The Daily Blog Open Mic – Friday – 14th February 2020

1. Homelessness – under neo liberalism it is just another business opportunity not now a government priority to provide intelligent, cost-effective, and kindly housing for people.

   Looking at the list of people on a government panel one wonders what salary they receive individually for their roles on this one body, and then their total intake. And then what the total of that would be for the whole group. There’s money in them human bundles roaming the streets and by-ways!

   And the global effect of free markets and the malign economics that go with it; the koolaid that our politicians have sucked up, and the entrenched economic policies and truthies connected to neo liberalism have us roped body and soul, bound hand and foot. But it has made an employment sector for international flyers to come in, not controlled by biosecurity though they ought to be, and they settle into the body politic, eg Scott Figenshow holds a Master of Arts in Urban Planning from UCLA. (From 2014 – Thursday,15May Scott Figenshow, Director, Community Housing Aotearoa: Achieving 20 percent by 2020: How is it going to happen?
   University of Auckland

   The latest government decision seems fair, that those remaining after seven days in emergency housing are to be charged 25% of their weekly income.
   The Government has agreed to a rule change for it to only pay the full cost of the emergency accommodation it provides, for the first seven days. After that, tenants will need to start paying the equivalent of 25% of their incomes – be that from wages or benefits.
   https://www.interest.co.nz/property/103636/stay-7-days-then-pay-government-start-charging-emergency-housing-recipients%C2%A0rent

   There is a lot of money going into this sector; why not have part of it including building apprenticeships for the beneficiaries who want and can manage them? Everything is top-down at present. There is life stirring at the grassroots level though. Enable it to flourish you planners, not just fit a plan to your own narrow and biased concepts of what the strugglers are.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/409432/government-announces-300m-homelessness-action-plan
   Though this sounds promising:
   $20m to work with Māori to prevent homelessness, expand housing supply delivered by Māori
   To speed up the work – why not have another fund with the same object for Pacifica, and another for Pakeha.
   Have weekly communication between the actual members of the working groups through their cellphones, (with a request for no slagging off, or sexist language) so they are all up to date with progress, advising on things of difficulty, tips for how they got over that, and building a supportive and co-operative environment through those reports to each other.

   This approach would be intended to be positively supportive, and if this didn’t happen, it would be an opportunity to see how their minds worked to prevent positive outcomes and interactions with each other. Often it is the ingrained attitudes of people that prevent them from changing their lives when they want to improve their ‘lot’. Assertiveness training in clear thinking instead of resorting to aggressiveness would take many a long way. The building work would be only part of their personal growth.

   We have in NZ to think our way out of our problems, the mess that we have at the end of the 20th century. Two decades on we are still having to force new thoughts out into the open air. just let them start flowing, free up the blockage and we can have brainstorms. Note all the ideas and rate them for outcomes, and the least cost, and get some going for pilots. Then rate the others for which would have definite outcomes but have been shelved because being more costly. Money can then be created to run them. Free up those rusted brains, neoliberal economics is just another thinking fashion and it’s time has passed; get out before it progresses to replacing human activity with machines because that is More Efficient. Copy the Dalek Machines and ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ and if you’ve a sense of humour like Spike Milligan, ‘Throw [the neolib ideas] in the curry’.

   • Re above – ‘present’ not ‘prevent’ positive outcomes. We sure need them don’t want to prevent them.

2. This looks good. But big price indicates this is aimed at overseas students.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/409519/climate-change-focussed-school-opens-in-taranaki

   Now let’s have a look at iwi building something for their people giving their children a good grounding in what is needed holistically. A lot have not been able to achieve that life balance that is now turning to simpler, greener and more co-operative ways than the pakeha system. It seems that many Maori will have to relearn what their tupuna knew and apply it to now. If they can give an education where computers are in frequent use but also pens, where projects and outcomes are the centre of the learning process, and the subjects built into them, Maori would shoot away from present levels, and rise above average student levels in NZ. What is Tuhoe doing – they seem to have good ideas that have enabled them to be resilient through trying times?

   So what about some differently structured learning for Maori? Not the laid-back self-directed style of the newish *Christchurch school but with involved, interested students who really want to learn about their subjects.
   * https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/113205774/haeata-community-campus-students-begging-to-be-taught

   • I see that there is a Maori school seeming to set its stamp on their students. Is it successful in its aims – which are? Don’t know this but feel that it will be good for more than stylish Maori-oriented design.http://rakaihautu.com/a/uS4ehkf
     https://hail.to/rakaihautu/publication/UOTqgq0 – Te Pā o Rākaihautū

3. Oh the stories that circulate and then are dragged out as irrefutable proof that something happened.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/409521/concerns-over-secret-search-for-giants-bones-near-huntly
   An 88 year old with a good story –
   Tyson doesn’t claim to have seen the skeletons, or their reburial – but says the story was told to him by the road workers who found them. He has multiple theories about who the skeletons belong to – from victims of the Spanish flu to WWII Japanese soldiers.

   I wonder if the road workers were actually Maori. And in their ironic way they made up a story to tell the pakeha, who were ready to believe anything provided it was suitably far-fetched.

4. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51488262
   Why were two Mexican butterfly activists found dead?
   Homero Gómez was one of best-known guardians of the monarch butterfly in Mexico. His body was found in a well last month. Three days later, another guide at a monarch butterfly reserve was also found dead.

   Mr Gómez’s colleagues and family, who believe he was murdered for his work protecting the threatened species from illegal loggers, are living in fear. They spoke to the BBC’s Will Grant in Michoacán.

   Will the butterfly effect work some effective change for the better in this case now it is most needed?
   In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. Wikipedia

5. The hatchets are out in the UK.
   https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-51491662
   Cabinet reshuffle: Sajid Javid resigns as chancellor
   Labour says:
   Commenting on Mr Javid’s resignation, Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell said: “This must be a historical record with the government in crisis after just over two months in power.
   “Dominic Cummings has clearly won the battle to take absolute control of the Treasury and install his stooge as chancellor.”

   Conservatives, Johnson, virtually sack:
   Sajid Javid has shocked Westminster by quitting as chancellor in the middle of Boris Johnson’s cabinet reshuffle.
   Mr Javid rejected the prime minister’s order to fire his team of aides, saying “no self-respecting minister” could accept such a condition.
   He has been replaced as chancellor by Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rishi Sunak – who just seven months ago was a junior housing minister.

   https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51490893
   Who is the new chancellor Rishi Sunak?

6. I’m finding a lot to interest me. I’ll give someone else a turn over the weekend!
   Hospitals – who needs them!
   From The Telegraph:   Alison Pearson  11 Feb 2020
   About the UK NHS.   Is this how you set up a giant public system for a giant private takeover – a stage at a time?   Perhaps first knock out the bottom step on the ladder; make people step higher to get the help they can afford and need.
   The ‘one ailment’ GP appointment is literally killing us
   I had lunch with a friend who told me that Lucy, her teenage daughter, had been really unwell. “I had to take her back to the GP six times,” she sighed.Good heavens, why?“Because at our surgery, you can only raise one thing at each appointment. The doctor said it was a virus, and it wasn’t. So we went back. Then he said it was her stomach, and it wasn’t. Back to the surgery again. It’s madness. Lucy was getting worse. I was really worried.”In despair, my friend turned to the private GP service I have mentioned before. After a 20-minute consultation, where the 16-year-old was not only allowed, but actively encouraged, to mention her multiple symptoms, Lucy finally got a diagnosis and an urgent course of treatment.
   Doctors and nurses!!

7. Details at: https://www.trademe.co.nz/books/nonfiction/biography/literary/listing-2531801903.htm?rsqid=60f4db3f61cc42199120e8774f2f07cf-001
   C. P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity by John de la Mothe 9780292729162
   Some writing, as in this review, has so much apparent wisdom embedded in it that a paragraph is equivalent to a book in its effect. This is a philosophical bent on today, written as a review to a book on C P Snow, now deceased. Perhaps in reading the Strangers and Brothers series we could get some objective view of what we are going through now trying to find our way through the current wilful madness.
   I’ve cut this into paras for easier digestion.

   The condition of modernity springs from that tension between science and the humanities that had its roots in the Enlightenment but reached its full flowering with the rise of twentieth-century technology. It manifests itself most notably in the crisis of individuality that is generated by the nexus of science – literature – and politics – one that challenges each of us to find a way of balancing our personal identities between our public and private selves in an otherwise estranging world.

   This challenge – which can only be expressed as -the struggle of modernity – – perhaps finds no better expression than in C. P. Snow. In his career as novelist – scientist – and civil servant – C. P. Snow (1905-1980) attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of modern science and the humanities.While Snow is often regarded as a late-Victorian liberal who has little to say about the modernist period in which he lived and wrote – de la Mothe challenges this judgment – reassessing Snows place in twentieth-century thought.

   He argues that Snows life and writings-most notably his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels and his provocative thesis in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution-reflect a persistent struggle with the nature of modernity. They manifest Snows belief that science and technology were at the center of modern life….
   Just in case people have a feeling for reading something that’s a change from ordinary light reading.
   Your library should be able to find a copy, and some actual Snow’s also. His life 1905-1980 covered the most dramatic, heart-wrenching events of our period.

   C P Snow’s books in p/b can probably be bought at large community book sale. The stories and actors move slowly through stages of great importance where the dominoes have to be chosen and stood exquisitely to get the right consequence, one of which in the books, was to make a stance against the UK joining the nuclear weapons race. This of course was a real matter of Margaret Thatcher’s day; a woman and a chemist; a proud scientist from the bourgeois class. The recent doco concerning Mikhail Gorbachev was interesting and to see her in full flow with her sincere support for ‘the bomb’. Some might recall the UK graphic book showing how trusting and true Brits were led to believe in safety if a nuclear bomb fell; When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs published 1982 displays some of what C P Snow was considering.

8. My past activities on Open Mic have been contagious, Grey has caught the chain comment bug.

9. I don’t think that commenting on a variety of things with intent to inform is the same as putting up a number of links by you. I suggested that you needed to describe what they related to but I don’t know if that thought got far in.

   • Why waste endless words to explain contents, when the pictures, words and sounds in videos tell you the story better than a thousand words of explanations could do?

Comments are closed.