The Daily Blog Open Mic – 28th November 2022

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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.

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.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

32 COMMENTS

  1. Just a thought – listening to Kim Hill this morning, she has so much that she is interested in, has thought about, I think she would have some good, possibly acerbic thoughts to add to the group discussions if she would. Could she, please, be asked??

  3. Interesting – are there learnings here for Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa?
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/479495/former-australia-pm-scott-morrison-s-secret-ministries-overkill-corrosive
    Former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s secret self-appointment to several ministries was “corrosive” to trust in government, former High Court justice Virginia Bell’s inquiry has found.
    The Bell Inquiry has recommended new laws that would require public notice of the appointment of ministers to an office, including temporary appointments, and departments to publish lists of ministers appointed to administer them.

    Morrison secretly appointed himself to administer several ministries throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, and in one instance used the powers to overrule a minister in a matter unrelated to the pandemic.

  5. Here is a useful vid for Labour Party organisers. It shows how to set up stage effects in the theatre. Seeing that Labour has given up being a real political party with values of serving the people and facilitating us to be a country of people able to work and earn and have an enjoyable and fulfilling life with wellbeing, these tips will be useful.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbhLBP78CTA – Creating an 18th-century Mechanical Theatre | V&A
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRjR5I2hg0 – Stage Mechanics and Special Effects

    Also these stage tips would be useful to a new set of young actors who arise to display our lives to us as we are somehow fogged, can’t see what and how and why we have ended up with so many ‘d’ words – discord, destitute, deprived, disadvantaged, distressed,
    disempowered, depressed, and all the synonyms for ‘hopeless’.

    Tips like this will be important in maintaining the facade of a group with power and purpose so that enough people will support them and keep the charade going; why? – because it pays and pays. (Upton Sinclair — ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ – Upton Sinclair, ‘I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked’).
    An interesting man to know about, ideas, background, achievements in changing bad conditions through getting new laws:
    https://www.britannica.com/biography/Upton-Sinclair
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair

  6. The truest NZer takes their weekend off or at least acknowledges the heresy. So, glad you’re doing that, ‘TDB’, unless it’s fun of course.

  8. Finally some middle class advice for surviving a recession. My favorite quotes?

    “Recessions don’t impact significantly on most people”

    “Don’t have a knee-jerk reaction if the market’s moving on you… you need to understand when you’re going to need that money in the future, and that’s what your reaction will be to a changing market – especially a volatile one”

    Best for last

    “Normally in a recession, you would see unemployment rise and that would be really hard to imagine in New Zealand at the moment”

    https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2022/08/cost-of-living-how-people-can-get-themselves-financially-ready-for-a-recession.html

    • The strange thing about measured, factual statistics is that they are malleable not hard-edged and straight. I offer for example the word ’employment’ as used by Statistics NZ and the wider economic world also and this quote from Lewis Carroll.
      “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
      ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
      ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
      ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
      https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12608-when-i-use-a-word-humpty-dumpty-said-in-rather

      (Our language, and revenue gathering, in general suffers from ‘Alice’s’ White Queen Effect – official acronym WQE!)
      Can you do Addition?” the White Queen said. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?” “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.” “She can’t do Addition,” the Red Queen interrupted.
      https://www.azquotes.com/quote/907522

      A few analogies for NZ/Ao in the 21st century, brought to you by seer Lewis Carroll
      On difficulties in devising a decent tax and monetary system and getting it adopted:
      “Well, yes, if you call that a-dressing,” the queen said. “It isn’t my notion of the thing, at all.”
      Alice thought it would never do to have an argument at the very beginning of their conversation, so she smiled and said, “If your Majesty will only tell me the right way to begin, I’ll do it as well as I can.”
      “But I don’t want it done at all!” groaned the poor queen. “I’ve been a-dressing myself for the last two hours.”

      It would have been all the better, as it seemed to Alice, if she had got someone else to dress her, she was so dreadfully untidy. “Every single thing’s crooked,” Alice thought to herself, “and she’s all over pins!—May I put your shawl straight for you?” she added aloud.
      “I don’t know what’s the matter with it!” the queen said in a melancholy voice. “It’s out of temper, I think. I’ve pinned it here, and I’ve pinned it there, but there’s no pleasing it!”
      “It can’t go straight, you know, if you pin it all on one side,” Alice said, as she gently put it right for her.

