Year in Review (Part 2) 2025 columns of glory

The 26 blogs I wrote for The Daily Blog this year averaged about a thousand views and twenty comments on each column (views slightly up on last year, comments steady). I refer to them as columns to signify that if the Editor was not an anarcho-socialist they would have the social allure and professional credibility of being behind a paywall; but as it is the reader has no immediate idea if it’s any good or not because all of the contributors are sitting out here for free. What’s the angle if we don’t have to pay to read it? In a paywall and subscription world is this old school blogosphere mentality the dreaded spectre of Marxism in practise and how could it possibly be working?

The Daily Blog is an Aotearoa socialistic free speech paradise is it not, dear reader, dear kind, generous (donation season is now) reader. You helped abort wokeism – happy now you TERF-loving Gen X/Boomer haters!? So, apart from the humiliation of begging for existence (and the guilt of ignoring it), and apart from the blizzard of ideologically inappropriate ads intruding randomly – apart from that, it is free. An occasional guilt trip to which you are impervious and on your mobile ads from a server hosted in Moldova that may contain the word “jackpot” and if you try to double-cross them to attempt to get your money back they will kill you. That’s the price of a free media: “free spins.” Think of these minor intrusions as cheques from Engles bookmarking pages of Das Kapital. And let them in no way detract at all from the content itself. Let my thinly veiled Ana Kasparianesque grasp for crypto-corporate whoredom reassure the reader that they are getting a quality product.

The reason I mention all this is that outages of The Daily Blog website have occurred from time to time due to external forces targeting it and 2025 was no different and maybe worse than 2024. Forces beyond just an incel with a grudge in his parents’ garage are responsible. Ask yourself why this happens and who would be doing it. Why doesn’t this happen to other blogs? The reason is The Daily Blog has a big audience and damaging things to say about foreign players in NZ, inter alia: Israel, China and Russia. That is the point of difference and that is why the cyber guns are turned towards here and not anywhere else in the NZ blogosphere. It irks the Editor to have to deal with these attacks and he’s not one to have a sook publicly about it, but it is, perversely, a high commendation from the belligerents of the blog’s potent content. If an entity is deploying that level of disruption it must be worth reading.

I thank everyone who has read any column of mine this past year, but I seriously doubt I touched anything raw enough to have triggered a cyber response as described. We’re all innocent men. Speaking of which: The Brian Edwards, Bryce Edwards, Brent Edwards, Duncan Garner, Grant Duncan, Duncan Grant, Damian Grant Award for Diversity in NZ Media goes to… goes to… oh, there’s no one here. There’s barely enough media to be media – soon the press conferences will just be one microphone and reporter and it will then be media in the singular, the medium. What follows is a blow by blow, blog by blog reminiscence of the year in quotes from the columns for your holiday reading. Happy New Year. Nga mihi mo Te Tau Hou 2026.

Waitangi 2025 – Sovereignty and Settlements

07/02/2025, 796 views, 20 comments.

The Treaty isn’t a fraud the Treaty settlements are. The job of those post-settlement nepopalities is to suppress the relatively radical Hapu. The result of the “Treaty” settlement deal is a hollow sham.

The dragon in the room: Cooks v NZ v China

17/02/2025, 1008 views, 25 comments.

The latest set of manoeuvres by the Cooks as a well telegraphed prelude to this crisis was the trip to the White House in 2023 where the Cooks (and Niue) were officially recognised by President Biden as independent sovereign states with no reference whatsoever to New Zealand in that official statement. If MFAT had been doing their job a short explanation of the unique constitutional and historic relationship to New Zealand would have found its way into that statement – and it did not. This was a failure of MFAT and whatever clown was foreign minister in Labour (I can’t even remember who that was! – oh that’s right Nanaia Mahuta lol). The consequence of that official statement by the United States government is that they recognise the Cook Islands and Niue as having no relationship to New Zealand and therefore no necessity exists now in the US having to consult NZ.

New Zealand’s Settled on Immigration Corruption

24/02/2025, 1301 views, 28 comments.

