Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.
The Editor doesn’t moderate this blog, 3 volunteers do, they are very lenient to provide you a free speech space but if it’s just deranged abuse or putting words in bloggers mouths to have a pointless argument, we don’t bother publishing. There’s no point complaining to Bomber.
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/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018867288/the-illusion-of-continuity-why-future-you-will-be-different
Academics discussing future possibilities in vehement terms of certainty add to confusion. Our biggest problem is understanding the concept that everything is an idea accepted by us all, or imposed by the powerful, as real, which includes money. As it says in Peter Pan about the Fairy Tinkerbell :
Tinkerbell effect
Wikipedia ·
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Tinkerbell…
The effect is named after Tinker Bell, the fairy in the play Peter Pan, who is revived from near death by the belief of the audience.
(And interestingly there is another idea of a reverse Tinkerbell effect.)
We don’t need any more discombobulating ideas such as the one that we all change during life but some people’s minds don’t grow to integrate their experiences. Don’t we already know that?
This is a sort of cooling wind on the hot topic of 3Waters Plan. I have not studied 3Waters being too busy trying to keep up with what’s now and daily events complicating that. But this from Chris Trotter on the matte sets out relevant details in case others also haven’t kept up with the ramifications, thinking more about ramraids or such. It is most important. Whatever private finance and business interests have got their snouts into, eventually the trough seems far deeper than the one that pollies have been known to dabble in.
https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2022/11/three-waters-three-mayors-three-cheers.html
Nothing can borrow money more cheaply than a solvent, sovereign state. Why? Because states, unlike people, corporations, and even banks, are immortal. There was a time when investors thought of municipalities in the much the same way. If nation states weren’t going anywhere, then neither were their cities and towns. But then New York City went bust, and international investors had to think again.
States, too, thought it advisable to impose strict limits on their borrowing. That’s why, for the last 40 years, successive Finance Ministers have forced local government to borrow the money it needed on the open market. The problem with this “solution” is that a city’s credit-card is maxed-out a lot faster than a state’s. Ditto, its rate-payers’ willingness to pay more and more and more. The present government has heaped scorn and derision on local authorities for their failure to adequately manage municipal infrastructure. Unfair. Those responsible for starving a person, are not really entitled to then complain about their victim’s weakness!
The Three Waters project, with its four “entities” and their hideously complex financial and governance structures, was the Government’s answer to local government’s maxed-out credit cards. The water entities could borrow the money that New Zealand’s cities, towns and districts could no longer access.
There was, however, a catch. According to the international credit-rating agencies, the four entities had to be protected from politics. International investors do not like politics – it’s messy and destabilising. If the cost of drinking, storm and wastewater management rose sharply, said the credit-raters, then the entities responsible had to be protected from every kind of consumer backlash. Whatever else these big beasts might be – they won’t be in any way democratically accountable.
Serious thinkers put time into their discourses on Bowalley Road. Maybe a well-rounded position will follow perusal of the total post.
I have a few old publications away on a shelf. Looking at a Listener from 2003 edited by Finlay McDonald, it somehow seemed so relevant and interesting. I pick out part of a Jane Clifton political piece. In a box besides a nice image of smiling Helen Clark it reads –
Clark is now so relaxed in office that the media, and by extension the audience of voters, have come to seem like her personal drawing-room, where she can relax and expound.
If Clark is replaced with Ardern does this still resonate rightly?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/479129/debate-sparks-up-on-controversial-sale-of-eastland-network
Let’s keep this asset under local control, with greater emphasis on service and less on profit… now is not the time to be selling an asset like this.”
He said the network was a reliable asset, while the other Eastland assets – the port and electricity generation – were risky.
“Our port, totally reliant on forestry, totally reliant on China at the moment. Generation? Risky and in a thermal area – prone to earthquake and eruptions. Without the network, this portfolio looks very precarious … our forefathers encapsulated this asset for future generations, knowing its value.”
