to me, how could he be sexist?” Collins said."
“He is an adult, he will make his own decisions and let’s put it this way, I don't have to answer for him because I have not been able to control him in 41 years."
"Spring is sprung, the grass is riz." and in the river and on its banks at the foot of my garden there are nests which produce cygnets and ducklings, little kawau and pukeko, tiny scaup and paradise shelducks, so I know 'where the birdies is." Life is indeed good.
Full moon as far as I can see tonight. 21 degrees today in Gisborne on the last day of winter. First day of chafing for me.
Why don't I think of myself as a manual worker? Yet by all measures I am for 34 years. I feel I'm posturing since I'm middle class and my real life is in my head.
It is all very well cutting the backrooms of public agencies but it may compromise the frontlines. One of the frustrations of the Productivity Commission’s 2017 review of universities is that while it observed that their non-academic staff were increasing faster than their academic staff, it did not bother to ...
Buzz from the Beehive Two speeches delivered by Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters at Anzac Day ceremonies in Turkey are the only new posts on the government’s official website since the PM announced his Cabinet shake-up. In one of the speeches, Peters stated the obvious: we live in a troubled ...
1. Which of these would you not expect to read in The Waikato Invader?a. Luxon is here to do business, don’t you worry about thatb. Mr KPI expects results, and you better believe itc. This decisive man of action is getting me all hot and excitedd. Melissa Lee is how ...
…it has a restricted jurisdiction which must not be abused: it is not an inquisitionNOTE – this article was published before the High Court ruled that Karen Chhour does not have to appear before the Waitangi Tribunal Gary Judd writes – The High Court ...
Lindsay Mitchell writes – One of reasons Oranga Tamariki exists is to prevent child neglect. But could the organisation itself be guilty of the same?Oranga Tamariki’s statistics show a decrease in the number and age of children in care. “There are less children ...
David Farrar writes: Graeme Edgeler wrote in 2017: In the first five years after three strikes came into effect 5248 offenders received a ‘first strike’ (that is, a “stage-1 conviction” under the three strikes sentencing regime), and 68 offenders received a ‘second strike’. In the five years prior to ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has surprised everyone with his ruthlessness in sacking two of his ministers from their crucial portfolios. Removing ministers for poor performance after only five months in the job just doesn’t normally happen in politics. That’s refreshing and will be extremely ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the two days to 6:06am on Thursday, April 25:Politics: PM Christopher Luxon has set up a dual standard for ministerial competence by demoting two National Cabinet ministers while leaving also-struggling ...
Hi,Today I mainly want to share some of your thoughts about the recent piece I wrote about success and failure, and the forces that seemingly guide our lives. But first, a quick bit of housekeeping: I am doing a Webworm popup in Los Angeles on Saturday May 11 at 2pm. ...
It is hard to see what Melissa Lee might have done to “save” the media. National went into the election with no public media policy and appears not to have developed one subsequently. Lee claimed that she had prepared a policy paper before the election but it had been decided ...
Open access notablesIce acceleration and rotation in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior in recent decades, Løkkegaard et al., Communications Earth & Environment:In the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated, partly due to the speedup of glaciers. However, uncertainty in speed derived from satellite products ...
Buzz from the Beehive A statement from Children’s Minister Karen Chhour – yet to be posted on the Government’s official website – arrived in Point of Order’s email in-tray last night. It welcomes the High Court ruling on whether the Waitangi Tribunal can demand she appear before it. It does ...
Mr Bombastic:Ironically, the media the academic experts wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to ...
It's hard times try to make a livingYou wake up every morning in the unforgivingOut there somewhere in the cityThere's people living lives without mercy or pityI feel good, yeah I'm feeling fineI feel better then I have for the longest timeI think these pills have been good for meI ...
In 1974, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, finding that the President was not a King, but was subject to the law and was required to turn over the evidence of his wrongdoing to the courts. It was a landmark decision for the rule ...
Every day now just seems to bring in more fresh meat for the grinder.In their relentlessly ideological drive to cut back on the “excessive bloat” (as they see it) of the previous Labour-led government, on the mountains of evidence accumulated in such a short period of time do not ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Megan Valére SosouMarket gardening site of the Itchèléré de Itagui agricultural cooperative in Dassa-Zoumè (Image credit: Megan Valère Sossou) For the residents of Dassa-Zoumè, a city in the West African country of Benin, choosing between drinking water and having enough ...
Buzz from the Beehive Melissa Lee – as may be discerned from the screenshot above – has not been demoted for doing something seriously wrong as Minister of ...
Morning in London Mother hugs beloved daughter outside the converted shoe factory in which she is living.Afternoon in London Travelling writer takes himself and his wrist down to A&E, just to be sure. Read more ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – The recent announcement of the University Advisory Group, chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, makes very clear where the Government’s focus and priorities lie. The remit of the Advisory Group is that Group members will consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector including: ...
Eric Crampton writes – The Reserve Bank of New Zealand desperately wants to find reasons to have workstreams in climate change. It makes little sense. They’ve run another stress test on the banks looking to see if they could find a prudential regulation case. They couldn’t. They ...
Rob MacCullough writes – Pundits from the left and the right are arguing that National’s Fast Track Bill that is designed to speed up infrastructure decisions could end up becoming mired in a cesspool of corruption. Political commentator ...
Looking at the headlines this morning it’s hard to feel anything other than pessimistic about the future of humanity.Note that I’m not speaking about the future of mankind, but the survival of our humanity. The values that we believe in seem to be ebbing away, by the day.Perhaps every generation ...
Swabbing mixed breed baby chicks to test for avian influenzaUh oh. Bird flu – often deadly to humans – is not only being transmitted from infected birds to dairy cows, but is now travelling between dairy cows. As of last Friday, Bloomberg News reports, there were 32 American dairy herds ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so: The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a ...
Photo # 1 I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The ConversationWhat Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, ...
Buzz from the Beehive Reactions to news of the government’s readiness to make urgent changes to “the resource management system” through a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) suggest a balanced approach is being taken. The Taxpayers’ Union says the proposed changes don’t go far enough. Greenpeace says ...
I’m starting to wonder if Anna Burns-Francis might be the best political interviewer we’ve got. That might sound unlikely to you, it came as a bit of a surprise to me.Jack Tame can be excellent, but has some pretty average days. I like Rebecca Wright on Newshub, she asks good ...
Chris Trotter writes – Willie Jackson is said to be planning a “media summit” to discuss “the state of the media and how to protect Fourth Estate Journalism”. Not only does the Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, think this is a good idea, but he has also ...
Graeme Edgeler writes – This morning [April 21], the Wellington High Court is hearing a judicial review brought by Hon. Karen Chhour, the Minister for Children, against a decision of the Waitangi Tribunal. This is unusual, judicial reviews are much more likely to brought against ministers, rather than ...
Both of Parliament’s watchdogs have now ripped into the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMy pick of the six newsey things to know from Aotearoa’s political economy and beyond on the morning of Tuesday, April 23 are:The Lead: The Auditor General,John Ryan, has joined the ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sarah SpengemanPeople wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP) Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that ...
The infrastructure industry yesterday issued a “hurry up” message to the Government, telling it to get cracking on developing a pipeline of infrastructure projects.The hiatus around the change of Government has seen some major projects cancelled and others delayed, and there is uncertainty about what will happen with the new ...
Hi,Over the weekend I revisited a podcast I really adore, Dead Eyes. It’s about a guy who got fired from Band of Brothers over two decades ago because Tom Hanks said he had “dead eyes”.If you don’t recall — 2001’s Band of Brothers was part of the emerging trend of ...
Buzz from the Beehive The 180 or so recipients of letters from the Government telling them how to submit infrastructure projects for “fast track” consideration includes some whose project applications previously have been rejected by the courts. News media were quick to feature these in their reports after RMA Reform Minister Chris ...
It would not be a desirable way to start your holiday by breaking your back, your head, or your wrist, but on our first hour in Singapore I gave it a try.We were chatting, last week, before we started a meeting of Hazel’s Enviro Trust, about the things that can ...
Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the ...
Feel worried. Shane Jones and a couple of his Cabinet colleagues are about to be granted the power to override any and all objections to projects like dams, mines, roads etc even if: said projects will harm biodiversity, increase global warming and cause other environmental harms, and even if ...
Bryce Edwards writes- The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. ...
Michael Bassett writes – If you think there is a move afoot by the radical Maori fringe of New Zealand society to create a parallel system of government to the one that we elect at our triennial elections, you aren’t wrong. Over the last few days we have ...
Without a corresponding drop in interest rates, it’s doubtful any changes to the CCCFA will unleash a massive rush of home buyers. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Monday, April 22 included:The Government making a ...
Sunday was a lazy day. I started watching Jack Tame on Q&A, the interviews are usually good for something to write about. Saying the things that the politicians won’t, but are quite possibly thinking. Things that are true and need to be extracted from between the lines.As you might know ...
In our Weekly Roundup last week we covered news from Auckland Transport that the WX1 Western Express is going to get an upgrade next year with double decker electric buses. As part of the announcement, AT also said “Since we introduced the WX1 Western Express last November we have seen ...
