Mogul-directed industrial-scale plant-only diet strategy brings premium branding value scope to commodity exporting nation…
Animal foods substitutes made from plants and on an industrial scale will be produced by an enterprise led by Canadian-born New Zealand resident James Cameron who anticipates that the scheme will have the eventual effect of shifting diets from animal to vegetable.
Mr Cameron’s fellow film mogul Sir Peter Jackson is also said to be involved with the scheme.
Both are land holders in the sparsely-populated Wairarapa Valley which is an hour’s drive north of Wellington, centre of the nation’s film industry.
Go-to operations guy in the strategy is Jasper Robards (pictured) who is Mr Cameron’s stepson.
Mr Robard’s grandmother was Lauren Bacall who was married to Old Hollywood star Jason Robards.
Jason Robards, the grandfather, became famed for such films as Tender is the Night, All the President’s Men, and Raise The Titanic.
Raise The Titanic co-incidentally was an earlier version of the genre that was to lay the foundation of Jasper’s stepfather James Cameron’s own global success.
Lauren Bacall was a visitor to New Zealand later in her career
Miss Bacall is remembered for her candid responses to questions she had spent much of her life fielding, notably those about her earlier marriage to Humphrey Bogart.
She was in New Zealand to take part in the fund-raising Telethon charity and sportingly pitched into the televised extravaganza, the pre-eminent broadcast event of its era.
Mr Cameron has invested in plant food substitution research and development in the Wairarapa region for quite some time, since in fact he set up his Avatar special effects processing in Wellington.
Mr Cameron never loses an opportunity to extol the virtues of a vegan diet, crediting it for bestowing upon him the energy to maintain in his later years the energetic output required of an explorer, agronomist, and film maker.
The range of products from the announced venture will go far beyond such well known protein replacements as soy types and will encompass a full slate of substitute extracts and even plant versions of hitherto synthetic and animal-derived garments.
In the meantime Mr Cameron will benefit from his vertical integration in the form of a retail store in one of the Wairarapa’s fashionable tourist hamlets.
It has the capability to render applied market research on contemporary upscale consumer tastes.
There may be in this vegan drive some ironic advantage to New Zealand food exporting in animal products.
This delicatessen approach to foodstuffs will offset the perennial disadvantage of bulk commodity exports in which New Zealand is a price taker, unable to take advantage of branded and processed added value and thus loyalty.
So the promotional possibilities in the foodstuffs produced under the direction of the moguls will be a valuable pointer to the traditional side of the industry which has twisted and turned to obtain global retail premium finished product value on dairy products especially.
The venture chimes with the policy resonance from New Zealand’s governing Labour-Green coalition.
This is especially so in the venture’s forestry emphasis on foodstuffs such as nuts and fungi.
New Zealand’s emphasis on organic cultivation remains fragmented under the critical mass imperatives of volume export demands.
Mr Cameron notes that plant cultivation and processing will re-invigorate rural settlements and it is here that the moguls’ venture harmonises with a government vision that surfaced 55 years ago.
This was to transform New Zealand into the “Switzerland,” of the South Seas.
This, so the notion went, would be accomplished by selling to the world intensively processed and high value products.
This theme would be accomplished now under the announced animal replacement vegan products scheme by producing a greater range of higher value products wrapped and ready for overseas retailers’ shelves in an expanded number of importing nations.
These high value foodstuffs will introduce Swiss-watch grade retail price elasticity simply because consumers will buy them regardless of the price.
The scheme also points to an avenue opening up in by-passing bulk quotas and tariffs both official and unofficial of the type which for example have restricted an established New Zealand plant export, apples.
Import substitution of high value grocery niche products is another benefit of the plant derived foodstuffs diversity scheme.
The cinematographers mission statement in substituting plants where animals once grazed elicits not so much shock and horror from animal graziers as simple disbelief.
And yet…and yet….those promoting the pastoral conversion scheme are in the ideas business and their ideas have so far been, well, fruitful.
“Emergency” Status used to counter low turnout and galvanise younger voters
The climate alarmist proclamation of civic emergencies in Auckland and in other municipalities is centred on a belief that climate alarm is the key to securing the allegiance of the younger vote in New Zealand’s pending local government elections in October.
In the 2016 local government elections voter turnout was 42 percent.
Public information pre-election campaigns to lift the turnout to the 50 percent experienced in the 1980s have failed to lift the turnout.
These new civic emergency declarations follow on the heels of a series of millennial apocalyptic proclamation scares often traced to the Y2K one ushering in the new millennium.
Peak oil was an example of these scares..
In the event when the oil drought was scheduled to make its appearance there was a surplus.
So great was the surplus in fact that one of the first moves of the New Zealand Labour-Green governing coalition was to put an embargo on future exploration for it.
