Dr Will Jones: Covid Vaccines Saved Far Fewer Lives Than Claimed by WHO, Major New Study Finds

Covid vaccines saved far fewer lives than first thought, a major new analysis from Stanford’s Professor John Ioannidis and team has concluded – closer to 2.5 million than the 14 million claimed by the WHO in 2022. The Telegraph has more.

Chris Morrison: Now Scientists Claim Near 20-Year Stable Arctic Sea Ice is “Unsurprising” and Predicted by Models

Dramatic confirmation that the sea ice in the Arctic has been stable for nearly two decades is contained in a recently published science paper from a team led by Dr Mark England from the University of Exeter. The finding is of course obvious to anyone who studies the data but it will inconvenience the activist cranks who continue to promote supposed reductions in Arctic sea ice as an important sign of their imaginary ‘tipping points’ and their fake climate crisis. Despite the data showing the ice has been stable over every month in the year since around 2007, Sir David Attenborough told BBC viewers in 2022 that the region could be summer ice-free by 2035. The climate hysteric Al Gore never quite recovered his authority when he said all the ice could be gone by 2014.

Chris Morrison: Sensational Findings Point to Hunga Tonga Eruption....

Sensational Findings Point to Hunga Tonga Eruption as Prime Suspect Behind Recent Temperature Spike

In January 2022, a massive underwater volcano called Hunga Tonga suddenly erupted and shot so much water into the upper atmosphere that levels in the stratosphere rose suddenly by at least 10%. It was a genuine one in 100, even 200 year event and was reasonably expected to produce temporary weather changes around the globe. Sure enough, subsequent temperatures showed a 0.3-0.4°C upward spike.

Chris Morrison: U.K. Met Office’s Junk and Fabricated Temperature Measurements.....

Inept ‘Fact Check’ by Science Feedback Shines Further Light on U.K. Met Office’s Junk and Fabricated Temperature Measurements

After a year of damaging revelations about the state of the Met Office’s temperature measuring network, the Green Blob-funded ‘fact-checker’ Science Feedback has sprung to the defence of the state-funded U.K. weather service. It has published a long ‘fact check’ seeking to exonerate practices that have recently come to light including the locating of stations with huge heat corrupted ‘uncertainties’ and the publication of invented data from 103 non-existent sites.

Chris Morrison: Climate Bombshell - New Evidence Reveals 30 Year Global Drop in Hurricane Frequency and Power

Last month a small but powerful cyclone named Chido made landfall in Mayotte before sweeping into Mozambique, causing considerable damage and leading to the loss of around 100 lives. Days after the tragedy, the Green Blob-funded Carbon Brief noted that scientists have “long suggested” that climate change is making cyclones worse in the region, while Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) at Imperial College London made a near-instant and curiously precise estimate that a Chido-like cyclone was about 40% more likely to happen in 2024 than during the pre-industrial age.

Peter Williams: UPDATE: A Book of Waitangi

My copy of Understanding Te Tiriti: a handbook of basic facts about Te Tiriti o Waitangi arrived by post today. This is the booklet, written by lawyer Roimata Smail, which has been distributed to every secondary school in the country.

My initial response was that if this is the level of textbook and reference source that high school students are provided with these days then heaven help our future. It is barely 30 pages, is comprised of simplistic language and unsupported claims and is the kind of pamphlet that might be appropriate for children at the oldest in years 7 and 8, the intermediate school level.

Lushington D. Brady: Qantas Told to Clean Up Their Room

Jordan Peterson slams corporate wokeness

It’s an odd thing: the very people who wax apoplectic that “corporations aren’t people!” also expect corporations to act like people.

Because, here’s the thing: only people can make moral judgements. So, when activists blither about “corporate social responsibility”, “triple bottom line”, and “social licence”, they’re very much wanting corporations to be people.

Point of Order: Apologies at Radio NZ.....

......as the state broadcaster falls foul of misreporting by a staffer within its own ranks

RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson says the New Zealand public has been let down after pro-Russian elements were added to reports of the war in the Ukraine without senior management realising.