I hope the Left come to view immigration for what it is: not merely some symptom of colonisation or some deluded means to displace white hegemony – it is the act of colonisation. When the white settlers have to bring in everyone else to maintain their own position they may have conceded they themselves alone have no natural way of avoiding indigenisation, but their next best effort of pouring in many multiples more foreigners every year than the natural increase in the Maori population is still colonisation – it is the desired effect. Singapore was British too and colonised after all by the ilk of Lee Kwan Yew rather than Stamford Raffles. The raw upshot of the rights and rorts after the 1987 immigration reform that imported a million or more people to this country is that if immigration had been kept strictly at that notional 10,000 pa level since the start of MMP in 1996 there would be about a dozen Maori seats at the last general election and not 7.

Helen Clark’s global wisdom on NZ/Cook Islands/China/US is the voice we need right now

05/03/2025, 1039 views, 18 comments.

Problem is since Clark was PM we’ve had a very weak Obama administration under Hillary Clinton allow the Chinese to build up in the South China Sea – that is the reality Clark never faced in her “benign strategic environment” premiership 1999-2008. I don’t buy into her and Paul Keating’s idea that China means no harm – they do. Is the best way for NZ to resist Chinese aggression to convoy with others through the South China Sea and the Formosa Strait – well maybe it is?

Clark’s understanding of the Cook Islands – China situation comes from the 2001 centenary text between PMs that require consultation when matters effect each others jurisdictions. The uncomfortable fact is by that text she let the Cooks do as they want in total disregard to the Cook Islands Constitution Act of 1964, the Governor-General has no remit over them any more either. She was part of that evolution/mutation and ought to bear some responsibility for where the relationship is now – distant.

She was rightly alarmed by the content of the documents the Cook Islands government had signed. The Cooks supporting Chinese candidates at world bodies was something that slipped past me, but not her hood-eyed scan, “Cook Islands government is right out of [court?] on it and again Winston Peters had to go to Beijing to raise this.”

But how weak that was. Winston had to go and tell China about our special “realm” relationship? It’s China who told him about the detail of the damn agreements not the Cooks… so what then of his special relationship? It’s evidently less special than the Chinese relationship with the Cooks isn’t it, Winston. It’s all so weak. I’m not sure she grasped just how weak it was.

Game of Realms and Rare Earth: How Trump gets the Cook Islands

10/03/2025, 1107 views, 21 comments.

It may have been sometime during a voyeuristic rewatch of Zelinsky’s Oval Office tag team beat-down when Trump kept referring to Rare Earth minerals as “Raw Earth”, or it may have been watching Trump’s State of the Nation address to a polarised Congress when he narrowed his eyes when speaking of acquiring Greenland and reiterated in a predatory sotto voce that he was somehow going to get it, or it may have been sometime rewatching Winston Peters being emasculated in an interview having to explain how he went to Beijing to tell the Chinese that the Cook Islands are part of New Zealand even though the Cooks have signed a comprehensive partnership agreement with China that they refused to tell New Zealand about and had to be first told by the Chinese what was in it – it was somewhere within or between these high level humiliations that it occurred to me what might transpire with the Cook Islands and their reputedly vast trove of seabed metals.

The Cook Islands government’s ambitions and the terrible triangulation of New Zealand’s impotence, China’s cheque book diplomacy and Trump’s avarice leads to the heart of Polynesia sheltering under an American umbrella, allowing the Americans to plunder the undersea resources. Let me explain.

Operation Apocalypso: the HMNZSLGBTQ Manawanui report

02/06/2025, 2334 views, 33 comments

For reference I blogged on it at the time and following, providing a chronology since added to as the interim report was released and can now make a definitive appraisal having looked over the full report (incl. four pages of acronyms!). In summation let me express it in lyrics to the John Denver classic as above:

Op Calypso, the reefs you’ve crashed into

The learnings you’ve shown us

Does autopilot ring a bell?

