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.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/462761/nato-rejects-ukraine-no-fly-zone-eu-readies-more-russia-sanctions
Dear Politicians, grey-haired men, bandbox-dressed women, hangers-on such as advisors, honest fact checkers etc if you are going to apply sanctions, please see they are lifted quickly when there is good reaction, instead of trying to grind down any opponent chosen. And will you please support Palestine while you are immersed in this cloud of goodwill and probity. Thanking you in anticipation.
PS Could you spare a thought for Myanmar and offer them some development help in return for a settlement with the oppressed, and it would be good if you would all stop selling more weapons. (This was Burma and once overrun by the British in George Orwell’s time. The people receiving harsh treatment are: The persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar dates back to the 1970s.)
“if you are going to apply sanctions, please see they are lifted quickly when there is good reaction, instead of trying to grind down any opponent chosen.”
Sanctions on dictators of poor/developing naations who have had their CIA seal of approval removed are a soft touch. Iraq got ground down all the way to the stone age.
Sanctions on a nuclear power mega nation are a whole different ball game. Putin has indicated he sees the sanctions as tantamount to a declaration of war. WW3 will happen before Russia is ground down.
Yes all that you have said sounds possible, plausible, words fail me – scary moon r.
Gwynne Dyer in stuff seems reliable.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300532115/look-at-his-face-what-tack-to-take-if-russian-president-vladimir-putin-is-on-steroids
Also Bowalley Road –
https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2022/03/russia-vs-ukraine-story-changes.html
Nuclear defences – what have we? Raymond Briggs humane graphic comic illustrator on nuclear fallout on ordinary people – When the Wind Blows
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/when-wind-blows-raymond-briggs-jimmy-murakami
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mTJ3keT6qY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pJKdTqYijY
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/462770/transmission-gully-nzta-slices-red-tape-to-open-sooner
When I was having my heart op in Wellington one of the recovery staff said she came into the city to work, from out on the coat near Kapiti. She said she couldn’t wait for Transmission Gully to be finished. So good get it done and do the maintenance for as long as it takes, just make it available to these hard working people of whom people such as the protesters know little. The hospital staff do a great job from down below in the x-ray rooms, to the ground level entrance and exit from the busy bottom of the ‘works’ where the medical, physical and mental stuff go full on. It’s an amazing hive of industry and we are lucky that it has not degenerated completely under the sharp cuts of the neo-lib political sawbones who would have hospitals and us reduced to mendicants.
( It is not really efficiency that government economists are after it is cheapness, and hospitals have acted to that end but at a human cost in delayed treatment and diagnostic tests. They have an achilles heel, the capital charge where they pay a sort of rent to the government for using public land for a public building carrying out a government service. This is to ensure that hospitals aren’t costing more than they should, and can compete with private services. Or something like that. There is a reward that comes from those savings, which goes to the generic managers and CEO. Weird, no, read your Alice in Wonderland mixed with Edward Bernays – as Friedman, Hayek etc. could have said ‘ You can fool most of the people most of the time’ and they fed that through to the ‘Grateful Dead’ who are those jackdaws in leadership positions who could virtually whip away a child’s only food, a cream doughnut, pronouncing it as unsuitable because sugar and cream are bad for you.
Protection against abuse for children in state care?
Sepuloni is the Minister responsible – It is time to act and she has not even bothered to read the report!! – She refused to answer questions about the recommendations.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/300529090/pm-wont-commit-to-recommendation-to-legally-protect-children-from-abuse-in-care
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care released a report last year that made a number of recommendations, including that it be enshrined in legislation that children in care should be free from abuse. It also recommended that if this right were not upheld, the Government should be liable and could not delegate that liability to another party.
The prime minister’s office was approached for comment on the recommendations after Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni hung up during an interview about oversight of Oranga Tamariki. Sepuloni is in charge of a bill looking to change the oversight structure of Oranga Tamariki.
Just before Christmas, the Oversight of Oranga Tamariki System and Children and Young People’s Commission Bill was slipped into the public domain with an invitation for submissions. Those who keep a close eye on Oranga Tamariki were caught on the hop and had to hastily put together a response, as the deadline closed at the end of January. The bill is at the select committee stage now.
Oversight of Oranga Tamariki was a subject the royal commission spoke to in a report on redress that was released late last year. However, Sepuloni admitted to Stuff that she hadn’t read the report when interviewed two weeks ago and wouldn’t answer questions about the recommendations. [Full article at the link.]
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/462780/canterbury-protest-disruption-give-us-our-once-peaceful-homes-back
Police don’t want to get involved? Can anyone camp where they like now in public parks? Council naturally can’t take on these determined troublemakers.
There is one word that would make all sit up and take notice ‘Vigilantes’. That is what the police will encourage if they sit back and play nicey in Christchurch for longer. In Wellington was one thing, and they were given plenty of time to put forward a reasoned protest with written requests. Now could they be arrrested as drifters, people who are a little short of a picnic? What could they do to be more like the successful Hikoi of Dame Whina Cooper?