Food miles was another example of this same excitable tendentious computer modelling.
As the logistics of international cargo transport and its economies of scale eventually broke through the artifice of this alarm, it too dissolved into the atmosphere.
In doing so it also saved the New Zealand economy which is based on exporting bulk milk and meat products.
The round of municipal climate emergencies is connected to United Nations winding back its climate doomsday clock to a mere 10 years away.
Another cause is the utter conviction in these municipalities that if only Bill Shorten in the Australian Federal Election had put more campaigning into climate that he would now be the prime minister
Then there were the school-hour extinction marches which further confirmed climatics as the overriding and encompassing dominant moral cause of the hour.
Declarations of emergencies until this round of declarations were reserved for immediate ones.
Emergencies were existential events such as an earthquake, fire or flood.
These were Civil Defence emergencies carrying defined statutory priorities, implications.
The recent round of politically motivated emergency declarations and the events leading up to them remain unchallenged by the mainstream media in New Zealand, anxious itself to accumulate support in a distracted youth market..
Government broadcasting maintains a drumbeat of alarmist reports on polar ice
The Wellington-based chain has candidly announced a deliberate policy not to publish anything in the denier category.
The Auckland-based chain is similarly cautious.
New Zealand’s focus on its top heavy socio and liberal arts at the expense of science education means that there is widespread ignorance on the difference between carbon monoxide (poisonous) and carbon dioxide (beneficial.)
In New Zealand the presence of other reflecting canopy (greenhouse) gases such as water vapour is omitted and the “warming” condition is said to be due simply to “carbon.”
Neither is the dangerous diluting of the word emergency likely to be examined by the social and liberal arts, notably the explosively expanding political-science wing.
The emergency nomenclature applied by the municipalities politicians is technically known as a dialectic.
This is a proposition.
One in which the purpose of a statement however forcibly delivered has several meanings not necessarily connected to the face-value meaning.
Thus an interpretation of the emergency in question could be understood, for example, as saying that unless the young vote is mobilised under the climate cause banner then there will be an electoral emergency in that we, the proclaimers, will lose our seats……
In Washington and Wellington the Fading vendetta for scalp of Megaupload Founder now looks more like Trouble than a Trophy
The tightly knit and warm pattern of alliances which inaugurated the seven year campaign to send Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom from his domicile in New Zealand to the United States to face piracy charges have now chilled and evaporated.
These close sets of relationships converged on the Obama era White House and the keystone alliance was then the one between Hollywood and the White House.
Since president Trump took office this relationship has turned sour.
It is characterised by the open feud demonstrated by the coruscating tweets about the Hollywood galaxy transmitted by president Trump and which dumps the celestial souls so influential in the Obama era into a collective black hole of ignominy.
Wellington and Washington were governmental soul mates at this congenial time between Hawaiian vacationing golfing mates president Obama and New Zealand prime minister John Key.
This friendly relationship curdled the moment that incoming president Trump described man made climate change as a “hoax.”
Then he withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, much to the anguish of the incoming New Zealand Labour-Green coalition government
An epoch in power and influence has flowed under the political bridge of both Washington and Wellington since the original airborne raid on Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion.
Then the Hollywood lobby the Motion Picture Association of America was led by insider former Democrat senator and onetime White House hopeful l Chris Dodd.
He was determined to make his mark in smoking out Hollywood’s main foe of this era which was copyright infringers, pirates, and working in close harness with the FBI to hunt them down wherever they were.
Then the FBI was among the most revered institutions in the United States.
Now the FBI is severely contaminated and is condemned by both winners and losers in the 2016 presidential election.
Chris Dodd is gone and now the Motion Picture Association is focussed on mending fences with an alienated White House, instead of the showboat corralling of copyright suspects.
The Kim Dotcom saga now well into its seventh year has lasted much longer than World War 2.
Like an Appalachian blood feud its origins are becoming shrouded in the mists of time.
It began when Kim Dotcom was identified as someone who in setting up shop in New Zealand would massively boost New Zealand’s digital technology comprehension base, an immersion style of industrial promotion in vogue at that time.
Which is what happened.
Though not in the anticipated direction.
The gung-ho aerial assault on Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion office did convince the Motion Picture Association that New Zealand meant business on cinematography.
Local digital effects flicks such as the Tolkien and Avatar series surged onward.
So too did the cost to the New Zealand taxpayer in funding the litigation in the long running extradition proceedings bouncing between the courts and which have racked up the equivalent of the cost of a Hollywood-grade international feature film.
In some ways a mystery film because so much in this real life Jarndyce versus Jarndyce process remains unexplained.
Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload servers were based in the United States, thus putting him in the United States jurisdiction.
