Rodney Hide: Endless repetition makes lies truth

The Ardern years continue to blight the nation. It’s not just the destructive policies and debilitating debt but the lasting dysfunctional governance both public and private that routinely lies to us and infantilises us.

The legacy media are gone. They are now pimps for government and corporate propaganda.

Endless repetition makes lies truth, with dissent deplatformed and demonised.

JC: The Greens Are Demonstrably Unfit

The Greens spent last weekend highlighting why they don’t deserve our vote and they couldn’t have done a better job if they had tried.

The Greens are green alright and not just in the environmental sense. They are green when it comes to sorting out their own internal issues. Chlöe Swarbrick tells the small number of people who bothered to turn up to the party conference that it is her intention to make the party the biggest on the left. Then almost straight away she illustrates what they would look like in government by dithering over the Darleen Tana issue. Chlöe says there are a lot of divergent opinions in the party and it is important that everyone gets to have a say.

Thursday August 1, 2024 

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Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive 1/8/24

Govt dishes up funds for oyster festival in the north – but what about the oyster festival down south?

Another day, another trough. Attention was drawn to this one by Matt Doocey, the same fellow who yesterday was calling for applications for the Government’s first round (good for $5 million) of the new $10 million Mental Health and Addiction Community Sector Innovation Fund.

Peter Williams: UPDATE - The Olympic Boxing Saga

It's more complicated than we thought

I have read extensively over the past twenty four hours on the issue of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting.

They appear to have been badly mischaracterized. I believe they are not transgender athletes after all, as in they have not transitioned from male to female.

Mike's Minute: One of the worst cases of red tape idiocy

If you ever want an example of why the new fast track legislation is not only a good idea, but badly needed, I give you Northport.

Northport want to expand. Why? To grow.

We need to grow because what we do is sell stuff to the world and for that we need ports.

Chris Trotter: Wooing The Masses – A Green Fairy Tale?

CHLOE SWARBRICK has embarked on a brave, but almost certainly doomed, political experiment. She has set out to build a mass movement on the foundations of a political party that rejects majoritarian decision-making, and which, by elevating the particular above the universal, makes the social solidarity that fuels mass action impossibly difficult to achieve. If the transformational movement Swarbrick is hoping to build is ever to eventuate, then she will have to fundamentally remake her party.

Dr Bryce Edwards: The Rise and Fall of a top lobbying PR firm

The top lobbying-PR firm SenateSHJ has closed its doors today for the last time, announcing that it has gone into liquidation. The reaction from those in the same or similar industries in the Capital has been one of shock and sympathy.

However, the wider public might not be mourning the demise of the lobbying business. In fact, they might be excused for indulging in some schadenfreude over lobbyists being made unemployed. After all, it’s not often that Wellington’s vested interests and those representing the rich and powerful lose their jobs.

Brendan O'Neill: Ismail Haniyeh was a monster, not a ‘moderate’

His fascist violence caused untold suffering to Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Forget ‘centrist dads’, there’s a new political character in town: the centrist fascist. The moderate Jew-killer. The middle-of-the-road cheerleader of mass murder. It’s Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who was bumped off in Tehran yesterday, presumably by the Israel Defence Forces. Reading the strangely pained media coverage of his death, you could be forgiven for thinking he’d been a pragmatic, upstanding guy, someone who was considered ‘very moderate’, in the words of Sky News crank, Alex Crawford. In truth, of course, he was a militant anti-Semite and we should spend as much time mourning his passing as he did the Jews his comrades butchered on 7 October: ie, none.

Dr Eric Crampton: The case for user charges on NZ’s favourite conservation destinations

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that the “Tragedy of the Commons” is commonplace. If you wanted to deliberately engineer a commons problem, the management of the Conservation Estate would make for a pretty decent guidebook.

Imagine a large pasture where anyone can graze their animals, without restriction or exclusions: the commons.

That pasture will be over-grazed, if there is no way of restricting access.