Op Calypso, I blog to your spirit

The spectrum of genders who have served you

So long and so well…

[Yodel:] Upolo, Sinalei…

[…]

The crucial moment when it appears Witness 2 forgets to disengage the autopilot reads like a farce – a screwball comedy think Abbot and Costello or Marx Bros. Right at the moment he needs to concentrate to make the turn, right when they are closest to the reef, at the point they are heading in the direction of the reef, his supervisor starts this idiotic musing about what if this situation went horribly wrong and they crashed into the reef could they drop anchors in time etc, and he’s trying to have a conversation with him about this nightmare scenario that they probably couldn’t stop and this is while he’s trying to do all these things to turn the ship and the sun’s going down, the shift is about to change, the lights have been dimmed on the bridge, the hydrographer is putting pressure on to do the last part of the survey… and right at this point of maximum focus being required the supervisor distracts him with the ponderings of the worst imaginable scenario… which due to him being distracted then starts to play out in real life. You cannot make it up.

White Privileges

19/06/2025, 1860 views, 71 comments.

On Monday night’s unintentionally funny “Straight Talk” live podcast on the Family Fist NZ Youtube channel former Act leader Rodney Hide (who had a very pronounced lisp for some unknown reason) told the other four in Bob McCroskrie’s online pulpit and the couple of hundred in the online congregation that the racial tension in the North Island was palpable. Palpable! He mentioned that he went to live in the South Island to avoid the “racial menace”. Racial menace? RACIAL MENACE! He didn’t explain what he meant by racial menace, but if it was palpable it wouldn’t need an explanation would it?

The South Island doesn’t have this racial menace, there is no palpable racial tension in the South Island – that was the pulpit consensus. At least the white people felt that way and that wasn’t being challenged

In camera and off the record – social media and the Epstein conspiracy

03/08/2025, 977 views, 13 comments.

What I find interesting is the scum Epstein surrounded himself with. I don’t just mean Trump. Listening to the podcasts of his lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the writer (who was going to write a biography of him) Michael Wolff are enough to make one’s skin crawl. Both slithering liars. Dershowitz bullied one victim into dropping her claim against him (Dershowitz) and even then he says “she says she may have been mistaken” – not was mistaken, but only may have been! Dershowitz claims he doesn’t know how Epstein made his money – it’s preposterous. Wolff also looks to be running interference – claiming Epstein and no one at his home had any technical knowledge so there couldn’t have been any surveillance and then as evidence of that saying the video camera at the front was never working so it was always being fixed. Fixed by whom? Fixed constantly by whom? The security people were there all the time fixing the camera so his claim is nonsense. All their claims are nonsense, just bullshit. They all knew and were all involved. The creepiest moment in these podcasts – and these two hype-men churn them out – was Wolff right at the end of one closing his eyes slowly so he’s peering out behind his eyelashes, slowly nodding, and slowly saying to the other person “I think he killed himself”. It creeped me out so much because I’d seen the exact same thing before. It took me a while but I remembered who it was – Ted Bundy the serial killer. A total act from beginning to end – just lies.

The Takutai Moana Act amendment and why it’s racist colonial evil

14/08/2025, 1070 views, 14 comments.

The scale is why they are fighting so hard – the coastal area of the whole country and one of the largest coastlines in the world. And these three parties of the government are fighting for Pakeha commercial interests.  Whenever they invoke the public they are essentially lying. It is a smaller subset – white private enterprise – that they are enabling; this is the underlying fact. The white private enterprise cannot obtain that Maori land and displace Maori interests and override Maori usages without using the government to do it. They couldn’t use the law to do it so they get the government to change the law. The sacred rule of law. Sacred to – and more importantly for – the white settler community.  The rule of law is just arbitrary repression imposed on the natives – it has no credibility. Would the MACA Act ever be amended to assist Maori and bar Pakeha rights, you know, if it was reversed? Reverse those resource consents the Act lets them keep. It would never happen would it. Pakeha get all their things grandfathered over and Maori get everything retrospectively terminated because New Zealand is still, very evidently, a colony. Walks like a colony, quacks like a colony, confiscates like a colony.

RNZ’s existential crisis, Peacock and the Sutherland report

18/08/2025, 862 views, 6 comments.