      (On trying to found a solid national policy for making a good living with useful employment to a high standard yielding just, practical earnings, advancement and wellbeing:)
      …“And, dear me, what a state your hair is in!”
      “The brush has got entangled in it!” the queen said with a sigh. “And I lost the comb yesterday.”
      Alice carefully released the brush and did her best to get the hair into order. “Come, you look rather better now!” she said, after altering most of the pins. “But really you should have a lady’s maid!”
      “I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!” the queen said. “Twopence a week and jam every other day.”

      Alice couldn’t help laughing as she said, “I don’t want you to hire me—and I don’t care for jam.”
      “It’s very good jam,” said the queen.
      “Well, I don’t want any today, at any rate.”
      “You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the queen said. “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”
      “It must come sometimes to ‘jam today,’ ” Alice objected.
      “No, it can’t,” said the queen. “It’s jam every other day: today isn’t any other day, you know.”
      “I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!’’

      (On discardable history and experience subject to whim and expedience.)
      “That’s the effect of living backward,” the queen said kindly. “It always makes one a little giddy at first—”
      “Living backward!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!…
      “I’m sure [my memory] only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”
      “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward,” the queen remarked.
      “What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

      “Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance, now,” she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, “there’s the king’s messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished—and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday; and of course the crime comes last of all.”
      “Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
      “That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.
      Alice felt there was no denying that. “Of course it would be all the better,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be all the better his being punished.”

      “You’re wrong there, at any rate,” said the queen. “Were you ever punished?”
      “Only for faults,” said Alice.
      “And you were all the better for it, I know!” the queen said triumphantly.
      “Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for,” said Alice. “That makes all the difference.”
      “But if you hadn’t done them,” the queen said, “that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!” Her voice went higher with each better, till it got quite to a squeak at last.
      Alice was just beginning to say, “There’s a mistake somewhere,” when the queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished.

      So the Queen was grievously upset about her finger being cut and bleeding – before it ever happened. This way would be madness one would think – but we are uncannily following Lewis Carroll’s fantastical stories. We need to wake up and apply our human minds warily, practically and kindly, rather than punitively, recording people’s details before they are ever criminals, and making rigid laws that punish people for doing something they wish to, so taking Puritan attitudes when we are supposed to be a thinking,tolerant community of free people.

      Punitive fines, uncaring social systems, make crime and our records showing that are sidelined or ignored. We are gradually losing hold on the reality we have created ourselves, and we and our society are made more vulnerable and less open to thinking, explanation and exploration of society’s mores. There is a necessity to combine to enable each group of people in an area to be in a loosely supportive, humanly sustainable, sensitive mode of purposeful intellectual life.

      • Consider this. The system of living backward as the queen suggests –
        Here we have a news item about doing more trade with Vietnam. Just think if we had lived backward? and somehow we skipped the awful Vietnam war and had gone straight to being on trading terms with Vietnam accompanied by some goodwill ?
        https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018868422/new-zealand-says-xin-chao-to-trade-with-vietnam

        If we are living in a moveable feast of meaning and doing, let’s skip the actual wars, sit round a table and snarl at each other and throw padded balls with hard cores that hurt, at each other. Then having expressed our primal emotions. settle down and note our grievances and work on remedying them until everyone grudgingly says the outcome will work for them. Could we make a satirical film along these lines that gets well-known like Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

  9. All of this hullabaloo about mowrees and 3Waters+2More Waters and the mowrees owning everything. Firstly the board members are only temporary whereas the 35 year services contracts worth up to $480b if their last estimate was right about how much its going to cost to fix it all.
    Add to that the conditions for the contracted company to provide those services that those companies can provide cover of liability for the undertaking of those contracts. This will exclude most probably 99% on NZ companies. So the question to be asked. Who might the contracting companies be? Multinational trillionarie balance sheet hedgefund investment companies?
    If so, then they will be bankrolled by the NZ Inc and also have an insurance policy that guarantees their business for all of this via the Ctppa or whatever its called now.
    The condition in the ctppa has a condition that allows companies to sue the NZ government for any losses of revenue.

    So this bs sideshow about the mowrees is just more white noise.

  10. Dairy murderer in Prime Minister’s electorate was Australian deportee

    My question is to the Prime Minister and asks, is this yet another case of Australia being a state sponsor of terrorism and if so will the NZ government be placing the Australian government on a terror watchlist and sanctioning them for transferring the problems and criminality of their country to New Zealand?