This acknowledgement comes after readers noticed the text of a Reuters story about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine published on RNZ had been changed.

Lindsay Mitchell: Propaganda writ large

An advert plays incessantly on the radio telling me that "Wearing a mask is an act of intentional kindness."

An intention cannot be ascribed to an action by a third party. How does the creator of this advert know why I am wearing a mask?

If I go into the supermarket maskless I will be asked to don one or leave. So I take my own. It is an act of resentful compliance. I resent the rule, the enforcer of the rule and worse, myself for complying.

Every time I hear the ad these angry feelings are reinforced.

Denis Hall: My response to the Fire and Fury propaganda video

This will jump out at you a bit - because there is a lot going on.

Yeah - and it’s long - so all Paramedics stand by with the oxygen.

Read it for the read of it - not the speed of it.

This week in politics - has a significance that may not be fully recognized for a decade or so - but the time will come when we look back and say:- “Yeah ---- right! - I remember!

Yeah - that’s when it began - 2022 - among the smoke and flames in the grounds of Parliament - when an unknown young woman with a cellphone on a stick - got more views than “The Professionals” - at TV One News.”

But also this week - came this astonishing taxpayer funded propaganda piece - styled as a “documentary”.

…….SPLAT! Fire and Fury! And the people who made it - slithered away out of sight behind the Port-a-loos.

Guy Steward: The Dangers of Misinformation and Disinformation

How precious of the mainstream news media to lecture us about the dangers of disinformation and misinformation when their whole modus operandi is along exactly those lines.

I remember when reading the daily newspaper was a pleasure and I’d look forward to it in work breaks, often getting something of interest and keeping articles to read later or do further research on. Over the years the time spent became less and less until in the last six years it went from fifteen minutes to five, then a quick flick through, then a glance at the first page headlines, now barely that. It was both the content and the literary quality that seemed, to me at least, to decrease over time until it just discredited itself or provoked a cringe.

Garrick Tremain: the New NZ History Curriculum

Here is Garrick Tremain's cartoon commentary on Labour's new compulsory New Zealand history curriculum! 

Henry Armstrong: Does Our Government Engage In Mis- And Disinformation?

In an interesting piece by Mitch McCann in Newshub (8^th March), our neo-Marxist Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (you know, she who has a degree in Communication) commenting on the Parliamentary sit-in, is quoted as saying: “One day it will be our job to try and understand how a group of people could succumb to such dangerous and wild mis- and disinformation”. 

But, does her government itself deliberately engage in using mis-and disinformation to promote itself and it’s policies, which it accuses others of doing?

McCann is one of those journalists invited to attend the daily 1pm TV Pantomime Covid briefings, sometimes being mistaken for Zane Small by Deputy PM Robertson when addressing journalists by their first names.

According to Kate McNamara, NZ Herald (10 March), in a series on the use of spin doctors by our New Zealand government (Ardern’s office has several), it  now transpires that the government “selected” a group of 21  Covid19  “commentators ”for “special briefings” earlier in the pandemic to ensure they could help get the “right message” out. I wonder who, how, and why they selected the gifted “21”?

Did you know that?

Karl du Fresne: Why the woke Left is so rattled by Camp Freedom

It’s been fascinating over the past couple of weeks to observe the intellectual contortions of people who forcefully uphold the right to protest, just as long as those ghastly lowlifes on the other side don’t do it.

Veteran old-school leftist Don Franks deftly skewered the hypocrites in a poem published on this blog, but it hasn’t deterred them from continuing to recoil in disgust at the sight of the “rabble” (a word suddenly much favoured by the illiberal Left, as opposed to those like Franks who believe in free speech) on the lawns outside Parliament.

There’s an unmistakeable note of panic in the posturing of the woke Left. They suddenly realise they no longer control the public debate and are wildly lashing out at the scruffy mob that usurped their right to make a nuisance of themselves.  How dare they!

Simon Ruda: Will nudge theory survive the pandemic?

