The Daily Blog Open Mic – Sunday – 10th May 2020

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Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

Moderation rules are more lenient for this section, but try and play nicely.

EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist language, homophobic language, racist language, anti-muslim hate, transphobic language, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.

17 COMMENTS

  1. Green party list voting closed at noon yesterday. Does anyone have any idea how long it will take for the results to be balanced (to GP criteria) and announced? It took a couple of weeks in the past, but I haven’t been a GP member for several years now (my pro-vivisection views weren’t too popular at the time). Maybe that’s been sped up a bit nowadays?

  2. This is interesting demonstration of facts about numbers, time and spread of Covid-19.
    https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-19-data-new-zealand/

    It compares us to Australia which didn’t take the immediate 4 weekly thorough-going lockdown, so I guess is likely to be reflecting business interests. Everyone in NZ has been affected by the lockdown but if we had not had it, our hospitals would have become overwhelmed. We are always looking at other countries and trying to emulate them. Our isolation has helped us to close our borders and check the prevalence in-house so to speak.

    But one of the features is that our nearest large neighbour Australia, has turned us into a relatively poor, vassal state which is operating under a diseased neolib economic system, and we fuel our economy by selling parts of our economic assets – we are eating ourselves. Not a healthy economy at all, and when human health fails and puts pressure on a failed economy, we don’t have adequately funded hospitals and also we can’t properly support with money and conditions, the precious human beings staffing our hospital who are specially trained for their jobs, and now strained.

    Also we have modernised everything and used inhuman targets, master controls, and machinery with models and algorithms, to guide decisions, and are relatively inflexible. We have empty hospitals with staff present who could be doing some daycare surgery, with care, and people would have to sign a document advising that though care would be taken, there would be an elevated risk of Covid-19 for such people.

    It is assessment of risk, and acceptance of some with preventative controlled measures, that this country seems to be unable to handle, and is unwilling to breach self-imposed conditions that don’t fit the needs of society. I think that the phrase commonly used here about accidental death, ‘an unnecessary death’ for a sudden and surprising death or a ‘preventable’ or ‘avoidable’ death, that indicates our woolly thinking. Listening to some
    complaining people, their thinking reflects the lack of reasoning that now prevails in competitive, demanding, entitled individualistic society. The practice of thinking through implications, understanding resource availability, system breakdown, has never been taught. Now the practice is demanding human rights, my rights, whatever the situation, not being a citizen and part of a nation, a polity.

    • “And people would have to sign a document advising that although care would be taken, there could be an elevated risk of Covid-19 for those people”. I would have thought it was obvious that “those people” From being Part of the general public, would be more likely to already have Covid-19 and would therefore be exposing the hospital and its staff to the disease which of course is exactly what happens in those areas of the hospital that are caring for those infected. In case you havent noticed many Nursing and frontline staff have already died in America in particular. Those people Who you think might have wanted to have their day surgery would also be compromised after their surgery. Even if they had tested negative the day before their surgery, they may well have tested positive the next day as has clearly happened here in the USA with the Vice Presidents Press Secretary.

      • Jacko
        Elective surgery you twit is what I was talking about. Don’t you understand anything. I said that part of the hospitals were empty and they could be doing something. The other part of the hospital was dealing with the Covid-19 cases. There would be no reason to expect that there was any likelihood of C-19 present in these people, but of course there would be the accepted precautionary measures taken.

        It is a pity you have chosen to spend your time writing about something completely unrelated to what I wrote. Getting huffy, emotional about something doesn’t contribute as a thoughtful response in reasoned discussion. It is however, what leads to mindless mob response to serious problems.

  3. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/416227/month-in-quarantine-bars-brisbane-based-man-s-bid-to-see-dying-mum
    Why can’t there be a small unit set up in emergencies to assist with people and cases that fall outside the broader systems – it would be expected if we were truly humane and advanced beings in this wonderful age of knowledge and technology. Appreciating our fine and sensitive natures, and our wide range of emotions would lead to a kinder, yet stronger world with reasonable mindfulness of the needs of the day and the times.

