I’m not sure what I’m doing
FFS!
Exclusive: National planning its own medicinal cannabis Bill
Newshub can reveal National is planning a massive broadside aimed at taking down Labour’s medicinal cannabis Bill.The Government thinks it’s got them on side, but tomorrow the Opposition is not only withdrawing its support, it’s doubling down and introducing its own more comprehensive Bill legalising medicinal cannabis.
Newshub understands National’s Bill will include a medicinal cannabis identification card issued by doctors, like those used in parts of the US.
National says its Bill is so much more comprehensive and thought out that it will split the Government, with Mr Bridges saying it’s “definitely possible” the Greens and New Zealand First could support it.
David Clark has screwed this up by being spineless and weak with the legislation. Labour are such cowards on cannabis reform they are going to get embarrassed by National stealing their thunder.
Too many clowns, not enough circus.
You get better than this right Carmel?
Then there’s Welfare Minister Carmel Sepuloni with her ridiculously weak ‘welfare reforms’. She’s seriously proclaiming great change from the sadists who run MSD that now because two people need to sign off on welfare sanctions is somehow a great step forward…
Figures released today show benefit sanctions fell 21.8 per cent in the last year, from 15,619 to 12,214. The biggest fall was in people being penalised for failing to attend an appointment. The number of people having their payment suspended for failing to prepare or participate in work also fell.
…so MSD have been suspending welfare for bullshit reasons like someone missing an appointment and they want a pat on the back? What about the 21.8% of people being suspended unfairly before that? What about the nearly 80% who are still being suspended for draconian reasons?
“We’re 21.8% less cruel than our predecessors” isn’t really the bread and roses we were promised is it?
Don’t worry, NZ is carbon neutral by 2050
The there’s the pathetic Carbon Zero by 2050 bullshit legislation.
By 2030, over 50% of the oceans will be collapsing as bio-habitats.
By 2030, East Coast cities in the U.S. can expect to see two to three-times as many flooding incidents.
By 2030, 122million will be driven into extreme poverty as  direct result of climate change.
By 2030, 100million will die as a direct consequence of climate change.
By 2030, even if the Paris Agreement is actually implemented, we will see a planet warm to 3.4 degrees by the end of this century meaning there will effectively be no future civilisation capable of surviving on a planet that warm.
By 2030, the global annual cost of global warming will be $3trillion.
By 2030, the number of extremely hot days — classified as maximum temperatures of more than 35C — are tipped to climb in all capital cities.
But don’t fret, NZ might be carbon neutral twenty years after all this has happened.
YAY!
When Jacinda called climate change our generations nuclear free moment she was right, but to date we aren’t seeing, “I can smell the uranium in your breath” moral certainty, we are seeing, “I can smell the garlic on your breath downwind from a garlic eating competition” hesitant cowardice.
Cannabis reform, welfare culture reform and climate change – if this is the best Labour and the Greens can muster to central issues of the Left, they need to be replaced because this crap is window dressing, it isn’t leadership.
Yes James Shaw is not the best at pushing the ‘climate change button’ very far is he.
Second place looser should be Minister of Broacasting Clare Curran as she has done so much damage to our voices for change.
She she should be fired for harbouring the ‘right wing’ inside all of our public service media platfoms now, and leaving us without a TV media platform to send our message of change needed here.
Agree re the welfare reform so far- too timid. A question I have about the fall in sanctions and the new policy of having two people to sign off for a benefit sanction is why was there no oversight before? What is the oversight and monitoring of front line staff process?
Susan, I think it’s KPI focused, a numbers rather than substance game.
It was computer generated remember. Billy put it on a cake and eat it.
Oh, come on, Martyn, you are not losing ‘hope’ on the government, are you? Better wait until all those working groups come back with their reports and ‘feedback’.
There’s nothing wrong with doing some research before you make a decision, in fact it’s idiotic to do otherwise, the problem is the decisions themselves.
My big concern about a Labour government was that they would do nothing more than soften the harsh edges of neliberalism and here they are doing pretty much that.
Sometimes I think it would have been better to have 3 more years of incompetence and corruption from National by which point most of the country would have been crying out for real change. Instead we could end up with 9 years of cringing Labour nothingness at which point everyone will hate them and take no notice of National’s policies in the rush to get a new government.