State propaganda can flourish in times of crisis

In 2015, during a public debate on behavioural science in Lucerne, I was accused of supporting tactics befitting an unsavoury authoritarian regime. At the time, knowing how well-intentioned my colleagues were, I thought this was, quite frankly, nuts.

I remain a supporter of the use of behavioural science in public policy, and of the Behavioural Insights Team, more commonly known as the Nudge Unit. However, witnessing how the UK and other governments have responded to the pandemic, I can now appreciate the vulnerabilities of well-intentioned, democratic regimes, and the potential for behavioural science to be used inappropriately.

I was a co-founder and leading figure within the Nudge Unit. Since its inception, in 2010, the unit has been a success story for the Government. When I joined we were a team of seven within what was called the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. In 2014, we were able to “spin out” of government. We became an independent, profit-making social purpose company, a third owned by the Cabinet Office. We could sell our services to the whole of the UK public sector and any other government or organisation seeking to improve people’s lives.

Clive Bibby: Difficulties with reality or simply outright lies

The most consistent message we are getting from the Prime Minister’s daily press conferences down to and including every cabinet ministerial announcement is that every effort is being made to ensure no one is left behind as we chart a course through these tumultuous times. The catch cry has always been - “We are all in this together”

Yeah right! The evidence suggests otherwise.

Continual repeating this daily chant is wearing thin on a populace confronted with events that are proving that line to be just another lie.

Karl du Fresne: Testing the limits of spin

We crossed a significant threshold in the Covid-19 crisis yesterday, and I’m not talking about the number of new cases.

Commenting on the potentially problematical disjunction between current high inoculation rates and dwindling supplies of the Pfizer vaccine, Jacinda Ardern had this to say: “It’s not a matter of running out [of the vaccine], it’s a matter of whether or not we are in a position of where we need to have a little less demand.”

Er, pardon me? I've read this sentence several times and I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to mean, or indeed whether it means anything at all. Communication is normally one of Ardern’s great political strengths, but this statement was, at best, cryptic. At worst it was nonsensical, and I’m wondering whether it’s a sign that the government is almost past pretending it’s in control of the pandemic.

Bob Jones: Colonialism Nonsense

Try and imagine the carry-on in Britain if its government announced special privileges for the original Anglo-Saxon and Celt citizens.

Nearly 40% of today’s Brits are of non-traditional ethnicity. Take those of Indian ethnicity. They have the highest educational standards of all Britain’s diverse ethnicities. They also have the highest incomes and are the least likely to be in prison. The current cabinet is dominated by Indian ethnics, many of four generations back and most pundits are picking the current, (Indian ethnic) Chancellor as Boris’s successor.

But here in New Zealand the government’s posture, if in charge in Britain, would be that you citizens of Indian ethnicity, must step back and allow special privileges to the poor suffering original Anglo-Saxon and Celt inhabitants.

That is a parallel of what is happening here in New Zealand with maoridom.

NZCPR Weekly: A Masterclass in Propaganda

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

In this week’s NZCPR newsletter we outline how Jacinda Ardern’s administration has become a masterclass in propaganda, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Graham Adams reveals the difficulties in holding the Prime Minister to account over teaching ‘white privilege’ in schools, and our poll asks whether you believe Jacinda Ardern is delivering on the promise to run the most open and transparent Government New Zealand has seen.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

John Robinson: Proposed New Zealand history curriculum - a critical appraisal

Maori are just one part – around one sixth – of the people of New Zealand (16.7% of the national population in 2020).  The focus of the draft curriculum on only this one group, with the claim that “Maori history forms a continuous thread, directly linking the contemporary world to the past”, denigrates the significance of the experiences of all other New Zealanders.  Pupils, of diverse backgrounds in a multicultural society, should all be included, and taught the history of us all – including their own ancestors whether Maori or other.

Maori should stop posturing (yes, I have read He Puapua ^[1]) and take their place as equals with the rest of us. This ethnic exceptionalism is nonsensical and damaging to our New Zealand community.