Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:24 am, December 10th, 2020 - 18 comments
Categories: boris johnson, International, national, politicans, Politics, same old national, uk politics
Tags: economist, politik
There are the odd occasions when you find a political opinion that is a joy to read and quite revealing. This morning whilst reading the Economist, I read a Bagehot column – "Tidying Boris Up". Despite my almost total lack of interest in the UK from this …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:10 am, December 9th, 2020 - 16 comments
Categories: covid-19, Environment, health, science, tourism
Tags: air travel crisis, geology, pandemic
Wikipedia describes the last super-continent as Pangaea or Pangea (/pænˈdʒiːə/[1]) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras.[2][3] It assembled from earlier continental units approximately 335 million years ago, …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:00 pm, December 4th, 2020 - 38 comments
Categories: jacinda ardern, Politics
Tags: colin james
There is a public meeting in Wellington on Monday evening from the Fabians – which is also conveniently being streamed via Youtube and accessible by Zoom. It features Colin James on his recent "Beyond Jacinda" following up on his prescient pre-election …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:22 am, November 30th, 2020 - 25 comments
Categories: australian politics, climate change, Environment, science, uncategorized
Tags: bushfires, electricity, electricity market, pumped hydro
Australia is likely to have less of an issue with raging bush fires this year. La Niña is likely to give a break to the droughts with a wetter East Coast. Doesn't stop record heatwaves as is happening at present. Means that there are more grass fires than…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:52 am, November 9th, 2020 - 45 comments
Categories: Economy, exports, immigration, International
Tags:
Liam Dann @ NZ Herald is reporting (paywalled) "Historic wave of returning Kiwis has just begun – new expat survey". The press release from KEA is here. The results of the survey are here. I'd just comment that this survey is effectively self-selected and…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 6:54 am, November 8th, 2020 - 92 comments
Categories: Donald Trump, International, us politics
Tags:
At last. All of the main US media organisations have now called the election for for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – including Fox News. Pennsylvania with its 20 electorate votes went past the 0.5% to Biden and the lead shows no signs of reducing. It …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:46 pm, November 6th, 2020 - 33 comments
Categories: Politics, referendum
Tags: cannabis
One of the other results from the final results on was the reeferendum. The loss was minuscule in the final results. Cannabis race tightened While the non-binding referendum on legalising recreational cannabis was still lost on the final count, the margin…
Written By: notices and features - Date published: 6:05 am, November 5th, 2020 - 155 comments
Categories: democracy under attack, us politics
Tags: US election 2020
…. Edited above (weka 8.24am) lprent: 0651 Catching up on this…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:45 am, November 1st, 2020 - 49 comments
Categories: act, Dirty Politics, greens, labour, national, nz first, political parties, Politics, same old national
Tags: red dwarf, rimmer
I liked the process for the Greens and Labour agreement. From Labour's side after this election it was logically completely unnecessary, except maybe under some weird scenarios. Bearing in mind the election result for Labour, these scenarios involved …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:44 am, October 30th, 2020 - 39 comments
Categories: election 2020, political parties, Politics
Tags: federated farmers
There has been a rather patronising meme running in recent weeks that voters who previously voted National did so because they wanted to make sure Labour didn't want the Greens to be in government. I was rather amused by this when reading the post-…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 7:54 pm, October 28th, 2020 - 8 comments
Categories: Donald Trump, International
Tags: Hacking
Had to laugh, albeit with a resigned anger, when I saw this in my emails today This afternoon, the official Trump campaign website was hacked and defaced. We have examined the site configuration and possible intrusion vectors, and our team has published …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:59 pm, October 16th, 2020 - 50 comments
Categories: election 2020, elections, Politics, The Standard
Tags:
There are some rules around Election day material on a website like ours. This rule applies to websites and social media Don’t post anything to social media or a website on election day that could influence voters. Also make sure your profile pictures on …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:51 pm, September 29th, 2020 - 56 comments
Categories: national, nz first, political parties, Politics, winston peters
Tags: SFO
The SFO has put out a press release a few days before overseas voting starts. This was in They have not laid charges against NZ First or anyone in it – excluding comprehensively…. It isn't… …a Minister, sitting MP, or candidate in the upcoming …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:41 am, September 2nd, 2020 - 16 comments
Categories: Financial markets, internet, Media, The Standard
Tags: banks, denial of service, metservice, stuff
Along with the grey weather, the weather around our local net is downright annoying at present. There are a massive increase in attempts to break into this site via backend systems and brute force front-end logins, a surge in scans from the search engine …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:48 pm, August 28th, 2020 - 34 comments
Categories: climate change, Environment, science
Tags: agriculture, antarctica, greenland, IPCC, WAIS
For the last 30 years, earth scientists have been warning that Greenland was nearing a tipping point into complete disintegration. Now authors of a new study published in Nature "Dynamic ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet driven by sustained glacier …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:00 am, August 18th, 2020 - 28 comments