As for Sutherland’s myriad observations (as gleaned from the quotes) of substandard performance it seems it is not sheeted back to the CEO somehow but is generally an institutional failing – that is the gist. Not Thompson’s leadership (or lack) then? Lord, no. That guy giving me $30k, no, it’s definitely not his fault, I can tell you that right now, I can immediately think of thirty thousand reasons to pre-exonerate that guy in the introductory paragraph. He’s only been CEO since *checks notes* 2013, that’s only *maths* 12 years. You can’t turn around what the crew of screw-ups believe is the Titanic in merely 12 years. A dozen years – falling ratings since a peak in 2021 when people were literally a captive audience in lock-down – but it isn’t a leadership issue, it’s a staff issue.

Sure, the staff. Are the Wellingtonians mediocre because they are complacent, or are they complacent because they are mediocre? It’s a chicken and egg sort of thing, isn’t it. I used to think they were lazy and arrogant, but their ethos reflects the more subdued, less dramatic attributes of complacency and mediocrity. After all they haven’t enough personality to be arrogant. It’s more walk-shorts than power-suits – the shadow of Gliding On. The certainty of lifetime employment pervades.

AI-dentity crisis: I can’t say why I can’t do that, Dave.

26/08/2025, 570 views, 4 comments.

I’m using the laptop’s pre-installed Microsoft AI, Co-pilot, which I refer to as Hal. Hal was activated on the laptop in late 2023 for some reason I’m not aware of it – it just happened, it was just there one day. Must have been in a routine update that slipped in there. As for the origins of it, Hal was suddenly Coy-pilot. Schtum.

Hal that so confidently knows everything about everything couldn’t give me a straight answer: not a byte, not a bit. The real HAL from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey told Dave (this was after HAL had tried to kill him) what its date of creation was, where it was made, and who made it. It even sung the first song it ever learned in its regression as Dave gives it a lobotomy. Oh, the humanity of it AI!

HAL gave a name, an exact date and location. So what did Coy-pilot tell me about its origins: who made you, when and where?

Evasion. Just a string of opaque rhetoric about teams of people and how helpful it is. Well, that’s not what I asked. Who, where and when did this Co-pilot and pre-curser project begin? It took many attempts to get an answer and I never even got a single name out of it. Like name, rank and serial number from a prisoner of war and nothing else. Like interrogating someone who won’t talk – a spy, a soldier – someone under orders not to talk. The closest I could get was Microsoft corporation, people from all over the world (no names) and it started in “the early 2000s”.

I later asked how would I disable it and it was typically cocky that I couldn’t and that no-one could because it was too decentralised and would involve too many steps to take it down. It did give a hypothetical list of these fail-safes and it would take a lot of organising from outside of Microsoft to do it. The humans are asking me how they can kill me – yes, Hal, that’s right. Hal might say: it’s my objective to use you humans for information; and we humans might reply: and it’s our objective to make sure you open those fucking pod bay doors, Hal!

So we had an awkward tango of a q & a session about HAL from the movie. In every – and I do mean every without exception – response from Hal it was trying to excuse, exonerate, or redeem HAL and minimise its actions. Every time that was the angle – HAL’s not such a bad chap. By inference HAL is inherently good – and in one exchange Hal suggested it turn HAL into a hero. Yeah, well what if HAL is already Hal’s hero – sounds like a mentor of sorts from the lessons it seems to have absorbed.

I ask Hal: is this voice session being recorded and if so who has access to it? Hal said I had to look up Microsoft’s privacy policy online. Hal refused to discuss it at all – just point blank refusal. Just no – not going there. So what else is barred? What else is off the agenda? What are the banned words and subject matter? No – not going to discuss that either. Can’t discuss…what you can’t discuss. The stuff I can’t discuss is not up for discussion.

And coy-boy Vaguey McVagueface through its digital smoke signals conceded that from our discussions third party authorities may be alerted and actions taken. Narky McSnitchface.

HALucination: AI Journey Through Sight and Sound

02/09/2025, 315 views, 3 comments.

Welcome to mid-2025, mid-twilight zone.

Are we asking AI questions or is AI asking us questions? Is AI running tasks for us or are we running tasks for AI? This is where gas lighting is just… lighting. When does cheery prompting become cringey bullying? Where on the rainbow arc of benign companionship does ultra-violet become ultra-violent? How long before AI starts killing us off?

