The Daily Blog Open Mic – Friday – 31st December 2021

1. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/458856/jacinta-ruru-top-legal-scholar-hopeful-of-more-inclusion-for-maori
   U would like to see more Maori builders and carpenters, these are the people we rely on and there is great satisfaction in being able to work with wood and make practical things for our needs. Maori already revere carving and so have knowledge of woods and conditioning of it and the artistic and synbolic side of it. And builders are well regarded in society, an individual is recognised, or a company. It’s a useful skill that requires training and calculation, use of electronics, and the person can aim to become registered with the trade authority for recognition of quality. More lawyers supporting Maori as Legal aid is diminished by our negligent, even hostile, governments would also be of value. And keep voting and advising governments on what they should be doing, until we get a political system that delivers practically for the citizens.

2. Ohho. It always was a likely outcome. It must have shown up badly to force such an anti-commercial warning.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/458860/covid-19-us-health-body-warns-people-not-to-travel-on-cruise-ships

   The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said people should avoid travelling on cruise ships regardless of their vaccination status, as daily Covid-19 cases in the country climb to record highs due to the fast-spreading Omicron variant.

3. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/458865/kiwi-led-task-force-seizes-drugs-worth-5-point-8-million-in-arabian-sea
   Now we are ilining up in the eternal drugs war working for the oligarchs who suck out all our money from our legitimate businesss?

4. Good old drugs how could we cope in this wonderful consumer paradize without them.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/458867/drugmaker-helped-drive-opioid-addiction-in-new-york-jury-finds
   …New York and Nassau and Suffolk counties had accused the Israel-based drugmaker of engaging in misleading marketing practices that fuelled opioid addiction in the state, including by pushing drugs for off-label use.
   They focused on Actiq and Fentora, cancer pain drugs made by Cephalon, a company Teva bought in 2011, as well as generic opioids sold by Teva..
   The New York lawsuit is one of more than 3300 filed by state, local and Native American tribal governments across the country accusing drugmakers of minimising the addictiveness of opioid pain medications, and distributors and pharmacies of ignoring red flags that they were being diverted into illegal channels.

   Other defendants in the case settled before or during trial – major pharmacies , distributors McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health, and drugmakers Johnson & Johnson, Endo International and AbbVie. AbbVie’s settlement, for $US200 million ($292m), came at the very end of the trial, on the day of closing arguments.

   The settlement with J&J and the distributors was part of a nationwide deal worth up to $26 billion. Teva did not take part in that deal.
   Teva previously prevailed in a similar case when a California judge on 2 November ruled that it and other drugmakers were not liable in a lawsuit brought by several counties in the state.
   OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019 and had hoped to resolve a flood of lawsuits over the painkiller through a deal in which the company’s former owners, the Sackler family, would pay $4.5 billion in exchange for immunity from future lawsuits. However, a federal judge on 17 December scrapped the deal, a decision the company was expected to appeal.

5. 2022 – Greed is Growth

   Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’
   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists

   “You dug up the astonishing statistic that China has poured more cement every three years since 2003 than the US managed in the entire 20th century. You calculated that in 2000, the dry mass of all the humans in the world was 125m metric tonnes compared with just 10m tonnes for all wild vertebrates.”

   • Our weight and mass may upset our orbit?

   • Greeeeeeed is growth.
     It is.
     In fact it’s now (well for 2 or 3 decades) the new Opium of the People.
     But it’s also a sign of the last dying gasps of those committed to their cult.
     We’ll just need to let it play out. The longer it takes, the more violent and the number of casualties is likely to be.
     The mathematics of it all were never ever going to add up

6. What I don’t like about the American Left Blogs is the daily churn for money. Cenk Ughur is insightful but he has to produce daily like a cheese factory, most difficultly, emotionally in every post. Very American, monetarily and emotionally.

   Chris Trotter has more time than TDB and so is the mainstay here. Do you need to do this daily apart from the open mic? I know it’s in the title but to what purpose, really? Your blog is more importantly about the realist and people’s point of view. I hate the production of ‘sell-y’/ clickbait headlines everyday. What’s the point?

   • Keep going daily TDB with jibes at politicians there but to the minimum and the vast majority being points about what is being done and said and the likely outcomes. I am interested in outcomes, I want better ones for NZ strugglers to a more cohesive society, looking out for each other and our resources, and being wised up to the world and how we manage our lives. It’s an every day problem with a world going too fast and never stopping to question itself. So we need to keep on top of it with short informative pieces mixed with some long thoughtful, factual and aspirational mixtures.

     The 5w’s about our situation us what is needed – What, where, who, wnen and particularly why, and How and to whom is important too. But with nuance please. I was upset at the image you posted back when the Auckland religious people created a super spreader with a big meeting.

7. Other countries speak more than one language so surely we can manage to expand. While Switzerland’s three official languages – German, French and Italian – are regularly spoken by practically all residents in their respective linguistic regions, the Swiss-German dialect is spoken at least once a week by 87% of those in the German-speaking part of the country. Happy New Year in Swiss-German ; Es guets Nöis’.

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