Former trustee Jim Martin had a different view.
“Did our forefathers [have] this asset for us with the intention to hold it forever? I don’t think so. The trust deed specifically says every three years the trustees must consider the continued ownership of the asset, which indicates the settlers of the trust wanted that to happen, they didn’t say that we would hold it forever.”
He said he had spoken to friends and clients who had started using solar energy.
“There could come a time when the network is just servicing heavy industry and some residential. It may lose a lot of connections over time. Now could be the best time to sell this asset if you’ve got the right price. One thing that’s absolutely certain – if you sell it today it’s still here tomorrow, it’s regulated by government as to the price and its continued existence.”
A spokesperson for Trust Tairāwhiti said a decision on the network sale would be made public in due course.
Good reality and practical advice can always be swamped by hyperbole and common sense
which always sees the smple and obvious if it enriches some-body or groups!
This is a comment from 2002 Deputy Prime Minister Jim Anderton RIP, on the loss of national assets to those with bigger pockets.
No one more than me supports the idea of New Zealanders owning their own strategic assets. But we have to realise that the horse has bolted here…a $500 million fund [mooted then] is only about 1 per cent of the sharemarket’s value.
What that shows is that it’s easy to sell strategic assets, but it’s much more difficult to buy them back.
[Jim Anderton] says further on that ‘Not all foreign investment has been bad for New Zealand. But much of it, particularly in privatised former state-owned assets, has added no economic value and has “simply been asset-stripping”.’
(The Dominion, I think p.9, Feb/5/2002: Government cool on Fund for Key Stakes from Craig Howie)
Thinking further – do we operate in two different spheres of concept – changing instantly from one to the other? Like hearing that there has been a bad vehicle crash, getting all the details including that they weren’t wearing seat belts, and then being in a hurry we enter our own vehicle with family and rush off not doing up our seat belts. So we feel part of society and then immediately distance ourselves from it and the risks that prevail to all.
We hear about violence in households particularly from drunks, but then don’t limit our own drinking and we cause unhappiness from our own tipsy behaviour. And will repeat this behaviour – As Queen Victoria is supposed to have said about lesbianism “I don’t want to know that” or that could apply to Prime Ministers asked to answer for some bad behaviour of their cohort.
Our complex minds discussed by Sabine Hossenfelder on wave function and quantum theory and how it somehow relates to our own thinking is something for people who have bigger brains than I have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1wqUCATYUA
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7SiRiqK-Q Does Consciousness influence Quantum Mechanics?
Trouble is do we know, can we allow for a time, when to stop thinking of esoteric things and just concentrate on being human beings getting on with each other in purposeful living and the planet, or are we terminally obsessed with intellectualism…?? There’s an acidic comment made to someone annoyingly smart that comes close to truth ‘You’re so smart you’ll cut yourself’. Well there has been work done on that also.
How self-harm provokes the brain into feeling better
Aeon ·
https://aeon.co › essays › how-self-harm-provok…
13/10/2014 — Cutting brings relief because emotion and pain criss-cross in the brain. Can we untangle the circuits and stop self-harm?
Wrong – obviously ‘You’re so sharp, you’ll cut yourself’. That’s what I meant to put – I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer!
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/479132/lab-grown-chicken-safe-to-eat-say-us-regulators
I should coco – if you don’t know what that means then you know how puzzled I feel about lab-grown chicken.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/479130/metservice-warns-of-risk-of-thunder-tornadoes-for-upper-north-island
But what about the children that have gone missing on that coast? The runaway Dad with his three small children needs to have a film made about him and them. That’s one way that co-operation and communication could be established. A lone or a pair of camera operators could document their adventures including how they get on when there are tornadoes around. It would appeal to his desire to be special, heroic, disobedient, different, and give him a personal lift and perhaps break the deadlock that now exists. The kids may be learning to be survivalists but I don’t see that will help much in the long run as there are other things to learn as well. He
could go into depression and kill all of them. His mindset seems to be unreadable.