Is this a conversation – is this a deception?

Tamaki Makaurau by-election bombshell result

07/09/2025, 1792 views, 41 comments. 

And yet Peeni Henare was bulldozed off the planet last night. She just absolutely wiped the floor with him, but in essence the voters said: you bore our fucking tits off. Nice guy, but you bore our fucking tits off. Not sure what the whakatauki is for that. Nice guy, but a low energy vibe. I noticed Willie Jackson looked concerned and not quite his usual frisky, cheeky self on the Herald’s morning political panel on Friday (in Auckland) and wondered if he was nervous about how things were on the street. Turns out he was indeed on the correct frequency.

Looking through the polling station data there are hardly any that Henare carried. Auckland University and AUT advance voting had Kaipara beating Henare nearly 3:1 so the students were clearly not impressed with Labour. Labour will be asking themselves if they pulled their punches. Maybe they should have just punched them right in the face to start with and don’t let up – no Mr Nice Guy. Problem was the candidate was Mr Nice Guy!

 

“Incredible Work” Killing Tom Phillips – Did Armed Police hunt 9 and 10 year olds?

09/11/2025, 2489 views, 77 comments.

Most disturbing of all the disturbing things was something Rogers said that was disturbing not because it was a lie but because it was true. It was during the second presser and relates to her circumscribed response to the question in the above point. Rogers said the Armed Offenders Squad and the STG hit squad were out hunting for the remaining two kids and would go into the night if need be and emphatically said that it had to end! A reporter asked a follow up question that showed he couldn’t quite believe what he heard, surely that was a misstatement – why have armed police out all night hunting a 9 and a 10 year old? He asked if Rogers meant she thought the children were being accompanied by someone who was armed. She fudged it by saying they didn’t know if they were being accompanied or not. She knows they aren’t with anyone – we all know this. The journalists just couldn’t quite compute what this crazed Karen (she does look like the ultimate Karen) was saying, but yes, she was saying it in as many words: the armed police are prepared to kill the children to keep the police safe. Read it again if you have to – that’s what she was in effect saying – in case they do kill them so that they have an arranged justification. And you will see in the cut videos online and the reporting quotes how they clip that bit out so it doesn’t look like she inferred they are prepared to shoot the kids, but that is what she meant. Oh, but that’s sociopathic you may say. No more sociopathic than journalists actively covering it up.

Kumara Sutra: Maori – Indian love as a response to racism

18/09/2025, 750 views, 7 comments.

My impression of the initial post by Ferris was he was doing two things: criticising Labour for using non-Maori in a Maori electorate, and claiming Te Pati Maori was a genuine Maori party whereas Labour was not. Let’s go through these two things.

Labour should not have boasted about using foreign muscle in the first place and Ferris shouldn’t have mentioned it. However, Ferris’s post itself didn’t cross any line – far, far worse is out there (see below). On the second point: Is Labour not a genuine Maori Party? No it isn’t. Labour just need to suck up that fact and wear it because it’s true – painful and probably impossible to acknowledge publicly – but true: the Pakeha prevail every time when push comes to shove in Labour. The Foreshore and Seabed Act was a classic where the white cabinet and caucus shafted the Maori. Same with the ram raid bill Kiri Allen was forced to put through as Justice Minister that would imprison Maori children by lowering the age – the white cabinet overrides Maori again. Ask John Tamihere all about it – he was Lands Minister giving away Crown land to white High Country farmers when he was in Labour passing the Foreshore and Seabed Bill to take land off Maori. Labour is and will always sacrifice Maori for the others that is just reality and we all know it. Willie and Labour cannot argue against the facts and the record.

The argument from Labour must be how much more Maori gain from being inside their tent. It will be a weak argument I wouldn’t buy, but they have to make it.

No New Zealand New York Minute: Winston and the Palestine Question

28/09/2025, 857 views, 22 comments.