TL;DR: The six key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 29 include:PM Christopher Luxon is scheduled to hold a post-Cabinet news conference at 4 pm today. Stats NZ releases its statutory report on Census 2023 tomorrow.Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivers a pre-Budget speech at ...
A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 14, 2024 thru Sat, April 20, 2024. Story of the week Our story of the week hinges on these words from the abstract of a fresh academic ...
The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. The Government says this will ...
This is a column to say thank you. So many of have been in touch since Mum died to say so many kind and thoughtful things. You’re wonderful, all of you. You’ve asked how we’re doing, how Dad’s doing. A little more realisation each day, of the irretrievable finality of ...
Identifying the engine type in your car is crucial for various reasons, including maintenance, repairs, and performance upgrades. Knowing the specific engine model allows you to access detailed technical information, locate compatible parts, and make informed decisions about modifications. This comprehensive guide will provide you with a step-by-step approach to ...
Introduction: The allure of racing is undeniable. The thrill of speed, the roar of engines, and the exhilaration of competition all contribute to the allure of this adrenaline-driven sport. For those who yearn to experience the pinnacle of racing, becoming a race car driver is the ultimate dream. However, the ...
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Mazda Motor Corporation, commonly known as Mazda, is a Japanese multinational automaker headquartered in Fuchu, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. The company was founded in 1920 as the Toyo Cork Kogyo Co., Ltd., and began producing vehicles in 1931. Mazda is primarily known for its production of passenger cars, but ...
Your car battery is an essential component that provides power to start your engine, operate your electrical systems, and store energy. Over time, batteries can weaken and lose their ability to hold a charge, which can lead to starting problems, power failures, and other issues. Replacing your battery before it ...
In most states, you cannot register a car without a valid driver’s license. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. Exceptions to the RuleIf you are under 18 years old: In some states, you can register a car in your name even if you do not ...
Mazda, a Japanese automotive manufacturer with a rich history of innovation and engineering excellence, has emerged as a formidable player in the global car market. Known for its reputation of producing high-quality, fuel-efficient, and driver-oriented vehicles, Mazda has consistently garnered praise from industry experts and consumers alike. In this article, ...
Struts are an essential part of a car’s suspension system. They are responsible for supporting the weight of the car and damping the oscillations of the springs. Struts are typically made of steel or aluminum and are filled with hydraulic fluid. How Do Struts Work? Struts work by transferring the ...
Car registration is a mandatory process that all vehicle owners must complete annually. This process involves registering your car with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and paying an associated fee. The registration process ensures that your vehicle is properly licensed and insured, and helps law enforcement and other authorities ...
Zoom is a video conferencing service that allows you to share your screen, webcam, and audio with other participants. In addition to sharing your own audio, you can also share the audio from your computer with other participants. This can be useful for playing music, sharing presentations with audio, or ...
Building your own computer can be a rewarding and cost-effective way to get a high-performance machine tailored to your specific needs. However, it also requires careful planning and execution, and one of the most important factors to consider is the time it will take. The exact time it takes to ...
Sleep mode is a power-saving state that allows your computer to quickly resume operation without having to boot up from scratch. This can be useful if you need to step away from your computer for a short period of time but don’t want to shut it down completely. There are ...
Introduction Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) has revolutionized the field of translation by harnessing the power of technology to assist human translators in their work. This innovative approach combines specialized software with human expertise to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and consistency of translations. In this comprehensive article, we will delve into the ...
In today’s digital age, mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Among the vast array of portable computing options available, iPads and tablet computers stand out as two prominent contenders. While both offer similar functionalities, there are subtle yet significant differences between these two devices. This ...
A computer is an electronic device that can be programmed to carry out a set of instructions. The basic components of a computer are the processor, memory, storage, input devices, and output devices. The Processor The processor, also known as the central processing unit (CPU), is the brain of the ...
Voice Memos is a convenient app on your iPhone that allows you to quickly record and store audio snippets. These recordings can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as taking notes, capturing ideas, or recording interviews. While you can listen to your voice memos on your iPhone, you ...
Laptop screens are essential for interacting with our devices and accessing information. However, when lines appear on the screen, it can be frustrating and disrupt productivity. Understanding the underlying causes of these lines is crucial for finding effective solutions. Types of Screen Lines Horizontal lines: Also known as scan ...
Right-clicking is a common and essential computer operation that allows users to access additional options and settings. While most desktop computers have dedicated right-click buttons on their mice, laptops often do not have these buttons due to space limitations. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on how to right-click ...
Powering up and shutting down your ASUS laptop is an essential task for any laptop user. Locating the power button can sometimes be a hassle, especially if you’re new to ASUS laptops. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on where to find the power button on different ASUS laptop ...
Dell laptops are renowned for their reliability, performance, and versatility. Whether you’re a student, a professional, or just someone who needs a reliable computing device, a Dell laptop can meet your needs. However, if you’re new to Dell laptops, you may be wondering how to get started. In this comprehensive ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
Te Pāti Māori is disgusted at the confirmation that hundreds are set to lose their jobs at Oranga Tamariki, and the disestablishment of the Treaty Response Unit. “This act of absolute carelessness and out of touch decision making is committing tamariki to state abuse.” Said Te Pāti Māori Oranga Tamariki ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, and Mema Paremata mō Tāmaki-Makaurau, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, will travel to the Gold Coast to strengthen ties with Māori in Australia next week (15-21 April). The visit, in the lead-up to the 9th Australian National Kapa haka Festival, will be an opportunity for both ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
A significant milestone has been reached in the fight to strike an anti-Pasifika and unfair law from the country’s books after Teanau Tuiono’s members’ bill passed its first reading. ...
New Zealand has today missed the opportunity to uphold the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, says James Shaw after his member’s bill was voted down in its first reading. ...
Today’s advice from the Climate Change Commission paints a sobering reality of the challenge we face in combating climate change, especially in light of recent Government policy announcements. ...
Minister for Disability Issues Penny Simmonds appears to have delayed a report back to Cabinet on the progress New Zealand is making against international obligations for disabled New Zealanders. ...
Ambassador Millar, Burgemeester, Vandepitte, Excellencies, military representatives, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen – good morning and welcome to this sacred Anzac Day dawn service. It is an honour to be here on behalf of the Government and people of New Zealand at Buttes New British Cemetery, Polygon Wood – a deeply ...
Distinguished guests - It is an honour to return once again to this site which, as the resting place for so many of our war-dead, has become a sacred place for generations of New Zealanders. Our presence here and at the other special spaces of Gallipoli is made ...
Mai ia tawhiti pamamao, te moana nui a Kiwa, kua tae whakaiti mai matou, ki to koutou papa whenua. No koutou te tapuwae, no matou te tapuwae, kua honoa pumautia. Ko nga toa kua hinga nei, o te Waipounamu, o te Ika a Maui, he okioki tahi me o ...
Paul Goldsmith will take on responsibility for the Media and Communications portfolio, while Louise Upston will pick up the Disability Issues portfolio, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today. “Our Government is relentlessly focused on getting New Zealand back on track. As issues change in prominence, I plan to adjust Ministerial ...
Recreational catch limits will be reduced in areas of Fiordland and the Chatham Islands to help keep those fisheries healthy and sustainable, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The lower recreational daily catch limits for a range of finfish and shellfish species caught in the Fiordland Marine Area and ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
Overseas models for regulating the oil and gas sector, including their decommissioning regimes, are being carefully scrutinised as a potential template for New Zealand’s own sector, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. The Coalition Government is focused on rebuilding investor confidence in New Zealand’s energy sector as it looks to strengthen ...
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell has today released the Report of the Government Inquiry into the response to the North Island Severe Weather Events. “The report shows that New Zealand’s emergency management system is not fit-for-purpose and there are some significant gaps we need to address,” Mr Mitchell ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is today travelling to Europe where he’ll update the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Government’s work to restore law and order. “Attending the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva provides us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while ...
Associate Agriculture Minister, Mark Patterson, formally reopened the world’s largest wool processing facility today in Awatoto, Napier, following a $50 million rebuild and refurbishment project. “The reopening of this facility will significantly lift the economic opportunities available to New Zealand’s wool sector, which already accounts for 20 per cent of ...
Hon Andrew Bayly, Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing At the Southland Otago Regional Engineering Collective (SOREC) Summit, 18 April, Dunedin Ngā mihi nui, Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Ko Whanganui aho Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to open your summit today. I am delighted ...
The Government is delivering on its commitment to bring back the Three Strikes legislation, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee announced today. “Our Government is committed to restoring law and order and enforcing appropriate consequences on criminals. We are making it clear that repeat serious violent or sexual offending is not ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has today announced four new diplomatic appointments for New Zealand’s overseas missions. “Our diplomats have a vital role in maintaining and protecting New Zealand’s interests around the world,” Mr Peters says. “I am pleased to announce the appointment of these senior diplomats from the ...
New Zealand is contributing NZ$7 million to support communities affected by severe food insecurity and other urgent humanitarian needs in Ethiopia and Somalia, Foreign Minister Rt Hon Winston Peters announced today. “Over 21 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across Ethiopia, with a further 6.9 million people ...
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith is congratulating Mataaho Collective for winning the Golden Lion for best participant in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. "Congratulations to the Mataaho Collective for winning one of the world's most prestigious art prizes at the Venice Biennale. “It is good ...
