Posts by Tom Semmens
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Question. If we were to strike a Saudi sized gusher off the NZ coast, who would win the election:
Party A, fully funded by the oil industry and backed to the hilt by every bank economist that the MSM care to regularly interview, to say: “We are all rich! Rich I tells ya! Tax cuts! Sovereign funds! Free university! Healthcare for everything all the time! WE CAN HAVE IT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
or Party B who say “Nooooo!!! Leave it in the ground! Save the planet! Let’s not have a party”.
Our leaders won’t do anything about global warming, because most of us don’t want them to. Or rather we do, as long as it doesn’t involve any sacrifices in our standard of living. Hence the popularity of recycling (everyone agrees it is a good thing because it costs us nothing and we feel good doing it) vs. putting up the price of petrol to fund more efficient public transport.
Only when Lockheed-Martin start building the tax-payer funded spaceships that will build the giant space umbrella will we get buy in from business and the public for global warming, because that will mean fat contracts for business and jobs for workers. In other words, the people that created the problem (and own our governments) have to make money out of fixing the problem before they’ll raise one finger to do anything about the problem.
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An interesting fact, which you may already know,, is that the fertiliser we use is made from hydrogen extracted from natural gas
absolutely. i thought Sue Kedley was crazy when she said that “we’re literally eating oil”
when Greens complain that deniers prefer their opinions to science all I see is the pot calling the kettle black. Spreading the idea that world food production will collapse when natural feedstocks run out is a typical piece of Green alarmism. The Haber process uses hydrogen obtained from natural gas only because this is the cheapest source. Hydrogen via electrolysis of sea water would be almost as cheap, and is practically inexhaustible. We are not going to run out of ammonia. The idea that the food distribution network might collapse when fossil fuel prices rise is another (arguable) question altogether.
Insofar as most climate change denial is frankly ideological and paranoid rather than scientific the tactics of the Green movement have much more in common with climate change denial than they would care to admit, and the Green movement pioneered how to manipulate language and with it public opinion. The trouble is the Greens were never bankrolled by big oil like the deniers are.
According to the ideology of climate change denial, Climate change is a leftist plot designed to destroy capitalism and replace it with - something, I have no idea what the outcome of the supposed plot is meant to be. A socialist world government I should imagine, that is the usual suspect. Having Greens like Sue Kegley going on about fertilizer production like some sort of bonkers Cassandra who sounds grimly pleased that we are all going to get our much deserved comeuppance in a cosmic morality play simply stokes the paranoia and resentment of climate change deniers.
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When I first arrived in New Zealand and was tiki-touring the country in around 2002-2003, I was really very surprised by the number of antique shops that openly displayed genuine Nazi/Wermacht artefacts, nearly always stuff that grandad had brought home from Italy or wherever as a souvenir after the war.
A relative of mine owned an SS officers full clobber – hat, arm band, jacket, belt and pants – that he proudly “liberated” from a German officer trudging his way home/to a prisoner of war camp in Italy in 1945. He was certainly no Nazi. He kept it as a momento of victory, of the moment when a soldier from New Zealand could force a member of the most feared organisation of the so-called master race to publicly disrobe. And indeed, the humiliation of being striped and left naked by your conqueror is a powerful piece of symbolism.
In this country, thousands of innocent miles from the vile turpitude of the European race wars of the first half of last century and a robust contributor to the victory over Fascism in WWII, the trappings of the defeated Nazis were generally regarded by the generation that fought the war as simply the defanged curiosities of the beast we helped slay, mere curios whose meaning has been proudly rendered powerless by our prowess at arms. The casual debasement of the solemn symbols of your enemy can be a powerful reminder of their defeat. For example, in the way the Moscow army museum displays the banners of the SS exactly as they were thrown to the ground at the feet of Stalin in the Red Square victory parade in 1945 or the way Charlie Chaplin comically parodied the mannerisms of Hitlerism.
Kim Dotcom doesn’t strike me as a bloke who would have thought to deeply about owning a signed copy of Mein Kampf. I think the chances he sees his ownership of the book as a symbol of the defeat of fascism as approaching nil, just as I think the odds that it signals he is a closet Nazi are practically nil. Not everyone is a bookish worrywart angsting over the symbolic meaning of something, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Dotcom isn’t the first and won’t be the last person who simply thinks owning something associated with a notorious criminal would be way cool.
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I read the replies by Patrick Gower in the post above. To me, they have all the believability and all the sincerity of a Rebekah Brooks solemnly promising she won't do it again.
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to Russell Brown,
Jesus. That’s very, very poor. Audrey Young’s usually better than that.
Are you sure about that? Another day, another story that reads like a National party press release.
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We planted about two dozen feijoas as a windbreak/shelter over ten years ago and they are now in numbers that rival Tribbles. The place to be in April is therefore http://feijoafeijoa.wordpress.com/
I make cakes to freeze, chutneys and pastes that does me all year (damn, have you seen the price of those things in the supermarket???) and you can freeze them as well. The Feijoa champagne, if bottled into sterile bottles, will keep nicely for months. This year, I plan to make it using my home brew kit and using sugar in 750ml bottles for secondary fermentation...
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I really think 3 News reporters have to stop using the Prime Minister to articulate their story angles...
It isn't just TV3. Here is Rob Salmond over at polity.co.nz catching out Audrey Young's lazy use of Key as an unchallenged media commentator in the Herald.
Really, it adds up to a press gallery that is completely besotted by John Key.
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John Drinnan politely opined that Patrick Gower is "sun struck" by John Key. I would remove the s, and add add a "c" and a "t" to less politely suggest Gower is completely c**t struck by Key. Such an emotional attachment to the PM would also explain Gowers other inexplicable grudge against Cunliffe. Gower certainly seems to see himself as a (completely unelected) player in the political game.
In an age when the moral guideline is ratings, and 24 hour senstionalism framed through rock star "journalists" like Gower is what passes as news and current affairs then people like Gower are powerful, unaccountable and therefore think they are untouchable.
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3 News was lauding new Act leader Jamie Whyte for lifting his party from zero (clearly not the party’s real level of support) to 1.1%
1.1% of, say, a thousand voters is 11 people. .4% (the TVNZ level of support for ACT) is 4 people. In other words, when you are dealing which such low percentages a party can appear to wax or wane based purely on a random half dozen people being home, and the variations in ACTs support are essentially meaningless. The only conclusion you can draw is that ACT remains politically irrelevant.
It would be great if media outlets could stop reporting poll results as if we still had First Past the Post…
This really hurts Labour, because the media persist in framing the narrative around National’s “commanding lead” in the polls, and dwells on the ‘crisis’ in Labour which, John Armstrong would tell us, needs John Key to slip on a “political banana” before it could dent the PMs “impressive connection” with the voters. When the reality is that undecided voters are going through the roof (probably being turned off politics in droves by the relentless sensationalism of the right wing smear machine) and of decided voters left and right blocks are neck and neck.
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Question: Is TV3 News the television front end for the Whaleoil blog? If so, where does it fit?