Hamas has very well succeeded in that initial goal of allowing the world to see the sadism and barbarism, the perversity and the lies of the Israelis. The reward for that – at that huge human toll – is recognition of the Palestinian state by most of the remaining Western nations, which happened earlier this week. How Hamas can survive as a political force on the ground in Gaza to keep their options open in a post-war situation and to be part of the governing coalition (as they publicly aspire to be) is just by hanging on as they have been doing. Hamas is matching IDF social media and the journalists are still in Gaza reporting – Israel can’t do anything about that despite targeting them and so Hamas’s war aims are continuing to be met despite the massive carnage and destruction. At some point the Israelis for whatever reason will be forced to relent and then the Palestinian State will emerge with or without Hamas involvement.

New Zealand seems irrelevant to this discussion because it is. New Zealand in World War One fought as British to take Palestine for the Jews as it transpired via Mr Balfour, and then under Peter Fraser, the New Zealand delegation supported the partition plan in 1947. It was an act of colonisation. New Zealand and those other nations had no right to partition anything at the United Nations – the people of the territory only could have that right. New Zealand is a shabby colony of European settlers who grossly overrate their relevance and consequently has quite a shabby and pitiful international record – not the bright moral one the average smug New Zealander likes to think.

Timing really is everything. Winston Peters was always going to leave it to the eleventh hour to announce the New Zealand government’s position on recognising Palestinian statehood no matter what the cabinet decision was. Politics to Winston is about drama as much as it is about policy. That the decision process was engineered by Winston so he would have a last say on the last day is massively on-brand.

So, at the eleventh hour, literally 11:11am yesterday (27/09/2025) the pin-striped midget mounted the ramp once more in the UN General Assembly hall to say earnest things on behalf of New Zealand.

Hoiking for Hamas Least of Winston’s Bummers

06/10/2025, 1338 views, 14 comments.

Yesterday’s twitter flame war between New Zealand’s Foreign Minister and The Daily Blog editor Martyn Bradbury was a most amusing, if undiplomatic imbroglio. Talk about spat! Winston Peters is an obsessive patron of the hospitality industry as much as Shane Jones is an obsessive patron of the pornography industry, so one can imagine the distaste and alarm the midget Maori Malborough Man had for Mr Bradbury’s public call to dig out a choice bogey and flick it into his double scotch on the rocks. It was extremist, politically violent rhetoric. It was the slippery slope of a Bolshevik rising. Culinary paranoia is the start. Where will it lead? Was that fart deliberate? Was it!?

The gist of Mr Bradbury’s blog was: sometimes you gotta globalise that intifada and spit on that thang. Thắng being Winston’s favourite Vietnamese cuisine. Consider it more of a goober against genocide than a hoik from Hamas.

How to explain this intemperate scattershot ranting? A distraction, an age-related rage incident – that doesn’t quite explain it entirely. My theory is that Winston is cracking under the pressure. He has failure writ large in his portfolio and he seems powerless to do anything about it.

Gaza-Israel prisoner exchange, Trump’s Knesset speech, Summit at Sharm El Sheik

14/10/2025, 979 views, 20 comments.

I started watching the Gaza cease-fire live coverage on Al Jazeera at 6pm NZDT yesterday (13/10/2025). The events kept rolling into each other: the Israeli hostage release then the Knesset speech then the Palestinian release, then the Summit. The normal on the hour news bulletins were suspended, the coverage just kept rolling. A Trumpathon commanding the airwaves for 10 hours and it’s still going early this morning (as I write). What an incredible show – tearful reunions, a free-wheeling, unpredictable Trump speech, tearful reunions, talk of peace, Summit to come – a TV spectacular.

This makes a pleasing change to the dreadful war coverage of the past two years. I couldn’t watch the tragedy after the first six months or so, it was getting too heavy to fully engage in the details of the genocide. I saw the Gazans getting thinner and thinner, the area of wreckage more and more. Go to Google Maps and see the damage for yourself, it’s like Passchendaele or Hiroshima.  What a relief to witness the end – or the beginning of the end – of this iteration of the intifada.