The Government is reforming financial services to improve access to home loans and other lending, and strengthen customer protections, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly and Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced today. “Our coalition Government is committed to rebuilding the economy and making life simpler by cutting red tape. We are ...
“China remains a strong commercial opportunity for Kiwi exporters as Chinese businesses and consumers continue to value our high-quality safe produce,” Trade and Agriculture Minister Todd McClay says. Mr McClay has returned to New Zealand following visits to Beijing, Harbin and Shanghai where he met ministers, governors and mayors and engaged in trade and agricultural events with the New ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has completed a successful trip to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, deepening relationships and capitalising on opportunities. Mr Luxon was accompanied by a business delegation and says the choice of countries represents the priority the New Zealand Government places on South East Asia, and our relationships in ...
New Zealand is demonstrating its commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions, and supporting clean energy transition in South East Asia, through a contribution of NZ$41 million (US$25 million) in climate finance to the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-led Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts announced ...
The Government is today releasing a list of organisations who received letters about the Fast-track applications process, says RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. “Recently Ministers and agencies have received a series of OIA requests for a list of organisations to whom I wrote with information on applying to have a ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Wellington Barrister David Jonathan Boldt as a Judge of the High Court, and the Honourable Justice Matthew Palmer as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Boldt graduated with an LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990, and also holds ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford will lead the New Zealand delegation at the 2024 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) held in Singapore. The delegation includes representatives from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Riu Roa. The summit is co-hosted ...
A stopbank upgrade project in Tairawhiti partly funded by the Government has increased flood resilience for around 7000ha of residential and horticultural land so far, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones today attended a dawn service in Gisborne to mark the end of the first stage of the ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters will represent the Government at Anzac Day commemorations on the Gallipoli Peninsula next week and engage with senior representatives of the Turkish government in Istanbul. “The Gallipoli campaign is a defining event in our history. It will be a privilege to share the occasion ...
Science, Innovation and Technology and Defence Minister Judith Collins will next week attend the OECD Science and Technology Ministerial conference in Paris and Anzac Day commemorations in Belgium. “Science, innovation and technology have a major role to play in rebuilding our economy and achieving better health, environmental and social outcomes ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Prime Minister was accompanied by MP Paulo Garcia, the first Filipino to be elected to a legislature outside the Philippines. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon and President Marcos Jr discussed opportunities to ...
The Government has announced that $20 million in funding will be made available to Westport to fund much needed flood protection around the town. This measure will significantly improve the resilience of the community, says Local Government Minister Simeon Brown. “The Westport community has already been allocated almost $3 million ...
The Government is proud to support the first ever Repco Supercars Championship event in Taupō as up to 70,000 motorsport fans attend the Taupō International Motorsport Park this weekend, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. “Anticipation for the ITM Taupō Super400 is huge, with tickets and accommodation selling out weeks ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced an increase to the Rates Rebate Scheme, putting money back into the pockets of low-income homeowners. “The coalition Government is committed to bringing down the cost of living for New Zealanders. That includes targeted support for those Kiwis who are doing things tough, such ...
The Coalition Government is investing in a project to boost survival rates of New Zealand mussels and grow the industry, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has announced. “This project seeks to increase the resilience of our mussels and significantly boost the sector’s productivity,” Mr Jones says. “The project - ...
Benefit figures released today underscore the importance of the Government’s plan to rebuild the economy and have 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “Benefit numbers are still significantly higher than when National was last in government, when there was about 70,000 fewer ...
The Government’s commitment to doubling New Zealand’s renewable energy capacity is backed by new data showing that clean energy has helped the country reach its lowest annual gross emissions since 1999, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. New Zealand’s latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory (1990-2022) published today, shows gross emissions fell ...
The Government is bringing the earthquake-prone building review forward, with work to start immediately, and extending the deadline for remediations by four years, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “Our Government is focused on rebuilding the economy. A key part of our plan is to cut red tape that ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Thai counterpart, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, have today agreed that New Zealand and the Kingdom of Thailand will upgrade the bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership by 2026. “New Zealand and Thailand have a lot to offer each other. We have a strong mutual desire to build ...
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Transport Minister Simeon Brown have today announced the Coalition Government’s intention to extend port coastal permits for a further 20 years, providing port operators with certainty to continue their operations. “The introduction of the Resource Management Act in 1991 required ports to obtain coastal ...
Today’s announcement that inflation is down to 4 per cent is encouraging news for Kiwis, but there is more work to be done - underlining the importance of the Government’s plan to get the economy back on track, acting Finance Minister Chris Bishop says. “Inflation is now at 4 per ...
Refreshed health guidance released today will help parents and schools make informed decisions about whether their child needs to be in school, addressing one of the key issues affecting school attendance, says Associate Education Minister David Seymour. In recent years, consistently across all school terms, short-term illness or medical reasons ...
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones is streamlining high-level oceans management while maintaining a focus on supporting the sector’s role in the export-led recovery of the economy. “I am working to realise the untapped potential of our fishing and aquaculture sector. To achieve that we need to be smarter with ...
I was initially resistant to the idea often suggested to me that the Government should deliver an arts strategy. The whole point of the arts and creativity is that people should do whatever the hell they want, unbound by the dictates of politicians in Wellington. Peter Jackson, Kiri Te Kanawa, Eleanor ...
Pacific Media Watch Palestine solidarity protesters today demonstrated at the Auckland headquarters of Television New Zealand, accusing the country’s major TV network of broadcasting “propaganda” backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. About 50 protesters targeted the main entrance to the TVNZ building near Sky Tower and also picketed a side ...
Opinion by Lynley Hood. Forty years on from my 1985 Fulbright Grant, my disquiet over the war in Gaza evoked some troubling questions. The answer to my first question – What is the primary purpose of the Fulbright Programme? – was on the Fulbright NZ website. It says: US Senator, ...
The ministers responsible for green-lighting major projects need to be open about potential conflicts of interest, says Transparency International. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anastasia Powell, Professor, Family and Sexual Violence, RMIT University It has been a particularly distressing start to the year. There is little that can ease the current grief of individuals, families and communities who have needlessly lost a loved one to men’s ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne Lichen, the first described example of symbiosis.AdeJ Artventure/Shutterstock Once known only to those studying biology, the word symbiosis is now widely used. Symbiosis is the intimate ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kim Hemsley, Head, Childhood Dementia Research Group, Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University Olena Ivanova/Shutterstock “Childhood” and “dementia” are two words we wish we didn’t have to use together. But sadly, around 1,400 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University The government’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee has just published its second report. It was set up by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth in 2022 to provide: ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne The Queensland state election will be held in October. A YouGov poll for The Courier Mail, conducted April 9–17 from a sample ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Naeni, PhD candidate at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University There’s been much talk in recent months about what a possible second Donald Trump presidency in the United States could mean for Europe, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the ...
A brief round-up of submissions on the controversial proposed law. This is an excerpt from our weekly environmental newsletter Future Proof. Sign up here. Last week, submissions on the controversial Fast-track Approvals Bill closed just hours after the government released a list of stakeholder organisations who were sent letters advising how they could ...
A poem from Robin Peace’s new collection Detritus of Empire: feather / grass / rock. Cereal giving I see a woman’s hands, see her curious hands break a stalk as she walks through the tall prairie, the savannah, the steppe, wherever it was. See her idly bite the grass that ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Hemingway’s Goblet by Dermot Ross (Mary Egan Publishing, $38)A handsomely produced (debossed cover, lovely ...
The Commissioner's decision validates the longstanding efforts of the local community and ensures that Awataha Marae will be managed to serve the needs of the local community, particularly for hosting tangihanga. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tristan Salles, Associate professor, University of Sydney Examples of Australian landscapes.Unsplash Seventy thousand years ago, the sea level was much lower than today. Australia, along with New Guinea and Tasmania, formed a connected landmass known as Sahul. Around this time – ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Felicity Castagna, Lecturer, Creative Writing, Western Sydney University Day Day Market, ParramattaPhoto: Garry Trinh I live on the edge of Parramatta, Australia’s fastest-growing city, on the kind of old-fashioned suburban street that has 1950s fibros constructed in the post-war housing boom, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Ryan, Teaching Fellow in Economics, University of Waikato GettyImagesfatido/Getty Images There is an ongoing global debate over whether the high inflation seen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic can be lowered without a recession. New Zealand is not ...
The ‘Wicked Game’ heartthrob is in his late 60s now. That didn’t stop him putting on a lively, goofy and very sparkly show. Apart from ‘Wicked Game’, which graces a sultry playlist of mine simply called 💋, my last sustained Chris Isaak listening session took place when I was about ...
Analysis - Two ministers were stripped of portfolios in a warning to Cabinet, drama broke out at the Waitangi Tribunal, and the gang patch ban bill ran into opposition. ...
Tara Ward makes an impassioned plea for some vital pop culture merch. In April 1999, I became obsessed with a new reality television show called Popstars. Every Tuesday night, five strangers transformed into music royalty before my very eyes as Joe, Keri, Carly, Erika and Megan were chosen to form ...