  4. Only 50 + people looked at the railway post put up recently. If more people would take an interest it would probably result in a tipping point where something practical would be done. So could you please read it and see if you can put support for it behind a push for government to okay this and step past the naysayers who can’t see further than their hip pockets?
    https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2020/05/08/ceac-support-the-calls-kiwirail-the-need-for-change/

    Question: Do we learn rational thought in our schooling, as we certainly don’t at home, and our other point of instruction outside of our peers’ parallel lack of experience and wisdom, is probably coloured television where life is like a dream, and well coiffed people tell us what the smart people are thinking and doing. with the invitation to conform to them, who are earning the sort of money you crave and therefore are VIPs in thinking.

    Another interesting rail project that the Green Party supports, yes they are out there in the cities and towns as well as the fields and the hedgerows!
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/2018745426/can-narrow-gauge-rail-support-high-speed-trains

    For those who think Green Party is out there chewing grass! No, this isn’t their song.
    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_3dPKR3Vjc

    • GreyW
      The site has been a bit laggy today (which I guess you know with your 8 seperate comments on OM being invisible until this evening), so the view count on any post may be artificially low. That said, it’s a Saturday, and volunteer moderators may have been busy elsewhere (fair enough) – it certainly disrupts the flow of the discourse though.

      Thanks for pointing out those rail related links. On mobile, yesterday’s post had slipped off TDB’s main page. That Napier based; “Citizens Environmental Advocacy Committee”, is a bit of a new one to me: Do they have many members apart from the Crispens?

  5. This is in the latest newsletter from Australia’s Mulloon Creek Natural Farms:
    Restore Australia is an initiative being progressed by the Global Evergreening Alliance (GEA) which has about $300M from international donors to restore degraded lands across Australia and sequester carbon over the next five years.
    This is significant funding directed to the Australian landscape and TMI [The Mulloon Institute] has been privileged to be invited to participate. Through the development of this project I have also been part of a Technical Advisory Board overseeing the structure of the program to be followed.

    Things are moving in Oz on the farming scene, conserving water, soil, with better pasture and plant growth and watchful stock grazing. Also here in NZ, so we could be learning from each other. Now that would be a useful win-win collaboration with Oz.

  6. Bushfires and how to cope. And possibly light up the politician’s path to active policy making and useful work. Probably the answer lies in the soil.
    Bushfire inquiries
    https://themullooninstitute.org/blog/2020/5/5/bushfire-inquiries
    During April, the Mulloon Institute made submissions to both the NSW Inquiry into the Bushfires and to the Federal Royal Commission. In addition, I made personal submissions to both Inquiries from the perspective of being the Chairman of a Federal Parliamentary Inquiry into the Australian Bushfires in 2003. That Inquiry produced a report, A Nation Charred, which included some 59 recommendations.

    Sadly, many of the issues raised back in 2003 were still quite relevant in relation to experiences during the 2019/2020 fires.

  7. While we fight off the delaying tactics of Big Business and the dead-hand of Technology on the living earth and all that sail through the skies on it, we now also have this virus to deal with. We need to use it to find a new path, so we can then turn to our known crisis building around and about to overwhelm us.
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/416235/extreme-heat-predicted-to-trap-millions-indoors-by-2060
    Parts of Australia, India, Bangladesh, the Persian Gulf, China, Mexico and the United States have experienced hundreds of previously rare incidents of extreme heat and humidity since 1979, said the study in the journal Science Advances.

    These punishing conditions have lasted only one to two hours but climate change is likely to prolong them to about six hours at a time by 2060 and expand the affected areas, lead author Colin Raymond told the Thomson Reuters Foundation…
    “We may be closer to a real tipping point on this than we think,” Radley Horton, co-author and climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a statement.

    The highest readings were in parts of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, home to some three million people.

    Surviving in these conditions would require adapting buildings to provide shade and cooling and human behaviour, which includes minimising outdoor labour, said Raymond.

    This could severely disrupt farming and commerce, with many poor people unable to afford air conditioning, said Horton.

    The study focused on “wet bulb” temperatures, which scientists say reflect the combined effects of temperature and humidity, a more useful indicator of heat stress.
    Russian heatwaves in 2010, with temperatures of nearly 40C, which killed tens of thousands of people, experienced wet bulb temperatures “no greater than 28C”, the paper said.

