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, Qanon lunacy, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics, 5G conspiracy theories, the virus is a bioweapon, some weird bullshit about the UN taking over the world and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.
Government plans to build a play slide to the US to help calm hysteria
The NZ government has plans to spend up large on the taxpayer credit card and purchase at least 200 million rapid antigen test kits in the coming months (RNZ, n.d.). From the looks of the single use kit they are about the size of a finger and made of plastic a few millimetres thick. Two hundred million of them stacked end to end would stretch from Auckland to New York, or the volumetric equivalent of around thirty thousand plastic play slides from Kmart. Single use play slides.
I’m all for medical diagnostics but we’re not talking about cancer or other life threatening urgent disease analysis here. These are test kits which are being distributed for voluntary home use, to monitor and force compliance in workplaces, and eventually for retail sale. The only urgency here is the government showing they are doing something for someone (probably for big pharma more than communities) while implementing a horrific surveillance regime, feeding health obsession (hysterical daily updating), appropriating tax payer money for a single cause in a single sector, and the weaponisation of personal health status to segregate communities and propagate harm based on mild disease. Oh and build these great plastic monuments to the medical industrial complex, which our descendants will dig up in a thousand years and wonder what in god’s name we were thinking.
RNZ. (n.d.). Covid-19 shipment of 10 million rapid antigen tests due over weekend. Retrieved from
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/462240/covid-19-shipment-of-10-million-rapid-antigen-tests-due-over-weekend
I’d like to have a few of these tests on hand in my home. You can keep your konspiracy paranoia.
Update: NZ government Covid-19 vaccine mandates ruled unlawful for those in police and defence force. The Bill of Rights and human rights law covers all people in this country so this ruling presumably also applies to any employee and those applying for roles.
Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof or something. What I would say to someone who worries too much and wants the world to be a better place and feels they are not achieving much.
If you worry about everything and analyse who might be getting advantage from procedures and resent that
they are then you are doing more than your share of worrying, and not making the most of what sort of life is available to you. Just remember that it is a small miracle to have had a life here on this planet, which is awful and wonderful with great potential which will only be achieved in small amounts. Help increase the small amounts, get some enjoyment, or the whole performance has been wasted on you.
Have a look at the Desiderata. I think an advertising man thought it up which doesn’t make it false or even if meant to be tacky, his effort has transformed it. I suggest a psychological gift to yourself; write down all your fears on paper and all the things you don’t like about yourself and the people you mix with, and then find a safe place to burn that paper. Then write down about 5 things you find good and at least two things good about yourself. Say to yourself that you are going to be more positive and enjoy seeing small things around you and smile at the checkout people and wish them a good day.
The Desiderata is about being positive mainly. And take interest in a religion and read the positive things in that and don’t linger on sad things or the Old Testament. Just think that we are living an Old Testament life and seek out good and funny people and feed them jokes – that is what they like and you can laugh together.
And forgive yourself for when you have been bad-tempered of callous, and you can more easily do so for others but also try to prevent bad things where you have some agency, when you can. Think kindly about Julian Assange realising his work along with others, as a great effort. Pick out some mild detective stories, perhaps some Val McDermid, crazy Carl Hiaasen, Russian-themed Martin Cruz Smith, cat-lover Lilian Jackson Braun RIP – detectives sort out their problems in a book unlike us. Read,. it’s refreshing to the mind. Give yourself the strength to face a possible shitty day, and find the sweet spots in it that lead to you enjoying someone’s company and their gifts of personality, and vice versa.
Some Desideratas – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFxvV7-JDRw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHPJlwu1l9s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata
If we are going to have such antisocial responses from the Human Rights Bill, how can ordinary citizens who want proper precautions in place to meet needs in society going to utilise this stupidly worded legal
Act?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/462265/covid-19-high-court-quashes-unlawful-vaccine-mandate-for-police-and-defence-force-staff
The order required Defence Force personnel, and police constables, recruits and authorised officers to have two doses of the vaccine by 1 March, or face termination.
Fewer than 300 of the more than 31,000 staff affected by the mandate across the organisations remain unvaccinated.
On 6 January, three unvaccinated staff sought a judicial review of the mandate.
Can we sue police for being unvaccinated and spreading disease.? Also for being bad role models when citizens should look to the police as good people?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/462163/altruism-in-birds-magpies-have-outwitted-scientists-by-helping-each-other-remove-tracking-devices
‘Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it…’
Let’s do it. Let’s get along together in a way that gives everybody a reasonable life. Then we can do the odd unreasoning thing without all falling to bits. And do teach us ways of diplomacy, handling our own psyches, appreciating our good and clever brains, not just the lowest level of self-satisfaction – eg keeping the cave nice and tidy, or getting food for the group.
We trained a group of local magpies to come to an outdoor, ground feeding “station” that could either wirelessly charge the battery of the tracker, download data, or release the tracker and harness by using a magnet.
The harness was tough, with only one weak point where the magnet could function. To remove the harness, one needed that magnet, or some really good scissors. We were excited by the design, as it opened up many possibilities for efficiency and enabled a lot of data to be collected.
We wanted to see if the new design would work as planned, and discover what kind of data we could gather. How far did magpies go? Did they have patterns or schedules throughout the day in terms of movement, and socialising? How did age, sex or dominance rank affect their activities?
All this could be uncovered using the tiny trackers – weighing less than one gram – we successfully fitted five of the magpies with. All we had to do was wait, and watch, and then lure the birds back to the station to gather the valuable data.
It didn’t work to plan, but they learned something else that was valuable. Can we be as clever as these birdbrains? But we have to follow through and not just repress information because it would do us out of our bonus, which should actually be called bon-me, or maybe not. Now I have learned something.