PNG Post-Courier In the early hours of ANZAC Day, aerial photographs captured an impressive gathering of Australians and Papua New Guineans at Isurava in the Northern (Oro) Province. The solemn dawn service yesterday was held at a site steeped in history, where some of the fiercest battles of World War ...
The PSA is shocked that Oranga Tamariki has used the cost cutting drive to downgrade its commitment to Te Ao Māori and remove many specialist Māori roles. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Kemish, Adjunct Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland There can be no more powerful symbol of the relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea than the prime ministers of these neighbouring countries walking together on the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sharon Robinson, Distinguished Professor and Deputy Director of ARC Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), University of Wollongong, University of Wollongong Andrew Netherwood Over the last 25 years, the ozone hole which forming over Antarctica each spring has started to shrink. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Viktoria Kahui, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Economics, University of Otago Getty Images/Amy Toensing Biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. This suggests the ways we currently use to manage our natural environment are failing. One emerging concept focuses on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Colin Bednall, Associate Professor in Management, Swinburne University of Technology marvent/Shutterstock Finding the best person to fill a position can be tough, from drafting a job ad to producing a shortlist of top interview candidates. Employers typically consider information from ...
Wondering where to host your next BYO? Whether its a small gathering or a massive party, we’ve got some recommendations. I was first introduced to the concept of BYOs at Dunedin’s India Gardens, a legendary but sadly defunct establishment, which purveyed enormous quantities of mango chicken to Aotearoa’s drunkest future ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julien Cooper, Honorary Lecturer, Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University Julien Cooper The hyper-arid desert of Eastern Sudan, the Atbai Desert, seems like an unlikely place to find evidence of ancient cattle herders. But in this dry environment, my new ...
The sector says it’s hopeful her replacement Paul Goldsmith will be able to throw it a lifeline, after six months with a minister deemed missing in action, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign ...
The government can't just rely on axing public sector jobs and has to do more to cut spending, says the chief economist at a free market think tank. ...
Rock The Vote NZ, known for its advocacy for minor party unity and its role within the Freedoms NZ Coalition during the 2023 General Election, celebrates this merger as a strategic enhancement of its operational strength and outreach. ...
Nearly everyone has experienced the frustration of something you use breaking and being difficult or expensive to fix. Proposed legislation could change that. It’s been raining on and off all Sunday afternoon but people are lining up outside a building in a corner of Gribblehirst Park in Sandringham, Auckland. In ...
What does a forever relationship look like when you don’t believe in marriage? And how do you celebrate it? This essay is part of our Sunday Essay series, made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.I’m going to do it, right now. I’m going to say ...
The Prime Minister has committed to resuming direct flights to Thailand. But it’s not a promise he will be able to deliver on anytime soon. The post Prime Minister jumps the gun in Thailand appeared first on Newsroom. ...
It’s not that long ago Eliza McCartney was seriously wondering if the Paris Olympics would be her pole vaulting swansong. After years of being hounded by injury after injury, the Rio Olympics bronze medallist was still confident she would compete at her second Olympics in Paris in July, unless something ...
FICTION 1 Take Two by Danielle Hawkins (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) There’s commercial fiction, like this book, and then there’s quality fiction, quality writers, quality literature; the forthcoming Auckland Writers Festival is full of quality, and ReadingRoom has two tickets to give away to the following events: Paul Lynch (Dublin ...
Loading…(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){var ql=document.querySelectorAll('A[quiz],DIV[quiz],A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if(ql){if(ql.length){for(var k=0;k<ql.length;k++){ql[k].id='quiz-embed-'+k;ql[k].href="javascript:var i=document.getElementById('quiz-embed-"+k+"');try{qz.startQuiz(i)}catch(e){i.start=1;i.style.cursor='wait';i.style.opacity='0.5'};void(0);"}}};i['QP']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','https://take.quiz-maker.com/3012/CDN/quiz-embed-v1.js','qp'); Got a good quiz question?Send Newsroom your questions. The post Newsroom daily quiz, Friday 26 April appeared first on Newsroom. ...
You can’t have missed the Gallipoli story as the movies, documentaries, essays and books capture what it was like for New Zealand troops in their eight-month campaign on the Peninsula. But this Anzac Day the Auckland War Memorial Museum has published a book that sheds light on a little-known aspect of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra In the free-for-all between the Australian government and Big Tech boss Elon Musk this week, the government had to be on a winner. Most people would have little sympathy with Musk’s vociferous opposition to ...
Asia Pacific Report Chief Mandla Mandela, a member of the National Assembly of South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, has joined the Freedom Flotilla in istanbul as the ships prepare to sail for Gaza, reports Kia Ora Gaza. Mandela is also the ambassador for the Global Campaign to Return to ...
Pacific Media Watch Journalists who report on environmental issues are encountering growing difficulties in many parts of the world, reports Reporters Without Borders. According to the tally kept by RSF, 200 journalists have been subjected to threats and physical violence, including murder, in the past 10 years because they were ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards, Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has surprised everyone with his ruthlessness in sacking two of his ministers from their crucial portfolios. Removing ministers for poor performance after only five months in the job just doesn’t normally happen in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra BagzhanSadvakassov/Upsplash, CC BY-SA Australia’s inflation rate has fallen for the fifth successive quarter, and it’s now less than half of what it was back in late 2022. ...
ACT's Rural Communities and Veterans spokesman Mark Cameron responds to cancellations and protests of ANZAC Day commemorations in Wellington. He says, "These pitiful attempts to detract from ANZAC Day are not at all indicative of the feelings of mainstream ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Meighen McCrae, Associate Professor of Strategic & Defence Studies, Australian National University American and Australian stretcher bearers working together near the front line during the Battle of Hamel in 1918.Australian War Memorial While the AUKUS alliance is new, the Australian-American partnership ...
Pōneke based peace activists staged a silent protest at the ANZAC day service to highlight New Zealand’s complicity in war and genocide, and urge the government to take concrete steps to stop the genocide in Palestine. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Magdalena M.E. Bunbury, Postdoctoral Researcher, James Cook University Burial with a horse at the Rákóczifalva site, Hungary (8th century AD).Sándor Hegedűs, Hungarian National Museum, CC BY How do we understand past societies? For centuries, our main sources of information have been ...
Amanda Thompson doesn’t really do Anzac Day. But what she does do is remember the people she knew who had a lifetime to remember stuff they didn’t really want to, because of a war they didn’t ask for. And she does make Anzac biscuits.First published in 2021.All my ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Willis, Postdoctoral Researcher, CSIRO Xavier Boulenger/Shutterstock In the two decades to 2019, global plastic production doubled. By 2040, plastic manufacturing and processing could consume as much as 20% of global oil production and use up 15% of the annual carbon ...
With our collective remembrance, and steadfast belief in our common humanity, we strengthen our hope and resolve to do what we can to foster dialogue and understanding, and to heal divisions in our pursuit of peace. ...
Principal reasons for the opposition is the loss of the public’s democratic right to have “a fair say” and the vital need for a government free from corruption, said Casey Cravens of Dunedin, president of the New Zealand Federation of Freshwater ...
Never mind the scoreboard – in the 2000 Bledisloe Cup decider, the real trans-Tasman battle was won before kickoff.First published in 2016. The dawn of the new millennium was a dark time for the All Blacks. Their final game pre-Y2K was a 22-18 loss to South Africa in the ...
I’m on the wrong side of 40, I never pursued creative work and now my job is killing my soul. Help! Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nzDear Hera,May I start with the least original conversation opener you’re likely to hear around the motu at the moment, particularly in Wellington: ...
“Never again - No AUKUS” was the message of the wreath laid at this morning’s national ANZAC Day commemorative service at Pukeahu National War Memorial Park this morning by the Stop AUKUS group. ...
You can stick people into two groups. Those who comply and those don't. Those who comply do so for their own safety and the safety of others. They do so for the greater collective good. Those who don't don't comply feel they themselves are the most important unit and will break any rule which suggests otherwise. These people are from the political right.
Because SARS – CoV 2 favours the non-complying group I comply. I wear a mask, wash my hands, physically distance and avoid crowds, try to stay as healthy as I can – easier for some than others.
"This metasynthesis provides among the most compelling evidence to date that personality predicts overall health and well-being."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28277701/
Plenty of people that would otherwise be progressive who aren't following the rules. We ignore this and make it a partisan issue at out peril.
Be interesting to hear the range of reasons why. Presumably our media will vox pop that for us.
In the past weeks own south people seem pretty relaxed about L2, basically not really doing much. More Q codes visible, some manual lists to sign, signs telling people to keep their distance, but while people are aware I guess, seems like it's a bit lax. Presumably because most people think there's no covid here. I assume people are allowed to leave Auckland now so hopefully that perception will change.
There's also the anti-authoritarian crowd.
She’ll be right, mate.
lol, not sure it's *quite that bad.
Anyone know why 900 state houses in Porirua were handed over to iwi, even though the government promised to put an end to privatisation of state housing?
Ref: https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/122560292/ngti-toa-will-take-its-land-back-and-bring-its-people-home-iwi-ceo-says
Probably part of a Treaty of Waitangi settlement and I would not call handing these houses over to Iwi to administer privatisation. Meeting of a treaty settlement is paramount I would have thought. What owners do then is the same as any other owner whose land has been taken. Some handing back is subject to restrictions but I am not sure if this part of the Treaty claim was.
