Now the Chinese Government have admitted the Wuhan Virus can be spread human to human, why the hell isn’t NZ screening for it at the border???

A virus has jumped the species divide in the cheek to jowl back streets of the back blocks of China and the Chinese have lied about the lethality, how it spreads and how fast the damned thing is spreading.

As families tell of pneumonia-like deaths in Wuhan, some wonder if China virus count is too low

By the time the Chinese start being honest it will be too late.

Put screenings at our borders and the millisecond we have any idea of how lethal it is shut the borders to those areas impacted.

NZ has seen the impact of our grotesque incompetence when it comes to measles, are our slack Health Officials going to let us down again or will a Government too frightened to anger China prefer to risk our collective health rather than infuriate our largest trading partner?

Wuhan Virus ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.

Look, it was bad enough that National allowed their alleged Chinese spy to organise Simon Bridges to meet the head of the Chinese secret police and then praise China afterwards, but to arrange for Simon Bridges to meet a Philippines politician who is an active Nazi sympathiser and promoter of extrajudicial killings without criticising the politician or publicly speak out against it is just outrageous…

…it’s a privilege to meet this guy…

…who says these things?

…this shows a jaw dropping lack of standards by the Leader of the Opposition!

Simon said he would hold the Philippines to account for their appalling human rights record, did it happen? Well, the official publication on the Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs website said that they only discussed issues on people-to-people relations, trade, investment, agriculture, science, and defence.

So much for standing up for New Zealand’s values Simon!

Imagine if a Labour leader met a foreign politician who was a Nazi sympathiser and who supported extrajudicial state killings and that Labour leader didn’t denounce the politician. Every media outlet in NZ would demand the immediate resignation of that Labour Leader, and never let up.

Will the NZ media start holding Simon to that level of accountability?

You know they won’t.

The double standards applied to Labour vs National in this country are just astounding.

Important ruling by the UN that climate refugees can’t be returned home without consideration of the impact being returned to a climate crisis zone has on the individual.

This as Australia, beset by catastrophic fires now succumbs to vast destructive hail storms, flash floods and huge dust storms provides a running commentary of how extreme weather events are now the norm.

In the middle of this, National are pulling political stunts like declaring they will stop climate change being taught in schools because it doesn’t allow climate denial to be part if the debate…

National might withdraw climate change teaching resource

National says it might make changes to a new resource being rolled out to schools to help with teaching climate change, or perhaps withdraw it altogether.

The resource, rolling out this year, presents data and information from scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NIWA and Government departments like Statistics NZ and the Ministry for the Environment. It doesn’t change the current curriculum, but aims to make it easier for teachers to do their job.

The Opposition has expressed concern over some of its contents, particularly information on the meat industry’s environmental impacts and what to do with students who express scepticism about humans’ impact on global temperatures, which have been rising for decades.

…the current political spectrum does not have the capacity to force through the radical adaptation we will require to survive the next phase of the climate crisis.

When Aucklanders looked up at the Orange skies caused by the megafires of Australia, we had a glimpse of the future we are leaving our children.

All the while the oil companies who knew about climate change in the 1990s are continuing to fund denial lies…

Oil And Gas Giants Spend Millions Lobbying To Block Climate Change Policies

Every year, the world’s five largest publicly owned oil and gas companies spend approximately $200 million on lobbying designed to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policy. This has caused problems for governments seeking to implement policies in the wake of the Paris Agreement which are vital in meeting climate change targets. Companies are generally reluctant to disclose such lobbying expenditure and late last week, a report from InfluenceMap used a methodology focusing on the best available records along with intensive research of corporate messaging to gauge their level of influence on initiatives to halt climate change.

…this is not getting better, the temperatures are only going up…

State of the climate: How the world warmed in 2019

All of the official climate data for 2019 is now in. In this article, Carbon Brief explains why last year proved to be so remarkable across the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere and surface temperature.

A number of records for the Earth’s climate were set in 2019:

• • It was the second or third warmest year on record for surface temperature – depending on the dataset used – and the warmest year without a major El Niño event. Temperatures in the lower troposphere were also either the second or third warmest.
  • It was the warmest year on record for ocean heat content, which increased markedly between 2018 and 2019.
  • It saw record lows in sea ice extent and volume in the Arctic and Antarctic for much of the period between April and August. The minimum Arctic sea ice extent reached in September tied for the second lowest on record.
  • Global sea levels and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations reached new record highs in 2019, while the world’s glaciers continued to melt.