Categories: election 2020, jacinda ardern, Media, The Standard
Tags:
One of the characteristics of a political blog in New Zealand is the way that our operations reflect the political cycle. Coming into an election after mid-year, we have a steadily increasing level of traffic, posts, and comments. Moderators, commenters …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 6:59 pm, August 17th, 2020 - 25 comments
Categories: election 2020, Politics
Tags:
Over at No Right Turn, Idiot Savant points out the following about the month delay in the election when talking about the parliamentary implications (my bold). Parliament will now resume on Tuesday, though it has a pretty light Order Paper. Most of its …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:15 am, August 17th, 2020 - 11 comments
Categories: election 2020, elections, jacinda ardern, Politics
Tags: voters
At 10am Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will announce her decision on the election date. This will be done in the light about what is currently known about the current covid-19 outbreak. That is her decision alone and is constrained by the parliamentary …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:14 pm, August 11th, 2020 - 48 comments
Categories: covid-19, health, jacinda ardern
Tags: ashley bloomfield, level 2, level 3, lock down
Just been reading the NZ Herald. "Covid 19 coronavirus: Auckland in lockdown, rest of country in level 2 – Four cases of community transmission". Four cases of community transmission from the same family – presumably without an obvious cause. Lock down …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:48 pm, August 2nd, 2020 - 33 comments
Categories: Andrew Little, election 2020, greens, jacinda ardern, labour, national, Politics, Simon Bridges, todd muller, uncategorized
Tags: micheal cullen
Three years ago I wrote a post "Ok, I’m pissed off with the Labour caucus again. Time to switch". While I am still totally surprised at just how successful Jacinda Ardern has been at pulling both the country and the Labour caucus together, I am absolutely…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:49 am, July 28th, 2020 - 40 comments
Categories: australian politics, covid-19, Economy, health, International
Tags: canada, north korea, pandemic, quarantine, somalia, student protests, universities, USA, WHO
Earlier this month, I saw a Reuters article that had the snag paragraphs (my bold). That was written on July 17th and based on stats up to July 13th. (Reuters) – Global coronavirus infections passed 14 million on Friday, according to a Reuters tally, …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:30 am, July 24th, 2020 - 23 comments
Categories: China, covid-19, Environment, International, science
Tags: The Economist, vietnam
One of the things that has been obvious about COVID-19 from the start has been that it is very well adapted to humans. It has evolved a good entry system to the human airways, is often has mild symptoms, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:00 am, July 23rd, 2020 - Comments Off on Post:Authorised by me
Categories: blogs, election 2020, Politics, The Standard
Tags:
Last night, a bit late I know, I finally perused the June 2020 Third Party handbook put out by the Electoral Commission. This morning I activated my authorisation notice for the site. You can see it at the bottom of any post and on the desktop site at …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:14 am, July 14th, 2020 - 98 comments
Categories: Amy Adams, Judith Collins, national, same old national, Simon Bridges
Tags:
I realise that National probably won't appreciate my advice. However I actually would like to have a viable competent opposition. I don't even want an election to be as much of a pushover as this one is likely to be. If I was a stalwart National supporter…
Written By: mickysavage - Date published: 8:15 am, July 14th, 2020 - 181 comments
Categories: national, Simon Bridges, todd muller, uncategorized
Tags:
…. Time to bring back Simon? lprent: Stuff: Todd Muller resigns as…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:05 am, July 13th, 2020 - 49 comments
Categories: Dirty Politics, national, political parties, Politics, same old national
Tags: ethics, pundit, tim watkin
There is a particularly resonant piece by Tim Watkin in Pundit. "National's problem with privacy and privilege". I'm only surprised that he seems to think that the National party is at all redeemable. Personally I think he is somewhat to charitable. I …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:58 am, July 9th, 2020 - 53 comments
Categories: Economy, uncategorized
Tags: electricity, electricity prices, invercargill, NZAS, southland
New Zealand was always a odd place to have a aluminium smelter. The only natural advantage we had was a untapped hydroelectricity capacity at the bottom of the world. Thousands of kilometers from raw material sources. Tens of thousands of kilometers from …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:52 am, July 6th, 2020 - 99 comments
Categories: climate change, covid-19, Economy, Environment, jacinda ardern, Politics, science, todd muller
Tags: audrey young, herald
Audrey Young's take in Granny Herald to Jacinda Arden's weekend speech was interesting. "No ordinary Labour speech by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern". Centring an election campaign on recent tragedies may seem like a potential problem for Prime Minister …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:31 pm, June 28th, 2020 - 19 comments
Categories: Dirty Politics, john key, Judith Collins, Media, politicans, Politics, The Standard
Tags: andrea vance, cameron slater, jason ede, kiwiblog, matthew hooton, whaleoil
I've just been reading Andrea Vance's "The brutal business of politics: Judith Collins discusses memoir, John Key, David Bain, and being a survivor", a review of Judith Collin's released biography. One thing that usually infuriates me is whining arseholes…
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