I am looking forward to the time when Paraparaumu airport, taken for Defence purposes around the time of WW2 and the Iwi never compensated, is handed back.
Iwi aren't private businesses, they're Treaty partners with the Crown.
Any shareholder owned organisation that's accumulating and reinvesting virtually all returns from invested settlement assets is by definition a private business.
Iwi have businesses (like the government), but they're not businesses. The Pākehā system forced Māori to adopt Iwi legal structures that suited Pākehā, but Iwi themselves predate any modern concept of business by a long time.
And does or should this overly technical approach by Joe90 override the fact that these settlements endeavour to bring the Iwi into a situation that they should have been had the Treaty of Waitangi breach not occurred.
I think not.
As Weka has said these are our Treaty partners, they have been badly treated in cases where Maori land has been taken for Public Works such as housing, roads, schools etc etc. and most have chosen a range or mix of former crown assets and $$$ to settle their grievances. It is mean-spirited not to allow Iwi to conduct their own commercial operations. Some of these ops have meant that Iwi does the managing eg Ngai Tahu and others the managing has been done by the former Govt dept.
If land owned by the Crown is not going to be in the mix, and Iwi want productive land as part of their settlement then the Treaty Settlements will stall big time.
I think to define the use of assets returned under Treaty settlements as private business is simplistic. To trammel the return of assets to Iwi with strictures on future use risks setting up yet another ToW claim. There are crown assets such as particular reserves that are not available for sale that are passed over to Iwi control.
Possibly it is a lack of knowledge about what the meaning of being a treaty partner is that has led to these mystifying picky comments
I would suggest that readers look at some of these settlements
Ngati Toa's is here
https://www.govt.nz/treaty-settlement-documents/ngati-toa-rangatira/
It is instructive to read some of the happenings and the beautiful language that has been used in these settlement documents
https://www.govt.nz/assets/Documents/OTS/Ngati-Toa-Rangatira/Ngati-Toa-Rangatira-Deed-of-Settlement-7-Dec-2012.pdf
Some of us who were around in Govt Depts when the full force of the Rogernomics was upon us will recall that it was only the intervention of our Treaty partner, by and through the NZ Maori Council taking Court cases, that some of the worst land related affects such as the proposal to sell the land under the trees as well as the forest crops were tossed out. Ordinary NZers had no ability to seek any stop to the tidal wave of Rogernomics that was going on. There were several cases other than the Forestry one where they over turned what had been proposed. Our Treaty partners have stepped up many times over the years since 1840, and it behoves us to treat their claims in a generous and fair-spirited way.
MP Jami-Lee Ross referred to committee over anti-vaccination video.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300094071/mp-jamilee-ross-referred-to-committee-over-antivaccination-video?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
"The Speaker has referred independent MP Jami-Lee Ross to the Privileges Committee for misusing edited parliamentary TV video for political ads.
"Trevor Mallard ordered the anti-vaccination video – posted by Ross's party and that of Billy Te Kahika's NZ Public Party – to be removed from social media, but that's been met with a blunt refusal.
Parliamentary footage of an exchange between government minister Megan Woods and National's Erica Stanford was edited for use in the political ad, posted on several sites."
Yeah I wonder why we can't force the main internet players twitter facebook etc to have a "local office" so that when something like this comes along they can easily be contacted so that at the very least it can be labeled "false" or "edited"or taken down fast rather than going through some offshore process.
Just heard this ad on RNZ,
!!!!
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018761552/how-a-digital-inclusion-policy-is-widening-the-inequality-gap
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300094308/the-detail-kiwis-are-suffering-from-digital-exclusion
Yes, it is certainly time for government to declare that being connected is a right and then ensure that the means exist for people to fulfil that right without being ripped off by private enterprise.
In other words, time to re-nationalise telecommunications and to produce capable phones and PCs here in NZ also by a government owned production process.
This is a very real problem with both government and private sector. There are whole communities that are effectively excluded.
I've stayed offline because I can't be bothered with the being hacked bit plus I have the ability to complain loudly – which not everyone has.
The government needs to sort its act out for starters. Any government fee or charge should be capable of being paid on the ground with no extra charge or fee payable – that is far from the current situation. Nor should costs and access be pushed sideways onto community organisations libraries funded by ratepayers etc.
There is also the major secondary discrimination- there are government jobs that cannot be applied for unless a real me id is used. Citizen tracking by default.
edit
There is a major and obvious question here, so obvious that nobody has thought to ask it. Did the citizens get asked if they agreed to have government retreat from face to face dealings, to only communicating with citizens through machines? Was it right that such swingeing changes were enabled by a handful of anarchists? Were taxpayers advised that lower taxes meant limited human input into dealing with citizens?
Were people enabled to discuss the result of withdrawal of government from the ordering of people's lives and that elections and ministers in government were becoming less and less true agents of the people? Perhaps if there wasn't so much hype about how marvellous it is, and truthfulness instead of truthiness about this bloody technological takeover and its constant expansion with obsolescence designed in, people might see things as they are, not rosy at all.
Addlepated* is a great word for the quandary we are in. Google quickly finds all I need to know to describe the poor state we and our state are in. I don't think that is quixotic (extremely idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.)
* In Middle English an adel eye was a putrid egg. The stench of such an egg apparently affected the minds of some witty thinkers, who hatched a comparison between the diminished, unsound quality of an adel eye (or addle egg as it came to be called in modern English) and an empty, confused head—or pate. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/addlepated
I want government back – with real people, and all channels open to all citizens., on-line plus traditional. I think that we need to reorganise Parliament though, and all people who work for government have to have a skill or profession that they have worked at adequately for five years before applying for government jobs.
Thankee for addlepated. 'Fun with words' is our non-lasting legacy. 10,000 of agriculture and 270 of industry.
JLR openly goes the false news route, gets caught and claims he's being 'censored' in an election campaign.
The apple doesn't fall far from the dirty politics tree does it.
JLR published an EDITED video.
Isn't “careful” selection of another's words a form of censorship?
lol.
Actually, its outright lying. Same as what National did the other day.
So, yeah, more proof that we need to make the publication and broadcasting of lies and misinformation illegal. Especially in politics.
@millsy 2 (reply not working etc, etc)
Did you read the article? The land the houses are on are part of a treaty settlement that was concluded in 2014.
Corin Dan this morning commenting (to Phil Goff I think) that the poor messaging that asked South and West Aucklanders to get tested "muddied the waters" on the country's response and then goes on to ask questions that invite others to muddy the messaging even further.
The PM on TVNZ this morning sensibly sidestepped a question about opening the borders because of "business". If she had addressed it, anything she said would be used to muddy the country's response at the moment. The best response for the economy is a health response. What is the sharemarket doing at the moment? Is the MSM banging on about it?
It has been down.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/122599368/hell-to-pay-from-kiwisaver-managers-if-nzx-doesnt-get-on-top-of-cyberattacks
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. It is actually not funny.
Edit: it is still happening FFS!
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/122611626/stock-market-website-crashes-but-trading-continues-without-a-blip-nzx-says
The thing about Distributed Denial of Service Attacks is they are often (always?) done by people activating Bot Nets.
"
A botnet is a logical collection of Internet-connected devices such as computers, smartphones or IoT devices whose security have been breached and control ceded to a third party. Each compromised device, known as a "bot", is created when a device is penetrated by software from a malware (malicious software) distribution. The controller of a botnet is able to direct the activities of these compromised computers through communication channels formed by standards-based network protocols, such as IRC and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).[3][4]
Botnets are increasingly rented out by cyber criminals as commodities for a variety of purposes.[5]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet
Why isn't more done to help people improve security of their systems to avoid them becoming part of a BotNet?
[This comment was held up in Pre-Moderation because it contains too many hyperlinks]
See my Moderation note @ 12:15 PM.
@ Muttonbird 1
Those who are not complying with wearing a mask the reasons why not would need to be known. Wise to wear a mask and not a team player if not wearing a mask.
I have a goal of making 500 cloth masks and donating them where needed. I will even cut extra elastic for ear loops and safety pin it on the mask as the elastic may wear due to a hot soapy hand wash.
I feel that a new cluster could only be a day away anywhere.
Why is a Samsung phone not working to reply?
Reply function doesn't work on iPad either.. my guess is some mobile browsers have trouble rendering the fancy comment box
Lprent is aware of the issue and working on it. You can try switching between mobile and desktop versions, sometimes that helps.
Another Auckland CCO failure. Not Watercare, this time it's POAL. Not content with shitting on Aucklanders by building a bloody great carpark in the middle of the harbour, Ports of Auckland is an exploitative employer as well.
The next government needs to take a serious look at the corporate model of governance for public utilities. The profit motive does not deliver for the people, only a bunch of MBA executives whose only skills are "cost" cutting and bullshit.
https://twitter.com/labourcartel/status/1300155354714570752?s=20
There also more than a whiff that POA (or Tauranga) was the source of the Auckland outbreak.
Are you sure it's not this incident which did circulate on SM before it came to light officially?
https://www.sunlive.co.nz/news/250672-tauranga-port-worker-covid19-claim-hoax.html
No. Just that massive port and truckie testing drive a few weeks ago. And the fact the Auckland outbreak is still sourced to Americold.
