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The minister of potholes is not keeping his promise the potholes are increasing daily. And they are wrecking my car.
Do you think he was talking about his ‘tummy-button’?
So much for inflation coming down.
Over half of small and medium businesses plan to increase prices in next 12 months
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/513247/over-half-of-small-and-medium-businesses-plan-to-increase-prices-in-next-12-months
Quote: The current mayor of Christchurch Phil Mauger, seems resigned to the fact. Small community libraries, he said recently, were just a “building with some books in.. People can always get on public transport and go to the really good libraries if they want to.”
https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=159321
The threat to the Central Library – Gordon Campbell
Sounds familiar – a Christchurch Mayor who deals summarily to problems with a bulldozer, without hesitation when the urgent need for remediation arises. My relative of similar ilk when he became a Councillor had the same cavalier attitude to libraries – expensive and needing a cut. Along with this prosaic attitude to imagination, he wasn’t a fan for the Hundertwasser and Maori Art Museum in Whangarei, not when more parking was needed! Roads and drains are the stuff of such people; services to the body politic but libraries serve both that body and mind.
People at the top of the pile, or devoted to the climb tend to be one-eyed with very little room for swivelling. Now a swivel-eyed character was always a negative term about people. But it was often about con artists, who are quick to see advantage. And libraries are like this. They offer an advantage to those who use them to widen their knowledge of others’ experience and wisdom, helping their skills of literacy, learning and imagination.
If there was more reading done and information absorbed we wouldn’t be in the throes of where we are. If the orcs pressure us too much and separate us from cogitation and wise education we will throw our freedom away. It is too easy to influence through moving pictures and imaginative scenarios (reality tv for instance). Now viewing can be manipulated to show something false, our minds are open to the sort of surgery that was pretend from the Filipino psychic surgeons which caught the imagination a while back.
We are getting more credulous now and rightly so as every boundary we thought established is broken, and it is paramount to keep libraries accessible and free and suitable for those content to be ordinary at the higher plane that leads from study of thoughtful publications. Cut the fancy trimmings for the design to be world-class or something but light with reasonable temperature and comfort planned. Don’t have them as playrooms for noisy children or chattering students, emphasising the community aspect, or a place for restless community-based mentally disabled. Make sure there is room for such but the rest for quiet reading or study and toilet, perhaps rent out a cafe area with food and drink to be consumed in that area, or in the meeting room.
Libraries are a sign of advanced civilisation. If they are downgraded or vanish or loaded with middle-class expectations of plush luxury, we will have no signpost to direct us to where the remnants of it may be found.
RNZ Author Interview
Davos Man: the billionaires who looted the world’s economies
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018831833/davos-man-the-billionaires-who-looted-the-world-s-economies
Thought this might be interesting as we have often looked at UK politics and thought WTH.
I bought a withdrawn library book about Brit politics by Nick Clegg. I can’t say I have come across the name in recent time. He was Liberal and talks about the slide over there from 2010 covering the ‘formation by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties of the first coalition government in Britain since the Second World War’ (over 50 years.)
Nick Clegg starts by recounting what happened in 2015 after he and his wife had been out door knocking across his constituency. The BBCs exit poll announced that the Lib Dems (him) would be hammered down to 10 seats from 57. They couldn’t believe it; it was actually eight.
Nick Clegg was Deputy Prime Minister . ‘I occupied a ringside seat as the Conservatives lurched rightwards under the pressure of an insurgent UK Independence Party (UKIP) and reopened their festering disagreement over Europe, culminating in Cameron’s spectacularly misjudged referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. I spent five years at the top of a government charged with an unenviable fiscal clean-up job after the calamitous financial crash of 2008…And I spent half a decade working with governments and leaders across Europe and America who were just as bewildered as I was by the rising tide of popular rage that was to sweep many of them out of power too.
I’ll read on. He sounds as if some happening and viewpoints might shed light on things that will help us. We have a coalition and ACT’s Seymour reminds me a bit of Nigel Farage prominent in UKIP from 2006 to 2016. (He has remained in a different position.)
One of our food dishes we embrace is pavlova, which requires eggs at the right temperature and right mixing of parts and slow cooking. Could we get things right cooking our own way with our own recipe.? I’ll try to read more about Brit and put up the odd extract.
Dealing with one of the – giant electronic corpse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVY7-Ti77UQ
Spotify’s Phony War on Bots
Somehow reminds me of Jack and his Beans in the folk tale.