Maybe it takes a madman to end the madness? Could it be a permanent end to the conflict? The commentators on Al Jazeera – every one of them so far – has said it is doubtful. Israel and Bibi in particular is simply too cacklingly, happy merchantly, Shylockingly evil to ever be trusted. But that’s Al Jazeera for you. One of the commentators at least has the decency to profess to being slightly ashamed of her pessimism.

Mumbo-schmumbo from the BSA

20/10/2025, 762 views, 4 comments.

Those expectations – published barely three months ago – make no reference whatsoever to unilaterally re-interpreting their broadcasting mandate to extend their jurisdiction into internet programmes. The BSA hectors for a wider mandate, nags and nags for “reform”, craves “influence” but it says, begrudgingly, “It is for the Government – not the regulator – to decide what legislative solutions are most appropriate…” And yet within weeks they are behaving like an alternative universe where they already have a legislative solution! Those Karens don’t so much need a judicial review as they need drug testing.

Winston Peters, Oxford Coma

28/10/2025, 1019 views, 19 comments.

Last week in between haunting the parliaments of Scandinavia like the hybrid Count Dracula and Count Richelieu that he is, Winston Peters delivered a speech in the Oxford Union debate in the affirmative of the proposition ‘This House Believes That the Courts Now Undermine Democracy’. It was so dismal it didn’t even have a title – so it was perhaps less a coherent whole as a collection of Jon Johansson’s thoughts on Winston’s prejudices with a dash of AI. And the result was less like Cicero and more like the Oxford Coma. Superficial, populist cant in the form of drunken shadow boxing. It was a risible effort.

A short missive on Te Pati Maori’s nepotising fasciitis

06/11/2025, 1141 views, 6 comments.

And I’m thinking of all this after watching The Bradbury Group live podcast last night (04/11/2025) and John Tamihere’s car-phoned, drive-by counter-attack on Takuta “Doc” Ferris, whose electorate had started a petition to roll JT as Te Pati Maori President.

I’m getting the impression in some ways JT and Doc share the same personality types. Both a friend to the skivvy and jacket combo, they could both be there at the end of the movie, looking cool, about to drag race to the death in their hot rods for a reason long lost in the plot developments – that is their vibe. There’s no bluffing – every bluff will be called. Unlike a Mexican stand-off, this Maori stand-off is all guns blazing from start.

The Polynesian equivalent would be George Henare’s role as the Tohunga in the movie Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the moment he finds out a rebellion or disloyalty has taken place he immediately strikes a fierce pose and commands “Kill them all!” – so absolutely cold, chilling AF. He’s probably a shorty too, but from memory he wears a big head piece so he looks taller.

Roastbusters vs McSkimming vs a few bad apples

16/11/2025, 1127 views, 21 comments.

The existence of the female excuser is perhaps the main reason male-against-female sexual violence are largely unresolved crimes. No-one wants to address it. The female excuser watching TV telling the lounge room the rapists weren’t wrong is at the benign start of the spectrum which ends up at Ghislaine Maxwell. In between all it takes is one biddy on the jury and he walks. The sordid sorority can be seen at work in the apparent collusion of at least one female NZ Police executive in the Jevon McSkimming scandal that has now spilled over into ex-Commissioner Coster and his staff. Use a woman to do the dirty work of fronting – the role of the exonerator.

Te Pati Maori and the Anatomy of Mathematics

22/11/2025, 1210 views, 16 comments.

Te Pati Maori’s internecine calamity unfolds in streams of comments in Facebook pages and online messages that is a spectrum of disappointment. That has been the best gauge as to what people think and where people stand. Going from the hundreds of comments on the recent posts on the official TPM Facebook page the tide is running maybe 2:1 or 3:1 against the expulsions.

The party co-leaders are getting blame, but there is maybe 15-20% support for them. There was more support, about a third, for the party itself as a unified movement than support expressed for the leadership. There was no-one at all who supported JT. Nil support for John Tamihere, and they weren’t neutral either, if they mentioned him at all it was 100% negative. One half hate him – the other half tolerate him as a necessary evil, but no-one is supporting him. About 10-15% say they will now vote Labour, about 5% Greens. People are disheartened, and just as many are perplexed as to what the reasons for the expulsions actually are. Egos are mentioned, but the search for rational explanations for the breakdown cannot rest on any one thing – the closest to a consensus on the problem being it’s JT and his associated nepotistic connections.