…once the heat becomes a run away event radical solutions for adaptation will become the only solutions.

I know I keep writing this, and I will not stop writing it.

Fortress Aotearoa is ‬the only way forward. We can pretend the world will unite and join hands to combat what is rapidly unfolding or we can accept the doomed nature of the worst of human nature and rather than plan for a pretend world of co-operation that will never exist, prepare for one where the worst angels of our nature are unleashed.

The current political spectrum in New Zealand can not radically adapt fast enough to adopt the changes we must make if we are to survive the climate crisis. It will require a radical Political Movement that elects a Party to implement Fortress Aotearoa…

• Move away from intensive farming and look to become domestically self sustainable in terms of food.
• Immediately ban all water exports.
• Empower local communities to make local decisions and set up resilience programs.
• 5 year Parliamentary term so Governments can actually plan for change.
• Upper and Lower House (Upper House 50-50 split between Māori & Pakeha that can hold up legislation if unhappy about Treaty issues)
• Massive investment into R&D from Government with the understanding research is to benefit NZ first before sold offshore.
• Large scale increase in Navy, Army & Airforce.
• Mass limiting of tourism numbers with huge increased tourist taxes.
• Only citizens can vote.
• Sustainable immigration and an end to exploitative migrant workers.
• Resettlement Programms for all pacific island neighbours.
• Increase refugee in take to 10 000 per year
• Fully funded public services focused on real welfare of people.
• Mass Green housing rebuild.
• 100% renewable energy for entire country.
• Massive tree planting across previous farming land.
• Wholesale re-write of state services act to end commercial values.
• Investment into basic pharmaceutical production.
• Financial transaction tax
• Wealth tax
• Multinational tax
• Inheritance tax
• Capitalist monopolies in energy, transport and finance have to be brought into public ownership and control. They should be subject to democratic plans drawn up by the whole community. Workers should have much stronger decision making powers within them.
• All economic sectors to be made take steps needed to decarbonise the economy as much as is needed to reach zero net emissions by 2030.
• Free and frequent public transport on electric buses and/or trains in all main cities.
• Health care and education for life should be free and universally accessible.
• Welfare, pensions, child allowances, should be universal wherever possible.
• Public housing at fixed and affordable rents should be a right of all not just the desperately poor.
• All workers should have a right to a job and the workweek reduced with no loss of pay to make that possible.
• Local communes should be supported for control and delivery of as many functions of the centralised state as possible – including housing, education, health care.
• Local communes to support cooperative forms of production of food, solar and wind energy,  electric transport, and media.

On a rapidly warming planet, NZ will increasingly be the life boat for Earth and the tyranny of our distance will become our blessing.

As the climate crisis unfolds more and more people in fury will turn against the current political system too wedded to the economic profits margins of the polluters. It is just a matter of time before the NZ electorate rejects the limitations of the current political spectrum.

The only thing that makes the Carbon Zero Act ‘historic’ is the future generations who will look back in spite & anger that we thought this sophistry was a legitimate response to the climate crisis – if you think maybe acting in 30 years is a solution, you are the problem.

In 2023, for the first time in NZ history, Gen x + Gen Y + Millennials will be a larger voting block than the boomers.

2023 is our date for political revolution comrades.

The ‘1X’ attempted suicide callout police are getting 67 times a day

Police are responding to suicide attempts and threats 67 times a day but new cadets enter the force with just eight hours of mental health training.

Last financial year 685 people took their own lives but figures from the New Zealand Police’s 2018/19 annual report show officers were called out 24,662 times to people attempting or threatening to – an average of 67 a day and a 10 per cent increase from the previous year.

With a mental health system struggling to keep up with demand, 111 has become the first point of contact when people are in crisis, pushing police officers to the frontline of a mental health crisis.

On top of suicide callouts police also received 32,994 other mental health calls for events such as psychosis or people in distress.

When ill equipped Police are the frontline to our mental health and suicide crisis, we are in deep, deep trouble.

The horror of our suicide rate gives us a glimpse behind the ‘she’ll be right’ facade of our culture and the dark torment of an alpha male macho mental landscape that is terribly fragile.

Our under funded social infrastructure, our ‘me first’ consumerism, our 30 years of neoliberal mythology, our disconnection from one another, our untreated pain, our lack of hope from grinding poverty in a first world country, our damaged masculinity, the intergenerational consequences of colonialism, our unspoken rage culture, our inability to express emotion beyond anger – all of this demands questions we don’t want to hear as a society and the shame of suicide continues to hide and smother any healing.

