Posts by Alfie
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Helen Kelly lists the criteria involved with applying for government permission, including this one which must have been dreamed up by somebody taking dumb pills.
4. patient (must be) hospitalised when treatment is initiated (wtf!)
It doesn't matter how much pain a person is suffering, or whether alternative treatment would improve their quality of life. If they're not hospitalised, they just don't qualify. That's ludicrous.
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Hard News: Kia kaha, Helen Kelly, in reply to Russell Brown,
If Fairfax had run that poll five years ago, I suspect the results would be very different.
However confused and unscientific the poll may be, it surely provides a small snapshot of public opinion at this point in time. And you'd have to agree that on the general subject of cannabis law, NZ opinion has moved drastically in recent years.
I'd like to think that the numerous positive stories coming out of Colorado, and more importantly the total lack of negative reports, are having an impact on public perception here.
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Hard News: Kia kaha, Helen Kelly, in reply to Sacha,
Unscientific reader poll results also interesting.
I'd say. Over 6,000 votes so far and only 5% entrenched. Public opinion has indeed turned.
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The Herald has published a NZ is a great country piece today. Penned by Key's biographer John Roughan, this reads like a misguided ode to Rogernomics.
When I see the New Zealand my grandchildren will inherit today, I am eternally grateful to the government we elected in 1984. It was younger than any we had elected before, more rash. Looking back now it is easy to say, as John Key does, that the changes they made could have been done more slowly and gently. I doubt it. Gradualism would not have given us the economy we enjoy today. We would have lost our way.
No mention of massive wealth transfer, child poverty, TPP, the pollution of most of our rivers due to overfarming, or even the decimation of investigative journalism? One gets the impression that Roughan is actually writing about Planet Key.
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Matt Nippert has been sifting through Mediaworks' accounts, searching for the motivation behind Oaktree's $17m pre-christmas capital investment in the company. And he found the answer.
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Horizon Regional Council has also purchased dodgy Lithuanian and Russian carbon credits. Back when NZ credits cost $12 each, these fraudulent credits cost a mere two cents apiece -- a real bargain according to the story.
Though quite how those fraudulent pieces of paper will slow global warming and save the planet is not made immediately clear.
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Cartoon by Garrick Tremain
While National continue to suck up to the evil regime – just think about all that cheap oil – at least NZ First and the Greens are calling for a halt to trade talks with the Saudis following their mass murder of those who oppose the leadership.
As usual, Labour are having a bob each way by condemning the executions but insisting trade talks should continue. David Shearer said on RNZ this morning that human rights concerns should not impede our trade with Saudi. Whatever happened to moral fibre? Or a relevant political opposition?
While the United Nations has condemned the attack on the Saudi embassy in Iran, it’s been strangely quiet on the Saudi executions. Back in September the UN actually elected Saudi Arabia to chair the Human Rights Council panel. Now how perverse is that?
Gordon Campbell provides a good overview on Scoop.
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Proving that leopards rarely change their spots, Chris Brown has been accused of punching another woman.
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Doctors Joshua Freeman and Hayley Bennet point out that the investor/state loophole in the TPPA could trump the Paris climate accord. In our new TPPA world the right of fossil fuel companies to make profits far outweighs the effects of climate change, regardless of the disastrous consequences to the planet.
In more than 6000 pages of legal text in the TPPA, climate change is not mentioned once. On the other hand, entire chapters are devoted to minimising "technical barriers to trade" and ensuring "regulatory coherence". These chapters consist of a range of rules that would turn the move to zero carbon into a legal minefield.
In addition, investors such as fossil fuel companies would be given broad powers to directly sue governments in off-shore tribunals for unfavourable changes in policy under investor-state dispute settlement provisions.
Awarding these powers to the fossil fuel industry is a direct affront to the Paris agreement. Given that trillions of dollars' worth of fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground - investor-state dispute settlement clauses are a disaster waiting to happen.
Things aren't much better at the other end of the world with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being negotiated between the EU and the USA.
In fact the EU trade commissioner has allowed oil companies to help write the energy chapter of the agreement, to ensure that it won't affect their bottom line. This effectively kneecaps the Paris Accord.
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Steve Braunias sums up the last year of his Secret Diary series with a special mention for NZ's least competent TV exec.
But I always felt at ease with one particular character. He was so ridiculous that it was a breeze to move him around the page. I devoted five diaries to his doings, or undoings - Mark Weldon, the TV3 supremo who axed Campbell Live and 3D, and replaced the shows with a gossip site nobody looks at.
Villain, obviously; wrecker, plainly; but like Key, he was impossible to take seriously, with his terrible ideas and his brazen sale of his own awful Terra Sancta wine to TV3. He'll exit the stage of public life one day. The soundtrack will be one long, loud raspberry; I'm just getting in early.
Well said, that man.