This Otago Daily Times August 2022 image shows him with a beard, something that I haven’t seen before.
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/extreme-stress-cops-widen-search-father-kids-missing-again
Oct 22 – https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/new-plea-for-missing-marokopa-children-theyre-living-like-fugitives/GT5NH6JFW53RDOPNJME4DO752A/
Nov 22 – https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/300735442/family-of-marokopa-dad-tom-phillips-raise-5027-for-reward-to-find-children
(A nice picture of the children showing them differently having a good time on an outing.)
Interesting how hard it is to find wanted news items in this age of onfo saturation. I saw something about a USA jail beating on Radionz and looked further on RNZ but it had vanished. I feel that there is less archival stuff and you have to search through each hour’s news groupings. Gave up. Very poor – then went to google and got something on Newsy but its so limited with admonitions and grey shading it is hardly readable. But still gives the story so am passing it on.
https://www.newsy.com/stories/georgia-man-beaten-by-five-officers-in-jail-cell/
Some of your open mics disappear completely. Understandable if it doesn’t suit you but principle is our bedrock. Disinterest and force for the people aren’t easy companions in one person. It’s just not good for our right cause. Getting away with things is easy, the easy path to Hell.
TS is disgusting.
What’s up?
Kim Dotcom coming back?
Today FM’s political commentator Josie Pagani can’t see the party connecting with voters.
“It is not a serious party and it is not a genuine movement of the people that I can identify,” Paganini says.
“It really is a salad bowl of cranks and fringe dwellers.”
Cheers from Josie Pagani, the nation’s cheer germ, better than Covid anyway.
Later:
Kim Dotcom
@KimDotcom
Follow
I need web-designers, app-devs, graphic artists and meme gods. This is the best time to shake things up in politics. People are tired of the bullshit and lies. Let’s ring in a new era in politics: Anti-globalist -establishment -secrecy. Pro-freedom -crypto -peace.
4:11 PM · Sep 2, 2022
https://www.todayfm.co.nz/home/politics/2022/09/kim-dotcom-hints-at-revival-of-internet-party-and-political-comeback-for-2023-election.html
Congrats to Lydia Ko. Amazing levels of excellence and perseverance – wins through again.
How does she do it?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/sport/479169/lydia-ko-wins-record-prize-purse
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/11/supreme-court-rules-in-favour-of-make-it-16-to-lower-voting-age.html
Good stuff, now make it law in time for next year’s election 🙂
From an old voter to a young one. Lyrics by Don McLean ‘Dreidel’
I feel like a spinning top or a Dreidel
The spinning don’t stop when you leave the cradle
You just slow down
Round and around the world you go
Spinning through the lives of the people you know
We all slow down
How you gonna keep on turning from day to day?
How you gonna keep from turning your life away?
No days you can borrow, no time you can buy.
No trust in tomorrow. It’s a lie.
And I feel like I’m dippin’ and divin’.
My sky shoes are spiked with lead heels.
I’m lost in this star car I’m drivin’.
But my air sole keeps pushin’ big wheels.
My world is a constant confusion.
My mind is prepared to attack.
My past a persuasive illusion.
I’m watchin’ the future it’s black.
What do you know?
You know just what you perceive.
What can you show?
Nothing of what you believe.
And as you grow, each thread of life that you leave
Will spin around your deeds and dictate your needs
As you sell your soul and you sow your seeds
And you wound yourself and your loved one bleeds
And your habits grow, and your conscience feeds
On all that you thought you should be
I never thought this could happen to me.
You’ve read the lyrics – here’s the man and his geetar weaving the words into deep meaning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKhYiOE8GzQ short
live with band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zMJvDOb8ds
Christ on a bike!
TVNZ are not doing themselves any favours are they!
The one time I make an exception to watch “”1 news” (Your New with Max Headroom) live. less than a minute into the broadcast. Max Headroom gets cut off as they ‘throw’ to an ad break.