  12. Great thoughts!

    All truth passes through three stages.
    First, it is ridiculed.
    Second, it is violently opposed.
    Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
    Arthur Schopenhauer
    German – Philosopher February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860

    The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in
    escaping from old ones.
    John Maynard Keynes English – Economist June 5, 1883 – April 21, 1946

    I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
    I’m frightened of the old ones.
    John Cage American – Composer September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992
    https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_maynard_keynes_385471?src=t_new_ideas

    “Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”
    W. E. B. Du Bois

    “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
    W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

    Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
    W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935)

    “Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.
    It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.”
    W. E. B. Du Bois
    http://duboiscenter.library.umass.edu/du-bois-quotes/

  13. Call out the vets. Human anomaly (er typo, animal it is) birthing on side of road, needs care.
    https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/baby-born-side-road-after-hospital-told-mum-go-home
    A first-time mum is traumatised after she was forced to give birth to her baby on the side of a busy road and he hit his head as he came out.

    The woman had earlier been sent home from Auckland City Hospital, despite being worried about bleeding and feeling the need to push.
    She and her partner were in the car when she could feel the baby’s head crowning. Terrified she would injure the baby’s neck, they pulled over so she could get out.
    In a “matter of seconds”, the baby had slipped down her pyjama pants leg and onto the road – hitting the side of his head.

    “You never expect to see your baby on the street, covered in dirt, covered in blood,” the man said.

    Today’s political motto ‘ Expect the unexpected,. but remember you can’t rely on it.’

  16. A way to gain continual hand-wringing outraged headlines – expect to reach targets of zero with every prevention, remedial spend in society’s ills from drugs etc. Won’t of course be successful to zero or high target, then tons of dissension and calls for ending such remedial funding.

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018868587/relapse-reports-upset-gang-based-rehab-programme
    “The money’s going straight out the back door to run the meth production units all the way through the Hawke’s Bay” National Party police spokesperson Mark Mitchell claimed on Newstalk ZB at the time.
    His colleague Simeon Brown MP said he would draft a Bill to ensure no public money would ever be given to any gang. (It was actually the Health Ministry which had applied for the funding for the scheme and it later emerged the police had backed the idea too).

    To draw an analogy. The smart aleks filled with fervour about making and keeping money, often with a self-righteous or religious overtone, can’t be bothered with people who fall in the pits they dig. Leave them to rot; yet keep selling them liquor or whatever, and on the side may finance heavy drugs or facilitate other traders, and organise the political system and economy so they are all right and the devil takes the hindmost.

    What do they care, they have dosh and to spare, everything they want can be bought, as they don’t have any human with spiritual values, only material ones. Humans are devious; they know and suspect everyone of this, but never look closely at themselves. Such people will burn out the core of a living society like a plant virus leaves a shrivelled wreck of a former active, growing plant. They are triffid growers, out for the valuable oil, but multiplying risk from the poison stings of wilding plants.

    The Day of the Triffids: John Wyndham
    This is an outstanding post-apocalyptic book about survival in a world destroyed by a cataclysmic event and a biogenetically engineered plant…
    But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk, and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, fifty years before their realization, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia. https://www.amazon.com/Day-Triffids-John-Wyndham/dp/0812967127

  17. Good question! https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/479361/with-nz-s-hate-speech-laws-postponed-where-are-the-limits-for-comedy
    Opinion – After a long and at times divisive public consultation process, the government has opted to make a single change to the Human Rights Act and push the “wider and more complex” issues around hate speech legislation to the Law Commission for review.

    While the act will be amended to include religious communities in existing protections against speech likely to “incite hostility”, any extension of the law, including to protect the rainbow and disability communities, has been postponed for now.

    Can we say that the.leader …of ….church looks like a ferret with a long nose and a small mouth and sharp teeth? Or that there seem to be too many fundamentalist Christians around with faces and beliefs of puritans or beards to their chests and long shorts, like a uniform for casual Fridays. What about criticising some church’s eg … or … love of money to an excessive degree? Can one indicate which is referred to by just showing the first initial – D or A or C etc? What if some man is called Christian or Muhammed, can they be named in a critical or denigrating fashion?

    Can we call someone a puritan (Merriam-Webster : someone who believes that it is important to work hard and control yourself, and that pleasure is wrong or unnecessary:)
    without being hauled up by Puritans who believe and act on the above meaning?

  19. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018868912/auckland-mayor-s-erebus-comments-cruel-victims-son
    Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown referred to the proposed memorial as a “a huge concrete thing” and said it should be near the airport to remind people there is a risk in flying.

    Agree about concrete thing in lovely verdant little park in midst of city. Why not invite public response in the first place. Seems bureaucratic know-alls administer everything to fit their own ideas of what is appropriate. Saying that reminding people of a risk in flying is harsh,

    That’s what you get from that Brown person as mayor; vote for a different brown person and you might get heart mixed in with practicality if you were lucky, but don’t know about background of candidates.

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