They still came up with nothing but a possible theory: Foreign crew member > stevedore > truck-driver > Americold worker. These people generally work (and have smoke breaks) in close contact so I wonder if there was a bit of mixing going on which shouldn't have happened.
I've had thoughts often re Americool as their Melbourne branch apparently had 2 cases a fortnight earlier – I know they dismiss it but seeing how some things are packed and that it can withstand cold surely is not just coincidence.
Around August 15th through 18th there was a big fluffy of articles about Americold Melbourne covid cases getting genome sequenced.
I have yet to find anything explicitly saying the genomes were different to the B.1.1.1 strain in the outbreak here, but I think it's safe to assume that if the Melbourne cases were also B.1.1.1 we would have heard all about it.
Over the last thirty odd years we've seen that the profit motive always brings about the worst possible response and does not meet the needs of the community.
Tony Gibson again, "Their health is our number one concern." Sure it is, mate. Sure it is. This guy was an arsehole all through the strikes, and he's still an arsehole.
It's deja vu all over again, again: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/13/politics/pentagon-ufo-task-force/index.html
You can understand how distressing it must be when your top guns get left flat-footed all the time. Hard to be macho. The hormones just stop flowing.
Yeah, those camera flares are a serious national security threat.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-new-navy-ufo-videos.11234/
If US intelligence would only learn from random website entrepreneurs posing as tech expert theoreticians, instead of believing what defense personnel & hotshot pilots saw, everyone would live happily ever after… 👽
Hotshot pilots with a penchant for trolling those who want to believe.
Obviously pranksters get in on such acts. I recall some faking crop circles in the early '90s & impressing the media – but not the experts, who would point out the physical differences between the fakes and the real thing. So that's a red herring. Military authorities aren't ever likely to be fooled by time-wasters.
Military authorities aren't ever likely to be fooled by time-wasters.
I'm rendered utterly speechless by that statement, so I'll just spend a while basking in the gloriousness of the worldview that produced it.
Be my guest, but I'd go with gloriosity… 😎
"…the real thing." Oh Dennis, isn't your inner skeptic twitching, just a little?
I admire the creativity/artistry of some hoaxers, provided it’s all in good fun.
all crop circles are consistent with human causation
Seems like total crap to me. Written by the type of sceptic who is possessed by an inner ideological agenda. You know, the kind of person who is too lazy to check out evidence.
Not that I have. I just looked at the photos & read parts of the books at the time. So I arrived at an opinion based on pattern recognition. Neither true believer nor retard sceptic. Binary folk are ever so reluctant to categorise stuff into the maybe category, eh? That's due to being unable to conceive a third alternative.
Like me, a physics graduate, so he ought to have known better! We may be alone, we may not, so that third option exists until you collapse the wave function (via experimental detection).
"There are many theories about what creates crop circles, including aliens, mysterious vortices, time travelers and wind patterns, but they all lack one important element: good evidence. The only known cause of crop circles is humans. Perhaps one day a mysterious, unknown source will be discovered for crop circles, but until then perhaps they are best thought of as collective public art."
Radford, B. "Crop Circles Explained". LiveScience. [2017]
Like Radford, I’m all for keeping an open mind, but with past and present crop circle evidence pointing in one direction, we’ll have to agree to disagree re “total crap“.
" but not the experts, who would point out the physical differences between the fakes and the real thing "
There are no real crop circles. They are all man made
Incorrect.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/crop-circles-stoned-wallabies_n_916196
Never heard of Black Swans either?
Anticipating publication of another theory sometime soon: those crop circles in English fields that have been reported on & off since the Middle Ages (according to one researcher years ago) must have been done by wallabies travelling from Oz on ufos.
What bothered me was the perfect symmetry exhibited by the wheat stalks. Perhaps wallabies are capable of levitation? That would explain the lack of footprints within the circles. 🤩
Wallabies are not capable of levitation AFAIK but some birds are and then there is the flying squirrel, of course, which happened to be native to Europe and is nocturnal.
I've got a soft spot for flying snakes.
Cool!
I'd bet there's some really interesting aerodynamics going on. Maybe something like each loop of the undulations generating lift off a specific part of a vortex shed from the loop ahead.
First 'reported' by the BBC in June 2009; for ‘true believers‘ only – it's enough to make a "retard sceptic" weep (with laughter.)
We need more laughter in this world.
I hope you didn't think I included your good self in that categorisation! There's an immense difference between a sceptic with an open mind and one without, and, operating within the former category, I tend to see you as more likely to be in that camp.
Those wielding scepticism as an ideology are sufficiently robotic that you can read them from phraseology used, denial of existence of evidence, aversion to even looking for it, etc.
Phew, that's a relief
Curiosity & skepticism: a knockout combination for researchers IMO.
https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~rikblok/wiki/doku.php?id=science:the_curious_skeptic#curiosity_and_skepticism
“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
– Richard Feynman
Curiosity & scepticism are the foundation of and for all learning. Otherwise, we would still be living in grottos.
Mere conjecture. No proof offered.
Terence McKenna says it's the Japanese crop-circle tourists who make them; they're always there as soon as the circles appear (and before, nearby, waiting…) and act completely innocent when challenged. Cameras are the perfect excuse for being there and a lack of English language the perfect foil to interrogation. The precision of some of those crop-circles certainly points toward a culture of accuracy, elegance and attention to detail in the creators: the Japanese fit the bill!
Good theory. Levitating Japanese wallabies is even better tho. 🤩
" Mere conjecture. No proof offered."
It's you lacking the proof, sir. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it isn't up to me – you made the claim, you back it up
I wasn't aware that I was claiming anything, John, but I think upon re-reading what I wrote that I can see why you thought so.
So to clarify: my perception of the difference between the fakes and the real thing is derived from the researchers plus the photos in their books, but I probably was too loose in the phrasing.
This is merely my personal impression we're talking about. Nothing to do with objective fact. And I don't rely on any single source – I scan the field & get an overview, a technique I acquired long ago. So my opinion re authenticity is not an assertion in the way you read it. I'm sorry to have used real thing in a way that may have implied whatever, when I just meant `no evidence of fakery apparent'. To differentiate those from the obvious fakes!
You are assuming that pentagon (especially air arm) officials see no advantage in a perceived techological "gap" between the USA and an unidentified neer-peer adversary.
After all, 60-70 years ago the "missile gap" resulted in budget cuts, right? But that had claims that were demonstrably false. These videos, released without comment, make no claims other than the subjects weren't conclusively and individually identified. Like, whose balloon was it? Obviously it's unidentified.
No, I agree that budget capture is a thing, and the US military hierarchy are masters of the art. It would be fair enough to then classify the senators as suckers – unless you'd rather deem them scamsters (ie operating as agents for the military), but that is probably more feasible for those with military corporations in their home state.
Dude, I don't deem them to be anything.
The only thing I deem is that there is nothing particularly novel or interesting about those films – the release of the footage and lack of classification of the objects is not proof of aliens, nor is it proof of a funding conspiracy, nor is it proof of haoxers, nor does it indicate that the pentagon merely declassifies shit without comment because it wants to keep the tinfoil hats at arm's length.
The general indications of the videos and the debunkers and the alternative theories is that the explanations for the content of those videos are incredibly banal. Why would I care to know or speculate beyond that, other than to respond to some obscurantist stupidity posted here?
If I were in their shoes (US military decision-makers & their pr hire) I'd reassure the public by making obscure videos available too! Heaven forbid they'd ever release the good ones!!
Anyway the point of the posting is the oscillating tendency of the US military & govt to create official UFO investigation orgs, wind them up some years or decades later, then do it all again in a different form…
Really?
The new one seemed to be the subject of comment 10, but the point still seems to be elusive. Could you please express your point more clearly?
The news reported by CNN alerts us to a pattern of behaviour by the US military & govt: create official UFO investigations, terminate them a considerable time later, then recreate them in a somewhat different form some years after that.
Bureaucracy is like gardening – the well-tended plots have things come and go and regrow and pruning is done, preferably for the health of the plant rather than convoluted topiary.
Bureaucracy is like a tropical jungle, full of poisonous animals and plants (e.g. Triffid deskus), and easy to get lost in and die, never to be seen again.
There are those who prefer open lawns over native jungle or forest. But remember -heavily rolled and mown non-pastoral, decorative lawns were adopted by the powerful to demonstrate their power. 🙂
It's like a magic money tree.
Back when children did domestic chores every day, I received training from the patriarch & become proficient at pushing a mechanical mower around the lawn. Come the 1960s, we moved up-market & became fossil-fuel dependent local neighbourhood noise polluters.
Last year I told my neighbour I intend to eliminate my front lawn & gazed curiously at him to see how much he would freak out, but he rolled with it. Sam is cool. Electrical inspector & staunch Labour voter, but we shoot the breeze with political conversations often with no arguments. Maori but looks Greek patrician, talks more like a pakeha, and his property is immaculate!
So I get your point. Encultured control of nature is embedded as much as bureaucracy. I'm rewilding – but slowly enough to not spook the locals. My frogs have been in winter hibernation but have seen a couple medium-sized, almost black, moving now & then but not much. Wonder why they never croak (even in spring & summer)…
Rewilding, Dennis!?!
