To be honest, I find the news that there is traffic chaos getting in and out of Auckland airport as hilarious as the bullshit solutions brainfarted out by Auckland Transport and Auckland Airport.
The failure of the TPPA was just one of many signs that this limb of the neoliberal paradigm is in crisis. 2016 saw the paralysis of the US-EU negotiation known as TTIP, well before Trump’s election. The Belgian regional parliament of Wallonia vetoed the ratification of the lesser-known Canada-EU deal (CETA), setting conditions for their approval, leading European activists to embrace the slogan: ‘we are all Wallonians’.
While communities are being torn asunder as I write by human-caused violence, such as we’re witnessing in Aleppo, Turkey and Egypt, I want to devote this post to honouring a snapshot of three communities that are being built around music in New Zealand.
People have been digesting the appointment of Stephen Bannon as Trump’s chief strategist and the sudden rise in overt racism and Nazi symbology. There are people saying “Heil Trump”, giving Nazi salutes, and spray-painting swastikas in alarming numbers. The US is a large, populous, diverse country, but there is clearly something of significance here beyond just a few ignorant teenagers with spraycans and emotional issues.
What Winston, the Greens and Labour all understand and appreciate about the Pike River Mine is how utterly responsible we all are as a civil society for the deaths there.
Did Russia hack the Democrats and drip feed that information to wikileaks to impact the US election?
With less than 10 months until the election, what will be the political issues and what will be the wild cards in 2017?
Psychology tells us we have huge, indomitable confirmation bias. We find rational arguments to justify our intuitive position. Is it so hard to believe, when a candidate like triggers ALL of the modules in our morality matrix, that he won? That in a polarised election the one who ticks all the morale boxes was going to lose?
I’VE ONLY EVER MET ONE serving agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. As far as most of us lefties knew he was a liberal American academic; friendly, generous, with a fund of interesting stories to tell. Outwardly, at least, the man seemed harmless.
One of the more unusual sights in the post-Key scramble for top jobs was that of nonentity Health Minister Jonathan Coleman putting his hat in the ring, and following up with the promise of more cash for the mental health sector.