A boy fell from a roof
10am
Monday
when we say boy, we mean he was preadolescent,
or at least not sexually active (proof pending)
IMPACT
Doctors assume he will live.
The roof was not high
Several people were looking the other way, we weren’t even there.
From which point do we measure the height? From the toe, from the head, did he try to arrest his fall?
If only we had a perspective. What is time?
FACT
He is HUMAN.
GRAVITY.
Monday, is a matter of opinion.

I mean, at least you won’t be swayed to vote National to regain control over your investment property fiefdom. When Martyn Bradbury starts talking about kicking in the walls and windows of slumlord properties, is it opinion, or emphasis done in the Bomber style, or both? Does it make the story more understandable, relateable, complex? Does it ask a question? Does it make a sound? Is it recognisable?
Opinion isn’t really the problem, as long as someone knows opinion exists, and which direction it’s pointed. When Dr. Greg Treadwell was writing for The Gulf News, did the things he write have context and chronology, follow a trend, even when he deliberately tried to create a foil to the trend? Is that an illustration of opinion? Is it a breach of facts, or one of their limitations?

He needs to meet Matt McCarten and the crew. According to their website, they meet “the boring” conspiracies every day, head on, layer on layer. You’d need nerves of steel, and patience for days. Good job he’s on the side of a larger constructive ideal, or we’d all be screwed.

We can turn off certain internet based tech and just not use it. I could do it, but then I still have bookshelves with real books on them. People born post mobile phones or post-interactive media would find it difficult. If you wander down the Post Office to pay your bill and are forced to use a touch screen, would you complain there’s no place to post your instagram pics? Does it matter if they know how much our phone and electricity bill is this month?
Russell and Edward have forgotten that the idea of the collective marching down the street being the only solution isn’t true. They’re using a wider context to define their argument, then saying the present day is the context, and then basing a solution on their being no wider context in which to find solutions. Conspiracy in plain view has always existed. People have owned nothing and been unhappy (and also “happy”) via many different methods of governance and control, for thousands of years. The two methods of resistance they’ve missed in focussing too closely on their topic, are 1) the ability of an individual to keep changing, therefore escape both control and behavioural prediction, and 2) the power of a good idea, applied at the right time. Tracking and control of either of those things cannot be done. They’re well known ideas, which is why you sometimes get sci-fi films about it, Minority Report (2002), springs to mind, but there are certainly others more recent. Just saw one on netflix. Even if Mr Big Corp knows how much you paid for your electricity in April, or that you searched for burrito outlets near you soon after, there is no algorithm that can accurately predict you will click on an advertisement about water reticulation privatisation in Mexico, on June 26th.

(Having said that, I know for a fact that google have now loaded those terms, and later tonight my youtube account will be offering some strange shit! But I will not click on them… or will I? The double bluff! Take that, Mr Big Corp.)

Also I don’t think they’ve deconstructed the conspiracy/no conspiracy idea far enough to understand why people do or don’t react/respond. There’s a logical flaw in there somewhere: you can’t know about something, and not know about it, at the same time, at least not without some serious dissonance. They might get through an entire dialogue on that and find the original question has changed.

I’m not saying the interview isn’t useful, or the information flawed, I’m just saying what appeared to me as they played it out.

1. The financial system is a gigantic Ponzi scheme, propped up in the short term by ever-greater ‘money-printing’ by central banks, and doomed to collapse in a matter of a few years (at best) and possibly in a matter of months.

2. Global extraction of conventional oil peaked around 2007, and the unconventional oil extraction business which has been propping up economic arrangements for well over a decade is in dire straits because of low oil prices and rapid depletion of fracked wells.

3. Planetary overheating -due to excessive use of fossil fuels- has reached the rapid meltdown stage, at which there is extreme danger of the Earth being rapidly thrown into an entirely new climate regime dominated by severe and lasting droughts, termination of water supply systems such as that of Lake Mead in the US, increasingly severe superstorms that wash away infrastructure, and collapse of much (or all) of the industrial agriculture system.

4. Collapse of health systems worldwide (but especially in the developing world and the US) as a consequence of out-of-control epidemics and underlying health ‘issues’ (such as obesity and diabetes) that are a consequences of ingestion of commercially manufactured ‘foods’ that are high in processed starch, fructose and vegetable oils and low in healthy protein and essential nutrients.

5. Population overshoot is now of the order of 7 billion -the vast majority kept alive in the short-term by the excessive (and unsustainable) use of fossil fuels.

6. Corporatised and internationalised sport has no future.

7. The currently growing gap between the rich and the poor will continue to grow in the short term until a massive crisis is generated, after which the impoverished masses and impoverished ‘middle classes’ will turn on the ‘elites’ in something resembling the French Revolution.

So what TVNZ and Radio NZ have to do is keep the lid on that lot and keep pretending none of it is happening, and that the ‘problems’ we are encountering can be fixed by the banks and corporations and worse-than-useless politicians who got us into this mess.

Be a climate denier while profiting from killing the planet and others, then purchase your super yacht. It’s like the private planes leaving India….

The only good thing about Stuff WAS the comments, then Stuff knocked them on the head because some were nasty. Go Woke, Go Broke.. then get a bailout from Labour.