He nui te tautoko!
His voice betrayed no guile to my ears.
I used to see UFOs all the time in my garden until somebody pointed out to me that they were Tui.
A scout troup were on a camp over the hills to the East of Paraparaumu at Camp Waghorn I think. One of the tasks was to build some hot air balloons out of tissue paper and fuelled with methylated spirits on cotton wool. Launched at night they drifted westwards over Paraparaumu. They were sighted by excited townsfolk. Police notified. Reports of figures looking out of portholes and craft as big as two football fields. Certain eyewitnesses. Until the lads went home on Sunday PM. Cover blown.
Those balloons were box shaped about 600mm high.
The Yes vote will be high in Paraparaumu in the upcoming referendum, undoubtedly.
You have reminded me of the international ballyhoo over the UFO's seen in the night sky seaward of Kaikoura in 1978. Every now and them TV3 comes up with a re-run of the story, totally ignoring the explanation for the phenomena issued at the time by the Meteorological Service.
There was an intense anticyclone over the South Island and an inversion layer at about 2000 feet. On the surface and just beyond the 12 mile limit there was a Japanese fishing fleet. The lights from the fishing fleet was being reflected back at the point of the inversion layer as bright lights seemingly bobbing around the night sky. Sea must have been quite choppy.
Jeez what a fun grinch, Anne.
Do you go to play-centres and tell the kids Santa isn't real as well?
What I can't figure out is why we sceptics never see the paranormal. The Kaikoura episode with Blenheim pilot Bill Startup brings back Bruce Cathie's leylines and Harmonic 33, and a local woman Moreland who saw a UFO there in 1959.
Seriously, I can identify with the startling sight of something inexplicable but evident to the eyes. Earlier this year looking at the night sky and then seeing travelling lights in a straight line was freaky, until I looked up online what was happening with a series of satellites……….
The individual experiences are often explained via optical illusions. The mass simultaneous sightings are usually ignored by sceptics due to being too hard to dismiss via this method.
I recall reading once about one such in Taupo, that happened in the 1950s. Think it made the newspaper, but what impressed me was the sheer number of eyewitness accounts that all told the same story.
Re Cathie's theory, I couldn't get my head into it, so I share the sceptic's view. Ley lines in Britain I'm agnostic about. Since they have a fair bit of physical correlates from the megalithic era, not just a personal fantasy of some nutcase.
except 10.2.1 was literally a mass sighting addressed by sceptics. They tend to be hyper-examined these days – e.g. the "missile" off California was examined exhaustively.
What "mass sightings" of ufos have been ignored? A taupo one in the 1950s deserves to be added to wikipedia.
On a related note, a while back I saw a joke chart that purported to show the incidence of miracles – consistantly high until photography was invented, then low and flat until photoshop was invented when it spiked up again. Same sort of thing applies to UFOs, I reckon.
Funnily, this sceptic has never been even part of a mass sighting. I did, though, find out as a young student on a ouija board that I could very subtly spell out all sorts of messages. Nearly cost me a relationship when my girlfriend finally sussed what I was doing………
Something similar happened to me in my first year at university: a group of us tried the ouija method & got mixed results. Some gibberish yet some words spelt out. After we gave up my old school friend & current flatmate admitted to the group that he had been steering the pointer. Taught me that the spirit of (scientific) enquiry is always vulnerable to being trumped by jokers…
Worked night shifts off and on for thick end of 40 years including outside work, never seen anything not explained by science.
gsay Hah Lol
The plane that reported the Kaikoura UFO is now a cafe parked opposite the Blenheim Airport.
Several police officers were handing out free disposable masks at the Wellington station.
This is the way.
The red balloon over the harbour was a spectacle, they said.
Extremely upsetting to hear parent being part of the problem and spouting some very unpleasant Pasifika remarks with regards to the outbreak, and by extension, immigration in general. No amount of calling out and calmly challenging her thought process made any difference.
I'm more confused given she's a refugee herself, and is also disgusted by her father's anti-semetic views during the war when his Jewish neighbours were literally being carted off for extermination. It seems her own life experiences haven't produced tolerance. The only thing we seem to agree on is maybe it stems from her growing up in Australia at a time when racism/white superiority was actively encouraged and perhaps a bit of indoctrination that stuck.
Is there any point in continuing to reason with her?
build bridges and keep lines of communication open over time (if you can). Change doesn't have to happen in one conversation or debate, it can happen gradually, building on each previous discussion.
My experience in conservative communities was that keeping the relationship sound was just as important as any reasoning.
What does this comment relate to?
I took it to be about an offline conversation.
"Is there any point in continuing to reason with her?"
Only for as long as you have the energy to.
Can you please put up a link, we don't know what you are referring to.
Apologies, it was a phone conversation this morning so no link.
Just a shock my otherwise very liberal mother has an extremely racist streak
Offense is only ever offered, it is over to you if you want to take it.
Try looking at where you have commonalities.
Plus, it is yr Mum…different generations, different experiences, different expectations.
Tell her to criticise government policy, not people just trying to make a life for their families
41 Covid deaths in Melbourne today.
When worldometers is updated Australia's total deaths from Covid will be 652. The 'first wave' stopped at 102 so the July outbreak there has cost 550 lives so far.
Hawaii should be a major heads-up for us, too.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/30/hawaii-coronavirus-cautionary-tale-404564
Lazy sensationalist headline from the Herald.
…… the Victorian health department said Monday's deaths included 22 people who died in the weeks leading up to August 27 and were only reported to DHHS by aged-care facilities on Sunday.
Which is why it can be helpful to look at rolling (moving) averages such as 3- or 7-day average.
What was the headline? You haven't linked to it.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/424837/fight-to-protect-hamilton-s-rare-bats-heads-to-environment-court
Save those cute little bats, and their home territory for hundreds, thousands? of years, that nasty great humans are just preparing to rip away and colonise with their own kind.
That is such a familiar theme in our country – here in NZ where we like to say we are a developed, highly civilised country. But a query – what did we develop from and what, to? Have we been fooling ourselves – is there someone who can give a studied, balanced opinion out there (not Mike Hosking or others with their feet in the troughs out there overflowing with goodies that I've heard of)?
Why bother to save anything (sarc). Think how rich we could be by allowing what is unique to NZ die out and we are left with sparrows, Tahr, Wallibies, rabbits, rats etc
https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/118303821/housing-development-protects-long-tailed-bats-as-well-as-housing-people
I'm not into saving anything. Habitat restoration and pest free islands then leave the mainland (plus Rakiura and Te Waipounamu) to mother nature. Love chilling on a river bank smothered with blossoming broom, watching the hares skittering, quail coveying, trout dimpling.
Set the wilding-pines free!
Police evasiveness, facial-recognition cameras, No Right Turn.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/424845/police-setting-up-9m-facial-recognition-system-which-can-identify-people-from-cctv-feed
http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2020/08/if-police-think-this-is-lawful-and.html
Bit of a non thing IMHO.
Places like SkyCity use it already, so if it helps the cops catch bad people who cares?
Maybe the people who get affected when the system is misused?
SkyCity is at Victoria Street, it is not Victoria Street. In other words, your comment contains a false equivalence.
Maybe.
And maybe I am just a drone, willing to be lead.
But I don't really see it as different from finger prints, and DNA records from crim's
They actually have to know who you are for the thing to work.
No maybe, ifs or buts. SkyCity is a private business with restrictions and not a public place as such. There are also CCTVs operating in prisons, which is an equally flawed comparison for this discussion. You are diverting, and this may be accidental, but now I have pointed it out to you, you have a conscious choice.
Apologies.
I was meaning the facial recognition.
The CCTV bit is irrelevant as they are every where
Yes, what about it?
Let me put it another way.
Ignore my point about SkyCity using facial recognition.
I just don't have an issue with the police using facial recognition if it catches bad people.
Yes, there may one or two cases of people using it for bad things, but the same could be argued for police having access to vehicle owners personal details from number plates at the push of a few buttons.
Ok, thanks.
Matching vehicle ownership for licensing purposes, for example, is not quite the same as biometrics identification (and authorisation?), is it? A better comparison would be the use of fingerprints or the publication of photos taken in public.
It really helps to very clearly articulate the issue before launching (into) debate.
Well I have a lot of issues with nasty little authoritarian tribes like the cops running around and spying on people going about their normal daily business. What about the taking of photos at demo's – then later using these to discriminate against certain classes of people. Where are these cameras going to be and will there be a bias towards younger and lower skilled people being photographed.
As to catching bad people – they would need to CCTV far more executive workplaces , clubs , the roads to coromandel baches and exclusive restaurants to catch the real crooks who prey on society.
Then the traffic enforcement side – the costs of licences, rego's etc has soared compared to minimal wages and benefits. Little wonder that otherwise law abiding citizens slither around in not so legal cars – the costs are beyond them. If the legalise dope goes through then there is whole areas of enforcement that will no longer be needed. Looks like cops are going for some job protection there.
RedBaronCV
From my limited understanding of dealing with them. And it is pretty limited apart from someone trying to sell it,
It is anywhere where the cameras are up to spec' to be good enough to pick up the details needed visually by the software, used on the servers which controls the network of cameras.