You won’t get nine years of Labour, not with the way things are developing at present, you will have a return of a Nat led government, with a VENGEANCE, and beneficiaries better get their blankets and emergency rations ready, if they have any, they will face an even worse onslaught than what the Nats did in 2013.
Labour and Greens should have stood back, let Nats deal with NZ First and their demands, and let it take its course, but they were so desperate to increase their salaries and perks and to get into government also, the Labour MPs, so they will be punished into the wilderness for another two to three terms at least, and that will mean HELL for those that need an alternative government.
And it is just the beginning:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/22/heatwave-northen-hemisphere-uk-algeria-canada-sweden-whats-the-cause
Indeed, just the beginning.
Just wait till all the summer sea ice in the Arctic region has all melted; unless something really unexpected happens that will be before 2025.
Once the ice has gone, all the energy currently absorbed by the seas in the Arctic region will manifest as increase in temperature (as opposed to much of it manifesting as phase change and the temperature not rising). In old units, 80 calories raises the temperature of 1g of water by 80oC as opposed to changing 1g of ice at 0oC into 1g of water at 0oC. That is elementary physics that politicians and their so-called technical advisors continue to ignore -at everyone’s peril.
In practice there won’t be small amounts of water rising by 80oC but large amounts of water rising by a few degrees, substantially changing the entire heat redistribution system of the Earth a lot more than it has already been changed.
three-way tie ?
But we will be human generated carbon free by 2050, actually even with no humans, our carbon production will go on for many years despite extinction, we done good.
Martyn, if you want to have hope you have to abandon politics.
Politicians are not there to solve problems: they are there to manage the economy and keep the human ‘livestock’ deceived and deluded.
Part of their strategy is to provide the populace with false hope (as demonstrated by National’s ‘Better brighter future’ nonsense, even as they made everything worse); hence the totally unrealistic polices relating to climate change and energy, and practically everything else.
Here is the latest example of the government throwing away taxpayers money on something that will never work and if it did would exacerbate the long-term predicament:
https://www.interest.co.nz/business/94953/hydrocarbons-hydrogen-what-govts-investing-help-nz-transition-low-carbon-economy-wake
Just in case there is any doubt, hydrogen is not an energy source and has to be made at substantial cost and substantial chemical inefficiency. In other words it is a way to lose substantial amounts of energy. Not only that, hydrogen is extremely difficult o store and extremely difficult and dangerous to transport. This has been known for decades, centuries even!
Converting natural gas into hydrogen is about the stupidest thing one can do with it. The whole project as a rort, which is probably why the government is pouring money into it..
Hydrogen as an energy source is fine if you make it from water. That would be truly “carbon neutral”, assuming that the electrolysis of the water molecule is done via non-carbon energy sources (e.g. nuclear, solar or wind). Unfortunately it’s not very energy efficient compared to steam-reforming of methane, which is why the industry tends to favour that method.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming
‘assuming that the electrolysis of the water molecule is done via non-carbon energy sources (e.g. nuclear, solar or wind).’
Either your unscientific narrative is based on gross ignorance of simple chemistry or you are just being argumentative for the sake of being argumentative.
To construct a nuclear reactor requires humungous quantities of concrete and steel, both of which require the emission of huge amounts of CO2 in their manufacture. Then there are all the other materials that go towards the construction -all of them having a CO2 debt to varying extents. To mine and refine uranium requires huge inputs of fossil fuels, as does handling spent uranium (or any other product of nuclear reactors). Nuclear reactors are therefore not carbon neutral.
Likewise, the construction of ‘solar and wind’ energy converters requires the mining, transportation, refining and chemical reduction of ores, and the transport of the finished article to the site….all of which require fossil fuel inputs and all of which result in a carbon dioxide debt. And then there is the maintenance and replacement.
Wind and solar are therefore not carbon neutral.
Carbon neutrality is a scam, a myth conjured up by neuro-linguistic programmers to brainwash the gullible and the uninformed.
Have you ever carried out electrolysis of water, Nitrium? I have, dozens of times. So maybe I might just know what is involved
Making hydrogen from water results in a net loss of energy. It is therefore a dumb strategy when a nation (in fact the whole world) is running our of energy.