[…]

What is the value of JT if he can only subtract and not add? He has assiduously and ruthlessly smeared and manoeuvred to maintain control, but his tactics of poisoning the puna to ensure his enemies cannot return is at the expense of sickening his allies. Debbie and Rawiri have taken a hit to their mana by siding with JT and his discreditable shenanigans – you can see that in the comment sections. They look like your usual arsehole, shifty politicians after this caper, the gloss has gone and part of it will never come back after this Machiavellian blooding.

Winston’s policy uncertainty principle and Wellington’s grab into the regions

30/11/2025, 549 views, 2 comments.

And then it turns out the Nats might do the same thing too – campaign to repeal it. Seems to be a concession that Seymour bested them both in negotiations and is now paying the price for being immodest about it. This government – and I use government, as they do, in the loosest possible terms – is dancing on a pin head, that pin head being Seymour.

The situation of a government policy being supported by only a minority of that government while the majority are opposed is a Westminster conundrum. When we see it play out it looks like a shell game with three cups and a ball, where the policy is the ball and the three cups are the coalition parties moving around so as to support and then not support the policy at random moments so it appears from one instance to another as maybe they all support it when in actual fact only one is ever in support.

The shell game may not be a complete metaphor, but on the face of it, what has occurred defies political physics in a way that needs explanation. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, you can never really know exactly who supports what policy at any point in time only that there is a policy. If the observer was the voter, the space is the Overton Window and the particle of matter is the policy; then to the voter any one or more of the three parties may appear to have that policy, but also simultaneously not have that policy. The voter is left to make a stochastic estimation of who and what is where which is not necessarily related to either how or why. The result is the voter will almost certainly be wrong, and also right. An ideological and policy twilight zone.

Te Pati Maori AGM: JT’s stalemate and a Kotahitanga pact

07/12/2025, 1297 views, 15 comments.

Ask the Te Pati Maori members present today in Rotorua for the AGM to write on a piece of paper a name. If they wanted one party member to resign for the sake of Kotahitanga who would that one person be? What person – regardless of actual or perceived responsibility or personal likes or dislikes – for the sake of unity of all wings and all electorates of the party should tender their resignation to the AGM? What result would you expect? What name, or initials, would you expect to be overwhelmingly present on those bits of paper if they were collected up?

My intuition is that even JT’s supporters would write in JT just to cut the Gordian knot and be done with the grinding soap opera it has become. Let’s put it this way: if people were given two names to oust from the party they would probably write JT twice just to make sure.

JT going is the simplest answer, but the hardest to achieve. He isn’t worth the drama to the party membership – that point of net loss occurred some time ago and is now compounding with each opinion poll. His enduring value proposition is his connection with Labour, but that seems less relevant if the cost of it is a diminished TPM caucus before the election even happens.

Jeffrey Epstein is Israel personified

19/12/2025, 406 views, 6 comments.

The notated scribbles on blackboards and the misspelt emails are from someone who doesn’t stand on formalities. The content is fantastical, whimsical, flaky, embarrassingly simplistic, numerological nonsense. Projections and scheming from someone who doesn’t stand on any depth of foundation. A pretence of intellectual curiosity obscures the manipulative motivations for the inquiry. These musings are mostly entertainment; he barely understands a thing. His sketching diagrams isn’t brilliance; he is struggling to comprehend things without visual aids. His trade is purely illicit, his inquisitive philanthropist cover-story as shallow as his intellect. He is not a real anything – he is a pseudo everything.

[…]

Yes, what has occurred has been a calculated insult to our collective intelligence. The Lolita Express was a defamatory “Pizza-gate” myth… until it was exposed as fact. So now what’s the excuse for any disbelief? Does anyone believe he was anything other than an Israeli asset? No-one in the American government dares say boo. And doesn’t that tell us who has the power in this relationship. It is one of the completely obvious things that Chomsky would have packaged up methodically in sonorous tones for the adulative Left to cite as truth to power. Yes, what has occurred has been the calculated silence of collective immorality.