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.
If the US and West are wondering why their countries are now divided and many people distrust authority, it could be because witch hunts against journalists reporting human rights abuses and western governments using decades of legal persecution to individuals does not sit well, with the average Joe.
Now many people living in the West believe that China, Middle East and Russia are the good guys for human rights abuses, because the Western governments seem to have a two tier justice system and can’t stand anybody reporting government or close government agency abuse.
UK approves extradition of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange to US
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2022/06/uk-approves-extradition-of-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-to-us.html
Jeffrey Epstein became an FBI INFORMANT to secure sweetheart deal and shut down federal probe into the pedophile’s abuse of underage girls, government records reveal
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7306597/Jeffrey-Epstein-got-sweetheart-plea-deal-FBI-informant-government-records-reveal.html
The British interior is not pretty. But Boris needs some alternative news to his failings. Pity that when the Empire and the Queen are passing away, they in the UK find that what’s left is just hollow scarecrows.
Wonder the financial and social cost to NZ taxpayers this man has had, after being given 25 years to offend in NZ after countless orders to deport him he ignored and then got away with it and gets residency with drug smuggling ignored until he more meth smuggling and a prison sentence.
‘Wilfulness and defiance’: After 25 years, failed asylum seeker loses appeal
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/06/wilfulness-and-defiance-after-25-years-failed-asylum-seeker-loses-appeal.html
NZ is now a Mecca for bloody minded people who come to NZ have little to offer but taking up health care, translation services, legal aid, housing, prison places and justice services from people in NZ who increasing can’t even access basic ED health care in NZ as NZ working citizens.
While OZ and even places like Dubai attract and retain professional skills with high wages and zero tolerance of lawlessness, NZ seems to be repelling professional skills while attracting the lawless with more drug smugglers, drug users and ram raiders and people needing extensive legal and benefit aid with our woke meets neoliberal, bums on seats, appeal after appeal, policy of immigration.
C’mon savenz – we can’t be as bad as that. ….. Oh. .. Well…. Um… I think I’ll have a cup of tea. Or maybe something stronger. Then I’ll turn and think about it. Maybe it will look better in 30 minutes, or a week, or
a year? But when did we last seem to be a good little country striving to make its way in a good way in a difficult world. We did for a while after WW2 but I reckon we got weak-minded from all that good living and high expectations. So… what can we, do we, expect now?
SaveNZ. Thank you. Once again, you speak truth to facts. Shame this is a country where disc jockeys are given priority over essential health workers. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Just a really disappointing situation. Iranian people are great, but when you get into those who are ‘claiming asylum’, these are a mix of those from the older generation who tortured Iranians for the Shah’s SAVAK spies, or some more recent types who are part of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a weird sex cult with slightly-Islamist and superficially-Marxist trappings which fought on the side of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War and has conducted terror bombings in Iran since that ended. Neither are people that anyone should have any sympathy for. I’m guessing Mohebbi is one of the latter.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/469284/dissident-refused-asylum-after-tribunal-finds-no-risk-of-harm-or-special-attention-in-russia
Are we cynical liars all of us? Emotional ratbags who pour out concern when the appropriate coloured button is pushed? Or are we under some meretricious serendipity rule that works like playing Lotto? Or is it left up to a machine or some dice that are specially weighted and rolled every day at 10.30 am after morning tea?
Graham Nash has turned 80. A good age to be if you still have faculties, and a love and meaning in life (Crosby, Stills and Nash).
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2018845540/graham-nash-the-boy-who-still-wants-to-know-everything
…On his music, Nash said many of his old songs – Immigrant Man and Fieldworker, for example – were still relevant today.
“It’s incredibly disappointing we have not learnt from the lessons of history, but at the same time I’m glad my music seems to have lasted at least 50 years.”
He said he doesn’t have a vocal coach nor take any lessons – “I just sing”.
He was still a hippy, he said. “I still believe that love is better than hatred, I still believe that peace is better than war, I still believe that we have to take care of each other, because what else do we have on this planet, and here I am, all these years later still rocking, and I intend to keep rocking until I’m dead.”…
Our House and some words from the man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROCzHRzHYdM
Lovely. And I hope you all have your own little or large house too.
From Gordon Campbell on Scoop – pondering?
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2206/S00029/on-the-price-tag-for-closer-us-military-ties.htm
…Meaning: before we allocate even more government spending to the armed forces– and even the ACT Party has been urging New Zealand to spend an extra $7 billion on Defence– surely we have to consider the track record of waste, under performance and premature obsolescence that this has involved over the few decades.