In a society that has no religious faith and all the cultural maturity of a can of coke, the bonds which keep us attached are frail and disconnected. In our fetishisation of individualism we have lost the central part of the human condition –  connection.

We have traded in our interwoven threads of whanau, friendship and kin for a rat race where no one wins.

The reason we can’t talk about suicide is because we can’t stand to talk about the dark treacle of self hate and loneliness at the core of consumer culture. We don’t dare confront the hollowness of our existence on these far flung crags of rock for fear of what we will reveal about ourselves.

Damaged individuals competing for a self identity too fragile for the storms and tempests of life.

Thanks to neoliberalism, we are further from each other than ever before.

Look at the manner in which our suicide rates jumped after the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, where we moved away from the communal towards the individual…

…we huddle frightened on these lonely rocks at the end of the world and slowly one by one slip off into the swallowing dark. Until we are prepared to confront many of the individualism-over-all myths and rebuild our tattered communities, our suicide rate will remain reminding us of our whispered deceptions.

We refuse to ask the why of suicide because we are too frightened to know the answer is a reflection of the shallow and lonely community we have become. Instead we reel off a list of phone numbers whenever we dare mention suicide as if that means a fucking thing.

We are broken and no one wants to admit that.

Shane Jones unleashes on ‘bible-bashing’ climate change activists

New Zealand First MP and Minister Shane Jones has berated climate change activists for promoting the importance of reduced meat consumption, comparing their campaigns to “eco bible-bashing”.

In an interview with Radio Waatea on Monday, Jones likened activists to “medieval torture chamber workers” hellbent on “preaching this gospel of absolutism”.

Jones, who is the Minister of Forestry, Infrastructure and Regional Economic Development, made his opinions known following the Government’s announcement that schools will receive new resources to teach children about climate change.

Good to see Waatea News leading the agenda again.

This is Matua Shane at his most predictable.

If any other MP said this sort of thing there would be outrage but Matua Shane says this sort of outlandish nonsense from time to time to keep NZ First politically relevant for the news headlines.

Matua Shane pledged war against the supermarket duopoly. Nothing happened.

Matua Shane cried out against regional Air NZ cutbacks. Nothing happened.

Matua Shane raged against immigration and promised to end loopholes. Nothing happened.

Matua Shane says blah blah blah about climate change. Nothing will happen.

Matua Shane is all bark and no bite, he’s the naughty boy who gets to say some outlandish crap and his bloke cred will give him a free pass.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Matua Shane, he’s funny, clever and bloody likeable, but sweet Jesus he needs a better media strategy.

Talking of which, what the bloody hell NZ First?

Who is running their social media campaign for this election? NZ First should be promoting anti-free market economic nationalism in a world increasingly becoming protectionist yet they are trying to play culture wars when they don’t understand the culture, the war or which social media platforms they should be fighting that war on.

NZ First should be riding a wave of anti-globalisation based on their own anti-neoliberalism, yet they are not.

Police warn they can’t guarantee gang violence won’t erupt again

Police warn they can’t guarantee gang violence won’t erupt again after two shootouts over the weekend.

Tensions between Black Power and Mongrel Mob gang members spilt over into violence in both Ruatoria and Taradale. 

Superintendent Tania Kura says police can’t guarantee gang incidents such as the ones over the weekend won’t happen again. 

On Saturday, shots rang out on McClutchie Road in Ruatoria after a gang clash. On Sunday, a 25-year-old man was shot in the face, head and torso in Taradale as 30 to 40 gang members brawled in the street. 

The man is in hospital in a serious but stable condition. 

Couple of thoughts here.

I argued one of the threats to Labour this Summer was an explosion in gang violence, this confrontation between the Mob and BP isn’t that explosion in gang violence.

What we saw with the BP and Mob are the very predictable tensions being built by the new dynamics within the gang world between the domestic gangs and the 501s.

I’ve written extensively about how these new dynamics are fundamentally changing the gang scene and how much of a political danger that is for Labour, but what we are seeing in Ruatoria and Taradale is the very predictable public frictions you get when a tsunami of meth has flooded the criminal fraternity.

It is the 501s vs the domestic gangs that is creating the pressures that we are seeing here, and I fear that if we simply focus on the symptoms of these new dynamics we will miss the disease.

Strike Force Raptor is not a solution here.