If he was knowingly doing anything illegal why did he settle in a nation, New Zealand, which has an active extradition treaty with the United States?
Why didn’t he simply stay in Hong Kong which is where he started Megaupload?
Did it have something to do with these very server farms which more than anything else require cooling?
An idea at the time that Kim Dotcom was encouraged to settle in New Zealand was that server farms could be embedded into the chilly if not frozen Southern Alps
Any alliance that Kim Dotcom had with the National government of the time went the way of all the other alliances in this saga which is into anti active hostility.
In a scattershot charge he is also charged with infringing United States RICO statutes designed to combat organised crime.
The notion of a company by definition employing geeks being in a position to deploy the muscle needed to run protection and extortion rackets remains unclear and is thought to be based on a plea bargain deal struck by the US Department of Justice.
Such freedom-for- information deals are standard in the United States in order to secure convictions.
The case reminds us that seven years ago under the Hollywood- White House alliance of that era piracy was the bugaboo of the era in the same way that social media is the political pressure point of today.
In its heyday Megaupload featured a piracy reporting option giving copyright holders the ability to hunt for illegal content. It registered with the U.S. government under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law aimed at fighting piracy.
Government extreme social equity posturing degrades performance and authority
The New Zealand Treasury’s failure to encrypt its pro-forma models of the actual budget can be traced to an engrained governmental procedure of elevating contemporary social sensibilities at the expense of applied practical ability.
This was further emphasised at the time of the budget “hacking” flap when it became clear that a cross-section of departmental officials failed to understand that the budget models had been accessed simply by intruders applying permutations and combinations to the Treasury’s home page search bar and doing so without recourse to passwords.
The access to the budget details at the time was instantly sheeted home to a massive and concerted hack and given criminal status.
The police were called in to investigate some time before the search bar legerdemain was identified and sheeted home to National Party, Opposition, geek-capability operatives.
The deeper implications of the incident were however overshadowed by still another pre-budget drama.
This one centred on the release, authorised, of an official report on “bullying and harassment” within the bounds of Parliament.
Again, the police were called in.
Again the police withdrew.
This time when it was discovered that the events luridly proclaimed involved incidents already long procedurally investigated and settled.
Curiously, and this also was overlooked, a search bar and its application was again involved, indirectly.
This is because had a search been conducted into the Parliamentary Services HR exception incidents archive, the existence of these cases and their procedural outcomes would have been revealed.
The issue remains that the contents of the 2019 Wellbeing Budget, the nation’s first branded budget, became subsumed by the combined drama that attained hysterical levels over these two incidents.
Embedded in all this remains the issue of how Parliament and the government as a whole has the capability to administer its own accelerating matrix of inclusion, diversity, and social equality, and do so without diluting operational efficiencies.
For example, and in quite recent times, one government agency propounded a scheme of the type calculated to sidestep the distracting morality fervour that so spoiled the release of the government’s own landmark and emblematic budget.
This was by promulgating a keep-your-distance edict in which male staff were required to literally ensure that at all times they kept themselves at arms length from their female counterparts.
Such an edict it was believed would enshrine personal space into a no-go zone
At first opposition to this scheme focussed on personal-space necessary infringement occasions such as handing over paper documents, positioning oneself in a lift, sharing a car, participating in a queue, seated at a conference…….
The scheme however ultimately dissolved in a morass of gender boundary eroding initialism characterised today in, for example, LGBTQ2+.
Bluntly, in terms of literal situational ethics alone it had become impossible to define who needed to keep their distance from whom.
HR specialists, psychologists, counsellors abound in the Parliamentary Precinct, so do consultants in areas such as gender and bias studies.
The two torrid events of budget week, the pre-release of the budget itself, and the weirdly-timed release of the official report on bullying and harassment within Parliament, share in common the need for comprehension of the nature of administrative computing.
Such a comprehension would have lowered the temperature of the budget leak episode.
A simple search into the archive would have revealed that the headline incidents in the bullying and harassment disclosure had already been resolved internally.
A curiosity about these fringe budget events was the manifestly excitable behaviour of several of the parliamentary protagonists.
They seemed unable to comprehend connections between cause and effect and even expenditure and value delivered in terms of the immense investment in human resources specialists and also information technology
Parliament deliberately advancing itself as the showcase for workplace social justice activism seems a factor underpinning the anything but calming response to the bullying /harassment report which in its broadcast form pictured parliament actively digging for its dirty linen and then, on discovering it, waving it from its rooftop.
Similarly we can now understand how this same posturing has degraded performance in managing its own publicly accessible departmental networks.
Candidates for senior jobs in government information technology are frequently selected on their ability to promote social equity instead of on their proven ability to deliver area digital services.