Ie your average old camera from the 90s is probably a bit screwed, but new ones on the main black spots like Courtney Place where there are drunken fights or same sort of places in Auckland would probably be ok.
And obviously the thing looking at the cameras needs access two the visual in real time or it is a bit pointless, so public ones in this case.
Thank you for confirming my point. and no we do not need the attempted distraction of the type of camera.
Clearly your idea of a camera set up to catch a "bad guy" boils down to a public camera for low level street drug deals, some public drunkenness and a forgot to rego the car moment.
How about a few cameras that catch high income males in cafes assaulting female wait staff, issuing warrants to search journalists homes and insinuating to third parties that said journalists are being looked at for criminal reasons all of which turned out to be blatantly untrue. Street camera's won't catch the real crooks of society they will just be used to intimidate lawful people going about their lawful business.
Sorry RBC, but think we might have to agree to disagree on this one.
An example. Some piece of scum king hits some innocent down Courtney Place, and does a runner.
The dude/dudette king hit smashes their head into the ground while falling and dies.
If all the police have is footage of the scums face, I would prefer them to be able to identify them as easily as possible.
Apologies, my comment on real time, was probably a bit too short sighted after thinking about it more.
What if the cops become bad people and set out to catch good people. It is important to try and care about surveillance, loss of personal freedom if you are commenting on a leftish blog Chris T.
If we are going to do hypotheticals I can come up with doozys
What if [name deleted; against TS policy] got away that day and the to catch him was through facial CCTV facial recognition?
Look I agree there will be bad cops like in every other profession, and a couple may even take advantage of it, that is a security issue for the police, but they already have way more access to private info' through other methods like vehicle registration etc, tracing phone movements with a warrant, to the point that I really can't see facial recognition making a difference to privacy.
If they start talking about bugging peoples phones and planting tracking devices on peoples cars I would be concerned. But this. Not really.
It is happening all over the world as part of policing, in airports, casinos as mentioned earlier etc (Yes I know these aren't public places)
[Some hypotheticals are just a bad idea – Incognito]
See my Moderation note @ 9:01 PM.
Fair call
I apologise
Again you confirm that there is far too much access by cops to private data in an unregulated way already. And the few bad cops – get real we have a continuing trickle of stories roast busters, Hager and other journalists, computer hacking investigations, illegal traffic stops to get information, tooling up and running around doing traffic stops like they are in a war zone and that's just what we know about .. that's just more than the odd bad egg it's a systemic problem that needs dealing with.
Nor is it correct to conflate such things as phone hacking which should need a warrant to the unrestricted unsupervised collection of public data using facial recognition of citizens doing absolutely nothing wrong as they go about their lawful daily lives.
and yes a lot of stuff is collected in non public spaces and again should we be ruling more fully against some of this.
Just remember the police work for us as a society not for some right wing authoritarian clique.
I like No Right Turn – it often has interesting information that is picked up much later by other media, but at other times it is frustrating in its blatant partisanship:
http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2020/08/climate-change-this-government-is.html
National often claims that the government has failed because an element of party policy put forward before the election has not been achieved and that this represents a failure of government – and the policy is of course always represented as a promise, so according to National it is a "broken promise." We know that a three party government does require compromises, but these do not always represent failure by the party or party that wants something to happen; it may represent a ''victory" for the third party. Also of course there are some policies which are overtaken by events (covid for example?) or where other priorities mean something gets lower than desired priority.
In this case NRT is talking about a "failure'' by the Green Party and Labour – not a failure of government. We need to remember this going into an election campaign; we collectively get what we collectively vote for…
Sadly NRT does not accept comments – fair enough as far as the time it clearly takes on The Standard to keep discussion civil and weed out the nutters; but for a blog that clearly supports some Green policies to blame the government for the need for consensus that is a fundamental part of that government is somewhat short sighted – despite problems I believe that a smaller party like the Green Party does have legitimate views; I do not want voters to think that it is only worth voting for Labour or National.
IS at NRT used to accept comments a long time ago. He shut it down because he prefers to write rather than deal with the ignorant dipshits who used to write most of the comments. I think that he stopped about 2006 or 7
It was pity because the comments were often as good as the posts.
A terrible look for Judith Collins here. Corrupt husband and chief Kauri stump digger David Wong tung has taken to posting misogynist memes about the Prime Minister.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/08/judith-collins-responds-to-criticism-of-husband-david-wong-tung-s-anti-jacinda-ardern-social-media-posts.html
She says she can’t do anything about it but in reality she endorses this behaviour.
Should be worth at least 50K votes for JA. Keep it up David.
While I don't really think it is that clever, I am missing where the misogynist bit is.
Have you seen some of the Collin's and Bridge's ones?
You are well known for not recognising misogyny. One clue is in the use of the name "Cindy" which minimises and trivialises the PM, and all women, really.
Also worrying for Collins is the second one retweeted there by her apparently unruly husband is watermarked “the BFD” which is Slater’s vehicle. He set it up after claiming he had a stroke in order to avoid paying his debtors from the failed WOBF.
Collins has had a cosy relationship with Slater through the years, using him to conduct Dirty Politics. That relationship also contributed to her fall from grace and generally highlighted her and her husband’s corrupt nature.
Seems Mr Wong tung is still an avid reader…
Something tells me Ardern is tough enough to not get offended by a stupid nickname, or needs people getting offended on her behalf.
Same as Crusher, or does that not count as misogynistic for some reason?
Or Soymun Brudges. Which I assume is misandrist.
It's actually less IMO about Jacinda Ardern who just gets one vote & given a raft of slights that most of the public have not had to witness, and would be rightly appalled by, this is how the public will view the LOTO. Regardless of her trying to dismiss it & perhaps suggesting NZers can't "take a joke" or a bit of levity it goes to the core of showing two faces to the public, one that's relatively benign and the other that is a relationship with a nasty and dismissive view of wider NZ
You have to wonder about the intellect…feeding the base has its limitations…they can only vote once
But What About Judith's personal responsibility for the poor personal choice of 41 years ago? Isn't that what the RW says to single mothers struggling to bring up the kids? They made a poor personal choice to have kids with someone so need to be pounded by the right?
Could you imagine the uproar if first bloke was doing anything like this? but he's far too sensible.
Yea seen that. This from ODT. Photo …a right pair. The dodgy duo.
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/decision-2020/collins-husband-criticised-sharing-anti-ardern-memes
Yuk, the face matches his personality.
The husband of Judith Collins is actually posting childish rubbish which one would think came from an immature 14 year old boy.
Collins shrugs and claims she can't do anything about it. This is an admission she endorses it. If she felt it was damaging she could say to her husband, "you are hurting my career, please stop". But she won't because she doesn't believe he is hurting her career.
Or, she told him to stfu and he didn't and it's better for her to make light of it in public. Her husband sounds like a total dick, and her point about not being able to control him seems potentially true.
Do you really think Collins would be genuinely concerned about what her husband's doing and would ask him to stop?
place yourself in his position and ask yourself the same question…do you wish your partner to succeed in his/her ambition?
if it was harming her election campaign, yes.
from the reporting it would appear he disagrees
yep.
But it's not so she won't.
Bring it on. The more he tweets the more the election will be a referendum on Judith Collins' relationship with her husband. If she can't control him, how can she control a cabinet?
It's probably mission accomplished now, getting the internet traffic through that toxic slater-esque website. Dirty politics john key style.
I guess he's fair game then.
If she can't even manage her husband she won't be much use as PM. Don't their billboards state "strong leadership" ?
"strong" ties to their puppet masters,
"leadership" in the game of dirty politics
" If you’ve got the secret to how you control a man who is 64 years old, used to play a lot of rugby and was a policeman, good luck and let me know,” Judith said.
Shudder…..
Yep. Screams male dominance and domestic abuse. And it screams even louder she is accepting of it.
That needs to go to the media.
Are you accusing Collin's husband of domestic abuse against her Muttonbird?
No. I am accusing her of trivialising domestic abuse in order to deflect and for political purposes.
That she would suggest the prospect is pretty gross.
OK
Point out where she is suggesting it.
Hint…… it's not about control, but Judith doesn't get that.
"“He is one of the least sexist men I know, he is married to me, how could he be sexist?” Collins said."
“He is an adult, he will make his own decisions and let’s put it this way, I don't have to answer for him because I have not been able to control him in 41 years."
These 2 claims are contradictory, Judith.
It's juvenile behaviour from the husband of the Leader of the Opposition.
Rebutting Chris Trotter's analysis of Winston Peters:
Misreading the Sorcerer's Apprentice
as usual neither party is correct…..id suggest both are writing to a desired outcome….and as time passes both will become increasingly unlikely
The green school saga get worst, funding conspiracy theorist and new age crystal moonbeams
Spring tomorrow, full moon the day after. Life is good.
"Spring is sprung, the grass is riz." and in the river and on its banks at the foot of my garden there are nests which produce cygnets and ducklings, little kawau and pukeko, tiny scaup and paradise shelducks, so I know 'where the birdies is." Life is indeed good.
Full moon as far as I can see tonight. 21 degrees today in Gisborne on the last day of winter. First day of chafing for me.
Why don't I think of myself as a manual worker? Yet by all measures I am for 34 years. I feel I'm posturing since I'm middle class and my real life is in my head.