  8. I didn’t rent a monopoly on writing here! And Martyn isn’t charging. So where the hell are y’all?
    We have to build a simulation of a real together nation really before we can have one. Practise the moves, until we have a successful entity.

    We will only get a closer more integrated country, with freedom for citizens to branch out and try new ideas and improve old ones, if we keep exchanging ideas, informing about what others are doing. To do that people have to start – Chinese Lao Tsu ‘ A journey of a thousand (Chinese) miles starts beneath one’s feet’. I take this to mean that anyone could take that journey – they just have to start one step at a time. People are motivated to do the physical thing, from Bluff to the Far North, but what about the mental thing the improving understanding.

    The right wing in NZ have taken steps to cut down on education you realise. They have sold our sober news and information gatherers so that often we have just a level of infotainment. Circulating information with sources, and perhaps a personal critique as to whether it is just gossip is so important. Keep reading, go to the theatres for fiction, or just watch and fund NZ channels for entertainment; we who are thinking are at least keeping the country alive, and hopefully on a good course.

  9. An interesting discussion this morning on Media Watch with the editor of NZ Geographic magazine Rebekah White. https://www.nzgeo.com/ She makes a good case for supporting it, and comments on the apparent bias against print in favour of on-line by government. I believe this is true. She mentions how broadcasting fees have gone down, while post costs continue to rise. It seems to me that NZ Post is being managed into the ground, recently public post boxes not being cleared, and some years ago, a contractor who had not been delivering for months? Imagine how many complaints and queries NZPost had been overlooking, not following up with ‘Zeal’.
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018745858/mediawatch-for-10-may-2020
    – 35 mins

    And that is a point – our name is New Zealand. That needs to be a ringing shout-out of what we are and what we are about. Finding new zeal to hold what is good, improve on it, and kick in the a..e what is bad and then get stuck in to what is unsatisfactory. All the zealots need to apply themselves because to somnolent NZ, only bold action will raise them from their everyday comforts if reasonably paid and housed, and those that aren’t are on a mousewheel and there isn’t enough cheese, and can you live from licking peanut butter?

  10. This could be a telling pointer to what goes on in the Jewish world. The Palestine question raises questions about their integrity and love for other people, while reminding the world of our lack of love for them, apart from small numbers saved by sympathetic people with values, daring and planning. The anti-Semitic slurs against a politician in the UK who spoke for Palestine. I read about hostility of a large bearded man to a black boy wanting to ride his bike in the streets of I think New York City suburb where many Hassidic Jews live. Things one hears that crop up remind us that there is a simmering unease and acceptance of unsavoury behaviour that does not match with the reputation of Jews as fine people both before and after WW2.
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018744895/deborah-feldman-inspiring-unorthodox
    Exposing the rigidity and lack of freedom within the Hasidic faith wasn’t the only motivation for writing her book. Winning custody of her son was the main driver.
    At 23, emboldened by classes at Sarah Lawrence College, she left her husband of six years and the community for good — taking her three-year-old son with her.
    hen planning her escape from the community she was introduced to a lawyer who had worked on similar case in 1980s.
    The lawyer advised that there was no way to win legal custody as the Hasidic community always worked the system to their advantage, but one thing she found was they hated the spotlight.

    And one thing to remember is that as government for and by the people breaks down, and women en masse let slip their fire of mind and respect for themselves, their own minds and futures entered of their own will and allowing the flowering of their natures and their wisdom and agency, the cult-like entities that choose religion as their leitmotif will meld in with fascist governments to restrict freedoms of thought and action.

    So many women seem to be happy to let others make main decisions, or to explode in emotional crusading fury over one chosen matter, ignoring all others, that females will be at the vanguard of reaction, and used by oppressive systems. So sad when so much has been done by so few, but was stopped when the middle-class had gained better opportunities and conditions. The lower income, working class mind was hardly touched by what more ambitious and educated women realised and educated themselves about, and the cult members were encouraged to deride female freedoms and advancement as unnatural. What is natural though, for humans who create their own cultures and societies? This generation needs to do some thinking about what they want, or instead they will be told to accept what is good for them, and accept it unquestioningly,.

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