Ele Ludemann: Insulation overdone

News that Building and Construction minister Chris Penk wants to roll back insulation standards, has met with some opposition:

Upgrades to insulation and glazing requirements in May 2023 were the first significant improvements to insulation standards in New Zealand in more than a decade.

Ian Bradford: Nothing But Climate Propaganda

I have been forcing myself to watch TV1 news, mainly so that I know what they are putting out. On Wednesday 17th July I sat in my lounge fuming with yet more climate propaganda these people are putting out to the gullible masses. There is barely a night goes by when TV1 doesn’t feature a flood in some country, or make an issue out of a high temperature somewhere. Of course the above are weather events not climate. It seems someone is prompting them to keep the climate scare going.

Viv Forbes: Welcome the Warmth

At dawn today (30^th July) mid-winter in sunny Queensland, it was zero degrees on the lawn outside our kitchen and the small water tub for our chooks was iced over.

Every morning, as soon as it gets light, Judy puts a winter coat over her jamas, adds gloves, glasses, rubber boots, a beanie and a walking stick (icy grass is very slippery). She then trudges down the hill to check any new-born lambs and then lets the sheep out of their dingo-proof night-camp into their paddock for the day. As soon as they are let out, they dribble into a long line and, led by the wisest old ewe, they wend their way across the frosty flat and then make their way up the hill to the highest point facing the morning sun.

Clive Bibby: We need to tone down the rhetoric but will it be enough?

The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump is a timely reminder that political discourse between waring factions throughout what is left of the Free World has deteriorated to a level where events such as what happened at the latest Trump rally are not only more likely but almost inevitable. 

But unfortunately, the lessons that should be learned by the main perpetrators of these false allegations about an opponent’s suitability for office are unlikely to register in the minds of those who have no appreciation of what is needed to change the course of history.

Peter Williams: Knocked Out

Boxing's Olympic transgender problem

Forget the drag queens mocking the Last Supper, or the dirty river which threatens to make the triathlon a duathlon, or the convicted rapist still living in the athletes’ village.

The Games of the 33rd Olympiad are but hours away from their biggest controversy yet.

Carolyn Moynihan: A shameful scandal offers New Zealand a chance to start again in caring for kids

New Zealanders during my lifetime have regarded our country as “a great place to bring up kids”. It still is – if you know how to bring up kids. If you didn’t learn good parenting from your own upbringing, you could be struggling, especially if you are poor, have a child with special needs, or a partner who is abusive.

In the mid-20th century, if parents had a child who was deaf, disabled or mentally disturbed, and lacked other support, they were often advised to place them in institutional care. Children in homes where they were neglected and abused would be removed by a welfare officer and placed with foster parents or in a state or church “home”.

Lushington D. Brady: Air NZ Admits It Was All Bullsh*t

Corporate wokesters admit that their “climate action” is virtue-signalling bullsh*t.

The thing about corporate pandering to the Climate Cult is that, sooner or later, harsh reality slaps even the most determinedly virtue-signalling CEO in the face. The alternative is going broke quicker. That’s because ‘climate action’ is as ruinously expensive as it is useless.

Only last week, even Twiggy Forrest gave up pretending that his ‘green hydrogen’ hyperbole was just that.

Kerre Woodham: Let the police get back to policing

There simply must be a better way of dealing with mental health patients rather than relying on police. For years now, police men and women have been left to pick up the pieces of broken minds because of a lack of resources within the beleaguered mental health sector. But more than the lack of resources is the lack of will on the part of the mental health sector. When you're overworked, when you're under resourced, and you have somebody else doing the heavy lifting, (that is the police) why on Earth would you make more work for yourself?

David Farrar: The $216 million nonsense

Radio NZ report:

The government has agreed to set aside $216 million it may need to pay for tax cuts for heated tobacco products (HTPs).

When I first heard this figure it seemed illogical as HTPs are such a minuscule part of the market.

Wednesday July 31, 2024 

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