The ONLY sustainable energy system is one based on carbohydrates generated by naturally by photosynthesis. A complex society in population overshoot and over-reliant on technology will not function on available carbohydrate. Hence the atmospheric CO2 is ‘doomed’ to rise inexorably until civilisation crashes as a consequence of excess atmospheric CO2 and/or depletion of resources.
By the way, if a hydrogen economy were viable we would have one right now. In practice hydrogen was largely abandoned in the 1930s for the reasons I have given above.
Those climate change stories show how utterly fruitless it is focussing on zero carbon, taxing and sending our cash overseas into the ether. We really should be spending it on preparing for a changing world and finding ways to adapt to it. That at least might produce results that benefit our descendants.
so sad really, after the heat comes the snow, carbon builds up it the atmosphere, blocks the sunlight, then ICE age ppl, the earth goes though these cycles of heat and cold… so enjoy the gobal warming becuase the ICE age is really gonna suck bad.
Under our system a politician’s first job is to get themselves re-elected, which is why there won’t be any adequate leadership on global warming.
The policy work shouldn’t be on lowering GHGs – we’re already screwed on that front – but how the hell we’re going to keep out the hordes that will be heading our way given that we are ranked as one of the few countries to be least affected by global warming.
The big question at the moment is whether the ‘heatwaves’ that have been affecting much of the Northern Hemisphere will continue or not.
A reversal of recent weather patterns would allow some kind of ‘return to normality’ (bearing in mind present living arrangements are an aberration); continuation of recent weather patterns would be indicative of a radically different climate regime (abrupt climate change) and would throw the world economy into a tailspin as food supplies diminish.
Presumably, as you suggest, those with the ready cash would stampede to places such as NZ, which are perceived as safer.
‘The picture is the same across much of Britain, as the long, hot spell of the last two months has made the first half of this summer, from the beginning of June to mid-July, the driest in the UK since records began.’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/25/british-farmers-fear-fire-as-heatwave-creates-tinderbox
Martyn – Why are you bagging our own government? This will be picked by the right wing bloggers as you have lost faith in this government. I think they are doing the best they can managing NZ First and Greens.L
I find that kind and over compensating makes for flaky loonies that are easily shook out of a movement. No one can micromanage every talking point but we can can harden them up. it’s been along time since ministers where approachable so just say thanks.
The truth must be spoken, and if progressives deny or hide the truth, this will one day lead to them being punished worse at the ballot boxes than they have been over the last few elections in 2008 to 2014.
Labour manages two allies that are hard to balance, and it must be feared that the coalition and support agreements will not last, maybe not even until 2020.
So better prepare for the time after then, and speak the truth. Criticising the government where it is deserved is the correct thing to do, to remain trustworthy. So Martyn is right on what he wrote above.
How do you deal with National voters, I wonder, are they ok and to be excused, and is selfishness and division the rule and modus operandi we need to get used to, or is there more shit going on, that needs cleaning out?
Gutless spineless labour. And their supporters I see reading the comments section as well.
Or this is not what was said before the election on medical cannabis, so lying scumbags is what we can add to the accusations as well.
Back to one term labour governments.
Why do you keep using that photo of Jacinda looking peeved with Carmel?
and repeating the minimalist improvements for beneficiaries? Surely it’s all these appalling problems that go back on election promises that we should be pointing to the PM to deliver on. She’s the leader and she should shake up her team and lead. Make demands on her Martyn, you let her off the hook because you’re still besotted with her.
We should be testing all our politicians to demonstrate they can’t fix our problems and persuade people that there is no parliamentary solution. Ultimately, we the people can organise to achieve a society of the people, for the people.
What is distressing about the following headline report on the Guardian is not that climate change (planetary overheating) is impacting severely right now (and will get much worse) but that all those who warned we would end up in this dire predicament if we did not alter the way society functioned were ignored for decades -indeed their efforts to stimulate public debate were systematically sabotaged by politicians and bureaucrats.
What is more, despite the dire predicament humanity is in, there is still no workable plan to disengage from fossil fuel use and all government policies (here in NZ and elsewhere) are geared to economic growth and INCREASED CO2 emissions.
NZ politicians (all parties) are worse than ‘hopeless’: they actively sabotage the welfare of the populace.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/27/extreme-global-weather-climate-change-michael-mann
So true!
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