“Shane Warne’s ex-fiance Elizabeth Hurley has broken her silence in the wake of the cricket legend’s shock death”
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/shane-warne-death-elizabeth-hurley-posts-tribute-to-ex-fiance/MHAK7AT574AXEFNLQ7YWK5X2YY/
Heavy media coverage but I can find no mention that Warne had “recovered” a serious covid infection last year. Dropped stone cold dead, heart attack at 52.
Herald had front page headline warning from NZ heart expert that we face a “tsunami of heart disease” from covid. But that news seems to have sunk quickly into the depths. Too nightmarish for the pundits and media consumers to process? Media black out?
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-omicron-outbreak-cardiologist-warns-of-tidal-wave-of-heart-disease-linked-to-long-covid/ZYMK3ZEV2J62UAI2VQ4DTHYIOY/
And Warne’s last communication was a tribute to a 74yo cricket great who also died from heart failure. Ok he is a lot older but still, did he also “recovered” from a covid infection…?
We are going to see a lot more high profile “celeb” types keel over in the months, years ahead. How long before the public get a clue and start panicking?
If ONE wave of covid causes a tsunami of heart disease, what will repeated waves of infection do? Its “endemic” now, we just have to “learn to live with it”. Waning vaccines, booster up take spluttering. Children 0-4yo have ZERO vax protection while Omicron variant hits the young cohort hard.
Covid is a systemic disease, if it is causing a “tsunami of heart disease”, what about neurological damage, and every other organ that is prone to covid?
Hipkins noted Omicron infected children are showing a new symptom – gastrointestinal pain. Here’s latest research on covid in the intestines:
“COVID-19: Abdominal and Bowel Damage
Evidence keeps increasing for the number of places in the body and the length after COVID-19 infection the virus continues to cause damage.
The presence of COVID-19 virus was confirmed in intestinal tissue 6 months after the patients stopped testing positive via nasopharyngeal PCR tests which suggests latent/hidden infection”
https://twitter.com/jeffgilchrist/status/1499709449518395394
https://bmcgastroenterol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12876-021-01905-3
Why is NO ONE talking about this?! Our entire population is being literally blighted.
Dear moon-rekt
Don’t be in a hurry to tell the loose cannons about this. Facts do not pervade their mind, they just skid along on top of it like on a banana skin. The government would be accused of trying to scare the populace, or else of being unprepared to fight a new problem which has not been uncovered yet.
When the gummint built up anti-flu vaccines against I think the bird flu, and later it wasn’t needed, all the smart slicks and poo bahs and inadequate nitwits came out from under their stones and wound up the criticism hurdy-gurdy. So have a heart, gummint for once is trying to be good, don’t you be trying to do the opposite will you.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2018833107/new-zealand-men-s-reading-rates-continuing-to-drop
…There was less of a fall in the amount of non-fiction read than fiction. Whereas the amount of poetry read increased, with more men reading poetry than women, and more Māori and Pasifika poetry readers than other ethnic groups.
This is important – by the way have you read Martin Cruz Smith’s Russian series. In Wolves Eat Dogs he brings Chernobyl into it.
https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/8277-martin-cruz-smith-mystery-suspense/
The last of the active Chernobyl reactors was finally shut down last year.
Smith recalls his first look at the sarcophagus that surrounds, though hardly “contains,” the world-famous number four reactor; radioactivity from it continues to seep into the groundwater that feeds the Dnepr River.
“It looks like a monument to a disaster,” he says. “It strongly resembles a cage, a cage that looks very impressive at first sight but then the more you study and know about it, the flimsier it becomes.” In fact, Chernobyl has become the unofficial sick joke of the once-proud Ukraine. There was the unnecessary low-power test that triggered the chain reaction that caused a deadly fireball to blow the roof off the tower, contaminating the Northern Hemisphere. Then came an unexplainable three-day silence from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during which children played in the green foam, the plant’s protection against radioactive release. After the forced evacuation of Pripyat, the government built a new town, Slavutych, on a radioactive site it called its “cesium patch.” “Pripyat really lets you know that things have gone very much awry; you walk into a city of 50,000 and you’re the only one,” Smith recalls. “But then they moved the workers to Slavutych and planted them on radioactive ground. How could they screw up so badly?” Workers clad in camouflage commute daily from Slavutych to the reactors, passing through radiation detectors frequently. A microdot of cesium or plutonium invisible to the naked eye is enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the gage. In his week inside the Zone of Exclusion, Smith carried a dosimeter constantly.
https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/8277-martin-cruz-smith-mystery-suspense/
Chernobyl reactor 4 is no longer burning. The reactor was originally covered after the disaster, but it resulted in a leak of nuclear waste and needed to be replaced. The systems for a new cover for the reactor were being tested in 2020 and is sometimes referred to as a “sarcophagus.”24/02/2022
What happened at Chernobyl? What to know about nuclear disaster
https://www.usatoday.com › news › world › 2022/02/24