If only the money that has been spent so carelessly on Defence hds been spent instead on public health, mental health services and drug treatment facilities. But that’s not how we roll. For example:…
A few years later, the Audit Office had a few sharp things to say about the dubious wisdom of us choosing to be a test case for an experimental design.
Note: Am I behind others, and only slowly coming to feel that a large part of the NZ drive to do things, is because we want to be thought as being ahead of others, being first, open to ideas, ‘a smart little nation’? Pat, pat on the head like being a faithful, biddable dog who deserves treats..
RE. the NH-90- no openness to ideas there- sheer corruption in that case. Nobody wants that garbage.
Our biggest threat is the American dogs trying to cut us off from our largest trading partner, and for that we need anti-ship missiles (cruise and ballistic DF21-Ds ideally) and SAMs (ideally S-400s), not helicopters. Some long range strike aircraft to hit the yanks from even further out with something like the Zircon would be a bonus.
This just gets us into a spending spree on war weapons that the USA Russia and Ukraine are promoting. We are only 5 Million people and can’t afford this enforced spending.
We will be sucked dry from every orifice by the warlike readiness of other nations, and their DAFs – defence and attack forces. Then climate change to suck up what’s left of our water. Rememberthat in times of war nations can do things entirely amoral and plead excuse – war. The USA Marshall Islands nuclear, Japan nuclear, others – Israel constant readiness etc. China, Cambodia, Vietnam.
And weapons buying means one big excuse for less for NZ citizen, one screwed up country..
Listen to our medical workers, they are among the few who say what’s what and know what they are talking about and who aren’t puppets dancing for money. Thank you for the ones working this weekend in South Auckland.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/469341/free-doctors-visits-attempt-to-alleviate-hospital-strain
With a large surge of winter illness sweeping Auckland, GPs in South Auckland are offering free doctors’ visits this weekend and next.
A patient died at Middlemore Hospital this week after earlier leaving the emergency department due to long wait times.
There has been a record number of people turning up to try and get treatment at Middlemore Hospital this week.
Influenza has far surpassed Covid as the leading cause of respiratory related hospitalisation in Tāmaki Makaurau, with Counties Manukau being particularly hard hit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN–atshVqs
This patient doesn’t feel happy, and our medical people here possibly feel as bad at times. He starts hallucinating – hope the medicals can keep going as we need them. Can they be facilitated as much as possible – from staff at the bottom up and from the involved medical people at the top down. (From The Singing Detective. )
There is a lot of truth and self-knowledge gained by readers of young adult books. For men and boys who rarely read it might be a genre to take up even though a lot of it is told through female actions – there are always important males in the best books. This is a thoughtful quote from a favourite USA author that might explain much about our understandings about politics and history that guide our actions as adults.
…Cynthia Voigt answers, “fiction is easier to remember, but I most often have my eyes opened by nonfiction. I used to tell my students that while History is the truth, designed to tell a lie, Fiction is a lie designed to tell the truth. It’s not so simple, I know, but with fiction I know that nothing more will be discovered.” History, on the other hand, constantly changes – driven by information subsequently acquired, and shaped by new interpretations.
Unfortunately, modern young adult books are not exactly ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’.
John White Tom Brown’s Schooldays is more about class education of males isn’t it?
Perhaps you also remember Goodbye Mr Chips.
However I am referring to a different level of writing that relates to experiences of young adults learning about the wider world trying to find their way, and forming skills that will enable them to flourish or cope with difficulties. Thinking alert people today are all in the situation of being uncertain adults having to find a path and skills to cope with a cataclysmic future.
There’s plenty of appropriate lessons young men can take from it, I feel. The same for Stalky & Co. Although more decolonized perspectives on the growth of a young man would be welcome too, of course.
I’m interested in young adults. There is too much sex separatism and fractionating going on. It is necessary for the two genders to learn how to get along as strong and positive individuals; young people without drugs, without loose sex as a joint interest, without religious or gender faction friction, without ignoring the world and concentrating on sport or becoming a house investor or other money accumulator. How can we get young females to stop this ultra-sensitive woke nonsense and the sexist gendered part of it particularly, which would tend to put men off women and drive them into homosexuality, I feel that our future working together to survive the travails of climate change, will be sad and brutish. It seems you haven’t started thinking about how to 21st century people interaction, and you are stuck a full century in the past with British colonial memes. Try reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays modern ‘sequel’ Posh Boys.